Philosophy occupies an important place in culture only when things seem to be falling apart—when cherished beliefs are threatened. At such times, intellectuals start to prophesy a new age. They reinterpret the past by reference to an imagined future, and offer suggestions about what should be preserved and what must be discarded. Those whose suggestions prove most influential win a place on the list of “great philosophers.”

For example, when prayer and priestcraft began to be viewed with suspicion, Plato and Aristotle suggested ways in which we might hold on to the idea that human beings, unlike the beasts that perish, have a special relation to the ruling powers of the universe. When Copernicus and Galileo erased the world-picture that had comforted Aquinas and Dante, Spinoza and Kant taught Europe how to replace love of God with love of Truth, and how to replace obedience to the divine will with moral purity. When the democratic revolutions and industrialization forced us to rethink the nature of the social bond, Marx and Mill stepped forward with some useful suggestions.

In the course of the twentieth century, there were no crises of the sort that set the agenda for Western intellectuals between 1600 and 1900. There was no intellectual struggle comparable in scale to the warfare between science and theology. As high culture became more thoroughly secularized, the educated classes of Europe and the Americas became complacently materialist in their understanding of how the universe works. They also become complacently utilitarian and experimentalist in their evaluations of proposed social and political initiatives. They came to share the same utopian vision of a global commonwealth in which human rights are respected, equality of opportunity assured, and the chances of human happiness thereby increased. Nowadays, serious political argument is about how this goal might be reached, not about whether that goal is the correct one to pursue.

That is why the controversies between Bertrand Russell and Henri Bergson, or Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, or the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and his older self, or Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Orman Quine, or A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin, or Jerry Fodor and Donald Davidson, or Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer, had little resonance outside the borders of philosophy departments. Philosophers’ explanations of how objects make sentences true, or of how the mind is related to the brain, or of how free will and mechanism might be reconciled do not intrigue most contemporary intellectuals. Such problems, preserved in amber as textbook “problems of philosophy,” still capture the imagination of bright students. But no one would claim that discussion of them is central to intellectual life. Solving those very problems was all-important for contemporaries of Spinoza, but when contemporary philosophers insist that they are “fundamental” or “perennial,” nobody takes their claims seriously.

Nevertheless, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry that I have sketched elsewhere, the one that was revitalized by the Romantic movement, still goes on. Nowadays it takes the form of a face-off between philosophers described (though not by themselves) as “postmodern relativists” and their opponents. The two camps disagree about whether Plato was right to assert that human beings can transcend their finitude by searching for truth or whether Nietzsche was right to treat both Platonism and religion as escapist fantasies. Philosophers who view postmodernism with alarm typically argue that Nietzsche was right about religion but wrong about Platonism. They resist the Nietzschean idea that reason works only within the limits that imagination has set—that rationality is simply a matter of making acceptable moves within a set of social practices. They agree with Plato that there is more to reason than that, and they regard their own discipline as a paradigm of rationality.

Here, I shall first describe how the current version of the Plato-Nietzsche opposition looks when it is seen as the issue between analytic and nonanalytic philosophy. Then I shall redescribe it, this time as a disagreement between two groups of analytic philosophers: the ones whom I have heroized—Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Davidson, and Robert Brandom—and their opponents. The latter resist the “social practice” account of mind and language, in part because they see it as lending aid and comfort to postmodernist relativism.

* * *

An account of what is going on these days in the world’s philosophy departments must start by distinguishing between social and political philosophy on the one hand, and the so-called core areas of philosophy on the other. The latter areas include metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. The philosophers who work at the margins usually have little communication with those at the core. Those who specialize in social and political theory typically read many more books by professors of political science or law than books written by fellow philosophers. They do not read books about the relation between the mind and the body, or that between language and reality. The converse also holds. The authors of books on the latter topics are typically ill informed about the state of sociopolitical theory. That these two sorts of specialists are members of the same academic department is an accident of university history.

The difference between these two broad areas of interest is highlighted by the fact that the split between “analytic” philosophy and “nonanalytic” philosophy (the kind of philosophy sometimes called “continental”) has little relevance to books that touch on political issues. Neither label can usefully be applied to such figures as Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Joseph Raz, and Pierre Manent. These philosophers are concerned with the same issues as are nonphilosophers like Michael Walzer, Ronald Dworkin, Richard Posner, and Ulrich Beck—questions about how we might change our social and political institutions so as better to combine freedom with order and justice.

Once we bracket off social and political philosophy, however, the analytic-versus-continental split becomes the most salient feature of the contemporary philosophical scene. Most analytic philosophers would still agree with Frank Ramsey that Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions is a paradigm of philosophy. Most nonanalytic philosophers think that nothing Russell did compares in importance with Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit or with Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism.

Someone who thinks of herself as an analytic philosopher of mind and language will almost certainly be familiar with Russell’s theory. But she may never have read, and may have little ambition to read, either Hegel or Heidegger. Yet if you teach philosophy in most non-Anglophone countries, you must be prepared to talk about both The Phenomenology of Spirit and Letter on Humanism. You can, however, skip the theory of descriptions. Most Brazilian, Turkish, and Polish philosophers, for example, manage to get by with only a vague idea of why their Anglophone colleagues believe Russell to have been an important figure. Conversely, most Australian and US philosophers are puzzled that in much of the world the study of Hegel is still thought essential to a sound training in their discipline.

In order to bring out the contrast between the self-images of these two kinds of philosophers, let me briefly describe the theory of descriptions. Russell designed it to answer such questions as “Given that the words used to form the subjects of sentences refer to things, and that a sentence is true if things are as the sentence says they are, how is it that some true sentences containing a referring expression become false if one substitutes another expression that refers to the same thing?” Russell’s example of two such sentences were “George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley,” which is true, and “George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott,” which is false.

The theory of descriptions answers this question by saying that the description “the author of Waverley,” unlike the word “Scott,” does not pick out a particular individual. What George IV really wanted to know, Russell said, was whether there existed an individual who had the property of being the author of Waverley and who was identical with Scott. Putting the matter that way, he claimed, reveals the true “logical form” of the sentence in question, and solves the puzzle.11xBertrand Russell first published his theory of descriptions, which incorporates the Waverley example, in his essay “On Denoting,” Mind, New Series, Vol. 14, no. 56. (Oct. 1905), 479–93.

That the sentence has this logical form can be revealed, Russell said, by invoking distinctions that were built into the new symbolic logic developed by Russell’s master, Gottlob Frege. A knowledge of this logic is still regarded by most Anglophone philosophers as essential to philosophical competence. Many of their non-Anglophone colleagues find it optional.

If you suspect that Russell’s theory provides a clever answer to a pointless question, you are in good company. You have many eminent contemporary philosophers on your side. These philosophers, ranging from the Heideggerians to the Davidsonians, do not think that questions about how things in the world make sentences true are of any interest. They take these questions to be good examples of what George Berkeley referred to as kicking up dust and then complaining that we cannot see. The dust cloud is created, in their view, by taking seriously the Platonic idea that some ways of speaking are better suited to put us in touch with the really real than others.

Philosophers who prefer Russell to Hegel and Heidegger often point out that the tradition in philosophy that Frege and Russell founded makes a virtue of spelling out exactly which questions it is currently attempting to answer. Whether or not you find the analytic philosophers’ problems intriguing, at least you know what they are. The only question is whether you should bother about them. Analytic philosophers typically claim that the issues they discuss should intrigue you because certain intuitions that you yourself had before you ever opened a philosophy book are in tension with one another. One such intuition is that sentences are made true by the extralinguistic entities that they are about. The value of the theory of descriptions is that it rescues this intuition from some apparent counterexamples.

Hegel and Heidegger, by contrast, did not care much about either common sense or ordinary language. Whereas Frege and Russell hoped to make things clearer, Hegel and Heidegger hoped to make things different. Russell’s admirers want to get things straight by finding perspicuous relations between your previously existing intuitions. Hegel, Heidegger, and their admirers hope to change not only your intuitions but also your sense of who you are, and your notion of what is most important to think about. To use Emerson’s language, they are trying to draw a larger circle—trying to lure their readers out into as yet uncharted spaces. In those spaces, old intuitions are up for grabs, and it is hard to argue in a straight line. It is hard to know when one has gotten something right, because it is never quite clear what exactly one is talking about.

In the hope of getting you to change your self-image, your priorities, and your intuitions, Hegel tells you that the Absolute alone is true, and Heidegger that language is the house of Being. If you stop at each such sentence and pause to ask yourself whether it has been backed up with a sound argument, you will never finish their books. To get through their books, you must temporarily suspend disbelief, get into the swing of the story that is being told, pick up the jargon as you go along, and then decide, after having given the entire book the most sympathetic reading you can, whether to move out into uncharted spaces.

If you lay down those books feeling no temptation to make any such move, you may conclude that Hegel and Heidegger are, at best, failed poets and, at worst, self-infatuated obscurantists. If this is your reaction, you will be in good company. You will have many eminent contemporary philosophers on your side. A willingness to define one’s terms, list one’s premises, and argue in a straight line is regarded by most admirers of Russell as essential to doing good philosophy. For admirers of Hegel and Heidegger, however, requests for definitions and premises are symptoms of unwillingness to let philosophy attempt its transformative task.

Given all these differences between analytic and nonanalytic philosophy, one might wonder whether there is any point in treating Frege, Russell, Hegel, and Heidegger as being in the same line of business. The two sorts of philosophers have, in fact, often tried to excommunicate each other. Analytic philosophers often describe Hegel and Heidegger as “not really doing philosophy.” Hegelians and Heideggerians typically rejoin that their analytic colleagues are intellectual cowards who feel insecure outside a familiar professional environment. This exchange of insults has been going on for some fifty years, and seems unlikely to cease.

My own view is that all four of the thinkers I have just mentioned are usefully grouped together. This is because they were all trying to answer questions first formulated explicitly by Plato: What makes human beings special? What do we have that the other animals lack? What self-image will do proper justice to our uniqueness?

Plato’s response was that we are special because we, unlike the animals, can know how things, including ourselves, really are. He urged that our self-image should be that of beings capable of grasping universal and unconditional truth—truth that is a product neither of imaginative redescription nor of contingent circumstance. Frege and Russell thought that Plato’s answer was roughly right. They saw their own work as helping us answer a question Plato had tried to answer—namely, What is the relation between our beliefs and reality such that we can have at least some of the knowledge we claim to have?

Earlier answers to that question were inadequate, Frege and Russell thought, because philosophers from Plato to Kant had failed to zero in on language as the medium in which human beings represent reality to themselves, and therefore had not reflected sufficiently on the nature of linguistic representations. So they had not paid proper attention to logical form, or to the puzzles to which Russell’s theory of descriptions offered solutions. Russell’s admirers say that you will not think discussion of the relation between George IV and Scott pointless once you realize that solving such puzzles is essential to understanding the relation between language and the world, and thus to understanding the nature of truth.

Nietzsche gave a different answer from Plato’s to the question about what makes human beings special. He said it was our ability to transform ourselves into something new, rather than our ability to know what we ourselves really are or what the universe is really like. He mocked Plato’s appearance-reality distinction, a distinction that most analytic philosophers still take for granted.

Most contemporary philosophers who take Hegel and Heidegger seriously share Nietzsche’s doubts about the utility of that distinction. They usually try to replace it with the distinction between the past and the present—between earlier and later stages of the world-spirit’s progress. Such philosophers read both Hegel and the Romantic poets as precursors of Nietzsche’s revolt against Platonism. Hegel’s story about how human beings have drawn successively wider circles around themselves prepares the way for Nietzsche’s claim that the point of being human is to achieve self-creation through self-redescription.

Those who read Hegel in this way typically go on to read Heidegger as the first thinker to have tried to mediate the conflict between Plato’s and Nietzsche’s suggestions about what makes human beings special. So read, Heidegger’s later writings tell a story about how Western intellectuals started off striving to gain self-knowledge but eventually decided to settle for self-creation. Like Hegel’s, Heidegger’s narrative of maturation is not an attempt to say something about human beings in general but, rather, to exhibit the difference between the Western past and the Western present. Telling stories of this sort has nothing to do with answering the questions about the scope and limits of human knowledge that were raised by Hume and Kant, or with those about how things make sentences true that were asked by Frege and Russell.

Philosophers in the Hegel-Nietzsche-Heidegger tradition are suspicious of what I shall call “universalist grandeur”—the sort of grandeur that is achieved in mathematics and in mathematical physics. Both numbers and elementary particles display the imperturbability and invulnerability traditionally attributed to the divine. The study of both produces structures of great beauty. The same impulse that led Plato to think that what he called “the really real” must be more like a number than like a lump of dirt leads many recent analytic philosophers both to take modern physical science as the overarching framework within which philosophical inquiry is to be conducted and to try to make philosophy itself into a science. They think that physics tells you not only how things work but also what is really real. So they think it important to develop a naturalized epistemology and a naturalized semantics, in order to fit mind and language into a physicalistic world-picture.

That is why many analytic philosophers think of the struggle they are waging against those whom they describe as “relativists” or “irrationalists” or “deniers of truth” as a defense of science against its enemies. Many of them think of science as pre-Galilean intellectuals thought of religion—as the place where the human mind comes up against something of transcendent significance. They think of physical science both as grasping the intrinsic nature of the really real and as the paradigmatically human activity. They regard the refusal to grant science this exalted status as a symptom of spiritual degradation. Thus Russell, at the beginning of the last century, reacted against the line of thought that William James called “pragmatism” and his Oxford friend F.C.S. Schiller called “humanism,” by writing as follows:

Greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies which assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self; like all unions, it is impaired by domination, and therefore by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with what we find in ourselves. There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made…. This view…is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value.… The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears…calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain.22xBertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 115−16. Originally published 1912.

Thomas Nagel, a contemporary critic of postmodern relativism, shares Russell’s contempt for those who believe that, as James put it, “the trail of the human serpent is...over everything.”33xQuoted in Richard M. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8. Nagel describes what he calls “the outermost framework of all thoughts” as “a conception of what is objectively the case—what is the case without subjective or relative qualification.”44xThomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 16. In response to pragmatists and historicists who reject the idea of an outermost framework and argue that all justification is by the lights of a particular time and place, Nagel says that

claims to the effect that a type of judgment expresses a local point of view are inherently objective in intent. They suggest a picture of the true sources of those judgments that places them in an unconditional context. The judgment of relativity or conditionality cannot be applied to the judgment of relativity itself.… There may be some subjectivists, perhaps calling themselves pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then what they say does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say.55xIbid., 14−15.

Russell and Nagel share Plato’s aspiration to universalist grandeur. Both agree with him that there is, in the end, no middle way between making unconditional truth-claims and simply saying whatever strikes you as agreeable to say. There is nothing between the attempt to attain the universal, the aspiration that sets humans apart from the brutes, and giving way to our lower desires, our transitory feelings, and our unjustifiable idiosyncrasies. So the pragmatists’ suggestion that contemporary physical science be thought of simply as the best way to cope with our environment that we have come up with so far strikes Russell and Nagel as a symptom of moral weakness as well as of intellectual error. So does Emerson’s suggestion that there is no enclosing wall, no permanent circumference, to human life—only endless opportunities to transform ourselves by expanding our imaginations.

* * *

So much for the split between analytic and nonanalytic philosophy. Now I want to turn to the debate going on within analytic philosophy between Wittgensteinian “social practice” theorists and those philosophers who look to cognitive science for an understanding of how mind and language work. The Wittgensteinians think it a mistake to treat mind and language as entities that have either elementary parts, or a structure, or inner workings. They do not believe that there are things called “beliefs” or “meanings” into which minds and languages can usefully be broken up. They think that the cognitive scientists fail to understand that mind, like language, is a social phenomenon, not something located between the ears.

Both sides agree that what makes human beings special is their possession of mind and language. They also agree that we should talk about mind and language in a way that is consistent with modern science—that is, without appealing to the nonphysical entities postulated by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes. But there the similarities end. One side wants to get psychology in touch with neurology in roughly the same way that chemistry was brought together with physics, and biology with chemistry. Such philosophers find it useful and important to say that the mind is, in some important sense, the brain. So they spend much of their time analyzing concepts like “belief” and “meaning” in order to show how beliefs and meanings can reside within the collection of physical particles that is the human central nervous system.

The Wittgensteinians, by contrast, think that identifying the mind with the brain is thoroughly misleading. As they see it, cognitive scientists are taking for granted that what worked for matter—namely, explaining macrostructural behavior by specifying transactions between microstructural components—will also work for mind. These philosophers agree that there is much to be discovered about how the brain works, but they doubt that even an ideal neurophysiology would tell us anything interesting about mind or language. They insist the mind is no more the brain than the computer is the hardware. Mind and brain, culture and biology, swing as free from one another as do silicon chips and programs. They can and should be studied independently.

Understanding mind and language, the Wittgensteinians say, is a matter of understanding culture and, in particular, understanding the evolution of the social practices in which we currently engage. Cultural evolution, to be sure, could not have begun until biological evolution reached a certain point. But explanations of human behavior that tie in with neurology and with evolutionary biology will tell us, at most, about what we share with the chimpanzees. We can learn about the processes that mediated between those ancestors and ourselves only by constructing a narrative, telling a story about how their social practices gradually mutated into ours.

These “social practice” theorists think the best way to show that we need not postulate immaterial entities to explain our uniqueness is to tell a story about how animal grunts mutated into human assertions. On Brandom’s account, to be an assertion, and so to be an example of sapience, a series of noises must be explicitly criticizable by reference to social norms. Language gets off the ground only when organisms start telling each other that they have made the wrong noise—that that is not the noise one is supposed to make in these circumstances. It only gets fully under way when the organisms are able to tell each other that they have given bad reasons for saying or doing something.

The sort of social norms that make it possible to distinguish good reasons from bad reasons—and thus to be rational—were already in place when a hominid first realized that because she had previously grunted “P,” she might well be beaten with sticks if she did not go on to grunt “Q.” But the norm only became explicit, and what Brandom calls “the game of giving and asking for reasons”66xRobert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 195. only began, a few hundreds of thousands of years later. At that point, descendants of the original grunters realized that since they had asserted “P” and also asserted “If P then Q,” they would be deservedly criticized if they were unable to produce a good reason for refusing to assert “Q.”

This Wittgensteinian view can be summed up in the claim that there is nothing intermediate between neurons and social practices for either philosophy or cognitive science to study. To study what makes human beings special is to study such practices—to study culture. We neither have nor need a bridge between the neurons and the practices, any more than we need one between hardware and software. Software is just a way of putting hardware to use, and culture is just a way of putting our neurological equipment to use. To understand how hardware works is one thing, but to understand the uses to which it is put is something quite different.

So much for my sketch of the battle lines within contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and language. I hope I have made clear that this is not a battle about alternative solutions to common problems. It is about whether the traditional problems of modern philosophy are to be taken seriously or set aside. As the battle has worn on, it has come to look more and more like a disagreement about what sort of thing philosophers should take themselves to be doing, about the self-image of the discipline. I hope that my account of the matter helps explain why philosophers like Nagel, who still aspire to universalist grandeur, see Wittgenstein and Davidson as cultural disasters.

Philosophical analysis of the sort Russell envisaged requires that there be such things as concepts or meanings that can be isolated and treated as elements of beliefs. But if, as Wittgenstein suggested, a concept is just the use of a word, and if the proper use of the words that interest philosophers is always going to be a matter of controversy, it is not clear how philosophical analysis could possibly help. For a philosopher’s claim to have discovered the contours of a concept will always be just a persuasive redefinition of a word. Philosophers’ diagnoses of “conceptual confusion” look, from a Wittgensteinian point of view, like disingenuous ways of going about the transformation of culture, rather than ways of making clearer what has already been going on.

The same problem arises for beliefs as for meanings. The anti-Wittgensteinian approach to the matter requires that minds be aggregates of mental representations. But philosophers like Davidson argue that figuring out what beliefs someone has is not a matter of figuring out which representations are in the “belief box” of her brain, but of construing her behavior so as to make as many of her assertions true, and as many of her actions rational, as possible. In the picture common to Wittgenstein and Davidson, we ascribe concepts and beliefs to an organism in order to learn how to cope with her behavior by integrating her projects into our own. The criteria for making these ascriptions are in constant flux, because the uses people make of words fluctuate. Such fluctuation is not an undesirable lack of clarity and precision, but a desirable ability to adapt to circumstance.

The more holistically we treat the ascription of meaning and belief, the less use we shall have for the notion of “conceptual analysis,” or for the claim that cognitive science can help us understand how human beings attain truth. For truth, in Davidson’s view, is not the sort of thing that beliefs and assertions can be nudged into acquiring through their encounters with bits of nonlinguistic reality—the sort of encounters in which cognitive scientists specialize. For Davidson, there are no interesting isomorphisms to be discovered between true beliefs and what those beliefs are about—isomorphisms of the sort that Russell and his followers took for granted. So we have to treat “correspondence with reality” as a metaphor that cannot be pressed. Doing so lets us set aside the puzzles that Russell resolved by invoking the Fregean notion of logical form.

The thought that Russell and his followers put their discipline on the secure path of a science is very dear to most analytic philosophers, as is the claim that training in analytic philosophy makes for greater conceptual clarity. So one of the reasons Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson are viewed with suspicion is the fear that to take seriously Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we should not ask about meaning, but only about use, is to leave the gates open to obscurantism and sophistry. For if there are no such things as meanings to study, but only the constantly changing uses of words to be traced, then there is no such thing as having attained “conceptual clarity.”

The philosophers who are willing to give up on the claim that there are such things as “conceptual questions” to be resolved think that philosophy will have to be satisfied with narratives rather than analyses. In their view, the best we can do in the way of understanding how mind and language work is to tell stories, of the sort told by Sellars and Brandom, about how metalinguistic and mentalistic vocabularies came into existence in the course of time, as well as stories about how cultural evolution gradually took over from biological evolution. The latter stories recount how we got out of the woods and into the caverns, out of the caverns and into the villages, and then out of the villages and into the law courts and the temples. The kind of understanding that narratives of this sort gives us is not the sort that we get from seeing many disparate things as manifestations of the same underlying processes, but rather the sort that comes from expanding our imagination by comparing the social practices of our day with those of past times and possible future times.

Followers of Wittgenstein like myself think that philosophers should give up on the question “What is the place of mental representations, or meanings, or values, in a world of physical particles?” They should regard talk about particles, talk about beliefs, and talk about what ought to be done as cultural activities that fulfill distinct purposes. These activities do not need to be fitted together in a systematic way, any more than basketball and cricket need to be fitted together with bridge and chess. If we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self-understanding. We can give up on what Russell called “knowledge as a form of union between Self and not-Self,”77xRussell, Problems of Philosophy, 115. and stop trying for what Nagel calls an “unconditional context.”88xNagel, The Last Word, 14. We can cease to resist Emerson’s prophecy that every context, no matter how encompassing, will eventually be subsumed within another, larger context. We can rejoice in the indefinite expansibility of the human imagination rather than attempt to circumscribe it.

Once one gives up on unconditionality, one will cease to use metaphors of getting down to the hard facts as well as metaphors of looking up toward grand overarching structures. One will start treating hardness as just noncontroversiality. One will begin to wonder, as the older Wittgenstein did, why we ever thought of logic as something sublime. One will instead think of logic as Brandom does—as a device for making our social norms explicit. This shift substitutes horizontal for vertical metaphors of intellectual progress, and thereby abandons the notion that mind or language is a thing that can be gotten right once and for all.

As I have already suggested, philosophers who take Hegel seriously substitute questions about what makes us, in our time and place, special for questions about what makes human beings in general special. So it is not surprising that Brandom describes himself as a neo-Hegelian. The more Hegelian philosophy becomes, the more questions about what we share with humans at all other times and places get replaced with questions about how we differ from our ancestors and from our neighbors, and about how our descendants might differ from us. For Hegelians, the most important human activity is not attempting to get things right but reinterpreting and recontexualizing the past—trying to put the past in a new, more imaginative context.

This difference of opinion about what it is important to think about explains why the Hegel-Nietzsche-Heidegger tradition of nonanalytic philosophy that I have described as “narrative philosophy” is often referred to as “hermeneutic philosophy.” The term “hermeneutic” signals a shift of interest from what can be gotten right once and for all to what can only be reinterpreted and recontextualized over and over again. That is why Brandom’s paradigm of rational inquiry is the common law rather than the discovery of physical microstructure. A model that would do as well is literary criticism, the necessary inconclusiveness of which is made plain by a remark that Brandom quotes from T.S. Eliot: “What happens when a work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.”99xT.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 28. Originally published as The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1920.

Brandom generalizes Eliot’s point by saying that Hegel taught us how to think of a concept on the model of a person—as the kind of thing that is understood only when one understands its history. The best answer to a question about who a person really is is a story about her past that provides a context in which to place her recent conduct. Analogously, the most useful response to questions about a concept is to tell a story about the ways in which the uses of certain words have changed in the past, leading up to a description of the different ways in which these words are being used now. The clarity that is achieved when these different ways are distinguished from one another, and when each is rendered intelligible by being placed within a narrative of past usage, is analogous to the increased sympathy we bring to the situation of a person whose life history we have learned.

According to the Hegelian view that I commend, human beings do not have a nature to be understood, but rather a history to be reinterpreted. They do not have a place in a universal scheme of things, nor a special relation to the ruling powers of the universe. But they are capable of increasingly rich and imaginative self-descriptions. They are finite creatures whose latest self-descriptions have shown an increasing willingness to accept that finitude.

October 11, 2004

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