A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology by Robert B. Brandom (review)

In order to be successful in philosophy, you must have the right kind of followers. Ideally, they should be able to perform either or both of these tasks: (1) to translate your teachings into an idiom that is accessible to an audience coming from different intellectual backgrounds, and/or (2) to integrate your philosophical message into a contemporary discourse in such a way that it proves to be productively connectable to what is discussed there. Kant was lucky enough to have had such ideal followers in abundance, both as exegetical interpreters and as modernizers of his ideas. They stretch from the post-Kantian idealists via the Neo-Kantians to twentieth-century epistemologists, moral philosophers, and aesthetical theorists. The result is a very vivid presence of Kant's ideas throughout the (academic) world.

The opposite is true with those post-Kantian philosophers who came to be labeled "German idealists." The major figures of this cluster (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) had the bad luck either to have had few followers (as in Fichte's and Schelling's case) or (as in Hegel's case) to have been followed by a bunch of unconvincing disciples (e.g. Rosenkranz and Michelet), who were not sufficiently talented or prepared for the task of maintaining the philosophical legacy of their paragon in a different cultural climate. It was this unfortunate accident that can be partly blamed for the prejudiced reception of Hegel's, as well as Fichte's and Schelling's, doctrines on both sides of the Atlantic divide, denying them intellectual respectability and stigmatizing them as hopelessly obscure and not worth the trouble.

This situation has changed considerably in the last seventy years, especially for Hegel's work, which draws new attention inspired by the scholarly efforts of people like Michael Theunissen, Dieter Henrich, Jean Hyppolite, Bernard Bourgeois, Franco Chiereghin, and Claudio Cesa on the Continental side, Charles Taylor, Michael Inwood, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and others on the English-speaking side. These persons have succeeded in initiating what could be called a new Hegel-renaissance. In particular, their efforts helped to lift the discussion of Hegel's work to a new level with respect to five important aspects: (1) exegetical transparency, (2) historical accuracy, (3) problem-awareness (Problembewusstsein), (4) intelligible reasoning, and (5) critical assessment.

Robert Brandom's monumental book A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology is a brilliant testament to what has been achieved so far, at least as far as Hegel's epistemology is concerned. Though it is literally a monument by virtue of its size, it also is a monument to what can or should be done with Hegel's philosophical œuvre in order to keep his way of thinking alive in a contemporary context. According to Brandom, Hegel's Phenomenology must be understood as "a story about the development of… higher-level concepts in terms of which his readers… can be brought to comprehend discursive activity in general" (103, cf. 636). He takes this story to be an allegorical presentation of a theory about the establishment of conceptual content. Consequently, he declares right at the beginning that "The defining subject that serves as both lens and filter for the present account is conceptual content" (2), where conceptual content, as it turns out, has to be understood as the result of our normative practices that consist in an intricate interplay between normative attitudes and statuses.

Although this is admittedly not the most obvious characterization of Hegel's phenomenological project, it is fascinating to witness Brandom's success in presenting one of the most penetrating and illuminating readings of central parts of the Phenomenology to date, all while relying on his rather un-Hegelian framework. One cannot but deeply admire the virtues Brandom's work puts on display in an exemplary way. Among these, his profound familiarity with even the minutest details of (large parts of) Hegel's text, the vast knowledge of both historical and...