Abstract

The early Hegel and late Wittgenstein alike suggest that the idealism-realism contrast is better understood as a contrast between normative and naturalistic accounts of actions. Building upon parallels between Hegel’s account of the “inverted world” and what Kripke called Wittgenstein’s “skeptical solution to the skeptical paradox,” I suggest that Wittgensteinian rule following may involve not only first personal commitments, as Lear argues, but also something like the specifically historical agency Hegel called Geist, and that, in turn, Hegel’s “Absolute” may be seen to represent not this agency itself but the normative “rule” governing our accounts of what it is to be a rule-following agent. This construal suggests that Brandom’s pragmatic reading of Hegel, claiming that practical adjudication of norms may be pursued independently of historical self-accounting, artificially delimits the practical sphere of such adjudication, and thus undermines rather than promotes the pragmatism he pursues.