Robert Brandom - A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

Works by G. W. F. Hegel

Works by Robert B. Brandom

Works by Others

This book presents a rational reconstruction of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. It traces a trajectory through that rich, sprawling Bildungsroman of modernity that reveals the cumulative expression and development of a set of apparently disparate philosophical insights and innovations, whose ramifications are gradually unified into what finally emerges as a single compelling line of thought. The narrative I retrospectively discern within Hegels is by no means the only one that can correctly and productively be recollected from the intricate and far-ranging story that he tells. Indeed, what is offered here is in many ways a severely selective reading. I am really concerned only with what he has to say insofar as it bears on one of the many topics he addresses. I believe it is an axial, organizing topic, and that focusing on it provides a useful perspective on all the rest. But the sharp focus involves real restrictions. Hewing rigorously to a thematic intensional restriction has extensional consequences: there are whole sections of the book, in other ways quite important ones, that are not so much as discussed here (for instance, Observing Reason, the entire Religion chapter, and substantial stretches of Spirit). Whatever does not show up as immediately bearing on and sufficiently advancing the emergence into explicitness of the account I see at the core of Hegels enterprise is ruthlessly put to one side. (By the end of this book, this methodological acknowledgment will be visible as having the characteristic form of a recollective confession. As such, it is accordingly also a trusting recognitive petition for forgiveness by more capable readersreaders, ideally, expressively empowered by whatever this reading does manage to reveal. But that is a lesson that lies far ahead of us at this point.)

The defining subject that serves as both lens and filter for the present account is conceptual content. At the very center of Hegels thought (to begin with, his metaphysics and logic) is a radically new conception of the conceptual. It understands as conceptually contentful anything that stands in relations of what he calls determinate negation and mediation to other such things. By determinate negation, Hegel means material incompatibility or Aristotelian contrariety: relations of exclusion of the sort that