It is clear that the doctrine of objective spirit gives a major role to both social and political institutions, but what does this mean for the problem of normativity (which Hegel in no way dismisses, despite what is sometimes claimed) and for our understanding of the normatively structured actions of empirical (“finite”) subjects within institutional networks that more or less restrict them? My hypothesis is that the Hegelian doctrine of Sittlichkeit inaugurates a very particular relationship between subjectivity and institutions, one that makes it possible to determine, by using an original conception of normativity, what it means for individuals to lead an ethical life. We must first define the vocabulary used here. Obviously “ethical life” must mean something other than biological life, which belongs to the philosophy of nature, or the life of the concept, the “logical life,” discussed in the Science of Logic; however, ethical life presupposes and in a sense extends them. Insofar as it is understood in its most general sense as the “resolving of . . . contradictions,” isn’t life “speculative?”1 Isn’t it, as Hegel proclaimed in Frankfurt, “the binding of binding and nonbinding?2 But ethical life (das sittliche Leben) must also not be confused with ethicality (die Sittlichkeit), though it presupposes it. If Sittlichkeit consists in “lead[ing] a universal life,”3 we still must understand how conforming to the rules of the “universal language” formulated in “customs and laws”4 allows the individual to live a life that is ethical while also being his or her own life. In other words, how does observing the beliefs and practices normatively defined by a cultural and political community authorize and even encourage individuals to attain a self-representation and a practical autonomy without which, in the context of modernity, they would be no more than mere biological particulars—that is, precisely not individuals? To speak, as Hegel sometimes (though rarely5) does, of an ethical life is thus to suppose that the matter of the institution of individuality or subjectivity within the powerfully institutional context Hegel calls objective spirit has been resolved. This is the issue I will discuss here.
It is generally accepted that Hegel’s understanding of Sittlichkeit substantially changed between his Jena writings and his mature works. The earlier writings, which developed what Jean Hyppolite called a “heroic conception of freedom,” were marked by strong criticism of the withdrawal into the “private individual”6 and of the “political nullity”7 characteristic of the modern bourgeois world. In these writings, the “repression” of individuality, or at least its subordination to the superior norm of the politeuein, of civic life, is the condition for true, “absolute”—not “relative”—ethicality. By contrast, the later writings, marked by Hegel’s goal of “reconciling with the times,” dismiss the ideal of the “beautiful and happy freedom of the Greeks”8 and make the disentanglement of civil society and the state, of bourgeois life and political life, the defining feature of the modern world and the sign of its ethical superiority. Not only do these writings not make the “disappearance of the individual”9 the condition of Sittlichkeit, they present the affirmation of the individual, with a few caveats, as a positive trait of modernity, including political modernity. Here we need only think of Hegel’s eminently positive judgment of the “elementary catechism” that is the Declaration of the Rights of Man in his 1817 article on the Wurtemberg Assembly: he calls that declaration a declaration of the individual’s “natural and inalienable” powers, and it is precisely for this reason that it expresses the “simple bases of political institutions.”10 However, it seems to me that what changed in the interim was not the concept of Sittlichkeit itself but rather Hegel’s determination of the conditions of its actualization and his assessment of its effects on the structure of action and the constitution of subjectivity.
The clearest definition of Sittlichkeit as distinct from morality (which is the relationship of subjectivity to norms of actions that it prescribes itself autonomously) and from the law (the relationship of a person to things and, through them, to other persons) is in section 142 of the Philosophy of Right:
Ethicality is the Idea of freedom as the living good which has its knowledge and volition in self-consciousness, and its actuality through self-conscious action. Similarly, it is in ethical being that self-consciousness has its motivating end and a foundation which has being in and for itself. Ethicality is accordingly the concept of freedom which has become the existing [vorhandenen] world and the nature of self-consciousness.11
What should we take from this definition of ethicality? First of all, it actualizes moral-practical normativity: in it, the idea of freedom takes on an actuality that it does not have on its own, and the abstract good to which moral subjectivity refers becomes a good that is living because it is embodied in shared community practices and representations. Second, ethicality is based on the interaction between objective universality (the universality of what Hegel calls “ethical being” or, later in the text, “ethical substance”) and particular subjectivity (individuals’ “self-consciousness”): the first is the “base” of the second, and the latter is the principle of actualization of the former. Third, objective spirit overcomes the seemingly fundamental scission between the subject and the world. Ethicality is a world that is imposed through a kind of immediate givenness (it is vorhanden, present in the mode of “that’s how it is”), but it is a world of intersubjectivity, a world within which subjects are practically constituted in their double relationship to other subjects (with whom they are engaged in a complex game of recognition) and to a “given” that is always already there but that only is thanks to the individual subject and other subjects. It is thus immediately clear that Sittlichkeit involves an original relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. But before going into this matter, we should recall a few essential aspects of the Hegelian concept of ethicality.
As I have said, Sittlichkeit is not a “part” of objective spirit, juxtaposed to law and to morality; in reality, it alone truly corresponds to the Hegelian definition of objective spirit.12 It is an objectivity lived by particular subjects; the identity of these subjects is constituted in the lived relationship they have with this objective totality, which, conversely, only exists through their actions and thanks to their inner dispositions. Ethicality thus coincides with objective spirit in its totality. Law and morality are not distinct layers but rather its abstract moments: they have substance only if they are articulated within the concrete unity of Sittlichkeit. Of course, they are not beings of reason, Gedankendinge. But they are abstract, since fulfilling their concept presupposes elements that are foreign to their own principle: the realization of law is not only legal, and that of the moral end assumes that ethical objectivity is conferred on the norms that subjectivity claims to give itself. Thus objective spirit, grasped from the standpoint of these two moments, maintains an incompleteness that it is up to ethicality to overcome. This does not mean that within ethicality the relations that characterize abstract/private law and morality disappear. To the contrary, it is there that they receive the guarantee of their actuality. Ethicality gathers together and reshapes the objective formalism of law and the subjective formalism of moral consciousness. But though this coming together overcomes the abstract opposition between the two, it does not abolish their difference. Sittlichkeit has first and foremost the traits of a world of objectivity whose determinations, forming a “circle of necessity,” are the “ethical powers which govern the lives of individuals.”13 However, these individuals are not only “accidents” of this substance, for the system of objective determinations to which their actions belong is for them a lived world that only has reality when it is an “object [Objekt] of knowledge” or at least of belief on their part.14 Unlike laws of nature, ethical laws have validity only because of the representations individuals have of them: their validity rests on subjects’ knowledge and recognition of them.
This is why there are two sides to the relationship the subject maintains with the objective structures of the ethical world. On the one hand, for the subject, “the ethical substance and its laws and powers” have “absolute authority and power, infinitely more firmly based than the being of nature”;15 thus, like the laws of nature, they exist entirely outside of the subject’s reach. On the other hand, this power of objectivity does not rule out the possibility of the subject finding his or her own place within it as long as the subject does not merely contrast his or her “virtue” to the “way of the world” and recognizes within objective spirit that which constitutes his or her own essence, that by which he or she can be a subject. In this way, the individual’s relation to the conditions and norms of his or her actions, which is still external when it takes the form of the moral ought, becomes fully internal when it becomes Sitte: as a “general mode of behavior,”16 ethical custom is a practice that expresses subjects’ adherence to the universal that constitutes them. Thus, Sittlichkeit reveals the decisive role of subjectivity within objective spirit. Objective spirit only corresponds to its concept, which is to be a “world [where] freedom is present as a necessity,”17 insofar as within it a particular subjectivity is the moment that validates the objective rules presiding over its constitution. But particular subjectivity only succeeds in this if, unlike “formal” moral consciousness, it recognizes the priority of objectivity, the “right of the world,” and accepts that relativization of its own aspirations.
Within objective spirit, the normative content to which subjectivities give actuality by adhering to it is not first posited by this subjective adherence: it is their substance, but, as substance, it is always presupposed by their action. Sittlichkeit, a second nature,18 is certainly radically different from external nature, for it is freedom expressing itself in the form of necessity rather than the blind rule of necessity. However, insofar as it is spontaneously perceived, it remains a nature: it speaks the language of necessity. Although Sittlichkeit allows subjective individuality to recognize itself and complete itself, it is not spontaneously apprehended as such, especially once subjectivity has freed itself from the restrictions that previously applied to it. For the individual, reaching true freedom requires an education (Bildung), an apprenticeship in the universal through the “hard work”19 it does on its immediate naturalness and its representation of freedom. Thus, the individual often resists a liberation that at first appears as an external violence. Consequently, in the sphere of objective spirit, the reconciliation between subjective spirit and objective spirit often remains (merely) objective. This is why, especially in the political-state domain, obligations appear to win out over rights—understood as subjective rights—even though the two are speculatively of equal weight and in truth are even reciprocal.20 The “ethical disposition” and the “political disposition”21 consist not in the subject’s power of self-determination in conformity with rational norms established by his or her reason but rather in his or her trusting and naive acknowledgment of the authority of the state and its laws. Thus, Sittlichkeit does not depend essentially on the virtue of the individual’s goals and behavior but rather on the fact that the individual is a “citizen of a state with good laws.”22 However, the validity of these laws of ethical nature requires something other than passive submission from individuals. It is precisely because humans do not have “the innocence of a plant”23 that second nature, unlike first nature, must be recognized and willed by subjective consciousness, which has been educated to do so. In the rational state, subjective freedom does not abdicate its rights. Thus, there must be some mediation between rights and obligations, between the state and subjective consciousness. This mediation is guaranteed by the substructures of the ethical sphere, which all share the feature of being institutions.
So-called institutionalist theories aim to go beyond the choice between subjectivism and objectivism.24 The Hegelian doctrine of Sittlichkeit shares this perspective even if it seems to lean toward the side of objectivity. This is precisely where its profound coherence lies: beyond the apparent heterogeneity of the materials it brings together, its goal is to show the institutional rootedness of individual and collective practices, which law and morality reduce to abstract operations (the acquisition, transferal, and restitution of rights; the moral imputation of action and the normative networks it involves) and only envision in their individual dimension (law judges a person’s acts; morality evaluates a subject’s actions). This institutional anchoring can also be seen in the family (marriage, filiation, inheritance) and in the economic and social relations that connect classes of individuals in the depoliticized space of civil society; it is also at the heart of the theory of the state, whose laws and institutions Hegel says are “will as thought.”25 Thanks to institutions (marriage, corporations, representative assemblies), the subject can submit to a universal regulation without feeling dispossessed. This is the paradox that Hegelian institutionalism assumes and accounts for. The question must nevertheless be asked: does recognition of a “right of the world” impose a restriction on the “right of subjective will,”26 or is it the condition of its actuality? The Hegelian philosophy of Sittlichkeit does not necessarily imply subordinating the subjective will to the objective will lodged in institutions, but it is clear that it excludes the opposite, for all institutionalism gives priority to objective structures; this priority may be described as that of syntax over the semantics and pragmatics of the system of ethicality.
The complex relationship individuals have with their peers and with the objective ethical milieu in which they exist involves a paradox that must be accounted for. On the one hand, the “objective ethical element”—in other words, the social and political world—is like a “circle of necessity” that has “absolute authority and power”27 over individuals and their representations of themselves, others, and their milieu; on the other hand, however, these objective powers “are not something alien to the subject,” for they guarantee “the right of individuals to their particularity”28—in other words, they institute their very individuality. Hegel describes this mutual constitution of subjects and the ethical world by using the Aristotelian idea of second nature. Ethical-political nature is nothing other than the movement of the institution of the identity that individuals claim as their own nature or freedom. In other words, for freedom to be more than a hollow claim, it must always already be mediated, structured by what appears to be its other but which in reality is nothing but the system of conditions of its reality and objectivity. Thus, objective spirit is a fully spiritual (let us say human) world but one that initially seems rife with impersonal objectivity. This corresponds to the spontaneous reaction of consciousness when it perceives the network of norms and institutions that frame its action as obstacles to its autonomy rather than as conditions of its freedom. Whence the paradox characteristic of objective spirit: in it, the subject finds its identity and constitutes itself in and through it, but it also exposes itself to the far-from-illusory risk of dispossession and alienation. Nothing, other than blind faith in the virtue of institutions (both static and dynamic), can entirely prevent the risk of individuals submitting to nonuniversalizable interests or the risk of social and political institutions—and therefore individual choices—becoming tainted by ideology, which is never more than a false consciousness of universality adopted by a particular form of being-self. Thus, even in adopting Hegel’s premises, it is perhaps appropriate to pair the elucidation of the structuring conditions of subjectivity, which are located in institutions, with a critique of ideologies intended to prevent or combat particular corruptions of those institutions. It is here that critical theory, basing itself on Marx and Freud, took leave of Hegelian orthodoxy, which right-wing neo-Hegelianism proved could sanction some very unsettling derivations when “the dialectic of Enlightenment is transformed objectively in delusion.”29
How are we to explain the paradoxical relationship by which subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, individuality and sociality mutually construct and strengthen one another? We must introduce a third term, one that appears occasionally yet decisively in Hegel’s text: the institution. Expressions of the “power of the rational in necessity,”30 ethical institutions (political, social, familial), because they are, so to speak, always already there, guarantee not only the cohesiveness of the individual and the objective totality but also their common genesis. In a single movement—the one that creates “shared meanings,” as Charles Taylor puts it, or, in Castoriadis’s terms, the “imaginary institution of society”—institutions structure subjectivity and objectivity, the individual (along with the individual’s very modern claim to freedom and autonomy) and the community (understood as a space of conversation that may be a site of conflict). For Hegel as for Hauriou, institutions are not artifacts; they are “geological layers,” a kind of archaic basis for truth, on which mores, beliefs, and practices, intertwining to form the field of action, are based as if on a kind of nature. For instituted subjects, institutions are quasi things that furnish the world in which they move: they are there, seemingly eternal,31 apparent because presupposed by the everyday behaviors for which they provide a horizon of meaning; they establish an “objective reason.”32 Thus, the church, the army, school, professional or associative organizations, as well as more abstract configurations such as marriage, the market, and language are institutions that produce meaning, truths, norms, and individuals. And yet they are not things, because there is nothing material about them: institutions are purely symbolic relations that structure the perceptions, utterances, and actions of subjects who only attain the status of subject by carrying out the rites that indicate their belonging to an institution and at the same time giving that institution the only reality it can have: symbolic—in other words, subjective-objective—reality. We can verify this by studying the role of familial and social institutions in constituting not only social but also political individuality.
Hegel says that social institutions (but we may generalize to all institutions) form “the constitution . . . in the realm of particularity.”33 In what sense are marriage and corporations (the first two institutions his analysis focuses on) institutions? In what sense do they constitute, and what do they constitute? To answer these questions, we must take the word constitution in its dynamic sense: something that institutes. Social institutions constitute “the trust and disposition of individuals”34 in the realm of particularity specific to the institution. Marriage—love within an institution, if not institutional love (Hegel calls it “rightfully ethical love”)35—is an ethical relationship insofar as it overcomes individual arbitrariness without thereby eliminating the vagaries of love’s choices; the strength of the institution lies in its ability to channel the contingency of subjective choices without sacrificing that contingency to pure legal formalism, as Kant does. Hence, marriage institutes an interpersonal relationship—the union of the sexes—not by sacrificing the sex drive but by making it a “natural moment” of a relationship that is not essentially natural but rather ethical or spiritual; thus, it institutes personality (feminine as well as masculine) in its nonlegal or superlegal aspects.
As for corporations, once we understand that Hegel is referring to something entirely different from the Zünfte—the guilds and confraternities of the ancien régime whose sole function was to maintain their members’ privileges and which contradicted the universalizing logic of the market in favor of particular interests—we see that they, too, play a constitutive role in individuality itself. The clearest text on this subject is the 1817 article on the Wurtemberg estates, which contrasts Zunftgeist, the “guild mentality” characteristic of the old corporations, with the modern institutionalization of social particularity that truly constitutes individuality (social and political) by allowing it to be “something,” although taken on its own, it is “nothing.”36 In other words, social individuality (the representations, choices, and behaviors of a person or bourgeois) and, mediately, political individuality (those of the citizen), this “volition which has become habitual,”37 are not given with the physical individual but are socially constructed, which means they are generated by institutionalized social life. But how?
While the dispositions of subjective spirit are aroused by the institutions of objective spirit, they are not determined by them in the sense that these institutions could be considered the superstructural reflection of these dispositions, and this is why something like an ethical life is possible: the Hegelian theory of the ethical constitution of subjectivity is not a theory of ideology in Marx’s sense, even if it can (or must, according to Horkheimer and Adorno) be completed by such a theory. Hegel’s weak institutionalism seeks to account for the institution of individuality without reducing it to a mere trace of what creates it, that is, objective familial, social, and political institutions. An individual’s identity presupposes partial memberships—that is, institutions (the family, the corporation, but also the legal system and the market) that nourish individual identity by creating feelings of cobelonging: I am not only “a bourgeois”—that is, as Rousseau fiercely notes, “nothing”38—I am identified, including in my own eyes, by my belonging to a certain profession, a certain religious or cultural community, a certain territorial collectivity, and so on.
The conscious and active individuality required by the conditions of modern social and political life presupposes institutions and networks of belonging, but it never develops mechanically: my social identity (my ethos) and my political identity (my opinions and engagements) cannot be deduced from my objective properties in the institutional field, and this is why I am “free” (according to a summary understanding of freedom) when I take on the institutional rootedness of my particular individuality. I am free, first, in the common sense of the term: I am not (entirely) determined by the properties that individualize me. But I am also free in the specifically Hegelian sense of the word: if freedom consists in being at home with oneself (or arriving at oneself) in the other, in an “absolute affirmation” born out of “negativity that deepens itself within itself to the point of the utmost intensity,”39 then it is clear why the actual freedom of the social and political (as well as moral) subject arises out of the formative infusion, which is cultural in the strong sense,40 of objective spirit diffused by institutions and lodged in mores and customs. But this infusion “inclines without necessitating,” as Leibniz might say. Thus, ethical and political freedom does not simply consist in recognizing necessity (embodied by institutions and the influence they have over individual representations and wills) but in sometimes confronting it, as, for example, in a context where an individual’s honor is at stake in a confrontation with injustice, as in the French Revolution.
Let us now look at how, within the context of objective spirit, the various shapes of individuality are articulated: the legal person, the moral subject, the social human (the “Bürger als bourgeois” of the Philosophy of Right),41 and finally, the political citizen. A linear reading (which goes along with a teleological understanding of Aufhebung) would lead us to think that each of these shapes surpasses the one before it, which is thus canceled out rather than preserved. But I believe that here (and in general)42 Aufhebung signifies a regression toward what a position is based on (i.e., what legitimizes it relatively) rather than a progression toward what refutes it: as the Logic indicates, progression toward the result is also a regression toward the foundation,43 since true immediacy is mediated by the mediations that proceed from it. The Philosophy of Right ratifies this “progressive-regressive” structure of the “method of truth”: here, too, the “result” (the state) is the “true ground” of the moments that precede it in the “development of the scientific concept”: the family and civil society.44 Thus, the specifically political form of individuality (citizenship and that which expresses it, “political disposition”) is the logical result and the real foundation of the earlier shapes—the person, the subject, and the bourgeois. And in the same way that “the state in general is in fact the primary factor [and] only within the state does the family first develop into civil society,”45 the citizen is the “true foundation” of the bourgeois and, mediately, of the person and the moral subject. What does this mean? It means that within the modern conditions of a functional differentiation between the social and political, political subjectivity or ethos is the condition of actuality (though not of possibility) of that in which it itself is rooted, that is, it is the condition of the prepolitical shapes (familial and social) of individuality. It is what delivers them from the abstraction they maintain within themselves, which means that outside of the political configuration of modernity (the postrevolutionary state), the legal person, the moral subject, and the social human have no actual existence. And, as we have seen, this political subjectivity is generated by “the institutions within the state.”46 Thus, we are dealing with a recursive scheme. Social (and political) institutions generate the spirit of citizenship, which in return carries out and nourishes the subjective dispositions (e.g., the “mentality of the corporation”)47 required by the proper functioning of the partial systems that are the family and civil society, which themselves actualize the “abstract” determinations of law and morality. In this way, subjective dispositions (“the spirit of the whole” as well as “esprit de corps”48) are indeed produced by the operation of institutions, but they themselves retroactively feed these institutions and allow them to operate, which in certain cases means that they contribute to their transformation.
One might object that if the dispositional components of Sittlichkeit—in other words, the various shapes of ethical subjectivity—are destined to consolidate the institutional structures that cause them to emerge, individuals’ autonomy with regard to these institutions remains very limited. Two responses can be made to this objection. First, it is necessary to take into consideration the fact that Hegel (like Kant before him) rejects any solely negative definition of subjective freedom; from Hegel’s perspective, it does not at all follow that an individual who diverges from the representations and practices that conform to institutions or who rejects them is eo ipso more free than one who, without being constrained, conforms to the obligations tied to his or her position.49 To the contrary, Hegel maintains that
The right of individuals to their subjective determination to freedom is fulfilled in so far as they belong to ethical actuality; for their certainty of their own freedom has its truth in such objectivity, and it is in the ethical realm that they actually possess their own essence and their inner universality.50
Hegel is convinced that the adherence of particular subjectivity to universal and objective norms (“the laws and institutions which have being in and for themselves”)51 does not, within the differentiation of normative systems that defines modern ethicality, lead to any irremediable sacrifice of the “right of individuals to their particularity.”52 It is true that for him, this right is honored above all in the nonpolitical elements of Sittlichkeit, the family and civil society, where the principle of free choice (of one’s spouse, of one’s profession) plays an essential role, for it is there that the difference between modern society and the altständische Gesellschaft lies: the former is based to a certain extent on the principle of free enterprise, whereas the latter assigned each individual an immutable position within a rigid and hierarchical political-social space (the “three orders” making up the “feudal imagination”).53 To summarize:
If it is supported by the objective order, conforming to the latter and at the same time retaining its rights, subjective particularity becomes the sole animating principle of civil society. . . . The recognition and right according to which all that is rationally necessary in civil society and in the state should at the same time come into effect through the mediation of the arbitrary will is the more precise definition of what is primarily meant by the universal representation [Vorstellung] of freedom.54
Second, while it is patent that within objective spirit, subjectivity is constantly measured against the “right of the world” as it is expressed in ethical-political institutions and the sets of norms that go along with them, and if it is true that subjectivity is in a sense repressed by the “right of the world,” it is also true that it is thanks to the historical work of “reason which is,”55 the objective reason embodied in institutions, that subjectivity can constitute itself as an actual reality, including its most extreme and self-indulgent claims. Free subjectivity, which the theory of subjective spirit presents as if it were the culmination of the knowledge that spirit, atemporally, gains of itself, is in fact inscribed in history; it is a sort of trace of objective spirit within the very order of subjectivity. The subject who thinks and acts as if free—including with respect to the world and the limits it imposes—is, as both the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of Right reiterate, a product of history (and a rather belated one at that).
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it is important not to confuse ethicality (Sittlichkeit) with ethical life (das sittliches Leben). We can now see the philosophical reason for this philological distinction. Sittlichkeit, in which the objective components of objective spirit (institutions) play a driving role, creates the conditions for an ethical life by producing distinct and historically situated schemas for the actualization of subjectivity, but only the individuals whose constitution it enables can have such a life, that is, can live it coherently and reasonably as if this life were the result of their own autonomous choice. But, as Hegel learned from Kant, autonomy means recognizing and observing a normativity that is not imposed on subjects but is in a sense validated by them. The question is thus as follows: when can one say that an individual is a subject without falling into the subjectivism reviled56 by Hegel and that his institutional understanding of objective spirit sought to eradicate? I am not sure that this question is clearly or explicitly answered in the texts, but we can find a series of elements that when brought together point in the direction of what the answer might be.
The first such element is recognition. One of Hegel’s great strengths was to have linked the constitution of subjectivity to intersubjective recognition (or to its negation) and to have conceived of these on the basis of the theme of conflict. I am of course thinking here of his (too?) famous analysis of the “struggle for recognition” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where what is at stake, we must remember, is the “self-sufficiency and non-self-sufficiency,”57 as the title of the passage says—that is, reaching being-self, subjectivity. The struggle with death, the “absolute master,” and the experience of brutal, prepolitical domination at the hands of a master are the conditions of the “truth” that consists in “being recognized as a self-sufficient self-consciousness.”58 And it must be remembered that coerced recognition, like the recognition the master thinks he has gained, can only be inauthentic and precarious. This is why the struggle for recognition “can only occur in the state of nature”;59 it precedes the symbolic institution of society and individuality, for which recognition of the other’s humanity is the minimal condition. But this origin myth, in the strong sense of the term, is also there to remind us that recognition, and thus living together, and thus achieving subjectivity, is not something given or established, but rather is at stake in an open process: “part of this freedom is the possibility of nonrecognition and nonfreedom.”60 The possibility of nonrecognition does not only concern the ideal-type called “the state of nature”61: it also concerns all the forms of social pathology that Hegel sketches out in the Philosophy of Right and which one current of contemporary political philosophy seeks to bring up to date on the basis of an expanded conception of recognition.62
The second element is work. We know how important this subject is in the Jena writings (and already in some of the Frankfurt writings), where it testifies to the influence that classical economists (Smith, Ricardo) and belated mercantilists (Steuart) had on Hegel. We also know how much “the reception of political economy” (M. Riedel) contributed to shaping Hegel’s concept of civil society. I would like to quickly discuss something a bit less well known: the role of work in creating subjectivities capable of leading an ethical life. Of course, and especially because of Marx’s influence, Hegel’s critique of the alienation necessarily implied by modern forms of the organization of work has often been a subject of focus, in particular his analysis in the Philosophy of Right of the structural contradictions of “ethicality lost in its extremes.”63 But this must not obscure the fact that for Hegel, as for Marx, work not only generates alienation but is a decisive factor in constructing subjectivity and intersubjectivity; there is in Hegel, as Habermas would say, a substantial connection between work and interaction.64 In the 1803–1804 Philosophy of Spirit and the System der Sittlichkeit, work is presented at the scale of a people as a “subjective activity” raised to a “universal rule.”65 It is thus a potent means of abstracting subjectivity from the particular context it is naturally in the grip of—all the more so because it requires no conscious planning to this end: thus work is a method of universalization. In other words, in the context of modern civil society, work is simultaneously a factor in relinquishment and a factor in the construction of subjectivity: to use the vocabulary of the 1802 article on natural law, it is both the tragedy and the comedy of ethicality.
The third element is normativity. The weak institutionalism of the doctrine of Sittlichkeit does not prevent it from including a normative structure. This bears repeating, for it goes against a reading that is still dominant: Hegel’s critique of the “ought” and of the “moral view of the world,” developed in particular in the Phenomenology of Spirit66 and repeated in many forms in his later work, does not imply any rejection of normativity as such. I will not comment here on his famous analysis of the “moral vision of the world,” but we have already seen that it is “incomplete morality” that Hegel criticizes from the point of view of what he calls in the Philosophy of Right “true moral consciousness,” which coincides with ethical-political subjectivity.67 In conformity with the structure of the ought and of the boundary (die Schranke) described in the logic of being, this incomplete morality calls for its own infinitization: the true infinity of the Logic thus corresponds to the ethical culmination of morality, or, in the register of the Phenomenology of Spirit, to the transition from the moral point of view to the “reconciling yes,”68 thanks to which two consciousnesses recognize each other in confessing to and forgiving evil and thus overcome the aporia of formal moral consciousness and the guiles of the beautiful soul. At most, the normative configuration of action must be brought back to its limits, as an expression from the Encyclopedia emphasizes a contrario: “the idea . . . is not so impotent as to demand that it merely ought to be actual without being so.”69 But the base structure of normativity—the opposition between Sein and Sollen—if understood dynamically and procedurally, is perfectly compatible with the requirement of Hegelian philosophy. The Logic emphasizes the contradictory dynamic that lies within the idea of the ought: unlike a limit, which inexorably determines the being of the finite (“something coincides with its limit”70), the boundary (die Schranke) that affects a being signifies both a restriction and the exigency of overcoming this restriction such that “in the ought the transcendence of finitude, infinity, begins.”71 Of course, this going beyond the finite itself remains finite; this is why it takes the shape of the ought or the undefined. Nevertheless, the problematic of Sollen is fruitful, as long as it is not taken as an ultimate horizon, for it contributes to adequately describing the relationship that finite subjects have with the given world they face:
The ought, for its part, is the transcending of restriction, but a transcending which is itself only finite. It therefore has its place and legitimacy in the field of finitude, where it holds in-itself fixed over against what is restricted, declaring it to be the norm and the essential relative to what is null. Duty is an ought directed against the particular will, against self-seeking desire and arbitrary interest; it is the ought held up before a will capable of isolating itself from the truth because of its instability. . . . But in the actual order of things, reason and law are not in such a sad state of affairs that they only ought to be (only the abstraction of the in-itself stays at this).72
The fertility of the point of view of the ought or normativity finds its expression all the way to the sphere of the idea, which, however, is “not so impotent as to demand that it merely ought to be actual without being so.” Indeed, the logical idea, when it has not yet been identified, as absolute idea, with the pure process of thought, includes a teleological structure manifested in particular by the “syllogism of action.”73 The surpassing of this teleological-normative structure is also the surpassing of the finitude of the subject itself and its will. It is not, of course, that the subject disappears and along with it the representations that gave meaning to its practical being. But it overcomes its own finitude by granting the actual, existent world the dignity that abstract normativism (Kelsen more so than Kant) reserves only for representations of what ought to be. By recognizing the rationality (the actuality!) of the world, the subject gives meaning to his or her rational action on it and posits him- or herself as a rational subject. But this is possible only because the subject has adopted the normative posture without which it could not posit itself as the subject of an action. This is precisely what happens in the analysis of objective spirit, at the turning point between Moralität and Sittlichkeit, and this is why the transition from the former to the latter includes an explicit reference to the analysis of the good in the Logic.74 Just as in the Logic, the resolution of the contradiction affecting action passes through a reminder of the actuality of the world,75 so in the Philosophy of Right the aporias of moral subjectivity, illustrated by the perversions of subjectivism denounced in the Remark to section 140, are overcome by the recognition of the “right of the world,” without which the “right of the subjective will,” along with the “right of the idea,” would remain inactual.76 This right of the world is honored first and foremost in the institutions of ethicality, if it is true that ethicality is freedom become world and that its institutional constitution distinguishes it from the abstract spheres of legal and moral normativism.
Recognition that is not coerced and that must always be won again—the constitution of social intersubjectivity, in particular through work; the active internalization of the normative structures without which there can be no sensible action—these are the primary conditions, necessary but not sufficient, that (eventually) allow an individual to lead an ethical life, that is, simply to have “a life” of which he or she can be the subject. Hegel was neither the first nor the last to realize that these conditions cannot be achieved once and for all.
1. Enzykl, § 337 Zusatz, W 10, p. 33 (Encyclopedia 274).
2. Systemfragment, W 1, p. 422.
3. RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 201–2 (Elements, 276; see Outlines, 229). See Naturrecht, W 2, p. 489.
4. PhG, GW 9, p. 195 (Phenomenology, ¶ 351).
5. See in particular PhG, GW 9, pp. 197, 240 (Phenomenology, ¶¶ 440, 753); Geschichte, W 12, p. 56.
6. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 492 (Natural Law, 103).
7. Naturrecht, W 2, p. 494 (Natural Law, 103).
8. GW 8, p. 262.
9. Ibid., 263.
10. Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 492; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 270.
11. RPh, § 142, GW 14.1, p. 137 (Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
13. RPh, § 145, GW 14.1, pp. 137–38 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 155).
14. RPh, § 146, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 155).
15. RPh, § 146, GW 14.1, p. 138 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 155).
16. RPh, § 151, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 195; see Outlines, 159).
17. Enzykl, § 385, GW 20, p. 383 (Encyclopedia 20).
18. See RPh, § 4, GW 14.1, p. 31, and § 151, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 35, 195; see Outlines, 26, 159).
19. RPh, § 187 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 163 (Elements, 225, see Outlines, 185).
20. See RPh, § 261, GW 14.1, p. 208 (Elements, 283, see Outlines, 236): “[Individuals] have duties toward the state to the same extent as they also have rights.”
21. See chapter 11 above.
22. RPh, § 153 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196; see Outlines, 160).
23. See Enzykl, § 248, Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 238.
24. See the preliminary to part 4 above and Maurice Hauriou, “La théorie de l’institution et de la fondation (Essai de vitalisme social),” in Aux sources du droit, 89–128.
25. RPh, § 256 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 200 (Elements, 274; see Outlines, 228).
26. For these two expressions, see RPh, § 33, GW 14.1, p. 48 (Elements, 62–63; see Outlines, 50–51).
27. RPh, § 145 and 146, GW 14.1, pp. 137–38 (Elements, 190; see Outlines, 154–55).
28. RPh, § 147, GW 14.1, p. 138, and § 154, GW 14.1, p. 141 (Elements, 191, 197; see Outlines, 155, 161).
29. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 204. On the critique of “fascist neo-Hegelianism,” see Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), 402 ff.
30. RPh, § 263, GW 14.1, p. 210 (Elements, 286; see Outlines, 23).
31. Legal institutions (Rechtsinstitute), says Savigny, are “always already prior to any given legal relationship” (System des heutigen römischen Rechts [Berlin, 1840], vol. 1, pt. 1, chap. 2, §7). It is tempting to apply this extraordinary definition to every institutional configuration!
32. Descombes, “Y at-il un esprit objectif?,” 364 The expression can already be found in Hegel: see, for example, Enzykl, § 467 Zusatz, W 10, p. 287 (Encyclopedia 204–5).
33. RPh, § 265, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 287; see Outlines, 239).
34. RPh, § 265, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 287; see Outlines, 239).
35. RPh, § 161 Zusatz, W 7, p. 310 (Elements, 201; see Outlines, 164).
36. Hegel, Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 482; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 263; the allusion to Sieyès’s What Is the Third Estate? seems obvious. See also Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, 168–70, 75; Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right, §§121, 25, 217ff, 24 ff.
37. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240).
38. See Rousseau, Emile, bk. 1: “He will be one of those men of our days; a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Bourgeois. He will be nothing.” Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 4:250; Emile, 164. On the degradation of the spirit of citizenship in modern states, see also Oeuvres complètes, 3:361–62; Social Contract, 1:6.
39. Enzykl, § 87 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 124 (Encyclopedia 140).
40. “It is through [the] work of education that the subjective will attains objectivity even within itself, that objectivity in which alone it is for its part worthy and capable of being the actuality of the idea.” (RPh, § 187 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 163 [Elements, 225; see Outlines, 185).
41. RPh, § 190 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 166 (Elements, 228; see Outlines, 188).
42. See WdL 12, GW 21, p. 94 (Science of Logic, 81–82): “The German ‘aufheben’ (‘to sublate’ in English) has a twofold meaning in the language: it equally means ‘to keep,’ ‘to preserve,” and ‘to cause to cease,’ ‘to put an end to.’ . . . That which is sublated is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing for that.”
43. See WdL 3, GW 12, p. 251 (Science of Logic, 750): “It is in this manner that each step of the advance in the process of further determination, while getting away from the indeterminate beginning, is also a getting back closer to it; consequently, that what may at first appear to be different, the retrogressive grounding of the beginning and the progressive further determination of it, run into one another and are the same.”
44. RPh, § 256 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 274; see Outlines, 227).
45. RPh, § 256 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 199 (Elements, 274; see Outlines, 227).
46. RPh, § 268, GW 14.1, p. 211 (Elements, 288; see Outlines, 240). See chapter 11 above.
47. See RPh, § 289 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 242 (Elements, 329, modified; see Outlines, 278).
48. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, 186; Lectures on Natural Right, §132 A, 237. See chapter 4 above.
49. This largely explains Hegel’s aversion for the cult of the “dear Self” practiced, before Stirner, by German romanticism (Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Kleist . . .); see RPh, § 140 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, pp. 132 ff. (Elements, 180 ff.; see Outlines, p147 ff., as well as the review of Solger’s Posthumous Works: W 11, pp. 205–74.
50. RPh, § 153, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 196; see Outlines, 160).
51. RPh, § 144, GW 14.1, p. 137 (Elements, 189; see Outlines, 154).
52. RPh, § 154, GW 14.1, p. 142 (Elements, 197; see Outlines, 161).
53. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
54. RPh, § 206 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 173 (Elements, 238, modified; see Outlines, 196).
55. Enzykl, § 6, GW 20, p. 44. The preface to the Philosophy of Right speaks of “reason as present actuality” (RPh, GW 14.1, p. 15 [Elements, 22] See Outlines, 15).
56. See Hegel’s detailed analysis of the various “shapes” of “subjectivity [that] declares itself absolute,” RPh, § 140 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 123 ff. (Elements, 170ff; see Outlines, 138 ff.).
57. PhG, GW 9, p. 109 (Phenomenology, ¶ 178).
58. PhG, GW 9, p. 111 (Phenomenology, ¶ 187).
59. Enzykl, § 432 Zusatz, W 10, p. 221 (Encyclopedia 159).
60. SS, GW 5, p. 305.
61. See Enzykl, § 433 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 431 (Encyclopedia 160), and RPh, § 349 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 277 (Elements, 375; see Outlines, 318).
62. The importance of the theme of recognition and its fecundity were highlighted, after Kojève, by Ludwig Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie, Munich: Alber 1979; Franck Fischbach, Fichte et Hegel: La reconnaissance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Suffering from Indeterminacy; Emmanuel Renault, Mépris social: Éthique et politique de la reconnaissance (Bordeaux: Le Passant ordinaire, 2000).
63. RPh, § 184, GW 14.1, p. 160 (Elements, 221; see Outlines, 182).
64. See Jürgen Habermas, “Arbeit und Interaktion,” in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie”? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 9–47.
65. GW 6, p. 320.
66. “Spirit that is certain of itself, morality,” in PhG, GW 9, pp. 323 ff. (Phenomenology, ¶¶ 596 ff.).
67. RPh, § 137 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 120 (Elements, 164–165; see Outlines, 133–34).
68. PhG, GW 9, p. 362 (Phenomenology, ¶ 671).
69. Enzykl, § 6 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 46 (Encyclopedia 34).
70. WdL 11, GW 11, p. 69.
71. WdL 12, GW 21, p. 121 (Science of Logic, 105).
72. WdL 12, GW 21, p. 123 (Science of Logic, 107).
73. WdL 3, GW 12, p. 234 (Science of Logic, 732).
74. See RPh, § 141 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 135 (Elements, 185; see Outlines, 152).
75. “This actuality is by presupposition determined to have only the reality of an appearance, to be in and for itself a nullity, entirely open to determination by the objective concept. As the external actuality is altered by the activity of the objective concept and its determination is consequently sublated, the merely apparent reality, the external determinability and worthlessness, are by that very fact removed from it and it is thereby posited as having existence in and for itself. In this the presupposition itself is sublated, namely the determination of the good as a merely subjective purpose restricted in content, the necessity of first realizing it by subjective activity, and this activity itself. In the result the mediation itself sublates itself; the result is an immediacy which is not the restoration of the presupposition, but is rather the presupposition as sublated. The idea of the concept that is determined in and for itself is thereby posited, no longer just in the active subject but equally as an immediate actuality; and conversely, this actuality is posited as it is in cognition, as an objectivity that truly exists. The singularity of the subject with which the subject was burdened by its presupposition has vanished together with the presupposition. Thus the subject now exists as free, universal self-identity for which the objectivity of the concept is a given, just as immediately present to the subject as the subject immediately knows itself to be the concept determined in and for itself.” (WdL 3, GW 12, p. 235 [Science of Logic, 734–34]).
76. RPh, § 33, GW 14.1, p. 48 (Elements, 62; see Outlines, 50).