1. Philosophy and reality: Three readings
In the preface to the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s main political opus, he famously states that philosophy ‘always comes on the scene too late’ to teach ‘what the world ought to be. … As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality [Wirklichkeit] has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state’ (PR, 16). This passage, along with the well-known image of the owl of Minerva, whose flight begins ‘with the falling of dusk’ (Ibid.), has led many interpreters to regard Hegel’s work as a retrospective enterprise, directed at past objects and events. According to this reading, the Philosophy of Right amounts to a fundamentally descriptive undertaking, with limited to no normative value. Its main goal is to explain or interpret the world as it is or has been, and not as it might be, if things were somehow different from what they are.
Yet despite the popularity of this reading, there is no agreement as to its actual implications. Although Hegel is generally recognized as an anti-utopian thinker, to whom philosophy must focus primarily on what exists or is immediately available, his philosophical engagement with his own historical time has been interpreted in at least three different ways. The first and earliest one became known as the ‘accommodation thesis’ and sought to denounce his alleged conformism with regard to Prussia’s authoritarian regime. This critique can be traced back to Jakob Fries and his followers, who accused Hegel of ‘servility and an unnatural political quietism’ (Scheidler, 1847, 608).
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However, it was Rudolf Haym’s Hegel und seine Zeit, published in 1857, that most contributed to the dissemination of this view. For Haym, the Philosophy of Right embodies the ‘spirit of the Prussian Restoration’ (1962, 359), through a philosophical apologia of reality that ‘sanctifies the existent as such’ (1962, 367f.).
This idea was reiterated, in different ways, by ‘young Hegelians like Marx and Ruge, and later revived by declared critics like Russell, Popper or Voegelin. Fortunately, it is now largely discredited. Throughout the last century, a careful reconsideration of Hegel’s political writings has shown that his reputation as a cringing state philosopher is based, for the most part, on politically disingenuous readings and gross interpretive mistakes, and that his theory of the state is not only different from, but indeed incompatible with the existing Prussian regime. As was rightly demonstrated, ‘the differences between what [Hegel] regarded as “rational” political institutions and those under which he actually lived are too many and too striking’ (Knox, 1940, 58).
A more recent way of approaching the preface to the Philosophy of Right has been to emphasize the passive nature of Hegel’s practical philosophy. According to Robert Pippin and Frank Ruda, among others, Hegel is indeed a philosopher of the status quo, but not because he endorses or attempts to justify a specific social or political order. Rather, his practical thought ‘is nothing but an explicit re-enactment of the development of the intersubjective logic of breakdown and recovery’ (Pippin, 2008, 268) that characterizes human history. And this means not only that philosophy’s role is merely to retrace and bring out this logic, but also that such a task takes place at a purely analytical level, detached from the actual lives of individuals. For Pippin, Hegel resembles Aristotle in that the latter ‘is in effect not providing in his ethical writings any reasons for anybody to do anything’ (Ibid.). His conclusions are deduced ex post facto, ‘with the falling of dusk’, and their content is thus strictly descriptive and ‘pragmatically inert’ (2008, 279). Building on this interpretation, Ruda also evokes the owl of Minerva to highlight the retrospective nature of Hegel’s text, and goes so far as to claim that he ‘does not present any normative account of what a state or a civil society should look like’, but ‘rather depicts the status quo of contemporary society because “it is a shape of life grown old” and thus has come close to its end’ (2017, 175f.).
This account is directly challenged by a third one, equally popular among recent interpreters. For Stephen Houlgate, for example, the Philosophy of Right does offer a normative account of social and political relations: ‘it tells us how freedom should be understood and how it should objectify itself, if it is to be true to its own nature’ (PR, xviii). However, this normative picture is largely a confirmation of the political landscape already in existence in Hegel’s day. The issue, then, is not so much whether he transcends the status quo as the extent to which he does so. For although his account is not a mere ‘re-enactment’ of a past historical cycle, it does aim to reveal a truth that is already contained, albeit imperfectly, in the empirical world. And if Hegel does believe that ‘all the essential elements of objective freedom are to be found in actual modern states’ (Ibid.), the gap between the descriptive and the prescriptive elements of his thought is necessarily limited. Accordingly, his philosophical findings will not pose a radical challenge to existing social and political arrangements, but merely point out minor inconsistencies. The practices and institutions he argues for are bound to be presented, as Frederick Neuhouser recently put it, ‘in roughly the form in which we already know them’ (2000, 36).
In what follows, I want to propose a different reading. While I agree that Hegel’s practical philosophy is a normative enterprise, aimed at revealing reality’s true or rational form, I do not think it is bound to confirm the rationality of the modern world. Indeed, it may just as well reveal the fundamental irrationality of key aspects of modern social life, which call for radical forms of criticism and resistance. To be clear, I do not mean to argue that Hegel saw his own philosophy in a strictly radical light. On the contrary, he regarded his work as a continuation – and indeed as the necessary completion – of the philosophical and political conquests achieved in the modern world. Moreover, his practical writings suggest that he was essentially a gradualist, who tended to favour reform over revolution.
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Nevertheless, his critique of modernity is not aimed at a minor political reform, but at a fundamental revision of the social logic underlying the modern liberal sphere. And this ambitious goal tends to be obscured by the relative conservatism of some of his actual political solutions. My present goal, however, is not to discuss the specific architecture of Hegel’s state, but to clarify the scope and implications of his philosophical method. I aim to show that there is no conceptual incompatibility between the critical model proposed in the Philosophy of Right and a radical critique of existing reality. In fact, I take the openness of Hegel’s approach to such a possibility as part of its enduring political relevance.
This new possibility entails not only the recognition of the normative dimension of Hegel’s practical thought, but also a different and more robust conception of normativity. More precisely, it entails the recognition that Hegel’s philosophy is about more than bringing out reality’s implicit rationality – that it is best understood as a normative reconstruction of objectivity,
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which can point beyond the practical horizon immediately available to a given society or epoch. And this reconstruction is not necessarily at odds with Hegel’s claims about philosophy’s retrospective nature. However, to understand how both ideas fit together, we must consider the totality of the argument developed in the preface and the way it unfolds in the work’s main text. This is what I set out to do below. First, I focus on Hegel’s dynamic understanding of the relationship between philosophy and objectivity, captured by the dialectical tension between reality and actuality, or Wirklichkeit (Section 2). Then, I argue that this tension plays out, in the Philosophy of Right, at two different levels: a conceptual level, which refers to the logical deduction of the concept of freedom, from the stage of ‘abstract right’ to that of the state, and a temporal level, which refers to the development of the Idea of freedom, that is, to the actualization of the concept of freedom in the concrete realm of world history (Section 3); finally, I claim that the methodological approach set out in the preface must be interpreted with these two levels in mind. The flight of the owl of Minerva illustrates the conceptual process whereby a given epoch is criticized and called into question. And this process reveals the need for a profound cultural transformation, with significant effects on the existing social order (Section 4).
2. Reason, reality, actuality
In the Philosophy of Right, shortly before mentioning the owl of Minerva, Hegel makes another, equally important methodological claim: ‘To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason’ (PR, 15). This brief formula encapsulates two of the guiding principles of his thought. On the one hand, philosophy is primarily concerned with reason: it aims to arrive at a rational account of reality, different from the one usually relied upon in ordinary life. On the other hand, this account is not an ideal version of things, to be found beyond empirical reality. It is already somehow present in the empirical world, for ‘what is, is reason’. But what exactly does this presence amount to? If the equation of ‘what is’ with ‘reason’ is understood as the simple identification of empirical reality with reason, to philosophize is simply to take note of received phenomena and acknowledge their rationality. Yet this is not only at odds with Hegel’s emphasis on the need to comprehend reality, but also, and more fundamentally, with the very possibility of critical thought. Indeed, this would mean that everything that happens to exist is, for that very reason, rational, and hence justified. To avoid this conclusion, ‘what is’ must be taken to refer to something other than received reality – a possibility suggested by Hegel’s use of italics.
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It must be understood as a mode of being that is somehow superior, more authentic or more rational than the being predicated of most empirical objects and events.
This same issue also arises earlier on in the preface, when Hegel, discussing the relationship between philosophy and reality, claims that ‘what is actual is rational and what is rational is actual’ (PR, 14).
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As is well known, this formula would become a sort of slogan for his entire philosophy. And like the previous one, it can also be read as a celebration of existing reality. In fact, since reason is here equated not with reality in general but with actuality – Wirklichkeit, which usually refers to what ‘actually’ exists, in an immediate and tangible way – this kind of reading is even more compelling. And sure enough, this double statement was seized upon by Hegel’s critics as further proof of his accommodation to the status quo. Haym denounced it as ‘the absolute formula of political conservatism’ (1962, 367f.), and Russell took it to mean that ‘whatever is, is right’ (1945, 731).
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However, if one considers Hegel’s indications as to how his claim should be interpreted, as well as the wider context of his theoretical and practical philosophy, what emerges is a very different picture. In the Encyclopaedia, as he defends his dictum against the ‘hostility’ of his detractors, Hegel reiterates the distinction between ‘mere appearance [Erscheinung], which is transient and meaningless’, and actuality [Wirklichkeit], the true object of philosophy, ‘of which [existing] objects, institutions and conditions are only the superficial outside’ (EL § 6). This means that actuality – at least in the technical sense at stake in these and similar passages – is not to be equated with received reality. Rather, it refers to a specific part of reality – the rational part of reality, or the rational core of which existing objects and events are the visible surface. As Hegel writes elsewhere, the rationality of the real must be looked for ‘with the eye of reason, which penetrates the surface and finds its way through the complex and confusing turmoil of events’ (LPWH, 30).
Given these and like images, the kind of enquiry proposed by Hegel might be conceived as a philosophical X-ray of reality, as it were, meant to expose the rational skeleton beneath the empirical flesh. Confronted with an infinite variety of objects and events, philosophy’s task would be to distinguish what is accidental from what is essential and to reveal a coherent logical pattern behind the world’s seeming arbitrariness. This would imply that received reality is not a contingent combination of facts and deeds, but the reflection of a rational plan, driven by the fulfilment of a rational goal. Yet although this kind of reading might fit some of Hegel’s formulations, it fails to grasp, in my view, the essence of his argument. By focusing on reality as it presents itself and looking therein for its rational core, this kind of approach is still attached to a descriptive account of the relationship between reason and reality. To be sure, this interpretation is no longer about a simple legitimation of existing reality: to philosophize is no longer to accept what is given, but to expose and interpret its true meaning. However, this approach still views reason as something that is already there, waiting to be exhumed and brought to light. And, therefore, it is still open to the charges of conservatism and complacency raised by Hegel’s critics. For although not everything that happens to exist is rational, there is nonetheless an inner logic presiding over reality, which must be recognized as such.
Hegel’s point, however, is not simply that reality is rational, but that it must become so. He conceives of reality not as a fixed reference point, which philosophy is to accept and interpret, but as a dynamic phenomenon, imbued with a rational potential that may or may not become actualized. Therefore, while philosophy may be limited to ‘comprehending what is’, this task is not merely descriptive. It amounts to a normative undertaking, which Hegel characterizes in different ways. He speaks, for example, of the rationality of the real as the degree of correspondence between reality and its concept (Begriff): ‘a reality that does not correspond to the concept is mere appearance, something subjective, accidental, arbitrary, something which is not the truth’ (SL, 675). Accordingly, ‘it is only in the concept that something has actuality’ (SL, 30), and can therefore be deemed rational; ‘in so far as reality does not match its concept’ (LPWH, 58), its rational potential remains unfulfilled. If Hegel were operating within a descriptive framework, his emphasis on conceptuality would be strictly epistemological and the whole issue would come down to the logical adequacy between a given concept and the reality it is meant to capture. Philosophical comprehension would then be a matter of correspondence: to look at reality ‘with the eye of reason’ would simply amount to finding the concept or set of concepts that best match a given object, or that best convey its meaning. But Hegel’s approach is both epistemological and ontological, which means that reality and reason cannot be thought of separately. What something is and what it means cannot be dissociated because the logical principles that guide human reason also apply to the objective world. Thought and Being are two halves of the same dynamic unity, and philosophy’s role is precisely to reveal and explore their mutual dependence. Therefore, reality cannot be conceived in a static manner, as the fixed ground against which different concepts are measured. To find the truth about reality is also to raise reality to its true form.
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The demand for logical adequacy usually placed on the conceptual realm is mirrored, in Hegel, by a demand for ontological adequacy placed on the objective realm. Just as there are false or irrational ideas and beliefs, there are also false or irrational objects, institutions and conditions. In these cases, reality has not yet fulfilled its rational potential – it has not yet been raised to actuality. Therefore, to ‘comprehend what is’ (das was ist zu begreifen) is nothing other than to ‘subjugate it to the concept’ (dem Begriffe unterwerfen)
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and thereby elevate it to its true or rational form. The term Begriff designates both the true meaning of a given reality and the form it must acquire if it is to conform with reason. Likewise, the verb begreifen designates the double movement whereby a given reality is both examined and found wanting and in need of transformation. As Marcuse rightly noted, ‘all fundamental concepts of the Hegelian system are characterized by the same ambiguity. They never denote mere concepts (as in formal logic), but forms or modes of being comprehended by thought’ (1960, 25).
3. Conceptual and temporal dialectic
If philosophy is to elevate the given to its rational form, it must have some means of distinguishing what is rational from what is not. According to Hegel, the truth of an object lies in its concept, but this statement is hardly conclusive, for it begs the question of how this concept is to be determined. If the concept is the yardstick with which to assess reality’s conformity to reason, it must itself be shown to be rational. Otherwise, it will convey nothing more than a dogmatic worldview, arbitrarily favoured over all others. And this issue is especially relevant for Hegel, given his recurring claim that in philosophy ‘we can assume nothing and assert nothing dogmatically’ (EL § 1). While other forms of knowledge ‘apply presupposed forms of definitions and the like … as known and accepted’ (SL, 23), philosophy is characterized precisely by its radical dismissal of all such presuppositions.
To ensure the validity of its knowledge, philosophy must avoid taking anything for granted, and this also applies to the criterion used to judge the rationality of the real. If the standard to which reality is to conform is simply a new idea brought in from the outside, it may well amount to a mere presupposition, in which case the standpoint of ordinary reason and the one introduced by philosophy are not qualitatively different. And this problem points to a more fundamental one, namely, that of the criterion whereby anything whatsoever can be deemed true. For Hegel, part of what distinguishes philosophy from other modes of enquiry is precisely its rejection of what he often refers to as a ‘finite’, ‘abstract’ or ‘undialectical’ conception of truth. ‘The way of asserting a proposition’, he writes, ‘adducing reasons for it and in the same way refuting its opposite by reasons, is not the form in which truth can appear’ (PS, 28). This strategy can provide one, at best, with convincing assertions about reality, but not with actual truth. For an assertion, however persuasive, is ultimately only a unilateral version of truth, and as such intrinsically open to refutation. It is only valid until a new, more convincing assertion comes along, armed with a similar claim to truth.
Instead of seeking to determine whether a given object conforms to an external standard of truth – a standard which must itself be validated by a further standard of truth, and so on ad infinitum – the philosopher must proceed immanently and focus on whether the object conforms with itself, that is, whether its definition corresponds to its underlying essence. In philosophy, ‘demonstrating [beweisen] is equivalent to showing how the object makes itself—through and out of itself—into what it is’ (EL § 83). And this immanent process, enacted in most of Hegel’s writings, can be divided into three main stages. First, an object that is usually accepted as self-evident turns out, upon closer inspection, to be incoherent or unintelligible. This discovery introduces a distinction between the appearance and the essence of the object, and the confrontation of these two aspects gives rise to a series of contradictions, which call into question its initial identity. These contradictions arise because the object is shown to be at odds with its true nature – whether because it is not what it makes out to be, because it is unable to fulfil its appointed purpose or because it falls short of its intrinsic potential. Whichever the case, this discrepancy gives rise to an immanent tension, which deprives what was given of its prior stability and reveals it as inconsistent or problematic. Second, the drive to resolve this tension prompts the need to conceive the object in some other, less problematic way. Again, however, the idea is not to replace its definition with a new one brought in from the outside, but to ‘look on at the proper immanent development of the thing itself’ (PR § 2). Third, the resolution of the contradictions brought out in the previous stage leads to the emergence of a new conception of the object, more closely aligned with its true nature. But although this new standpoint is a step forward in the road to reason, it is usually not the end of the journey. A closer inspection ends up revealing a new immanent tension, which leads to a new set of contradictions.
The three aforementioned stages are the constitutive moments of what Hegel calls dialectic. But although this term is usually applied to his philosophy as a whole, its actual use is not uniform. In fact, it can differ in important ways from writing to writing, depending on the object of Hegel’s critique. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, for example, he focuses on historical events, institutions and societies and retraces their philosophical evolution. His aim is to show that certain historical developments, despite their share of contingency, can be linked to certain discrepancies between existing phenomena and their underlying essence or potential. A similar approach can be found in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, centred on the evolution of philosophical ideas, movements and schools of thought. Despite their differences, both works highlight the interplay between the material and intellectual resources available at different historical periods and the conceptual possibilities they allow. In both cases, the rationality of the real depends on the extent to which these possibilities are actualized.
Hegel’s historical lectures offer a fairly direct application of the critical procedure we have been considering. By focusing on historically situated objects, he aims to expose their contradictions and reveal their rational potential. Yet this is not the only mode of enquiry available in Hegel’s writings. In the Science of Logic and in most of the Encyclopaedia, he is not directly concerned with existing reality. The ‘object’ at the centre of the dialectical process is not a historical reality, but a logical notion, and Hegel’s goal is to retrace the implications of that notion regardless of its empirical or historical instantiations. ‘The same development of thinking that is portrayed in the history of philosophy is also portrayed in philosophy itself, only freed from its historical externality, purely in the element of thinking’ (EL § 14).
In light of this difference, some interpreters have drawn a distinction between the ‘empirical’ or ‘temporal’ dialectic deployed in Hegel’s historical writings and the ‘conceptual’ dialectic of his logical writings.
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But although this distinction is clearly suggested in his works, it should not make one lose sight of the common ground shared by these two modes of enquiry. More than different philosophical strategies, the two strands are more fruitfully regarded as different responses to the problem of dogmatism, which Hegel is keen to overcome. In his temporal dialectic, the problem is tackled by examining reality on its own terms and tracing its rational progress. Moreover, to ensure the continuity of this process, Hegel begins his enquiry at the very beginning, that is, at the dawn of human history, and proceeds chronologically. In his conceptual dialectic, he also begins at the beginning. However, the priority of the starting point over the enquiry’s subsequent stages is not historical, but logical. To avoid unwarranted assumptions, the philosopher must retrace the logical history of a given concept all the way to its simplest or most immediate form.
At first glance, the Philosophy of Right seems to follow the second of these approaches. Hegel’s text retraces the immanent development of the concept of freedom, from its most immediate to its most rational form. Starting from the freedom of thought, that is, the ability of every thinking being to abstract from anything determinate (PR § 5), Hegel goes on to show that freedom cannot be grasped in this way, and this initial criticism leads to a string of alternative definitions: the intellectual freedom to abstract from the objective world is recast as the legal freedom to own and exchange property, as the moral freedom to act according to one’s conscience and, finally, as the political freedom to participate in a just, well-ordered state. Yet while the progression deals with issues as concrete as property rights, the market or the administrative structure of the state, these are not primarily viewed from a historical angle, as descriptions of actually existing norms and institutions, but from a normative angle, as descriptions of the kinds of norms and institutions that are logically required for freedom to attain its true form.
However, this is only part of what goes on in Hegel’s progression. In reality, the Philosophy of Right offers both a conceptual dialectic and a temporal dialectic, and this double task is clearly indicated in the first paragraph of the introduction:
The subject-matter of the philosophical science of right is the Idea [Idee] of right, i.e. the concept of right together with the actualization [Verwirklichung] of that concept. (PR § 1)
And, as the Addition to § 1 goes on to clarify,
The Idea of right is freedom, and if it is to be truly understood, it must be known both in its concept and in the determinate existence of that concept. (PR § 1A)
We have seen that Hegel defines philosophy in general as a form of Begreifen, that is, as the movement whereby a given object is raised to its concept, and thereby to its true form. However, a further stage of this process is now brought to light: although the conformity to the concept is a necessary condition for the attainment of reason, it is not a sufficient one. The truth of a given object lies not only in its concept, but also in its historical actualization. It is this actualized concept, verwirklichter Begriff, that Hegel usually calls the Idea, and equates with Reason proper:
The determinations of the concept in the course of its development are from one point of view themselves concepts, but from another they have the form of existence [Dasein], since the concept is in essence Idea. (PR § 32. Translation modified.)
The Philosophy of Right is meant to show how freedom should be understood, but also how it comes to exist as a social and political reality. In Hegel’s vocabulary, his work documents both the comprehension (Begreifen) and the actualization (Verwirklichung) of freedom, and these two tasks correspond to two structural moments of the ‘philosophical science of right’: the former consists in the progression leading from the stage of ‘abstract right’ to that of the state and its constitution; the latter is the theme of the book’s final section, ‘world history’, where the conceptual enquiry of the previous sections gives way to a temporal enquiry into the actualization of the concept of freedom. Having outlined the kinds of norms and practices that best articulate and promote human freedom, Hegel proceeds to examine how they have materialized in the course of human history, by singling out four ‘world-historical realms’ (PR § 354) which he takes to represent four key stages in the development of the consciousness of freedom: the ‘Oriental realm’, encompassing the most primitive human societies, characterized by patriarchal and theocratic forms of government; the ‘Greek realm’, where freedom is largely conditional on social rank and ethnic identity; the ‘Roman realm’, focused on the legal freedom of individuals and their private pursuits; and the ‘Germanic realm’, which includes both the feudalism of medieval Europe and the rise and consolidation of the modern constitutional state.
This temporal enquiry stands out for its different methodology, but also for its comparative brevity: a mere 20 paragraphs, as opposed to the more than three hundred that make up the progression’s conceptual part.
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Understandably, this asymmetry has led many interpreters to minimize the importance of the Philosophy of Right’s historical dialectic, or to treat it as an afterthought, but that is not how Hegel sees it. Although the dialectic of world history would only be fully developed later on, in the lectures on the philosophy of history, it is already an integral part of the Philosophy of Right and a central part of its overall argument.
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The preface to the 1818–19 lectures on the philosophy of right highlights the duality of Hegel’s enterprise and offers a clearer picture of its historical component:
The history of the development of a people shows how the latter actualizes its concept of freedom. Each people must undergo the struggle aimed at making the concept of freedom coincide with actuality, by means of a necessary progression grounded in the nature of reason.
As the legal relations of this progression belong to actuality, they obey, on the one hand, a rational necessity; and, on the other, a historical one. (VRP 1, 231f.)
The concept of freedom establishes the rational necessity of a modern rational state, but not its actualization. Only a dialectic that is able to move beyond the logical realm, towards the concrete element of human history, can capture freedom in its actual form, as the living process whereby particular epochs and worldviews are transcended in favour of new and more rational ones. But how does this process relate to the conceptual progression outlined throughout most of the Philosophy of Right? We might be tempted to regard Hegel’s characterization of the state as a timeless recipe for what a state should be. The actualization of freedom would then consist merely in applying this recipe to a concrete historical context, so as to shape existing conditions in its image. If this were so, however, the philosophy of history would indeed be little more than an afterthought: although the effort of documenting how a given culture has come to adopt the norms and institutions Hegel deems rational might be of historiographical or sociological interest, it would not advance the philosophical argument in any significant way. Such an effort would result, at best, in a historical illustration of a predetermined philosophical standpoint.
The problem with this interpretation becomes more apparent if one considers the place occupied by the dialectic of right and the dialectic of history in Hegel’s system. Indeed, the fact that the latter comes after the former, that is, that it is situated at a higher position in the system’s global hierarchy, indicates that it cannot be a mere addendum to what went before. Instead of a sequence of elements put together, Hegel’s system is a dialectical progression, which means that each new stage is born out of the former as a result of its inner contradictions. At the end of the Logic, for example, the transition to the Philosophy of Nature does not amount simply to the introduction of a new philosophical subject. The realm of nature is not brought in as a concrete field to which the principles of logic can be applied. Rather, the Logic itself culminates in the realization that the concept of being cannot be grasped exclusively in logical terms, that it requires an understanding of being’s spatial and temporal reality. In like manner, the transition from the dialectic of the state to that of world history is not meant to illustrate the historical application of the categories deduced in Hegel’s theory of the state. It is rather the concept of the state that is shown to be ultimately incapable, on its own, to convey the full meaning of human freedom. Therefore, the very definition of the rational state requires that it move beyond the conceptual sphere and become actualized in concrete laws and institutions.
The transition from a philosophical theory of the state to a philosophical history of the state implies that ‘it belongs to the essence of the state to be historical, i.e. that history is the ground in which the concept of the state acquires its meaning’ (Brauer, 1982, 20). And to grasp why this is so, it is important to bear in mind the specificity of Hegel’s conception of Geist, or ‘spirit’. As he writes in the introduction, ‘the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of spirit brought forth out of itself as a second nature’ (PR § 4). However, the Logic dealt with the basic structure of reality, and the Philosophy of Nature with the laws that govern the natural world, Hegel’s practical philosophy is first and foremost a Philosophy of Spirit. At its centre is the notion of Geist, which for Hegel is both the defining principle of human life and the mode of being it must strive to attain. Human beings are ‘spiritual’ insofar as they are able to rise above their natural and historical circumstances and determine their own identity. This self-determination is the essence of freedom and the ultimate purpose of philosophy. Crucially, however, it is not just a theoretical process, but also a practical or productive one: to acknowledge one’s spiritual nature is not simply to recognize oneself as being capable of self-determination, but also to bring this recognition into effect by engaging in the actual task of self-determination. From the standpoint of Geist, self-awareness is always already self-production, for ‘free spirit consists precisely … in its being no longer implicit [an sich] or concept alone, but in its superseding this formal stage of its being …, until the existence which it gives to itself is one which is solely its own and free’ (PR § 57R).
It is now clearer why the Philosophy of Right cannot amount to a mere recipe for how the state ought to be. While the identity of natural beings can be subsumed under a set of causal or physical laws, human beings cannot be determined in this way. Likewise, the laws and institutions that best embody human freedom cannot be copied from a fixed conceptual script. True or ‘spiritual’ freedom is not merely about the conformity to a specific conception of freedom: to be free is to bring forth one’s own freedom ‘as a second nature’; and this dynamic approach constitutes an important departure from the normative framework traditionally favoured by political philosophy. As a philosophy of spirit, Hegel’s practical thought ‘does not construct reason for reality; it identifies the reason existing and attaining existence in reality itself. … Only an account that sees contradictions as resolved in existence itself, and not just in thought, can properly surmount the dichotomy between reason and reality’ (Buchwalter, 2012, 150), and thereby raise freedom to its true form.
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4. The owl of Minerva
We have seen that Hegel departs from more conventional approaches to political philosophy in at least two fundamental respects. Firstly, instead of advancing his own views on how a rational society should be organized, he proposes to derive its organization from a dialectical enquiry into the concept of freedom. This is possible, he argues, because of the developmental logic that binds the most primitive to the most sophisticated conceptions of freedom, which it is up to philosophy to bring into view. By exposing the contradictions usually associated with the concept of freedom, and by criticizing a series of political arrangements based on those contradictions, the philosopher is able to determine the normative principles that are required for a society to be deemed rational. But this procedure is only one part of the philosopher’s task. It amounts to the conceptual half of the dialectic of objective spirit, to be followed, secondly, by an enquiry into whether and how those normative principles have been actualized. For Hegel, the rationality of a given political order does not rest only on its theoretical validity, but also on its practical realizability. He believes that ‘the generalities of philosophy … must be shown to be rational by virtue of the power to be made actual’ (Gilbert, 2013, 250).
Yet the formal priority accorded by Hegel to this practical component raises further methodological questions. In particular, the claim that a rational state is only truly revealed in its historical form seems to imply that it can only be known retrospectively, after it has been brought into existence. And this conclusion, if justified, is not easy to reconcile with the normative nature of Hegel’s conceptual dialectic. In the previous sections, when characterizing his dialectical method, I argued against reducing Hegel’s practical philosophy to a descriptive enterprise, as this would assume the pre-existence of some grand masterplan at work in the empirical world. I claimed instead that the main task he ascribes to practical philosophy is not one of interpretation, but one of reconstruction: its ultimate aim is to reveal the form that freedom must take if it is to be true to its own essence. However, Hegel’s subsequent emphasis on the historical actualization of freedom appears to point in a different direction. Indeed, the idea that the philosopher should move beyond the conceptual sphere and retrace the actual history of freedom seems to lead right back to the descriptive framework I started by rejecting. And, moreover, since this historical approach is hierarchically superior, in Hegel’s system, to the conceptual dialectic of freedom, it appears to be his final word on the matter. The logical deduction of the concept of freedom, however important, can only be expected to play a secondary or subordinate role in his overall conception of freedom.
The tension between the normative and the historical dimensions of Hegel’s dialectic of freedom is nowhere more evident than in the final pages of the preface to the Philosophy of Right, where he insists on philosophy’s inability to ‘transcend its contemporary world’ and teach the state ‘what it ought to be’ (PR, 15). His position is famously summed up in the penultimate paragraph, which is now worth quoting in full:
One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state. The teaching of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal [das Ideale] first appears over against the real and that the ideal grasps this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk. (PR, 16)
As already noted, this paragraph has been read in many quarters as a heavy, if not fatal blow to philosophy’s critical role. For some interpreters, the reference to the owl of Minerva amounts to an outright rejection of philosophy’s normative dimension. According to this reading, the Philosophy of Right is not about looking ahead, at what the world should become, but about looking backwards, at what it already is. Hegel’s text can only offer a philosophical recapitulation of past historical eras, highlighting their rational achievements. For others interpreters, the Philosophy of Right does have a normative dimension, but one that is necessarily limited. While philosophy’s role is indeed to help elevate received reality to actuality, this movement has been largely achieved in the most advanced European nations. Hegel’s reflections are thus seen as the theoretical ratification of a world that is, for the most part, already rational.
As I see it, Hegel’s methodological programme is by no means incompatible with a critical outlook on received reality. What is more, it does not preclude the possibility of a robust or radical criticism of received reality. As the preface to the 1818-19 lectures makes clear, ‘the object of the philosophical science of right is the higher concept of the nature of freedom, regardless of what counts as valid to the views of the age [auf die Vorstellung der Zeit]’ (VRP 1, 234, my emphasis). In like manner, what the preface to the published version of the Philosophy of Right rules out, in my view, is not the possibility of radical social criticism, but a specific conception of criticism, consistently opposed throughout the Hegelian corpus. When Hegel insists on philosophy’s inability to ‘teach what the world ought to be’, he is simply reiterating his condemnation of the dogmatism he associates with all undialectical forms of enquiry. And we already know, from the characterization sketched in the previous sections, that this condemnation it targeted at two complementary modes of dogmatism. Firstly, he aims to show that the rational standpoint pursued by philosophy cannot be attained in a utopian manner, by replacing a specific standpoint with another brought in from the outside. Philosophy is not about the ‘setting up of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where’ (PR, 13), but about assessing received ideas and objects on their own terms and exposing their intrinsic limitations. This is the procedure applied in Hegel’s theory of the rational state, where the latter emerges as the necessary product of the immanent development of the concept of freedom. But Hegel also claims, secondly, that philosophy must refrain from imposing its logical conclusions on the empirical world. The theory of the state is not yet the final word on what a state ought to be, but only the conceptual component of a dialectical process that must extend to the sociohistorical realm. And this requirement follows from a wider call for philosophy to overcome the dichotomical framework, still upheld by more traditional philosophical projects, between theory and practice, thought and action, Sollen and Sein.
It is this practice-oriented, historically embedded standpoint that Hegel has in mind when he speaks, in the preface, of philosophy’s ‘belated flight’. To know freedom in its true form, the philosopher must determine how the concept of freedom has come to be actualized, that is, how the dialectic of right has played out in human history. And part of this effort consists, to be sure, in a retrospective examination, reprised at different historical junctures: in the ancient world, the freedom introduced by Roman Law, where individuals, as legal persons, are at liberty to engage in voluntary contractual exchanges, represents an advance over the kind of freedom allowed in the Greek world, where the wills of individuals were more directly conditioned by the their cultural, familial and religious affiliations; likewise, in the Christian world, the elevation of freedom to a universal human trait, based on the recognition of the infinite value of human life, signals an important departure from the Roman model, where freedom is only fully granted to property-owning individuals (and hence not to slaves, women or children); finally, the freedom championed in the modern Western world, following the rise of Protestantism and the French Revolution, is also a breakthrough vis-à-vis the Christian worldview, as it calls for a liberation that is no longer focused on a subjective, otherworldly salvation, but on a series of objective, inalienable rights, accorded to every human being as such.
This historical survey charts the elevation of freedom to ever higher and more developed forms; or, to use the language of the introduction, the elevation of the Idea of right to its rational form. However, this movement is not a linear one. In Hegel’s account, each new conception of freedom is the result of a cultural crisis, whereby the previous conception of freedom is shown to be inadequate and out of step with the spirit of the age. The legal freedom of the Roman world emerges as a response to the fundamental conflict between the immediate ethical customs on which the Greek world is founded and a nascent focus on ‘the subjectivity of self-consciousness’ (PR § 356). The Christian conception of freedom, in turn, is a reaction to the contradiction between the individualism inherent to Roman Law and the ‘monstrously insatiable self-will’ (PR § 357) such individualism is bound to promote. Finally, the political freedom of the modern constitutional state arises out of the tension between Christianity’s insistence on the intrinsic value of human life and its simultaneous subjection of humankind to an all-powerful God. The Christian heaven, reduced to ‘an earthly here and now’, develops ‘into the rationality of right and law’ (PR § 360).
The need for philosophy arises when a given worldview loses its authority. As a ‘shape of life grows old’, its basic principles and institutions cease to be regarded as natural or self-evident and are gradually called into question. This waning world ‘cannot be rejuvenated but only understood’, and the philosopher’s task is indeed to bring out its inner contradictions and the necessity of its demise. But this is only one half of Hegel’s account. By looking backwards at the contradictions of his or her epoch, the philosopher is at the same time prompted to look forward and rearticulate its meaning in a new way. ‘When actuality has attained its finished state’ – that is, when the vision of reality deemed rational in the past has ceased to count as such – ‘the ideal appears over against the real” and “builds it up into the shape of an intellectual realm’. We find here the same immanent logic that pervades Hegel’s practical thought: the negation of a specific world order points the way to its own sublation, which culminates in a new conception of social and political relations; however, the latter is at first only an ‘intellectual realm’, whose truth must play out in a new historical cycle, shaped by new norms and practices. The dialectical alternance between the philosophical deduction of a rational social order and its historical actualization – or between the concept and the Idea – is the motor that drives philosophy and history itself towards ever more rational forms.
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As is now more apparent, the dynamic described in the preface is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, at the end of an era, but its movement also marks the dawn of a new era. More than a mere epitaph to a dying world, as Pippin or Ruda would have it, Hegel’s image refers to a regenerative process, through which the past is not just examined or criticized but critically reconstructed. Philosophy’s starting point is the frontier between the old and the new, the Übergangspunkt that the young Marx would also describe, less than 20 years later, with the aid of an avian image:
There are life-moments that, like border markers, stand before an expiring time and at the same time point clearly in a new direction.
In such a period of transition we feel ourselves compelled to consider the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to come to a realization of our actual position. Yes, world history itself likes this looking back and introspection which often make it look like it were going backwards or standing still, whereas it is merely throwing itself into an armchair to understand itself and comprehend intellectually its own activity, the act of Spirit [ihre eigne, des Geistes Tat zu durchdringen] (2000, p. 206. Translation modified).
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For Hegel, as for the early Marx, the philosophical comprehension of history is a form of self-comprehension, consisting in an immanent critique of the existing social order. What is more, this critique is not directed at minor or marginal aspects of that order, but at its defining principles. The transitions from the Greek world to the Roman world, to Christianity and to the Enlightenment entail a succession of radical cultural transformations, with profound practical implications. And the critique of modernity outlined in the Philosophy of Right is no exception. On the one hand, Hegel recognizes the emergence of the modern liberal order as an important civilizational leap. The widening range of civil, economic and political rights championed in modern states like France, Britain or the Netherlands is undoubtedly more rational than the feudal practices still upheld in Restoration Prussia. On the other hand, this liberal worldview is not yet the final goal of Hegel’s progression, but itself an intermediate stage in the dialectic of freedom. For although modern individuals are free to determine and pursue their own conceptions of the good, their freedom is still only the instrumental freedom of ‘civil society’, a sphere where each person is but a self-seeking, interest-maximizing agent, and where the state’s role is limited to protecting the security and the property of its citizens. For Hegel, this social model is constitutively unable to generate a cohesive social whole. Its atomistic logic leads instead to an increasingly divided and unequal society, where ‘particularity’ is ‘given free rein in every direction’ and ends up affording ‘a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both’ (PR § 185).
In the Philosophy of Right, the solution to the contradictions of modern liberalism lies in the communal logic introduced by a system of professional associations (the ‘corporations’) and cemented by the institutions of the rational state. Only by moving beyond the individualism of the liberal tradition can freedom be raised to its true form. However, this new stage differs from the previous ones in that it lacks a concrete historical substrate. While the stages of abstract right, morality and civil society can all be led back to specific moments in the historical actualization of freedom, which have been duly criticized and sublated, the rational state is the solution to an ongoing crisis. And while for many modern philosophers the liberal order represented the future, Hegel sees it as a necessary but ultimately untenable reality, in need of transformation. His characterization of the state is thus the conceptual forecast of a new Idea of freedom – the flight towards a new cultural era, which has yet to be actualized.
5. Conclusions
Hegel’s complex understanding of the relationship between philosophy and reality is one of the greatest challenges posed by his political thought. My aim in revisiting this issue has been to refute the widespread assumption that his political vision is structurally incompatible with a radical critique of the status quo. While many scholars have seen Hegel’s emphasis on philosophy’s ‘belated flight’ as proof of its limited normative power, I take it to refer to the immanent process whereby a given worldview is criticized and sublated. In my reading, the dialectical transitions discussed in the Philosophy of Right amount to nothing less than profound conceptual shifts, with important cultural and political implications. And the same applies to the work’s last major transition: focusing on the modern liberal order, Hegel shows that the conception of freedom it is based on is at odds with true freedom, and that its atomistic logic must give way to a truly collective conception of the common good.
As argued in the previous section, the characterization of Hegel as a champion of the liberal state contradicts the methodological indications provided in the preface to the Philosophy of Right. According to its well-known image, philosophy takes flight when a given social order has “grown old”, that is, when a specific conception of freedom, embodied by the practices and institutions of a given society, has ceased to accommodate the social and political tensions generated within that society. At this critical moment, philosophy is needed to spell out the contradictions of the present and, at the same time, to extract therefrom the foundations of a future, more coherent social order. What Hegel’s description attempts to capture is thus the transitional nature of the philosopher’s work: as a dialectical enterprise, philosophy is simultaneously a product of its time, born as a reaction to a specific historical context, and ahead of its time, for it ends up establishing the conceptual necessity of a new social order, not yet in existence. None of this would apply, though, were Hegel’s theory of the state merely a philosophical corroboration of an existing social reality. If the modern liberal state were indeed the last stop in the road towards the actualization of freedom, philosophy’s flight would have no real aim. It would amount to a victory lap, as it were, starting and ending in the same familiar location.
What the Philosophy of Right sets out, then, is not a philosophical justification of the modern liberal order, but a critical response to its conceptual limitations. Contrary to what is often assumed, the constitutional state of the early 19th century is not the rational state outlined at the end of Hegel’s progression, where universality and particularity are to be brought together, but the ‘external state’ he associates with civil society, where particularity still has the upper hand.
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In other words, Hegel sees his own epoch as corresponding to the moment of transition from the stage of civil society to that of the state. It is this pivotal moment, much more than the section on the state itself, that constitutes the focal point of the entire progression, for it is here that the Idea of freedom characteristic of Hegel’s time gives way to a new conceptual alternative, for which there is yet no historical precedent.
At the same time, however, there is an obvious tension, in the Philosophy of Right, between Hegel’s critical programme and its actual results, that is, between what he sets out to achieve – the dialectical deduction of a rational political order, through a complete actualization of the concept of freedom – and what he offers as an actual political alternative – a constitutional solution that combines a visionary affirmation of personal and collective freedom with a strict rejection of popular sovereignty and an ‘awkwardly ideological’ (Adorno, 2003, 361) defence of hereditary monarchy and aristocratic birth rights.
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As some interpreters have pointed out, this solution is remarkable not so much because it distances Hegel from more progressive critics of the Prussian regime, but because it fails to honour the critical potential of his own ideas. Engels famously noted how Hegel’s ‘thoroughly revolutionary method of thought’ ended up producing ‘a very tame political conclusion’ (1984, 269); more recently, Losurdo highlighted the ‘excess of [Hegel’s] theoretical categories with regard to the immediacy of his political options’, guided by a pragmatic concern with the kinds of changes his epoch would be willing to accept (2012, 295f.). In line with these interpreters, I believe it is crucial to distinguish Hegel’s critical method from the concrete way it has been applied. Through my own analysis, I hope to have shown that Hegel’s acceptance of some of the reactionary features of the Prussian regime is not only not supported by the Philosophy of Right’s methodological indications, but indeed an unwarranted restriction on their full philosophical import.
For today’s readers, the political relevance of Hegel’s text lies not in his defence of a constitutional solution that has long been discredited, but in his pioneering critique of liberalism. Faced with the contradictions of modern civil society, Hegel believed the world was ripe for a major political transformation. Just as feudalism had given way to a new cultural era, centred on individual freedom and self-determination, so too was liberalism to be replaced by a higher political order. As Hegel would later write, the ‘collision’ between liberal individualism and the communal vocation of the state ‘is the problem with which history is currently faced, and which it has to solve in the future’ (HW 12, 535). But although the Philosophy of Right lays out the conceptual basis for such a solution, the historical transformation that was to follow never materialized. After Hegel’s death, the liberal order he criticized became increasingly pervasive, fuelled by the formidable development of capitalism. And our own age, more than 200 years on, is still faced with the same fundamental predicament: with the consolidation of neoliberalism and the consequent surge in social and economic inequality, the acknowledgement of the collective implications of our choices and actions has never been more urgent.
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