THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

along with its attendant conception of immediate experience, often rests upon a sharp
distinction between perceptual awareness and cognition. Our perceptual awareness of the
world presents us with discrete objects. If perceptual awareness precedes cognition, if, in
other words, it presents us with that which is pre-cognitive and thus “immediate,” then
that which is immediately given to us is a discrete plurality and not a manifold. Initially,
this conception seems highly plausible. Perceptual awareness seems to be a passive
recent essay, “Hegel and the Myth of the Given,” John McDowell sums up the point of Sellars essay in
manner that has direct relevance for the present context. He says: “Sellars sets up [or defends] a position
according to which even the most basic perceptual knowledge requires conceptual capacities” (Das
Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, 76). In other words, Sellars rejects the claim that
immediate or perceptual knowledge precedes judgment or discursive cognition. Following Sellars – who
somewhat playfully describes his arguments in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind as a “Meditations
Hegeliènnes,” – McDowell ascribes this insight to Hegel. McDowell develops and modifies this Sellarsian
insight in Mind and World, which he describes as a “prolegomena to reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit. In Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism and Tales of the Mighty Dead, Robert
Brandom attempts to follow a similar rout back to Hegel through Sellars. If the general line of Hegel
interpretation presented in this dissertation is correct, then this approach to Hegel is highly problematic.
Any approach to Hegel through Sellars must construe Hegel largely in epistemological and semantic terms,
rather than ontological ones. This can already be seen in the brief quote from McDowell’s essay.
McDowell doesn’t claim that “all perception presupposes conceptual capacities or structure,” but rather he
claims that “all perceptual knowledge requires conceptual capacity.” Sellars argues that perceptual
awareness cannot be both (a) immediate while at the same time (b) serving as the basis for knowledge (see
particularly sections I and VII of EPM). Sellars isn’t making a point about perception per se, but rather he
is making a point about perception insofar as it is fit to serve as the basis of justified propositional claims.
In fact, Sellars insists that there is another story to tell about perception, one that treats perception as a
natural – and therefore non-conceptual – process. Sellars merely argues that this scientific account cannot
play a role in our account of how beliefs are justified. Thus for any Sellarsean reading of Hegel, it seems
there will always be two distinct levels of explanation – the causal and the rational/normative. In his essay,
“Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel’s Compatibilism,” Pippin states the basis of the Sellarsean approach
as follows: “That is, to use again a vaguely Sellarsean formulation: (i) the question at the heart of the basic
spirit-nature dualism at issue is eventually treated as one between the applicability of normative notions and
assessments versus natural or law-like explanations, all within a radically constructivist account of norms;
and (ii) the Hegelian approach does not involve treating the possibility of such a distinction as being based
on any ontological fact of the matter, as, say, between immaterial, causally exempt, and materially, causally
determined beings. The distinction is itself a normative and historical one, not an ontological one”
(European Journal of Philosophy, 7, 1999. Pp. 203-4). In these terms, we can say that nothing captured in
law-like explanations can serve as an epistemic basis for claims about the things as they stand under
“normative notions.” In other words, perception, insofar as it is merely a natural phenomena described
under law-like explanations, cannot serve as a justification for normative epistemic or practical claims. By
contrast to all this, the argument presented in this section attempts to show that perception per se is
conceptually structured. (For an application of the Sellarsian interpretation to practical issues, see
Brandom’s “Freedom and Constraint by Norms.” For a further discussion of the relationship between
McDowell’s Mind and World and Hegel, see Michael Quante’s “Reconciling Mind and World: Some
Initial Considerations for Opening a Dialogue between Hegel and McDowell.”
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