It is not necessary to justify the special interest one takes in a certain area of an author’s thought (in my case, Hegel’s legal, social, and political thought, to which a large part of my research over the last twenty-five years has been dedicated). The reasons for one’s interest may be partly external to that thought or to philosophy on the whole. On the other hand, the way one studies an area of thought, the presuppositions of one’s reading, must be exposed and justified, which means one must be clearly aware of them, being able to measure their effects. For me, coming to this realization was a slow process, one that to a certain degree modified the rules by which I had undertaken my study of Hegel. After years spent reading and commenting on the Science of Logic as part of a group led by the late André Lécrivain,1 I naturally approached the study of the doctrine of objective spirit with that long, collective labor in mind. I was, and remain, convinced that the logical-speculative perspective opened relatively unprecedented hermeneutic possibilities and that it was important to read Hegel’s legal-political writings not as the expression of opinions or even theoretical positions in political philosophy but as elements of a system, of an “Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences,” of which the Science of Logic is the center and nexus of meaning. Moreover, this conviction comes from a basic reading of the texts. In the Philosophy of Right,2 Hegel constantly emphasizes the interdependence between the doctrine of objective spirit and the Logic, to which he makes some twenty explicit references. He writes, for example, in the preface,
It will readily be noticed that the work as a whole, like the construction of its parts, is based on the logical spirit. It is also chiefly from this point of view that I would wish this treatise to be understood and judged. For what it deals with is science, and in science, the content is essentially inseparable from the form.3
It is indisputable that for Hegel the doctrine of objective spirit, like every part of the system, rests not only on the “spirit” of the Logic but on its letter; if that were not the case, there would be no sense in speaking of a Hegelian system. For Hegel, as for Kant, a system is fundamentally distinct from a mere “aggregate” of knowledge.4 Moreover, for Hegel, the systematic project is not at all incompatible with attention to the concrete aspect of things and with the concern for the “life of men,” as he wrote to Schelling:
In my scientific development, which started from [the] more subordinate needs of man, I was inevitably driven toward science, and the ideal of [my] youth had to take the form of reflection and thus at once of a system. I now ask myself, while I am still occupied at it, what return to intervention in the life of men can be found.5
The problem—raised quite early on, in particular by Marx—is the following: must we believe Hegel, and to what extent, when he maintains that all the philosophy of law and right (e.g.) is an extension of his Logic? If the answer is yes, don’t we risk having to consider that “the entire philosophy of right is only a parenthesis to Logic”?6 It must, moreover, be noted that the young Marx’s position on the matter evolved greatly, for in the end he (along with Engels) considered the Logic to constitute the “rational kernel”—revolutionary because dialectic—of Hegelianism. Strangely enough, that had already been the position of Rudolf Haym, who so greatly contributed to establishing the bad reputation of the “philosopher of the Prussian state” when he asserted that the system is “revolutionary in its logical part” though “conservative in its practical part.”7 The opposite position, which was adopted by a good number of later commentators, consists in separating the argument of the Philosophy of Right as much as possible from its logical-systematic context in an attempt to render it more acceptable at a time and in a context where absolute spirit no longer enjoys very good press. If we wanted to summarize this alternative crudely, we might say, with the help of a historical nod, that either, like the “old Hegelians,” one opts for an orthodox reading of the system and runs the risk of helping discredit it, or, like the “young Hegelians,” one pits the spirit of the work against its letter and tries to rid it of its metaphysical dross at the risk of depriving it of what gives it its power and coherence.
It must be noted that recently, though some eminent commentators continue to take the “old Hegelian” position of a reading faithful to Hegelianism’s explicit systematic program (even if this means nourishing the suspicions that some burden it with—e.g., the suspicion of totalitarianism popularized by Popper), others increasingly choose a “young Hegelian,” nonmetaphysical reading of Hegel—a reading that, no matter how it breaks with the letter of the system, implies pushing away or relativizing some of its strongest ambitions at the obvious risk of thus depriving it of what is most powerful in it. I would like, with the help of several examples, to show what is interesting and risky in such iconoclastic attempts, which, at bottom, amount to distinguishing once again “what is living” and “what is dead” in Hegel,8 even at the risk of being suspected of doing arbitrary violence to the coherence of this thought.
When one considers the disrepute that has followed Hegel within the dominant strand of Anglo-Saxon philosophy ever since Russell’s break with neo-Hegelian idealism, it is surprising to observe that for some ten years now, Hegel has once again become a significant point of reference within what one no longer dares call analytic philosophy, given that it is now so diverse and renounces some of the distinctive traits of its original identity—in particular, its distrust of continental philosophy and especially of German idealism. It is not only that important, now-classic contributions to the study of Hegel have been born in the Anglo-American world, which had previously lagged behind in this area (I am thinking, e.g., of the innovative works of Robert Pippin9 and Terry Pinkard).10 We have even seen analytic philosophers seize Hegelianism (certainly in a very liberal way that would be problematic for a historian of philosophy in the European tradition) and even what is apparently most suspect within it—that is, its idealism—in order to try to raise, on the analytic continent itself, new, post-Wittgensteinian, post-Quinean, or neopragmatist questions. I am thinking here of the works of Robert Brandom11 and John McDowell,12 which have caused quite a commotion, and not only because of the doubly iconoclastic use they make of Hegel (iconoclastic in relation to classic readings of Hegel and in relation to the analytic mainstream).
However, these works deal with problems of philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of language. Since my subject is different, I will highlight instead Axel Honneth’s effort to update the Hegelian doctrine of Sittlichkeit. In a book titled Suffering from Indeterminacy, he proposes a “reactualization of Hegel’s philosophy of right”13 in order to show that here, too, a return to Hegel, comparable to the return occurring in the field of theories of knowledge, is fruitful. Honneth does not claim that the Philosophy of Right offers answers to the questions raised by contemporary social and political philosophy, but he does maintain that a nonmetaphysical reading of the text makes it possible to confront and even resolve certain difficulties encountered by contemporary philosophy—for example, in the debate between liberals and communitarians. After dismissing the usual political objections (Hegel is an enemy of democracy) and methodological objections (the system’s logical-speculative presuppositions are unacceptable), Honneth shows that the doctrine of objective spirit, adequately reconstructed, can be fruitful for post-Habermasian discussions on three subjects. First of all, the Hegelian theory of right and law, centered as it is on the idea of a “universally free will,” can be understood as a theory of justice in the contemporary (post-Rawlsian) sense of the term—as a theory that exposes the intersubjective conditions of individual autonomy and distinguishes different spheres of self-realization. Second, in direct line with his earlier works on recognition and “social suffering,” Honneth seeks within the doctrine of Sittlichkeit the ingredients for a “therapeutic for social pathologies.” Finally—and on this point there is convergence with Pippin—he proposes understanding this doctrine as a normative theory of modernity; a theory whose limits, nevertheless, stem from its “superinstitutional” character. This, by the way, is a point whose demonstration can be debated; doesn’t it fall prey to the anti-institutional disposition common to large sections of contemporary political philosophy? Whatever the case may be, these analyses show the potential inventiveness and fecundity of nonmetaphysical readings of Hegel. But of course, Honneth, like the other authors mentioned, must answer the prejudicial question, do Hegelian statements (here, those concerning objective spirit) still make sense when one abstracts them from the logical-speculative context of their justification? There is material here for fruitful debates.
As for me, I confess that on this essential question my opinion is, if not wavering, at least nuanced. Having started off from an orthodox (old Hegelian) position nourished by long contact with the Logic, I gradually realized that what interested me the most and seemed most relevant in the doctrine of objective spirit did not always need to be correlated with the logical-metaphysical infrastructure of the system in order to be judged valid. A good part of the doctrine of abstract law—which I aim to reevaluate in a positive manner—can be coherently understood independently of Hegelian metaphysics (by which I mean first and foremost the Logic, which Hegel explicitly tells us “takes the place of the former metaphysics”).14 But this is not always the case. On one decisive point, the question of the rabble (Pöbel), I believe I have shown that the solution Hegel seems to support (there must be a social and political solution to the social question) presupposes what I call a metaethical and metaobjective guarantee: the spirit of the world, the worldly figure of absolute spirit.15 Moreover, this is what is suggested by the final paragraph of the Philosophy of Right, which in a sense places the principle of the internal opening of objective spirit in the direction of absolute spirit (religion, philosophy) and affirms—counterintuitively—that “the present has cast off its barbarism” and that, as a result, the state appears as “the image and actuality of reason.”16 Indeed, the doctrine of Sittlichkeit and even the doctrine of objective spirit in its entirety do not by themselves offer the means for thinking civil society’s reconciliation (Versöhnung) with itself as necessary; they show, rather, the unavoidable nature of social fracture, as we would say today, and the ultimately aporetic character of the solutions that civil society and the state can implement to remedy it (such as aid for the poor or the policy of colonial expansion). But what does the idea that the structural contradictions of objective spirit can be resolved only from the point of view of absolute spirit mean if not that Hegel’s metaphysics is the ultimate guarantee of the coherence of his philosophy of finite spirit and in particular of the doctrine of objective spirit? An anecdote recounted by Heine seems to confirm this: to the question, “Do you really believe that everything that is wirklich is vernünftig?” Hegel is said to have answered, smiling, “It could also be put: ‘Everything that is rational, must be!’”17
Having arrived at this point, we must examine what exactly the term metaphysics refers to in the Hegelian context, where its meaning is obviously transformed.18 I am aware that in the foregoing remarks I mentioned interpretations that are neither synonymous nor necessarily compatible with one another. I do not know exactly what Hegel thought about this question. (When it comes to his explicit formulations, I know, of course, like everyone else; what is less clear to me is the definition of a position in keeping with the overall intention of Hegelianism as I perceive or reconstruct it.) But I can attempt to define the spectrum of acceptable positions. They seem to me to fall between two extremes: (1) Hegel’s metaphysics is his Logic; (2) Hegel’s metaphysics is his doctrine of absolute spirit. It is not my goal here to choose between these two positions—there are good arguments for either one—but instead to show the stakes of these interpretive choices.
If it is true that the Logic “takes the place of” and at the same time “takes over for” traditional (precritical) metaphysics, then it must be said that it is the true metaphysics. So what is the intention of Hegelian logic? It is to show—in accordance with a strong understanding of what logos is19—that rational discourse is the very discourse of being, that logic is an onto-logic. According to its explicit ambition, Hegelian logic, setting itself apart from all that is said or thought by means of this word, including from the point of view of transcendental philosophy, claims to be not a discourse on being but rather the discourse of being. Hegel is then “just” a secretary taking dictation from the World Spirit, which through him thinks its own actuality. If this is the case (I mean, if one agrees not to disqualify this program immediately as paranoid or hypocritical), then Hegel’s logic/metaphysics defines not only the conditions of possibility for thinking the thinkable (as does Kant’s transcendental logic) but also the very regime of being engaged in a unique process of verification. To say that logic replaces metaphysics, understood as the science of being as being and not as the description of existents or as regional ontology, is thus to affirm that the program for a theory of (true) discourse of substance raising itself into subject—to use the terms of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit—must replace the program for a theory of the conditions of possibility of experience.
This hardly helps us assess the other position, the interpretation of metaphysics as the philosophy or science of absolute spirit in its triple register: art, religion, philosophy. My hypothesis is that this interpretation and everything that derives from it is of course required by Hegelianism’s own self-representation but is not necessarily part of the development of “real [philosophical] sciences”—in any case, of the philosophy of nature and of finite spirit. In other words, the doctrine of objective spirit undoubtedly cannot be thought coherently without the Logic but perhaps can be without the philosophy of religion. However, on certain key points, this position is no longer tenable: once again, the way Hegel deals with the problem he highlights—the structural crisis of civil society—must give us pause. We know the solution he retains: the institutionalization of social life through corporations and proper enforcement by the rational state supplemented by an adroit policy of using the poor for colonial expansion allows for the gradual resolution of the fundamental contradiction of civil society (which here must be called bourgeois civil society) on the ground of world history, which is expressly mentioned in section 247 of the Philosophy of Right in order to emphasize the increasing role played by the globalization of trade, including at the cultural level. Now, the reasons for this speculative optimism20 cannot be found in the doctrine of objective spirit alone, although Hegel does not seem willing to admit as much. Here, we might read the half-worried, half-furious observations he makes over the course of the 1820s regarding the harmful effects of the freedom of enterprise21 and of the suppression of corporations22 as well as his tirade, at the end of the 1830 course on the philosophy of history, against the dangers liberalism (here, political liberalism of the French type) poses for old Europe. Obviously, old Hegel wasn’t very optimistic about the health of Sittlichkeit! Consequently, what I, in the interest of simplicity, have named his speculative optimism can only be a metaphysical, counterintuitive optimism, the very optimism that caused him, in his lectures, to give the expression from the 1820 preface, “The rational is actual and the actual is rational,” the sense of historical process—“the rational becomes actual and the actual becomes rational”23—and even of a speculative necessity: “it must be so!”
Which position to choose? Mine is the following, which I openly admit is debatable: when Hegel’s speculative optimism (at least within the doctrine of objective spirit) seems to be contradicted by the state of the world or to contrast with what we are given to know of it, it is rooted not simply in the Logic as a theory of discourse and of being (onto-logic) but also in the doctrine of absolute spirit, or at least in that which within objective spirit echoes absolute spirit (“the spirit of the world”). If our concern is to discern the effective truth of Hegelian discourse and to make good use of it—in other words, if we read Hegel from a perspective that is neither historical nor “technological” in Martial Gueroult’s sense—a good rule would seem to be to practice an epokhè toward statements whose strength of conviction seems exhausted as well as toward the context of meaning they belong to and to separate them (as much as possible, which can only be measured on a case by case basis) from the rest of the analysis. To return to my earlier example, we can take advantage of Hegel’s analyses of the tensions of civil society and “social suffering” without thereby believing that the institutionalization of social life and good government policy necessarily provide a positive and definitive solution to these tensions. This amounts to considering that it is dialecticity that constitutes the living, and possibly topical, element of Hegelian analyses but also that we probably must renounce what was perhaps for Hegel himself a purely metaphysical conviction: faith in a “true reconciliation that has become objective”24 woven into the fabric of the human world. No doubt in doing so we sacrifice what is most ambitious in Hegel’s metaphysics—that which, from his point of view, guarantees the “positively rational” coherence of the system: not only the doctrine of absolute spirit but also a significant part of the teaching of the Logic. It seems to me that this sacrifice is necessary because of what we are and what our world is: we no longer live up to the heights of absolute spirit. But to pronounce this diagnosis is still to be Hegelian in a certain way, by accepting the congruence of the rational and the actual.
1. See J. Biard et al., Introduction à la lecture de la science de la logique de Hegel, vol. 1, L’être (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1987).
2. I accept the usual translation of Philosophie des Rechts as “Philosophy of Right.” But there are good reasons for choosing “Philosophy of Law” instead, inasmuch as on my view in the Hegelian context the “subjective” meaning of Recht (right) depends on the “objective” meaning of the word (law).
3. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 6 (Elements, 10; see Outlines, 4).
4. “By an architectonic I understand the art of systems. Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary cognition into science, i.e., makes a system out of a mere aggregate of it, architectonic is the doctrine of that which is scientific in our cognition in general” (KrV, Ak. 3, B 860 / 1C, p. 691).
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 64. Letter dated November 2, 1800.
6. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 18. “Logic is not used to prove the nature of the state, but the state is used to prove the Logic” (ibid.).
7. Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit: Vorlesungen über Entstehung und Entwicklung, Wesen und Werth der Hegel’schen Philosophie (Berlin: Rudolph Gaertner, 1857), 368–69. We find the same argument in Engels; see Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 67–70; Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International, 1941).
8. See Benedetto Croce, What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: Macmillan, 1915).
9. See in particular Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
10. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996); Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Hegel’s Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Terry Pinkard and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Hegel Reconsidered: Beyond Metaphysics and the Authoritarian State (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994).
11. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Robert B. Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 164–89.
12. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
13. Axel Honneth, Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Two Lectures, trans. Jack Ben-Levi (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 2000).
14. WdL 11, GW 11, p. 32, or WdL 12, GW 21, p. 48 (Science of Logic, 42).
16. RPh, § 360, GW 14.1, p. 281 (Elements, 380; see Outlines, 323).
17. Günter Nicolin, Hegel in Berichten Seiner Zeitgenossen (Hamburg: Meiner, 2013), document 363, p. 235: “It could also mean: ‘everything that is rational, must be.’”
18. See Hans Friedrich Fulda, “Spekulative Logik als die eigentliche Metaphysik: Zu Hegels verwandlung des neuzeitlichen Metaphysikverständnisses,” in Hegels Transformation der Metaphysik, ed. Detlev Pätzold (Cologne: Dinter, 1991); Emmanuel Renault, “La Métaphysique entre logique et sciences particulières,” in Logique et sciences concrètes dans le système Hégélien, ed. Jean-Michel Buée, Emmanuel Renault, and David Wittman (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). The state of the debate is summarized in Frederick Beiser, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–20. Discussions with Bernard Mabille helped me to clarify my own position.
19. On this point, see the illuminating observations—in spite of the radically anti-Hegelian conclusions drawn from them—of Dominique Dubarle, Logos et formalisation du langage (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), chaps. 1, 8–10.
20. To speak of speculative optimism obviously does not mean ascribing to Hegel the naive faith in the progress of the human spirit proclaimed by the Aufklärung; for him, it is the “work of the negative” that causes history, like any process, to advance. “Optimism” here designates only the proclaimed conviction that there will be an ultimate resolution of social and political contradictions.
22. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974), 4:619.
23. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts: Die Vorlesung von 1819/20 in einer Nachschrift (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 51. See Dieter Henrich’s commentary in his Introduction, 14–16.
24. RPh, § 360, GW 14.1, p. 281 (Elements, 380; see Outlines, 323).