“Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.”1 This is undoubtedly the most often quoted expression in the entire Hegelian corpus and also the one that has most contributed to Hegel’s bad reputation—perhaps we should say, to his bad reputations. Doesn’t it contain within it all the ambiguities of speculative dialectics, to use the term that constantly reappears in the writings of Hegel’s enemies? This, in any case, is what some of the most perspicacious first readers the Philosophy of Right already suspected, first and foremost Nikolaus von Thaden, a worthy representative of the Prussian administration that the work in question allegedly aims to glorify. In a letter to Hegel dated August 8, 1821, von Thaden presents “what was displeasing in [its] politics” to him, “a faithful soul, a zealous disciple.”2 There follows a long list of criticisms that constitute the first and nearly definitive version of the liberal argument against the Philosophy of Right. The disappointed disciple suspects Hegel of having, “out of enthusiasm for the princes,” “justified the reality that exists in most states,”3 and in particular in the Prussian state—in contradiction with the teachings that can and must be drawn from his philosophy and with the views that he had presented in the “famous article” of 1817 on the states of Wurtemberg. Von Thaden suggests that this piece, considered the most liberal of Hegel’s texts (even if some, e.g., Niethammer, find it too “governmental”—according to him, it “defends a bad cause with great wit”4), might well contain Hegel’s “true” political philosophy, meaning the only philosophy that conforms to the requirements of the system. Thus, the expression from the preface to the Philosophy of Right deserves special treatment. For von Thaden, this proposition, admittedly “the greatest, highest, and most important of all” is “philosophically true,” but it is also “politically false,”5 since it amounts to giving philosophical approval—Haym says “benediction”—to the most contingent and contestable aspects of reality: for example, the repressive and conservative policy of the Prussian state in applying the Carlsbad decisions after 1819. But the letter discusses only this latter aspect of the question. Von Thaden admits that this phrase from the preface is, in general, faithful to the broad lines of Hegelian philosophy; however, although he explains why it seems to him politically false or inappropriate, he does not say how it is philosophically true. So what then, exactly, does the equivalence of the actual and the rational mean when measured against the logical-systematic requirements of Hegelian philosophy?
According to the common translation—which corresponds to the most frequent interpretation and, it would seem, to the obvious meaning of the words—the phrase from the 1820 preface means “what is rational is real and what is real is rational.” It is easy to see where such an interpretation leads, for the vision of Hegelian philosophy that remains most widespread rests on it. When Hegel postulates that “all that is real is rational,” doesn’t he radically deny contingency, and in this way doesn’t he sacrifice freedom—which he nevertheless constantly invokes—to a costly necessitarianism? Of course, we can note in passing the unconscious addition of a universal qualifier that is absent from the text, as well as the omission—or at least relegation to the rank of a mere indirect filler—of the other half of the couplet, which proclaims the actuality of the rational. But, at bottom, this does not change much. In the eyes of nearly all, Hegel remains the philosopher for whom being is but the garb of the concept and who thus embodies the most extreme version of idealism’s mad ambition to “deduce” or “construct” everything that exists, including—as Krug perfidiously noted—the pen used to refute it.6 From this fundamental and fundamentally false position follow the other vices of such a philosophy: first and foremost, what Haym and others called its quietism, its irresistible tendency to accord the “benediction of the concept” to everything that exists and everything that is done, including the most revolting acts. And from there comes the imputation of conservatism that among Hegel’s opponents is so often associated with metaphysical suspicion of what is perceived as blind necessitarianism. Thus, Haym writes in the fifteenth chapter of his book on Hegel:
In contrast with a politics of progress [embodied by Fries], the preface gives classical expression to the spirit of the Restoration, it pronounces the absolute formula of political conservatism, quietism, and optimism: . . . what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.7
In the century that followed, interpretations went even further, to the point of seeing in Hegelian philosophy an early anticipation of Nazi or Stalinist totalitarianism. The move from the tyranny of the concept to tyranny tout court would appear plausible: certain interpretations—though not necessarily the strongest ones—bluntly proclaimed it.8
It is sometimes forgotten that in the second edition of the Encyclopedia (1827), Hegel formally contests such an interpretation of the dictum from the preface to the Philosophy of Right while at the same time conceding that “these simple propositions have seemed shocking to many.”9 To read him as saying that “[all] the real is rational” is to ignore the conceptual distinction that the Science of Logic establishes between Realität and Wirklichkeit, between the reality of empirical, contingent Dasein, as it is analyzed in the first section of the logic of being, and actuality, as it is presented in the third section of the logic of essence. There, Hegel specifies:
But when I spoke of actuality, it should have been evident in what sense I am using this expression, since I treated actuality in my more extensive Logic, too. There I directly distinguished it not only from what is contingent (which, afterall, exists as well), but also and more specifically and precisely from existence [Dasein], concrete existence [Existenz] and other determinations.10
The real in the sense of the Logic is that which, characterized by the finitude of its qualitative determination and the variability of its quantitative limit, can always be other than what it is and even—this is the meaning of the famous being-nothing-becoming sequence with which the Logic opens—necessarily and incessantly becomes other than it is. Existence (Dasein), whose reflected expression is “reality,” is “being with a non-being”:11 it suffers from an insurmountable negativity that identifies its positivity as a mix of being and nonbeing, being-self and being-other. However, within what is commonly called the real, this negativity remains enveloped, so to speak, within the massive and “naive” positivity of the existent, of what merely exists.
In reality, as quality with the accent on being an existent, that it is determinateness and hence also negation is concealed; reality only has, therefore, the value of something positive from which negating, restriction, lack, are excluded.12
Thus, the real is existence in its insurmountable contingency and its factuality but also in the deceptive obviousness of its presence: it is there.
Actuality, on the other hand, is “essence which is one with its appearance,”13 “the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence, or of what is inner and what is outer.”14 The result is that in the reality of immediate concrete existence, mediation, which is constantly hidden, can only manifest itself in the corrupting form of alteration and change, whereas what is actual is “exempted from passing-over.”15 But it is exempted precisely because its exteriority, its phenomenality or concrete existence (Existenz, as opposed to simple Dasein), do not presuppose any Hintergrund, any background on which its being and meaning would depend. From a Hegelian point of view, it is thus obvious that reality is something quite different from actuality: the two correspond to different levels of thought about what is. It is quite possible that actuality could be entirely rational, though the Logic does not specifically say so. On the other hand, reality cannot be absolutely rational, and the (empirical) real is often not rational at all: “Who is not smart enough to be able to see around him quite a lot that is not, in fact, how it ought to be?”16 No doubt reality cannot be assigned any coefficient of rationality inasmuch as instability, variability, and inequality are inherent to it.
However, we are not out of the woods yet. Not satisfied with the Encyclopedia’s clarification, Rudolf Haym formulated a weighty objection. The dictum from the preface to the Philosophy of Right “contains in concentrated form all the duplicity of the system” in that, through conscious play on the “empirical” and “ideal” meanings of the term wirklich, it leads either to a contradictory conclusion or to a tautological one. If the term wirklich is taken as it is usually understood, in the sense of empirical reality, then the Hegelian thesis is contradictory, for it is obvious—Hegel himself agrees—that the real is saturated with irrationality. One could then just as easily write “the real is not real.” But if we distinguish between Realität and Wirklichkeit, as the Logic tells us to, then the preface’s slogan becomes a tautology pure and simple: for what is the actual in the Hegelian sense if not precisely that which, within the real, is able to reveal its rationality? The famous catchphrase “what is actual is rational,” then, says nothing more than “what is rational is rational.”17 In one case, one insists on the actuality that the rational has or must have, and the Hegelian dictum takes on a revolutionary cast: the real must be made to conform to what the philosopher considers to be rational. In the other case, one emphasizes the rationality of the actual (in the sense of what is given), and one arrives at conservative conclusions: the real, as it is, must be credited with rationality for, as Hegel says, “what is is reason.”18 But this cultivated ambiguity comes at the cost of an unacceptable doubling of the concept of Wirklichkeit: there would be an “empirical, phenomenal” actuality and a “true, rational” actuality.19
Is it possible—and if so, how—to respond to this objection, one of the strongest ever made against the 1820 preface’s formulation and perhaps even against Hegelian philosophy overall, of which it stands as an emblem? To find out, it is necessary to return to the analysis of actuality developed in the Logic. If we want to avoid not only Haym’s conclusions but above all the suspicion of inconsistency that they cast over the system (the same term has two distinct and incompatible meanings), we should of course maintain the conceptual unity of Wirklichkeit, which does not rule out recognizing within it a specific semantic thickness analogous to that of other terms Hegel seizes onto in order to reproduce—thanks to lexical suppleness and in spite of the limitations of the propositional form—the very movement, the processuality, that constitutes all reality. The best example of the lexical polyvalence that Hegelian philosophy acquires by exploiting the lexical resources of natural language is of course the famous Aufheben, which as Hegel emphasizes has, in ordinary language, the double meaning of “to preserve” and “to put an end to.” He adds the following specification, which seems to apply to all the other terms that speculative philosophy uses in order to think the real in its processuality:
It must strike one as remarkable that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. For speculative thought it is gratifying to find words that have in themselves a speculative meaning.20
We can in fact consider that it is the suppleness of natural languages (a word never has one meaning or one context of use) that makes them more suitable than formalized language for expressing dialecticity or processuality. But it is clear that mobilizing the resources of language is quite different from passively accepting its ambiguities. We then assert that there is no confusion between “reality” and “actuality” in Hegel’s texts, or between the trivial meaning and the philosophical meaning of “actuality,” though this does not mean that Hegel does not play on the proximity between these terms and these meanings in common language.
So what then of Wirklichkeit within Hegelian logic? We must first consider where the examination of Wirklichkeit takes place: not within the doctrine of being, like the examination of reality, but rather within the doctrine of essence. It is not part of the study of thought in its immediacy but rather of thought “in its reflection and mediation.”21 This placement indicates that the actual, unlike simple, real Dasein, is from the outset given a depth that has to do with the fact that within it the inessential and the essential, contingency and necessity, are intertwined: there is, in actuality, a distance of self from self, a mobility, an active reflexivity that contrasts with the immediate coincidence with itself or with its own determinacy that is the hallmark of concrete existence, of the real in its immediacy. Essence designates in general the negativity and reflexivity that are always inherent to being in the apparent immediacy of its positivity or existence: “essence is past—but timelessly past—being.”22 Consequently, within actuality in the logical sense of the term, immediacy and mediation, exteriority and interiority, negativity and positivity are copresent, and each expresses itself in the terms of the other. The actual is an immediacy that carries within itself the present trace of the mediation that structures it: it is an exterior term that is entirely inhabited by the interiority toward which it points; a positive saturated with negativity. But this distance from self, this reflexivity, is here—contrary to the first two sections of the logic of essence—grasped in the movement of its reduction and not any longer in the movement of its emergence. This is the sense of the distinction between the shining (Scheinen) of essence, or its reflection within itself, and the appearance (Erscheinen) of this essence, understood as interiority, within the externality of a concrete existence or a phenomenon (Erscheinung) and the (self)-manifestation of actuality.23 Wirklichkeit in its totality designates the mobile, processual coincidence of the inner and outer, whatever name they go by: substance and accident, necessity and contingency, cause and effect. This process is what Hegel calls manifesting or revealing, where revealing is understood as the fact that essential “interiority” “is, in and for itself, nothing but this: to express itself.”24 Thus, unlike the forms of immediacy previously encountered (being, existence, phenomenon), “the actual is therefore manifestation. . . . This means that in its externality, and only in it, it is itself.”25
We must be more precise. Actuality is the culmination of the dialectics of essence, and Hegel, outlining a comparison between the structures of essence and the structures of being, suggests that actuality is in a sense the being for self of essence, just as existence and phenomenon are essence’s concrete existence:
Absolute essence in this simple unity with itself has no existence [Dasein]. But it must pass over into existence, for it is being-in-and-for-itself; that is to say, it differentiates the determinations which it holds in itself. . . . Since essence is at first simple negativity, in order to give itself existence and then being-for-itself, it must now posit in its sphere the determinateness which it contains in principle only in itself.26
With actuality, essence bends back on itself, so to speak, or rejoins itself after having exposed itself to the risk of externality. But this does not mean that the actual has absorbed the essential figures of externality (existence, appearance) into a pure interiority; to the contrary, actuality is in a sense nothing but externality; its interiority is exhausted in its external expression. This is explained by the specific characteristics of essence’s process. Born out of the initial and massive duality of “indeterminate” essence and the appearance to which being is temporarily reduced with regard to essence, the process by which essence posits its determinations—identity and difference, foundation and what is founded, essence and existence, essentiality and phenomenon, inner and outer—can be understood as a way of confronting, in order to overcome it, the dualistic tendency of the metaphysics Hegel is combating. The thought of actuality, “essence which is one with its appearance,”27 requires abandoning all understanding of what is on the basis of a presupposed background; it manifests the full coincidence of being and reason for being in a movement in which what is revealed is not united with the medium of being within which it manifests itself. Thus, what Hegel says about the necessary in his presentation of absolute necessity can be applied to the actual in general: it “only is because it is.”28 It is absolutely, without remainder—this is its dimension of externality or existence—but it is because it is, it is the raison d’être of its being—this is its dimension of inwardness or reflexivity.
The end of the second book of the Logic and the beginning of the third teach us that this process of constituting a surface without depth—or rather, a surface that is its own depth—leads from essence, which is an inwardness “glowing” or “appearing” within a network of external configurations, to concept, which is the free subject of infinite self-affirmation and is its own “development.”29 Consequently, the actual, capable of manifesting itself from itself and not within a foreign or predetermined milieu is, at bottom, nothing other than the prefiguration of the concept, freedom expressing itself—and it must do so—in the vocabulary of necessity. In other words, its process guarantees the conversion of necessity into freedom. But, insofar as actuality still bears the trace of the dualities whose Aufhebung it constitutes, it still only stands “on the threshold of the Concept.”30
Wirklichkeit is thus the becoming concept of being, always already mediated by the negativity of essence—and only this becoming. Let us admit that in the Hegelian system, the rational is identified with the concept. Strictly speaking, this is true only of the idea, which corresponds to “the proper philosophical meaning of ‘reason.’”31 But the idea, which itself is only “the unity in-itself of the subjective and the objective . . . posited as being-for-itself,”32 is at bottom nothing other than the coming to expression of the immanent rationality of the actual, of its being-concept.
As distinct from mere appearance [Erscheinung] actuality, being initially the unity of inward and outward, is so far from confronting reason as something other than it, that it is, on the contrary, what is rational through and through; and what is not rational must, for that very reason, be considered not to be actual.33
But the rationality of the actual stands in need of an explanation: the word concept is the name for this explanation.
We may thus say that the analysis of Wirklichkeit, as it is carried out at the end of the objective logic, describes the movement of the rational arriving at the position of subject of the real or of objectivity, where subjectivity is understood not as an anthropological determination but as the very vitality of the concept—the concept, “which, being dialectical, breaks through its own barrier, and opens itself up into objectivity”34—and where reality is understood as the infinitely open field in which “objective thought”—a thinking production of being by itself—is deployed. This last formulation expresses nothing other than the immanence of thought to the world, to actuality in the logical sense of the term. By its constitution, actuality thus testifies to the congruence of the “rational” and the “real”:
To say that there is understanding, or reason, in the world is exactly what is contained in the expression “objective thought.” But this expression is inconvenient precisely because “thought” is all too commonly used as if it belonged only to spirit, or consciousness, while “objective” is used primarily just with reference to what is unspiritual.35
In a sense, then, Haym is not wrong to judge the Hegelian identification of the rational with the real and the real with the rational to be either tautological or grossly contradictory. However, there is one crucial caveat: this identity is neither a fact nor a given but rather both the stakes and the result of an infinite process of adjustment between the concept and being, a process whose fundamental constitution the Logic exposes and whose concrete figures are presented, in all their diversity, by the “real sciences,” in particular the doctrine of objective spirit. This is why in the 1819–1820 course on the philosophy of right, we find the equation from the 1820 preface expressed in terms of movement: “what is rational becomes actual, and what is actual becomes rational.”36
What does the phrase whose speculative content I have just presented imply for the “real [philosophical] sciences” and in particular for the doctrine of objective spirit? This is the question of the “relation of philosophy to actuality,” which gives rise to “misunderstandings.” The principled answer that Hegel gives to this question comes out of his understanding of actuality but also exceeds it in part. Here is his answer:
Since philosophy is exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a world beyond which exists God knows where.37
This sentence highlights another aspect of the thesis of the rationality of the actual, one that the rest of the preface forcefully emphasizes, with clearly polemical intent:38 the refusal of all normativism. It is not philosophy’s task to prescribe what reality must or should be, for beyond the real or being there is nothing; in any case, nothing other than the void of an incantatory and self-referential discourse. Philosophy’s task is rather to “to comprehend what is . . . for what is is reason.”39 What is: not, of course, immediate concrete Dasein insofar as it is empirical, or even existence or phenomenon, which are always as if at a distance from the essentiality they reflect, but rather the actual, the present as the presence and actuality of the rational. Reason: not an abstractly normative reason claiming to teach the world how “it ought to be”40 but rather reason that is the “thought of the world,”41 or the self-thought of a world that discovers that it bears truth, and learns to regard itself as such. But then, if the equation of the actual and the rational signifies nothing other than the congruence of rationality with itself, the concordance of “reason as self-conscious spirit” and “reason as present actuality,”42 then isn’t Haym’s suspicion that the Hegelian formula is a flat-out tautology justified in spite of what I have just tried to claim?
To answer this question, it is useful to refer to what Hegel says about Plato’s Republic in the Philosophy of Right and in the lectures on the history of philosophy. His argumentation should be compared with Kant’s on the same subject;43 the comparison shows that although the two philosophers have different strategies, when it comes to the relationship between ideality and normativity, they both seek to do justice to what, in Plato, falls under the “tension of the concept.” What does Hegel say? The Platonic city is “a proverbial example of an empty ideal”44 because it rules out choosing one’s social position (which is imposed) or one’s spouse (sexual communism) as well as private property: it eliminates everything that modern mankind demands in the name of the idea of freedom. These measures do indeed consistently exclude “the principle of subjective freedom.”45 But this exclusion is not some whim of Plato’s or the trait of a totalitarian fantasy. It proves that he, better than his contemporaries, understood just how much the principle of autonomy—which philosophy was the first to valorize by proclaiming everyone’s right to think for himself—contradicted the very essence of Greek Sittlichkeit, whose purest expression is democracy:
Established ethicality [Sittlichkeit] has in general the relation of the substantial, and therefore is maintained as divine. This is without question the fundamental determination. The determination which stands in contrast to this substantial relation of the individual to established morality is the subjective will of the individual.46
The Republic declares the incompatibility of Greek Sittlichkeit and the “substantial” rationality around which it was ordered with subjective self-determination; in imagistic terms, it demonstrates the necessity of Socrates’ execution and perhaps also—though developing this point would lead us too far astray—Christ’s. It was Plato’s great merit to have foreseen—precisely in trying to eliminate it—the political effect that the emergence of “subjective freedom”47 would necessarily have. It is the hallmark of modern Sittlichkeit to hold that the universal cannot truly be universal unless it welcomes within itself the principle of particularity and recognizes the right of subjects to think and desire for themselves and that the state must let develop within itself a civil society that carries its “unilateral principle” to its logical conclusion. Indirectly, Plato helps us think through this. In a single movement, the author of the Republic grasped “the nature of Greek ethics” and discerned that it was “being penetrated by a deeper principle”48 that would rattle and then replace it: he exposes the essence, in all its rationality, of the polis, pointing out the historical limits of this rationality and, consequently, the inscription of all rationality within a history. Thus, he simultaneously demonstrates the rationality of the actual (the Republic is an ideal-type that captures the deep meaning of Greek historical reality) and the actuality of the rational (what this philosophy proscribes is precisely “the pivot on which the impending world revolution turned”49).
The equivalence of the rational and the actual, of reason that thinks and reason that is, is thus no more tautological when it is grasped in the domain of objective spirit than it is in a strictly logical context: moreover, who would claim that the Republic proposes a copy of the Athenian city or even a simple inverted image of it? The identity between them is of the order of a process or a history. As Plato’s example shows with perfect clarity, this history is the history by which objective spirit as ethicality (Sittlichkeit) produces an image of itself in thought and in so doing works toward its own transformation. Hence, it becomes clear that Hegel’s resolute refusal of normativism—philosophy always comes too late to tell the world what it must be—does not at all prevent the concept from having intrinsic normative power. To the contrary, philosophy demands it if it is true that the idea “is not so impotent that it merely ought to be, and is not actual.”50 But this normativity remains immanent to the field of objectivity to which it applies. It is therefore necessary to stop representing the concept or norm as the product of a subjectivity defined at an anthropological level, freely disposing of its productions. The norm of the true—the “rational”—far from any separation between Sollen and Sein, which, according to Hans Kelsen,51 is the precondition of any coherent normativism, is present at the heart of the historical world—the “actual”—“as the rose in the cross of the present,”52 to quote the enigmatic expression from the 1820 preface. In my opinion, we may take this to mean that the true—the speculative—is something like an indicator of the fact that, within a world not yet reconciled with itself, a world prey to suffering and contradiction, the dimension of Versöhnung is not only present in the mode of the implicit or potential but is truly actual inasmuch as it is this alone that makes it possible to conceive of a future for the world. But, at bottom, is this future of a historical world itself historical in nature? Is it another figure of the world or another world?
What does the doctrine of objective spirit as a “real science” deal with? With the real, of course, or rather with the actual, whose immanent rationality or concept this doctrine brings to expression. As the example of the Republic has very clearly shown, this does not mean that it is a mere copy of the real: to grasp the rationality of the actual is to reveal the drive that moves the real and carries it beyond itself; it is to think the contradiction that will usher in a new world. The 1820 preface contains famous, though enigmatic, remarks on this topic. Let us first highlight two judgments that at first seem contradictory at the very least: philosophy “is its own time comprehended in thoughts,”53 and “what matters is to recognize in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.”54 How can philosophy simultaneously be the “daughter of its time” and the expression of a timeless truth—even when its object is intrinsically historical? What, indeed, can a political philosophy speak of if it has no normative vocation and if its object—the state—is by its nature engaged in history and exposed to contingency?
A passage from the preface can put us on the path to answering these questions:
This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. . . . Such instruction as it may contain cannot be aimed at instructing the state on how it ought to be, but rather at showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be comprehended.55
It should henceforth be understood that it is not philosophy’s role to imagine what the state should be: as we have seen, Hegel judges all forms of normativism to be incompatible with the subordination of thought to the present or the actual. But in what sense is it philosophy’s task to present how the state must be comprehended? According to a perspective such as that of Haym or Ilting, this affirmation proves Hegel’s political “quietism,” or, to put it harshly, his servility; didn’t he write to chancellor Hardenberg in 1821 that the Philosophy of Right was “the immediate auxiliary to the government’s beneficent intentions”?56 But it seems to me that this statement can be understood in another way if we agree to take seriously the stated claim of Hegel’s philosophy to be both “exploration of the rational” and “comprehension of the present and the actual.”
Philosophy is a thinking of the present. Its vocation is thus to be the rational knowledge of actuality, or rather to let actuality arrive, within itself, at awareness of its own degree and shape of rationality. But just as actuality is not identical with reality, the present that philosophy thinks is not what occurs contingently; it is the timeless presence of the rational within the time of the event:
In philosophy . . . we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally—in short, with reason. And that is quite enough to occupy our attention.57
We must add that this eternity of the rational, emphasized quite provocatively at the beginning of the Science of Logic,58 has no place that is distinct from the real: it reveals itself in the real not as a masked inwardness but rather as the mediation that binds the real to itself. Despite the preface’s recourse to a metaphorical register that evokes the essentialist representation of a background truth (there is a “brightly colored covering” that one must “penetrate” in order to find the “core” of truth),59 in the “real science” of objective spirit, Hegel maintains the teaching of speculative logic: that is, that the revelation or manifestation that is proper to the actual in its rationality (in its becoming-concept) is not that of an “Other” of the actual; its “being-there is only the manifestation of itself, not of an other.”60
In these circumstances, what is the object of political philosophy (in Hegelian terms, the doctrine of objective spirit) given that this object can be defined analogously to that of other “real sciences”? What is it to teach “how the state must be recognized”? It is to show, within the real, the presence of what both “actually” structures it and what attests to its immanent limitation. To think the political—but also law, civil society, and history itself—as “the image and actuality of reason”61 is to measure what, within its own constitution, exceeds it. Not in the sense that there would be, beyond the state and history, an absolute, intangible, metaphysical truth: infinite spirit has no space distinct from the space of spirit in its subjective and objective finitude. But rather in the sense that the thought of truth—and also the thought of the truth of the state and history—is that which assigns them a limit from within simply because it is of the order of knowledge. Philosophy, as the thought of the rational in actuality, indicates the insurmountable limit of every form or degree of actuality, which stems from the fact that its thought logically precedes its being (which is paradoxically expressed as a chronological delay):
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.62
The thought of spirit in its actuality only comes at dusk, precisely when one of its figures ceases to be actual. This is why this thought only becomes complete in transgressing its object—that is, in revealing itself to be philosophy tout court. The conjunction of the rational and the actual, the cornerstone of Hegel’s philosophy, demonstrates the “relativity of political philosophy”63 at the same time as it defines its task.
1. “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.” RPh, GW 14.1, p. 24 (Elements, 20; see Outlines, 14).
2. Johannes Hoffmeister, ed. Briefe von und an Hegel (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952–1960), 2:278. For an English excerpt, see Hegel, The Letters, 462–65.
3. Hoffmeister, Briefe von und an Hegel, 2:278.
4. Letter to Hegel, dated December 27, 1817 (ibid., 2:172).
5. Hoffmeister, Briefe von und an Hegel, 2:279; Hegel, The Letters, 463.
6. See W 2, p. 195–97. On the question of contingency, see Dieter Henrich, “Hegels Theorie des Zufalls,” in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971); Jean-Marie Lardic, “La contingence chez Hegel,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Comment le sens commun comprend la philosophie, trans. Jean-Marie Lardic, 63–114 (Arles: Actes Sud, 1989); Bernard Mabille, Hegel: L’épreuve de la contingence (Paris: Aubier, 1999).
7. Haym, Hegel und Seine Zeit, 365. Haym also says that “the Hegelian system became the scientific home of the spirit of the Prussian Restoration” (359).
8. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Hubert Kiesewetter, Von Hegel zu Hitler: Die politische Verwirklichung einer totalitaren Machtstaatstheorie in Deutschland, 1815–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995); Ernst Topitsch, Die Sozialphilosophie Hegels als Heilslehre und Herrschaftsideologie, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1981).
9. Enzykl, § 6 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 45 (Encyclopedia 34).
10. Enzykl, § 6, GW 20, p. 45 (Encyclopedia 34).
11. WdL 11, GW 11, p. 67.
12. WdL 12, GW 21, p. 99 (Science of Logic, 85).
13. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 243 (Science of Logic, 339).
14. Enzykl, § 142, GW 20, p. 164 (Encyclopedia 213).
15. Enzykl, § 142 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 164 (Encyclopedia 214).
16. Enzykl, § 6 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 46 (Encyclopedia 30).
17. Haym, Hegel und Seine Zeit, 368 ff.
18. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 21; see Outlines, 15). See Haym, Hegel und Seine Zeit, 369: “Revolutionary in its logical part, the system is conservative in its practical part.” This judgment is identical to Engels’s in Ludwig Feuerbach, where, however, the intention is the opposite: to valorize the system’s revolutionary potential.
19. Haym, Hegel und Seine Zeit, 368.
20. WdL 12, GW 21, p. 94 (Science of Logic, 82).
21. Enzykl, § 83, GW 20, p. 120 (Encyclopedia 133).
22. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 241 (Science of Logic, 337).
23. On these three dialectical modalities of essence and the relation between them, see WdL 2, GW 11, p. 380–81 (Science of Logic, 477–78).
24. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 368 (Science of Logic, 464).
25. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 381 (Science of Logic, 478). See Enzykl, § 142, GW 20, p. 164 (Encyclopedia 213): “The utterance [Äusserung/extériorisation] of the actual is the actual itself.”
26. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 242 (Science of Logic, 338–39).
27. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 243 (Science of Logic, 339).
28. WdL 2, GW 11, p. 391 (Science of Logic, 487).
29. “The progression of the Concept is no longer either passing-over or shining into another, but development.” Enzykl, § 161, GW 20, p. 177 (Encyclopedia 237). The addition to this paragraph clarifies that with this development, “only that is posited which is already implicitly present.”
30. Enzykl, § 156 Zusatz, W 8, p. 302 (Encyclopedia 231).
31. Enzykl, § 214, GW 20, p. 216 (Encyclopedia 88).
32. Enzykl, § 212, GW 20, p. 214 (Encyclopedia 86).
33. Enzykl, § 143 Zusatz, W 8, p. 280 (Encyclopedia 214).
34. Enzykl, § 192 Zusatz, W 8, p. 345 (Encyclopedia 268).
35. Enzykl, § 24 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 67–68 (Encyclopedia 56).
36. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, 51. There is no need to indulge in haphazard conjectures about why Hegel did not, in the end, retain the preface’s formulation.
37. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 13 (Elements, 20; see Outlines, 13).
38. I do not deal with this aspect here. Information on the context can be found in the “Présentation” section of my translation of the Philosophy of Right as well as in Adriaan Peperzak’s meticulous commentary in the preface to Philosophy and Politics (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1987).
39. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 21; see Outlines, 15).
40. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 21; see Outlines, 15).
41. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 16 (Elements, 23; see Outlines, 16).
42. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 22; see Outlines, 1).
43. See KrV, Ak. 3, A 316, B 372–73.
44. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 14 (Elements, 20; see Outlines, 13).
45. GdP, W 19, p. 123 (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 109). Hegel also speaks of “repression of the principle of individuality.”
46. GdP, W 19, p. 113–14 / (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. Frances H. Simson and E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 98 modified.
47. RPh, § 124 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 110 (Elements, 151 see Outlines, 122).
48. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 14 (Elements, 20; see Outlines, 13).
49. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 14 (Elements, 20; see Outlines, 13).
50. Enzykl, § 6 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 46 (Encyclopedia 30).
51. “The difference between is and ought cannot be explained furthermore. We are immediately aware of the difference.” Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1989), p. 5.
52. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15–16 (Elements, 22; see Outlines, 15).
53. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 21; see Outlines, 15).
54. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 14 (Elements, 20, modified; see Outlines, 14).
55. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 (Elements, 21, modified; see Outlines, 14–15).
56. Hoffmeister, Briefe von und an Hegel, 2:214. Cf. Hegel, The Letters, 459.
57. G. F. W. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), 210; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 171.
58. “This content [of logic] is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.” WdL 11, GW 11, p. 17, or WdL 12, GW 21, p. 34 (Science of Logic, 29).
59. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 14 (Elements, 21; see Outlines, 14).
60. Enzykl, § 142, GW 20, p. 164 (Encyclopedia 393).
61. RPh, § 360, GW 14.1, p. 281 (Elements, 380; see Outlines, 323).
62. RPh, GW 14.1, p. 16 (Elements, 23; see Outlines, 16).
63. Bernard Bourgeois, La pensée politique de Hegel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 6.