Colleg e of A r t s and Let t er s

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2008.04.18
Author Paul Redding

Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought

Pu bl i sh ed: A pr i l 18, 2008

Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought , Cam bridge Univ ersity Press, 2007 , 252pp., $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 97 8052187 27 20. Rev iewed by Willem A. deVries, Univ ersity of New Ham pshire Analy tic philosophy [AP] began, the stories tell us, in a reaction against "Hegelian thought," specifically , the neoHegelianism of late 1 9th century Britain. Russell and Moore ov erthrew the doctrines of internal relations, of the falsehood of the partial and the truth only of the whole, and of the fundamentally spiritual nature of the world. Most important, they brought into philosophy the new logic that had rev olutionized a discipline that hadn't changed significantly since Aristotle inv ented it. Russell (particularly ) promulgated a 'shadow Hegel,' a distorted, ev en my thical image that justified his philosophical patricide, and he sold it effectiv ely for the rest of his life. After the Cambridge Two slew the Hegelian father and liberated philosophy from his oppressiv e regime, Hegel and Absolute Idealism became taboo, mentionable only with disgust, scorn, and ritualistic ex coriation. Though AP is regularly accused of being not just ahistorical, but anti-historical, there is an identifiable canon of historical philosophers that (most) analy sts think it is profitable and good (though perhaps not necessary ) to read and ponder. Indeed, there has been some v ery good history of philosophy done by analy tically trained scholars working on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, etc. But Hegel is not in the canon, and is still widely stigmatized in analy tic circles. For the last 30 y ears (since Charles Tay lor's 1 97 5 Hegel), there has been talk of a rapprochement between AP and Hegelian thought. But Hegel's entry into the Anglo-American canon made only halting progress. In Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought Paul Redding spells out the latest case for thinking that (at last) the barriers that put Hegel bey ond the analy tic pale are breaking down. Internal influences within AP after WWII prepared the ground for a rev iv al of interest in Hegel, most significantly the critique of the my th of the giv en and the arguments for semantic holism. "Among the v arious figures of the generally post-positiv ist period of analy tic philosophers after the Second World War, perhaps the one whose work promised some ty pe of reconciliation with the idealist tradition from which Russell and Moore had broken was the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars" (1 1 ). The first resurgence of Hegelian thought within analy tic philosophy had champions like Charles Tay lor, Richard J. Bernstein, and Richard Rorty . (Bernstein and Rorty had both been significantly influenced by Sellars.) Its strength was demonstrating the relev ance and cogency of Hegelian social thought. But this first Hegel rev iv al, according to Redding, still found Hegelian metaphy sics indigestible, conceiv ing it still along Russellian lines as an ontological enterprise. AP is now, in Redding's v iew, in a second and more thoroughgoing rapprochement with Hegel, again departing from groundwork done by Sellars and, indeed, radiating from a base in Pittsburgh. Its principal protagonists are John McDowell and Robert Brandom, who each emphasizes different aspects of Hegel's philosophy . Redding does not, howev er, believ e that Pittsburgh neo-Hegelianism is the only form that a new and illuminating connection between AP and Hegelian thought can take. His focus on followers of Sellars is apparently arbitrary , for a footnote claims he could do the same with Kripke. One has to think, though, that the members of the Pittsburgh school make his job much easier by doing a good deal of the work of connecting to Hegel themselv es. The fans of Kripke and Lewis (either one) are hardly in a stampede towards Hegel. Redding's discussions of the changes in AP that make it possible now to absorb and re-enact Hegelian modes of thought are rich and erudite, drawing on a wealth of knowledge in the history of philosophy , but there are two themes at the center of concern here. The first is the notion of a given; the second is the primacy of propositional ov er term logic. There are other leitmotifs that weav e in and out of his discussions, such as the contrast between the Frege-Wittgenstein strand and the Russell-Moore strand of AP or the Fichtean/Hegelian conception of

recognition as the ground of normativ ity . But the ideas of the giv en and of the proper interpretation of fundamental logical notions form the thematic backbone of the book. With regard to both of these themes Russell is the bogey man: his conception of acquaintance ensconced giv enness at the v ery heart of both epistemology and metaphy sics, and his Platonic conception of modern propositional and quantificational logic affected his reading of ev ery philosopher and philosophical claim. Once AP escapes from Russell's shadow, it can begin to rev eal the real Hegel and appropriate his insights. Chapters 1 and 2 are dev oted, respectiv ely , to McDowell and Brandom, demonstrating how each jumps off from a fundamental Sellarsian thesis and dev elops it in Hegelian way s bey ond Sellars's original intent. For McDowell, the central concern is the proper interpretation of the perceptual giv en. For Brandom, it is the proper interpretation of the logical giv en. These chapters set up the rest of the book by lay ing out the basic concerns of Pittsburgh neoHegelianism in both its av atars and raising the issues central to the rest of the book. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned principally with the correct interpretation of fundamental logical classifications and particles in German Idealism and modern neo-Hegelianism. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the logical grammar of ev aluation, and chapters 7 and 8 confront the central stumbling block to the modern appropriation of Hegel: his theory of the contradictoriness of things. One recurrent theme is the proper treatment of the singular. This has both logical and epistemological dimensions. Epistemologically , it is clear that cognition must be able to relate to indiv idual objects in one's immediate env ironment if it is to be at all useful. But how are we to understand our cognitiv e relation to the singular? In empiricism, this is one of the jobs giv en the giv en. Here the classical logic of the scholastics generated problems that infected epistemology as well, for it was embarrassed by the singular. Concepts are univ ersals; they hav e instances . A truly singular term is not a univ ersal and not a concept. Y et the constituents of judgments are concepts ; judgments hav e no place for non-conceptual content. The empiricists basically ignored the problem, for they took sensory ex perience to be singular y et sufficiently complex that concepts could be abstracted from it. (Thus Sellars's criticism that empiricism's notion of the sensory is a "mongrel resulting from the crossbreeding of two ideas".) Leibniz hoped to escape the embarrassment by treating singular terms as infinitely complex concepts, but Kant saw through that ruse and proclaimed that singular representations had to be of a different kind from concepts: intuitions. That still leav es the problem of how this new kind of singular representation enters into judgment . Redding nicely ex plains how we hav e lost the distinction between the singular and the particular, and how the notion of particularity gets employ ed to bridge the gap that threatens to ex clude the singular from judgment and cognition generally . Sellars's suggestion that intuitions hav e the logical form of a 'this-such,' and that, effectiv ely , the manifold of intuitions is a set of truly singular representations that, howev er, are av ailable to consciousness only after hav ing been massaged into the intuition of a manifold, something particular, belonging to a sort or kind , mobilizes Aristotelian themes to flesh out the thin resources of the new way of ideas. McDowell mobilizes some of Sellars's insights (McDowell does not buy the Sellarsian analy sis of the manifold of intuition as a plethora of singular, sensory representations), and Redding does a good job of relating the later McDowell's Kantian reflections to the work of the early McDowell (together with Gareth Ev ans) on demonstrativ es. But McDowell, like Hegel, rejects the idea that there is an ultimate distinction in kind between intuition and concept ev en more radically than Sellars. The conceptual realm, the "logical space of reasons" is unbounded, and the notion of nonconceptual content is a confusion. Redding is not able to clarify McDowell's thought entirely to my satisfaction -he repeats without much critical analy sis McDowell's metaphor of a "sideway s on" v iew of the world that naturalists are supposed to be (unfortunately for them) committed to -- but his treatment of McDowell is illuminating on many fronts. The other major theme in the book is the proper interpretation of logical structure. Russell grounded logical principles in our acquaintance with Platonic univ ersals, a logical giv en. This conception of logic can no more surv iv e a critique of the "framework of giv enness" than sense-data or appearance-based theories, and Sellars prov ided the fundamental insights for a better conception of the logical as well. Sellars sketched an inferentialist and expressivist conception of logic that Robert Brandom has made more articulate and ex plicit in his work. The content of a representation is determined by its contributions to acceptable inferences, both formal and material. Logic formulates ov ertly the principles that are implicit in the norms gov erning our inferential behav ior. This approach does not attempt to reduce logic to a set of empirical generalizations describing our inferential behav ior, for it ex plicitly acknowledges the normativ ity of such behav ior. But it does contain a strategy for av oiding the

Scy lla of the rationalist givenness of normativ e principles as well as the Chary bdis of reductiv e naturalism: "[T]he normativ ity of behav ior will be bound up with its being treated by others in terms of its measuring up to or failing to measure up to common norms" (7 2). The echoes of Hegel's notion of recognition are clear, but so are links to Dav idson's notion of triangulation. Brandom has made much of the analogues between his project and Hegel's, but Redding finds a problem with these claims: Hegel's concept of determinate negation, which Brandom admits is Hegel's most fundamental conceptual tool, retains features of Aristotelian logic that hav e no simple equiv alent in the Fregean logic Brandom endorses. Brandom tries to cash determinate negation out in terms of material incompatibility , but this neglects, for instance, the fact that Aristotelian logic recognizes two different forms of negation. Redding spends a fair amount of time discussing the ramifications of the fact that Aristotelian logic recognizes a distinction between negating a term (as in "A is non-B") and deny ing a term to a subject ("A is not B"), whereas Fregean-Russellian logic recognizes only sentence negation. The point is not that one or the other is right , but that these two different sy stems express different aspects of our actual inferential norms, and both hav e a claim on our regard. At least, according to Redding, that is what Hegel thought, for Redding finds in Hegel recognition of the appropriateness of these different logical forms to different forms of thought (or 'shapes of consciousness'). To understand Hegelian thought, therefore, one cannot attempt to force ev ery thing into the Procrustean bed of modern propositional or quantificational logic. There is one more theme I'd like to discuss briefly : ev aluativ e judgment. Normativ e assessment along the dimensions of the true, the good, and the beautiful is a central feature of human ex istence. Redding's chapters on the perceptual discernment of v alue and the dy namics of ev aluativ e reason are an ex tended meditation on what the grounding of normativ ity in the practices of socially interactiv e beings means for the applicability of ev aluativ e concepts to particular instances and individuals . Kant's treatment of aesthetic judgment forms the key transition to Hegelian thought here, but the implications rev erberate in ethics and epistemology as well. Indeed, they lead Redding finally to discuss Hegel's attitude towards contradiction. For Hegel contradiction is the mov ing soul of the world; but what does that mean? Here again, Redding's inv estigation into Aristotelian logic allows him to elaborate alternativ e readings of the 'law of non-contradiction' and argue that Hegel's cognitiv e contex tualism giv es him grounds to believ e that there is no one 'law of non-contradiction' that could be affirmed or rejected as normativ e for all thought. As is clear from my ex position here, a leitmotif throughout the book is how to incorporate rich and v aluable Aristotelian insights into a modernist, post-Kantian mode of thought. Though this is not a major focus for Brandom, Sellars and McDowell hav e both made substantial contributions to the contemporary interpretation of Aristotle and share with Hegel a profound respect for the peripatetic. The book, while an essay on the return of Hegelian thought, is almost as much an essay on the return of Aristotelian thought that, while modernist, doesn't force it into the Procrustean bed of Principia Mathematica . Redding's book is a tough read, but it is quite rewarding. I marked many places where I had questions I would like to pursue further; I marked a few where I think Redding gets something wrong (an egregious misreading of Sellars on p. 84 stands out, because his reading of Sellars -- notoriously a difficult read himself (not much easier than Hegel) -- is normally v ery good). I am also left wondering by Redding's final picture of Hegelian metaphy sics as itself ex pressiv ist. "[T]he structure of 'being' is that which show s itself within the logical structure of our sayings about particular 'beings', understanding 'logical structure' here as comprising those features of our say ings that mediate their inferential relations" (232). On this v iew, "The absolute is to be thought of as something the structure of which is ex pressed or shown in the logic of our self-correcting attempts to talk about the world" (232). The strongly teleological dimension of Hegel's conception of the Absolute does not seem to be done justice to in this characterization, unless we believ e that the world ex ists in order for us to be able to talk about it. One v alue in Redding's book that I endorse strongly is that both Hegel and AP are treated throughout with respect. Redding is not arguing that the benighted members of the analy tic school hav e, at long last, caught back up to Hegel, who knew ev ery thing all along; nor is he arguing that the tough, unintelligible nut Hegel presents to us can only now, with the help of people like McDowell and Brandom, be cracked. This is a genuine attempt to fuse the horizons of two deeply related but historically separated traditions. Will Hegelian thought make significant inroads in the enclav es of analy sis outside the boundaries of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, or will Hegel continue to be the gaping hole in the canon of Anglo-American philosophy ? Only time will tell, but there is new hope with books like this.

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