The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit
416
The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit
416eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
?Kervégan begins with Hegel’s term “objective spirit,” the public manifestation of our deepest commitments, the binding norms that shape our existence as subjects and agents. He examines objective spirit in three realms: the notion of right, the theory of society, and the state. In conversation with Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy, whether in the Anglophone world or in Europe, Kervégan shows how Hegel—often associated with grand metaphysical ideas—actually had a specific conception of civil society and the state. In Hegel’s view, public institutions represent the fulfillment of deep subjective needs—and in that sense, demonstrate that the real is the rational, because what surrounds us is the product of our collective mindedness. This groundbreaking analysis will guide the study of Hegel and nineteenth-century political thought for years to come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226023946 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Law
Its Concept and Actualizations
There is one point on which, with few exceptions, partisans, adversaries, casual readers, and recognized specialists of Hegel have all agreed: Hegel's philosophy does not look favorably on the notion of law. Thus, an established specialist writes, "Law is not Hegel's God ... Hegel hardly prizes law or freedom of the person." Indeed, doesn't Hegel constantly describe law — at least, the law he calls "limited juristic law" — as formal and abstract? And doesn't the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (in the section on the Roman world), paint a merciless picture of the state of law or legal status (Rechtzustand)? And isn't it necessary to go beyond the sphere of abstract law in order to arrive at the essential truth of the human world, which is an ethical-political truth? From this point of view, law in the strict sense — which in Kantian practical philosophy is foundational and, in away, insurmountable: fiat justitia, pereat mundus (let there be justice, though the world perish) — seems instead like a bad moment to be passed through. Of course, in 1820, when Hegel published an amply fleshed-out version of the part of the system that, since the first 1817 edition, the Encyclopedia had somewhat esoterically termed objective spirit, Hegel titled the version Elements of the Philosophy of Right — a remarkable expression, all the more remarkable as it was unusual at the time. But this innovation, which was actually offset by a more classical subtitle — Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (Natural law and the science of the state) — seems above all intended to relativize law by grounding it in an extralegal — even antilegal — context of which the state, which Hegel thinks should be "venerate[d] as an earthly divinity," is the determining element. In the assertion that each stratum of objective spirit (law, morality, family, civil society, state, history) features as a "stage in the development of the Idea of freedom" and has "its distinctive right" is the germ of the subordination of formal law, which becomes no more than a "subordinate moment" of this "altogether different sphere": the state, sole authentic bearer of "actual and concrete spirit." Since the second half of the nineteenth century, this antilegalism and even contempt for law, which so sharply distinguishes Hegel from Kant — for whom "politics must always bend a knee" to law — has found a convenient explanation with several variants. These run as follows: Hegel, a contemporary of the first theoreticians of the Rechtstaat (Robert von Mohl, Rudolf von Gneist, Lorenz von Stein) was, in fact, the precursor of ideologues of the Machtstaat. This, at least, was the image of him held by sycophants and detractors of state power alike, and shared by a large audience: Hegel as an enemy avant la lettre of the envelopment of the state by law, which is, it seems, characteristic of modern democracy. Since then, Hegel studies have convincingly shown that lumping Hegel in with the doctrinaires of Realpolitik and imperialism was overly hasty. For many, however, it remains the case that he contributed to the "myth of the state," of which contemporary totalitarianism marks the ultimate development. If, as Cassirer says, Hegel contributed to this myth "more than any other philosophical system," this was through the simultaneous exaltation of politics and devalorization of law that marked his thought. Therefore, it is not surprising that the "return of law" we have witnessed over the past few years in the French philosophical scene has often targeted Hegel and his Marxist legacy.
The argument I have just summarized cannot be brushed aside: it would be unreasonable to contest the existence of Hegelian antilegalism. But it is possible to understand "antilegalism" in a variety of ways. For the sake of simplicity, let us focus on two quite distinct attitudes that term may designate: first, a hostility to law and rights that goes along with doubt about their capacity to form a specific order, and second, a hostility to legalism — that is, to the absolutization of law as such. There are good arguments to be made that Hegel, at least in his mature writings, adopts the second attitude and professes what we might call a weak antilegalism. From this perspective, it can be shown that Hegel both affirms the full autonomy of what he calls abstract law and judges necessary its relativization by the state, which is itself irreducible to any legal model. As we shall see, it is possible to understand that there is no contradiction between these two assertions only on the basis of a conception of civil society as the authentic, though conflictual, realization of the principles of the abstract legal order. But before anything else, it is important to assess the recasting of the classic concept of law performed by Hegel's thought. Only this will allow us to understand why, while proclaiming the limits of "narrow legal law," Hegel can at the same time emphatically maintain that law is "something utterly sacred, for the simple reason that it is the existence [Dasein] of the absolute concept, of self-conscious freedom."
The "Philosophical Science of Law": Concept and Idea
The subject-matter of the philosophical science of law is the Idea of right — the concept of law and its actualization.
This preliminary definition of the philosophy of law is based on the distinction between concept (Begriff) and idea (Idee). The latter adds to the former (which Hegel sometimes calls "the simple concept," the "concept as such," or the "concept of the concept" in order to distinguish it from the completed, fully developed concept) the dimension of realization or actualization. This distinction is presented and grounded in the Logic, as is the key notion of Verwirklichung (actualization) on which it relies.
The concept in the Hegelian sense is not to be understood as a general representation developed by a thinking subject, although it does immediately suggest this mangled and provisory meaning:
The shape of the immediate concept constitutes the standpoint that makes of the concept a subjective thinking, a reflection external to the subject matter. This stage constitutes, therefore, subjectivity, or the formal concept.
In its full meaning — that is, as it is constituted through the process that connects the three moments of the "subjective concept" (the concept as such, judgment, and syllogism) — the concept is thought itself as subject, actor, and prime mover of its development. It refers to thought's capacity to self-posit or self-produce, an autoaffection (to use Fichtean terminology) to which subjective thought, in the common sense of the term — for example, the philosopher's thought — is, so to speak, merely a spectator. The true subject of the concept, in the various senses of the term, is not a finite consciousness but rather the real in its totality, expressed in and through the concept and its fundamental articulations, which are (plural) determined concepts. Hence, "the logical forms of the concept" are not "dead ... receptacles of representations," which would make them the objects of "a completely superfluous and dispensable description"; instead, they are "the living spirit of what is actual," the soul of the real. Thus, the subjective concept has a necessary relation to objectivity, a relation far more complex than that between empty form and inert content. Objectivity is not a given, closed world that faces the thinking subject; it is rather "the real concept that has emerged from its inwardness and has passed over into existence." As Hegel understands it, objectivity is the realization of the concept in exteriority, "immediacy as which the concept has determined itself by the sublation of its abstraction and mediation" such that the pulse of the concept, which is the soul of objectivity, seems to have disappeared within it; in reality, however, it is only the appearance of the exteriority of subjective thought with respect to the objective real that vanishes. According to the Logic, objectification is the decisive act by which the concept, going beyond the interiority of a privileged relationship to itself, verifies its ability to organize the objectivity of things and is experienced as an immanent structuring of the world. We must still analyze the unity of the subjective and the objective that is first given in an immediate — and thus external — manner. In the sense of speculative logic, the idea, the "subject-object," is the process that dialectically unifies the subjective concept and objectivity without destroying their difference. Thus, the idea, in its mobility and inexhaustible vitality, is "the adequate concept, the objectively true, or the true as such." In the Hegelian sense, an idea is entirely different from a "simple idea," if by that is meant a subjective representation devoid of any content of reality. Instead, it expresses the rational texture of the real (of objectivity), its thought of itself, "for the externality has being only as determined by the concept and as taken up into its negativity." In the Hegelian sense, the idea is reason — but reason incorporated into materiality. This reason thus no longer has anything to do with some subjective faculty or anthropological determination; in Hegel, reason is the philosophical name for the process by which subjectivity and objectivity, thought and worldly reality, infinitely overlap without ever being completely identical, which would be the death of all thought. Thus, the idealism that Hegel claims (and doesn't he assert that "every genuine philosophy is Idealism"?) comes down to this fundamental, two-part thesis: all reality, or rather actuality, is conceptual, and there is no concept that is not objectivized in the human and natural world. Above, I analyzed the meaning and consequences of such a definition: we know that it expresses the conviction — which is ultimately a metaphysical and speculative conviction — that there is a fundamental coherence between the rational and the actual, between "reason that is conscious of itself" and "reason that is." We must now specify the consequences of this for the conceptualization of law.
How can the above account of the logic of the concept help us understand the status of what Hegel calls the philosophical science of law and decode its definition in the Philosophy of Right? First of all, it allows us to give specific content to the distinction between the concept and idea of law, which Hegel describes in section 2 of the introduction:
The science of law is a part of philosophy. It has therefore to develop the Idea, which is the reason within an object [Gegenstand], out of the concept; or what comes to the same thing, it must observe the proper immanent development of the thing [Sache] itself. As a part [of philosophy], it has a determinate starting point, which is the result and truth of what preceded it, and what preceded it is the so-called proof of that result. Hence the concept of law, so far as its coming into being is concerned, falls outside the science of law; its deduction is presupposed here and is to be taken as given.
We must first understand why Hegel writes that "the concept of law falls outside the science of law" — quite a surprising statement on the face of it. To do so, we must be attentive to the distinction between concept and idea. If for Hegel law is "freedom, as Idea," this is because law participates in the objectivization of a principle that is initially subjective or inner — that is, freedom — which is the defining feature of spirit, or, to use a later term, of "culture," as distinct from "nature" and the universe of necessity, while also being essentially connected to it. Freedom is thus the concept that becomes objective via the successive strata of objective spirit, unfolding itself in the idea that is, in the totality of its determinations, the idea of the law. By thus defining the object of the philosophical science of law — in truth, for Hegel, there is no philosophy that is not scientific — he is emphasizing that law is wholly of the order of an objectivization of what is initially a (merely) subjective principle, its "simple concept." This concept itself is the culmination of the process of subjective spirit, a process thus akin to the philosophical deduction of law and rights. This is indeed why paragraphs 5 through 28 of the introduction to the Philosophy of Right recapitulate the final steps of this process. The entire sphere of objective spirit (i.e., of law in the broad sense) bears the mark of this first determination. The movement included in this sphere — a movement whose phases are like the strata of the idea of law — is actually the negative rejoinder to the movement of subjective spirit. Whereas subjective spirit conquers its own determination (freedom) against the naturalness that initially subsumed it (under the figure of the soul), law starts off from freedom in order to constitute it as second nature. This nature is essentially second, since it presupposes the spirit whose concept it makes objective, and thus it is fundamentally different from "first" nature because the objective world it constitutes is "produced and to be produced" by spirit. If spirit is higher than nature, this is precisely due to its ability and vocation to reproduce in itself and from itself as a veritable nature of spirit, the nature of which it is initially, abstractly, only simple negation or going-beyond:
The basis [Boden] of law 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 [Bestimmung] and the system of law is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature.
We thus see that the transposition of a merely subjective concept of freedom — a concept closed off in its own rationality — into an objectivity that is its own product is the decisive source for the movement of the Verwirklichung of abstract law. The doctrine of objective spirit describes the constitution of the abstract freedom of the legal person in a universe of objective determinations and the legal, social, and political institutions that give that freedom coherence and actuality. It is by developing itself within a system of objective historical configurations — whose concept or principle lies in the subjectivity of spirit — that freedom reveals its properly idealized (idéel) character. The idea of freedom ("not the idea that [men] have of it, but the idea that they are") is thus objective — or rather, it is nothing other than a process of becoming-objective. However, all the figures of objective freedom must be passed through in order for its ideal (subjective-objective) nature to become manifest, a nature that is at first ensconced in the formalism of its (simple) concept.
Law is the idea of freedom in that it actualizes freedom's (and thus spirit's) tendency to inscribe its originally subjective and self-centered dimension in the objectivity of a world; that is to say, to express itself in the register of its other: necessity. The speculative definition of objective spirit or law could thus be freedom speaking itself in the language of necessity. This only appears to be a paradox, for within a dialectical perspective, freedom "is not merely an independence of the Other won outside the Other" — rather, it consists — a grand Hegelian theme — in being at home with oneself in the other (Beisichsein im Anderen). The ground of being (subjectivity or freedom) is nothing if it does not give itself being (objectivity, necessity) and if that being does not become the contradiction that freedom must overcome to constitute itself.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Actual and the Rational"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface: Hegel without Metaphysics?Prologue: The Actual and the Rational
PART I
The Law: The Positivity of Abstraction
Preliminary: The Objectivity of Willing
1 Law: Its Concept and Actualizations
2 Between Nature and History: The Law
3 Contract: The Legal Conditions of the Social
PART II
The Vitality and Flaws of the Social
Preliminary: The Archeology of Society
4 “Citoyen” versus “Bourgeois”? The Quest for the “Spirit of the Whole”
5 The State of Law: Civil Society
6 “Ethicality Lost in Its Extremes”
PART III
The State and the Political
Preliminary: The Enduring Myth of the Philosopher of the Prussian State
7 Tocqueville-Hegel: A Silent Dialogue on Modernity
8 A Theory of Representation
9 Beyond Democracy
PART IV
Figures of Subjectivity in Objective Spirit: Normativity and Institutions
Preliminary: Strong and Weak Institutionalism
10 The Truth of Morality
11 The Conditions of Political Subjectivity
12 Subjects, Norms, and Institutions: What Is an Ethical Life?
Epilogue: The Passion of the Concept
Translator’s Note
Bibliography
Index