“For Pippin, most, if not all, of the connotations of Hegel’s key concept that might worry the modernist – the concept of “spirit” (Geist) – can be sidelined by correctly placing it in relation to Kant’s notion of the “transcendental unity of apperception”. “Spirit” is not the name of some spooky non-natural substance. Rather, at its heart is the type of normative requirement that any finite rational individual integrate their beliefs into a consistent whole. This is the demand for unification expressed in the moral context in Kant by the idea of acting on the Categorical Imperative.”
“Rocío Zambrana’s book helps us to start seeing beyond all these divisions. On a first reading, she comes out as a qualified but clear supporter of Pippin’s post-Kantian reading. Like Pippin, Zambrana criticizes approaches that treat Hegel’s logic as expressive of an ontology – in this work, a position effectively represented by Stephen Houlgate – and describes Pippin as showing that “Hegel’s philosophy seems to inherit the ‘apperception theme’ in Kant.”
“Like Kant’s, Hegel’s idealism elaborates the conditions for unity and hence determinacy of any possible object of thought” (p. 8).”
“But Zambrana picks up on and develops an aspect of Pippin’s reading that had become explicit only in his later work. This concerns a displacement from Kant’s concern with “transcendental conditions” to that of reflexivity as a feature of actuality (Wirklichkeit). This points to an interpretation of Hegel’s idealism as a “theory of the historical development of norms, one that supports a theory of radical conceptual change” (p. 8).”
“Hegel’s logic is thus an elucidation of the logic of normative practices and institutions as they appear throughout human history. It is about, as she quotes Pippin, the “self-sufficiency of reason’s own authority” – the Hegelian theme that transforms Kant’s moral idea of freedom as self-governance – but a self-sufficiency that is always manifest under specific historical conditions.”
“Zambrana thus focuses on the notions of actuality and actualization as holding the key to Hegel’s logic, and in the course of this stresses the centrality of the notion of negativity for Hegel, a theme more at home within recent deconstructive or continental readings of Hegel than in the analytic-leaning approaches of the likes of Pippin and Brandom.”
“For Zambrana negativity is, in fact, the key to the form of intelligibility itself in Hegel: it is a form that “calls into question the assumption that the content of any normative commitment retains authority or stability within a historically specific form of life” (p. 7).”
“In short, Hegel’s logic is an attempt to account for the articulation of intelligibility itself in terms of normative practices and institutions that are essentially fragile and subject to constant change and even reversal.”