Countering Postmodern Genealogies: Brandom, Hegel and the Logic of Self-Determination

Abstract

In his recent A Spirit of Trust, Robert Brandom interprets Hegel as proposing a conception of normativity that overcomes the shortcomings of both modernity and its critics. Brandom’s Hegel asks for a “hermeneutics of magnanimity”, in opposition to what Paul Ricœur labelled the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. According to Brandom, “great unmaskers” of modern normativity like Nietzsche or Foucault make use of the delegitimizing force that characterizes genealogical explanation. Their suspicion is that what is thought to be normative is conditioned by contingencies that undermine that very normativity. In this paper, while raising objections against Brandom’s reading, I want to hold on to his idea that Hegelian philosophy counters those subversive postmodern genealogies. Instead of focusing, as Brandom does, on the end of the “Spirit” chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology, I draw on Hegel’s logic of self-determination. Contrary to the “great unmaskers”, for Hegel, explanation of something through reference to some external or contingent factor is parasitic on explanation that explains something through itself.