Robert B. Brandom, "A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology."

Robert Brandom's lifelong reading of Hegel reaches full fruition in A Spirit of Trust.In this impressive long book.Brandom presents a meticulous reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that resembles no other; a reading that stands 'substantially apart from the mainstream tradition of Hegel interpretation,' as Brandom writes in one of the few remarks he makes on other readings of Hegel (6).In the first sentence of the book, Brandom states that it presents 'a rational reconstruction' of the Phenomenology (1).This statement, however, is not cashed out, and cannot be fully comprehended for its gravity and importance, until the final chapters of the book.For Brandom's way of reading Hegel-what he terms 'rational reconstruction'-is not simply another hermeneutical method for interpreting texts, but rather a practical commitment to recollective rationality: the very key idea of Hegel's Idealism in Brandom's view.As Brandom shows in detail in the last part of the book, recollective rationality stands at the heart of Hegel's philosophy, it is his most important and novel contribution to philosophy, and understanding and acknowledging it provides no less than the pathway to the third age of Geist: an age of better communities and individuals.To accomplish it one needs to exercise a selective engagement with the past that renders it a history: to construct a tradition or a narrative that shows how a specific view (norm) achieves explicitness over time by finding it implicit in past cases.This rational recollective reconstruction is also what Hegel does in the Phenomenology, according to Brandom, and it is likewise what Brandom does in his own book.Recollective rationality is thus the view that explains and justifies Brandom's hermeneutical choices, and the view that is explained and justified by their outcomes.As Brandom writes in the last sentence of the book: 'A Spirit of Trust exemplifies the process of recollective rationality whose structure it is its business to articulate' (769).To thoroughly understand what is meant by this idea, and to judge whether the circularity it evinces is valid or not, one needs to wait, and follow Brandom's story, for nearly 500 pages.Nevertheless, it is a wait richly worthwhile.The idea of recollective rationality is built on a set of commitments that Brandom attributes to Hegel, but they are also, first and foremost, his own philosophical commitments.Working his way to show how they are implicit in Hegel's work, rationally reconstructing it to make them explicit, Brandom uses his own terminology and philosophical framework: his is a pragmatist semantic reading, guided by a strategy he names 'semantic descent' its vocabulary is Brandomian and Fregean, and its main interlocutors are Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Sellars.Accordingly, most of the lessons Brandom derives from this strategy and setting are those he had articulated in his masterpiece of 1994, Making It Explicit, and later developed throughout his career.However, as he reads them out of, or into, the Phenomenology, these lessons gain further development, clarity, and are sometimes significantly altered.The most important among them is the idea of recollective rationality itself, which Brandom introduced briefly in 2002 as the missing piece in his earlier inferentialism, and now appears to stand at the center of the philosophical system he presents.The second is the model of reciprocal recognition that replaces (or underwrites?)his earlier score-keeping model to account for the structure of the essentially social discursive realm of intersubjective relations.These two ideas are discussed at length in the second and third parts of the book, as Brandom reads the Self-Consciousness, Reason, and Spirit chapters.The first part of the book contains less development of Brandomian themes, but it is nevertheless interestingly rich and important, for it prepares the ground for the social and historical dimensions that follow by taking the earlier chapters of the Phenomenology to lay the foundations of inferentialism.

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