Substance and Subject

Here is one way of starting. We are natural animals, but there is a way in which we are different from other animals. One way of thinking about that is to claim or try to demonstrate that there is something very “un-animal” about the stuff out of which we are constituted. That is not Hegel’s way. For him, there is a line that runs from nature to fully minded agents, but it is not a line that runs from the animal to the nonanimal but rather from animals with a certain type of self-relation to animals with a very different self-relation. Something like that thought is behind his summary statement in the Phenomenology that “everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the true not just as substance but also equally as subject.”¹ Or, as we might alternately put it, if Hegel is right about the importance of that statement, then everything about what we say about Hegel hangs on what we take Hegel to mean by that assertion. Let us start with the view that Hegel’s statement about substance and subject is the key to his idealism. At first, let us simply lay out some of the basic commitments and come back to their interpretation and defense later.

One of the oldest interpretations of Hegel’s thought takes his idealism to consist rather straightforwardly in the claim that only spiritual (or perhaps mental) things are real, and that the supposedly nonspiritual world of interstellar gases, stars, and the more mundane supposedly nonspiritual world of rocks, plants, and animals is an unreal or untrue manifestation of that deeper spiritual reality—or, on another version of the same view, it holds that there must be some singular big Mind that constructs objects out of its own experiences but that those objects remain only spiritual constructions, even if they appear (untruly) as physical. This is the most common view of Hegel’s idealism: It is supposed to be a monistic metaphysics of Geist, i.e., of “spirit” or “mind.”² Mind is not a feature of nature so much as nature is supposed to be a manifestation of a more basic spiritual order of the world.

Although it is always tempting to assimilate Hegel’s idealism to one of these other, more familiar forms of idealism, it is also misleading. One of Hegel’s favorite analogies—which pops up in all the various places where he remarks that animals are true idealists—is in an indication that his is not an idealism that declares everything to be ultimately mental. Animals do not, he notes, take food to be untrue or merely one-sided phenomenal appearances of an underlying mental reality. Rather, as he puts it, they confront the things that show up to them as food and “without any further ado, they simply help themselves to them and devour them.”³ Animals do not, that is, construct the objects of their world out of their mental experiences. To animals with the requisite sensory apparatus, things “show up” as food because of the purposes the animal brings to bear on its environment by virtue of being the kind of animal it is. Lettuce shows up for rabbits as food because of the kind of creatures rabbits are, just as rabbits show up as food for foxes because of the kinds of creatures foxes are.⁴ What “shows up” to an animal as salient in its world depends on the species interests it brings to bear on that world. Food can “show up” only to creatures with the proper organic makeup and the appropriate nervous systems, but nothing shows up to an iron spike. However—and it is here that Hegel’s genuine idealism starts to come into view—for self-conscious creatures, very different things can “show up” in experience, for example, states, constitutions, divinities, artworks, and ethical requirements.⁵

We can put the first provisional formulation of Hegel’s idealism in this way: It is a view that the way the world shows up for living creatures depends on the nature of the creature and that the world “shows up” for creatures with a capacity for self-consciousness in a way that it cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. Put in this way, it is not the thesis that the mind creates the world or that what is really fundamental or more basically real are mental things, nor is it the idea the world is inherently spiritual and not material, nor is it the idea that subjects “construct” (either socially or individually) these kinds of things, nor finally that subjects impose conceptual meaning on some kind of distinct and neutral sensible information. The world is not dependent on us for its existence or its structure, but what “shows up” as salient in our world is a function of our species interests as the beings we are.

There is a second way of stating Hegel’s idealism that augments the first one, which has to do with the way things show up to thinking creatures. It holds that not only are there items which can only be entertained in thought—although the infinitely large and the infinitely small are not perceptible they are thinkable—there is also nothing in the world that is in principle unavailable for conceptual thought. There is no reason to think, for example, that there are items which can be felt or grasped in some deep emotional state but not thought. A corollary to this is that for Hegel’s idealism, the world taken as a whole—the “totality” of such things—is only available to thought and not to intuition. We can think of the infinite, we can imagine it, but we cannot see it. Because of this capacity for comprehending the world that goes beyond the more direct deliverances of experience, things can show up for humans in a way that they cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. As such self-conscious creatures, we become capable of wondering whether the way things show up for us is the way things really are. This capacity for self-conscious thought—and, in Hegel’s language, for entertaining the “universal”—is the determining feature of our species life. That also means that our species life is also characterized by a profound unease with itself, another corollary of Hegel’s idealism but which requires a different argument. This is a feature of our type of self-relation, not an indication that we are made of different stuff than other natural things.

Nonetheless, even if Hegel’s idealism is not, after all, a monistic metaphysics of spirituality, it is still metaphysics.⁶ What kind?

Life’s Purposes

Once again, it is best to begin by laying the view out before going into it in more detail. The way the world shows up for animals has to do with their own nature, but that does not mean that the world has been organized to show up as it does to animals. Nature as a whole means nothing, aims at nothing, and cannot organize itself into better or worse.⁷ However, there is nonetheless a place for a kind of functional teleology in the structure of organisms.⁸ Living creatures have functions that are basic to themselves as organisms, namely, survival of the individual and reproduction of the species, even though sometimes those requirements may conflict with each other. In terms of Hegel’s overall idealism, there is no need to see the teleological structure of organisms as implying an overall teleological structure to nature itself. That animals act in terms of an “inner purpose” does not imply that that there is an overall purpose to nature as a whole (such that nature’s organization would require an organizer) nor that they are aware of that purpose. It is, as Hegel says, a mistake to think that all such purposes must be conscious purposes or be the purposes that are at work paradigmatically in conscious action.⁹

These ends are not merely artifacts of our own species-bound way of describing nature. The concepts of disease and injury suggest that such explanations in terms of an animal’s nature have a basis in a real feature of the world and are not merely features of our way of describing nature. An animal, unlike, say, a rock can have things go well or badly for it, even in the cases where the animal does not have the neurological apparatus to take note that something is going badly for it.¹⁰ Disease is a way of things going badly for the animal: An animal is diseased when something external to the normal functioning of the organism interferes with it, and the animal is prevented from (or has difficulty with) living in the terms of the standards appropriate to its form of life (or, as Hegel would put it, when it is inadequate to its concept). To say that an animal is in a diseased state is thus not merely a subjective requirement on our part or just a way of talking. Or, again as Hegel phrases it: “The defect in a chair which has only three legs is in us; but in life, the defect is in life itself, and yet it is also sublated because life is aware of the limitation as defect.”¹¹ Thus, for things to go well or badly for a creature does not require the existence of their being creatures with “wills.” We humans do not bring all value into the world.

However, what is a disease for the particular animal may be a means of sustenance for the microbes that are causing the disease. This is yet another manifestation of what Hegel calls nature’s impotence in this regard.¹² It would be pointless to romantically protest and blame nature for this, since nature cannot put itself into any better order. In fact, “better order” makes no real sense at all in the case of nature as a whole. Instead, in nature, a creature’s ends are bound up with circumstances external to it, such that what counts as disease for the animal will be nutrition for the parasite, and predator and prey exist together.

Life is its own purpose, even if the emergence of life on earth itself fulfills no further purpose of nature itself. Hegel calls life a Selbstzweck, an end unto itself (as does Kant). The living creature is its own end even though the purpose of life is distributed among many different creatures who do not in an important way share that purpose with each other.¹³

Just as disease is a real feature of nature, reasons also have a place in the natural world. Some animals can be said to respond to reasons that are in the nature of things, given the species-nature they have. The mouse running from the cat is responding to a good reason right there before it. The cat coming after it shows up to the mouse as danger, as a good reason to get on the move speedily to somewhere else. Some animals, even those whom we may not ordinarily at first describe as particularly intelligent, may even maintain a certain flexibility about how they do this and thereby display at least a type of cognitive skill. Since for these animals there is a way that they take in the world in light of their natures, they can be said to be subjects in Hegel’s sense.¹⁴ They experience things, and they act accordingly. He thereby clearly sees a kind of continuum at work in the passages from life to animal life to human life, and that continuum has to do with the quality of the responsiveness to reasons such organisms confront. The human subject responds to its purposes as purposes.¹⁵

The difference between having reasons and being aware of reasons as reasons means that there is a rupture between all other forms of life and human life. Only the human form stands in the kind of self-relation that we find exemplified in exemplary fashion in self-consciousness.

Making Sense of Human Life

The difference between animal life and human animal life has to do with the kind of self-relation that human animal life has to itself. Humans, that is, are self-conscious primates, odd creatures in the natural order, not because they are made of different “stuff” nor because they can exercise some kind of nonnatural causation of their actions but because they are constituted by distinctive kind of self-relation. To get straight on this, it is still worth spending a little more time on an exposition of the concept of self-relating life before we look at how it might be defended against its competitors.

The human shape of life is self-conscious. Describing it like this, of course, suggests that it is a life that is always reflectively aware of itself, but on Hegel’s conception, such reflective self-awareness is to be distinguished from another form of self-awareness that consists in moving within a world of involvements in which there is an awareness of what one is doing in terms of various “ought’s,” “musts,” and “ought not’s” without there necessarily being any separate act of reflection accompanying one’s awareness. For example, as you are reading this sentence, you are aware that you are reading a sentence and not, say, swimming, cooking, gardening, or skydiving. If asked, for example, “What are you doing?,” the answer is: “Reading a sentence or two.” This is not a matter of having already been reflectively aware that you were reading the sentence as you were reading the sentence, as if you were reading the sentence and in a separate act thinking to yourself, “I am reading this sentence.” (If it were, a vicious regress would immediately set itself in motion.) To use a Kantian idiom to refer to this kind of self-conscious life that although self-conscious need not be reflective in all its operations, we can call it an apperceptive life. To shift to a slightly more Hegelian idiom: To be an apperceptive life—a subject—is to know that one is this shape of life exactly by being the life that falls under the concept, and an apperceptive life falls under that concept just by bringing itself under that concept.¹⁶ We are self-conscious animals by being the animals that bring ourselves under that concept of “self-conscious animal.” Moreover, we are not disembodied somethings that, on looking more carefully at themselves, decide to bring themselves under a certain concept. We are the creatures we are by bringing ourselves under the concept.¹⁷ We fall under the concept by our actualizing the concept in our own lives. Hegel refers to this in various places as the concept’s giving itself its own reality.¹⁸ The absolute identity of the two-in-one—of the I aware of me—is the apperceptive self. This conception of subjectivity’s apperceptive self-relation comprises more or less the ground floor of Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity.

Because this is an achievement on our part, we live (in one of Hegel’s striking metaphors) as “an amphibious animal, because [we] now have to live in two worlds which contradict one another.”¹⁹ We are natural creatures subject to natural needs and forces, and we are “spiritual,” normative creatures who live in a world of various normative demands, involvements, and contours.²⁰ This opposition is at the heart of human subjectivity, but it is an opposition at all only because apperceptive organisms bring such a division on themselves. However, that we are amphibians who live with this tension between our normative and natural lives does not mean that we are not creatures who, as it were, have our apperceptive lives merely glued onto our natural lives. In our self-consciousness, we become different natural creatures—rational animals—and not just animals with an added function of rationality grafted onto us. In Matthew Boyle’s phrase, Hegel’s conception of human subjectivity is not an “additive” but rather a “transformative” conception of the role of reason in our lives.²¹ It is a life that essentially involves the capacity to have a thought of itself to be the life it is, and it is that life, which, when conscious of itself, can take itself to be pulled in different directions.

Because it is an opposition, it is all too easy to think that such an opposition must therefore represent some way in which mind and body are totally different, or that our reflective capacities are different operations from our more animal sensitivities and that they must therefore function as some kind of monitoring mechanism for those animal sensitivities. Rather, on the Hegelian account, we are rational animals, who because we are rational animals, put ourselves into potential opposition to ourselves. A “rational animal” is not a substance with a subject stuck onto it who monitors it. It is a subject which is a substance that knows it is that kind of substance by bringing itself under the category “subject.”²²

The “Idea” of Subjectivity

Laying out Hegel’s view pushes us back to his own way of beginning. The full story of why he took himself to hold such a view of human subjectivity is to be found in his dense Science of Logic, which claims to present an account of intelligibility, both of what makes sense of things and a logic of when sense has been made. This is not the place to go into any kind of detailed exegesis of Hegel’s Logic, so, rather than following Hegel’s own meticulously dense exposition of it, we can instead speak of it in a much looser way, similar to the way he himself did in his more popular lectures on the topic.

Hegel divides his book in three sections comprised of three different kinds of logical structure. The first section has to do with those judgments we make of individuals by pointing them out (“That thing over there”), by classifying them (“That one is red”), by making generalizations about them (“American Robins live on average 1.7 years”), or by counting them (“There are seven robins in the garden”). Hegel calls the logic of these judgments about individuals and how those judgments relate to each other the logic of “being.”

Second, there are those judgments, such as “The tie only looks green in the store but is blue in normal sunlight,” and “Deficiency in vitamin D may cause cognitive impairment in older adults,” in which we explain things by appeal to some underlying condition or structure that is not immediately apparent in the mere observation of them. Hegel calls the logic of these kinds of judgments about the relation between the “essence” of things and their appearances the logic of “essence.”

These two “logics” of “being” and “essence” are how we make sense of “things” in the most general way. Indeed, they are the logic of traditional metaphysics, and Hegel takes himself to have shown how the classical philosophical problems of metaphysics are generated out of the apparent paradoxes that arise in trying to state them clearly. Stating them clearly brings out the opposed ways of resolving the issues raised in such general thought of things, and that in turn motivates a reworking of the way in which the problems need to be stated. (The details of that are a story for another time and are not really suited for this kind of very general overview.)

These two “logics” disclose that we also need a third way of making sense, namely, to make sense of making sense—or as we might alternatively put it, making sense of when we really have made sense. Examples of that are judgments such as “What you just said does not follow from your premises” or “This makes no sense within the current standards of physics.” The question, “What is this and how many of them are there?” is typically answered in one way that makes sense of things, whereas “Why does it look that way?” or “Why did that happen?” are typically answered in another way. “How does that follow?” is typically answered in neither of those two ways. These kinds of judgments belong to what Hegel calls the logic of the “concept.”

This third part of Hegel’s Logic is thus not just that of making sense of “things.” It also introduces a sense of the way in which there are better and worse ways of being—examples of worse ways of being include those of a bad argument, an inconsistent or incoherent theory, a badly constructed artifact that fails to realize its purpose, and even a bad act or a bad person. In Hegel’s terms, the logics of “Being” and “Essence” do not introduce better or worse ways of being. That of “Concept” does. The full concept of being a subject emerges in that section, not merely as an entity that causes itself to act in light of its reasons or passions (that is the kind of account given in “Essence”) but as an entity that acts and thinks in terms of norms, constitutive principles of thought, and evaluations—as a locus of various kinds of ought’s, as it were.²³ A subject is to be explained as a subject by being the kind of thing that moves in a logical space. Its thoughts and actions are explained by reasons, which means that what is doing the explaining is also something known by the subject and does not play this role outside of being known by the subject.

As noted, Hegel does not present his Logic in the rather loose way just given here but as itself manifesting a rigorous set of steps all along its development. Each stage (Being, Essence, Concept) supposedly fails at what establishing for itself what counts as success at that stage, so that, for example, “Being”—with all of its accounts of what it is to point out, classify, count, and such—fails to secure its end of successfully exhausting the purpose of thinking about the world so that it requires another set of purposes, those of “Essence.” It eventually reaches a point where, in good Kantian spirit but not by any means by the Kantian letter, reason (or “thinking”) realizes that it is responsible for setting its own limits (which by its nature it has) and that it is therefore “absolute.” How all that works is another story, but not one especially for this telling. What is crucial for this telling is that this loose account itself can make sense of his Logic in a much looser way than Hegel himself thought the Logic should ultimately make sense.

The Logic culminates in what Hegel, in the preferred terminology of German idealism, calls the “Idea” (usually capitalized in English translation to distinguish it—the German Idee—from the noncapitalized “idea,” or Vorstellung, itself often also rendered as “representation”).²⁴ In both the Logic and his other mature works, Hegel consistently defines the “Idea” as the unity of concept and objectivity and often as the unity of concept and reality, and this makes a difference to his overall conception of subjectivity as both agents and persons.²⁵

In clarifying Hegel’s use of his term of art, “Idea,” there is what looks like merely a terminological point but which makes a substantive difference to how to understand Hegel’s account. In using the very term “Idea,” Hegel is putting a Kantian concept to work for his own related but nonetheless different purposes. Kant had used the term “Idea” to talk about those “ideas” (representations, as they are often called) with which we tried to comprehend the world as an unconditioned whole, in other words, tried to do traditional metaphysics.²⁶ Reason, in Kant’s nominalization of the term, knows that in experiential knowledge it is limited by the deliverances of sensibility, and, as unconditionally knowing itself as experientially conditioned, it pushes itself to seek the unconditioned. This self-push is necessary to reason since it claims to know itself fully, including the very limits of what it can know. This “unconditioned” would be the “whole” that reason seeks to comprehend. However, since we finite creatures can have no direct experience of the whole, we can only entertain the whole in thought. Kant called the world as comprehended in such pure, nonexperiential thought the noumenal world (i.e., the world comprehended in pure “thought”), and, for better or worse, he argued that the noumenal world was composed of a realm of unknowable things in themselves (and thus, that traditional metaphysics, as the a priori study of what turns out to be unknowable, was impossible). For Kant, an “Idea” is the result of an attempt to think of all the conditioned and bounded objects of experience as part of an unconditioned whole, and this meant that such “Ideas” of the unconditioned were—however important they were and however much of a necessary regulatory role they might play in knowledge—merely creatures of thought and lacked objective reality. (Kant also took the necessary failures that accompany all efforts to comprehend the “unconditioned” in pure reason to be a demonstration that traditional metaphysics was impossible. That is another interesting and well-researched path to take, but not for here.)

The subtleties involved in Kant’s conceptions of the phenomenal, the noumenal, things in themselves and the failures of traditional metaphysics are not the issue here. It is crucial to note that Hegel took the upshot of Kant’s use of “Idea” to mean that although the objects of ordinary experience could not be grasped as unconditioned—he took Kant to be completely right about that—the activity of thinking could indeed grasp the unconditioned, that is, the “infinite,” or, as it appeared in his way of putting the issues, the “absolute,” and this was intended as a counterweight to Kant’s claim that the noumenal realm was composed of unknowable things in themselves. Like Wittgenstein later, Hegel argued that if setting the limits of thought meant that one claimed to be thinking literally of the unthinkable, then one would be thinking what could not be thought.²⁷

In his own usage, Hegel contrasted the phenomenal world not, as Kant did, with the noumenal realm but rather with the “concept” (or, rather, he substituted “the concept” for Kant’s conception of the noumenal). We are phenomenal creatures whose nature is also to be noumenal creatures, that is, to be oriented by our sense of how the whole not only adds up in all its part but how it has a distinct meaning on its own. In the Hegelian sense, an “Idea” is the unity of the phenomenal world as it is ordinarily comprehended in science and commonsense with that of the noumenal world—the “concept”—that is, with the world as comprehended in thought.

However, part of the force of Hegel’s approach is to take Kant’s strictures about the limits of experiential knowledge seriously. For Hegel, an “Idea” is the unity of the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, and thus, the “Idea,” as Hegel explicitly puts it in his Science of Logic, is the unity of concept and objectivity.²⁸ The concept is what Hegel calls the thought of the thing “in itself” (an sich), and the “Idea” is the unity of the concept (the “in itself”) with the phenomenal (erscheinende) reality that expresses it. The unity of the phenomenal world is that of an infinitely extending background, not all of which can be grasped through perception or intuition. The phenomenal world is more fully conceptually comprehended in the unity of how the abstract thought of things is at one with and modified by the thought of how that more abstract thought is concretely embodied. The grasp of the “Idea” of mind and world has an infinity that can be grasped not, as it were, as one thing after another but in the self-contained boundlessness of the conceptual itself.²⁹ It is also crucial to Hegel’s conception of the unity of the phenomenal and the noumenal that our conception of the “in itself” (or of things in themselves) is conceptual and has a historical dynamic to itself, which is mediated by the way those thoughts are concretely embodied and developed.³⁰ Although nature can be grasped in its conceptual unity, much of phenomenal nature is not at one with our concept of it, and this means that nature in detail is only best studied through the empirical sciences. (Or, in Hegel’s preferred terminology, nature’s fundamental relation to the “Idea” is that of “externality.”³¹)

The edges of the sharp rift between the world as it is rationally comprehended in thought and the world as it presents itself to us in experience are supposed to be softened and unified in an adequate “Idea.” Likewise, the subject as split between the noumenal subject (an agent acting on consciously entertained reasons) and the phenomenal subject (an agent acting according to the drives and impulses inherent to its species) is a division that is reunited in the subject’s own activity. The subject is the phenomenal creature who, by embodying this kind of self-relation, constitutes herself as a noumenal creature. She does this by bringing herself under the concept of an apperceptive life. There is thus no inherent need in the “Idea” of the subject to separate the agent into two spheres, one sphere of which is causally efficacious (the phenomenal) with the other operating in the space of reasons. The phenomenal agent becomes the noumenal agent in taking up a self-conscious relation to the world.

The Hegelian distinction between the “concept” of a rational agent and the “Idea” of a rational life turns on the way in which the “Idea” of a rational life is known by the apperceptive animals that are the embodiment of the “Idea,” that is, is known by those rational animals leading that kind of life. In the “Idea” of a rational animal, it is not just “rationality” in general to which an appeal is being made but to human rationality as such (not just to the “concept” but also its phenomenal reality). That means that the more austere concept of the living, knowing subject as it is introduced in the Logic is, as Hegel explicitly says, only the “possibility” of such a subject, not its actuality (not its full “Idea”), since a conception of its actuality requires in turn a conception of how it develops itself concretely historically and socially.³² As Hegel pithily summed that up for his young students: “The individual exists as a determinate being, unlike man in general, who has no existence as such.”³³ The “concepts” that are developed within the “Idea” are the necessary components of the “Idea” itself—the self-articulations of the absolute, as Hegel likes to put it.³⁴ They are the components of what a human subject must take itself to know if it is to know itself as a human subject and not merely as an abstracted rational subject. Whereas in both empiricist thought and in Kantian schemes, the relation of the general concept to the things falling under it is taken to consist in something like a rule being applied to external instances, in the case of the “Idea,” so Hegel puts it, “the universal particularizes itself and is herein identity with itself.”³⁵ But what does that mean?

These concepts as components of the “Idea” are not external rules to which content is given, nor are they merely “empirical” facts subsumed under a priori thoughts, nor are they the conditions of the very possibility of thought. They rather emerge as necessary components, or, in Hegel’s term, “moments” for human agents to make sense of themselves as they develop their conceptions of mind and world over time. They emerge within the view of ourselves as rational humans, and as such also develop historically as things fall apart and regroup themselves.³⁶ In that way, they do not function completely as norms (which can always be transgressed), but become incorporated into what it has historically come to be constitutive of making sense of mind and world.³⁷

This line of thought will lead in the following direction. As this conception is developed, what seem to be constitutive of some social status turn out, as the shape of life develops itself, instead to be normative. A ruler may take certain things to be constitutive of rulership, such that if he did not conform to them he would simply no longer be a ruler at all. (For example, he might think that he must deal with his enemies fiercely or simply fail at being a ruler.) As things develop, what had been a constitutive principle can become instead nonconstitutive, come instead to be a norm that can always be transgressed, and in that case, the ruler comes to see those same things as normative, the violation of which would not immediately cancel his status as ruler but which might undermine it or, for that matter, be largely irrelevant to it. (In the example given, the ruler might think failing to deal with his enemies fiercely is a shortcoming, but it hardly affects his status as king.) In Hegel’s system, the distinction between the normative, which can always be transgressed, and the constitutive, which defines a status and where transgressing those principles means cancellation of the status, is fluid and shifting. How this works is best left to later in the exposition of what goes in on history.

In Hegel’s rather novel formulation, these “Idea-concepts” form the basis of the intelligibility of the way we minded creatures relate to the world and ourselves. Yet these forms of intelligibility themselves move in history and take on new shapes in light of the tensions and oppositions they develop within themselves. They are the components of intelligibility itself, and they are also themselves historical achievements.

As Hegel acknowledges, showing how or whether that works requires in turn the attention to historical detail that would otherwise be out of place in a more traditional philosophical account. Such an account bypasses the more usual hard and fast philosophical distinction between purely conceptual (or, in the Kantian scheme, transcendental) concerns and those of empirical matters. The components of the “Idea” arise in history, but as humans reflect on those concepts, put them to use, and modify them in the course of their collective lives, they refashion them into overall schemes of intelligibility, sometimes in art, most often in religion, and finally in philosophy.³⁸

As we might put it, the self-knowledge of such a subject is not merely the self-knowledge of a rational agent in general but of a material subject (a substance) whose powers include those of standing in an apperceptive relation to herself. It is thus “human” reason and not the generalized Kantian reason of a generalized rational being that is at issue.³⁹

The Hegelian subject is a “thinking substance,” the way in which substance becomes subject, that is, a material creature who possesses the capacity for a kind of self-relation that is otherwise not found in nature.⁴⁰ Our various acts of thinking are manifestations, and not just particular instantiations, of the power of human thought, which as rational thought, is ultimately bounded only by itself. In Hegel’s words: “The determinateness of spirit is consequently that of manifestation. … Its possibility is thus immediately infinite absolute actuality.”⁴¹

This is part of Hegel’s naturalism, which is also part and parcel of his idealism.⁴² The world shows up to us because of our nature, which is to become and to be apperceptive creatures for whom things show up differently than they do for nonapperceptive creatures. We are rational animals who have various powers that develop first in the shape of immediacy in infancy and then into a more reflective form as we develop.⁴³

Spirit and Self-Consciousness

“Spirit” is Hegel’s name for a species of living things, namely that of self-conscious human life. That he calls it “spirit” instead of simply “human being” is intended to bring out the way in which self-consciousness transforms the very nature of that life itself.⁴⁴ Spirit is subjectivity, and a subject is a subject by being the life that falls under the concept of subject, and it falls under that concept by spontaneously bringing itself under that concept. In doing so, its “possibility”—its thinking of itself—really is its actuality as a subject exercising agency and establishing itself as a person. Now, to be standing under concepts of subject and what is associated with that status will amount to standing within what Hegel calls a “shape of life,” that is, a kind of concrete order of thoughts, an “Idea.”⁴⁵ In such a shape of life, subjects seek authority for their beliefs and actions, which inevitably leads to the confrontations over what the space of reasons actually requires. A self-conscious primate, that is, is eventually compelled by her nature—which is to locate herself within a space of reasons as given concrete shape within her human shape of life—to become not merely self-conscious but reflectively self-conscious, and this is initiated in the original struggle over such authority.⁴⁶

That this authority should consist solely in an appeal to anything like the abstraction, “the space of reasons,” is not where we start. That abstraction is a result, and, for all that, the result of a rather long historical development. The space of reasons, which Hegel details in the Logic, is but the “realm of shadows” of the practices of trying to make sense of ourselves and the world. The logic portrayed in the Logic is, as Hegel’s image has it, only the shadows cast by the more concrete world of historical subjects. As such shadows, in their very provisionality they often seem to dissolve as we reflect on them.⁴⁷ Had subjects but world enough and time, they would not have to worry about how to settle such matters, since their discussion could go on forever. However, they never have world enough and time. They are finite creatures facing an infinite problem.

Hegel himself faces up to this problem in different ways. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, he asserts early in the book: “Self-consciousness is desire itself.”⁴⁸ Since desire is the inward noting of a lack in the animal—for example, hunger can indicate a lack of nutrition, drowsiness a lack of sleep—Hegel is there claiming that self-consciousness exhibits the felt lack of something. Hegel’s claim, to which we shall return, is that what it lacks, at least at the stage in the argument where he says that, is some form of sustainable authority. For it to have the authority that seems to lie in its very concept of itself, it needs recognition from another who also has the legitimacy to recognize such authority—it needs what Rousseau, with his typical briskness, called an “authority of a different order, capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing”⁴⁹

Spirit manifests itself in appearance analogously to the way an intention manifests itself in action.⁵⁰ An action, for example, as a series of individual bodily movements has a unity by virtue of the intention (that is, the thought) which the movements manifest. The individual steps taken to fulfill the intention are thus, as Hegel terms them, “moments” of the action as “manifesting” the intention.⁵¹ (For example, my intention to go over and open the door is manifested in all the individual movements I make in turning, walking to the door, pulling the lever, etc.) “Manifestation” in Hegel’s usage is thus a kind of expression. For subjects, it is the expression of a thought or a principle. The action expresses the thought that animates it, since it is only the thought (the intention) that holds the different bodily movements together in a unity. The action, as unified by the thought, is thus different from the deed (what the actor succeeds or fails in doing) so that the actor can be intending such and such without ever actually accomplishing such and such.⁵² What I take myself to be doing and what I end up having done can obviously part ways. This distinction is not clearly marked in the ways English speakers use “act,” “do,” “action” and “deed.” Hegel sometimes marks this distinction between what I take myself to be doing and what I am doing by noting one as “action” (Handlung) and the other as “deed” (Tat), but that is in part a self-conscious regimentation of the words.⁵³

To know what one is doing is to be claiming a certain authority over one’s acts as to what they are as acts. If, for example, someone were to send you a text message—“What are you doing?”—you would reply that you are reading about Hegel, and you knew that without having to have reflected on it prior to receiving the message. Even if the text message asked something different, such as “How do you feel?” and the answer was: “I feel very sick,” the report of the feeling of being sick still supposes that one is saying something meaningful. Both of you understand the sentence because you have the self-conscious capacity for such comprehension. Even what looks like a report on one’s internal states assumes that the kind of self-ascription involved in an apperceptive life falling under the concept of “apperceptive life” by virtue of bringing itself under that concept.⁵⁴ Now, the statement, “I feel sick” may also be accompanied by all kinds of moaning and grimacing, and it is thus easy to think that the statement is just another (linguistic) way to go on moaning. It is more. When another says, “Oh, you’re just putting that on to get sympathy,” the reply, “No, you’re wrong. I really do feel sick,” is more than another groan. It is a statement of knowledge, a statement about how you know yourself to be.⁵⁵

Self-consciousness thus is constituted by a self-presence that in knowing itself is distinguishing itself from itself while knowing that there is no real distinction present.⁵⁶ It is the act of assuming authority over things like belief not by inspecting one’s internal mental states but by something more like taking on a commitment. Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel says that that “self-consciousness is essentially judgment.”⁵⁷

What is this self-presence? Why is it both desire and judgment?

Self-Consciousness and Its Other

Hegel gives an account of the way in which a kind of immediate self-consciousness living in a world of background involvements is pushed into a more reflective form by virtue of breakdowns in its own practices. To motivate this view, Hegel argued in the opening chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit that a straightforward stance of experiencing things which takes itself to dispense with any such self-conscious involvement is ultimately self-undermining. What he calls “sense-certainty” is the act of pointing something out, for example in such statements as “That one, over there.” In such “sense-certainty,” what looks like transparent reference to objects—a way of “taking” objects that need not rely on any “meaning” but only some kind of meaning-free reference to them—undermines itself in the way that it has to take into account the speaker’s or experiencer’s position.⁵⁸ Hegel entertains the suggestion that this idea of a pure reference to objects can be made good in terms a purely perceptual encounter with objects (as distinct from a meaning-free, purely sensuous act of referring), but this ultimately fares no better. That kind of encounter also takes itself to grasp such objects in terms of a pure referring activity that is not mediated by meanings (but which nonetheless occurs against the background of a set of descriptions). In turn, making that move raises the ante about whether what we refer to as, for example, a “green” thing might be in reality a “red” thing, or that even perhaps when we call an act of gratitude a virtue, we are actually referring to a vice. Those doubts raise the even more unnerving possibility that even the whole world might be actually inverted on us, such that everything that appears up is really down, left is really right, green is really red, sweet is really sour, just is really unjust, and so forth. Behind even ordinary acts of referring, it turns out, there is a mode of our “taking” things one way or another and having to posit matters that are not immediately present in the sense-experience itself. Our apperceptive lives are already at work in what at first glance seem to be decidedly nonapperceptive activities.

Just as we are tempted to take our conscious lives as resting on the basis of some kind of meaning-free reference to objects, we are also tempted to take our self-conscious lives as our showing up for each other in what also looks like a completely transparent fashion and of our actions as guided by ultimate desires that cannot themselves be justified (that is, are not mediated by any further meanings). Each thinks of the other subject as a self-conscious other, as an immediate second-person to its first-personal reference. However, it is in each having the second-person as the object of their thought that each shows up as the second-person. That is, it is in my first-person grasping of “you” as your thinking second-personally of “me” that “you” grasp “me” second-personally, and it is thinking within that complex thought that we comprehend ourselves thereby as plural, as what Hegel calls “The I that is a We, and a We that is an I.”⁵⁹ In such thoughts, in the actualized state of such self-knowledge, we do not swallow, as it were, the other person simply into our own viewpoint, but rather, as Hegel puts it, see the “other as other” while remaining at one with ourselves.⁶⁰ We comprehend each other, that is, as each occupying a place in a concrete space of reasons that is occupied by human creatures in the natural order. That space is also a space of authority, of taking on the burden of justifying ourselves to each other and even to ourselves, all carried out within the idea of a rational human life and not just a rational life abstracted away from its animality.

Absent any other considerations, the possibility for a fundamental conflict is thereby established. If for whatever contingent reason, one of the self-conscious creatures takes himself to be unconditionally authoritative over some set of claims and the other disputes this authority, and when for whatever contingent reason, that first subject takes this to matter so much to him that he is willing to stake his life on it (and thus willing to kill for it), there is and eventually must be a struggle for recognition. Obviously, if both subjects die in the struggle, this problem is not solved. However, if one kills the other, the problem is once again not solved (since there is nobody to give the desire recognition). If out of exhaustion both call off the struggle, the problem is also not resolved, and the struggle for its resolution is merely postponed. In this context, when there is a ground-level, fundamental dispute over what reason requires and a decision must be reached, there is nowhere else to go but for one of them simply to establish by fiat some relation of authority. That, in turn, takes them both out of the abstract space of reasons and into the real world of conflict. In such a struggle, the only solution, absent any other considerations, seems to be for one of them, out of the fear of death, succumbing to the claim to authority on the part of the other. One becomes the master, and the other becomes the slave subservient to the master.⁶¹

The irrational appeal to force on the master’s part arises out of the impossibility, at this stage of abstraction, of settling the argument about authority, when one of them stakes a claim to such authority that cannot at first be shared (and is willing to stake his life on it). However, there are two deeper strata of difficulty with the result of the dialectic of master and slave.

First, if all authority is recognized authority, then an infinite regress is set into motion, since one subject will have authority only if his authority is recognized by another subject, who in turn must be therefore recognized by yet another subject with authority, ad infinitum. If there are only two of them in the struggle, neither can claim authority, since it seems either that the regress cannot even get started (because there is no authority to start it), or that it just circles back and forth between two subjects neither of whom could ever acquire the authority to recognize the other one. If there were any mediating institutions such that an appeal to reason itself might be workable, the problem would be solved, but at this level of abstraction—in which one is discussing the concept of self-consciousness itself, not a particular institutionalized shape it must in fact assume—there are no such mediating institutions. If one of them simply has authority, then the regress does not get going. The struggle is over which one of them has it.

The second stratum of difficulty with the dialectic of master and slave goes to the heart of Hegel’s theory of subjectivity. Although the dialectic of master and slave is often taken to be aiming at the establishment of some kind of intersubjectivity, Hegel’s point in the discussion is slightly different. In the initial confrontation, there is no grand failure of intersubjectivity per se. At one level, the two combatants understand each other perfectly well. (They certainly share enough to be able to talk to each other, and each seems to understand the expression, “Submit or die!”) For that matter, each may even understand himself as having some version of what we might loosely call “ethical” requirements on him or herself. (For example, one or both may see themselves as ethically required to assert the superiority of their own “people” over those of the other.) Each is a form of self-consciousness, rooted in a world fraught with ought.⁶² Their struggle over who is to exercise the right to determine their own respective normative positions (such as who is to defer to the wishes of the other and who is to give orders) indicates that there already is a bit of a shared outlook on things—shared enough for both of them to engage in a struggle to the death. Their problem has to do with the way in which they relate to the order of thoughts under which they bring themselves as “subjects” in the first place.

Putting Hegel’s discussion into a different context may help here. Michael Thompson has distinguished monadic from what he calls bipolar judgments (or what we might better call “dyadic” judgments).⁶³ This is not merely a surface distinction between judgments such as “He did something wrong” and “He did her wrong.” The latter type of judgments are dyadic—one wronged a specific other—and the former are monadic in that they apply to a subject conceived as a single individual standing in a relation to an order of thoughts. As Thompson phrases it, in a monadic judgment, “the other agent is something in respect of which either agent might ‘mess up’ instrumentally. All of the normativity in the case derives from the agent’s own ends, and is thus merely monadic.”⁶⁴

That the “normativity … derives from the agent’s own ends” does not imply that monadically conceived agents must be conceived as necessarily brutally self-interested or as indifferent to the suffering of others. Their own ends may in fact include norms such as “do not knowingly inflict suffering on other self-conscious agents,” but they are still just their own ends, monadically conceived, not specific duties to specific others. A system of law, for example, may specify all kinds of duties regarding others and declare that one has done wrong if one harms another in a specific way. What makes the action (legally) wrong in such a case is that it violates the legal norm under which the individual fell. A monadic order has more or less the structure of a game. In the monadic order, doing a wrongful or rightful action is just violating the rules—such as committing a foul or stepping outside the white lines—and only secondarily in having done something or another to an other. It is like having the moral referee blow the whistle on you for being offside or committing a foul.

As Thompson notes, like himself, both Aristotle and Aquinas seem to distinguish clearly between the kinds of monadic requirements imposed by such a legal system from those dyadic requirements imposed by a system of justice. To be sure, a legal system can also impose dyadic requirements, or it can achieve much the same end by a system of rights belonging to individuals but which are rights that can be monadically held. The point is that it need not do either, and yet it can still be a legal system. The distinction between the monadic and dyadic stances even appears typically in legal systems themselves in the matters of private law, such as contract (where one creates via legal rules a duty to a specific other and a corresponding right on the part of the other), and in matters of criminal law, where, as Thompson puts it, “the verdict of the jury, ‘Guilty!’, expresses a property of one agent, not a relation of agents. If another agent comes into the matter—if there is, as we say, a ‘victim’—it is, so to speak, as raw material in respect of which one might do wrong.”⁶⁵

In the imaginative encounter of the individuals who constitute the dialectic of mastery and servitude, the encounter is staged as that between two concept-using agents who jointly bring each other under the concept of concept-user, which means that they see each other as self-conscious agents. Each is a self-conscious life who at first takes his normative requirements to be monadic in structure. His commitments are his own and are mediated by the order of thoughts under which he places himself in order to be a knowing subject at all. He tells himself, as it were, that he is obligated to infer Q from P or that the evidence requires him to believe X. These are duties he owes but not to any particular person. It is by continuing to see himself as a monadic subject gripped by normative requirements but owing them to nobody in particular that he confronts the other.

Now, it does not follow from the assumption of such agents grasping each other as self-conscious concept-users that they also thereby have a sense of justice vis-à-vis each other—that they see the other as having the kind of status that would be given expression in some kind of dyadic relation, as in, “I owe it to her not to do that.” They may well have a concept such as, “It would be wrong for me to do that,” but that is a different matter. One can think of them as analogous to agents belonging to two different legal systems confronting each other and each demanding of the other that the other recognize—bestow or acknowledge the binding status of—the former’s own legal system as binding on himself. With each coming from two different metaphorical legal systems in a context in which each demands complete jurisdiction over the other, each is, as Hegel likes to say, an other to the other. Even though both legal systems might by chance share some of the same content—or, for that matter, they might by chance even have the same norm of not coercing other rational agents into compliance with one’s own legal orders—any such sharing would be accidental. It is not necessary for it to be a “legal system” that it have such a norm prohibiting that kind of coercion at all, and in the absence of such a norm, there will be conflicts that will be, from the standpoint of each, legally irresolvable. In particular, if both agents assert the full normative status of their own “legal system”—remembering that this is an analogy—against the other, there will be no way to adjudicate the conflict except by either abandoning the conflict or by appeal to force.

To the extent that one of the agents decides in favor of demanding full recognition for himself and his order of thoughts on the part of the other, there is a struggle which can also escalate into a struggle over life and death. This will happen when one of the agents for some reason demands the jurisdiction of his own order of thoughts—his own, so to speak, legal system—and is willing to stake his own life on such a demand. He demands recognition from the other as authoritative. The other, moreover, understands the demand. Both share a human shape of life, and they both understand what each is demanding and equally the seriousness of the demand. Each understands the other to be saying “submit or die.”

That at first creates the misleading appearance that they share an order of thoughts, that they seem to inhabit the same “legal system” or that they are really playing the same game. However, from within the demands made for recognition, what starts out as two “games” becomes deadly. Once one of them, for whatever reason—madness, rage, Alexandrian dreams of conquest—decides that the system within which he lives simply must be recognized by others not in that system, there is no way out of the conflict other than a struggle for recognition which quickly turns lethal. When out of fear of losing his life one submits to the domination of the other, a new relation, that of mastery and servitude, is instituted.

Although the struggle begins as each attempts to subjugate the other by bringing him into his own system of concepts, by virtue of engaging in the struggle, they have changed the context in which they operate. They were at first two individuals at odds with each other. Now they are two individuals whose subjectivity is part of a shared normative enterprise, except that this enterprise now involves servitude on the part of one, mastery and command on the part of the other. As part of a shared normative enterprise, they have also changed the shape of their respective self-relations and therefore their self-consciousness. Whereas before, they were part of two different enterprises, now they share an enterprise with a conceptual and existential conflict at its very core.

The master demands recognition from the other as master, but the master refuses to give in turn any such recognition to the other. The master demands recognition but refuses to give it. Logically viewed, the master demands a dyadic judgment from the servant, whereas he refuses to take up any such judgment for himself, relating himself only monadically to his own conception of what his order of thoughts requires. He also demands recognition from somebody who on the master’s own terms does not have the authority to bestow such recognition.

What Hegel calls “eternal justice” thus can, within the terms set by the master, not become manifest here. However, the servant, by being taken up into the master’s “legal system,” eventually comes to grasp, however inchoately, that his own status as agent depends on his taking up the dyadic form for himself. He is an agent with status only in the eyes of the master, and he comes to understand that likewise the master is only the master in terms of such a dyadic relation. The servant thus comes to a correct comprehension of the relationship, whereas the master acquires powerful motives for understanding it falsely.⁶⁶ The servant comes to understand what he is doing and, as he does, to distance himself from his status as servant. The master, on the other hand, has powerful motivations for not understanding his deeds in a deep way at all.

Transparency of reference breaks down in both the observational cases and the cases of second-person reference. What seemed like a fully transparent reference to another subject (in the second-person) as standing in the same order of thoughts as oneself itself breaks down under the pressure of disputes about who or what really has authority to specify what that order really requires or what exactly is the order in which both are standing. What seemed like merely a brute desire for submission by the other is in fact a mediated desire for authority. That is the dialectic of mastery and servitude, and it provokes, as Hegel puts it in his later entries in his Encyclopedia, the formation of a common will which in turn systematically yields its place to a conception of “universal self-consciousness” (a term borrowed from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason⁶⁷), that is, of reason itself as constituting the order of thoughts with all human subjects as its members. It provokes, that is, recognition of a “space of reasons” as authoritative. However, that is a result, not a presupposition—an achievement, not something always already in place. It is also in its concrete form not fixed once and for all.

“Eternal justice” is not coeval with “subjectivity,” but it emerges as essential to the shape subjectivity takes in history. Out of mastery and servitude emerges a conception of a justice to which appeal can always be made, even if it often goes unheeded and often is repressed before it can ever find expression. How that actually works in historical development is yet to be shown.

Rational Animals

Although there is nowadays a familiar hierarchical picture of subjectivity as that of a subject reflectively endorsing certain desires and finding its freedom only in such a reflective endorsement, Hegel has many separate reasons for rejecting that picture as basic to self-consciousness. His most prominent reason is that it generates a kind of regress about the subject’s own self-consciousness since it seems to require for self-consciousness a consciousness of consciousness, which in turn requires a consciousness of consciousness of consciousness, ad infinitum. Second, the concept of “reflectively identifying with one’s desires” is simply too weak to do the job it is supposed to do.

Instead, Hegel himself speaks of free action as the subject’s being “in” the action. For example, he says that, “If I put something into practice and give it a real existence, it must be right for me, I have to be ‘in’ the act and hope to obtain satisfaction through its accomplishment.”⁶⁸ Interests are part of our second nature such that for people of different interests, the world may show up to them in different ways, and this has to do with who they are as the individuals they are (along with their particular talents, their other inclinations and oddities of personality). An interest in this case is not best conceived as an internal mental state but as something that itself manifests itself over a wide range of things and activities. This is part of Hegel’s larger claim in his Logic that the “universal” must be manifested in the individual, and that the way this is manifested makes a difference to the content.⁶⁹ Reasons show up for us and become motivating only in the context of our animal, social, and political lives.⁷⁰ Because of our animal life, things matter to us, and because of our rational lives, other things show up as mattering. Thus, because we are rational animals, “laws and principles have no immediate life or binding force in themselves. The activity which puts them into operation and endows them with real existence has its source in the needs, impulses, inclinations, and passions of man.”⁷¹ Human subjectivity is not that of two different faculties or machines coordinating their efforts. It is the (sometimes conflicted) result of the way in which rational agents themselves are at work in the world.

Hegel’s view is thus a kind of outlier version of what has come to be called “internalism” in moral psychology, namely, the view that there is a close, perhaps even necessary, connection between our reasons (as norms) and our motivational structure—so close that some internalists argue that unless the connection is already there, a reason lacking that connection cannot even count as a “normative,” action-guiding reason at all.⁷²

Hegel is perfectly aware that he has raised the stakes for whatever kind of “internalist” he is by taking this particular position on the issue. To the extent that interests can change over time as a function of the shape of life at stake (which includes that shape of life’s material culture), there will be some reasons that either cannot develop or at least can have no binding force for those people. When a shape of life stops making sense to the people living within it, the immediate self-conscious unity of the shape of life tends to become more reflective, and as it becomes more clear that there may not be any sense to be made of the crumbling state of affairs, the shape of life may fall into dissolution. The people living in the ruins of that dissolution have to pick up the pieces, keep what still works, discard the rest, and create something new out of it. (Hegel’s German term for that process is Aufhebung as both cancelling and preserving, and rendered in English by the term of art “sublation.”) Out of that reshaping come new reasons that have “immediate life and binding force” for such people.⁷³

In the scheme of Hegel’s version of naturalism, a reason for action is thus the significance that something has for a certain organic creature given the possibilities of that creature. Self-conscious creatures socially institute a new realm of significance for themselves that goes beyond the possibilities set by self-maintenance and reproduction, that is, goes beyond the basic ends of nonrational life. Those new realms of significance include, for example, religious observance, different forms of governance, ethical obligations, and so forth. Or, as we might put it, what shows up as salient for an animal are the reasons and their context, and thus for rational animals, a host of other things can show up as salient for them that cannot show up for nonrational animals.

This shifts the ground away from a more familiar picture of reasons as competing with the passions or with animal inclinations. The various desires, drives, and inclinations of rational animals can get their grip on the more developed conceptuality of self-conscious subjects, not because the drives, desires, and inclinations are nonconceptual natural events that must be “synthesized” into maxims or regulated by some rational monitoring faculty but because they are already meaningful. They are ready for conceptual systematization in a scheme of practical reason because, as purposes of life, they are already ready to take on conceptual form. The inclinations can become incorporated into the will of a self-conscious agent as motives because they are already there as incentives for a living being, that is, as putative reasons.⁷⁴ If animals have reasons, then the so-called sharp break between the nonrational animals and the rational animals is not in fact so sharp. Both respond to reasons. Where the genuinely sharp break occurs is that between the self-conscious rational animals (who can see their purposes as purposes and thus entertain their reasons as reasons) and non-self-conscious animals.

Hegel takes Kant, among others who see the passions as in competition with the intellect, to have necessarily “dissembled” about the issue of the relation between the passions and reason. On that view, our hearts may pull us one way and our reason pull us in another, and moralists have often phrased the issue as the debate over which side should have predominance in human life. In at least one very familiar interpretation of Kant, he too sees the passions as providing one source of motivation and reason as providing an alternative source, with the two often being at odds with each other. Hegel thinks that Kant “dissembled” on that issue, since Kant also held something like what Henry Allison has called Kant’s “incorporation thesis.” For Kant, no sensible incentive can actually be a reason for action (or a motive) unless the subject makes it a reason for action (which sounds very much like reason “monitoring” or “regulating” some lower-level activity).⁷⁵ Even very early in his career, Hegel had argued against Kant’s way of marking the distinction between concepts and intuitions by showing how Kant’s official doctrine of the separation of the two was itself undermined by Kant’s own arguments supporting the contrary conclusion.⁷⁶ (Hegel’s arguments were most emphatically not that there is thus no difference between concept and intuition. It was that the two are distinguishable but not separable.)⁷⁷

Consistent with that view, Hegel argued in his writings on practical philosophy that Kant’s separation of sensible motive and rational maxim (or imperative) was itself undermined by Kant’s own arguments. If it is true that no sensible incentive can become a motive unless it is made into a motive, then there is simply no way of prying apart incentive and motive in a self-conscious subject (in an analogous way that a self-conscious subject, in the terms of Kant’s first Critique, also cannot be aware of an “unsynthesized” intuition). A self-conscious subject can be aware that something looks like a good reason for action—because, for example, it would be fun, pleasant, enriching, etc.—but even an awareness of a brute desire is not yet the formation of an intention, a “thought,” to put that into action.⁷⁸

Kant’s view is a familiar one that appeals to just about anyone’s experience, and it is easy to see why that what looks at first like the collision of two great forces meeting each other in one individual—passion coming at it from one side, reason coming at it from the other—in fact is, if one takes Kant’s incorporation thesis as his real position, really a struggle of reason with itself. The battle between passion and reason is a battle within the individual about what he really has reason to do. The attempt to display reason’s struggle with itself as reason’s struggle with its passionate “other” is really only “shadowboxing,” not a real conflict between different masters.⁷⁹ The issue is thus not: How do we manage to get reason to overcome passion? Nor is it: How to build up one force to crush the other? But: Is following my immediate wants in this case a better reason for action than, say, keeping faith with other commitments?

The amphibious character of human subjects as naturally responsive to reasons that show up for them given their natures, and who often experience conflicts between duty and desire or theory and life, is a feature of the way in which reason itself can be in conflict with itself within a rational animal’s life. To the extent that, to follow Hegel’s rather extravagant way of speaking, “reason” is the absolute (as authorizing its own boundaries, including those which limit its own claims), then the experience of certain types of basic conflict is an experience of the absolute’s dissatisfaction with itself, the way in which entire shapes of life can be built out of fundamental oppositions within themselves. It is more or less distinctive to Hegel’s conception that this kind of conflict is a key feature of reason itself and not merely of the myriad distinct empirical conditions in which reason functions. The inadequacies to be found within an authoritative set of reasons are inadequacies for the shape of life in which they function as basic.

When Hegel speaks, as he often does, of a will “immersed” or “sunken” into nature, he is speaking therefore of a will that takes some sets of desires or passions to automatically generate reasons. A natural will would be a will that equates, for example, “That is attractive” with “That is therefore reason enough for me to pursue it.” In effect, what counts as a good reason will therefore be part of the order of thoughts to which a subject belongs—what concatenation of principle and passion institutionally and practically is the case. That this or that passion is reason enough to act in this or that way thus hangs together with an overall view that passion and principle hang together in a certain way. That certain things are particularly hard to resist—something noted by Aristotle as grounds for excusing some otherwise nonvirtuous actions⁸⁰—is only a statement about how some things are so attractive (for example, money, power, sex) or unattractive (shame, extreme pain, severe loss of status,) such that it is very easy for people to rationalize rearranging their economy of reasons to accommodate their taking those incentives to be justified reasons. What will count as justifiable depends on the order of thoughts at work and the context in that order.

One of Hegel’s key hypotheses about historical development is that it will display the development of the “natural” will into a “rational” will. That is, it will offer illustrations of how certain shapes of life effectively take on certain things as givens, which function, as it were, automatically as reasons. Such shapes of life have not yet developed the proper critical capacities to separate out such reasons-as-given-in-a-shape-of-life from real reasons. For that to work, there needs to be some reasons that at least present themselves to us as not bound to a particular set of social rules but present themselves as distinct from them, as principles of criticism that go beyond the mere givenness of a particular way some reasons are in fact taken to be authoritative. We must have an appeal to “something higher,” as Hegel puts it, to get a grip on these principles of criticism. This “higher” viewpoint is attained first, he thinks, in religion and in art and only afterward, after such seemingly external principles have been developed, do they appear in philosophical thought.

The picture of us standing back and reflecting on what desires we are to identify with is thus in Hegel’s view at best a derivative picture from the more basic view of us as self-conscious primates apperceptively but not necessarily reflectively working our way through the involvements within which we always and already immersed. We are pushed into reflection on those involvements when the deeper seated tensions and contradictions in them begin to manifest themselves in our lives and the tensions become more clear.

Hegel’s internalism is thus an outlier in two ways. First, even though there has to be a link between reasons and passions for the reason to be a real reason for the subject, this concatenation of passion and principle is relative to the historical shape of life. Shapes of life themselves are displaced historically by other shapes, and, if Hegel can make his case, that displacement can be shown in parts to have a rational structure.⁸¹

Second, the individual is not a composite of passion and principle but a unity, even if a fragile one. The subject is a rational animal, and not just an animal that has had rationality added onto it. It is a subject who relates itself to itself as the rational creature it is, with it being such a creature by bringing itself under the concept of such a creature. The subject is thus not something like a Kantian rational agent who also happens to be embodied in a human shape. Rather, the subject is a rational animal by bringing itself under that concept, although this act need not itself be a reflective act. The subject actualizes herself in actualizing the thoughts of herself as falling under that concept (which does not imply that the subject is always articulate about what that concept or what it further entails). In bringing itself under the concept, it thus stands in a relation to itself mediated by the concrete shape of life in which the subject lives and which is socially and historically indexed, even if not all the passions themselves are so thoroughly socially indexed.

If Hegel is right about that conception of subjectivity, then the familiar conception that the subject is somehow lying behind the action and directing his actions by a faculty of the “will,” as the circus director is directing all his performers, is, however tempting, also deeply misleading. It is the embodied subject, not his mental events, that is the cause of the action, and the subject itself is not a little homunculus inside the human person pulling the levers or directing the show. The faculty of the will is just thought taking an embodied shape. All such activities involve a way of being in the world that “consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of activities immediately to mind in any case that occurs, even, we may say, immediate in our very limbs, in an activity directed outwards.”⁸²

The key distinctions are thus between animal-absorbed activities (which are not fully actions), self-consciously absorbed activities, and reflectively self-conscious activities. As Hegel puts it, although no new content is added when we move from being self-consciously absorbed in, say, a perceptual judgment (in Hegel’s terms, in our being in-itself a rational animal) to being reflectively self-conscious about the same judgment (when we are a rational animal for-itself), the resulting difference in form is of crucial importance. Hegel’s reworking of Kant’s incorporation thesis is not the view that somehow the passions lose their force in moving people to action, nor that they are dissolved into the more bloodless ideas of impartially weighing reasons against each other. It does, however, claim that the passions stand in a different relation to the subject than they do to a non-self-conscious animal. The incorporation thesis brings, as he puts it, the “form of being-for-itself”—that is, the form of self-consciousness—to the passions, and this makes all the difference, since, as Hegel puts it, “the great difference that matters in world history is what has to do with this difference.”⁸³ Animals act on desire. The human animal, in acting on a desire, acts with the form of self-consciousness, which means that in acting on that desire, he makes himself into “the kind of person who acts on that desire,” and the justification for being that kind of person has to do with the specific shape of life. Because of the “form of self-consciousness,” even at the level of acting on desire, we are already implicated in a collective enterprise.

Hegel consistently identifies freedom across his writings as a matter of being at one with oneself, or being “with oneself” (to give his German formulations of bei sich selbst a literal translation). Freedom is thus a form of self-unity, indeed, of self-consciousness. It is easy to misread Hegel on this point as arguing that freedom is some form of “identification” with the objects or principles of willing in terms of seeing them as “mine.” That is far too narcissistic as an interpretation as if the major function of freedom was to make everything “my own.” In a passage often stressed by commentators, Hegel says that “we already possess this freedom … in friendship and love.”⁸⁴ The more narcissistic interpretation has to take passages like that to mean that “I” somehow incorporate the other into my own goals and projects for that specific other’s needs and interests to serve as effective motivators for me. However, Hegel means it in a far more social sense: In such relationships, I find a purpose that I could not have on my own. That conception of freedom is heavily indebted to Rousseau’s and Kant’s conceptions of freedom as being both sovereign and subject in a community: I am both author of and subject to the principles that make up a community free of domination and in which each is thus “sovereign” (as constituting the principles) and subject (as subject to the legislation offered by the other). In Hegel’s own terms, as “sovereign,” I have an indeterminate and thus at best merely a purely reflective will, but as “subject,” I acquire a wider set of purposes. Indeed, so Hegel argues, only his more dialectical conception is the adequate way to understand that relation between being equally sovereign and subject.⁸⁵ All other social unities that involve domination and irrationality are, to that extent, distortions and failures to live up to the concept of true freedom.

In each case, Hegel argues that there is a developmental story to be told about how we realize this power of self-conscious thought in action. Freedom is a matter of how one’s order of thoughts determines one’s actions. We act freely when our bodily movements are adequate expressions of the thoughts that form the unity of those movements. For this reason, Hegel concludes that freedom is the capacity to make what truly matters effective in one’s life, and, in modern times, that more or less comes down to acting on our own reasons rather than on vague feelings of guidance from nature, the gods, or those who claim to rule us by natural right.

Since acting on reasons requires that the reason, the explanation of the action, be known by the actor, I act truly freely when it is my thoughts alone that take embodiment in the process that constitutes the action. To the extent that my actions are realizations of something like completely unconscious reasons, I am not free (or not at least fully free). To the extent that my conscious thoughts are not the final court of appeal, I am not free. Likewise, as he points out time and again, I am also not free with regard to empirical matters since, in those cases, it is the facts that determine what I am to think, not me, and that pretense to be the “absolute” in those matters is either pathetic or downright dangerous.⁸⁶ Nor am I free when I am under the compulsion of some basic need (food, sleep, water, etc.).⁸⁷ Nor am I free when I take my thoughts to be under the guidance of another person, or something else that is external to my own thought (as in the idea of “Thy will be done” said by a vassal to his master).⁸⁸ I am free when I can make what genuinely matters into something actual, and that means that I can be deprived of freedom by other people and by circumstances beyond my control. As a slave, I am not free. As a person for whom it matters that he or she be able to take care of their children, I am not free when social circumstances or unwarranted power deprive me of that ability.

The actor is free when she is at one with herself, that is, the action is up to her, she can make some sense of those thoughts, she can understand them as her conscious thoughts even when those thoughts may not be entirely clear to her, and she has the power to make what matters in light of those reasons effective in the world.⁸⁹ Since the actor is only free when she acts on reasons that are intelligible and not just “given,” it is only in modern times that we have been in the position to say that “all are free,” that in principle each such rational animal has the capacity to actualize the power of such free-standing thought, and it would only be in rational social conditions—where each is in principle (that is, in his or her “concept”) equally sovereign and subject—that this true conception could be actualized. Freedom in this Hegelian sense is not an all-or-nothing affair, as it might look if one took it to be an issue of some kind of uncaused causation at work in free willing. It involves a relation to self in which the grounds one gives for one’s actions are themselves justifiable, in which they “make sense” (in an extended sense of making sense that includes art and religion). Freedom is thus a way of way of being at one with oneself such that the life one leads is not rent by reasons that seem not to be real reasons. In pre-modern times, in which the great majority of people are under normative compulsion to take their thoughts to be guided by the gods or their betters and where there is no institutional way out of that arrangement, at most only “some are free.” Freedom thus ultimately rests on our relations to others, not on some power to step outside of the natural causal realm. It rests on the “form of self-consciousness.”

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Preliminaries