Animating Ideas of Idealism:
A Semantic Sonata in Kant and Hegel
Lecture One
Norms, Selves, and Concepts
1. In these lectures I consider some of the ideas that animated the philosophical tradition, anchored and epitomized by Kant and Hegel, which they called ‘idealism.’ My aim is to reanimate some of those ideas, breathing new life into them by exhibiting a new perspective from which they show up as worthy of our interest and attention today. I do that by retrospectively rationally reconstructing a coherent, cumulative trajectory of thought, carving it out of the context in which it is embedded, ruthlessly ignoring elements near and dear to Kant and Hegel that are not essential to the line of thought on which I am focusing. This will seem to some a perverse sort of enterprise. At the end of my third and final lecture I assemble conceptual raw materials drawn from all three lectures, in order to address the methodological issue of how to think about the nature, justification, and possible value of this sort of undertaking.
2. At the heart of Descartes’ innovations in epistemology and the philosophy of mind lies a revolutionary semantic idea. He saw that the rising new science required giving up the old ways of thinking about the relations between appearance and reality. Since the Greeks, the idea had been that, at least when things go well, the way things appear to us resembles the way they really are. Resemblance in this sense is a matter of sharing properties (or some more general sort of form), as a realistic picture shares some elements of shape and perhaps color with what it pictures. But on Copernicus’s account, the reality behind the appearance of a stationary Earth and a revolving Sun is a rotating Earth and stationary Sun. No resemblance there. And Galileo’s reading of what he calls the “book of nature, written in the language of mathematics” finds the best way of getting a grip on the reality of motion to be by manipulating geometrical appearances, in which a period of time shows up as the length of a line, and acceleration as the area of triangle. The category of resemblance is of little help in understanding the connections that are being exploited. And in Descartes’ own algebraized geometry, the equations of lines and circles do not at all resemble the geometrical figures about which they let us reason so effectively. Descartes sees that a more abstract notion of representation is needed. We’ve been worrying about it ever since.
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3. Where Descartes’ semantic concerns center on the nature of representational success, Kant addresses more fundamental questions about the nature of representational purport. What is it, he wants to know, for our ideas so much as to seem to be about something? What is it for us to take or treat them as, for them to show up to us as, representings, in the sense of something that answers for its correctness to what thereby counts as being represented? This issue is the core around which cluster the other elements of Kant’s concern with what he calls “objectivity.” The line of thought he develops to answer these questions begins with the identification of a critical shortcoming of the account of judgment he inherited. That account finds its place as part of the traditional classificatory theory of consciousness. This is the idea that to be aware of something is to take it as something: paradigmatically, to classify something particular as being of some general kind. In its form as a theory of judgment, it becomes the view that judging is predicating one concept of another: putting two concepts into a relation, marked by a copula, whose paradigm once again is bringing a particular concept under a general one, or subordinating a less general to a more general one.
In a radical break with the whole of the logical tradition he inherited, Kant rejects this way of thinking about judgment. The reason he gives is that it does not apply to logically compound judgments:
I have never been able to accept the interpretation which logicians give of judgment in general. It is, they declare, the representation of a relation between two concepts…(W)hat is defective in this interpretation…(is) that it applies only to categorical, not to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (the two latter containing a relation not of concepts but of judgments), an oversight from which many troublesome consequences have followed. [CPR B140-1]
It will be instructive to fill in some of those “troublesome consequences.” The same logical tradition distinguishes between mental acts and their contents—that is, between the two sides of what Sellars calls the “notorious ‘ing’/‘ed’ ambiguity,” which affects concepts such as judgment, representation, experience, and perception—between what one is doing in judging, representing, experiencing, or perceiving, on the one hand, and what is judged, represented, experienced, or perceived, on the other.
4. For this reason, Kant could not take over the traditional classificatory theory of consciousness, which depends on understanding judging as predicating. But what can go in its place? Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.
Drawing on a jurisprudential tradition that includes Grotius, Pufendorf, and Crusius, Kant talks about norms in the form of rules. Judging and acting—endorsing claims and maxims, committing ourselves as to what is or shall be true—is binding ourselves by norms. It is making ourselves subject to assessment according to rules that articulate the contents of those commitments. Those norms, those rules, he calls ‘concepts’. In a strict sense, all a Kantian subject can do is apply concepts, either theoretically, in judging, or practically, in acting. Discursive, that is to say, concept-mongering creatures, are normative creatures—creatures who live, and move, and have their being in a normative space.
It follows that the most urgent philosophical task is to understand the nature of this normativity, the bindingness or validity (Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit) of conceptual norms. For Descartes, the question was how to think about our grip on our concepts, thoughts, or ideas (Is it clear? Is it distinct?). For Kant the question is rather how to understand their grip on us: the conditions of the intelligibility of our being bound by conceptual norms.
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