헤겔은 프래그머티스트인가?-브랜덤의 추론주의에 나타난 헤겔의 관념론

Abstract

Brandom directly raises the following question: “Is Hegel a pragmatist?” He answers, “Surely yes!” From Brandom's point of view, Hegel belongs to a member of pragmatists, because Hegel holds the philosophical position that contentful meanings expressed by concepts are to be understood in terms of the use of them. It is the main point of Brandom's inferentialism that meanings of concepts are dependent on social and normative use or practice of them. Brandom regards what Hegel tries to show us as just what his inferentialism does to us. In this essay, I repeat Brandom's question: “Is Hegel a pragmatist?”, but my answer is not same as Brandom's, but rather oppositional to it. I think that Brandom overlooks a critical moment in Hegel's idealism. Brandom nullifies the internal orderly hierarchy between concepts and the independent process of building them which Hegel has accomplished with effort. Brandom sees the purely logical kingdom of concepts as merely the given, and he pictures that the contentful meanings of logical world are (or should be) made up by process of experience. This opinion turns the most important feature in Hegel's idealism upside down, especially concerning to logics. Hegel's original idea is that concepts describing our own experience are (or should be) dependent on the purely logical relation of concepts which subsist independently of our use of them. Brandom transforms Hegel's idealism in order to interpret it as pragmatism. In my view, this work is not only a surgical operation but gene manipulation of Hegel's philosophy, so I think that Hegel portrayed by Brandom is a fictitious character and merely Brandom's Hegel.