The Fragility of Reflection and the Spectrum of Nature: McDowell, Brandom, and the Debate Between Hermeneutics and Critical Theory

This article highlights from the perspective of the debate in the 1960s between hermeneutics and critique of ideology some aspects under which both McDowell and Brandom take up some theses of hermeneutics – concerning the relation between language, experience, historicity, tradition, and rational authority – but at the same time give a central role to the question of reflection, and in this sense provide helpful devices to formulate some form of "critical hermeneutics" that responds to at least some of Habermas's concerns about the universality claim of hermeneutics. It will be argued that McDowell's second nature approach is better equipped than Brandom's constructivist model to formulate a model of internal critique understood as a process that is both natural and internal to historical processes, and proceeds as a piecemeal process of open-ended revision and reconstruction. Still, in order to succeed, McDowell's approach to radical critical reflection should take into account the whole spectrum of second nature – and not be limited to just the subjective dimension of rational animals and its virtues – and should rather be extended to the objective side of second nature, and consider how reflection stands between first and second nature.