Hegel on the Idealism of Practical Life

By: David Ciavatta, Ryerson University

(This paper is forthcoming in Hegel Bulletin)

That so-called philosophy which ascribes reality—in the sense of self-sufficiency [Selbständigkeit] and genuine being-for-and-in-itself—to immediate individual things,to the non-personal realm, as well as that philosophy which assures us that spirit cannot recognize truth or know what the thing-in-itself is, is immediately refuted by the attitude [Verhalten] of the free will towards these things. If so-called external things have a semblance of self-sufficiency for consciousness, for intuition and representational thought, the free will, in contrast, is the idealism and truth of such actuality.i

On Hegel’s account, to perceive is necessarily to

take oneself to be in direct contact with a world of

independently existing, individual things.ii When we open

our eyes we immediately perceive such things as chairs,

trees, dogs, rocks, rivers, other people, and each of

these things appears as self-contained and complete in

itself, as separate from and external to everything

around it.iii Each individual thing implicitly presents

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itself as having metaphysical integrity and self-

sufficiency in its own right: each simply is what it is,

and one need look nowhere other than to the individual

thing to develop an account of its reality. Above all,

these individual things present themselves as being

independent of our perception of them: when we open our

eyes, we take ourselves to be gaining access to things

that exist as they are whether we are conscious of them

or not, and so we implicitly take our contact with them

to be utterly inessential and inconsequential with

respect to their ultimate nature and existence.iv After

all, we ourselves are, from this perspective, self-

sufficient individuals among others, and so the things we

perceive around us are as inessential with respect to our

reality as we are with respect to theirs.

Insofar as we are perceiving beings, Hegel thinks,

this view of reality is natural and immediately evident

to us, a kind of default view that the very form of our

perceptual consciousness itself tends to foist upon us.

Of course, Hegel is concerned to challenge this view of

reality. Among other things, he claims to show that

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genuine, full-fledged individuals must be understood as

bearing their relations to others within them, such that

what is other is not simply external after all. In the

end, for Hegel the most evolved metaphysical view brings

reality to focus as a movement of self-realization in and through

an ongoing relation to others, and what is ultimately real is

not just the individual things that are, as it were, the

static products of this relational movement, but the

ongoing movement itself, as that through which alone

these things are able to be distinct, lasting individuals

in the first place.v On this view it turns out, too, that

the world is not simply external to us, as our natural

consciousness would have it. Rather, Hegel argues not

only that we realize ourselves as who we really are only

in and through our cognitive and practical interactions

with the world, but also that the world fully realizes

itself in its truth only in and through its ongoing

interactions with our self-consciousness.

This focus on the metaphysical primacy of

interaction, and in particular on our unique role in

enabling this metaphysical truth to come to a fuller

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realization, constitutes a core pillar of Hegel’s

idealism, in distinction to the kind of naïve realism

that Hegel associates with perceptual consciousness’ most

immediate, native view of the world.vi What I wish to

explore in this paper is why it is that Hegel takes our

practical attitude to play a distinctive, even

privileged, role in his articulation of an idealistic

alternative to the naïvely realistic conception of

reality outlined above. As the text quoted above from

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right suggests, Hegel conceives of our

practical attitude as refuting the sort of naïve realism

that is native to our everyday perception. As Hegel

says, the free will ‘is the idealism and truth’ of what

otherwise appears—that is, of what immediately appears to

consciousness—to be a world composed of separate, self-

sufficient, external things. On Hegel’s account, the

practical attitude has the capacity to see through this

initial appearance, tapping into and affirming the

dynamic, relational movement that underlies it, enabling

this movement itself to come to the fore.

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Interestingly, Hegel implies that this more

sophisticated, idealist orientation towards reality is

just as natural or immediate to our practical attitude as

the naïve realist conception is to perceptual

consciousness. This would suggest that the truth

purportedly revealed by our practical attitude is not

first and foremost a conclusion we arrive at on the basis

of any sort of express reflection upon what our practical

attitude involves—as though the truth were located only

in this reflection, and not in the practical attitude

itself. It is not that one would first have to think

philosophically about one’s practical attitude, teasing

out its specific rational implications in the way that

one does with a concept or judgement, before one were

privy to the idealist truth that Hegel thinks is harbored

in it. Rather, Hegel is suggesting, this truth is

immediately inherent in the very movement whereby we

interact with the world as a field open to our practical

exertions, and in the way in which we, in practice, take

this interactive movement and this field to have a kind

of legitimacy and standing in their own right. As Hegel

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says, the practical attitude is immediately a refutation of

realism, and the free will is itself the truth and idealism

of reality. This attitude and this will are involved in

the direct enactment or performance of that truth and of that

refutation: the free will is involved in making idealism

true, as it were, by the very fact that a practical

attitude towards the world is actually adopted in the

first place, and by the very fact that a field of

interaction is thereby brought to life.

That the world presents itself as open to, even as

solicitous of, our potential undertakings, seems like a

constant and irreducible given of our lived experience.

Even the infant’s primitive intentional movements—the

reaching out to grasp a toy or a finger, for instance—

seem to be premised upon there being, not only objects

within reach that present themselves as solicitous of

those movements, but also a field that is immediately

open to and traversable by its limbs, a practical field

in which there is, minimally, a ‘here’ and a ‘there’ and

a ‘towards which’ tracing out the limb’s possible

trajectories. The infant’s very sense of its own

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practical capacity to move its own limbs is immediately

corroborated, throughout, by an external world that

enables, outlines, even beckons, this limb movement.vii

Thus it seems that adopting a practical attitude is

not merely a matter of forming a subjective perspective

on the world, a perspective that is ‘in me’ or ‘in my

head’ but that has no bearing whatsoever on the way the

world ‘out there’ itself is. Rather, there can only be a

practical attitude—there can only be realistic potential

actions on the horizon, a realistic, embodied sense of an

‘I can’—on the condition that the world correlates with

this attitude by presenting itself as something we can

roam around in, as a field populated, not so much with

independent, practically-neutral, self-contained things,

as with pragma, with things calling to be touched, picked

up, thrown, eaten, avoided, cared for, worshiped, owned,

and so on. That the world is itself such a practical

field, and that we, in actually realizing ourselves as

concrete agents in it, are at once alive to it

specifically as something that affords us the potential to

realize ourselves practically, seems to be an essential

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part of what is at stake in talking about a ‘practical

attitude’ in the first place.

As I will go on to claim, that the world

corroborates our engaged perspective in this way is an

essential dimension of the idealist truth that Hegel

takes the practical attitude to disclose. The idealism

of this attitude, then, is not just something internal to

the agent herself, but has to do just as much with the

way the world itself conditions and enables agency. For

Hegel, our account of free agency and its living

relationship to itself must come hand in hand with an

account of the nature of the world in which agents

inevitably realize themselves, an account that reveals

this world to be of a nature that makes agency, not only

possible, but motivated, beckoned, fitting. In short,

Hegel’s idealism requires that the nature of the world be

fit for freedom.viii

In my view this essentially metaphysical dimension

of the philosophy of action, focused in particular on the

question of what the nature of reality must be like in

order for human agency to be possible, has not been

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sufficiently attended to in the recent literature on

Hegel’s philosophy of agency.ix To the extent that

metaphysical issues arise at all in this literature, they

tend to be oriented around traditional questions

concerning the compatibility of human agency with the

sorts of external, causal relations that purportedly

govern all events in the natural world.x While it is

often noted (rightly, in my view) that Hegel himself does

not put much stock in those traditional questions, this

is sometimes taken as a sign that Hegel’s own account of

agency is not fundamentally engaged with metaphysical

concerns at all, but is, rather, exclusively focused on

epistemological or normative concerns, and with what we

might generally call the inner or subjective conditions

of practical life.xi Thus, for instance, in the

literature there has been much focus on what sort of

knowledge a subject must have, both about herself and the

world, in order to be said to act intentionally and to be

held accountable for her actions; and, normatively, there

is the question of how agency is linked specifically with

the capacity to respond to reasons and to the possibility

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of conflicting interpretations of what one has done. To

the extent that attention has been paid to the “external”

conditions of agency—to what the world must be like in

order for agency to be possible—this has been largely

limited to a focus on Hegel’s developed social theory and

his thesis that we can only be agents in the context of

other selves and the broader institutions that recognize

us as agents.xii

While these internal and social dimensions of agency

are certainly essential for Hegel, in my view they cannot

ultimately be uncoupled from the more rudimentary and

distinctive metaphysical stakes that, for Hegel, are at

play in the practical attitude’s very relationship to the

external world. Hegel’s general neglect of causal

questions in his more explicit accounts of agency

springs, not from an attempt to articulate an account of

agency that is, as it were, metaphysically neutral, but

ultimately from a sense of the inadequacy of that

particular metaphysical view that takes external, causal

relations between things or events to set the ultimate

terms for our understanding of realityxiii—a view that, for

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Hegel, is challenged to some extent by our practical

attitude itself, insofar as it commits us to privileging,

against the purported primacy of external relations, the

idealist notion of a movement of self-realization that

occurs only in and through relations to others. For

Hegel, part of the task of a philosophy of action is to

get clearer on the distinctive sorts of metaphysical

commitments that are internal to the movement of agency

itself—commitments that we, as agents interacting with

the world, are constitutively implicated in—and this is

quite distinct from the task of determining whether

agency is compatible with a causal conception of reality

that would presumably preclude any irreducible

ontological status for human actions and that would trump

any distinctively idealist commitments at the outset.

In what follows I take up the issue of how to

conceive of our practical relationship with the world,

and I concentrate, in particular, on the question of

whether the world itself can be said to call us to

action. I cast this question in terms of the

metaphysical question of whether the world would in some

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sense be deficient or incomplete without our agency, such

that our practical exertions can be conceived as

addressing and mitigating this privation, and thus be

conceived as warranted by the world itself. I suggest

that from the naïve realist perspective—a perspective

that, on Hegel’s view, leaves out of account the

distinctive metaphysical implications of the engaged

agent in the midst of realizing its will—the world is to

be conceived as wholly independent of and external to us,

and so as fundamentally indifferent to whether we do

anything at all in it. In contrast, from the idealist

perspective that, for Hegel, is internal to the practical

attitude’s living relation to the world, the world itself

is populated with metaphysical deficiencies that we, as

free agents, are specifically equipped to address, and

these deficiencies are not exclusively subjective or

internal—residing solely within our experience of our own

desire as a privative state, for instance—but are just as

much to be located in the character of the objective

situation itself.

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After sketching out these root metaphysical

concerns, I go on to explore certain dimensions of

Hegel’s ‘practical idealism’ by focusing, first, on

certain aspects of Hegel’s conception of moral action,

and then on Hegel’s conception of property ownership. In

both cases, we will see, agency realizes and affirms

itself by rendering an otherwise external world into a

manifestation of its own will, and it is precisely by

realizing, and affirming the legitimacy of, this

interaction with the world that it lays claim to refuting

the sort of externality that realism takes to be the

final word on things.

I. Action as an Intrusion into an Indifferent

World

From the perspective of the sort of realist stance

that Hegel takes to come most naturally to our everyday

consciousness, the world is ultimately made up of

separate, individual things, each of which simply is what

it is, and is external to other things.xiv As we saw,

from this perspective each thing has its own nature and

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its own material presence, separate from and external to

that of other things—and so separate from and external to

us, insofar as we are likewise concrete individuals

within this world. The world, conceived in this way,

must thus be indifferent to whatever particular

initiatives or ends that we have a mind to realize in it.

Moreover, it does not in any way solicit or demand action

from us: it does not present itself as specifically

needing our agency to address, rectify, fulfill,

preserve, or transform it in any way, for the things we

perceive around us are what they are with or without us,

and do not in any way call upon us to concern ourselves

with them or become involved in their unfolding.

Perhaps other living things, and certain animals in

particular, on occasion actively solicit responses from

us as agents, but it seems they too would have just

carried on being what they were had we never entered

their environments in the first place. That is, they do

not need us to be what they are—the principle that

accounts for their individual being is independent of and

external to that which accounts for ours—and so no lack

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or deficiency in their being would result if we as agents

were taken out of the ontological equation altogether.

Whatever particular solicitations they might make upon

our agency thus seem contingent and dispensable relative

to their essential natures, and as a result any actions

we might undertake in response to these solicitations are

likewise contingent and dispensable. Indeed, it is hard

not to get the impression that, for the most part,

animals would be better able to realize themselves

without our interventions into their affairs, and often,

when they do solicit specific responses from us, what

they demand from us is precisely to be left alone.

Though we as agents might at times experience

ourselves as answering to a deficiency that is actually

there in the world—as for instance when we attempt to

protect an injured bird from the aggressive pursuit of a

vicious cat, perceiving that the bird is at risk of dying

and so needs our help—from the realist perspective we are

considering there can in truth be nothing in the

objective situation itself that specifically solicits us

into motion: all there are are positive, objective

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things or events, all occurring naturally, as they are

bound to occur by the objective laws of nature, and if we

do not like what is happening or find it to be deficient,

that is perhaps an expression of who we are, or of our

subjectively formed perspective on things, but not of how

things are in themselves. The objective world itself

does not of its own accord create gaps that need us, in

particular, to fill them in, does not give rise to

tensions that specifically require our decisions, our

initiatives, to bring them to resolution.

Let us for a moment grant that there are actual

deficiencies in the objective world. For instance, in

our example we might consider the bird’s being batted

around by the cat as an objective state of affairs that

is contingent and deficient with respect to the bird’s

natural capacity to realize itself.xv That we ourselves

experience such deficiencies personally as calls to action,

that such situations implicate and motivate us as

practical agents in the first place, that we could

possibly find, in such situations, opportunities for our

own individual self-realization or self-satisfaction as agents—

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again, all this seems to be something that reflects

something about us, something perhaps about our own

natural inclinations or our values and self-conceptions,

rather than something as it were brewing in the world

itself. That some of the deficiencies immanent in the

world happen to be such that we, given our particular

powers and limits, are in a position to rectify or

resolve them, and that we are such as to feel motivated

to respond to them, seems purely accidental from the

point of view of the nature of this external world. In

that case, we are really answering to ourselves, to our

own particular natures or self-conceptions, and not first

and foremost to something at play in the world itself.

If the world in which we act does not, on its own

account, call for action on our part, if all the things

we encounter simply are what they are independently of

anything we as agents might do in relation to them, then

all of our actions seem to take the form of intrusions:

like the stranger who barges in uninvited, we as agents

barge into a world that would have gotten along just fine

without us, introducing into it changes that are external

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and contingent with respect to what it really is in

essence. From the realist point of view, one can give a

full and adequate account of the nature of the external

world of things without any reference whatsoever to our

particular practical powers, to our specific character as

free agents. And so the thought that we, taken as

particular individuals among others within the objective

world, should have some sort of privileged place in it,

such that the world itself would need free agents, in

particular, to somehow complete or fulfill or settle its

character, seems to be wholly out of place.

If Hegel takes his philosophy to offer a challenge

to this conception of action and to the realist

assumptions that underlie it, it seems that Hegel must

hold that the objective world in which we act is not

simply external to our agency in this way. That is, he

needs to hold that there is, after all, a sense in which

the world itself does contain gaps or deficiencies that

specifically call our agency into action. Also he must

hold that we act, not only on behalf of ourselves (on the

basis of our needs, desires, or individual self-

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conceptions) as particular beings in the world, external

to all others, but also on behalf of the world itself,

taking up into our actions something inherently

universal, something that transcends our immediate,

natural particularity.

For instance, if it were the case that, in

responding to the injured bird’s vulnerability in

relation to the attacking cat, we were in fact acting on

behalf of some genuinely universal concern—imagine some

sort of cosmic principle of harmony between all

creatures, say, something sought after, not merely by

this or that being, but by the very order of nature

itself, an order that the cat was threatening to disrupt

with its attack—then our action would not need to be

conceived as an intrusion into a sphere that is external

and indifferent to it. Rather, the action could be

understood as participating in a striving that was

already prepared for by, already underway in, this sphere

itself. Further, we would not have to treat whatever

satisfaction we might obtain from engaging in such an

action as evidence that we were, in the end, responding

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exclusively to our own particular natures—some sort of natural

sympathy for the vulnerable, for instance. For it could

very well be the case that we are the particular kind of

being that is most satisfied when we are answering to

universal concerns, when we know that our actions are, as

it were, called for by reality itself. That we are such

as to find satisfaction in such actions does not itself

preclude them from having this universal import.xvi

Now Hegel does not endorse such a cosmic principle

of harmony, at least not in any straightforward sense,xvii

but he is concerned to show that our actions can be such

as to answer to some sort of universal force at play in

the real. Since it is most obviously in the sphere of

moral life that action claims to manifest, not just an

agent’s own particularity, but something of inherently

universal import, it is to Hegel’s account of this sphere

that I now turn.

II. Moral Action and its Place in Nature

It is perhaps in the sphere of moral life most of

all that we are prepared to recognize the existence of

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objective situations that themselves solicit actions from

us. To recognize some injustice, for instance, is to

experience a sort of deficiency at play in the world. It

is to recognize the actual, positive presence of a

glaring absence, to recognize an existing situation that

is in itself unsettled, and that as such cries out for

some sort of active response that will address that

absence or unsettledness and bring some closure. Even

though it might be a situation that arises wholly

independently of us, we can find ourselves as agents

personally implicated in it. In that case we are

suddenly put in a position in which a failure to offer a

response that would somehow eliminate the deficiency and

restore justice would be tantamount to permitting this

deficiency to persist, and so inaction would constitute

negligence on our part. Just as, when someone we know

waves at us from across the street, we are suddenly put

in a situation in which a response is called for, and in

which no response is no longer an option (for not

responding is now an active snub, whether we intend it or

not); so too are those objective situations we consider

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moral such as to implicate our agency in ways we cannot

control. It is as though such situations have a right to

our action, and they themselves would be incomplete or

unfulfilled without our active intervention, without our

bringing things to their proper resolution. This is

essentially what Hegel, in his discussion of morality in

the Philosophy of Right, calls the ‘right of objectivity’(PhR:

132 and R). This right concerns the capacity of the

objective world in which the agent lives to demand or

proscribe an agent’s actions unconditionally, regardless

of whether the particular agent recognizes this demand or

proscription for herself.

Now it seems to be above all in our dealings with

other selves that we as agents are solicited into moral

action: other selves are those specific external beings

that themselves actively place demands and make claims on

us, those worldly ‘objects’ that oblige us, in our

capacity as free agents, to respond and answer to them.

Indeed, according to Hegel’s much-discussed doctrine of

interpersonal recognition, a self simply cannot be a self

without engaging in relations of recognition with other

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selves.xviii For Hegel, then, the other is essentially

incomplete without my active recognition, and so the very

presence of the other is, as it were, a call to action, a

call to engage in ways of being that recognize this other

as a free self in its own right. It is this call for

recognition that arguably stands as the ultimate source

not only of moral obligation, but also of just

institutions and law on Hegel’s account.xix And it is the

other’s real need for appropriate recognition that

constitutes the most basic example of the sort of

metaphysical deficiency that specifically mobilizes us

into actions that would negate such a deficiency.

On this account, then, the naïve realist’s vision of

individuals as self-sufficient, self-contained

totalities, essentially external and indifferent to all

otherness, simply fails to do justice to the essentially

relational character of selves. And the domain of

interpersonal recognition, then, would seem to be

especially well-suited to demonstrating how our practical

attitude enacts both a refutation of such naïve realism,

as well as a practical affirmation of the idealist’s

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privileging of a relational ontology. The moral and

political philosophy of recognition, then, is arguably

idealist through and through.

However, if we focus exclusively or even primarily

on the intersubjective domain of recognition, we risk

overlooking the full significance and scope of Hegel’s

claim about the practical attitude as enacting a

refutation of realism, and as demonstrating idealism

actually at work in the world. xx It may well be that

other selves, taken as a particular class of external

beings among others, indeed call us to action in the ways

I have described. But Hegel’s claim about the practical

attitude’s distinctive capacity to reveal the inadequacy

of realism’s privileging of the metaphysical integrity

and substantiality of materially separated individuals,

concerns our relations to all things—that is, to anything

that our immediate, perceptual consciousness presents to

us as a self-standing individual, external to us and to

other things—not just to those particular ‘things’ we

call other selves. Focusing primarily on our social

relations, then, can serve to obscure the fact that, for

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Hegel, it is even in our practical relations with the

natural world at large that we are engaged in a kind of

practical refutation of naïve realism—that, for Hegel,

even the natural world proves to be open to and in

certain ways solicitous of our agency.

In fact, if we look to Hegel’s detailed discussion

of Morality in Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we

find that the key issue at stake there concerns, not

primarily the individual agent specifically in its

relation to other agents, but rather the question of how

to understand the relationship between the moral agent’s

actions and the natural world in which it acts. More

precisely, the question is whether the practical attitude

specific to the moral agent is such as to commit this

agent to treating the natural world as fundamentally

external and indifferent to its most genuine, freely

determined purposes (as in the realist’s ‘intrusion’

picture), or whether, on the contrary, it must implicitly

posit nature as being fundamentally in harmony with it,

as expressly accommodating, even requiring, its action.

That is, for Hegel what is centrally at issue in our

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attempt to act morally is, at bottom, the metaphysics not

only of moral agency itself, but of the natural world in

which alone moral agency realizes itself: to be a moral

agent is necessarily to become embroiled in the

metaphysical question of whether the natural world is

complete on its own account and thus wholly independent

of our strivings (whether it is ‘free,’ as Hegel says),

or whether we must conceive of nature as in some way

deficient or indeterminate, and thus as itself calling

upon our free agency to bring it to its fuller truth and

resolution. As Hegel puts it, the moral agent’s relation

to nature is based, ‘on the one hand, on the complete

indifference and independence of nature and moral purposes and

activity with respect to one another, and, on the other,

on the consciousness of duty alone as the essential fact,

and of nature as completely devoid of independence and

essential being’.xxi

So, for instance, Hegel sees the moral agent as

struggling with the question of whether the given world

of nature is itself constituted such that agents giving

themselves over to universal, moral ends can count on

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being happy in this life, where happiness is construed

expressly as ‘a consciousness of the unity of its [the

agent’s] actuality with that of nature’ (PhS: M601, W/C

396–7; trans. modified ). Similarly, he sees the moral

agent struggling with the issue of whether its naturally

given, sensuous inclinations, conceived as the real

impetuses of all concrete action, are inherently at odds

with its moral strivings, or whether they must be such as

to play a mediating role in bringing its moral intentions

to actual fruition (PhS: M622, W/C 408-9). Finally, given

that the agent, as particular, is inevitably situated in

the natural world alongside other particular beings, and

given that its relation to this empirical manifold will

be such that, in taking up one side of it, other sides

will be left out of account, the question arises as to

whether the concrete world is itself such as to lend

itself to the sort of single, unified, all-trumping

imperative that moral action demands, or whether such

action inevitably becomes bogged down in the multiplicity

and complexity of the concrete (PhS: M605, W/C 400). In

each case, the issue concerns moral agency’s way of

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taking up what nature is, and it is precisely this issue

that structures Hegel’s immanent critique of moral life.

In this context, Hegel regularly draws attention to

the fact that it is the moral agent’s practical attitude

that itself enacts or demonstrates—in deeds rather than

in thoughts or words—a response to this metaphysical

question concerning the ultimate status of the natural

world. For instance, Hegel argues at one point that,

despite the moral agent’s express commitment to

conceiving of the given world of nature as fundamentally

indifferent to and independent of its moral ends (in that

respect implicitly endorsing the realist’s treatment of

the world as wholly external to our free agency), moral

action itself embodies a rather different, we might say

idealist orientation, according to which the natural

world is not wholly other, but is rather introduced,

through the movement of free action itself, into a

higher, more complete, and self-consciously justified way

of being. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel argues that,

because the moral agent must perceive nature, in its

present form, as being external to it and thus as

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inharmonious with its moral purposes, it must postulate

such a harmony as merely ideal or as possible only in

principle. On the other hand, however, ‘consciousness …

proclaims through its deed that it is not in earnest in

making its postulate, because the meaning of the action

is really this, to make into a present reality what was

not supposed to exist in the present [namely, the harmony

itself]’(PhS: M618, W/C 618; emphasis added). The

practically engaged self-consciousness that is peculiar

to the movement of moral action itself is such that it

cannot fail to posit the actual world as fundamentally

amenable to its moral strivings: in actually acting, it

demonstrates its certainty that it is embodying a claim

that is vindicated in the face of all potential

challenges, and so it acts as though all reality were in

itself receptive of its action’s coming to be, as though

it were doing the concrete work of a universal striving or

will (the will that bears on everything, the will of

reality itself, as it were) not just its own particular

will (a will that would be external to, and thus

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potentially intrusive upon, the claims that other

particular realities might make on it).

Further, given that all moral actions, as concrete

events taking place in the natural world, will directly

draw upon and incorporate natural forces within them

(including the agent’s naturally-given impulses), Hegel

argues that, in practice, it cannot be that nature is

wholly external to, independent of, and thus ultimately

recalcitrant with respect to, the realization of moral

action. On the contrary, the natural world must be

fundamentally open to being thus incorporated; the given

situation, including the given state of the agent’s

natural impulses and needs, must be fundamentally

receptive to the actualization of moral purpose, if moral

action and the concrete practical attitude of the moral

agent are possible in the first place.xxii Thus, for

Hegel, moral agency—in its very claim to be acting

morally, in its very performance of moral action—itself

is involved in bringing to light a nature that is in

harmony with moral freedom, a world that would be

deficient without it.xxiii Or, we can also say, it

30

demonstrates the objective existence of moral

deficiencies or gaps at play in the given world itself,

precisely by acting morally, and by thereby introducing

into the fabric of this world something (the action

itself) whose concrete reality can only be understood as

a negation or redressing of such deficiency.

That the moral stance continues to be structured in

terms of the ultimate opposition and externality between

moral agency and nature, and insists on this opposition

despite the fact that the concrete movement of moral action

itself belies this opposition, constitutes a significant

part of Hegel’s dialectical critique of the moral world

view. For Hegel, then, we might say that part of

morality’s problem is that it does not adequately heed

the distinctive perspective on reality that moral action

itself brings to the table, a perspective from the point

of view of which the given world is not ultimately

external to its own self-realization.

Though I cannot fully explore the claim here, I take

it that Hegel’s argument for the priority of what, in

contrast to morality, he calls the ‘ethical’ domain,

31

hinges in part on ethical life’s having incorporated into

itself this perspective on reality, this ‘practical

idealism’ of the will. Thus, for instance, Hegel

describes the practical sphere of the ethical as ‘spirit

living and present as a world’ (PhR: 151), highlighting

the notion that here the exigencies that press upon the

agent are not merely subjective and internal to the agent

(and thus external to the world the agent confronts), but

are already at play in structuring the immediately given,

concrete situations ethical agents face when they set out

to act. Here, then, agency is a matter of responding to

what this concrete world itself calls for—that is, the

world is itself such as to demand being addressed by

action—rather than a matter of trying to impose something

‘pure’ and abstractly ideal into a nature conceived as

something wholly alien or indifferent to it.xxiv From the

point of view of ethical agency, then, the world of

objective nature must be conceived, not merely as a set

of self-contained, practically-neutral things, but rather

in terms of the actual and potential practical situations

to which they give rise.

32

To explore further Hegel’s conception of the

relationship between the practical attitude and the

natural world, I turn now to Hegel’s discussion of the

right to property ownership. The most basic issue at

stake here, we shall see, has to do with the agent’s

capacity to realize itself in and through a natural world

that is otherwise external to it, and in the course of

his analysis Hegel sheds light on a particular way in

which nature opens itself to being incorporated into the

will’s self-realization.

III. The Practical Attitude and the Ownership of

Inanimate Things

The extended passage quoted at the outset of this

paper, in which the basic link between the practical

attitude and idealism is identified, is taken from

Hegel’s discussion of the right to own property. Here

Hegel’s focus is exclusively on the will’s relationship

to non-personal things, to non-selves. Though it is

nominally possible to own another person, Hegel argues

that it is against right to do so, and his argument

33

hinges specifically on metaphysical concerns—on what we

might call the metaphysics of ownership itself in

relation to the metaphysics of selfhood. As I will

discuss further below, to come to own something, on

Hegel’s account, is quite literally to become the

substantial ground of its reality. That is, from an

ontological perspective the owner and her various items

of rightful property together constitute one being, a

single, self-standing, concrete actuality. And because

other selves are (at least implicitly) free and

autonomous, and because as such they actively actualize

themselves, and so are their own ground, it is in the end

not metaphysically possible for one self to own

another.xxv Hegel thus identifies the world that the

proprietary will confronts specifically as a world of

things (Sachen), and stipulates that things are precisely

the sorts of beings that lack any substantial capacity to

realize themselves as autonomous centres in their own

right, that lack the capacity to maintain their

identities in the face of external forces that would

determine them. As Hegel writes,

34

the thing is the opposite of the substantial: it is that which, by definition, is purely external. What is external for the free spirit (which must be clearly distinguished from mere consciousness) is external in and for itself (PhR: 42; Hegel’s emphasis).

Though Hegel means to include animals and other

living beings under the category of things, I will be

focusing primarily on inanimate, naturally given objects,

as I think these are the clearest example of such purely

external things.xxvi For Hegel, we will see, such

inanimate things are inherently incomplete and

indeterminate when conceived in abstraction from the

fuller interactional contexts in which they actually

exist, and it is in particular our practical interactions

with them that can bring them to a kind of stability and

incorporate them into a higher, more stable, and more

complete ontological whole—that of the rational agent’s

self-standing and self-affirming practical life—than they

are capable of attaining on their own. It is thus the

inherent, ontological deficiency of such things, as well

as their inherent openness to being thus incorporated,

that can be said to constitute a kind of solicitation of

our free agency.xxvii In relation to them we can see how

35

our agency is not, as in the realist account, an

intrusion into a world that is wholly external to it, but

rather has room opened up for it by the nature of the

world itself.

A rock, unlike an organism or another person, does

not care whether we crush it up into dust, or shape its

material mass into some other form useful for our

purposes. The rock is, in effect, indifferent to its own

material integrity and individual presence, as it is to

its various other determinacies, such as its shape and

size. As Hegel would put it, it is fundamentally external

to itself in these respects, or it is ‘indifferent to its

determinateness’: its various determinations, the

features that would seem to make it the specific object

that it is and that distinguish it from others, are not

held together by a substantial unity that maintains itself as

thus determinate.xxviii There is no substantial ‘it’ that

is destroyed when the particular rock is pulverized into

dust that now floats through the air, and no unified

individual ‘self’ or substrate—one that would warrant

such expressions as the ‘rock in itself’—that affirms

36

itself as a unified, self-same, concrete presence through

‘its’ various material changes. What such individual

things lack is precisely some sort of inner identity or

stable, substantial standard in relation to which we

could identify what is proper to them as individuals, and

what is merely accidental.

Whereas the specific realist position we considered

held there to be a kind of substantial integrity to the

concrete individuals we find around us in the perceptible

world, in the case of rocks—and arguably of all other

naturally occurring inorganic things—we are faced with

individuals that seem indifferent to their very

individuality and material integrity in basic ways. That

such things are inherently indifferent to the individual

forms they take on, and that their individual form is

inevitably determined by what is external to them—that

this determinability by others is inherent in their very

being, such that they are inherently external to

themselves—makes it the case that, in taking such things

up into our practical projects, we are not thereby

infringing upon some internal integrity, some way that

37

individual things ‘naturally are’ on their own account.

On the contrary, our transformation of such things into a

form that manifests our purposes is in a way licensed by

the very character of such things, by this very self-

indifference.

In this respect, it may seem that our practical

transformations of inanimate objects are not essentially

different from the transformations that these things

undergo at the hands of other inanimate objects: the

sculptor’s chisel’s forming of the stone, it seems, is of

essentially the same nature as the river’s much more

gradual, but purposeless, formation of it, in that both

involve external, mechanical processes, and both are

grounded in the stone’s self-indifference and its

fundamental openness to external determination. However,

Hegel would argue that the mechanical processes at play

in the sculptor’s case are really abstract moments in the

concrete realization of a different, higher kind of

reality than is possible in a merely mechanical,

inanimate world. To anticipate: for Hegel the living

body of the agent engaging itself with the rock, along

38

with the chisel and the rock itself, together constitute

the single, unified actuality of the self-determining,

self-realizing movement of the agent’s own will, a

movement that is realized precisely in and through the

interaction of concrete, worldly things, but that is

itself not reducible to these things taken in abstraction

from this interaction.

The river’s external relation to the stone is, in

turn, external and indifferent to the river itself. For

its being formed as this individual river with this

causal power in relation to the stone—as opposed, say, to

its having the form of groundwater out of contact with

the stone altogether—is likewise a matter of indifference

to it, and is, in turn, just a product of further

external forces acting on it.xxix Indeed, in a purely

mechanical world comprised of individuals that are

fundamentally indifferent to themselves in this way,

there really are no independent, individual centers that

can be singled out as causes or ultimate starting points

of change, for the apparent capacity of each thing to

originate change is itself purely a function of the

39

external forces that are at work in shaping it, forces

which are in turn a function of the mechanical forces

that are shaping them, and so on. A genuine starting

point that could sufficiently account for any actual

change in the world is always deferred. Faced with this

infinite deferral, we might appeal to the idea that each

particular change is really just a function of the total

system of all interacting objects, and though we might

single out individual phases or moments, our selection

will always be merely contingent abstractions from the

point of view of this essentially continuous, ultimately

indivisible totality.xxx Either way, we find that the

immediately apparent individuality and independence of

such inanimate things—an individuality that, from the

naïve realist’s point of view, was to be conceived of as

the ultimate starting point and building block of our

account of reality—proves insufficient to stand on its

own. Such individuals cannot account for their own

reality, but on the contrary reveal themselves to be

inherently incomplete moments of something that

transcends them.xxxi For Hegel, this inadequacy is

40

inherent in the very being of such apparently self-

sufficient things: it is thus that they themselves, in

their constitutive deficiency, implicitly call for a

higher kind of being, one that can, as it were, answer

for its own reality.

In the end, it is the self-affirming, self-realizing

individual agent that answers this call: the immanent

deficiency of the inanimate world makes room for a being

that exists as its own centre, a being that is not wholly

in the thrall of external determination, but that takes

up otherwise external, inanimate forces and transforms

them into manifestations of its own self-grounding, self-

affirmed reality.xxxii It is precisely this movement that

stands at the heart of Hegel’s account of the right to

property: in becoming the owner of property, the free

will comes to affirm itself, and make itself actual and

objective—gives itself concrete, worldly efficacy, as it

were—precisely by appropriating what otherwise has the

appearance of being independent of it. As Hegel says,

‘I, as free will, am an object to myself in what I

possess and only become an actual will by this means’

41

(PhR 45). Without something in the world it could call

its own—minimally, the agent’s living body, along with

this body’s natural capacity to turn the things in its

immediate surroundings to the purpose of realizing

itselfxxxiii—the will could never make an actual difference

in the first place, could never become a concrete will.

The will’s very efficacy, the very power by which it can

realize itself in the world, requires that there be

things whose objective presence is such as to carry or

embody the will, things whose actuality is the actuality

of the will itself—in short, things the will can claim as

its very own.

On Hegel’s account, the appropriated thing, though

initially external, comes to have ‘my will as its

substantial end,… its determination, and its soul’ (PhR

44). When a thing is owned, it no longer has a self-

sufficient reality or integrity of its own, but becomes

most essentially an actual manifestation of the

individual will’s affirmation of itself. Or rather, the

appropriating will demonstrates, by its very act of

assimilating the thing into its own actuality, that the

42

thing never had a self-sufficient reality of its own, but

was always incomplete in itself and essentially

vulnerable to other-determination, inherently incapable

of maintaining its individual integrity in the face of

external forces.xxxiv The person’s individual will, in

contrast, is precisely a power of affirming and

maintaining the person’s individual identity and freedom

in the face of otherness, and it does so, in part, by

incorporating other things, other ‘quasi-individuals,’

into its own actuality—making them, in effect, extensions

of its living body. It is this capacity of the

individual will to, as Locke said, ‘mix itself’ into

things, that grounds the obligation we feel in certain

circumstances to ask the owner of an item of property

whether we can handle the item or not, for this item is

‘possessed’ by the owner’s will, this will is quite

literally present in it, and to handle it without permission

would be a violation.

This complex metaphysical notion—namely, that a

self-realizing individual realizes itself essentially in

and through a negation of what is other to it, and that

43

this negation itself demonstrates the metaphysical

deficiency of the (otherwise apparently self-sufficient)

other relative to the self-affirming individual that

incorporates it—is basic to Hegel’s essentially dynamic,

relational idealism. We see this notion play a central

role particularly in Hegel’s conception of the

distinctive being of living organisms, for instance.

Indeed, Hegel regularly construes the animal’s basic act

of eating as a kind of idealism in practice, and thus as

displaying a practical refutation of naïve realism; for

this act, like the will’s act of appropriating something

as its own, involves a process of self-realization in and

through a negation of what is other, and as such this act

is also construed as demonstrating that the apparent

independence and substantiality of the incorporated

external thing (ie. the food) is really a mere appearance

(See PhR: 44A; PhS: M109, W/C77; and PhN: 246A). More

broadly, the animal is, on Hegel’s account, not merely a

discrete body, separable from its external environment,

but is essentially a breathing, eating, seeing, chasing

body, and as such its very reality qua living inevitably

44

takes the form of an ongoing interaction with the world

(PhN: 362 and A). It is not that, in the absence of such

interactions, the living being would die (though that is

of course true). Rather, it simply is this ongoing

interaction, and so in the absence of this interaction it

simply would not be what it is, it would not have the

form of a living being in the first place. But this

suggests that the things it interacts with are not

straightforwardly external to its body. Indeed, as

incorporated into the animal’s constitutive life-

processes they are just as much part of its living

actuality as its own bodily organs, and so animal life

realizes a situation in which the apparent externality

and separate material integrity of these things—those

features that the naïve realist ontology takes as

absolute—is overcome, at least while the animal continues

to be alive.xxxv

Hegel’s conception of the idealism at play in the

human practical attitude is clearly rooted in a very

similar notion of the metaphysical status of the world

with which we interact as we realize our agency. Indeed,

45

it would seem that this notion ought to play a role, not

merely in our understanding of property ownership, but

also in our understanding of human action generally. For

every action, conceived as an actual, concrete event of

the will’s self-realization, will take the form of a

movement of negating the immediate presence of things so

as to realize in and through them a sense or an end that

they do not straightforwardly contain in themselves.

For example, an agent engages in an actual process of

cutting a tree with a stone axe she has made, and a new

kind of reality comes to be thereby—namely, the process

of tree-felling, a dynamically-unfolding, futurally-

oriented reality that is just as objectively there as the

untouched stone. However, this new reality realizes

itself only as a negation of the given, material presence

of the untouched stone, and it itself is a being within

which the stone does not stand alone as a positive,

independent, self-contained totality, but functions

essentially as a moment among others within a dynamic,

relational whole: the actual, concrete movement of tree-

felling is what it is only as a gathering together of the

46

stone’s durability and shape, along with the power of the

living human body that wields it, along with the tree’s

specific perviousness and resistance to the axe, and so

on, and through this dynamic synthesis a new being takes

place (the felling) that has a distinctive presence of

its own.xxxvi In the end, its presence is really that of the

agent undertaking it, the presence of her will as she

realizes herself, as an agent, precisely in and through

these ‘negated’ things, precisely as the real ‘soul’ of

these things. The stone-as-axe is what it is precisely

in the context of this dynamic, relational whole in which

the axe is actually at work in the process of cutting

down the tree, or, we can also say, in the process of

realizing the agent’s will and purpose.xxxvii It is this

whole working context of self-realization through

otherness that provides the ultimate terms for

understanding the stone’s reality as axe, and not merely

those aspects of the stone’s reality that are present

independently of its actual interaction with hand and

tree.

47

IV. Agency as Condition of Individuation

In a passage in which Hegel argues that it is not

possible to own generic natural elements, but only

concrete individuals, he indirectly draws our attention

to the possibility that it is the will’s concrete

presence as a living, bodily individual that first

provides the context in which such inanimate objects come

to have the form of individual things in the first place.

The breathe of air or the mouthful of water can be

possessed, not air or water as such, Hegel argues,

drawing attention to how our individuality as agents is

essentially correlated to the individuality of such

inanimate elements (PhR: 52R). In these cases, it is easy

to see that we as individual living beings are the ground

of the individuality of the inanimate thing, or at least

that our respective individuality is constituted in

tandem through a movement of interaction. For water or

air would not take the form of individual breathes or

mouthfuls without lungs and mouths, and, indeed, we can

48

likewise say that we would not exist in the particular,

individual form we actual do, if there did not exist air

and water that are actually individuated into breathable

units and mouthfuls, and if there did not exist the

generic elements that offered no fundamental resistance

to becoming thus individuated.

Likewise, when we consider that such things as ‘this

river’ or ‘this mountain’ are also singled out by us—by

our perceptions, but also by our practical projects (say,

swimming or climbing) in relation to them—from what would

otherwise be an indifferent continuity of water or earth,

we are brought to wonder whether these things too, which

on the surface seem to have a kind of integrity and

undeniable sensible presence of their own as individuals,

are likewise the correlates of our own (and other

comparable animals’) concrete relations to them.xxxviii

That is, in these cases it seems that the individuality

of the things encountered is essentially correlated to

our (and other comparable animals’) actual and potential

interactions, and has no standing independently of this

interactional context. If that is so, then the same

49

practical movement in virtue of which we affirm and

realize ourselves as individual agents in the world, is

at once the movement that affirms and realizes the

individuality of the things we as particular agents

encounter—even if, in the end, our particular practical

relation with the things at issue amounts to nothing

other than a consumption of them (as in the drinking and

breathing cases).

It may appear that such things as individual rocks

are different, in that they seem to stand as separate

individuals, discontinuous with and external to their

surroundings, whether or not we encounter them. But our

discussion of the inherent indifference of such things to

their own individuality and determinacy seems to imply

that, even in cases such as this, there is something

inherently contingent and relative about the fact that

the individual object happens to take the form that it

does at any given moment. Though we ourselves may not

have literally shaped the rock into its current form,

there is a sense in which its being relative to our

perspective, and other perspectives like ours, is more

50

important, with respect to the rock’s being constituted

as an immediate, separate individual, than the natural,

inanimate forces that shaped it into its current form.

For, as I suggested, the rock’s individuality is a matter

of utter indifference and contingency relative to the

other inanimate things that were involved in shaping it,

things that are both external to it, and external to the

particular forms they happened to possess while engaged

in that shaping; whereas we, as beings who actively

comport ourselves in relation to such things, and who see

them as the potential sites of our own practical self-

realization as agents, are precisely the sorts of beings

for whom their current individual shape does matter.

We might look at the point this way. We as

individuals engaged in a practical attitude bring to the

world the relatively short-term, finite temporality of

our lives and of our projects—we bring the world into the

‘now’ of our practical experience—and from the point of

view of the time-scale of our actual and potential

interactions with the rock, the rock as it is right now

appears to stand on its own, immediately discontinuous

51

with the rest of the world. However, considered not from

the point of view of our finite, embodied perspective,

but in terms of the wholly objective (that is,

subjectless or perspectiveless), long-term process of its

geological formation and deterioration, it is best

understood as an insubstantial, utterly contingent

temporal phase of what is otherwise essentially a

continuum. Thus it seems that our practical attitude is

itself involved in generating the temporal field in which

the rock first stands out as a separate, individual thing

in the first place; our practical attitude is, as it

were, what lets the individual rock occur and make a

difference as an individual, rather than as a merely

passing phase in a continuum. As with the river or the

mountain, the individual boundaries we identify as

mattering are correlated to our own concrete, practical

potentials as individual agents.

In that case, our very encounter with such things,

our immediate perception of them as external things that

are separate from us, is already a kind of incipient

‘formative activity’ on our part—not in the sense that we

52

materially shape the things with our bodies, but rather

in the sense we, in our practical attitude, are involved

in giving rise to a world of individuals that can be thus

shaped in the first place. The rock stands out, in its

individuality, precisely as something that can, in

principle, enter into relation, as something having the

potential to be gathered, with other things and with my

body, into a unified manifestation of our will. Its very

individuality, its very separateness and immediate

givenness, as something mediated by the practical

attitude, is thus essentially a beckoning of the will.

It is thus that the practical attitude enacts a

refutation of the realist construal of action as an

intrusion into a being that has an ontological integrity

of its own. If even the rock’s immediate presence is

owed to the practical, relational context that we, as

agents, set in motion in the world, this amounts to

saying that what grants it standing in its immediacy is

precisely what undermines this standing, precisely what

reveals it to be a contingent appearance.xxxix That we

access the rock in a given moment, and treat its current

53

state as a presentation of a complete, self-sufficient

being, is to fail to appreciate its fundamental self-

indifference and self-externality. This is, again, how

our immediate, realist-oriented consciousness operates.

As Hegel argues, however, our practical attitude does not

accept such immediacy as absolute, but rather introduces

the rock into a context of actual and potential action in

which the rock’s very actuality is fundamentally mediated

by otherness—at the very least, by the agent’s own body,

which has the power to turn it towards a substantial

purpose, most basically that of affirming the will in its

character as self-affirming.

V. Concluding Remarks: Agency’s Relation to

Animal Life

I have focused the discussion on the practical

attitude’s relationship to the inanimate world, but the

issue of the will’s overall relationship to nature

becomes significantly more complicated if we take into

consideration the agent’s relation to living beings, and

particularly to animals. As I suggested earlier,

54

individual animals likewise enact a sort of practical

demonstration of idealism, on Hegel’s view, in that they

too have a stake in constituting the external world as

something naturally amenable to their own self-

realization. They are hardly the passive, externally-

determined, self-indifferent individuals characteristic

of the inanimate world. Rather, they exist as forging a

determinate environment for their own lives, and, as is

the case with human agency, their realization of

themselves as individuals seems essentially bound up with

a process of negating what is external.

Thus despite Hegel’s claim that animals, too, are

external to themselves, and that they are therefore as

much susceptible to being owned as inanimate things (see

PhR: 44A), the nature of the relationship between the will

and animal life in particular would seem to be much more

complex than the will’s relation to the inanimate world.

Indeed, the fact that we, as embodied agents, are

essentially alive, and that our every practical contact

with the world is mediated by our own living bodies,

would, it seems, need to play a significant role in our

55

account of how the will realizes its freedom in and

through a concrete engagement with external things. For

the will’s exemplary capacity to demonstrate the truth of

idealism by overcoming the apparent externality of the

things must, it seems, be rooted at least in part in the

way the organic body of the agent realizes itself as

living in and through its ongoing interaction with the

world. Indeed, it seems that Hegel’s metaphysics of

agency depends essentially on his metaphysics of life,

even if, on the whole, Hegel is more concerned to

highlight how the free will transcends our animality than

he is to explore our continuity with it.

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Taylor, Charles (2010), ‘Hegel and the Philosophy of Action,’ in A. Laitinen and C. Sandis (eds.), Hegel on Action. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Westphal, Merold (1992), ‘Hegel’s Radical Idealism: Family and State as Ethical Communities,’ in his Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Williams, Robert (2000), Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yeomans, Christopher (2012), Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. New York: Oxford University Press.

58

Young, Garry (2005), ‘Ecological Perception Affords an Explanation of Object Permanence,’ Philosophical Explorations 8:2: 189–208.

59

i Hegel 1991: Section 44, Remark. Hereafter all references to the

Philosophy of Right will be given as PhR: followed by the section number. In

referring to the Remarks and Additions associated with Hegel’s numbered

sections, I will give the section number directly followed by ‘R’ or ‘A.’

ii For one of Hegel’s more extended accounts of perception and its

relation to things [Dinge], see Hegel (1977: paragraphs 111–31 [in

German: Hegel 1988: 79-92]). Hereafter all references to the

Phenomenology of Spirit will be given as PhS: followed by ‘M’ and the

paragraph numbers of Miller’s translation, and then by ‘W/C’ and the page

numbers of the Wessels and Clairmont edition.

iii It seems that it is sight, more than the other senses, that tends to

construe the world in terms of self-contained, independent, things, each

external to all others. For a discussion of this theme as it pertains to

Hegel, see Russon (2004: 184–209).

iv As Hegel writes, from the point of view of perception ‘the object,

defined as the simple, is the essence regardless of whether it is

perceived or not; but the act of perceiving, as a movement, is the

unessential moment, the unstable factor which can as well be as not be’

(PhS:: M111, W/C 79).

v Here is one of Hegel’s more decisive statements concerning the

essentially dynamic character of what he calls the ‘idea’ (which for him

constitutes the most evolved category in terms of which to think

reality): ‘[T]he idea is the process of disrupting itself into

individuality and into the latter’s inorganic nature, and of then

bringing this inorganic nature again under the controlling power of the

subject and back to the first simple universality. The identity of the idea

with itself is one with the process; the thought that liberates actuality

from the seeming [von dem Scheine] of purposeless mutability and

transfigures it into idea must not represent this truth of actuality as

dead repose, as a mere picture [Bild], numb, without impulse and movement,

as a genius or number, or as an abstract thought; the idea, because of

the freedom which the concept has attained in it, also has the most

stubborn opposition within it; its repose consists in the assurance and the

certainty with which it eternally generates that opposition and eternally

overcomes it, and in it rejoins itself’ (Hegel 2010: 674; and in German,

Hegel 1968: 177). Hereafter all references to the Science of Logic will be

given as SL followed by the English page number, then the relevant volume

and page number of the Gesammelte Werke.

vi I call it a ‘naïve’ realism to capture’s Hegel’s thought that this is

not so much a fully-articulated, systematic philosophical view, as it is

something that ordinary consciousness tends to adopt naturally. One

might even call it ‘common sense’ realism.

vii In highlighting the way our relation to our own agency is essentially

correlated to the existence of a world articulated as a field of

potential actions, I am here drawing from a line of thought brought to

the fore by such phenomenological philosophers as Martin Heidegger and

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See especially Heidegger’s analysis of

‘worldliness’ in Heidegger (1962: 91–107); and Merleau-Ponty (1962: esp.

part 1, ch. 3). Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty even our apparently immediate

sensations (for instance, those of colour) are essentially correlated to

particular sorts of practical bodily attitudes (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 211–

5). For a discussion of how developmental psychology factors in how an

infant’s perception of things is shaped by the ways in which these things

solicit certain practical attitudes, see, for instance, Young (2005).

Young draws on the notion that the world is strucutured in terms of

‘affordances’ to action, a notion initially developed by James J. Gibson

(Gibson 1986).

viii This theme is perhaps most apparent in Hegel’s conception of Sittlichkeit,

which Hegel at one point characterizes as ‘the concept of freedom which has

become the existing world’ (PhR: 142; Hegel’s emphasis).

ix Consider, for instance, that none of the fourteen papers included in

the recent edited volume entitled Hegel on Action (Laitinen and Sandis,

2010) directly address the relationship between Hegel’s theory of action

and his distinctively idealist metaphysical commitments. The book’s lead

paper, Charles Taylor’s influential ‘Hegel and the Philosophy of Action,’

does tread upon this terrain, in that it sketches out Hegel’s thesis that

action is irreducible to other sorts of events, and so demands a

distinctive metaphysical account that runs against the grain of much

contemporary (and broadly realist) philosophy of action (Taylor, 2010).

But Taylor is here more concerned with situating Hegel in the lineage of

Romanticism than with laying out the distinguishing features of Hegel’s

idealism in particular. In his paper ‘Idealism and Agency in Kant and

Hegel,’ Robert Pippin is concerned to address the relation of agency and

idealism head-on, but the conception of Hegelian idealism operative here

is decidedly non-metaphysical, and for Pippin has to do with the

normative continuity between natural inclinations and rational moral

imperatives within the sphere of an agent’s reason-giving (see Pippin

1991).

x See, for instance, Knowles (2010) and Yeomans (2012). Yeomans’ rich

studies of the links between Hegel’s logic and his account of agency

certainly have metaphysical implications that extend beyond the

traditional concerns with causality and that bear on our understanding of

Hegel’s metaphysical idealism. However, Yeomans’ overriding goal is to

situate Hegel in relation to these traditional concerns, and even to

defend a certain causally-oriented interpretation of agency in the face

of commentators who seek to deny such a dimension in Hegel.

xi This downplaying of any causal dimension to Hegel’s theory of agency

in favour of epistemic and normative concerns has perhaps been made most

prominent by Robert Pippin (see, for instance, Pippin 2008), but can also

be found, for instance, in Deligiorgi (2010), Quante (2004), and Speight

(2001).

xii See, for instance, Pippin (2010), where Pippin usefully articulates

Hegel’s focus on the external conditions of agency in terms of Hegel’s

dialectic of the inner and the outer, but construes these external

conditions exclusively in terms of the social sphere.

xiii Hegel’s internal critique of the metaphysical view that takes causal

relations to be ultimate can be found in SL: 492 -500, 11.396-404. For

a good discussion of this critique, with attention to some of its

implications for our understanding of agency, see Yeomans (2012), ch. 10.

xiv Compare Hegel’s statement that ‘[f]or our ordinary consciousness (ie.

the consciousness at the level of sense-perception and understanding) the

objects that it knows count as self-standing and self-founded in their

isolation from one another, and when they prove to be related to each

other, and conditioned by one another, their mutual dependence upon one

another is regarded as something external to the object, and not as

belonging to their nature’ (Hegel 1991: 45Addition).

xv However, it may be that depriving the cat its access to the bird

introduces a kind of deficiency for it, and there seems to be no obvious

ground, at least as far as nature is concerned, for privileging the

bird’s perspective on things. That would suggest that our intervention

into nature is, again, not warranted or called for by nature itself.

xvi Compare Hegel’s critique of those would attempt to deflate the import

of noble actions by drawing attention to the self-serving motives that

inevitably underlie them; PhR: 124 and R; and PhS: M665, W/C 436–8.

xvii Indeed, Hegel sees contradiction, opposition, and incompleteness (or,

simply, finitude) as ineliminable aspects of both nature and the

spiritual domain, so if there is some sort of force at work in bringing

harmony or unity to all reality, it is one that does not ultimately do

away with discord and difference. For a basic discussion of how

contradiction is at play in the real, see SL: 381–385, 11. 286–90.

xviii ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact

that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being

acknowledged’ (PhS: M178, W/C 127).

xix For an extended investigation of this theme, see Williams 2000.

xx Indeed, some accounts that focus on Hegel’s doctrine concerning the

social conditions of agency tend to abstract from the metaphysical

underpinnings of this doctrine altogether, as though there were nothing

particularly metaphysical at stake in Hegel’s famous thesis that “Self-

consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so

exists for another” (PhS: M178, W/C 127). Pippin’s broadly “cognitivist”

reading of the intersubjective dimensions of agency goes in this

direction (see Pippin 2008, ch. 6 and 7), as does Quante’s (Quante 2004)

and Williams’s (Williams 2000). In contrast, for an attempt to identify

some of the basic ways in which Hegel’s idealistic metaphysical

commitments inform his conception of the social and political realms, see

Westphal (1992: 7–54).

xxi PhS: M600, W/C 396; Hegel’s emphases; translation modified.

xxii I take it that this is part of what lies behind Hegel’s argument that

moral action is itself the demonstration of an existing harmony between

impulse and moral purpose (see PhS: M622, W/C 408–9).

xxiii I agree with Pippin’s argument that Hegel’s idealism posits a

continuity between nature and our self-consciously held moral or rational

commitments (see Pippin 1991), but on my reading Hegel takes action

itself to demonstrate that there is in fact a metaphysical continuity

between nature and morality, not merely that we as agents are bound to

think in terms of such a continuity. Part of the implication of Hegel’s

claim, I take it, is that moral action reveals something about the nature

of objective nature itself—namely, that it is not wholly devoid of, or

recalcitrant to, the sorts of normative tensions that mobilize us as

agents.

xxiv See PhS: M439, W/C 289 for an especially clear characterization of

ethical life as involving the overcoming of the opposition between

subjectivity and objectivity. Hegel here writes that, in the domain of

the ethical, the actual world has ‘completely lost the meaning for the

self of something alien to it, just as the self has completely lost the

meaning of a being-for-self separated from the world’. See also PhR:

142, where Hegel characterizes ethical life as ‘the concept of freedom which has

become the existing world’ (Hegel’s emphases).

xxv For Hegel’s discussion of ownership of other selves, see PhR: 57R.

Hegel’s account of the master/slave relation in the Phenomenology claims

to show that, though the slave is treated as an owned thing in the

context of this relation, the slave could only maintain this relation and

behave as the master’s thing if he takes himself to be such a thing. It

is precisely this active self-relation, this ‘pure being-for-self’, that

ultimately precludes him from really being a thing, and so that

ultimately undermines the initial terms of the master/slave relation; see

PhS: M190–196, W/C 132–6). If the self is going to play a role in

completing and corroborating the reality of the other self, this relation

cannot take the form of ownership, but rather of recognition, an act that

expressly frees the other to be itself.

xxvi Hegel does say in PhR: 44A that animals are ‘external to themselves’,

and that the reason for this is that they are not ends unto themselves,

and are not characterized by ‘infinite self-reference’, a trait usually

associated with subjectivity and self-consciousness. However, it is

quite clear from his account of organic being in the Philosophy of Nature that

he takes some of the distinguishing ontological characteristics of life

to be internal teleology (having itself as its end) and (at least in the

case of animals) infinite self-reference (Hegel 1970). (Hereafter all

references to the Philosohy of Nature will be given as PhN followed by the

section number, and R [for Remark] and A [for Addition] where

appropriate.) See, for instance, PhN: 337A, where Hegel expressly

describes life in terms of the notion of Selbstzweck, and PhN: 359R, where

he appeals to the notion of infinite self-reference in his account of the

animal’s practical relation to the world.

xxvii In the Hotho addition to paragraph 44 of the Philosophy of Right, we find

Hegel saying: ‘to appropriate something means basically only to manifest

the supremacy of my will in relation to the thing and to demonstrate that

the latter does not have being in and for itself and is not an end in

itself. This manifestation occurs through my conferring upon the thing

an end other than that which it immediately possessed.’ It is clear from

this passage that Hegel is conceiving of this supremacy in ontological

terms.

xxviii On Hegel’s account, living beings are characterized by a more

sophisticated way of being, a more sophisticated ontological structure,

than that of inanimate beings; in particular, living beings actively

reproduce and maintain themselves in the face of otherness, and so are

self-reflected. I follow Hegel here in identifying the character of the

inanimate world in terms that presume both the existence of life and the

irreducibility of its being to inanimate (mechanical and chemical)

processes. However, I should say that Hegel’s own account of such

inanimate things as rocks and water is more complicated than I am

presenting it here, for in the end he goes so far as to conceive of such

earthly things as though they were, in themselves, moments of a

biosphere. That is, in the face of the fact that such things are, as

individuals, external and indifferent to the living things that exist

around them, he interprets their being from the point of view of their

more global role in housing and providing the matter or potentiality for

living beings (see PhN: 338–342). In contrast to this account, and in

keeping with the basic commitments of the naïve realist account I

outlined above, I am treating such things on the model of basic physical

bodies, spatially self-contained and external to one another, and

fundamentally engaged in mechanical relations, or relations involving the

external determination of one thing by another. These are bodies of the

sort Hegel discusses, for instance, in his account of mechanical objects;

see, for instance, PhN: 262–71, and SL: 631–44, 12.133–47.

xxix ‘Since the object is thus determinate yet indifferent to its

determinateness, through itself it points for its determinateness outside

and beyond itself, constantly to objects for which it is however likewise

a matter of indifference that they do the determining. Consequently, nowhere is a

principle of self-determination to be found’ (SL: 633, 12.135; Hegel’s

emphases).

xxx Hegel explores a comparable line of thought in his account of the

mechanical world: ‘the object has the determinateness of its totality

outside it, in other objects, and these again outside them, and so forth to

infinity. The immanent turning back of this progression in infinitum must

indeed be likewise assumed, and it must be represented as a totality, as a

world, but one which is nothing but a universality brought to closure

through a singularity that remains indeterminate, a universe’ (SL: 633,

12.135; Hegel’s emphases). For a more elaborate discussion of just why

an exclusively mechanical account of reality is inherently inadequate on

Hegel’s account, see Kreines (2004).

xxxi A worry sometimes expressed about Hegelian idealism is that it adopts

a kind of holism that threatens the ontological status of individuals.

For a good discussion of the issues at stake in this criticism, and for

some potential responses, see Stern (2009: ch. 1). On my reading, there

are degrees of individuation on Hegel’s view, with animals and human

agents possessing the most developed individuality, and with inanimate

objects characterized by an impoverished form of individuation (with the

result that the latter are susceptible of being subsumed into greater

wholes).

xxxii In the Science of Logic, the progress from mechanism’s inherent

insufficiency, to a form of being that is conceived of as self-affirming

and self-determining, involves a more detailed movement through chemism,

teleology, life, and then finally self-knowing agency. While I cannot

trace out this movement here, I do wish to suggest that the metaphysical

insufficiency of mechanism is itself what calls for a more self-

determining way of being, and that this is relevant for Hegel’s own

account of how free agency, in its relation with the inanimate world,

takes itself to be responding to a genuine deficiency at play in that

world.

xxxiii For a discussion of the privileged role of the self’s own body in

Hegel’s account of property, see Ciavatta (2005).

xxxiv See the addition to paragraph 44 of the Philosophy of Right (the relevant

passage is quoted above in note 27), where Hegel suggests that it is

precisely in the movement whereby the will appropriates the thing to

itself, that the thing’s externality to itself is demonstrated and comes

to its truth. See also PhR: 61, where Hegel speaks of a ‘realized

externality’, suggesting the proprietary will is itself participant in

bringing this externality about.

xxxv Compare Hegel’s remark that the animal’s self-reproductive

involvement with the world (e.g., in eating things) ‘constitutes,

properly speaking, the object and the negative over against the

subjectivity of the organism, which the latter has to overcome and

digest’ (PhN: 365). The same living movement that gives rise to the

animal at once gives rise to the objects with which the animal involves

itself.

xxxvi I am drawing here on Hegel’s likening of the end of an action to a

living soul that gathers otherwise external parts into a coherent whole

that has an identity of its own, an identity that enables us to determine

what is internal or essential to the action, and what is merely external;

see PhR: 118. Compare also Hegel’s discussion in the Introduction to the

Philosophy of History, of how we in our productive work use nature against

itself, setting it to purposes that negate or limit what would otherwise

happen naturally, thereby realizing something of a different order

precisely through this negation (Hegel 1956: 27).

xxxvii We often think of Heidegger as being the first thinker to draw our

attention to the dynamic, relational ontology peculiar to our practical

involvements with the world, but I am here suggesting that the seed of a

comparable insight can be found in Hegel’s account of how the will

realizes itself in and through an otherwise external world. Compare

Heidegger’s account of equipment in Heidegger (1962: div. 1, part III).

xxxviii This point relies on the notion that individuation is, from the

point of view of the inanimate world itself, at bottom arbitrary or

externally determined. But note that our own self-individuation and that

of other animals is not arbitrary, at least as far as we and they are

concerned. And if this living, self-individuating movement is inherently

correlated with the individuation of things in our environments, then at

the very least the latter is posited, from the perspective of the living,

as being as essential as that of the living individuality.

xxxix This dynamic, involving the presupposition of an immediate given that

is external to us, and the subsequent realization that even this

givenness is in fact a necessary correlate of our own activity, is basic

to the structure of reflection as Hegel conceives it; see especially Hegel’s

discussion of the transition from ‘external reflection’ to ‘determining

reflection’ (SL: 348–53, 11.252–7). As Christopher Yeomans has

demonstrated, this basic dynamic can be found, in different forms, in

various parts of the Logic, and in the end constitutes an essential

dimension of Hegel’s overall conception of human agency (Yeomans 2012).