Hegel's Philosophy of Drives

hegel’s philosophy of drives

Series

New Studies in IdealismPaolo Diego Bubbio, Series Editor

hegel’s philosophy of drives

james muldoon

Noesis PressAurora, Colorado

Copyright 2014, James Muldoon

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written consent of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Printed in the United States of AmericaPublished 2014. The Davies Group, Publishers

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The Unification of Love

Critique of Transcendent LawThe Ethical Structure of Love and LifePunishment as Fate and the Necessity of TransgressionThe Fate of Jesus’s Followers and the Limits of Love

Chapter 3 The Drive to Reconciliation

A Logic of ExperienceThe Force of the ConceptA Drive to Reconciliation

Chapter 4 The Transformation of the Drives

Toward a Modern PolisThe Actualisation of FreedomThe Development of a System of NeedsThe Hegelian State

Appendix: A Brief History of the Concept of the Drives

Notes

Bibliography

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Andrew Benjamin and Associate Professor Alison Ross for guiding this project and to the Brunswick Stift for their helpful advice along the way. I would particularly like to thank Gene Flenady for his thought-provoking feedback on an earlier draft of the book.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Over the past forty years there has been a significant revival of interest in the work of Hegel. This has been in part due to his historical significance as culminating the era of classical German philosophy and also due to how Hegel is able to speak to contemporary concerns in epistemology, ethics, politics and metaphysics. But what is the relationship of Hegel’s philosophy to the present and what relevance could Hegel have today? One important reason that Hegel seems so contemporary is that he is the most prescient thinker of modernity: a diagnostician of its many perversities and a systematic thinker of its ineluctable cultural and political crises. He is the first modern thinker to properly comprehend the material and economic realm of civil society and analyse its relationship to modern political institutions. His work is critical to our understanding of modern society because he is able to grasp and give philosophical life to the dynamic and affective dimensions of human existence, i.e. to the basic needs and inclinations that instigate human thought and action. He comprehends that human beings live with drives that are not merely pathological distractions from the moral law or natural and fixed determinations of an inert human nature. Human drives are themselves plastic, malleable and susceptible to transformation through a process of education and cultural development. In this book I aim to demonstrate the importance and centrality of the drives [die Triebe] to Hegel’s thought. My claim is that a focus on this concept transforms our understanding of the Hegelian project and that a proper appreciation of the role of the drives is the key to grasping the

2 | HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF DRIVES

significance of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. Hegel’s philosophy has often been understood through the language of dynamism, movement and force. Indeed, most would agree that dialectical philosophy involves a certain economy of forces that is driven by contradiction and negation. Hegel dissolves static images of thought and the world into a dynamic movement through the power of negation. However, unlike the related concepts of desire and negativity, the concept of the drives has not yet received significant attention within Hegel scholarship. One of the key aims of this book is to fill this current gap within the secondary literature. In addition to providing a detailed analysis of the concept of the drives, this book also aims to provide a broad overview of Hegel’s writings that offers a basic introduction to his philosophy, in particular, to his ethical and political thought. It traces the development of Hegel’s thought from his early writings on Christianity to his final published work, The Philosophy of Right.

The Hegel that emerges in these pages is neither an antiquated thinker of the past nor a visionary of a future to come. He is a critical thinker of the present – both his and our own. His relevance for our own time is based on his interpretation of modernity as an era of the immanent self-development of humanity within a material culture. Modernity is understood by Hegel as the self-actualisation and self-comprehension of human beings’ vital capacities through a drive towards freedom.1 Humanity’s development is presented by Hegel as a dialectical process of self-formation through progressively higher forms of self-understanding.2 The practical force of this self-understanding for humanity is due to the fact that, as both subject and object of this knowledge, an increased knowledge brings about a transformation of the subject. As an important philosopher of modernity, Hegel’s arguments are still able to shed light on the aporias and complexities of our own historical

INTRODUCTION | 3

situation. In many respects, we still occupy the position of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, for today it is difficult to reconcile ourselves with the divisive and individualising effects of neoliberal capitalism. Hegel’s philosophy is of particular relevance because it convincingly portrays the material reality of individuals’ sensuous drives and affective life. It is because of this feature that Hegel’s thought provides an ideal vantage point from which one can conceptualise the dynamic nature of material human drives in modernity and their relationship to modern institutions and practices.

Hegel’s entire corpus is marked by a desire to make an active intervention into the present through philosophical analysis and insight. From his earliest days Hegel saw himself as a public intellectual and “educator of the people” whose task was to bring about a cultural rejuvenation and reintegration of individuals into modern society.3 But philosophy’s role, for Hegel, is not to offer proclamations on how society ought to function or to issue idealistic manifestos or blueprints of future possible worlds. Philosophy is a product of its time and remains inextricably embedded within its own cultural and political milieu. Its proper task, then, is one of critical analysis and comprehension of the present. Beneath the apparent political quietism of Hegel’s remarks in the preface of the Philosophy of Right a more critical position can be uncovered. In this text, Hegel never argues that philosophy should be put in service of an established order or enable individuals to become reconciled with the injustices of their society. Rather, Hegel states that the comprehension of the present is to be directed towards preserving the subjective freedom of individuals in the political institutions of modern society.4 Although Hegel argues that philosophy can only discern the true outline of a society after it has already developed, this does not necessarily lead to a position of political or religious accommodation. By


revealing the irrationalities and pathologies of the present order, philosophy is able to provide critical insight into its functioning. In recalling Hegel’s famous image of philosophy as the owl of Minerva that begins its flight at dusk – often invoked as evidence of the conservative leanings of Hegel’s philosophy – it must be remembered that every night is followed by a new dawn.5 Philosophy still bears a relationship to an ongoing political process of historical transformation. The critical analysis provided by philosophy of a form of life that has grown old must be linked to the metaphor of a diurnal sequence that invokes the continuing transformation of humanity.

Within Hegel’s thought, the drives can be rendered intelligible in a double register: the moral and the metaphysical. In the first instance, the drives can be understood in the moral sphere, as the basic sensuous inclinations, impulses and desires of human beings. They are near synonymous with Kant’s concepts of a subjective ground of desire [Triebfeder] and a subject’s inclinations [Neigungen] based on their faculty of desire being affected by feelings.6 To this extent, they figure in Hegel’s practical philosophy as a problematic aspect of human behaviour in so far as these inclinations can often be at odds with the demands of reason. There are important sections in Hegel’s work where he makes no distinction between drives [Triebe] and desire [Begierde], such as in the Philosophy of Right, where he refers in one breath to a subject’s “drives, desires and inclinations.”7 However, it is clear that Hegel does not want to conflate the concept of desire with that of the drives in every instance.8 In a general sense, terms such as desire [Begierde] and striving [Streben] are usually reserved by Hegel as descriptions of a self-conscious subject, whereas terms such as drive [Trieb], energy [Energie] and force [Kraft] have a much broader scope, involving a relationship between substance and subjectivity. This relationship allows for a

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richer theoretical analysis: it enables us to unpack the concept of the drives along two separate but related lines of inquiry.

The second aspect of the drives is the metaphysical. In the metaphysical domain, the drives come to signify something much broader than a human being’s inclinations and desires. It is here that the full multivalent significance of the concept of the drives can be brought to light. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy itself is moved by a certain drive that is internal to the structure of his thinking. There is a dynamism and movement to Hegel’s philosophy, which appears in different ways throughout his work, but always in a sense that is traceable back to an idea of force, compulsion or drive. This dynamism is expressed through an idea of the development of history, the realisation of the Concept [Begriff], the power of the negative, the movement of Spirit [Geist], education/culture [Bildung], the actualisation of the will, and even subjectivity itself. All of these concepts share a certain family resemblance as “drives”. The concept of the “drives,” considered in the metaphysical sense of the term, is the “motor” of the dialectic. It is what moves Hegel’s philosophy forward and provides it with its animating force. This is what Hegel intends to convey by his statement, “Spirit has to be grasped as drive [Trieb] however, for it is essentially activity [Tätigkeit].”9 If Kant’s philosophy could be described as a static architectonic system, then Hegel’s is a philosophy of the drives in which concepts are set in motion by a dialectical force. The most important expression of this metaphysical drive in Hegel’s system is a drive towards freedom. A drive to freedom – both free thought and the actualisation of freedom in the world – is the central principle of Hegel’s philosophy. He argues that freedom is the “worthiest and most sacred possession of man” and the highest possible pinnacle of thought.10

The drives considered in their full metaphysical dimension are not an abstract force detached from reality, but function


according to Hegel’s basic insight that there is an essential connection between the ideal and the material. The two aspects of the drives, the sensuous and the spiritual, are indissoluble. The metaphysical drive is grounded in the sensuous and material drive of human life. On a subjective level, the drives express that which is unique to each individual – their underlying particularity and subjectivity. The simultaneous existence of potentially conflicting and contradictory drives therefore poses problems for ethics as well as politics. The metaphysical dimension of the drives expresses the fundamental free movement of thought and the possibility of actualising freedom in the world through social and political institutions. The uncovering of the centrality of the drives rests not simply on an etymological argument – of pointing to the appearance of the term throughout Hegel’s work – but on a philosophical argument concerning a deeper question of the movement of Hegel’s thought as a whole. The word Trieb itself is used infrequently by Hegel in his early works and only sparingly in the Phenomenology of Spirit. One must first identify the importance of a consideration of the drives in Hegel’s later philosophy in order to see the ways in which it pervades his entire system. This study attempts to draw out the varied connections between Hegel’s different works and demonstrate how a thorough conceptualisation of the drives is essential in understanding Hegel’s project.

The subsequent development of the concept of the drives in the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis has followed some of Hegel’s most important intuitions, including the role that institutions can play in breaking down individual pathologies. However, I will not follow the psychoanalytic literature on the concept of the drives in this study.11 Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition introduce a number of concerns into the concept of the drives that are foreign to Hegel’s project. In particular, Freud emphasises the drives’ ahistorical, irrational

INTRODUCTION | 7

and sexual nature, which are at odds with Hegel’s theory. Hegel’s own formulations are based within the ethical and political framework of German idealism. His account is more rationalist and less strongly aligned with the unconscious insofar as he believes that the drives contain an implicit rationality and are susceptible to rational modification. For Hegel, drives are not ahistorical, quasi-mythic sources of libidinal energy, but culturally and socially mediated impetuses to thought and action that can be acted upon and transformed through cultural development. Although the drives are fundamental to human psychic life for both Freud and Hegel, for the latter they are not simply factical givens of human beings or impersonal psychic forces that could be temporarily discharged with the attainment of a desired object. For Hegel, drives are historically mediated and are articulated and realized only as a potential developing in tandem with human historical-cultural experience. Hegel’s theory of drives is embedded within a broader understanding of the cultural development of human beings and the relationship of individuals to the practices and institutions of modernity.

Instead, this book is positioned within a line of philosophical inquiry concerning the nature and the role of force within philosophy and life, which can be traced back to Leibniz and emerges in figures such as Nietzsche, Gabriel Tarde, Foucault and Deleuze.12 Hegel is particularly concerned with an analysis of forces in parts of his Phenomenology, but also in his social and political philosophy, where this analysis takes on a more explicitly political dimension.13 Hegel wants to introduce mediation into the immediacy of the present. For him, such mediation of the present can determine which historical forces exhibit a movement towards becoming autonomous. Hegel provides an analysis of the relationship of forces that exist within his own society through a philosophical analysis of the structure of Spirit. The problem, for Hegel, is that social relations appear


to subjects as natural and necessary modes of living. In other words, Spirit forgets its own history. Human beings forget how they came to live in their current diversity of ways and the conditions that made this possible. Critical historical work reveals the present as mediated, that is to say, as resulting from a long formation of social and historical experience. This work involves a phenomenological investigation into the ensemble of antagonistic forces that produced the current assemblage of institutions, practices and subjectivities that constitute society. Hegel allows us to transform our beliefs and forms of life by drawing to the surface congealed problems that have resulted from our historical development. It is only when Spirit can understand itself as the necessary product of a series of stages on its own journey that the present can be adequately understood.

The purpose of mediating the historical experience of the present is to further the project of human freedom. Philosophical reflection aims to create a conceptual map that is adequate to contemporary practices. Through knowledge and insight attained via reflection, philosophy locates and determines which forces are becoming free and which are regressive. Hegel recognises that both exist alongside one another in a constant state of tension. There is no perfectly linear notion of the progress of history for Hegel because every society is composed of an agglomeration of competing historical ideas, movements and social groups that resists a strictly progressive historical narrative. On the one hand, there are forces that attempt to prevent the drives from moving: forces of stultification and reification that seek to close up social relations in imposed hierarchies and systems of domination. On the other, there are emancipatory movements that seek to actualise the possibilities of human self-determination in concrete practices and institutions. Philosophy’s role in this conflict for Hegel is to provide the most adequate conceptualisation of those basic institutions and practices that would actualise freedom

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in any given society. Individuals must feel that their subjective drives are appropriately integrated into political institutions and that their own interests are embodied in the common good of the state.

According to this reading, Hegel’s well-known principal philosophical problem of overcoming the diremptions of modernity becomes a political question of how society could live with a continuation of the drives.14 In other words, the pertinent question that Hegel poses is the following: which structures and systems need to be established that would appropriately form modern political subjectivities and mediate social and political disagreement within a rational and normative framework? This problematic is associated with what for Hegel is one of the deepest truths of humanity – its underlying drive towards free and rational self-determination. Hegel thus connects the problem of politics to the possibility of the actualisation of freedom in the world. Any attempt at a solution to this problem must involve a relationship between human beings’ sensuous drives and desires and a broader movement towards free political institutions in modern societies. This relationship will be mediated by the sphere of social and cultural institutions and the shared practices of Sittlichkeit or ethical life. While for interpreters like Kojève, Hegel enacts a final synthesis and reconciliation that closes off the drives, this study argues that Hegel maintains a disjunctive relationship between these two moments – sensuous drives and political freedom.15 By this I mean that the drives must be maintained in their dynamism and movement within political institutions. His primary lesson is not how all forms of difference and otherness could be reconciled but how subjects could learn to live in a modern condition of alienation, fragmentation and political disagreement.

Furthermore, Hegel provides an evolutionary account to the transformation of norms within a given society through


the movement of the drives. In the Phenomenology of Spirit he outlines a model of how political change occurs through the contestation of a shifting universal of rules, norms and regulated practices that are grounded in a society’s basic institutions and embodied in the subjectivities of its citizens. There is no end of history in Hegel because human history is dialectic and self-transforming. Nor is there a set of foundational principles or a finalised logical system that could put an end to this evolution. Any temporary compromise or stability achieved through a crystallisation of shared yet contested values must remain in a continual state of flux due to the capacity of individuals to reopen debate concerning the validity of these norms. These partial and provisional fixations are what Hegel refers to as “shapes of spirit,” ways of living and thinking together in a shared material culture. The subjective drives of individuals and the objective sphere of legal and political institutions are both involved in a dynamic movement and constant interaction with one another. Hegel’s philosophy seeks to adequately frame this dialectic relationship between the subjective and the objective, individual drives and social and political institutions.

This study adheres to two general methodological rules. First, it argues that Hegel’s deepest and most central philosophical concerns are revealed in his early writings. Early essays such as The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate are instructive for the reading of his philosophy as a whole because they develop, in lucid prose uncomplicated by technical language, several themes that will recur throughout his later works. There is an essential continuity throughout Hegel’s oeuvre as to what he considers to be the basic task of philosophy and the central socio-political questions of his age. Hegel was troubled by the cultural disintegration of modern society, which included the effects of social alienation, loss of sources of meaning and legitimacy and the breakdown of the cohesive force of traditional values and

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institutions. While his metaphysical system undergoes a number of transformations, the basic problems to which he intends to provide answers remain relatively constant. These early writings therefore reveal Hegel at a rather unguarded moment before the gradual crystallisation of his system. The layers of metaphysical baggage covering Hegel’s basic vision of the world can be peeled back to expose the bare artifice of the hopes and ambitions of his youth. The texts exhibit his most important philosophical interests in a very raw and unmediated form. This is not to argue that the early writings reveal the truth of Hegelianism or that there are no significant changes that occur throughout Hegel’s career. Hegel will radically alter a number of his early positions on account of a realisation of metaphysical problems with his earlier systems and a growing awareness of the complexities of modern society. However, there is an underlying continuity from the Difference essay to The Philosophy of Right concerning the basic problems of modernity.

Second, it argues that Hegel’s ethical and political commitments drive and determine his more abstract logical system and not the other way around. This is to reverse a common presumption that Hegel’s philosophy is an abstract system detached from the material world and only imperfectly applied to social and political life. This view has been popularised by Feuerbach and Marx’s critique of Hegel as a philosopher with a tendency towards mysticism whose system is driven by an abstract Idea that should be brought down to the material reality of concrete social life.16 I claim that Hegel was deeply concerned with social issues and that these had a profound effect over the development of his more systematic enterprise. Hegel’s early political ideals were formed in the 1790s amongst a whole generation responding to the Kantian revolution in philosophy and the political consequences of the French Revolution.17 Hegel witnessed the rupturing and


splintering effects of the Enlightenment use of reason in both theoretical and practical life. He saw the need for a new Volk community to heal the many divisions of modernity and restore a sense of lost harmony and wholeness to society. He wanted to reverse the process of individuals’ separation from social and religious communities and their disconnection from a fundamental ground of existence. However, for Hegel, this could only be achieved on the basis of the recognition of the constitutive split of modernity: both in modern individuals and social life. The reconciliation between different elements within a fragmented social world and the restoration of individuals’ sense of wholeness could only be possible by acknowledging the irreparable breach at the heart of being.

The second chapter offers an account of Hegel’s early ethical and political thought by giving a reading of his early essay, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, as the high point of the pre-Jena phase of his writing. In this chapter, the drives are considered in their moral sense, as the basic inclinations of human beings. One of Hegel’s main concerns in this essay is Kant’s privileging of duty over inclination. Hegel attempts to solve the problem of the formalism and rationalism of Kantian morality with a metaphysics of love and life that reconciles duty and inclination into an aesthetic whole in which their divisive attributes are negated and overcome. Hegel will ultimately realise that this initial attempt to develop a moral and social philosophy on the basis of a concept of an aesthetic totality must fail. He moves beyond nostalgic criticisms of modernity based on aesthetic experience or love. He realises that he was attempting to solve social and political problems with an inadequate metaphysics and an insufficient understanding of the complexities of modern social and economic life. The need for a reform in his thinking leads to the articulation of a more developed metaphysics grasped in conceptual rather than aesthetic terms in the Phenomenology of

INTRODUCTION | 13

Spirit and the final presentation of a moral and social philosophy in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

The third chapter, on the Phenomenology of Spirit, is an intermezzo between chapters two and four, which both analyse the progression of Hegel’s arguments on ethics and politics from his early to his later works. Chapter two analyses ethical and political concerns in an early essay by Hegel whereas chapter four gives a reading of Hegel’s mature political philosophy in the Philosophy of Right. In chapter three, however, I consider the drives in a much broader sense than the inclinations of sensuous human beings – they figure as the driving force of Hegel’s dialectic. A drive is at the logical core of Hegel’s philosophy and is that which pushes it forward and provides it with its dynamism and movement. This is equally as important for the historical experience of human societies as it is for the logical development of a structure of thinking. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel also provides the outline of an evolving structure of normativity through the relationship between a universal system of law and particular human needs and wants. Absolute knowledge is the stage at which human beings can adequately reflect on the nature of this conflict and form an institutional arrangement for mediating its continual antagonisms and contradictions.

The final chapter examines the development of Hegel’s mature thought on ethics and politics as presented in the Philosophy of Right. The two aspects of the drives studied previously are shown to be interconnected through the concept of the will in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel demonstrates that there is a metaphysical concept of the drive in the human will in so far as it attempts to actualise itself in the world through the concrete institutions of the family, civil society, and the state.18 This process of the actualisation of freedom is only achieved through what I call a “re-naturing” of human beings that involves a transformation of the sensuous drives into the rational


determinations of the will. Hegel calls this a process of the “purification of the drives,” in which individuals are integrated into social institutions through a mixture of ideology, work and institutional learning.19 The realisation and actualisation of freedom in concrete social institutions is connected to a process of the development of habit within individuals and the transformation of their immediate and natural drives into fully mediated cultural ones. The problem with this aspect of Hegel’s theory is that he attempts to block up the drives by locating the universal in a reified bureaucratic class and not in the people.

Contrary to many readings of Hegel as an abstract idealist whose thought must be brought back down to the sensuous reality of material life, I argue that Hegel recognises that human beings are “amphibious animals” with both a “sensuous and a spiritual existence” that interact in a dialectic relationship.20 Hegel’s idealism does not imply a stoic renunciation of human drives and needs. Hegel learns from Schiller that one cannot properly understand the nature of human beings or their relationship to others in a shared material culture without a central position being granted to human drives. By drawing attention to the prevalence of the drives in Hegel’s philosophy I am emphasising the materialist and humanist dimensions of his writings. This book can thus be situated within a broad school of Left Hegelianism that highlights the immanent and anthropological aspects of Hegel’s social and political thought. Hegel emphasises how human beings are not just spiritual but also natural beings with active and vital powers that exist in an objective world. His philosophy analyses the sensuous existence of human beings with corporeal dispositions and embodied habits. These characteristics of human beings and their relationship to political institutions in modernity are crucial elements in the movement of Hegel’s philosophy.

Chapter 2

The Unification of Love

One of the central problems to which Hegel’s philosophy responds is the social alienation, fragmentation and loss of meaning brought about by the numerous diremptions of modernity.1 These diremptions are the result of a series of cultural shifts in the modern era towards more rational and technical modes of living. In his early writings, Hegel rejects an Enlightenment belief in the application of pure instrumental reason and turns toward classical models of Greek life as paradigms of wholeness and harmony. The limitations of modern forms of understanding for Hegel are their purely calculative nature and fragmentary and divisive effects. He believes that they lead to a constitutive breach in modernity in which human beings become separated from God, nature and their community. Hegel’s entire philosophical development can be viewed as an attempt to provide an adequate response to this basic problematic. His most refined and developed answer to this question in his pre-Jena writings is the presentation of a metaphysics of love and life in his early essay, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate.2 The essay, composed between 1798 and 1799,3 marks a distinct break from the earlier Kantian-inflected The Life of Jesus and The Positivity of the Christian Religion, and reveals his first tentative steps towards his own dialectic philosophy. It is Hegel’s first attempt at reconciling his youthful ideals of Greek polis life with the realities of an increasingly sophisticated modern society. The most obvious and immediate target of the essay is the dualisms of Kantian philosophy,4 but in the background lies an attempt to deal with the complex set of social, economic and political


transformations that characterise modernity. If it is easy to read Kant as the main object of criticism in this essay, this is because Hegel believed Kant was so successful at articulating and giving philosophical life to a picture of the deeply fragmented nature of modern individuals and society. The divisions within Kantian philosophy stand in for more complicated social processes that were only just beginning to develop in Hegel’s era.5 Hegel’s essay reflects a widely held view in his time that Kant’s philosophy embodied a form of rationality that was put into practice in the political events of the French Revolution, the birth of political modernity.6

The Spirit of Christianity presents itself as a theological study of the divergence between the Jewish and Christian religions. In spite of the title given to this collection of essays by its publisher, in substance, the Early Theological Writings cannot be considered orthodox theological writings in any ordinary sense of the term.7 Instead, these studies primarily concern social, historical and even economic aspects of religion and society. Theological themes are the terrain on which the young Hegel grapples with the fundamental problems of his generation. The essays reveal Hegel as a social critic, as much as a historian or theologian, and in them, one can even see traces of future paths taken by Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard. The Spirit of Christianity unfolds as a narrative of Jesus’ teachings and seeks to demonstrate the superiority of Jesus’ notion of love over a Jewish transcendent God. While prominent Hegel scholar, H. S. Harris, does not believe Hegel could be said to have his own “philosophy” at this early stage, I argue that a coherent philosophical position can be extracted from the text.8 In particular, Hegel develops a notion of love as an aesthetic union that is superior to theoretical reason. The concept of love represents the power of unification—a force that can reconcile opposites, heal divisions and provide new foundations for a social

THE UNIFICATION OF LOVE | 17

bond that has been disintegrated by the vicissitudes of modern life. In overcoming these divisions, love can restore a sense of lost wholeness and unity without reverting to a pre-modern form of an undifferentiated community. For the young Hegel, love has the power to reshape modern life by rearticulating an organic and holistic conception of a community of rich, varied and complete individuals. However, the essay also bears witness to the inevitable reification of the “living” subjective spirit of love into a “positive” objective religion. Hegel’s text performs the very impossibility of love while simultaneously standing as a testament to its enormous force and transformative potential.

The moral sense of the concept of the drives as the sensuous inclinations of human beings can be located in a germinal form in this early essay. Although not as fully developed as in his later writings, the drives play a major role in Hegel’s understanding and critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. In particular, Hegel is critical of the way in which the drives (or inclinations) figure within Kant’s morality as subordinated to the moral law. Hegel places a primary importance upon human drives and attempts to reconcile them with the law through an ethics of love. Hegel, along with Schiller and Schelling, held a particularly critical view of Kant’s morality and saw within it ascetic and life-denying tendencies.9 Hegel argues that Kant constructs an overly formal and rational moral philosophy that is unable to adequately orient human beings in the sphere of life. The crudeness of Hegel’s criticisms of Kant has been noted by many.10 Hence, the problems Hegel may encounter as a convincing reader of Kant will not be addressed here. My focus is instead on what Hegel’s critique of Kant tells us about Hegel’s own project. It is the way in which Hegel responds to Kant’s problematic and the philosophical ideas that are developed from it that is of primary importance. Along with this critique of Kant’s morality, Hegel also provides an initial outline of the basic social and political institutions that


would be required in response to the modern social problems of alienation, division and disagreement. However, on both counts (in ethics and politics) Hegel ultimately fails. The reconciliation of duty and inclination is unable to be achieved in the aesthetic domain with an inadequate metaphysics of love and life. In the political sphere, reconciliation will require a much more nuanced set of social institutions that take into account the realities of a complex and developed civil society. However, Hegel does begin to hint at a more intricate and sophisticated analysis of these problems. His goal of reconciliation is not simply a one-dimensional fusion and unification, but a far more complex paradigm of the multi-faceted development and flourishing of life that he finds in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. The figure of the trespasser, in Hegel’s text, reveals the necessity of a break with a condition of natural unity and harmony and the need for the cultivation of a sense of strife, conflict and development, which are central ideas to any possible notion of self-actualisation. It is these themes that will become essential to Hegel in the development of his philosophy from the Phenomenology onwards.

Critique of Transcendent Law

Hegel’s aim in The Spirit of Christianity is not so much to defend or criticise a particular theological doctrine but rather to find solutions to the deep divisions and fragmentary nature of late 18th century German culture. For Hegel, the spirit of Judaism is the essence and origin of Western reason or, more specifically, of Kantian philosophy and modern individualism.11 Hegel’s narrative of the Jewish people is divided into three parts, each centred on the figures of Noah, Abraham and Moses. He begins with the story of an incredible flood in Noah’s era, which ends the natural harmony between man and nature. The metaphor


of the flood symbolises the rise of the physical sciences, the age of Enlightenment, and the political events culminating in the French Revolution. These events all share a similar hope placed in human reason for the possibility of the liberation of humanity through a mastery of nature. Once nature is posited as having “poured savage devastation over everything” the question of how man can exist in opposition to, and alongside, nature is raised as a serious problem.12 What Hegel describes through the metaphor of the flood is one of the defining features of the historical condition of modernity: the memory and mourning of a perceived yet fictive state of original unity and harmony with nature. In this text Hegel grapples with the idea that modern societies presuppose a taming of nature in order to satisfy human needs. Economic progress in the form of commercial and social activity is based on a struggle against and overcoming of natural obstacles.

Hegel compares the biblical story of Noah and the flood with the account given of Nimrod in the Jewish historian Josephus’ The Antiquities of the Jews.13 Nimrod and Noah both confront the crisis of the flood and the separation between man and nature in different ways: Nimrod attempts to build a tower to avoid future catastrophes, while Noah makes a pact with God to obey God’s law in exchange for the taming of nature. Hegel views both solutions as equally problematic. While Nimrod “united men after they had become mistrustful of each other, estranged from one another,” he did so by force, through the creation of a despotic tyranny.14 Noah, on the other hand, makes an agreement with God, in which God promises “to confine within their limits the elements which were his servants, so that no flood was ever again to destroy mankind.”15 This agreement comes at the cost of the creation of a transcendent system of divine law to which men are subjected. Nimrod and Noah stand in for Kantian theoretical and practical reason respectively.16 Nimrod


uses the faculty of the understanding to master nature through the construction of a tower, whereas Noah uses the faculty of reason and creates a relationship of subjection to a transcendent law. In Hegel’s view, neither approach adequately deals with the fundamental problem of the primary cleavage that separates man and nature. Instead of reconciling themselves with nature both Noah and Nimrod “made a peace of necessity with the foe and thus perpetuated the hostility.”17 As long as this initial cleavage remains, no productive set of relations can be established, “for the only relationship possible between hostile entities is mastery of one by the other.”18 As a result of this, modern individuals, for Hegel, remain divided within themselves and separated from nature.

Noah’s strategy to master nature is brought to full fruition in the figure of Abraham. Abraham, for Hegel, is the “true progenitor of the Jews,” and it is with his decision to relate to other living things exclusively through the mediation of a transcendent God, that the fate of the Jewish people is sealed. 19 Abraham is the most chilling figure in Hegel’s history of the Jewish people, for he exhibits the kind of lifeless and cold calculation that in Hegel’s view is characteristic of Kantian morality. Abraham’s first significant act is a “disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love,” thus spurning the “beautiful relationships of his youth.”20 He chooses to turn away from the natural connections and relationships of his community to become independent, wandering the open expanses of the desert. Hegel clearly intends Abraham to evoke the image of individuals in a fragmented modern society, living an isolated and atomistic life in which they attempt, as far as possible, to submit all other living things to their will. Hegel will come to argue in more detail that such a simplistic and one-sided idea of freedom must be located within a more nuanced conception of mutual dependence, trust and recognition.


In these passages Hegel is attempting to respond to what he perceives to be the central problem in Kant’s moral philosophy. Hegel senses that if worked out in practice, Kantian morality requires turning one’s back on life itself as a source of ethical orientation in the world. Hegel’s reading of Kant emphasises a temptation of asceticism, a withdrawal from life and a detachment of the self from social and emotional connections in the world. Abraham is described as having “torn himself free altogether from his family . . . in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself.”21 Hegel’s main charge against Kant in this essay is the sheer coldness of heart with which Kant prescribes the moral law. In a note in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant defines life as inextricably bound up with our faculty of desire [Begehrungsvermögens], particularly when this faculty is affected by our feelings, which produce preferences or inclinations [Neigungen].22 Part of what it means to live a finite human life is to be affected by our lived environment and have various preferences or desires for certain objects, which Kant, in the same footnote, also ties to the production of human needs [Bedürfnisse]. Hegel draws a similar connection between drives/inclinations and needs in his own philosophy. Both drives and human needs are essential components of a full and rich human life.

The production of preferences or inclinations pose a great problem for Kant’s morality, as he holds that transcendental philosophy must be based entirely on a priori grounds, and cannot rest on motives that are grounded in empirical concepts.23 This leads Kant to separate radically two different sources of our motives for action: a priori and thus properly moral sources of action motivated from the moral law, and subjective grounds of desire or incentives [Triebfeder] that rely on our action’s agreeableness to our senses.24 Of the two, it is only the latter “pathological” or empirical incentives that are located in the


realm of our senses and based on an antecedent desire. The former type of interest is a “pure” or “practical” interest that is independent from empirical desires and our sensuous nature. This interest is generated in the minds of rational agents by the moral law itself, which engenders a certain feeling of respect for the law, thus producing its own motivation for acting in accordance with it. Kant’s claim is summarised in his first proposition of morality, that “for an action to have moral worth it must be done from duty,” and hence be separated from other competing empirical incentives for action.25 It is only such a pure motivation for morality that can ensure our obedience to duty. For Kant, the subjective grounds of action located in our senses are too unreliable to ground our freedom. Hegel’s concern is that in Kant’s attempt to locate the higher cognitive faculty of reason as a basis for our freedom, the sensuous and material realities of life itself get left behind in the process.

Hegel makes explicit reference to the subjective content of individual human particularity as the basis for any discussion of the ethical. He argues that at the core of human particularity lies “a human drive, and so a human need” [einen Trieb, sogar ein Bedürfnis des Menschen].26 Following Kant, Hegel makes a clear link between human drives or sources of action and the appearance of needs. The former is the experience of the drive by the individual in question, while the latter is the outward manifestation of the drive as present to the consciousness of others. The universality of command is directly contrasted with these individual and particular drives. Hegel elevates the particularity of human need and desire to a position of primary importance since within a human need lies “the sensing or the preserving of a human being, no matter how empty this being may be.”27 The starting point of ethics has to be human particularity as such. For there to be any possibility of a more humane form of inter-subjective relationality, one must begin


with human drives and needs and privilege them above the lifeless morality of objective law.

The precise nature of these needs is not expanded upon in any great detail as only two brief examples are provided in the text, but a rough outline can be discerned from these passages. The concept of Bedürfnis must include the most basic of human needs such as hunger, thirst and shelter. But they could also include more developed spiritual and social needs, as Hegel states that the disciples satisfying their hunger by picking ears of corn on the Sabbath was the satisfaction of only the most basic or ordinary of needs.28 Hegel provides a second example of a need through the story of the disciples rescuing an animal from drowning, which suggests that a need arises whenever a sensuous being experiences suffering or requires some form of assistance. Needs are idiosyncratic, they are particular to each individual and form part of the complex web of connections and “natural relations” that constitutes human subjectivity. The broad and encompassing manner with which Hegel refers to needs and the multiple ways in which needs arise in life suggests that for Hegel there exists a multiplicity of heterogeneous needs that can arise within human beings. They are simply a part of the day-to-day nature of living a finite human life, part of “the subjective in general.”29 However, in this early formulation of the problem of needs, Hegel does not offer any further analysis on the social nature of needs. He does not explain how living in society influences need production and how the growth of modern civil society profoundly transforms the satisfaction of needs. It is not until the analysis of the Philosophy of Right, in chapter four, that we encounter Hegel’s notion of a “system of needs” as the organisation of the satisfaction of human needs and desires through social processes of labour and a system of estates.

The story of the Jewish people is concluded in the third and final figure of Moses, the Jewish legislator. Whereas the history


of Noah’s flood and Abraham’s rejection of the bonds of love and life demonstrate the gradual expansion of modern man’s initial feelings of estrangement and alienation, Moses represents the culmination of this division in a reified system of universal rational law. It is Moses who finally establishes a covenant with a transcendent God through “the terror of physical force” which grounds the Jewish system of law as command.30 For Hegel, this conception of divine law does not involve an idea of truth or beauty—it rests merely on the notion of objective command and control. The central focus of The Spirit of Christianity emerges as a polemic against this conception of law and an argument in favour of an ethics of love and reconciliation. The philosophical crux of the problem of transcendent law lies in the relationship that is established between a formal conception of universality that rules over and oppresses instances of particularity. It is in this final character that the political dimensions of Hegel’s critique fully emerge. What was analysed, on the one hand, as the internalisation of objective law in the form of the categorical imperative in the supersensible realm of the Kantian individual, is now exhibited in the political sphere as the positing of the divine law of a transcendent God, which is privileged above any subjective needs or desires of the Jewish people. Hegel notices a parallel relationship that exists in both a moral and a politico-legal sense in so far as the rational commands of Kantian morality can be just as external and oppressive as those of positive law. Hegel argues that having done nothing to remedy man’s fundamental state of diremption, the universal appears as something alien and objective and thus as an external master.

The political dimension to Hegel’s critique is given more substance in a short piece composed at a similar time to The Spirit of Christianity essay, entitled Earliest System Program of German Idealism.31 Although the exact authorship of this short manifesto remains somewhat in doubt, the manuscript is in Hegel’s


handwriting and it is probable that at this stage in his life he had at least assented to some version of the ideas contained within it.32 In this text, Hegel criticises the idea of a positive law reified in the state as something “mechanical,” contained within the artificial and inhuman structure of a machine.33 This external and objective system of government is entirely antithetical to the idea of freedom, leading Hegel to conclude that “we must therefore go beyond the state” in order not to “treat free human beings like mechanical works.”34 The image of the reified and objective form of the state is in contrast to the model set forth of an aesthetic community united by truth, love and beauty. Although the piece is very short and the basic ideas are only presented rather than argued for, it does give a reasonable indication of Hegel’s social and political views at the time, which are in accord with those expressed in The Spirit of Christianity.

The Ethical Structure of Love and Life

Hegel completely rejects a transcendent conception of law and morality. Rather than interpret Jesus as a reformer of Jewish law, Hegel presents him as having “set himself against the whole.”35 In opposition to the objective command of the law, Jesus stands for a holistic, subjective ethics, in which man’s humanity is restored through a rejection of the deep oppositions of Kantian morality. Hegel’s first move is to demonstrate how Jesus reverses the importance of duty over human need by focusing attention on the importance of human drives and suffering. No command or duty can be so absolute as to not be trumped in the final instance by a human need. Morality cannot be reduced to a series of rule-following acts as needs arise antecedent to the law and hence modify and condition the way in which the law should be followed. Hegel expresses this in the simple formula, “need cancels guilt.”36 Needs are powerful enough to make a


sufficient ethical counter-claim to objective commands. There is no use for a system of objective command within Hegel’s holistic subjective ethics as the satisfaction of needs follows automatically from their appearance. As Jay Bernstein notes, within this ethical framework “satisfying the need is the internal correlative of perceiving it as a need.”37 Need fulfilment is the basic reaction to the perception of a need, which requires neither intellectualisation nor the assertion of duty to undertake it. However, Hegel is not advocating for a simple reversal of the Kantian privileging of duty over inclination, as if following every one of our natural desires could be an end in itself. Hegel’s alternative to the oppressive notion of a transcendent law is a metaphysics love and life.

The origins of this formula lie in an amalgamation of ideas Hegel finds in Schiller and Hölderlin. From his meeting with Hölderlin in Frankfurt in the Spring of 1797, Hegel receives the central concept of love as a power of unification.38 From Schiller, on the other hand, he adopts the formal structure of the reconciliation of sense and reason through a third moment of aesthetic experience. Hölderlin’s concept of love is of a unification of life’s tendencies. Love is a force that reconciles in human beings a striving for, on the one hand, the absolute and infinite—a point of origin or primordial being prior to consciousness—and on the other, a striving towards abandonment and loss of self-hood. Hegel adopts only part of Hölderlin’s theory, namely, the idea of love as a unifying force. However, he does not also take on board the fully developed notion of a reconciliation of life’s opposing tendencies or strivings. Hegel uses the concept of love in a different context, to solve the problem of social alienation and the divisive nature of modernity. The concept of love in Hegel plays a role more similar to that of aesthetic experience in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Hegel argues that our natural inclinations should not be ruled by reason, but


instead, cultivated with reason into a beautiful and harmonious whole. In many respects, Hegel’s The Spirit of Christianity can be seen as a rewrite of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man against a theological backdrop. Just as in Schiller, Hegel searches for a reconciliation of inclinations and law and attempts to demonstrate how these could be integrated into a conception of ethics without recourse to the “ought” of Kantian morality. Hegel does not presuppose an unbridgeable divide between an individual’s duty and their inclinations. For Hegel, a third position must be brought in to mediate between the two, which is a Platonic-inspired aesthetic mixture of truth, beauty and love. However, Hegel also moves beyond Schiller, who still ultimately wishes to defend his position on Kantian grounds. Hegel, on the other hand, breaks with the presupposition of a Kantian dualism.

At its logical core Hegel’s metaphysics of love and life represents a move away from a relationship of command of the universal over the particular towards an internal harmony between a whole and its parts. Hegel first presents religious practice as this attempt at unifying and harmonising these two aspects of humanity. He states that

religious practice is the most holy, the most beautiful, of all things; it is our endeavour to unify the discords necessitated by our development and our attempt to exhibit the unification in the ideal as fully existent, as no longer opposed to reality, and thus to express and confirm it in deed.39

The Jews had misunderstood the nature of religious practice by their interpretation that all that is necessary is a “bare service” to the Lord. Hegel views this form of religious practice as enslavement without pleasure or joy. He states that “if that spirit of beauty be lacking in religious actions, they are the most empty of all; they are the most senseless bondage,


demanding a consciousness of one’s annihilation, or deeds in which man expresses his nullity, his passivity.”40 Jesus aims to alter the way in which religious practice is carried out by establishing a new relationship between human needs and the law. This point is expressed at first rather cryptically. Hegel explains that Jesus sought to “strip the laws of their legality,” not simply by a direct repudiation of them through illegal acts, but rather through a conception of love which “fulfils the law but annuls it as law and so is something higher than obedience to law and makes law superfluous.”41 Jesus did not promote the simple doing as one pleases regardless of the content of the law; his project was one of reconciling individual desires with the abstract form of universal law. A crucial element of the law is negated and preserved in the higher unity of the reconciliation of inclination and duty. As Hegel says, in the concept of love “all thought of duty vanishes.”42 The law may still be adhered to, in fact, in certain respects it is important that it is, but it is not in contradiction to subjective inclinations. Hegel’s key insight here is that while law remains itself it can only reconcile opposites conceptually and hence imperfectly. The opposites that law attempts to reconcile are the prohibited act and its prohibition (thou shalt not kill, and the act of killing). Since the law stands in the form of a command the unification of the two must keep them as opposites, and hence the unification remains merely conceptual. Jesus seeks to reconcile the opposites of particular and universal in reality itself, which can only be done though a different articulation of the problem.

The solution is first expressed in the following manner: “what is raised above this cleavage is by contrast [to an “ought,”] an ‘is,’ a modification of life.”43 Hegel’s use of the concept of a modification is intriguing and although he does not expand upon its precise meaning one can assume a connection with Spinoza’s modes.44 Hegel is referring to the way in which human


beings express themselves according to different comportments and dispositions, which, although different from one another, each encapsulate the entirety of their selves. This becomes clear through Hegel’s example of the way in which Jesus interprets a law such as “love thy neighbour,” not as a command, but as a particular mode in which life expresses itself. Hegel states that the law is “restricted only if looked at in reference to the object.”45 By this he means that rather than create a division within the self between duty and inclination, the precept “love thy neighbour” entails the use of the lover’s entire self and a restriction, or a modification, merely of the object of love. In this respect, the neighbour is one among a variety of objects one could love. The command structure of a recalcitrant empirical desiring self and a moral super-ego thus drops away. Hegel argues that “in reconcilability law loses its form, the concept is displaced by life.” This is because “it has in itself a so much richer, more living, fullness that so poor a thing as a law is nothing for it at all.”46

Life can be seen as Hegel’s first answer to his search for a basic substance that connects the atomised individuals of modern society and integrates them—both physically and ethically—into a shared world. The pantheism that necessarily follows from such a conception of life will be replaced in the Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel’s notion of Geist. However, within the framework of The Spirit of Christianity, all living things are posited as taking part in the same process of flourishing and development. As Hegel states, “everything springs from the same Godhead.”47 The question to which life and Geist are both answers is “How can the alienated modern subject be reintegrated into a positive relationship with himself, nature and his fellow men?.” Hegel’s early response to the question sheds considerable light on its structure and aim.

Life provides an organic unity between individuals formed within a vital and material environment. There is a cyclical


aspect to the structure of life within this text as it includes the basic production and reproduction of individual organic entities and the necessary activities to maintain life through food and sustenance. Life also expresses one of the central oppositions in Hegel’s early work, that between a “dead” and objective religious faith and a subjective and “living” faith of Jesus’ followers. This highlights that subjective faith is immanent within and internal to the subject rather than acting as an external or positive restraint.

Within a metaphysics of life and love, Hegel introduces the concept of love as a structure of ethical relations, which both reconciles all of an individual’s specific virtues and obligations into a “living unity,” and places him in a relation of reciprocity with other ethical agents. Love thus plays a double role: it makes possible harmonious ethical action for the individual; and, it is constitutive of the structure of inter-subjective ethical life. Firstly, on an individual level, love is Hegel’s way of bringing together a form of Lutheran inwardness with a modified Aristotelian virtue ethics. While Kant brings the law of God down to earth and places it inside human beings in the supersensible form of reason, Hegel further internalises our source of self-legislation by completely uniting it with our sensuous and empirical self. Furthermore, Hegel wants to replace a Kantian notion of virtue with his own conception of “virtues without lordship and without submission, i.e. virtues as modifications of love.”48 Love allows Hegel to ensure that specific virtues do not come into conflict with one another and that competing ethical demands do not end up in a state of contradiction. Hegel argues that every virtue has its own specific sphere within a united person that it cannot overstep, hence preventing “insoluble conflicts arising from the plurality of absolutes.”49 The final result is not a multiplicity of competing claims pulling at cross-purposes within a human being, but a single living spirit that modifies itself based on specific needs.


Secondly, the concept of love connects isolated individuals into a community of reciprocal obligation and recognition. Hegel argues that the life and flourishing of each individual is interconnected with others within a living whole. Individuals all exist in an always already ethically coded social space bounded by the basic norms of social life. The affective experience of love is that which transforms self-interested desire into an outward-looking sensitivity to the demands of the other. Hegel argues that, “in love man has found himself again in another.”50 The complex web of relations that constitutes society means that my capacity for living a meaningful human life is bound up with the lives of others. Love, then, offers a different angle on social life than the Hobbesian conception of self-interested desire inherited by Kant. Love binds one individual to another and attempts to reconcile competing interests through a romantic strategy of aesthetic mediation. In Hegel’s fragment on love, written twelve or eighteen months before The Spirit of Christianity, he highlights the need for modern individuals, “for whom everything else is a world external to him,” to be integrated into a shared world with others through a “genuine love [that] excludes all oppositions.”51 In this short fragment, Hegel stresses the completeness and totality of the union that love enacts, leaving no aspect of the individual as something particular or severed.

The pinnacle of this idea of love and life is embodied in what Jesus calls the “Kingdom of God,” a concept which best expresses Hegel’s social and political ideals at the time. Hegel’s romantic vision of the ethical state resounds with other early German Romantic writings on politics and can be read alongside essays such as Novalis’ Faith and Love and Schleiermacher’s Toward a Theory of Social Conduct.52 The early German Romantics conceive of the state not as a series of legal contracts between self-interested individuals, but as a living organic bond that precedes individuals and is the basis for social life. Their


thinking is profoundly influenced by an idealised version of the Athenian polis and other Greek examples of political life such as Plato’s Republic. They reject a mechanistic image of man presented by a certain strand of Enlightenment thinking, and prefer naturalistic and vitalist conceptions that point towards the continuities between the physical world and human society as a natural living organism. The romantics attempted to rejuvenate this sense of community through enlivening citizens feeling of interconnection with one another through the domain of the aesthetic. The precise relationship between Hegel and early German Romanticism is contentious,53 but this essay is perhaps Hegel’s most romantic influenced work. It is at a stage in his philosophical development in which he is heavily influenced by the thinking of Schelling and Hölderlin and his political and metaphysical beliefs share a strong resemblance to the thoughts of romantic writers at the time.

Hegel’s own version of this is presented in his idea of the Kingdom of God in which “what is common to all is life in God, [acting] as a living bond which unites all followers.”54 For Hegel, this kingdom is a “living harmony of men” in which they live “in the harmony of their developed many-sidedness and their entire being and character. In this harmony their many-sided consciousness chimes in with one spirit and their many different lives with one life.”55 Hegel explains that “kingdom” is a word that Jesus inherits from the Jewish language, but in using it he intends to signify not a “union through domination” but “the beauty of the divine life of a pure human fellowship.”56 Hegel’s vision is of a “nation of men related to one another by love” that results in the “development of the divine among men.”57 For Hegel the Christian gospel is the closest resemblance to this idea. Christian believers live together in God insofar as the “same living spirit animates [their] different beings.”58 Interestingly, from the perspective of Hegel’s later development, he argues


that the believers are not unified by a concept or a universal but through a direct “feeling of the unity of life.”59 It is feeling, rather than reason, that provides the force of reconciliation for the young Hegel. Nor is this an anomaly in Hegel’s earlier work. Similar sentiments are contained in several of Hegel’s other essays of the same period.60 Hegel, in these early years, offers a vision in which all oppositions and enmities can be reconciled, whereby life is unified into a living whole.

Punishment as Fate and the Necessity of Transgression

In addition to providing a critique of Kantian morality and a sketch of a more just future political society, Hegel also presents the concept of love as a transcendence of the mechanical application of penal law. In contrast to the automatic retributive nature of penal law, the unity of life allows individuals to be reconciled with the society that they have acted against through the unifying power of love. Hegel argues that the universal nature of penal law is the “direct opposite of life because it signalizes the destruction of life.”61 To understand how penal law proves so harmful Hegel introduces the figure of the trespasser. The trespasser is an individual who positions himself in opposition to the law by attempting to make himself an exception to its universal form. Through the act of trespass the individual annuls the particular content of the law and therefore loses his rights under it. Regardless of a trespasser’s repudiation of the offending act or subsequent rehabilitation, the uncompromising universality of justice in the form of law demands that in the most extreme cases the trespasser must be put to death. According to the strictures of law there is no way of undoing an action, there is no space for forgiveness or transcendence of prior injuries. The action of the trespasser brings about an equal and opposite reaction of the law. This form of justice is unbending,


uncompromising and without leniency. Hegel describes it as the sacrifice of human particularity to the universal. Because the trespasser has offended against the entire community and undermined the lawfulness of the law by denying its authority as such, he must be punished.

The introduction of Hegel’s metaphysics of life and love transforms this situation. The most fundamental shift is that it is impossible for a trespasser to cause harm to another without any consequences to himself. Hegel believes a trespasser is wrong to assume that in the act of trespass against another’s rights he is simply enlarging his own possible sphere of action. For Hegel, the “destruction of life is not the nullification of life but its diremption, and the destruction consists in its transformation into an enemy.”62 Since life consists of one substance it follows that when a trespasser acts against another he, in effect, “destroys his own.”63 In actuality, the trespasser is merely undermining the enabling conditions of a shared life with others and fracturing the complex web of relations that makes his own life possible. Hegel proposes the notion of “punishment as fate” as the basic method through which the trespasser’s life is disrupted and turned into a misery by the offending act. Punishment as fate is not the cold application of a universal legal norm to a particular fact scenario, but rather, a modification of life and therefore an act of love. However, one would be mistaken in concluding that because the trespasser was in the hands of love, and not the law, that his punishment would be any less severe. Hegel makes clear that through his actions the trespasser has “perverted life into an enemy,” a “hostile power,” in which he will feel the “disruption of his life” at a deep existential level, in the very core of his being.64

In contrast to the law, with which no reconciliation is possible, love occurs “within the orbit of life” and hence within a mode that is transformable into a more positive and harmonious form.65 Within life there is the possibility of transcending a


simple logic of retributive justice. During his suffering the trespasser realises the truth of what he has done and his “feeling of a life disrupted must become a longing for what has been lost.”66 This longing is for an overcoming of the opposition that has arisen between the individual and life through the act of transgression and for the return to a harmonious and unified form of living. It is the trespasser’s self-realisation of the consequences of his act that enables love to reconcile him with life and to repair the damage done through a transformation of relations between himself and others.

However, the thought that this longing could be a simple desire for reconciliation and wholeness, for an end to the disruption of life, is itself disturbed by several of Hegel’s more ambiguous passages. For the trespasser in the toils of fate, who has come to the realisation of his woeful position, “may still hold himself back from returning to the latter [life]; he may prolong his bad conscience and feeling of grief and stimulate it [at] every moment.”67 Rather than make a simple return to the bosom of life Hegel here seems to be suggesting that there may be reasons why the trespasser would wish to linger in this state of purgatory; that there is something deeply redemptive, or at the very least educative, about remaining as an “unhappy consciousness,” as Hegel will later call it. Every moment of the trespasser’s conscience must be activated in order to truly understand the profundity of his action and its effects on his victims. He must hold back “until his longing for reunion springs from the deepest recesses of his soul.”68 Why? In order that “he avoids being frivolous with life.”69 The trespasser has a duty to take his own life seriously, to not simply act as he pleases without any regard for life. He must accept and take on the challenge of his own humanity and rise above a state of mere animality in which he might act on his every whim regardless of its consequences.


Hegel’s realisation is that there is a certain inevitability, and even necessity, of acts of transgression, and that all significant human action will entail some moment of disruption of a previous social order. Since all individuals are joined in the unity of life, it is possible for both evil (Macbeth)70 and innocent (Oedipus)71 trespass to call upon punishment as fate.72 It is important for Hegel that love is seen as a force that attempts to “unify the discords necessitated by our development.”73 Otherwise stated, a state of diremption is a necessary condition for the full growth, development and flourishing of human beings. We must become alienated from ourselves before we return to ourselves and attain a deeper and more profound understanding of who we are. There has to be a rupture with our natural undeveloped state in order to attain a higher spiritual existence. In his lectures on religion Hegel argues that this is the true meaning of the doctrine of original sin:

This means that its [humanity’s] true nature is to abandon its immediacy, to treat it as a state in which it ought not to be: as immediately natural human beings, we ought to regard ourselves as being what we ought not to be. This has been expressed by saying that human beings are evil by nature.74

Hegel emphasises a similar point in The Spirit of Christianity essay where he states that “opposition is the possibility of reunification” and that “the more variegated the manifold in which life is alive, the more the places in which it can be reunified.”75 The latter statement reinforces the idea that the deeper the feeling of dislocation and estrangement—the more complex and developed this emotion becomes—the more intense and satisfying the final reunification will be. The basic logical structure of this movement, from unity to difference and finally to unity-in-difference, is a crucial idea, which will form the basis of Hegel’s dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit.


The Fate of Jesus’ Followers and the Limits of Love

In the final section of The Spirit of Christianity Hegel turns from the concept of a spirit of a people to examine the idea of their “fate” [Schicksal]. No doubt, the inspiration behind this concept comes predominantly from Hegel’s reading of Greek tragedy and the ananke or necessity against which men and Gods are powerless to struggle. But Schicksal also plays a prominent role in German mythology and was taken by many of Hegel’s contemporaries to refer also to the inner development of an individual or civilisation. The fate of a people is therefore their movement along a path of development from which, to a certain extent, they are unable to turn back, or fully recapture previous forms of life. In particular, this section reveals Hegel’s growing belief that the utopian vision in his earlier writings of the reconciliatory powers of a Volksreligion is ineffective under modern conditions.

The fate of Jesus and his communion of followers is to have their loving circle of fellowship, their subjective faith and living soul, transformed into a positive religion and manifest in an objective form. Hegel mourns the loss of the living spirit of faith amongst the followers. But he is able to offer a diagnosis of how this degeneration occurred. He gives two main reasons for the objectification of love into a positive religion. First, Hegel points to the growing size of the community and the fact that the group’s love had become overstretched, which made it impossible to sustain strong and personal relationships of love. Second, and for Hegel more importantly, the mode of being in which love expresses itself—as an affective and spiritual intuition or feeling—does not satisfy the demands of an increasingly important way of experiencing the world through individual rationality and representational thought. Hegel refers to the “need for religion,” the desire to acquire sensible knowledge of


tangible and visible objects and apply universal categories in order to understand them.76 This entails love being expressed in an objective form, and not simply as the subjective feeling of the communion. I will explore each of these two aspects in turn.

Hegel identifies a distinctive characteristic of love: it is unable to be extended to more than a small band of lovers. Love demands a deep and affective subjective connection between human beings. After the death of Jesus, his friends kept their love alive by living and praying together, being strengthened by their shared faith and courage. However, the bonds of love are so intense that they make it difficult to extend the community of worshipers. Any form of relationship that stands outside the purity of worshipping together, indeed, all other common activities, become an alien and objective field. Love is able to unify opposites and reconcile conflicting aspects of human beings, but it cannot serve as the basis for a long-term or large-scale social or political philosophy.

Since the love of the group had overreached itself by being spread over a whole assembly of people and therefore was not filled with an ideal content but was deficient in life, the bare ideal of love was something “positive” for it; it recognised it as set over against itself as dependent on it.77

The limits of love lie in the narrowness of a community of lovers due to the restriction of activities that love requires: “in love’s task the community scorns any unification save the deepest, any spirit save the highest.”78 Once the community extends itself into a philanthropic association and followers organise themselves around other ends, the spirit of love is lost. Thus for Hegel, “the love which a large group of people can feel for one another admits of only a certain degree of strength or depth.”79 Larger communities cannot maintain the same pure and affective, loving bonds between individuals and so they must attain their


feeling of unity through an external purpose or object that then destroys the living spirit of love.

Hegel’s recognition of the failure of love to unite more than a small community of followers reveals an appreciation of the complexities of modern life.80 These complexities were introduced by the increase of commercial activity, which produced a division of labour and fragmentation of traditional social roles. In his detailed study of Hegel’s social and political thought, Shlomo Avineri highlights the profound influence that political economist James Steuart had over Hegel’s thinking during his stay in Berne.81 However, it was perhaps through a detailed reading of Steuart’s An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy in Frankfurt in 1799 that Hegel was able to grasp, in a manner which eluded many of his contemporaries, the importance of industry, labour and commerce in modern society.82 His study of this work was completed only months before he embarked on the writing of The Spirit of Christianity and so its influence upon the work should not be underestimated. He agrees with Plato and Rousseau that a polis can only be maintained within the boundaries of a small community, but he also understands that it is not simply a quantitative increase that makes a return to traditional ways of life impossible but a qualitative change brought about through increased commercial activity and market forces that both divide society and bring about increased development.

Although these economic considerations are not directly referred to in The Spirit of Christianity essay, it is clear from Hegel’s other political writings at the time that these ideas were in the forefront of his mind. These ideas are most clearly expressed in a manuscript Hegel completed in 1802, entitled by its editors, “The German Constitution.” In a spirit similar to that of Marx or Weber, Hegel points to the rise of the bourgeoisie as the primary causal factor in the development of civil society.


He records howthe bourgeois sense gained ascendancy—a sense which cares only for individual particularity without regard for public order or the needs of the whole—at this point the individualization of dispositions would have demanded a more general or universal and more affirmative bond.83

A simple affective connection is insufficient in a modern society in which people are related to one another through complex and indirect systems of needs satisfaction in civil society.

Hegel’s second reason for the failure of love is its inability to incorporate the demands of rationality and representational thinking. Modern rationalist philosophy begins with Descartes, but the greatest exemplar of this tradition, for Hegel, is Kant’s critical philosophy. Hegel follows Kant in his conviction that one must submit all beliefs to criticism and the tribunal of reason. Love’s purely affective dimension and its ineffable nature raise reason’s suspicion that it is a pre-critical dogmatic belief. Hegel doubts the binding power of such a connection and questions whether it would be sufficient for the task of reconciling modern divisions. He fears that “this harshness is all the greater for us than for the members of the first Christian community, the more intellectual we are in comparison with them.”84 The growing spirit of rationality in modern society represented by the development of the physical sciences and the political events of the French Revolution makes it even more imperative to consider a solution comprehensible to representational thought.

A crucial aspect of fulfilling these demands is representing the community in an objective form. The love of the believers was merely “a feeling, something subjective,” which had to be “fused with the universal, with something represented in an idea.”85 The drive to religion and to objective form stems from this need to overcome the division between subject and


object and to “unite feeling and feeling’s demand for objects, with the intellect.”86 The power of love in its subjective form unites the lovers but ultimately, only imperfectly. This is because “love unites them, but the lovers do not know of this union.”87 Knowing and feeling have to be united in an objective form for this union to last. When Jesus’s followers begin to objectify their faith in the figure of the cross the divine spirit is able to become a religion.

Thus, it may appear that The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate finishes on a rather disheartening note, since the promise of reconciliation that Jesus brings in to the world ends in a very similar position to the Jewish religion criticised so vehemently at the beginning of the essay. However, one should not take the fate of the communion of Jesus’ followers as an absolute rejection of love, but rather, an appreciation of its limits. As an early essay, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate strikes too many chords with Hegel’s later, more developed philosophy, to believe that by the end of the essay he wished simply to discard the notion of love and abandon it completely. Hegel’s primary message is that the longing for union and for a reconciliation of the deep divisions that characterise modernity remains unfulfilled in love. It is Jesus’ fate to ultimately fail in his task of transforming the ancient world. That which remains absent from this essay is any discussion of the kind of comprehensive political system that incorporates the modern demand for rational understanding and appreciates the complex array of forces that constitute modern society. The full realisation of this system will not be attained until his final published work, the Philosophy of Right.

Chapter 3

The Drive to Reconciliation

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a narrative of the human spirit’s development through successive stages of history, as expressed through its social and political institutions and practices. The story is told from a position at the end of this journey, from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, in which self-consciousness understands itself as the product of these necessary stages. Throughout this development, Spirit divides, differentiates and articulates itself on increasingly complex levels. The book concludes when Spirit returns to itself reunited, much richer in content and developed into a multifaceted totality. Every prior stage that is negated and overcome remains within Spirit as an inoperative moment of the larger whole. The development of Spirit is not simply an abstract epistemological exercise but a recollective narrative of different forms of life that bears a relation to a history of Western civilisation.1 The original undivided unity and harmony of the Greek polis develops into the modern legal and political institutions of the nation-state. The Phenomenology offers an account of the history of self-consciousness through a philosophical consideration of the various forms in which it has been embodied in the spirit of a people. Hegel believes that a knowledge of the totality of human history can be gained through a retrospective analysis of how humanity has expressed itself though art, religion, philosophy and also through its economic and political institutions. The text is one of Hegel’s most challenging and intriguing as it attempts to accomplish metaphysical, epistemological, social and pedagogical tasks through a study of the development of consciousness via a series of standpoints of thought.2


Throughout the history of its interpretation, different aspects of the Phenomenology have been given prominence as “keys” to unlocking Hegel’s philosophy.3 According to the standard account, central to Hegel’s revival in the twentieth century were the lectures given by Alexandre Kojève and his interpretation of Hegel through the famous passage of the Master/Slave dialectic.4 However, to place too much emphasis on Kojève’s lectures would be to miss, among other things, the important influence played by the publication of Jean Wahl’s 1929 book, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel,5 which preceded Kojève’s lectures by a decade and proved highly influential over generations of French thinkers from surrealists and existentialists, to post-structuralists alike.6 Wahl interprets Hegel through the figure of the “unhappy consciousness,” focussing attention on the human subject divided within itself, a self-alienated subject unable to reconcile its differences within a higher unity and synthesis. For Hegel, the paradigmatic form of the unhappy consciousness is the Christian believer who is split between a universal and eternal “Unchangeable,” and the finite and mortal “Changeable.” The Unchangeable could be taken as representing either God or the transcendental ego, whereas the Changeable represents either humanity in general or the individual’s sensuous, perishable existence. For Wahl, the unhappy consciousness is more than simply a passing stage on Spirit’s journey; it is the central protagonist of Hegel’s Phenomenology.7 Every shape of consciousness is, for Wahl, an unhappy and divided one. The suffering self-consciousness passes from one pole to another without ever reaching a final state of rest and reconciliation.

Following Wahl, the central task of this chapter will be to examine the driving force of the dialectical progression of Hegel’s text. What pushes unhappy consciousness onwards and why does it feel this force to be an active drive to reconciliation?

THE DRIVE TO RECONCILIATION | 45

Wahl is correct in identifying the unhappy consciousness as a central character in Hegel’s Phenomenology, but Wahl goes beyond the text in ascribing the unhappy consciousness a pivotal role at every stage of Spirit’s journey. As a description of an individual self-consciousness, unhappy consciousness most aptly describes self-consciousness in the chapters of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness and is less relevant to the chapters on universal consciousness, namely Reason and Spirit. Spirit represents the complex structure and development of an entire society for which Hegel rarely uses the psychological categories of “desire” [Begierde], “striving” [Streben] and “unhappiness” [Unglückseligkeit]. In contrast, the concept of “the drive” [Trieb] remains fundamental to every movement of Spirit along its dialectical journey. Throughout the chapters of the book, consciousness is pushed from one standpoint to the next by an ineluctable and necessary drive. This movement of the Phenomenology is one of the most prominent instances of a metaphysical drive in Hegel’s philosophy. It presents an exemplary account of how Hegel’s philosophy itself is driven by a dynamic force. This compulsion is not affected by an external agent acting from a position of transcendence or exteriority. Rather, it is an internal dynamic of consciousness as such. What Hegel will refer to as the “force of Spirit” is constitutive of consciousness and is an integral component of its structure. As Hegel emphasises, “Spirit is never to be conceived at being at rest but rather as ever advancing.”8 Hegel highlights the vital and animated nature of Spirit as a “living substance.”9 Spirit is active and in a constant state of motion and unrest. Understanding the nature of this drive and how it operates is essential to grasping the movement of Hegel’s thinking in the Phenomenology.

The Phenomenology is structured around two figures: a natural or experiencing consciousness who undertakes the journey of discovery and observing consciousness, the “We” (presumably


Hegel and his readers) who watch this unfold. This double standpoint of the text explains how the drive appears from two different perspectives. On the one hand, the Phenomenology is an account of the development of consciousness through experience from the position of a self-conscious subject. But on the other, it is also a work of science that unfolds the internal necessity of the development of a conceptual structure of thought. These two standpoints can be differentiated on the basis of two of Hegel’s primary terms. First, the system of science develops through the movement of the Concept, the importance of which cannot be overstated, since for Hegel “reality is its [the Concept’s] own self-development.”10 From the standpoint of Hegel’s logical system of thought “the Concept already contains everything that reality as such brings into appearance.”11 This first standpoint, reflecting the development of the Concept, expresses the fundamental ontological principle of Hegel’s entire system. The second standpoint is that of human consciousness or Spirit, which is the development of the Concept manifested as human consciousness and society. From this latter perspective, the experiencing consciousness progresses through a series of stages of phenomenal knowledge to the position of absolute knowledge. At first, natural consciousness cannot see that this movement is the free self-movement of science. To consciousness, the entire movement is taken to be “the path of the soul as it wanders through the series of the ways it takes shape, as if those shapes were stations laid out for it by its own nature.”12 However, from the position of the phenomenological observer, what develops is not just an experiential logic but what Hegel refers to as the development of the Concept or science. Once consciousness has attained the final stage of its development it is no longer merely an experiencing consciousness but a universal self-consciousness that becomes the thought of itself. The system of science that Hegel introduces to comprehend Spirit is differentiated from


previous philosophical standpoints by its “self-moving” nature.13 The drive of Spirit can be viewed either from the perspective of the experiencing consciousness or the development of speculative thought. This chapter will examine each of the standpoints of the drive in turn: firstly the Phenomenology as a logic of experience and secondly as a movement of the Concept. It will then be necessary to analyse what happens to this drive in the infamous conclusion of the Phenomenology, the section on absolute knowledge.

Following these sections, the final part of this chapter will introduce a socio-political reading of the Phenomenology that paves the way for the arguments in chapter three concerning the Philosophy of Right. I argue that at least part of what is being attempted in the Phenomenology is not simply the outline of an abstract experience of consciousness or conceptual structure of reality, but a socio-political account of what it means to live in modern, norm-governed, human societies. According to this reading, the chapter on Spirit in the Phenomenology is not simply a superfluous extra, added as an after-thought, but an essential component of the development of the text. I analyse how the subjective drives of individuals can play a role in challenging and reforming norms in human society. The section on judging and acting consciousness in the Phenomenology shows the dynamic tension that exists in modern societies between the two modern principles of universal binding norms and individual self-legislating subjectivity. Judging consciousness seeks to establish universal norms that govern behaviour while acting consciousness wishes to only obey norms that it itself has posited. The “reconciliation” that occurs between them by the end of the chapter is not Kojève’s “end of history,” but a realisation and acceptance of the continuing dynamic aspect of modernity as a foundationless era in which society’s basic norms are continually challenged, contested and transformed by individuals’ subjective drives.


A Logic of Experience

The first instance of the operation of the drive that will be examined is what I will call, following Pippin, a “logic of experience.”14 In the Phenomenology, it is only through a notion of experience [Erfahrung] that the movement of Spirit is able to take place. Spirit progresses through different “shapes” along its journey in which consciousness attempts to test its knowledge claims against an external reality in order to determine whether it can adequately comprehend the world. The necessary failure and breakdown of its conceptual structure of knowledge is that which forces consciousness to revise its basic categories and progress to a different philosophical standpoint. Hegel describes this movement as a progression along “the entire series of the patterns of consciousness in their necessary sequence.”15 As one structure collapses another takes its place. This is achieved by the immanent and necessary creation of a new form of consciousness through the contradictions and inadequacies of the previous form. There is a certain necessity to this journey insofar as there is no point at which consciousness is able to turn around and retreat back to the safety of a previous stage. The goal for consciousness is an adequate conceptual structure for interpreting the world, “where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself.”16 Hegel argues that “progress towards this goal is thus also unrelenting, and satisfaction is not to be found at any prior station on the way.”17 Upon embarking on this journey, consciousness is compelled to go on, driven, as it were, by a necessary force.18 The journey itself is the development of natural consciousness from its unphilosophical standpoint to the position of absolute knowledge. But to understand this more fully will require a more detailed explication of the concept of experience.

In general terms, experience refers to an activity consciousness goes through involving a change or alteration of a pre-given state


of affairs, accompanied by a gaining of knowledge through this process. However, this is only part of what Hegel is referring to in his use of the term. Hegel has a series of technical definitions of this concept that differ markedly from the ordinary use of the term and that also distinguishes it from previous philosophical uses.19 Hegel admits that his own definition will “not seem to agree with what is ordinarily understood by experience.”20 However, it is clear that the concept of experience is crucial for Hegel as it occupies a central position in his text. The original subtitle of the Phenomenology, which is still retained at paragraph 88 of the introduction, is “the Science of the experience of consciousness.”21 The preface also contains a key reference to the pathway of consciousness as being “the Science of the experience which consciousness goes through.”22 What Spirit will discover is that its movement is nothing other than the logical progression of its “experiences.” By the concept of experience Hegel is not invoking an unmediated access to a given as the most legitimate basis of knowledge. Hegel understands that this is what most of his contemporaries would have understood by the term experience. However, Hegel mocks this “attention to the here and now as such,” which focuses on the merely sensuous at the expense of intellectual concepts and “the divine.”23 Hegel criticises the Humean tradition of empiricism for its inclination that “what is unmediated is often held to be superior.”24 He challenges the notion of immediacy, since in experience the object itself is always encountered “united and combined with the certainty of our own selves.”25 The basic premise of all forms of idealism is that an object is never simply “out there,” immediately present and free from any element of thought. For Hegel, consciousness’ active role in comprehending an object rules out empiricist notions of immediacy in understanding experience.

Hegel also rejects the Kantian notion of experience given in the Critique of Pure Reason as the combination of an intuition of


raw sensible data with a concept in the form of a judgement.26 In Kant, experience is always of an aspect of the natural world as it appears to consciousness. Hegel’s general problem with Kantian experience is that by limiting experience to mere sense perception, Kant offers a limited or “thin” version of experience. This does not take into consideration the socially mediated nature of experience or properly grasp the internal relationship between consciousness and the sensible world. But more specifically, Hegel’s problem with Kantian experience is that Kant presupposes an ultimately unbridgeable gap between consciousness and things-in-themselves, allowing consciousness access to only the phenomenal reality of the thing as it appears for it. Kant assumes that before we attempt to know an object we must be sure that our powers of cognition are capable of undertaking the task. However, this cautionary approach is not as critical as it appears as it takes a large number of things for granted. It presupposes that cognition is an “instrument” that we would be able to step back from and examine and that there is a separation between ourselves as knowing subjects and an external world to be known. Hegel argues that there are no grounds for presupposing “a difference between ourselves and this cognition.”27 The starting point of Hegel’s absolute idealism is the basic unity of spirit and nature, of thought and being. He contends that the two are united in consciousness, but he admits that to adequately justify this will take the entire course of the Phenomenology. What consciousness will discover along the journey is that there is an inherent connection between consciousness and its object, which Hegel refers to as the unity of Spirit and substance.28

Experience for Hegel is something that involves a deeper movement than either mere empiricism or transcendental idealism. At its core, experience is a movement of consciousness itself. Consciousness, for Hegel, is “on the one hand,


consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself.”29 It is this dual nature of consciousness that is crucial for Hegel. Consciousness possesses a reflexive self-awareness of its relationship to the object in the form of knowledge. Otherwise said, consciousness is aware of its own knowing. Experience for Hegel occurs when consciousness attempts to test the criterion it has established for knowing an object in order to determine whether or not it can be verified to be identical with the object itself. Because it is consciousness itself that establishes this criterion to begin with, “the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself.”30 When the standard that consciousness sets fails to adequately correspond with its object then the criterion for testing is altered.31 Experience is this process of cognition in which consciousness produces a new concept of its object through the contradictions and logical breakdown of the previous one. The changing of the criterion brings about a change in both the nature of consciousness and the constitution of its object. An essential aspect of this movement is consciousness’ becoming “other” to itself, followed by a return back to itself, to be at home with itself in this otherness. By producing the criterion through which it will know the object, consciousness essentially produces the object out of itself. As Hegel puts it, “Spirit becomes object because it is just this movement of becoming an other to itself, i.e. becoming an object to itself, and of suspending this otherness.”32 Experience is the process by which consciousness differentiates itself from an object, yet at the same time becomes an object and hence becomes alienated from its original existence. In actualising itself in the object, consciousness sets up a relationship that will only be resolved through the recognition that both self and object are aspects of Spirit.

A reading of the introductory passages on their own can give the impression that the Phenomenology is merely an


abstract epistemological exercise. However, formulations of the experience of consciousness later in the text call into question such a narrow interpretation. Consciousness is not fully developed, and experience therefore not fully tested, until it passes through the chapter on Spirit. The drive of consciousness extends from the first section on sense-certainty right through the chapters on Spirit, religion and absolute knowledge. The precise nature of Spirit and what is entailed by experience in the latter sections of the Phenomenology has been subject to considerable debate. Hegel’s technical definition of Spirit is the “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’”33 One way of interpreting this is to say that Hegel is presenting an understanding of human society (Spirit) as a unified structure that contains multiple opposing perspectives.34 According to this interpretation, there would be no “mind of God” or singular point of view of Spirit considered as an individual thing or entity. Rather, the concept of Spirit conveys the idea that there is a relationship of reciprocal determination between individuals and the broader social collective of which they are a part. For Hegel, society is the “absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals in their independent actual existence,” whereas the individual “is only this existent unit in so far as it is aware of the universal consciousness in its individuality as its own being.”35 This quotation gestures towards a dynamic conception of society as a continually recreated inter-subjective process achieved through a concrete material culture. As a self-conscious form of life, Spirit includes a subjective framework of shared fundamental ideas and an objective realm of practices and institutions in which individual subjects are embedded. Spirit is not a foreign entity existing over and above concrete individuals and directing them from behind their backs. Spirit is merely the total sum of individuals’ beliefs and actions within a coherent social network that mediates individuals’ self-consciousness. Taking Hegel’s


various remarks on Spirit into consideration, the definition I offer of Spirit is the totality of collectively achieved practices and institutions that make up a form of life, or social existence, as expressed through various forms of self-understanding, such as politics, art, religion and philosophy.36

However, such an interpretation is by no means uncontentious. The concept of Spirit, along with most of Hegel’s vocabulary, has been heavily disputed throughout the history of its interpretation. One of the most important debates is that between an immanent and a transcendent reading of Hegel’s philosophy.37 Where one is positioned in this disagreement will go a long way to determining one’s understanding of the nature of the drives in Hegel’s Phenomenology. On the transcendent reading, represented by Feuerbach and Marx, the finite realm of nature and human society is “governed by another reality” that is “alien to it,” namely the realm of Spirit or the Idea.38 Feuerbach sees a divide in Hegel’s philosophy in an analogous manner to the religious split between a creator God who is independent and separate from the objects of his creation and the objects themselves. On this view, Spirit is conceived as an autonomous, supra-human source of dynamism and action that is the real driving force behind the social and historical world of human affairs. Such an interpretation has been offered more recently by Charles Taylor who argues that Spirit is an infinite self-reflecting subject, a “cosmic spirit which posits the universe” and possesses a superior form of consciousness, “something infinitely higher than our own.”39 Alternatively, Spirit could be understood through the God of pantheism: a conception of God dispersed throughout and coextensive with the universe itself as a continuously developing totality. According to this immanent reading, Spirit is nothing other than the consciousness and actions of human beings embedded in particular determinate societies. The Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, was one of the


earliest to give a reading of Hegel’s philosophy as expressing the self-conscious activity of the human spirit creating itself in self-limited material worlds in an immanent universality.40

Hegel provides some evidence for both interpretations. However, he offers a number of direct statements to warn against a Feuerbachian reading of his work. He specifically advises against interpreting “the Concept” [Begriff] as an abstract universality that “stands over against nature.”41 Rather, it is a “living substance,” a “movement of self-positing,” “one organic totality” that progresses through progressively higher stages of development.42 Hegel argues that “as regards the nature of the Concept as such, it is not in itself an abstract unity at all over against the differences of reality; as Concept it is already the unity of specific differences and therefore a concrete totality.”43 For Hegel, Spirit is in a ceaseless process of self-bifurcation in which material and ideal aspects are conjoined into a single self-developmental whole. The mistake that Hegel’s self-declared materialist critics make is to assume that the self-development of the concept implies the complete triumph of the ideal and the subordination of materiality to the driving force of immaterial thought. It is inaccurate for Marx to suggest that Hegel is solely concerned with “abstract mental labour.”44 This reading crucially misreads the dynamic of the relationship between matter and thought in his work. Spirit contains a material element within its development which includes the material realm of human culture and society. An immanent reading of the drive of Spirit—which takes into account the essential connection between the development of human society and the sensuous drives of human beings—is essential to the reading of Hegel offered in this book.

This immanent conception of Spirit also enables a better understanding of the role of experience in Hegel’s Phenomenology. If Spirit is interpreted as the material practices


based on the norms and beliefs that make up the “life of a people,” then the full significance of Hegel’s notion of experience becomes apparent.45 For Hegel, “the movement of carrying forward the form of its self-knowledge is the labour which it accomplishes as actual History.”46 Real historical practice is the key to Hegel’s understanding of the important role of experience in Spirit’s self-actualisation. It is only through reflected historical practices that Spirit attains its true status. Hegel’s philosophy can be distinguished from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie on the basis that the Phenomenology is a history of Spirit and not simply of nature. The negativity of consciousness’ self-reflection is what separates these two forms of philosophy and renders Hegel’s notion of experience dependent on human history. Without a society’s reflection on the lived experience of its own practices Spirit would be unable to develop. The majority of Hegel’s chapter on Spirit is comprised of a historical narrative of Western civilisation’s journey from ancient Greek society, through the Roman era and Medieval Church, to the early modern world of the French Revolution and German philosophy. Actual historical events are given important consideration in the Phenomenology and the role of history remains central to the text.47 For Hegel, experience is not the simple testing of ideas in the abstract through a Socratic doubting in which consciousness calls into question all received forms of knowledge and takes as true only those to which it can personally assent. Hegel states in the introduction that what occurs in the Phenomenology is not merely a “shilly-shallying about this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has been appropriately dispelled.”48 Hegel’s procedure is not something that is “directly over and done with in the making of the resolution,” but involves the actual “living out” of these problems and their resolution in the sphere of life itself.49


Self-reflection is the motor of Spirit’s historical development through experience. Hegel explicitly defines experience as “the process in which Spirit becomes what it is in itself; and it is only as this process of reflecting itself into itself that it is in itself truly Spirit.”50 In this quote Hegel argues that Spirit must undertake a continual process of self-reflection to attain its true status. This involves a complex interplay between a process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. The way in which spirit transforms itself will become dependent on its own immanent reflections upon the conditions of its own existence. Spirit must be able to reflect on the process of altering its basic normative framework and conceptualise these changes in thought. These reflections will in turn generate further transformations. Without this moment of reflection Spirit risks existing in a state of immediacy and remaining stagnant. Hegel begins the chapter on Spirit with the image of the beautiful and harmonious ethical life of the Greek polis, “a world unsullied by any internal dissension.”51 The reason why this first shape of Spirit as ethical life remains insufficient is because it contains an unreflective moment of immediacy. Its essence is “immediate, unwavering, without contradiction,”52 in which the immediacy of “[n]ature as such enters into the ethical act.”53 Hegel argues that the Greeks, or at least the German’s romanticised ideal of the Greeks, did not possess an element of subjectivity in which an individual could rationally reflect on their identity and actions outside of the particular role they played within society. The element of immediacy in Greek ethical life is the individual’s lack of conscious reflection on the natural customs and laws of its community. It takes the action of Antigone to reveal “the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself.”54 With this act, Spirit is revealed as always already divided within itself and as necessitating self-cognition and reflection.


It is only once the Spirit chapter has been reached that consciousness realises that its previous shapes have been mere abstractions taken from the more concrete reality of Spirit itself. Spirit understood as the actuality of human society in history is the true reality upon which all the other figures in the Phenomenology are based. Hegel argues that

Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it. They result from Spirit analysing itself, distinguishing its moments, and dwelling for a while with each. The isolating of those moments presupposes Spirit itself and subsists therein; in other words, the isolation exists only in Spirit which is a concrete existence.55

Hegel claims that several figures introduced within the Phenomenology, such as self-certainty, perception and the unhappy consciousness, are all forms of consciousness that exist within a particular social formation. The emergence and passing away of each of these figures is only the appearance of one-sided and partial determinations of consciousness, which are for Hegel not fully complete forms of Spirit, but abstractions in consciousness’ journey of recollection. They are brought to light by consciousness as fragmented forms of knowing of previous societies that form part of the necessary stages consciousness must pass through for its education [Bildung]. The actual formations of Spirit progress far beyond these mere outlines, as these shapes, “instead of being shapes merely of consciousness, are shapes of the world.”56 It is for this reason that the Phenomenology is not merely an epistemological account of an individual’s knowledge of an object but an inquiry into historical forms of concrete experience.

The logical dimension to Hegel’s argument (why we would consider it a logic of experience) is that the progression


of experiences that consciousness passes through can be conceptualised with scientific rigour and seen to follow a necessary and intelligible sequence. Hegel explains that although this often occurs “behind the back of consciousness,” it nevertheless “guides the entire series of the patterns of consciousness in their necessary sequence.”57 For Hegel, the “internal necessity” of this system can only ever be understood through its systematic exposition.58 The reason why each new step in the series is rationally intelligible is due to the nature of the dialectical progression. When a particular shape of consciousness is found to be inadequate it is not merely discarded as a completely useless phase in consciousness’ development. Instead, each experience remains contained within consciousness as a moment of the developmental sequence. When a shape of consciousness is negated it is retained as a “determinate nothingness, one which has a content.”59 That is to say that the next shape of consciousness in the series emerges as a result of the contradictions and problems associated with the errors of the previous stage. The previous criterion applied by consciousness is only truly recognised as inadequate because it has, on its own terms, generated the new criterion out of its own failure. This is why Hegel will say that “consciousness provides its own criteria within itself ” and that “the new true object issues from it.”60 Hegel’s Phenomenology follows a logic of experience because the dialectical progression of shapes of spirit is a rational movement of phenomenal consciousness driven by the unavoidable break downs of inadequate structures of knowing.

The Force of the Concept

A second important aspect to understanding the role of the drive in the Phenomenology of Spirit is its relationship with Hegel’s term of art, Begriff,61 which is translated as either Concept or


Notion.62 It is clear from the numerous appearances of the term at key points in Hegel’s text that this is another central idea in Hegel’s thinking. But to decipher exactly what Hegel intends to convey by this idea can lead to serious difficulties, as the Concept appears to defy simple categorisation and definition. Glossed by Soloman as our “conception of concepts”63 and by Kojève as a “coherent whole of conceptual understanding,”64 the Concept takes on different significations depending on the context in which it is used. Throughout Hegel’s text the Concept is used to describe, among other things: a philosophical method; the true subject matter of philosophy; a merely abstract idea; a fully developed and determinate concept; a movement or process; a way of thinking; a conceptual schema; and even consciousness itself. The sheer length of the list and the varied meanings it encompasses is enough to suspect Hegel of lacking analytic rigour. However, there is no necessary contradiction in these numerous uses, as they all represent different sides of a complex structural whole with multiple dimensions. It is problematic to attempt to view the Concept as a reified “thing” that one could fix and determine once and for all, as one of its central attributes is to be in a constant state of movement and development.

In this section I will unpack the different aspects of the Concept and analyse its relationship to a notion of the drive. As my task is to determine the role of the drive in the Phenomenology of Spirit I will only consider the Concept in this text and will not refer to Hegel’s use of the term in his Science of Logic. This follows Hegel’s suggestion in the introduction to the Science of Logic that the Concept is fully developed in the Phenomenology.65 If from the point of view of experiencing consciousness the drive appears to operate according to a logic of experience, then for the phenomenological observer, Spirit’s drive can equally be explicated according to the development of the Concept itself. In what is effectively the same movement as described above,


consciousness is driven by the dialectical progression to attempt to grasp its object using a set of criteria that Hegel refers to as the Concept. Consciousness witnesses its progressive attempts to grasp the object fail until the Concept eventually corresponds to the object.66 The phenomenological observer can see that as the Concept and the object are both internal to consciousness all the experiencing consciousness must do is verify whether the set of criteria consciousness supplies adequately corresponds to the object, allowing the observer to remain passive during the procedure.67 The development and education of consciousness is the process of reaching the fully developed idea of the Concept, a task that takes the entire length of the Phenomenology and is then presupposed in Hegel’s mature works such as the Science of Logic.

It might again be instructive to begin with the ways in which Hegel’s idea of the Concept differs from Kant’s view. For Kant, a concept is a type of objective representation in which a thing is identified according to properties it shares with other things.68 Concepts are utilised by the faculty of the understanding in a process of abstract thinking in which general categories are applied to objects of perception. For Kant, concepts are restricted to a mental process of an individual subject engaged in an act of cognising a part of the world. They have a determinate place within the a priori logical structure of the possibility of experience for human beings. Hegel does not directly address the Kantian idea of concepts in the Phenomenology but it is clear from the nature of his argument what his position would be. Hegel would contend that the concept in Kant is unduly restricted to the experience of an individual subject and reduced to a specific aspect of presenting an object in the mind of a perceiving subject in the form of a representation [Vorstellung]. Hegel contrasts his own mode of speculative philosophy with what he describes as “picture thinking” [Vorstellung]. Hegel’s speculative method does not limit the Concept to a subjectivist


or meta-psychological interpretation but instead sees it as the development of both subject and object in a unified whole. There is no a priori separation of concepts and intuitions or delineation between a transcendental world and an empirical one. Hegel presupposes the implicit rationality and conceptual structure of Spirit and nature, the unity of which is able to be proven for Hegel through an account of the dialectical progression of conceptual thought.

Another set of interlocutors against whom Hegel distinguishes his own idea of the Concept are Jacobi and the German Romantics and their understanding of intuition. Hegel shares with these thinkers the desire to overcome the dichotomies of Kant’s philosophy and attain an understanding of absolute truth. However, Hegel does not believe that it is possible to reach an immediate apprehension of reality through intuition or feeling. In the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel explicitly opposes the Concept to intuition [Anschauung], which he notes is sometimes called “immediate knowledge of the Absolute.”69 He rejects an immediate intuition of being along with any form of immediate access to the absolute. For Hegel this form of understanding points to a naïve and uncritical philosophical position which ultimately collapses in pure subjectivism and relativism. If immediate knowledge were possible in which all mediation would be excluded then each individual could take their own subjective leap of faith to whichever position they pleased. This would be the end of genuine philosophical inquiry for Hegel as truth would be left to a question of intuition and feeling subject to the whims of individual caprice. Hegel, on the other hand, is interested in maintaining the scientific rigour of rational thought as a means by which truth can be grasped. Hegel’s Concept [Begriff] bares an etymological similarity to begreifen, meaning, “to grasp,” “to conceive,” or “to comprehend,” which for Hegel is the true


task of philosophy. Genuine philosophy is concerned with the attainment of actual knowledge, not providing mere “edification rather than insight.”70 Hegel emphasises the need for critical analysis and reflection as an essential element of thinking, which cannot operate simply by repressing differences and restoring a feeling of unity.

In its most grand and expansive form, the Concept refers to the structure of reason considered as a dynamic and coherent whole. It incorporates not only a subjective dimension or process of thought but how things actually are in themselves. The Concept is thus not merely a way human beings think but relates to the nature of an objective world—both separate from, but ultimately posited by, consciousness. It illustrates Hegel’s belief that there is an intelligible and rational structure to the make up of the world. Hegel refers to it as the idea of “logical necessity” and states that the Concept is the “rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole.”71 This organic whole incorporates a natural element and a spiritual one, spirit being merely a more complex and divided form of nature that has become conscious of its own self-determining nature. Hegel continually stresses the centrality of a sense of totality, wholeness or entirety [Gesamtheit] to his understanding of the term. Hegel’s position can be summarised by his famous formula: “The True is the whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze]. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.”72 The world considered in its conceptual nature does not merely consist of abstract singularities and differences but involves the overall structure of relationality and mediation that connects all of these separate parts within a broader whole. In logical terms, the Concept includes a complex and moving systematisation of abstract logical propositions that expresses the world in thought. For Hegel this explains the unity of being and thought and why the world can be conceived as a single self-developmental totality


that bifurcates into nature and spirit and only after this split is conceived by consciousness as a divided world. Hegel believes that the world contains an implicit structure of rationality and necessity that can be conceived by consciousness once it attains an adequate knowledge of this through philosophical insight.

The Concept is not simply a completed totality but rather a developing essence that passes through an extended phase of growth. It is not possible to conceive of the Concept exclusively as an abstract structural whole because for Hegel it involves a process of conceptual transformation and, in certain respects, encapsulates the movement of logical thinking as such in its self-understanding. But this movement should not be considered in opposition to the structure as for Hegel, “the method is nothing but the structure set forth in its pure essentiality.”73 The journey is part of the exposition of the system itself, which is expressed in Hegel’s statement that the absolute is “essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.”74 The Concept undergoes a developmental process that leads Hegel to refer to it in two distinct ways. First, Hegel refers to the Concept as the beginning, germ or foundation of the process. The particular architectonic metaphor of the laying of foundations comes through in the following passage: “It [a new shape of Spirit] comes on the scene for the first time in its immediacy or its Concept. Just as little as a building is finished when its foundation has been laid, so little is the achieved Concept of the whole the whole itself.”75 For Spirit to be “in its Concept,” is to be in an embryonic, undeveloped state, awaiting further development. Hegel expresses similar sentiments at other places in the text where he refers to the Concept as the “simple Concept [der einfache Begriff] of the whole.”76 This is the Concept considered as the beginning of a process. However, at other moments in the text Hegel has a different sense he is attempting to convey with the term. Rather than existing as


“merely” or “only” the Concept of something, the Concept is described as “fully developed, perfected cognition.”77 Hence the Concept also refers to the completed journey and state of full development. Not surprisingly, the process of this development itself is also what Hegel intends to signify by his use of the term. Hegel refers to consciousness’ progress itself as “the movement of the Concept.”78 The Concept for Hegel embodies this form of drive and development as well as the many transformations of the content of the Concept along this progression. The Concept contains a drive to develop itself into an explicit and actual version of what it is implicitly from the very beginning. Hegel provides the analogy of the way in which a large oak tree develops from an acorn. For Hegel, In the same manner as a seed contains a natural drive towards a fully actualised version of itself, so too does the rational structure of the world develop according to an implicit drive. The development of the Concept is co-extensive with the progress of consciousness through a logic of experience. When consciousness realises it is merely the Concept of itself it suffers from an internal tension that is only resolved in the further development of its essence. The question that remains is what occurs to this drive in the final chapter of Hegel’s text.

A Drive to Reconciliation

Having outlined the basic features of the drive in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the final task will be to analyse what precisely is entailed in the concluding moment of the drive towards reconciliation. I have maintained that at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy is a desire to overcome division. However, the manner in which Hegel attempts to accomplish this task has led to dramatically different interpretations of this aspect of his work, disagreements that go to the centre of his philosophical


project. Is there some form of end or closure of the dialectical drive of the Phenomenology? If so, what happens to the drive and what remnants are left behind? It is clear from explicit remarks throughout the book that Hegel intends some kind of “closure,” “conclusion” [Hegel uses the past participle, beschlossen] or “completion” [Vollendung] to occur by the end of the Phenomenology.79 The dominant interpretation of Hegel throughout history has been a strong reading of “conclusion” that usually entails a claim about the closure of the dialectical movement, the overcoming of alienation and, depending on the commentator, the metaphorical or literal “end of history.” 80 The key concept in dispute is that of absolute knowledge, which is outlined in a short chapter of the same name at the end of the book. Much of one’s interpretation of this aspect of Hegel’s work will depend on how the concept of absolute knowledge is interpreted and what role it is seen to play in the Phenomenology.

While the central focus of this book is on the concept of the drive, giving a complete account of the drive that does not beg the question will also entail touching upon a number of other related issues. My claim in this section is that the drive does not end at absolute knowledge but in fact continues indefinitely, for as long as humans continue to exist together in societies and create forms of art, religion and philosophy.81 The argument will proceed via the following steps: I will (1) sketch the central issues in dispute over the interpretation of this aspect of Hegel’s work; (2) give an account of absolute knowledge that accords with the view of Hegel that has been offered in this book; (3) outline the nature of the drive on the basis of this reading.

It is little wonder that there has been so much dispute surrounding this aspect of Hegel’s work, as his various pronouncements on the topic are marked by a deep ambivalence. Hegel has provided much ammunition for a strong, even eschatological, reading of his work throughout his writings.


In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel famously describes modern Europe as “the absolute end of History.”82 Furthermore, in the Phenomenology itself Hegel speaks of an abolition [Tilgung] of time in which Spirit “sets aside its Time-form” [hebt er seine Zeitform auf].83 It is from statements such as these that commentators have argued that the attainment of absolute knowledge involves the end of historical progress and perhaps even the end of time itself, if it is read as a Christian eschatology. A slightly weaker version of the “end of history” thesis was popularised by Alexandre Kojève who claimed that absolute knowledge was “the last moment of time . . . a moment without a future” and that “there will never more be anything new on earth.”84 More recently, Francis Fukuyama has put forward a less nuanced and slightly altered version of the same thesis, claiming that with democratic, liberal capitalism world history had come to an end.85

The evidence for a strong reading of an “end” in Hegel’s work does not stop at a few scattered remarks in his lecture courses. Hegel makes numerous clear and explicit references to a “closure” and “completion” of his system at key moments within the Phenomenology itself that cannot be simply dismissed as irrelevant. In the chapter on absolute knowledge Hegel argues that “Spirit has concluded the movement in which it has shaped itself.”86 He also states that this final moment is that which “closes the series of the shapes of Spirit” in which Spirit has “completed itself as world-Spirit.”87 These are not simply slips of the pen of an author attempting to finish his first book in a hurry. Indeed, closer analysis suggests it has been the objective from the very beginning of the text. In the introduction Hegel states that “the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression” and this will “bring to pass the completion of the series.”88 Rather than view these statements as anomalous or as explainable in some other way, I argue that they are indicative


of a tension that animates Hegel’s entire project: that between the finite and infinite, becoming and being, and history and eternity. Hegel’s aim is to reconcile these oppositions into a higher unity, but the way in which this occurs and the emphasis that should be placed on either end of the spectrum has divided interpreters. There is a genuine ambiguity within the notion that everything is part of a limitless, historical process of becoming but at the same time this process reaches its completion at some point and is “raised up” to a higher “absolute” level, in which the divisions and contradictions come to an end. How should such an ambiguity be resolved?

Many interpreters of Hegel have seen this tension as a great weakness in his project and have chastised his attempts at bringing the dialectical movement to a close. Lukács, in language very pertinent to the current investigation, speaks of Hegel’s final chapter as an annulment of history in which “the actual driving force, the motor of history, ends up by turning into a mere simulacrum.”89 This would entail the disappearance of the drive and its resolution and completion in absolute knowledge. Stanley Rosen also argues that Hegel has in mind a final completion of history and human knowledge.90 Merold Westphal speaks of the culmination of Hegel’s history in absolute knowledge as “an unbelievable deux ex machine.”91 Julia Kristeva, the most polemical of these writers, accuses Hegel of paranoia and a fear of finitude in the closure of his system.92 The sentiment shared by these interpreters is perhaps best summed up by Kojève in his remark that Hegel “gives up the dialectical method” in order “to lay claim to absolute truth.”93 These authors all share the thought that Hegel abandons the free play of dialectical movement to the sombre and motionless contemplation of absolute knowledge. They interpret the passages on closure and completion as referring to an end to the drive, dialectical motion and a final fixing of meaning and knowledge.


According to this interpretation, the ambiguity in Hegel is resolved by claiming that the latter moment of consummation subsumes and erases the prior movement of Spirit. However, there are several crucial passages that contradict this view. It must be recalled that Hegel’s definition of Spirit is an “absolute unrest of self-movement” [absolute Unruhe des reinen Sichselbstbewegens] which, by definition, could not come to an end.94 To claim that Hegel’s system reifies itself in its completion would be to destroy the very essence of dialectical philosophy and everything for which Hegel has hitherto argued. Furthermore, Hegel refers to his own era not as the end of history or conclusion of all progress but as the commencement of a new epoch. In unequivocal prose in the introduction Hegel states, “It is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. . . . Spirit is never to be conceived at being at rest but rather as ever advancing.”95 The same sense of a “new world” is mirrored in paragraph 492 in the absolute knowledge chapter. Interpreters are faced with central and explicit passages at the beginning and end of the text where Hegel states both that spirit is in a process of continuous and indefinite motion and that there is some kind of conclusion or completion at the end of the book. Rather than resolve this ambiguity by arguing that Hegel simply buries the first moment in order to substantiate the second, it will be shown that absolute knowledge can be interpreted in such a way as to keep both of these two moments alive.

The seeming paradox is minimised when we adopt a different interpretation of what is meant by “completion” in the absolute knowledge chapter. It would be easy to misinterpret the absolute as having connotations with omniscience or as designating the resolution of all problems of knowledge and the attainment of complete certainty regarding knowledge claims. However, for the young Hegel and Schelling, who collaboratively developed the philosophy of absolute idealism, the absolute entailed the


identity of subject-object and the identity of identity and non-identity.96 To be absolute means to be self-contained, completely undivided and not dependent or conditioned by anything else. One of the principle significations of absolute knowledge is the overcoming of the opposition between a subjective knower and an objective world. The seeming division between self and substance, objectivity and content, are overcome through the movement of Spirit in its progress towards absolute knowledge. Spirit becomes aware of its identity with objectivity and realises that it ultimately posits the objective world. Hegel argues that the absolute cannot be considered as the beginning or principle but must come as “essentially a result” of a process of development.97 Spirit has to undertake a journey of alienating itself into objectivity and returning to itself for it to properly understand itself from the position of the absolute. By the end of the Phenomenology Spirit realises that it exists as both substance and subject. Hegel blends Spinoza’s idea of substance with a Fichtean conception of subjectivity: substance expressed as subject.98 For Hegel, “Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content.”99 For Hegel, the absolute is not an immediate intuition but “contains a becoming-other [ein Anderswerden] that has to be taken back” [das zurückgenommen werden muß].100It is ultimately a “communion with itself in its otherness as such” [in seinem Anderssein als solchem bei sich ist].101 In absolute knowledge, Spirit becomes an active knowledge of itself in its otherness and reunifies with what was previously considered an alien and external realm of objectivity.

This process of Spirit alienating and returning to itself also implies a cognitive act of self-reflection and self-understanding, which, as has already been demonstrated, is a crucial aspect of


Spirit. For Hegel, “it is only as this process of reflecting itself into itself that it is in itself truly Spirit.”102 A common definition of absolute knowledge in the final chapter is simply “Spirit that knows itself as Spirit.”103 Rather than a state of perfect or complete knowledge, absolute knowledge designates a state in which Spirit can begin to adequately reflect on the truth of its own existence. Before this stage, Spirit is hindered by various one-sided views of itself and is unable to grasp the essence of its own being. It is only in modernity—following the French Revolution and its aftermath—that society develops institutions and practices that allows it to reflect adequately on its own existence as Spirit. The truth of absolute knowledge is society’s capacity for active self-reflection through the institutional embodiment of modern forms of reason such as account-giving and justification. Modern societies maintain cultural practices that allow for rational and self-conscious reflection on everyday human activities. For Hegel, this occurs most effectively in the forms of art, religion and philosophy. Absolute knowledge, on the view presented here, is a collective and historical event in which modern societies come to recognise themselves as self-legislating and are no longer able to rely on any given ground as a source for their normativity. As Habermas puts it, modernity “must make its normativity out of itself.”104 In modernity, human beings realise that history consists of the immanent self-development of humanity. It is in this epoch that Hegel argues that modern societies are able to gain full self-reflexivity and awareness of their self-constituting nature.

The conclusion of the movement in which Spirit “shapes itself ” is not the end of Spirit’s movement per se but the end of a particular aspect of Spirit’s journey in which it sheds its various one-sided views of itself and becomes fully self-aware and reflexive. Hegel does not make any greater claim to have heralded in the end of historical transformation or to have solved


the problem of political disagreement and social antagonism once and for all. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel does argue that the modern nation-state is the most adequate institutional structure for actualising freedom within his own historical epoch, but he says nothing to preclude the further social and technological development of society into qualitatively new and different forms. Modernity is not the end of Spirit’s journey, at which point the drives would cease and Spirit would become mere substance, but rather the beginning of a process of reflection in which “Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity.”105 In brief, history has not ended for modern consciousness—it has only just begun.106 The future will continue to involve the movement of history through social contradictions and antagonisms that are for Hegel never entirely solvable.

The extended process of self-reflection that occurs in the Phenomenology, according to this reading, is simply Spirit’s recollective narrative of its own coming to be. The truth of Spirit is contained within all of its past experiences, which, as completed, can be brought before it one after another in a history of its own development. This takes place in the form of a “recollection” in which, “the inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance.”107 For Hegel, “the goal, absolute knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organisation of their realm.”108 The process of going through the many stages of the Phenomenology is the observation of a “gallery of images” of previous forms of Spirit in order to obtain a deeper knowledge of the present era. The act of recollection is only possible after having passed through all of the varied shapes of Spirit that provide a body of experiences upon which to reflect. For Hegel, such a recollective experience is necessary for Spirit “to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance.”109


This allows Spirit to better understand its own nature but in no way prevents a new future path of development. The owl of Minerva flies at dusk only to be followed by the coming of a new dawn the next day.

The drives as self-development can thus be seen to play a central role in the development of Spirit, even taking Hegel’s discussion of absolute knowledge into consideration. Contrary to a strong reading of the “end of history” in Hegel’s Phenomenology, I claim that Hegel provides a model for how the continuation of individuals’ subjective drives can be integrated into institutions in modern societies. Individuals’ desires to see their own subjective freedom actualised in the world leads to potential conflict between multiple competing drives that exist within a single shared society. Hegel outlines a schema of the dynamic tension at the heart of modern societies created by the ineliminable presence of the drives as a constant source of potential instability and conflict. Hegel is interested in how societies develop in such a way that drives can be incorporated into structures of normativity. This idea is most clearly expressed in the Phenomenology in the section on judging and acting consciousness, which highlights the tension between the two modern principles of universal binding norms on the one hand and individual self-legislating subjectivity on the other. The principle of individuality (or subjectivity) is the demand that a subject be free from sources of external authority and that it has the right to only adhere to those forms of knowledge to which it can personally assent. The principle of universality, on the other hand, is that a society’s norms should be rationalised and embodied in institutions and apply equally to all citizens. There is a seeming contradiction in the co-existence of these two principles. Acting consciousness acts according to its own self-made principles, aware of the particularity of the content of its deed in the eyes of the universal law. Judging consciousness seeks


to restrain acting consciousness through the universal in-itself and views acting consciousness as both evil and hypocritical, since it claims to act according to a law (its own) but merely acts capriciously. Neither the rigid, unchanging universality of judging consciousness nor the completely subjective and individual actions of acting consciousness will ultimately prove acceptable to Hegel.

Reconciliation involves a learning to live with one another in modern society through a negotiation of social norms. Acting consciousness must learn that by acting in accordance with its own subjective desires its actions will necessarily be seen as wrong, for “no action can escape such judgment.”110 Hegel’s deeper point here is that there is an inherent particularity and problematic nature to any significant form of human action that is not merely a mundane imitation and repetition of socially accepted norms. Acting consciousness sees that it is not the sole author and interpreter of its own actions and that as objective deeds they take place within a community and form part of a process of giving shape to new universals, or, as Hegel puts it, acting consciousness “through its own self gives filling to this universality.”111 On the other hand, judging consciousness must come to realise that the universal norm cannot be a stagnant and unchanging law because through time this will be seen as an external imposition on acting consciousness. The norms must be provided with a degree of flexibility to allow individuals to alter and shape them in accordance with their individuality. This tension is parsed only very briefly by Hegel, but he is able to sketch a basic dynamic of political contestation and struggle over the normative framework of a community. Forgiveness comes in the form of a “reconciling Yea” in which judging consciousness’ hardness of heart is softened, acting consciousness realises its for-an-otherness, and both sides—the evil of individuality and the externality of the universal—become reconciled.112


This reconciliation is by no means the end of the drives. The reconciliation entails a learning to live with the continuation of the drives rather than their completion or closure. The drives never cease because they are a constitutive element of spirit, which is an endless process of self-actualisation and self-reflection. Contestation of social norms does not come to an end as it involves a constant negotiation between the principles of universality and individuality that must be continually worked out. The drives remain insofar as subjectivity, figured as negativity, continues to inject difference, disagreement and struggle into the world. While the narrative of the Phenomenology ends historically in Hegel’s era, and thematically with the concept of forgiveness and reconciliation, this does not involve any broader claims concerning the end of human history. It is in Hegel’s more consciously political work, The Philosophy of Right, that he offers a much clearer picture of the institutional requirements for the political sphere.

Chapter 4

The Transformation of the Drives

The Philosophy of Right is Hegel’s final published work and the most definitive statement of his later position on ethics and politics.1 Its stated intention is “to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity,” in which individuals are able “to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular and contingent situation, but in what has being in and for itself.”2 To understand what Hegel means by this programmatic statement will be the task of this chapter. What will be seen is that Hegel’s primary aim is to reveal how the modern principle of freedom, which arose out of the Reformation and the French Revolution, can be given content and embodied in the social and political institutions of the modern state. He constructs what might be called a “logic of political life” that justifies and gives an account of the rational structure of the institutions of the family, civil society and the state.3 In contrast to liberal political theory, which conceives of an individual’s freedom as limited by the state, Hegel proposes that modern individuals can be free in the fullest sense of the term only within the social and political structures of the state. Hegel criticises various narrow and one-sided conceptions of freedom and develops a broader theory of social freedom that integrates the wide number of issues analysed in the Philosophy of Right. Along this path, Hegel seeks to reconcile a series of divisions characteristic of modernity: those between the individual and the community, civil society and the state, and within individuals themselves. For Hegel, many of these divisions can be clarified


through an appropriate conceptualisation of the relationship between universality and particularity. In Hegel’s later work, such as the Philosophy of Right, the reconciliation between these two concepts can no longer take place in the aesthetic domain, for what is required is a fully mediated and rational concept of reconciliation. For Hegel, the political institution of the state represents a form of concrete rather than abstract universality. This is a type of universality that is fully differentiated and contains elements of particularity within it as part of its general structure. In practice, what this means for Hegel is that the state does not unilaterally rule over individuals from a position of externality, but contains their own particular ends within its rational structure. Essential to this process are the various mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the state, which are able to integrate individuals into modern society.

If in the Phenomenology of Spirit it is “Spirit” that plays the central role, in the Philosophy of Right it is “the will” that is the key to the development of the text. Hegel seeks to show how the institutions of the modern state are rational, intelligible and can be logically developed from the starting point of an individual will. Hegel argues that the will is intrinsically free and that freedom is its “substance and destiny [Bestimmung].”4 In a fully rational and legitimate modern society, institutions should all be traceable back to a process of the will’s actualisation of freedom in the world. For Hegel, freedom is actualised through the free will in three distinct ways, which is reflected in the tripartite structure of the book. The development of the concept of the will is intended to demonstrate the inadequacies of the first two accounts of freedom through revealing how they are unable to realise their own stated objectives and hence logically lead to the third and final account of social freedom. The first, most abstract and vulgar conception of freedom, for Hegel, is the classic liberal

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE DRIVES | 77

understanding of freedom, as the ability to do what one wants. This is associated with what Hegel calls abstract right and the rule of law. The second, moral, or subjective freedom, consists in the ability to be the source of one’s own normative principles that govern one’s life. However, for Hegel, the above two insufficient forms are transcended and incorporated within the highest form of social freedom, that contained within Sittlichkeit or ethical life, in which individuals actualise their freedom through participation in social institutions. It is not until this stage that Hegel begins to analyse the modern institutions of the family, civil society and the state, which all play a role in the actualisation of the free will in modern societies.

The Philosophy of Right incorporates an analysis of the two instances of the drives analysed in the two previous chapters into a single philosophical schema. The metaphysical drive, previously considered as the driving force of Spirit, is here embodied in the concept of the will. The will possesses a metaphysical drive towards freedom as it attempts to actualise itself in concrete form. However, its realisation and actualisation in the institutions and practices of modern life is only effected through what Hegel refers to as a “purification [Reinigung] of the drives,” by which he intends to signify the sensuous drives of individual human beings.5 Hegel argues that there is a relationship between the metaphysical drive to freedom and the necessity to work upon the sensuous drives as the basic motivating factors of human thought and action. The purification of the drives involves the transformation of sensuous drives as they are rationalised and denatured through the inculcation of habit in individuals. Hegel provides a highly developed analysis of the education, development and integration of individuals into the state through a mixture of ideology, work and institutional learning. This framework gives substance and depth to his argument for the free will’s metaphysical drive to freedom. Hegel’s exposition


and analysis of the two drives complement each other as they are engaged in an identical process or movement. This is to say that the realisation and institutionalisation of freedom in modern societies is intrinsically connected to a process of “re-naturing” human beings and transforming their immediate and natural drives into fully mediated cultural ones. Hegel’s early criticisms of the privileging of duty over inclination in Kantian morality are transfigured in his mature work and set within a more complex picture of modern social life. The sensuous drives are no longer placed within the context of a purely ethical theory that is separated from a coherent political philosophy. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel provides an analysis of the “system of needs” in modern society, described as the multiplication and transformation of needs through the division of labour and a growing interconnection of individuals within civil society. Hegel subsumes ethics and politics within a single analytic account of how modern individuals are integrated into modern institutions.6

Toward a Modern Polis

The Philosophy of Right represents the end point of a long line of development from Hegel’s earlier work. A crucial moment in this development is his stay in Jena (1801–1807) where his unpublished writings reveal a great deal about the formation of his political philosophy. While a metaphysics of love and life was Hegel’s first attempt in his Frankfurt years to solve the problem of the alienation of modern individuals, his Jena writings display a significant shift from a romantic vision of society towards the rational and mediated political state outlined in his final published work, the Philosophy of Right. As was noted in chapter one, the early signs of such a move were already present in The Spirit of Christianity essay, and become more apparent


throughout his unpublished essays and lectures from the Jena period onwards.7 It is here that Hegel first attempts to create a systematic philosophy. These texts reveal many similarities between his early social and economic studies (unknown to most of his early commentators) and his later published political philosophy.8 They demonstrate that social and political problems were always a central concern for Hegel and that throughout this period he continued his search for a reconciliation of the classical ideals of his youth with the realities of modern social life. This evidence points toward the fact that there was no abrupt leap from a young radical Hegel to a conservative quietist or nationalist.9 In fact, Shlomo Avineri, in his exhaustive study of Hegel’s political writings, goes so far as to note that “Hegel had not only been persistently preoccupied with the same set of problems, but that in a way he was also trying to write the same book all the time: we thus have before us early drafts, so to speak, of the Philosophy of Right.”10 What can be traced in these manuscripts is the gradual development of some of the central ideas of Hegel’s political philosophy.11

Following a few brief political studies and sketches in the late 1790s, Hegel widens his horizon in The German Constitution, finished in 1802, to consider the complex problem of the struggling Holy Roman Empire.12 Of particular interest for our analysis is Hegel’s conception of a political state, which deserves quotation: “[a] multitude of human beings can only call itself a state if it be united for the common defence of the entirety of its property.”13 Later, Hegel states, “[i]f a multitude is to form a state, then it must form a common military and public authority.”14 Hegel’s earliest attempts at thinking the nature of a modern state remain deeply embedded in a Hobbesian conception of the state as a supreme power for the purpose of the protection of property.15 This definition is much narrower than his later definition of the state in the Philosophy of Right which


includes a conception of custom, habit and the ethical life of a nation.16 However, despite this strong surface resemblance to Hobbes, there are two points at which a divergence can already be seen. Even in these early years, Hegel moves away from a purely instrumental view of the state.

First, Hegel notes that it is not individual property that must be defended, but the collective property of the state. Thus, while Hegel recognises that the two most important things for a state are military power and finances, he places these reflections within a framework of public virtue and political solidarity, reinforcing the idea that the goal of the state must be a public rather than a private enterprise. The problem with the old feudal order is that each individual and estate conducts its own affairs in isolation without any regard for the whole. What is important for Hegel is not exiting a fictive state of nature or the protection of individual property but the “power of the association of all with the whole.”17 The state brings individuals together in a living “union,” not a mere aggregation of personal interests. The problem with the current system, in Hegel’s view, is that “the Germans have kept alive for centuries a show of union in which in fact no member has yielded one jot of its claims to independence.”18

Second, Hegel perceives the need for institutions of mediation and representation to stand between the individual and a universal state. He rules out the idea of “giving every free individual a share in debating and deciding political affairs of universal concern.”19 But nor does he think it acceptable to have princes and dukes maintaining too much power and being able to set up a “state within a state.” Instead, groups of individuals should be organised into estates [Stände] in which their interests are balanced against other competing groups. Above any of these particular interests must stand the state as a “universal centre,” ruled by a monarch with the power to unite competing


interests.20 Within these criticisms of the Holy Roman Empire one can see emerge the outlines of Hegel’s future trajectory. However, one of the limitation of his approach in this essay is that he offers very little in the way of concrete programs of reform or suggestions for an alternative model.

Hegel makes a major advancement in his System of Ethical Life, which can be regarded as his first attempt at a systematic presentation of his political thought.21 The text illustrates the translation of Hegel’s earlier ideas of a Volksreligion into the language of modern economic and political theory: what emerges is a Sittlichkeit for the modern age.22 In this essay, Hegel presents a developmental account of human beings through the three stages of natural life, civil society and the universality of the state. He seeks to show not only the differences between an individual’s particular standpoint and the position of public or absolute spirit, but how a transition can be made between the two. Hegel begins with natural Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, which is defined as the identification of the individual with the totality of his social life.23 He uses this term to describe the undifferentiated and natural condition of social existence of human beings in which individuals have an immediate relationship to objects of nature. Within this mode, the feeling of separation between a subject and an object is overcome through the consumption and annihilation of the object, which gives the subject an immediate, although temporary, satisfaction. It is a condition in which human beings relate to the world through an intuitive mode of feeling. This first mode of relation is overturned by the process of labour, in which immediate satisfaction is delayed through the production of durable goods. This process transforms both the nature of human needs and human beings’ self-conception of themselves as natural animals. The complex role of labour within this text is the first great anticipation of later developments of the role of the “system of needs” within


Hegel’s political philosophy.24 Labour is presented as that which transforms natural appetites and inclinations into complex socially mediated ones. It links human beings to each other through the transformation of individual needs into general universal ones, which can only be met through a division of labour and co-operation in the production of goods. Finally, the sphere of labour itself is superseded by the move to a political community, the absolute Sittlichkeit of the universal state.

The most interesting aspect of this first presentation of Hegel’s system is his clear statement in the introduction that, for him, “ethical life is a drive” [Die Sittlichkeit ist ein Trieb].25 This drive towards sociality, or human development, mirrors similar passages in the work of Kant, Schiller and Fichte.26 The broad philosophical program that is being pursued in each instance is an insistence that to be both properly human and free, human beings must raise themselves out of a natural state of compulsion and necessity to a developed state of spiritual existence.27 In this essay, Hegel sets forth a picture of the denaturing and development of human beings through a process of labour and education. This project will be essential to Hegel’s political philosophy in the Philosophy of Right. The reason why labour can provide a practical education and formation is due to the interactions it promotes between human beings. The dialectic of labour results in individuals being able to see not only their own self-interest, but how this interest relates to a universal or general interest through the provision of goods to meet the needs of others. For Hegel, “absolute ethical life is . . . the absolute process of formation [Bildung].”28 However, on this economic level, individuals remain separated from one another and governed by the abstract universal rules of the market. This opposition is only overcome in the realm of the state where citizens are able to recognise one another as partners in a collective and shared public life. The state is needed as a third


stage, a concrete universal, in order to unite citizens in a modern ethical life. However, in this early sketch the precise details of the structure of the state remain rather vague and incomplete.29

A much clearer account of Hegel’s idea of the state emerges in his two lecture courses that have become known under the title Jenaer Realphilosophie I & II delivered in 1803–4 and 1805–6.30 In these lectures the role of the state is given more substance. In particular, Hegel stresses the need for the state to regulate the economy, which, if left unchecked, would destroy the basis for collective social life through driving sections of the population into crippling poverty. The state must stand above the workings of civil society in order to provide a check on the vicissitudes of economic life. This would ensure a minimum level of socio-economic development for individuals so that they could participate in public life. The state represents human being’s universal nature, their ability to overcome their particular interests in civil society and become reintegrated into the universal political state. Another important anticipation of the structure of the Philosophy of Right in this early text is the need for a universal class of public servants to carry out the functions of the state. This class should not be swayed by particular interests that come from membership of one of the estates. They must stand for a universal interest of society as a whole. These lectures are the last attempts Hegel made to outline his social and political philosophy before the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit. From this point, one must turn to his Philosophy of Right to witness a full account of Hegel’s political philosophy.

The Actualisation of Freedom

For Hegel, the great achievement of modern thought is the realisation that the human essence consists of a striving towards


freedom. Hegel’s mature political philosophy begins with Rousseau’s central question of: “Under what conditions could a free will be said to be self-determined?.”31 The basic structure that Hegel inherits from Rousseau is that this freedom of the will consists in both an objective and a subjective element. First, a state’s institutions and laws must be rational and provide the basic conditions in which individuals can actualise their freedom. But furthermore, individuals must themselves be able to see these institutions as emanating from their own rational wills and understand the state’s objectives and ends as their own. A point often missed by Hegel’s critics is that it is only when both these conditions are met—the establishment of a free state and the substantial freedom of individuals within that state—that genuine political freedom will be achieved. Not only must the objective institutions exist that embody the principles of freedom, but in the subjective sphere, citizens’ political consciousness and subjective dispositions should be such that they habitually identify the state’s ends as their own. Hegel classifies this basic trust in the political institutions of one’s community as the attitude of “patriotism.”32 He seeks to show how the institutions of modern society are logical and rational determinations of an individual will. The Philosophy of Right is a narrative of the development of the will into the full institutional framework of the modern state.

Hegel’s argument in the Philosophy of Right is best placed within a broader understanding of his idea of freedom. Put in very general terms, Hegel’s basic definition of freedom is that an entity is free when it is self-determined, hence the importance of a conceptualisation of the will as independent, self-sufficient and not limited by anything other than itself. For Hegel, self-determination involves “being with oneself ” [bei sich selbst], i.e. in a condition of non-alienation and self-consistency. By “being with oneself ” Hegel means that free


individuals must be self-conscious and in control of themselves. The idea of a spatial proximity conveyed by the German bei indicates a sense of “togetherness,” of constituent parts being harmoniously integrated into a whole.33 A second aspect of this freedom for Hegel is that it involves a “being with oneself in an other” [Beisichselbstsein in einem Anderen]. This means that true independence for Hegel can only ever be achieved through some form of mediation with and overcoming of otherness. This process entails a reconciling of one’s necessary relationality with others into a condition of self-relatedness.34 The full overcoming of otherness is only possible in the realm of philosophy where Spirit comes to recognise itself in everything and the externality of nature is able to be negated. But in the realm of politics, what must be overcome are the natural determinations of the will, other individuals and finally the perceived externality of the institutions of the state. Each of these stages of the overcoming of otherness is important to Hegel’s fully developed conception of political freedom.

The starting point of Hegel’s dialectic argument concerning freedom in the Philosophy of Right is an individual free will, completely undetermined by anything outside of itself.35 This will has freedom as its essence and contains a drive to actualise this freedom in the world. Hegel explains the will’s essential relationship with freedom and why it must undergo this process in the following way:

The basis of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point of departure is the will; the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny and the system of right is the realm of actualised freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as second nature.36

Hegel explicitly states that “[t]he absolute determination, or if one prefers, the absolute drive [absolute Trieb], of the free spirit is to make its freedom into its object [Gegenstand].”37 The


dialectical movement of the will, which progresses from the starting point of an individual will through to a fully actualised state, operates according to what Hegel will again refer to as a “drive.” The language and imagery of a movement or force that progresses through the Philosophy of Right is an essential aspect of the text.

There are a number of reasons why Hegel chooses the concept of the will as the basis of his political philosophy. First, he realises that in modernity any form of modern politics must accord with the principle of subjectivity: that every individual has a right to subject the basic laws of society to rational scrutiny. Therefore, any given political system must be based on the self-consciousness and understanding of its citizens. It will not count as a genuine actualisation of freedom if individuals cannot see themselves in the institutions of their society and view them as a legitimate source of authority. Hegel must show that his philosophy can be demonstrated to be rational and legitimate to individual subjects. Second, although Hegel believes that one requires a much more complex and developed understanding of political citizenship than the abstract individual, he believes that he needs to demonstrate how one moves from the position of the isolated free individual citizen to a place from which the state could be seen to be a necessary and rational institution that actualises the freedom of citizens considered as fully integrated social beings. The dialectical development through different conceptions of individual human beings shows how the pitfalls and weaknesses of each determination lead to the necessity of a more complex conceptualisation. The Philosophy of Right serves as a propaedeutic for his readers by leading them through the stages of the argument necessary to attain the final standpoint of the rational structure of the state. Hegel states that the development of the will occurs through an “immanent progression and production of its own determinations.”38 It is


not a chance or contingent transformation but a rational and necessary development.

In Hegel’s explication of this development the will must progress through two other stages before it arrives at the third and final concept of Sittlichkeit. The developmental account of freedom is split into the three domains of abstract right, morality and Sittlichkeit. Each phase of the development has a corresponding image of a human being, which includes a conception of how individuals within this self-understanding view themselves and their role in the world. For Hegel, the first idea of freedom is the classic liberal understanding of freedom as the ability to do what one wants. This is identified in the introduction as being the form of freedom associated with “persons” and is discussed in the section on abstract right. A human being’s capacity for rational thought and ability to take oneself as an object of reflection allows for a level of freedom unattainable by non-human animals. It is the human being qua active will that is seen by Hegel as having obtained the status of personhood. More specifically, to be considered a person a human being must take themselves as an object of their will by actively acknowledging and affirming their freedom of thought and movement in order to secure these as rights. A person is a type of individual who is able to reflect on their many desires and drives and is able to reject some while embracing others. They have the capacity to make an arbitrary decision as to which drives they will satisfy on any given occasion. This conception of the individual leads to the need for an external domain in which the individual can act and impose its arbitrary will exclusively on other objects. This requires a conception of property which is first actualised in Roman law.

Hegel shows how, on its own terms, this conception of freedom will necessarily fail and lead to a drive towards a more complex and sophisticated account. The main problem with this


initial idea of freedom is that although the will is formally free in its ability to decide between different drives, the content of these drives is still something that comes from nature and hence is a potential source of heteronomy. Hegel inquires as to how drives arise in the subject and finds that they are not freely and rationally chosen but rather emerge as a natural given of nature. As Hegel puts it, “these are the drives, desires and inclinations [die Triebe, Begierden, Neigungen] by which the will finds itself naturally determined.”39 Hegel agrees with Kant that if left unmodified the natural desires and inclinations of human beings can be a potential source of unfreedom as although the will is formally free, the content is still determined by an external source and hence the will is not yet, in Hegel’s famous formulation, “the free will which will’s the free will.”40 An individual must undergo a more complex procedure of providing content for its own drives through a process of enculturation and formation of habit for the drives to be considered rationally determined and hence a product of the individual’s free will. Another related problem of this stage of freedom is that by acting arbitrarily according to its whim the will is not able to live a more coherent and stable life by setting itself principles and norms to guide its conduct. By adhering to the second, more developed, conception of freedom as morality the will is able to rationally determine maxims from which it can judge its own conduct in a systematic and consistent manner. Hegel views the development of the moral standpoint to be the great discovery of Kantian philosophy.

The second account of freedom consists of the individual’s ability to be the source of the normative principles that govern one’s life. In the modern era, human beings begin to see themselves as self-determining beings. They wish to be held morally responsible for actions they have chosen to the extent that they are the cause of their external actions and in this respect free. Human beings take satisfaction in choosing


determinate paths for their lives by consciously deciding upon their own version of the good. Hegel describes this as the “moral point of view” which takes the shape of the “right of the subjective will.”41 In Hegel’s words, “the will can recognise something or be something only in so far as that thing is its own, and in so far as the will is present to itself in it as subjectivity.”42 Subjects require social institutions that allow them to live according to their own principles and not to have to undertake significant actions under the command of another. For individuals who have achieved a self-understanding of themselves as modern subjects, institutions such as slavery or serfdom would be straightforwardly illegitimate. The basic attributes that characterise a moral will are shown by Hegel to be insufficient to the task of ensuring a completely free and self-determined will. In this instance, the problem lies in the social formation of the subject. The moral subject cannot be fully self-determining in isolation from other subjects because it relies upon a whole assembly of social institutions to educate and socialise it. If these institutions themselves are not taken into account and shown to be compatible with a free and self-determining will then they could stand as a potential source of external power and control. Secondly, subjects considered in isolation from social institutions are unable to give specific content to their particular conceptualisations of the good. Hegel argues that the truth of the moral standpoint ends up in an empty formalism or abstraction. Subjects require specific social roles, customs and habits in order to enact their own conception of the good.

For Hegel, the above two insufficient forms of freedom are incorporated within the highest form of freedom, that contained within Sittlichkeit or ethical life, in which individuals actualise their freedom through participation in social institutions. In this last stage, the sections on abstract right and morality are revealed to be methodological fictions that are designed to show


the impossibility of actualising a form of social life based on them. The will must pass through them in order to develop itself into a fully mediated institutional structure, but ultimately they are superseded in the final stage. Ethical life is thus the first real beginning of Hegel’s political philosophy. It is the realm in which the complete institutions of the state begin to be developed in full. The main problem with the previous conceptualisations of freedom is their reliance upon a view of individuals as abstracted from their position within a functional social order. Hegel believes that there is a failure to take account of an individual’s place within society and the social and political institutions that play a role in shaping and forming their character. One of the most important aspects of Hegel’s political philosophy is the significance he places on institutions in modern life. Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit expresses the idea that there should be an ethical substance to social life that forms part of the everyday fabric of social relations and is embedded within the practices and institutions of a people. It is only through knowledge of an individual’s location within a complex network of social relations that their rights and duties can be discerned. Without such concrete determinations the notion of a universal duty appears abstract and lacks substance and content. Duties must be appropriately particularised according to an individual’s place within a functional social order to be properly understood and enacted.

In ordinary German, the word Sittlichkeit means customary morality; it calls attention to the close connection between ethical norms and social custom. Ethical life represents the embodiment of freedom in the world in two distinct ways. First, in the objective sphere, it refers to the rational structure of a society’s basic laws and institutions that are given determinate content necessary for their existence. These include the institutions of a modern society such as the family, civil society and the state,


which should be fully developed, properly differentiated from one another, and structured rationally. The subjective side is an individual’s subjective disposition or attitude towards these laws and institutions, which takes the form of an immediate trust and feeling at home within them, as if they expressed the individual’s own desires and inclinations. In the first section on Sittlichkeit in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel emphasises the double use of this term:

Ethical life [Sittlichkeit] is the Idea of freedom in that on one hand it is the good become alive—the good endowed in self-consciousness with knowing and willing and actualised by self-conscious action—while, on the other hand self-consciousness has in the ethical realm its absolute foundation and the end which actuates its effort. Thus ethical life is the concept of freedom developed into the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness.43

It is not enough for individuals to choose their own conception of the good as moral subjects since the “laws and institutions which have being in and for themselves” must “govern the lives of individuals” for there to be a genuine sense of a reconciliation between individuals and their world.44 But at the same time, individuals themselves must fully acknowledge the authority and legitimacy of social institutions and see them as part of their own self-realisation. Patriotism, in this sphere, is not an act, but part of the unreflective disposition of all citizens who habitually recognise their fulfilment in their own community.45 The ethical is called a “substance” because Hegel wants to suggest that ethical life is something firm and unshakeable: the individual can rely on its workings and be sure of the validity of its laws. The ethical attitude toward laws and institutions is a natural, habitual, spontaneous and unselfconscious one. This is the freedom of being at home in the world and recognising that


what ought to be is already realised in the laws and customs of one’s community and in one’s own habits and practices in so far as they accord with those laws and customs. It does not reflect a blind following of norms, but rather a conscious and reflected series of practices that have sunk into the basic patterns and ways of life of a people. The personal freedom and particularity of individuals evident in the sections on abstract right and morality are retained in the final ends of the state.46

In the ethical life of Hegel’s political philosophy, the metaphysical drive to freedom coalesces with a need to transform the sensuous drives so that an individual’s basis for action is no longer fixed and determined by nature. In order to become citizens living in an ethical community individuals must undergo a process of education and “re-naturing,” in which their natural, unreflected and determined drives and desires are replaced by a rational, culturally mediated set of new sources of action. This process is not so much a “drive to overcome the drives,” but rather a complex process of the transformation of existing drives. The drives are not to be ignored or discounted but refigured and transformed. Hegel does not commence his analysis of the drives with the same hostility and suspicion as Kant. On the contrary, for Hegel, as the drives are “based on the rational nature of the mind,” they must contain at least a “nominal rationality.”47 Hegel recognises the necessity of the inclusion of the drives within any theory of moral agency, since “impulse and passion are the very life-blood of all action.”48 Hegel agrees with Schiller that material and sensuous life cannot be overlooked as a source of ethical orientation in the world. He does not pose an initial cleavage between duty and inclination as he recognises that there is nothing inherently illogical or irrational about human drives. The problem is not their existence but rather their one-sided subjectivity and propensity to exist as contradictory impulses. Rational reflection and education are


necessary in order that the reflective will can select between the drives and select the appropriate ones as its own.

There is a direct relationship between a subject’s basic drives in the realm of abstract right, a subject’s duties in the realm of morality and finally a subject’s virtues in ethical life. These three concepts are used by Hegel to refer to an individual’s motivations for action within different spheres of life. Hegel states that “[t]he same content which assumes the form of duties and then of virtues also takes the form of drives.”49 For Hegel it is necessary to have a transformation of the drives in order to actualise the freedom of the will in concrete social institutions. Whereas in abstract right the drives are immediately determined by nature, a subject’s duty is self-legislated and reflected upon. In Kant’s formulation, a subject gives itself its moral duty through the use of reason. However, Hegel thinks that at this level duty remains merely abstract and empty of further determinations and particularity. It is only through an individual’s participation within an ethical community that these abstract duties acquire cultural and ethical determinations and become virtues. The virtues are not completely new sources of action, external to or distinct from an individual’s subjective drives, but rather, they are modifications of the drives.50 This is the stage at which the drives “become the rational system of the will’s determination.”51 The duties and virtues contain the previous drives within them but in an inoperative and sublated form. Hegel does not wish to discard Kant’s insight of the necessity of a universal rational will; he merely requires that a theory of duties be related to an ethical content based on the social role of each member of a community. For Hegel, “virtue represents nothing more than the simple adequacy of the individual to the duties of the circumstances to which he belongs.”52

Hegel describes this process of the purification of the drives as the creation of “habit” in individuals which “appears


as a second nature,” as the “all-pervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence.”53 As a second nature, habit comes between an individual’s subjective dispositions and the overriding concerns of its culture. It is that which mediates between an individual’s subjectivity and particularity and the demands of universality and rationality of the social order. Habit enables individuals to incorporate the rationality of the state into the deep inner realms of their subjectivity so that their own thoughts and actions become fully immersed with the same rationality and purpose of the state. Habit is the cultivation of a second nature, which necessarily retains certain aspects of an original nature within it. Although in habit there is no longer an appeal to nature as a given, there is still a conception of the individual as giving rise to drives and desires. The difference is that the forms of desires that are likely to arise in an individual within ethical substance are those corresponding to the customs and laws of their society. Through a process of habit the laws of a society become incorporated into the subject as a vital component of who a subject feels him or herself to be. The positive acts of institutions become part of the self, ingrained and inscribed in different modes of self-experience and self-realisation.54

Development of a System of Needs

Hegel’s original critique of Kant’s separation of inclination and duty is complicated in the Philosophy of Right by Hegel’s discovery of modern civil society, which includes the idea of a division of labour and the development of a system of needs. Hegel’s account of the transformation of the natural drives in ethical life must take into account their development within a fully differentiated system of needs. The system of needs is the organisation of the satisfaction of human needs and desires through social processes of labour within an interdependent human world.


Hegel must modify his initial critique of transcendent law in The Spirit of Christianity, since inclinations are no longer figured as personal, individual needs, but as complex social ones. In civil society, personal needs are interwoven with the needs of other individuals so that their satisfaction cannot be achieved without the co-operation of others. This transforms both Hegel’s understanding of the relationship between inclination and duty and the relationship between ethics and politics. Although The Spirit of Christianity addresses both ethical and political issues, there is no indication at this early stage that Hegel considered the two to be inextricably connected. In contrast, in Hegel’s mature philosophy ethics and politics are both contained within a single account of how modern individuals are integrated into the practices and institutions of social life.

The system of needs appears within the sphere of civil society, which is located in Hegel’s political philosophy between the realms of the family and the state. The individual begins their life within the structure of a family in which they appear not in their full independence and individuality but as a member of the family unit. They are connected to other family members by a feeling of love, which Hegel describes as the consciousness of their natural unity with the family through an immediate ethical relationship. The family is a sphere in which individuals do not directly pursue their own egoistic desires but attempt to care for the interests of the family as a whole. Children are brought up and reared within the family using its resources until they are old enough to become self-sufficient and leave the family to pursue their own ends in the world. Upon leaving the family, children are recognised as full legal persons capable of holding property and exercising political rights. Individuals insofar as they exist within families belong to a realm of particular altruism in which they work for the benefit of the family. However, heads of households also live in another


sphere, that of civil society. Modern citizens demand a world separated from the state in which they can pursue their own particular ends in accordance with their subjective freedom. Hegel believes that the discovery of civil society as a separate sphere from the state is the crowning achievement of modern societies.55 A modern state cannot unilaterally curtail subjective freedom and completely subordinate it to the interests or ends of the collective. Hegel argues that

[t]he principle of modern states has enormous depth and strength because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfilment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.56

Civil society fulfils an important function in that it allows “the right of the subject’s particularity to find satisfaction.”57

In a modern civil society with a developed system of needs, the satisfaction of personal needs becomes a much more complex affair. In The Spirit of Christianity needs were depicted as the most basic of impulses: the two specific examples given were that of satisfying one’s hunger and preventing the suffering of an animal. Aside from these instances, the concept of needs was left largely undefined. In modern society human beings multiply their needs and means of satisfying them through a “dividing and differentiating” which make needs more “particularised and hence more abstract.”58 Once needs are socialised, the ways in which they can be satisfied becomes more diverse. One is no longer simply hungry; one desires particular types of foods, to be consumed in particular ways, forming part of particular social practices. The modes of satisfaction undergo an “infinite process of multiplication” in which natural needs take on a cultural character and become “concrete, i.e. social


ones.”59 Needs themselves grow to include not simply natural needs such as hunger, thirst, shelter, but also complex social ones such as fame, honour and respect. This process is necessary for the development of freedom as human beings must reflect on their needs so that they are not fully determined by them in an immediate sense. As Hegel argues, “a condition in which natural needs as such were immediately satisfied would merely be one in which spirituality was immersed in nature, and hence a condition of savagery and unfreedom.”60 The development of a system of needs and their satisfaction within the realm of civil society is a necessary aspect of the growth of modern social institutions. Hegel realises through the writings of political economists such as Smith and Steuart that the relationship between individuals in a complex civil society “establishes a system of all-round interdependence” where the rights of the individual are “interwoven with, and grounded on, the subsistence, welfare, and rights of all.”61 The genius of political economy, in Hegel’s view, is to see a rationality and universality (Smith’s “invisible hand of the market”) in the satisfaction of purely subjective needs.62 Hegel gives a dialectical twist to Smith’s famous insight in the following formulation: “the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account, thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others.”63 Through dialectical argumentation Hegel seeks to show how an individual’s pursuit of personal satisfaction will lead to the public good.

An important aspect of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology is located in this system of needs. In opposition to non-human animals that can only satisfy their needs in very limited and specific ways, one of the defining features of human beings as they begin to live in more complex societies is a more sophisticated system of needs satisfaction. “Here, at the level of needs, it is that concretum of representational thought which we


call the human being; this is the first, and in fact the only occasion on which we shall refer to the human being in this sense.”64 Needs satisfaction according to cultural standards enables human beings to raise themselves above the merely biological aspects of their human nature. It is the socialisation of needs that allows the transformation of drives into ethical virtues and provides an escape from an immediate and uncultivated condition, which is described in the addition to section eighteen as “a situation in which he ought not to be, and from which he must liberate himself.”65 The full exposition of the system of needs provides the impetus for Hegel to subsume his ethics, including his critique of Kantian morality, within a wider theory of social and political life. Hegel changes the angle of his main critique of Kant, shifting from a focus on the coldness of heart with which Kant prescribes the moral law to a charge of empty formalism, although the essence of the critique remains the same.66 In the Philosophy of Right Hegel has three main objections to Kant’s moral philosophy. First he argues that Kant’s theory of duty is unable to provide the content of specific duties, which can only be given within the context of an ethical life, as embedded within community expectations of how one will perform a particular social role.67 Second, Hegel argues that Kant provides no reasons as to why an individual would seek to be moral, or adhere to the moral law. For Hegel, duty must be reconciled with inclination so that one desires to follow one’s duty. Third, Hegel is deeply critical of Kant’s view that the morality of an individual’s actions should be based solely upon their intentions. For Hegel, it is the social and inter-subjective consequences of an action that must be placed at the centre of any ethical inquiry.

On the question of the relationship between duty and inclination, one that proved so pivotal to Hegel’s earlier conception of a reconciliation in the sphere of love, Hegel now offers a reformulation. For the mature Hegel, the individual


“finds his liberation in duty.”68 A binding duty only initially appears as a limitation on the individual who is still directed by natural drives. The individual who understands this duty not as the duty of the Kantian transcendent law but as the self-willed rational determinations of ethical life will not see this as something external but as a part of oneself. The major difference between Hegel’s early and later work on this topic is that he switches from an argument relating to aesthetic wholeness in the sphere of love to one based on modern social institutions as the force that is able to transform the drives. As has already been made clear, the drives do not disappear in duty, the individual is only liberated from his “dependence on mere natural drives.”69 Virtue, as a modification of the drives and a component of ethical life, is able to connect reason to the drives by cultivating certain dispositions that become hardened into habit within the subject. The self-actualisation of freedom as the essence of human beings requires the preservation of these drives, albeit in an inoperative form, and does not demand their complete annulment or cancellation.

The Hegelian State

Hegel’s argument for the actualisation of freedom in the world does not end in the sphere of civil society. It requires the complete reconciliation of individuals with the modern political institution of the state. Hegel recognises that civil society is in itself insufficient to meet the demands of modern politics as it is based primarily on the unrestricted accumulation of wealth and the growing specialisation and particularisation of modern industry. Civil society creates a problematic split within social life between an individual’s economic role as a bourgeois and their political role as a citoyen. The overcoming of this division becomes one of the central functions of the state. Civil society


requires a final higher sphere of the universal state in order to synthesise and bring together the divided and competing interests of the marketplace. The distinction between civil society and the state for Hegel is based on their respective organising principles for social life. Whereas civil society rests on the principle of each individual pursuing their own particular needs, the state provides citizens with membership to a universal political organisation in which the common good is discerned through rational political institutions. An individual’s purpose in civil society is particular and finite, while the ends of the state are universal and relate to the collective freedom of society. The state makes possible the formation of a common will and a process of collective self-determination through institutions that focus on the public good and the shared aims of the community as a whole.70 The goal of the state is to preserve a free realm for particularity to exercise its freedom, while at the same time establishing a relationship between civil society and the universal sphere of the state through a series of mediating institutions.

This process begins in the realm of civil society but is only fully completed in the realm of the state. Within civil society, individuals learn that although each person can pursue his or her own ends, they cannot accomplish these without the cooperation and participation of others within a collective project. This level of consciousness is achieved in the institutions of the corporations and the police. However, these institutions play a double role in Hegel’s political philosophy. As institutions of civil society they provide for the private welfare of individuals but as institutions of the state they aim to promote the good of the whole of society. The task of reconciling civil society and the state rests upon an institutional blending and interconnection of these two spheres so that each is properly integrated into the rational functioning of the other. The promotion of the particular


ends of private individuals has to be mediated with the state’s pursuit of the universal and common good. The police are the public authorities that provide for the security and protection of society as a whole, including intervening in the activities of the production, distribution and sale of goods and services. Corporations are legally recognised voluntary associations which have as their end the provision of resources and the training and education of its members. In these institutions there arises greater awareness of the interdependence of individuals and their belonging to a shared political sphere of the state.

Hegel uses the term “state” [der Staat] to refer both to the organic totality of the institutions of the family, civil society and the state, but also in a sense which refers exclusively to the third and final moment of this system, which he calls the strictly political state [der eigentlich politische Staat].71 Hegel thus draws a distinction between the political state, or government, and the broader political community of which it is a part. The political state consists of a constitutional monarchy divided into the three modern institutions of government: the crown, the legislature and the executive. These three institutions follow a typically Hegelian structural pattern with the legislative power able to determine and establish the universal, the executive or bureaucratic class subsuming the particular under the universal and the sovereign containing the final and ultimate decision of the will in his or her subjectivity.72 Hegel has received much criticism for his model of the state, beginning with Marx and the Young Hegelians’ attack on the conservative nature of his analysis and the way in which it appears to legitimise the Prussian state.73 Certain more recent commentators have sought to defend Hegel from such charges and reveal the more liberal and republican aspects of Hegel’s system.74 I argue that the way in which Hegel attempts to mediate the drives in his final political philosophy seeks to close them up and restrict them


within the bureaucratisation of state institutions. Hegel seeks to sideline and marginalise the actual opinions and desires of the many in favour of the knowledge and expertise of a bureaucratic class.

The most significant investment of institutional power in Hegel’s system occurs neither in the figure of the monarch nor in the agricultural and industrial estates, but in the executive power of a rational bureaucracy. The structure of Hegel’s chapter appears to suggest that the sovereign would be the most powerful figure in the state. This is because a hereditary monarch contains all three moments of the government within itself and represents the unity of the state within its own subjectivity. However, in the rational and systematic structure of the state, the precise characteristics or particularities of the sovereign are unimportant, since in a fully rational and organised state “all that is required in a monarch is someone to say ‘yes’ and to dot the ‘i’; . . . to add his subjective ‘I will.’”75 Despite some limited formal and symbolic power, the actual figure of the monarch in Hegel’s system is reduced to a functional role of unification and will formation. It is the universal estate of the bureaucracy that is the primary locus of power within the government. This estate devotes itself to the service of government and has the state’s universal end as its activity. Its privileged position is due to its training and education that provides it with superior concrete knowledge [Kenntnis] of the affairs of government and also due to its orientation towards the common good rather than its own particular ends.76 The executive power is exercised by this class of civil servants and delegates of the monarch. The central attribute of the universal estate is its knowledge of state affairs and proof of ability that is guaranteed through a system of public testing as a condition of appointment to the civil service. To counteract the mechanical nature of their role this class also receives direct moral and spiritual education to assist them in


undertaking their work.77 The majority of the everyday business of government is carried out by the executive.

Hegel insists that individual subjective drives may only be incorporated into the political realm on the condition of their mediation within a complex institutional framework. Hegel imagines there to be significant risks in allowing the undiluted opinions and desires of the people into the political sphere without suitable forms of mediation. To have a political effect, the subjective drives of individuals must first pass through the system of estates. For Hegel, “the constitution is essentially a system of mediation.”78 This system of mediation is divided between the three spheres of government, out of which the only sphere that common citizens have access to is the legislature. The legislature is divided into two houses: the landed gentry of the agricultural estate occupy the upper house by right of birth and the industrial estate select deputies to sit in the lower house upon election. The lower house is the only sphere in which individuals belonging to the classes of “the many” are able to directly elect deputies to have an influence over the making of laws. The role of the estates in the legislature is to “bring the universal interest into existence,” in particular the “empirical universality of the views and thoughts of the many.”79 However, there are limits placed on this process. Hegel remains suspicious of “the many” due to their preoccupation with their private interests. He argues that they are “inclined to direct their efforts towards these at the expense of the universal interest.”80 Hegel establishes a bureaucratic system that attempts to limit any potential influence they could have over the legislative process. For Hegel, “‘the people’ denotes a particular category of members of the state, it refers to that category of citizens who do not know their own will.”81 In contrast, the civil servants and officials of the state “have a more profound and comprehensive insight into the nature of the state’s institutions and needs.”82


The legislature is also assisted by the rational advice of the universal estate of civil servants who are able to serve as an “advisory moment which has concrete knowledge” within the estates system.83 For Hegel, it is in the interests of the lower estates to follow the advice and universal knowledge of the executive as they are dedicated to the universal end of the state itself. The true function of the estates, for Hegel, is to organise the masses into established social groups so that they do not appear as a “crowd or aggregate, unorganised in their opinions and volition” that might become a threat to the state.84

The complex institutional framework that Hegel establishes for mediating the drives thus serves two purposes. First, it cultivates individuals so that their subjective drives are elevated from a position in which they are immediately determined by nature to become culturally determined virtues. This requires that individuals within the state fully internalise and subjectify the rational ways of life of citizens through habit as part of their own self-understanding. In addition, and more problematically, Hegel mistrusts the judgment and decision-making capacity of the majority of citizens and attempts to block their access to the direct exercise of power within the state through a series of mediating institutions. For Hegel, the actualisation of freedom in society does not require the direct participation of the many in politics; their role in the state is predominantly a passive one. Rather than create laws through their own capacities of deliberation and judgment, the people can receive information about government affairs through the debate that takes place in the estates assembly, which is open to the public. Hegel believes that the universal rationality of the state will entrench itself in the opinions of the many through the education received by attending these deliberative processes. In this way, the public opinion of the many would be granted the same universality and rationality of the state.85 Public opinion, much like the


general public itself, is to be “respected as well as despised,” respected insofar as it can embody the same rationality and determinate knowledge of the state and despised insofar as it contains no criterion within itself for determining this.86 For the subjective drives of the many to enter the political realm, Hegel stresses that they must be mediated through a rational institutional framework and transformed from their previous state of naturalness and immediacy.

Hegel is the first philosopher of modernity insofar as he adequately grasps the dialectical tension between individuals’ subjective drives and their embodiment in the institutions and practices of modern life. Hegel raises the question of which structures and institutions would be able to actualise human freedom in the modern world. While we may no longer find the answer of a Hegelian state compelling, the basic problematic of modern society’s drive towards freedom is still a recognisable description of our present. It is doubtful whether the institution of the state—even in Hegel’s own time—could have ever lived up to the enormous expectations that he placed on it. In contemporary Western societies the state has proved vastly inadequate to the task of embodying the universal and rational interest of society. Instead, it has been transformed into a monolithic and bureaucratic institution in which socio-economic power blocs and particular interest groups compete for power. However, if the political essence of Hegelianism can be understood as the actualisation of freedom in the world and the necessity of individuals being integrated into the institutions of modern life, then contemporary instances of the state open themselves up to a Hegelian-inspired critique. One may wish to argue with the young Hegel (or Hölderlin/Schelling) that, “[w]e must therefore go beyond the state!—Because every state must treat free human beings like mechanical works; and it should not do that; therefore it should cease.”87 Although Hegel himself


believed in the need for a monarch to unify political differences, his dialectic method demands that philosophy be sensitive to the dynamic nature of material reality and the progression of consciousness to different forms of life that require different political institutions. If the agonistic nature of the drives continues to transform society and the ultimate goal of this drive is a movement towards the actualisation of freedom, then perhaps the only way to be Hegelian today may be to go beyond the strict letter of Hegel’s political philosophy. It is possible to argue that the state itself must be progressively replaced by an emerging set of institutions and practices that would be more adequately actualise freedom in the world. The contours of this debate are beginning to emerge amongst contemporary theorists of global and radical democratic theory. This line of analysis, which takes the human drive towards freedom as its starting point, is faithful to Hegel’s stated project of achieving both a subjective and objective realisation of freedom in the world through the mediation of individuals into contemporary institutions that preserve their own individual freedom and integrate them into social life.

Appendix

A Brief History of the Concept of the Drives

It is useful to have as a resource the rich and varied semantic history of the term Trieb (drive) within the German language to properly understand its significance in Hegel’s philosophy. The importance of the concept of die Triebe for German literature and culture since the eighteenth century cannot be overstated. The entry in the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch occupies 18 printed columns, which give a detailed analysis of the word’s origins and form. Trieb can be traced back to the thirteenth century in print and to the sixteenth century in the spoken language. Its earliest meaning was “to drive cattle” in the sense of directing animals’ movement towards a pasture for grazing. The word began to take on other meanings from the sixteenth century onwards. It denoted the driving force of a mechanical process powered by heat, wind or water, but could also mean the birth and growth of organic life, as in the shoot or bud of a plant. A third meaning during this early period was of an external agitation or irritation that provoked movement or action in man.

The unifying theme of each of these variations is the underlying concept of a dynamic process or movement. The importance of this dynamic view of the world is embodied in the science and metaphysics of Gottfried Leibniz whose conception of vis viva (living force) was to have a profound influence over German thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Leibniz overturned Descartes dualistic conception of ideas and matter with the metaphysics of a substance-force, the idea that all substance is at the same time a


living and dynamic force. It also refers back to the importance of Aristotle’s conception of nature and the dynamic development of individuated forms. Gradually, in the eighteenth century, the drives began to take on the meaning of an exciting force within living beings. While the development of this understanding of the term must have taken place gradually, an important turning point was the publication of German philosopher, Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere (General Observations on the Animal Drives). This treatise was a polemic against a Cartesian mechanical materialist understanding of animals as dead matter, which operated like machines set in motion by their divine creator. In opposition to this view, Reimarus believed that his empirical research clearly demonstrated the existence of an inner psychic and emotional life of animals comparable to human beings. He argued that phenomena such as spiders building webs and young rams attempting to butt with horns that had not yet grown, showed that they had inner drives that were not merely responses to external stimuli or learned behaviour from the observation of other animals. He proposed that animals acted intentionally and even possessed a Kunsttrieb (skilful drive) through which each animal attempted to grow and develop to maximise its potential within its own form of life.

Although Reimarus’ scientific study is arguably the first to use the concept of Trieb in this manner, it is the later work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose Über den Bildungstrieb was to have the most influence on the German writers of Hegel’s generation. Blumenbach’s work extended Reimarus’ observations of animals to set out a model for the formation, self-organisation and development of organic life. He employs the concept of a Bildungstrieb or development drive, a translation of the Latin nisus formativus, to explain the driving force behind the biological cycle of reproduction. As Blumenbach writes,

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“there exists in all living creatures, from men to maggots and from cedar trees to mould, a particular inborn, life-long active drive. This drive initially bestows on creatures their form, then preserves it, and, if they become injured, where possible restores their form.” For Blumenbach this Bildungstrieb is a vital energy within organic matter that causes it to grow, self-repair and maintain itself.

Both Goethe and Kant praise Blumenbach for the discovery of this principle and make use of it within their own work. Goethe embraces the term as a more comprehensive notion than the term Kraft (force) which for him remained too mechanistic and physicalist to be a basic principle of Lebensphilosophie. Goethe believed Blumenbach had overcome these limitations of Kraft through the more organic and vital conception of a Trieb or “vigorous activity that effects a formation.” Kant gives equal praise to Blumenbach for his work but arguably adopts the concept for his own ends by limiting the constitutive nature of the principle to a merely regulative or heuristic device for understanding how nature operates. Although Kant and Blumenbach considered they were generally in accord on the issue of a Bildungstrieb, there is evidence to suggest there are very real differences between their conceptions that were overlooked by both authors. However, they both agreed that it allowed for some form of a uniting of the mechanistic and purposeful understandings of nature.

The important transition that Blumenbach enabled was the anthropomorphisation of the concept of the drives so that the term could refer to a drive within human beings. By the end of the eighteenth century the term was in common use as a way of describing basic instincts such as a drive for hunger, thirst, and sex in both animals and human beings, but it was increasingly also used to describe higher activities such as intellectual, social and moral drives. Several of the major philosophers of


the period including Kant, Fichte and Schiller, all develop a conception of a socialisation drive of human beings within their work. This socialisation drive is a way of describing humanity’s process of development, maturity and expansion of creative forces, as well as their capacity for living together and sharing an inter-subjective life.

The concept of the drives is first given its fullest metaphysical elaboration in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte uses the concept of a drive to outline a dynamic conception of the self as absolute activity. He does not use the concept with the same quasi-naturalistic connotations as previous writers, but rather uses it as part of a description of the metaphysical process of self-constitution. Although the majority of Fichte’s analysis in the Wissenshaftslehre is concerned with his central notion of striving, Fichte states that “[a] self-productive striving that is fixed, determinate and definite in character is known as a drive.” He identifies three central characteristics of the drive. First, it is to be found in the internal nature of the self, an innate characteristic that is part of the structure of the self. Second, it is something fixed and enduring, an essential part of the self rather than an accident or addition. Third, this inner force aspires to causality outside of itself but in a certain sense fails to achieve this causality. Thus we cannot understand this force according to the mechanistic laws that govern the rest of nature. These drives relate to the absolute self of Fichte’s metaphysics and not to empirical selves as they exist in the world. Following Fichte’s work, the concept of the drive was used by many eighteenth and nineteenth century German philosophers, psychologists, and poets. It is taken up by Schiller in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man as the key to understanding the relationship between the Formtrieb and Stofftrieb, which, through their mutual interaction in aesthetic experience, produce a resulting Spieltrieb (play drive), which is

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essential for the full development of human beings. The concept is then adopted by Schelling and Hegel for their own critical philosophy. Hegel’s use of this term cannot be disassociated from this complex history.

Notes

Notes to chapter 1: Introduction

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 22, 35.

2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) ¶ 77, ¶ 78.

3. Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 15.

4. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 22.5. Ibid, 23. Rudolf Haym was among the first to accuse Hegel of

having conservative politics and accommodating the Prussian state. See Rudolf Haym, Hegel und Seine Zeit (Berlin: G. Olms, 1857). The more activist reading of Hegel’s statement has already been suggested by K. L. Michelet. He reports having asked Hegel whether the metaphor of the owl also referred to a morning dawn. “Hegel himself confirmed my word … that the philosophy is not only the owl of Minerva spreading its wings only with the coming of dusk, but it is also the rooster’s call, proclaiming the red dawn of a new day.” K. L. Michelet, Entwickelungsgeschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophie (Berlin: Nobel Press, 1843) 397-398.

6. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 40.

7. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 45.8. In an earlier formulation in the Philosophy of Spirit Hegel

does distinguish between desire and drive by stating that desire is something simple whereas a drive “embraces a series of satisfactions.” See G. W. F Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (3 vols.) (ed. and tr. M. J. Petry) (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978) § 473 A.

9. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, § 443 A.10. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 247.11. For a Freudian reading of Hegel see Rebecca Comay,

Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). There is also a prominent Lacanian reading of Hegel by the “Slovenian School” philosophers (Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic).


12. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).

13. See the chapter on “Force and the Understanding” in Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 132-165.

14. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) 89.

15. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969) 191. A prominent view of Hegel throughout the latter half of the twentieth century has been the post-structuralist reading of Hegel as a totalising thinker of recuperation and closure. This view is shared by Levinas, Deleuze, Lyotard and Kristeva among others. Hegel’s philosophy is understood by these thinkers as the culmination of an onto-theological tradition. It is portrayed as a metaphysical system that annuls instances of alterity and subsumes all differences within a monolithic structure of sameness. The drives, if considered at all, are seen to come to a standstill in the closure of Hegel’s system. One of the aims of this book is to challenge the post-structuralist reading of Hegel as a philosopher of closure and recuperation. A focus on the concept of the drives reveals a more open, materialist and complex Hegel than the closed and mechanical thinker depicted in post-structuralist literature.

16. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, in Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975) 62.

17. Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1992) 1.

18. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 28.19. Ibid, 52.20. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Vol. 1)

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) 52.

Notes to chapter 2

1. See Hegel’s early statement of this problem in G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) 89.

2. Hegel, ‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’ in Knox (ed.), Early Theological Writings, 182–302.

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3. See Harris’ discussion of the likely dates of the various manuscripts. “‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’ is really a series of essays with no absolutely determinate sequence. The essays themselves were put together by Hegel during 1799, or even perhaps early in 1800, by cutting up, revising, and making lengthy additions to, a set of meditations written in the last few months of 1798 and the first few months of 1799.” H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 330.

4. Hegel undertook an intensive study of Kant’s philosophy while he was a tutor in Berne from 1793 to 1796. Hegel viewed Kant as the culmination of Enlightenment thought, but began to develop serious criticisms of his philosophy that first manifest themselves in The Spirit of Christianity essay. The most developed criticisms of Kant can be found in Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, the Lesser Logic, and Volume III of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel also makes scattered remarks about Kant in G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). His criticisms of Kant do not undergo a dramatic transformation over the course of his life. Kant is characterised throughout his career as the philosopher of the understanding who is only able to think in oppositions and is therefore unable to gain knowledge of the whole. A thorough appraisal of Hegel’s critique of Kant is beyond the scope of this book. Several essays on the topic are collected in Stephen Priest (ed.), Hegel’s Critique of Kant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

5. This reflects Lukács’ suggestion that Kant provides the philosophical basis of modern bourgeois life. See Lukács’ ‘The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’ in Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: The Merlin Press, 1971) 110–148.

6. See Comay, Mourning Sickness, 1–8.7. There is a large debate within Hegel scholarship over the nature

of these texts, which reflects broader arguments about the position of religion in Hegel’s philosophy. Lukács and Kaufmann hold the position that these essays could be considered anti-theological writings. Lukács claims they exhibit a “sustained hostility” to theology, while Kaufmann argues that the writings are directed “against the Christian religion.” See Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel (trans. R. Livingston) (London: Merlin Press, 1975) 8; Walter Kaufmann, ‘Hegel’s Early Antitheological Phase’ (1954) Philosophical Review, 63(1): 5; Schlomo


Avineri disagrees that they are anti-theological. See Schlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 13. Charles Taylor also argues that politics and religion are inseparable for the young Hegel and so believes Hegel is arguing for a “de-theologised Christianity.” See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 495.

8. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801, xxvi. In contrast to Harris, Alice Ormiston argues for the importance of reading this essay as a philosophical text in its own right. Alice Ormiston, Love and Politics: Reinterpreting Hegel (New York: SUNY Press, 2004) 9.

9. This was a view held by many of Hegel’s contemporaries. The sentiment is captured by one of Schiller poem’s ridiculing Kant’s moral doctrine:

“Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure.Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person.Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely,And then with aversion do what your duty enjoins you.”

This translation appears in H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1947) 48.

10. Scholars have since attempted a more sensuous and feel-ing-oriented reading of Kant. For contrasting views to Hegel’s charge of formalism and coldness see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 2000); Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1982).

11. J. M. Bernstein, ‘Love and Law: Hegel’s Critique of Modernity’ (2003) Social Research 70(2): 397.

12. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings (trans. T. M. Knox.) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975) 182.

13. Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews (trans. William Whiston) (Peabody, M.A: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987).

14. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 184.15. Ibid, 183.16. Bernstein, ‘Love and Law,’ 398.


17. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 184.18. Ibid, 186.19. Ibid, 182.20. Ibid, 185.21. Ibid, 185.22. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996) 144. 23. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 3–8.24. The fact that “preferences” [Neigungen] is largely synonymous

with the term drives [Triebe] (a term Fichte will prefer to refer to largely the same thing) is shown by their etymological proximity with that which preferences produce, namely, subjective principles of action or incentives [Triebfeder].

25. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 15.26. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 206 (translation modified).27. Ibid, 207.28. Ibid, 208.29. Ibid.30. Ibid, 197.31. Ernst Behler (ed.), The Philosophy of German Idealism (New

York: Continuum Publishing, 2003) 161–5.32. The article has been attributed at different times to Hegel,

Schelling and Hölderlin.33. Behler (ed.), The Philosophy of German Idealism, 162.34. Ibid.35. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 205.36. Ibid, 208.37. Bernstein, ‘Love and Law,’ 407.38. Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and other Essays

on Hölderlin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 129. H. S. Harris, on the other hand, while agreeing with the importance of the meeting with Hölderlin, points to a more distant source: the Spinozist-inspired theory of the “one and all” as conceptualised by Hegel as early as 1791. See Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801, 294.

39. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 206.40. Ibid, 207.41. Ibid, 212.


42. Ibid, 213.43. Ibid, 212.44. See Spinoza’s discussion of modes in his Ethics. Spinoza,

Complete Works (trans. Samuel Shirley) (ed. Michael L. Morgan) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002) 213–382.

45. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 212.46. Ibid, 215.47. Ibid, 229.48. Ibid, 244.49. Ibid.50. Ibid, 278.51. Ibid, 304.52. See Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Early Political Writings of the

German Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).53. Scholars such as Walter Kaufmann and Georg Lukács have

argued that Hegel should not be conflated with the romantics and that significant differences exist between their projects. In support of this view it can be noted that Hegel was never present at the meetings of prominent romantic writers in salons or households in Jena or Berlin and only arrived in Jena after the movement had petered out. However, Frederick Beiser has convincingly argued that it would be wrong to deduce that Hegel was a figure fundamentally opposed to and separated from romantic ideals. Hegel was profoundly influenced by the romantic climate of the 1790s and several of his works of the time remain some of the best examples of the romantic tradition. Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York and London: Routledge, 2005) 34. Hegel’s break with romanticism is analysed in John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 49–70.

54. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 278.55. Ibid, 277.56. Ibid, 278.57. Ibid.58. Ibid.59. Ibid.60 See Hegel’s fragment on love and ‘Fragment of a System’ in

Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 302–320.61. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 227.


62. Ibid, 229.63. Ibid.64. Ibid.65. Ibid, 230.66. Ibid. 67. Ibid, 231.68. Ibid.69. Ibid.70. Ibid, 229.71. Ibid, 232–3.72. Bernstein, ‘Love and Law,’ 422.73. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 206 (my emphasis).74. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (ed. Peter

C Hodgson) (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 201.75. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 207.76. Ibid, 176.77. Ibid, 294.78. Ibid, 280.79. Ibid, 279. 80. Hegel conducted a number of economic and political studies

in his youth, which began in serious during his stay in Berne. However, of these only a few fragments of writing survive. A 1798 fragment entitled “On the Recent Domestic Affairs of Württemburg” and a translation of J. J. Cart’s Confidential Letters both reveal criticisms of the oligarchical orders in Berne and Württemburg. In addition to these studies, the majority of his knowledge of the workings of modern civil society comes from British political economists and reading British newspapers. See Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (Berlin, 1844) 85. Hegel calls political economy “one of the sciences which have arisen out of the conditions of the modern world” and praises it as “a credit to thought.” Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 228.

81. Avineri notes that “[i]t must have been under the impact of Steuart that Hegel embarked upon a detailed study of the Bernese financial and fiscal system and its social implications.” See Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 5. Harris speculates that in Berne Hegel also studied the work of Adam Smith. H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development II: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–6) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 126, n 2.


82. Hegel read a German translation of this book and wrote a detailed commentary on it. This manuscript has since been lost. Karl Rosenkranz states that “[a]11 of Hegel’s ideas about the nature of civil society, about need and labour, about division of labour and the wealth of estates, about poverty, the police, taxation etc., are finally concentrated in a commentary on the German translation of Steuart’s book on political economy which he wrote between 19 February and 16 May 1799, and which has survived intact.” See Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben, 61. For a detailed attempt to trace Steuart’s influence on Hegel see Paul Chamley, Économie politique et philosophie chez Steuart et Hegel (Paris: Dalloz, 1963).

83. G. W. F. Hegel, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 6–101.

84. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 297.85. Ibid, 289.86. Ibid.87. Ibid, 291.

Notes to chapter 3

1. Cf. Stephen Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) 28. Houlgate argues that the development of consciousness is not a historical progression but a logical one. I agree with Houlgate’s analysis that “the logic of such experience has not always been, and will not always be, followed by historical individuals and communities, but it is the logic that should be followed by them if they are true to themselves.” However, there is an important relationship for Hegel between these logical categories and the actual historical experiences that occur within Western societies. It is important to underline how for Hegel self-consciousness is dependent upon and conditioned by concrete historical experience.

2. The most detailed overview of the role and purpose of the Phenomenology is given by Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Robert Pippin, ‘You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,’ in Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 52–85. One of the most explicit


problems in interpreting the Phenomenology is the relationship between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s Logic. For a discussion of this issue see Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) 573–606.

3. The three most famous are Kojève and the Master/Slave dialectic, Heidegger and the chapter on Sense-Certainty, and Jean Wahl and the unhappy consciousness.

4. See for example Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1987).

5. Jean Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Gallard, 1984).

6. Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 2.

7. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, 119–147.

8. Hegel, Phenomenology, ¶ 11 (translation modified).9. Ibid, ¶ 18.10. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, 106.11. Ibid.12. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 77 (translation modified,

my emphasis).13. Ibid, ¶ 22.14. Robert Pippin, ‘The “logic of experience” as “absolute

knowledge” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’ in Moyar and Quante (eds.) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, 210–227. This is also in line with Jean Hyppolite’s interpretation of the Phenomenology: “The history of consciousness—the Phenomenology of Spirit—is thus the history of its experience, the progressive revelation of spiritual substance to the self. In the Phenomenology spirit stages itself as a spectacle to itself as its substance, and then brings it back to itself.” Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 578.

15. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 87.16. Ibid, ¶ 80.17. Ibid.18. For a more in depth analysis of the role of experiencing

consciousness and the phenomenological observer in this journey see Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 15–30.


19. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit ¶ 84–5, ¶ 802. For discussions of Hegel’s concept of experience see also Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 3–30; Theodore Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994) 31–89; Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 18–25.

20. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 87.21. Ibid, ¶ 88.22. Ibid, ¶ 36.23. Ibid, ¶ 8.24. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1970) 19.25. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, § 7.26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. and ed. Paul

Guyer and Allen Wood) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) A1.

27. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 74.28. Ibid.29. Ibid, ¶ 85.30. Ibid, ¶ 84.31. Ibid, ¶ 85.32. Ibid, ¶ 36.33. Ibid, ¶ 177.34. The equation of Hegel’s concept of Spirit with human society

or humanity is part of the Left Hegelian legacy of what has been called an “anthropological reduction” of Hegel’s thought. This Left Hegelian reading has been disputed by “anti-humanist” interpreters of Hegel such as Jean Hyppolite. For a criticism of the humanist interpretation see Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (New York: SUNY Press, 1997) 177–190.

35. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 349.36. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of

Spirit (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) 27–50, 321–334; Ludwig Siep, ‘The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy’ in Deligiorgi (ed.), Hegel: New Directions, 143–157. See also the entry on “Spirit” in Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary


(Blackwell Publishers: Cambridge, 1992).37. The outlines of this divide are succinctly explained by Joseph

McCarney in Tony Burns and Ian Fraser (eds.), The Hegel-Marx Connection (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 56–78.

38. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’ in Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975) 62.

39. Taylor, Hegel, 92.40. Bruno Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel

the Atheist and Antichrist. An Ultimatum (Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen Press, 1989).

41. Hegel, Aesthetics, 92.42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 18; Hegel, Aesthetics, 24.43. Hegel, Aesthetics, 108.44. Marx, Early Writings, 386.45. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 350.46. Ibid, ¶ 803.47. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology

of Spirit, 27–50; Comay, Mourning Sickness, 1–8; Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 5–40.

48. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 78.49. Ibid, ¶ 78.50. Ibid, ¶ 802.51. Ibid, ¶ 463.52. Ibid, ¶ 465.53. Ibid, ¶ 476.54. Ibid.55. Ibid, ¶ 440.56. Ibid, ¶ 441.57. Ibid, ¶ 87.58. Ibid, ¶ 5.59. Ibid, ¶ 79.60. Ibid, ¶ 84.61. I will use “the Concept” as my preferred translation despite

Miller’s use of “the Notion.”62. For varying interpretations of the term “Concept” in Hegel’s

philosophy see Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: Texts and Commentary (Chicago: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966) 7–9; J. N. Findlay, ‘Forward’ in Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, vii; Herbert Marcuse,


Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) 25; Josiah Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: The Riverside Press, 1892) 224; Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 101.

63. Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 276.

64. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 101.65. See Hegel’s passage in the Science of Logic: “The Notion or

pure science and its deduction is therefore presupposed in the present work in so far as the Phenomenology of Spirit is nothing other than the deduction of it.” Hegel, The Science of Logic, 48–9.

66. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 84.67. There is an argument that the observer intervenes at certain

moments in the process as Hegel states that “the origination of the new object” is “something contributed by us” and occurs “behind the back of consciousness.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 87. For an explication of this argument see Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 23–29.

68. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A320/B376–77.69. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 6.70. Ibid, ¶ 7.71. Ibid, ¶ 56.72. Ibid, ¶ 20.73. Ibid, ¶ 48.74. Ibid, ¶ 20.75. Ibid, ¶ 12.76. Ibid.77. Ibid, ¶ 70.78. Ibid, ¶ 34.79. Ibid, ¶ 802, ¶ 805.80 For discussions of this view see Stephen Crites, ‘For the Best

Account of What Hegel Thought (or Should Have Thought) the Next Stage of History, After his Own, Would be Like’ (1962/3) Review of Metaphysics 16: 1245; Schlomo Avineri, ‘Consciousness and history: List der Vernunft in Hegel and Marx’ in Warren E. Steinkraus (ed.), New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy (New York: Rineheart and Winston, 1971) 108–115.

81. This follows the views of a number of commentators but in particular it affirms Pippin’s argument that “Hegel’s affirmation


of modernity, his modernism, does not involve any monism or any premodern teleology or any ‘reconciliationist’ movement that involves a World or Cosmic Spirit directing human history to some pantheistic self-understanding.” Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, 170.

82. See Hegel’s remark: “The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 122.

83. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 808.84. Kojève, An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 148, 168.85. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New

York: Free Press, 1992).86. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 805.87. Ibid, ¶ 794, ¶ 802.88. Ibid, ¶ 80, ¶ 79.89. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 546.90. Stanley Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of

Wisdom (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2000) 9, 15, 45.91. Merold Westphal, History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology

(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1979) 226.92. Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Éditions

du Seuil, 1979) 122.93. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 191.94. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 163.95. Ibid, ¶ 11 (translation modified).96. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of

Philosophy, 93–4.97. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 20.98. Ibid, ¶ 18.99. Ibid, ¶ 804.100. Ibid.101. Ibid, ¶ 788.102. Ibid, ¶ 802.103. Ibid, ¶ 808, see also ¶ 798.104. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, 7.105. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 808.106. Pippin also argues that “Hegel’s formulation of this final

self-consciousness [absolute knowledge] expressly denies any sort of


systematic closure or static finality.” Pippin, Idealism as Modernism, 160.

107. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶ 808.108. Ibid (translation modified).109. Ibid, ¶ 807.110. Ibid, ¶ 665.111. Ibid.112. Ibid, ¶ 671.

Notes to chapter 4

1. The Philosophy of Right has received far less attention than his other philosophical texts. One of the most influential readings of Hegel’s political philosophy is still Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the State. See also the two edited collections Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For a number of different angles on the Philosophy of Right see Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) on freedom, Michael O. Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) on reconciliation, and Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), on Hegel’s conception of ethical culture. The most recent collection of essays on the text is Thom Brooks (ed.) Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

2. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 21–2.3. See Harry Brod, Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics: Idealism, Identity,

and Modernity (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992).

4. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 35.5. Ibid, 52.6. See Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 200; Cf. Wood, Hegel’s

Ethical Thought.7. The four texts that I will be briefly considering in this section

are Hegel’s essay The German Constitution, the System of Ethical


Life and the two Jena lecture series Realphilosophie I & II. In such limited space I am unable to offer a complete study of these texts. I will merely bring to light pertinent points for the development of my own argument. For a detailed study of these texts see Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the State, 34–132; Lukács, The Young Hegel, 91–420; H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development II: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–6) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 102–143, 299–339, 467–522; Habermas, Theory and Practice, 142–169.

8. Here I follow Rosenkranz, Glockner, Haring and Avineri, who all stress the continuity between the early Jena writings and the Philosophy of Right.

9. The standard account is that failing to produce any real historical change in the world, the young radical became a disenchanted old conservative, whose retreat into the life of the vita contemplative represented the disappointments and unfulfilled political hopes of an entire generation of the 1790s. Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit, (Berlin: G. Olms, 1857) 160–2. Taylor claims that Hegel arrived at his mature position in 1800 where he changes “from a man-centred theory to one centred on Geist.” This reflects a young Hegel who was “quite politically radical” in contrast to a mature Hegel who was “not a political radical at all.” Taylor, Hegel, 73–5. See also Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, 39; Raymond Plant, Hegel (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1973) 53.

10. Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the State, 81.11. See the introductory essay by Z. A. Pelczynski in Hegel’s

Political Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).12. Hegel, Hegel’s Political Writings, 143–242.13. Ibid, 153.14. Ibid, 154.15. For an interesting argument on the influence of Hobbes

on Hegel see Ludwig Siep, ‘The Struggle for Recognition: Hegel’s dispute with Hobbes in the Jena writings,’ in John O’Neill, Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, 273–288.

16. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 275, 288.17. Hegel, Hegel’s Political Writings, 144.18. Ibid, 153.19. Ibid, 160.20. Ibid, 151.


21. The System of Ethical Life was designed as the third part of a single textbook of systematic philosophy. The first part was entitled “Logic and Metaphysics” and the second part the “Philosophy of Nature.” Harris estimates that it was finished in October 1802. Harris, Night Thoughts, 103. Harris has also written a lengthy introduction to the System at the beginning of his translation. However, the essay is not without its difficulties. It is one of the least comprehensible of all of Hegel’s works. His political insights are obscured by his philosophical language. Commenting on an interpretation of this essay, Haring notes that “the difficulties in understanding it are quite extraordinary.” Theodor Haering, Hegel: Sein Wollen und Sein Werk (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1929) ii, 338. Marcuse refers to this essay as “one of the most difficult in German philosophy.” Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 56.

22. For a detailed study of the transition of Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit throughout his early writing see Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit 1770–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 181- 277.

23. Hegel speaks of the first level of natural ethical life as “the complete undifferentiatedness of ethical life” where “the living individual, as life, is equal with the absolute concept.” G. W. F., Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979) 103, 143.

24. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 227–239.25. Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of

Spirit, 102. 26. Kant refers to a “drive to society” [Trieb zur Gesellschaft] that

is “natural to human beings,” while the “suitability and tendency toward” it is what he describes as “sociability,” [Geselligkeit] which is “necessary for human beings as creatures destined for society, and thus as a property belonging to humanity.” Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 176. Schiller’s “play-drive” [Spieltrieb] performs a similar function in his philosophy. Schiller states “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 107. In the second lecture of The Vocation of the Scholar, Fichte proposes that, “the social drive is one of man’s fundamental drives. It is man’s destiny to live in society; he ought to live in society.” Johann


Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Some Lectures Concerning the Vocation of the Scholar,’ in Daniel Breazeale (ed.) Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) 156.

27. The humanisation of man is a theme treated at length in Hegel’s 1805–6 lectures. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983). See also Lukàcs, The Young Hegel, 325.

28. Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit, 147.

29. However, for all its ingenuity the System of Ethical Life is not simply an anticipation of the Philosophy of Right. It has a number of serious methodological differences. It does not contain the same dialectical progression as the Philosophy of Right through the development of the will into the concrete institutions of the state.

30. These lecture courses were first published in German by Johannes Hoffmeister in 1932. They were translated into English and published as G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979) and G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983).

31. Hegel credits Rousseau in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy with recognising the importance of the free will as the first principle of political philosophy. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) 400–3.The importance of Rousseau for Hegel’s political philosophy cannot be overstated. As one of Hegel’s friends from Tübingen notes: “Metaphysics was certainly not Hegel’s special interest during the four years that I knew him well [1788–1792]. His hero was Rousseau, whose Emile, Social Contract, and Confessions he read constantly.” Quoted by Bernard Cullen in Hegel’s Social and Political Thought: An Introduction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979) 4. His main criticism of Rousseau in the Philosophy of Right is that his “general will” remains an artificial construct and does not become the living ethos of the people. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 283. For a more in depth examination see Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom, 55–81.

32. Ibid, 288.33. See Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 45.


34. The final condition is one in which the will relates only to itself: “only in this freedom is the will completely with itself, because it has reference to nothing but itself, so that every relationship of dependence on something other than itself is thereby eliminated.” Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 55. However, this is not to say that dependence has been denied or forgotten. Rather, it has been incorporated into a broader whole. Otherness is incorporated into the self through practical activity on the world. In this way the self turns otherness into something that it has created and hence something determined by it. This reshaped world no longer confronts the self as something alien but as part of the self.

35. For further discussion of the concept of the will in Hegel see John H. Smith, ‘Of Spirit and Will(s)’ in Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel After Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) 64–90.

36. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 35.37. Ibid, 57.38. Ibid, 59.39. Ibid, 45.40. Ibid, 57.41. Ibid, 136.42. Ibid.43. Ibid, 189.44. Ibid, 190–1.45. Ibid, 288–9.46. Ibid, 282.47. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, § 474.48. Ibid, § 475.49. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 194. 50. Ibid, 51.51. Ibid.52. Ibid, 193.53. Ibid, 195.54. Ibid, 282.55. Ibid, 151.56. Ibid, 282.57. Ibid, 151.58. Ibid, 228.59. Ibid, 229.

NOTES TO APPENDIX | 129

60. Ibid, 231.61. Ibid, 221.62. Ibid, 227.63. Ibid, 233.64. Ibid, 228.65. Ibid, 51.66. For an overview of contemporary scholarship on Hegel’s

critique of Kant see Fabian Freuenhagen, ‘The Empty Formalism Objection Revisited’ and Robert Stern ‘On Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Ethics: Beyond the Empty Formalism Objection’ in Thom Brooks (ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Wilely-Blackwell, 2012) 43–72, 73–100.

67. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 162.68. Ibid, 192.69. Ibid, (my emphasis).70. Ibid, 276.71. Ibid, 288.72. Ibid, 308.73. Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State.’74. See Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 117.75. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 323.76. Ibid, 339.77. Ibid, 335.78. Ibid, 343.79. Ibid, 339.80. Ibid, 341.81. Ibid, 340.82. Ibid.83. Ibid, 339.84. Ibid, 342.85. Ibid, 352.86. Ibid, 355.87. Behler (ed.), The Philosophy of German Idealism, 161–5.

Notes to Appendix

1. Leibniz’s first paper on this topic was published as ‘Brevis demonstratio erroris memorabilis Cartesii et aliorum circa legem


naturalem, secundum quam volunt a Deo eandem semper quantitatem motus conservari; qua et in re mechanica abutuntur,’ Acta Eruditorum, 1686, 161–163. A translation appears in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, (trans. Leroy E. Loemker) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956) Vol. I, 455–463. For a discussion of this aspect of Leibniz’s work see Carolyn Iltis, ‘Leibniz and the Vis Viva Controversy’ 1971 Isis 62(1) 21–35.

2. Aristotle, Physics, Books I-II, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).3. H. S. Reimarus, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der

Thiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe (4th ed.) (1st ed. 1760) (Hamburg: K.E. Bohn, 1798).

4. Reimarus, Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, 102.5. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb und das

Zeugungsgeschäfte (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1781).6. Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, 12–13.7. However, Goethe did object to the extension of the Bildungstrieb

to inanimate nature. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Botanical Writings (trans. Bertha Mueller) (Honolulu, Hawaii: The University of Hawaii Press, 1952).

8. Goethe, Goethe’s Botanical Writings, 232.9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000) 290–1.10. See Robert J. Richards, ‘Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb:

A Historical Misunderstanding,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2000 (31) 1, 11–32.

11. Kant refers to a “drive to society” [Trieb zur Gesellschaft] that is “natural to human beings,” while the “suitability and tendency toward” it is what he describes as “sociability,” [Geselligkeit] which is “necessary for human beings as creatures destined for society, and thus as a property belonging to humanity.” Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 176. Schiller’s “play-drive” [Spieltrieb] performs a similar function in his philosophy. Schiller states “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)107. In the second lecture of The Vocation of the Scholar, Fichte proposes that, “the social drive is one of man’s fundamental drives. It is man’s destiny to live in society; he ought to

NOTES TO APPENDIX | 131

live in society.” Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, ‘Some Lectures Concerning the Vocation of the Scholar,’ in Daniel Breazeale (ed.) Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) 156.

12. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 253.

13. Ibid.14. See the analysis of the concept Trieb given by the editors in the

glossary of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, 331–2.

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Hegel's Philosophy of Drives

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