Reason

Individuality Which, to Itself,
is Real in and for Itself

With the fall of virtue, the lone individual has reached its apex, and can no longer pretend that wisdom and happiness can be found when one lives outside of society and the way of the world. Self-consciousness has been brought to the realisation that individual action, regardless of its intentions, is always part of a social whole greater than any one person. What this means, Hegel explains, is that ‘Self-consciousness has now grasped the concept of itself, which was initially only our concept of it.’¹ Hegel is referring here to the idealist concept of self-consciousness, which served as the starting point of the whole Reason chapter, namely: self-consciousness is that which knows itself to be ‘all reality’.²

Now that the individual no longer acts ‘in opposition to immediately existent actuality [i.e. society]’, and instead recognises itself as part of that actuality, it has reconciled self-consciousness and being. In other words, now that it has truly grasped the concept of what it really is, self-consciousness ‘is the category which has become conscious of itself.’³ In this accomplished state, aware of itself as a ‘permeation of the universal … and individuality’, self-consciousness ‘begins anew from itself, not by directing itself towards an other but by directing itself towards itself.’⁴ Self-consciousness is now concerned not with ideological motivations, as the knight of virtue was, but with the natural actions of communal, social survival: caring and being cared for, working, education, living and dying. For ‘the man of the Weltlauf’, Kojève writes, ‘what counts is not ideas but concrete action, and it is this action that creates (social, political, historical) human reality.’⁵ This action ‘alters nothing and opposes nothing’, Hegel explains, because it is no longer carried out in opposition to something (the pain of necessity, laws of society, etc.).⁶

What is left of the enormous Reason chapter is an examination of this new form of self-consciousness, who acts out ‘the exhibition or expression of individuality’ and has left behind all grand ideology to instead pursue simple self-expression in ‘the pure form of translating not having been seen into having been seen.’⁷ Accordingly, Pinkard suggests that this is the point in humanity’s development when genuine autobiography emerges. In the pre-modern world, books by writers like Augustine and Peter Abelard were written to fit a religious narrative (of falling away from God and rediscovering one’s religion); Augustine’s Confessions in particular are explicitly addressed to God. In Rousseau’s Confessions, however, the author presents himself as a unique individual, and ‘not just an instance of some more general pattern.’⁸

The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deception

We’ve heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one’s own work and not meddling with what isn’t one’s own.

The individual now knows itself to be ‘all reality’, but what is this reality? At first, it is not very much at all: the individual’s sense of itself starts as nothing but an ‘abstract universal’, some potential cause or vocation.⁹ Until a person acts upon the abstract idea of their vocation, it is really nothing more than abstractness. As such, it is still crucial for us to focus on the activity of the individual.

Individuality ‘comes on the scene’, Hegel writes, ‘as an original determinate nature.’¹⁰ A person is restricted – their existence is in some part determined – by the kind of animal they are (an animal that cannot fly, that cannot breathe underwater, etc.), and as such they are limited to a certain range of activity. Within this range, however, ‘the doing of consciousness’ cannot be limited, and the individual is free. The ‘original nature’ of the individual is the individual’s potential, their skill – whether that is the skill of weaving, of painting, of cooking, or anything else. Indeed, Hegel points out that the determinate nature of the individual is not regarded as ‘a restriction which it would want to transcend’: unlike the unhappy consciousness, who dreamt of overcoming its bodily existence (but also knew this dream to be impossible), the real individual enjoys their limited capacities, because it is through them – when they are put into practice – that the individual is merged with reality.¹¹ This coexistence of restriction and freedom is a motif that recurs throughout Hegel’s work. Hegel repeatedly points out that real freedom – freedom that is practical and effective – appears only in situations wherein one is directed by certain norms or restrictions. As an example, consider language: though someone (a Romantic, perhaps) might feel that the rules of language are too narrow, preventing true human expression, what would a language with no rules look like? It would presumably be indistinguishable from a baby’s babbling. It is only because of the restrictions of language that we are able to say anything meaningful at all, because these restrictions introduce a universal regulation to language that makes it communicable to others. On a broader and more political scale, Slavoj Žižek uses the example of rules about vaccinations:

The freedom to choose being vaccinated or not is, of course, a formal kind of freedom; however, to reject vaccination effectively implies limiting my actual freedom as well as the freedom of others. … My freedom is only actual as freedom within a certain social space regulated by rules and prohibitions. I can walk freely along a busy street because I can be reasonably sure that others on the street will behave in a civilized way towards me, will be punished if they attack me, if they insult me, etc. – and it is exactly the same with vaccination.¹²

In the present context, the restriction in question is the determinate nature of the individual. This determinate nature determines how the individual experiences their environment; in Kalkavage’s words, the individual ‘sees the whole world through the specific coloration of his techno-medium and originality.’¹³ Furthermore, the actualisation of the individual’s talents serves as a mediation between the individual’s consciousness (their intentions, the purpose of their activity, and so on) and the world itself. This is the rational manifestation of the ‘labor of the negative’ that appeared in the Preface and in the slave’s liberation in Self-Consciousness: through the individual’s doing, they come to face ‘the object as it has emerged from the actor to be outside of him and to be for him as an other.’¹⁴ The difference here is that, while the slave’s work brought the slave to an awareness of themselves, the real individual’s work brings them to an awareness not only of themselves but also of their unity with their environment, of the ‘permeation’ of universality and individuality mentioned above.

As a real individual, my activity negates my original nature, since it transforms it from an implicit potentiality into something actual and external to me (in the environment objects and I work in and upon). Activity makes my nature explicit and legible: ‘doing is, in particular, the pure translation of the form of the being not yet exhibited into the form of the being that is exhibited.’¹⁵ Consequently, I cannot really know my own individuality until I act upon it.

At this point, Hegel points out an apparent paradox involved in the individual’s activity. It seems that the individual ‘is incapable of finding a beginning for his actions’: in order to act on one’s individual nature, this nature must be known; but it can only be known when it is made explicit in individual activity. ‘The individual who sets himself to act therefore seems to be situated in a circle in which every moment already presupposes the other.’¹⁶ Hegel actually offers no clean logical solution to this paradox; rather, he claims that the individual simply begins its activity immediately, without worrying about ‘beginnings, middles, and ends’, precisely because activity itself is the beginning, middle, and end (in the sense of purpose) of itself. In other words, we come to know the nature that inspires our activity because we just ‘get on with it’, and our nature is revealed to us in the way we act. Harris explains this point with a helpful anecdote:

The little girl, of whom I once heard in a philosophy class, who asked “How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” had her feet set firmly on the path towards a Real Individuality that will not deceive itself at least. But, of course, we could ask her how she knew what she was saying if she did not formulate it to herself before she said it.¹⁷

At this point, we are ready to think about other people again. Importantly, it is not only the individual who has determinate qualities. The object of their work is determinate too, ‘as an existing actuality freed from the doing’.¹⁸ The individual looks upon their work, just as the slave of Self-Consciousness did, and recognises it as an embodiment of negativity (since, for Hegel, all determination is negation), produced by the negativity of the individual’s doing. The consequence of this is that individuals in the Weltlauf can compare themselves to one another by assessing the objects of their neighbours’ work. Who has expressed their original nature most skillfully? Who has been limited by their restricted skill? Hegel stresses that these comparisons are only quantitative: there is no ‘exaltation nor lamentation’, no assessments of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but merely judgments regarding the ‘translation’ of the individual’s original nature from an abstract, in-itself potentiality to a concrete, actual being.¹⁹

It is when we enter the realm of others that dialectical tensions start to emerge. Just as we saw with the law of the heart, the exposure of the individual to the public forces the individual to face up to the truth of their experience. ‘In his work, [the individual] has placed himself outside of himself and into the element of universality.’²⁰ At this stage at least, the individual can be understood as one of Leibniz’s monads: simple and distinct beings who move freely and act in order to express their essence.²¹ The public’s gaze upon the individual’s work reminds us of one specific remark about monads:

Monads just have no windows through which something can enter into or depart from them … neither substance nor accident can enter a monad from without.²²

In the context of the individual, this means that the Other has no way of seeing into the individual and their original nature; rather, they must make do with an interpretation of the individual’s action. (Here is another instance of Hegel’s proto-behaviourism, which we also saw in his chapter on physiognomy). The public Other, as interpreter, thus has a comparable role to the reader as depicted by Roland Barthes in his writing on ‘the death of the author’. If we imagine the individual and their action as a ‘scriptor’ and a ‘text’, what Barthes suggests is in agreement with Hegel:

The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.²³

The final words of Barthes’s remark – ‘every text is eternally written here and now’ – is a clue towards Hegel’s own thinking in this section. In Sensuous Certainty, the concepts ‘here and now’ betrayed the immediate particular and gave way to the universal that was the focus of Perception. The ‘here and now’ is not an immediate atom of space and time, but is universal – or, in Barthes’s words, ‘eternal’. Here, in the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’, the individual’s action similarly betrays their (apparent) private individuality and leads the individual into universal consciousness by – as described above – forcing them to consider themselves as the embodiment of negativity, rather than just a practitioner of particular determinate acts. ‘The consciousness which steps back from its work is in fact the universal consciousness,’ Hegel writes, ‘because it becomes absolute negativity.’²⁴

The Weltlauf is thus a competition or a market in which individuals universalise themselves through work, through the production of ‘alien actuality’, and in which they seek recognition for their alienated labour by the judging eyes of the Other. The individual is still primary, but in the social world, this primacy is only possible in the context of competition with others. This constant competition for recognition (which we might as well call ‘attention seeking’) is what makes the Weltlauf an ‘animal kingdom’ – or a ‘zoo’, as Robert Solomon more aptly renders it. An individual in the animal kingdom can only fully exist when they are recognised, Solomon points out: ‘not in the crude mode of domination and submission, independence and dependence, as in the “master-slave” parable, but by way of having a place in society, an exalted place as a producer, a creator, an agent of self-expression.’²⁵ The chaos of the animal kingdom, the lunacy of the ‘rat race’, is all in pursuit of this place.

When the individual was an individualist – in the case of the Faustian pleasure-seeker, for instance – they began by opposing activity (doing) to actuality (being). The actuality of the world was in a dire state, in need of overturning through the individualist’s activity. For the individual of the animal kingdom, however, the opposition of being and doing is the result.²⁶ Individual self-consciousness understands its ‘original nature’ to be its being: the in-itself, the intention or original thought ‘behind’ their activity. Their work, on the other hand, is the doing, which – through its release into the eyes of the public, and through the inevitable imperfections of human labour – never entirely matches up with the original being. Now, it is up to the individual whether it is the original intention or the action itself that is considered the concept, with the other regarded as the reality of this concept; either way, the two remain mismatched, and it is work itself that reveals this mismatch or contradiction:

In its work, consciousness learns from its own experience about this inadequation of concept and reality that lies in the essence of consciousness. Therefore, it is in its work that, to itself, consciousness comes to be as it is in truth, and its empty concept of itself vanishes.²⁷

Here is the real problem with this mismatch: while I change, my works are still out there, unchanging. And they are subjected to the interpretation of a public that, for all intents and purposes, does not know me. So how can I be sure that I myself will be well thought of by others? It seems that me and my work completely fall apart; a ‘vanishing’ [Verschwindens] takes place wherein I lose my authority on the work.²⁸

But – for someone whose primary goal is to express themselves, to act – is this vanishing such a problem? As Inwood writes, the individual ‘did at least perform an action, expressing its purpose in actuality and, from its own point of view, its performance was coherently unified. What does it matter if its work vanishes in the public sphere?’²⁹ To be sure, there is always a chance that my works and actions might unfortunately be misunderstood, but that’s all that there is: a chance. It is ‘fortune’ that decides how a public work is interpreted.³⁰ Thus, the contingent element of my activity is itself contingent. An individual is free to simply keep acting, and to reassert their original intentions in spite of the public’s misinterpretations. Moreover, this second assertion of the intention is more than a simple repetition: it is an instance of Hegelian ‘determinate negation’ – the ‘vanishing of the vanishing’ [Verschwinden des Verschwindens] wherein the public’s negation of the work is itself negated, and the individual moves from mere expression towards an assertion of truth.³¹

Looked at in this way, the scrutiny of the public is only ‘a vanishing moment’, as is the work itself. Indeed, even the original intention, the idea behind the work, is not what truly matters. The crux of the matter, the ‘thing itself’ [die Sache selbst] is the ‘unity’ of the whole process: the whole course of action wherein the individual ‘unreservedly affirms itself and is experienced as what endures, independently of the contingency of [their] doing and the contingency of the circumstances, means, and actuality.’³² Recall Hegel’s comment right at the start of the Phenomenology: ‘the whole is the result together with the way the result comes to be … the unadorned result is just the corpse that has left the tendency behind.’³³ What we are seeing now is the practical individual coming to the realisation of this fact. In understanding the whole process of work to be the crux of the matter, the individual recognises the category in its Hegelian sense: the unity of thought and being (‘the permeation of individuality and objectivity’, as Hegel puts it in this passage) that is brought about as something processual and developmental.³⁴ As Hyppolite puts it, ‘The “thing itself” is actual reality envisaged as the work of self-consciousness, the real at the level of creating consciousness.’³⁵

The thing itself expresses ‘the spiritual essentiality’ of the individual’s activity, without being equal to any isolated moment of this activity. In this way, it is a new sort of object, ‘born out of self-consciousness as its own object, without thereby ceasing to be a free-standing, genuine object.’³⁶ This object, Hegel tells us, will go through stages of development that parallel those of sensuous certainty and perception. (A major difference here is that, while those early chapters were concerned with ‘regular’ consciousness, we are now concerned with consciousness of the self.)

At the start of this development, one is conscious of the thing itself only immediately, apprehending it as a ‘simple essence’. In this sense, the thing itself is an abstract predicate that applies equally to all of its moments but does not truly unify them. ‘It is the genus which is to be found in all these moments as its species and which is likewise free-standing from all of them.’³⁷ Equipped with this sense of the thing itself, the individual embodies what Hegel calls ‘honest consciousness’. This individual is honest because they regard all of their activities – and all moments of their activities – to be honourable. At every step of their journey, the honest individual considers themselves to be engaged with the thing itself, the crux of the matter. Just as naïve sensuous certainty failed to recognise the universality involved in the observation that every moment is always ‘here’ and ‘now’, the honest individual ‘always gains satisfaction’ in the belief that their every move is the crux of the matter, the real heart of their activity.³⁸ This attitude goes so far as to apply even to activities carried out by other people:

If finally something of interest to [the honest individual] has come to be without his own involvement in it, then to himself it is this actuality itself which is the crux of the matter just because of the interest that he himself finds in it, which is quite independent of whether or not he brought about that actuality.³⁹

The honest individual ‘makes one meaning after another into [the thing itself], and then it forgets one after the other.’⁴⁰ Indeed, the only thing that unifies these multiple instances of the thing itself is the individual themselves: ‘they are so plainly related to each other’ insofar as ‘The pure doing is essentially this individual’s doing.’⁴¹ In this sense, the ‘honest’ individual is, in truth, concerned above all with themselves, with their own ego. Accordingly, we can see the honest consciousness as a parody of Fichte’s idealism – at least in the form that Hegel understood it. For Hegel, the foundation of Fichtean idealism is the ego’s ‘pure thinking of itself, pure selfconsciousness.’⁴² Similarly, the honest individual is self-congratulatory about its activity, concerning any action to be the crux of the matter simply because they deem it to be so. As Judith Shklar writes,

It is really because it is his ‘own’ cause that the ‘honest’ participant cares about it and imputes values to it. His activity is only a reflection of his self-absorption. … He is like the spectator who uses art to display his good taste. Causes [i.e. cruxes of the matter] are a foil to demonstrate his ‘honesty’. It remains a matter of the self playing with itself.⁴³

The honest individual is deceiving themselves: having no grasp on how their activity’s subjective side (i.e., their investment in it) relates to its objective side (i.e., its supposed status as the crux of the matter), they ‘run from the truth’ by constantly changing their mind about their focus and values.⁴⁴ Through this deception, however, they also end up deceiving others: when an individual declares a certain cause or vocation to be the crux of the matter, they declare it to be of universal interest: the activity ‘is exposed by consciousness to the light of day and is represented as being for others.’⁴⁵ Accordingly, other people start adopting and appropriating the activity, and making it their own. But as soon as this happens, the individual has lost what really made the activity worthwhile to them: namely, that it was them doing it themselves. Furthermore, the other people who adopted the activity, having been given no objective reasons to find the activity truly worthwhile, are also carrying it out in a merely self-congratulatory manner. For the first individual, ‘what interests him about the [supposed] crux of the matter is what it has to do with his own goings-on’; likewise, the ‘haste’ of the others to ‘offer their assistance’ amounts to nothing more ‘but their own desire to see and to show off not the crux of the matter but only their own activities’.⁴⁶ Deception and ‘hoodwinking’ spreads throughout the community.

If this seems too abstract, consider a contemporary example: the ‘hipster’. At least according to the stereotype, a hipster will fanatically praise something (perhaps a filmmaker, a style of music, or a way of dressing), declaring it to be the current Big Thing – the thing itself. However, if other people were to start adopting this Big Thing for themselves (going to see the filmmaker’s films, or listening to that particular style of music, etc.), the hipster would quickly denounce the thing, and perhaps claim that it has been misunderstood by the public: ‘they didn’t get it!’. It is quickly revealed that the hipster’s ‘interest’ in the thing was nothing but self-interest in disguise: it only earned its status as the thing itself insofar as the hipster could claim it as their own.

People will only tolerate such deception for so long. When an individual loses the trust of their community – and, moreover, continues to deceive themselves – they eventually come to the realisation that their conception of their activity is deeply flawed. No matter how much these ‘animal’ individuals compete with each other, ‘still they all mutually learn from experience that everyone is on the move and considers himself invited’ and that, when an overly individualistic notion of the crux of the matter is abandoned, something else is ‘brought into the open.’⁴⁷ Through experience, each member of the ‘animal kingdom’ comes to learn that the real crux of the matter is not an exclusively individual thing, but a social thing: it ‘is only a fact insofar as it is the doing of each and all’. This kind of fact, in Hegelian language, is called ‘spiritual essence’.⁴⁸

As Robert Pippin has suggested, Hegel’s conclusion of this chapter is that a conception of practical reason wherein my activity ‘is rational for me simply if it fits and helps realize my overall life plan and interests’ is, ultimately, not reason in any meaningful sense. Put otherwise, activity can be rational ‘only if tied to the development or realization of a supra-individual subject, Geist.’⁴⁹

Sartrean Animals

A short interlude

It is well known that French existentialism was influenced by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, where the relation of master to slave was taken as the centre of Hegel’s thought. In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, however, there are some passages that prompt comparisons with Hegel’s chapter on the animal kingdom (whether or not this was Sartre’s intention). In his chapter on concrete relations with others, Sartre explicitly cites Hegel on mastery and servitude, but he acknowledges that there is a strict limit to the comparison between his concerns and Hegel’s concerns in that chapter.⁵⁰ It is the animal kingdom, I would argue, where Hegel really shares concerns with Sartre in this regard.

The work of the slave is lonely and bound to be forgotten; so long as it serves a purpose for the master, no assessment is passed on it at all. (Indeed, it is through their work that the slave comes to shrug off the influence of the ‘outsider’s mind’.)⁵¹ In the animal kingdom, however, the gaze of the other individuals persists throughout, in the spirit of competition: at every stage of my activity, I cannot help but consider how the activity appears to others. By acting, the individual ‘has placed himself outside of himself’, into public visibility.⁵² It is here that we notice what Sartre described as ‘the look’ [le regard], where ‘my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other … I see myself because somebody sees me.’⁵³

When Sartre looks at phenomena like insecurity, shame, and love, he comes incredibly close to the Hegelian points which I have compared to Barthes. When, through acting, the individual submits themselves into ‘universal consciousness’ – when they enter themselves into the market – they betray their individuality, the dimension of their existence that had seemed to be private. The Other cannot judge me based on my intentions, plans, and so on; it is only in the actuality of these – that is, in my activity – that I can be recognised or (mis)understood. The way Sartre thinks about this is that the look of the Other betrays the narrative that I am telling myself about my activity. The ‘secret’ of my activity is not an inner intention, hidden away from public; rather, it is that visible dimension of my activity, available only to the public and hidden from me. ‘The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am,’ Sartre writes: ‘thus the profound meaning of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence.’⁵⁴

The real overlap between Hegel and Sartre here is twofold. Firstly, both of them claim that the interpretation of an individual and their activity takes place on the surface: as Sartre writes,

For the Other I am seated as this inkwell is on the table; for the Other, I am leaning over the keyhole as this tree is bent by the wind. Thus for the Other I have stripped myself of my transcendence. This is because my transcendence becomes for whoever makes himself a witness of it … a purely established transcendence, a given-transcendence; that is, it acquires a nature by the sole fact that the Other confers on it an outside.⁵⁵

Secondly, it is this surface – not any kind of interiority (private individuality for Hegel, or a personal sense of being-for-itself for Sartre) – that holds the authority of who I am and what I am doing. In the animal kingdom, an individual cannot appeal to their intentions or aims to convince others of the value of their work; the value is found in the surface layer of the work’s actuality. And for Sartre, it is a form of ‘bad faith’ to appeal to some interiority and undermine the authority that our visible existence has on who we are. There cannot be any disconnect between what we do and what we mean to do, for Sartre, since the starting point of human existence is a radical kind of freedom. (It is on this basis that Sartre rejects psychoanalysis.)

Of course, Sartre didn’t simply repeat Hegel. It is perhaps in the notion of radical freedom that the difference between Sartrean relations and the animal kingdom is found. For both Hegel and Sartre, all activity is a kind of negating: ‘doing is itself nothing but negativity’, Hegel claims.⁵⁶ Sartre agrees when he writes that ‘Hegel is right rather than Heidegger when he states that Mind is the negative’; he claims that the freedom of the subject for-itself is ‘constituted’ by the ‘negating act.’⁵⁷ However, in the chapter on the animal kingdom, Hegel describes activity as negating an ‘original determinate nature’ – the particular restrictive qualities of the acting being (such as their body). For Sartre, activity is negative because the choice of one action negates all other possibilities – he refuses the idea of an ‘original nature’ that is supposed to be negated by an act. Indeed, in existentialism there is no human nature at all. ‘Existence precedes essence’: first, the human simply exists, and acts only once they have encountered themselves in an experience with the Other. The body is not a restriction for Sartre as it is for Hegel. In Being and Nothingness he claims enigmatically that ‘I exist my body’; that is, the very being of the body – namely, as a ‘lived’ thing – is determined by us and disclosed to us in our activity; is is nothing at all prior to the act.⁵⁸

The notion of original nature leads Hegel to a Meno-style paradox involved in the activity of the animal kingdom. In order to act in accordance with my nature, I must know my nature; but ino rder to know my nature, I must first make it explicit by acting. The Sartrean solution to this paradox is that there is no ‘nature’ that the human acts on in the first place; rather, the human is its acting. The activity comes before any ‘nature’, since the individual’s radical freedom allows them to act without the presupposition of any restriction or inclination. … Interestingly enough, however, this is very clsoe to the solution that Hegel proposes himself. The individual ‘has to begin immediately’, he claims: activity is the beginning, middle, and end of itself, and this idea is seemingly close to the claim that the human – at least as it is understood in the animal kingdom – is radically free. Perhaps, from the Sartrean perspective, Hegel’s insistence on original nature preceding action introduces a contradiction into his argument. Did Sartre realise the truth of Hegel’s thought more than Hegel did himself?

Law-Giving Reason

Now that the obsession with the crux of the matter has been inverted and fallen into universal deception, and this deception has itself been inverted and moved aside for the rise of spiritual essence, the scene is set for a new shape of consciousness: that of ‘law-giving reason’. When consciousness takes this shape, it no longer takes its original determinate nature to be the primary, ‘positive’ determination of its activity and purpose.⁵⁹ Instead, consciousness starts to grasp the ‘spiritual essence’ of society, and focuses on a new object whose existence ‘is the actuality and the doing of self-consciousness’: no more wasting time with intentions, aims, and reputations.⁶⁰ This new object is ethical substance (or what we might call ‘social substance’), and it holds absolutely for our ethical consciousness: who would want to transcend that which substantiates and is substantiated by one’s own activity (along with the activity of everyone else), and from which actual laws can be derived, so solidly that anyone with ‘healthy reason’ immediately knows right from wrong?⁶¹

Of course, Hegel’s repeated lesson in the Phenomenology is that there is always an inherent limit to any such immediately desirable situation. As such, though consciousness now has ethical substance as its object, it is not yet at the stage of Spirit. The consciousness of law-giving reason is still too individualistic; it sees ethical substance all around but does not understand its role in this substance. ‘The individual self is still distinct from the substance of which it is the self, and substance is still separate from this self.’⁶²

This short section is consequently devoted to undermining reason’s claim that it can devise necessary moral laws – laws of nature, perhaps – simply through abstract rational thought. Such laws always collapse, Hegel will argue, because in aiming for necessity they fail to incorporate the contingency that runs throughout diverse individuals in ethical life. Just like in sensuous certainty, Hegel is here demonstrating that immediate claims to truth amount to very little.

The first attempt at an immediately valid law is: ‘everyone ought to speak the truth.’⁶³ An instruction that is so succinct almost instantly requires clarification: for instance, what if I don’t know the truth? Am I therefore prohibited from speaking at all? Accordingly, the law is revised: ‘everyone should speak the truth, at all times according to his knowing and conviction of it.’ Now, it’s easy to imagine that this amendment might be given with some tone of frustration: of course this law doesn’t prohibit you from speaking simply because you don’t know the truth – even if that wasn’t stated, it should have just been understood! As Hegel puts it, ‘healthy reason … will also explain that this condition is already so closely linked with its universal pronouncements that it is how it meant that the command was to be taken.’ Law-giving reason thus claims that, in giving a law that requires truth-telling, it meant something other than what was directly said… What is this if not a failure to tell the truth? We might grant that the law only had to be revised because a potential misunderstanding was discovered, but this isn’t good enough for a law: what kind of law is ‘left up to the contingency’ of whether or not it will convince people or satisfy its own demands? This law is not as necessary as its expression would suggest; as Hyppolite puts it, laws of this kind ‘manifest a contingency which derives from the individuality of the consciousness that formulates them.’⁶⁴

Secondly, Hegel looks at one of the most famous ‘laws’ of all time: ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’⁶⁵ He suggests that a charitable interpretation of this rule is that we should aim both to keep others out of harm’s way and to bring good to them. But what good? Is the good for my neighbour necessarily what is good for me? Should I deliver the same good to every individual? This rule can only be meaningful if it contradicts its necessity by allowing room for the contingency of individual ‘neighbours’. Furthermore, Hegel claims (in a rather unromantic remark) that I alone cannot bring much good to another person when my action is compared with that of the wider social community or the state. Further than this, as Harris points out, ‘I can do no good for my neighbour (or myself) unless we are participants in the great common good that we call “the State.” It is our commitment to, and membership in, the community … that enables us to be good to one another.’⁶⁶ Consequently, Hegel concludes, ‘the only significance that remains to beneficence is that of sentiment.’

What Hegel realises in his deconstruction of these ‘laws’ is that the contingent individuality of a speaker quickly undermines the universality of the speaker’s claim. This is what Jacques Lacan understood as the difference between the content of ‘the enunciated’ and the subject of ‘the enunciation’.⁶⁷ Think back to sensuous certainty, where Hegel shows that ‘what is meant’ is, in act and in fact, ‘inaccessible’ to language and to consciousness.⁶⁸ The same difficulty arises here, when the enunciated universality in ‘everyone ought to speak the truth’ is undermined by the subjective contingency of the consciousness enunciating it. These ‘laws of nature’ therefore express nothing more than a ‘formal’ or abtract universality which has as little concrete content as a tautology.⁶⁹ For Lacan, this undermining is what reveals to us the unconscious (indeed, the subject of the enunciation is the unconscious subject). Similarly, for Hegel it is always the surplus element that undermines a claim to universality that reveals a more comprehensive truth.⁷⁰ In this context, it is the (importance of the) subjective position of consciousness within ethical substance that is revealed to us; in other words, the emptiness of law-giving reason takes consciousness closer to the realisation that the subjective and the universal must be combined in a shared way of life (that is, spirit) in order for moral maxims to have any concrete content.

If it is always the case for Hegel that the undermining of a claim to truth is what takes us to a more comprehensive truth, it must also be the case that the weaker, narrower claim must come first. Consequently, pre-spiritual reason has one last attempt before we arrive at the stage of spirit. This last attempt is what Hegel calls law-testing reason, and it is, in some sense, a little more humble than law-giving reason: rather than trying to command humanity on the basis of reason or ‘common sense’, consciousness now sets about to use its reason merely for testing laws (or maxims) that are already presented to it.

Law-Testing Reason

At this point, consciousness takes the formal universality that emerged from law-giving reason’s failure and assigns a positive role to it: formal universality – that is, reason and the principle of non-contradiction – is now used to test laws that are already contingently, externally given.⁷¹ It no longer has the role of giving laws – seemingly out of thin air – as law-giving reason did. The test of formal university is simple. Given some maxim, it asks: is this maxim self-contradictory or not? The principle of non-contradiction thus becomes the ultimate barometer of morality. As such, we have arrived at a simplified form of Kant’s moral philosophy as it was outlined in his Groundwork. For Kant, a maxim can count as a moral law only if you can act on it while also acting as if ‘the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal laws of nature’ without any contradiction arising.⁷² It is precisely this idea that is examined in Law-Testing Reason.

Hegel takes as an example the maxim that there ought to be property. In a quasi-Kantian manner, let’s examine this maxim in and for itself – without any reference to its utility, potential consequences, intentions, or any other extraneous factor. To have property means that every individual is entitled to what they own. There is nothing self-contradictory about this. However, there is also no self-contradiction in the absence of property, which would amount to every individual’s lack of entitlement to anything. Property and no-property contradict one another, but on their own they are each completely stable. As such, the Kantian test has told us nothing: it justifies anything that is formulated as an abstract rule but loses its discriminatory power when competing abstract rules are placed alongside one another. ‘Just because the criterion is a tautology and is indifferent with regard to the content, it incorporates one content into itself with the same ease that it does its opposite.’⁷³ Hegel’s main point here is that reason, especially in such a formalist manifestation as the principle of non-contradiction, is totally inadequate in evaluating maxims that are given in a contingent, socially constituted community. Indeed, this approach to moral evaluation is not only philosophically deficient, but is also the sign of an alienation from ethical life; as Judith Shklar argues, law-testing reason ‘is merely a symptom of a disintegrated society’:

For an Antigone or any completely socialized citizen the very idea that laws should be tested or could be other than what they are would not arise at all. That, however is merely a damaging comparison between modern and ancient politics. To give his criticisms a more rigorous turn Hegel wanted to show that Kant’s test of universal consistency was of no use in practice to ordinary men, even though it was meant to be available to even the meanest intelligence. That was so because men have only particular and specific obligations and these cannot be universalized into general, timeless and unconditional duties.⁷⁴

Later, in his Encyclopaedia, Hegel repeats his criticism when he remarks that when practical thinking takes only the ‘abstract identity of the understanding’ as its determining factor, it ‘does not get beyond the formalism that was supposed to be the last word of theoretical reason.’⁷⁵ In a way, and insofar as Law-Testing Reason can be taken as truly aiming at Kant, Hegel takes the Kantian criticism of pre-critical Enlightenment and repeats it on Kant himself. Kant famously critiqued the Enlightenment’s insistence on the purity of reason (or observation, in the case of empiricism) on the grounds of its internal contradictions discovered by philosophers like Hume and Rousseau. However, in his own insistence on a transcendental separation of ‘reason’ from ‘nature’ (and, indeed, from spirit), Kant restricted himself to a ‘formalism’ that is unable to present or authorise anything substantive. ‘Without any appeal to what has become authoritative for a specific community, nor to what in that community’s accounts of why what it has taken as authoritative really is genuinely authoritative, no determinate set of moral principles can be generated.’⁷⁶

As such, the law-giving and law-testing manifestations of reason not only fail to prop up ethical life, but in fact demonstrate a profound alienation from ethical life. Law-giving reason is ‘the tyrannical outrage that makes arbitrariness into law’, and law-testing reason amounts to ‘a freedom from absolute laws [which] takes absolute laws to be an issuance of an alien arbitrary will.’⁷⁷ In both cases, consciousness mistakes its own reason and willing for actual ethical substance, which still remains only in the background (most prominently as the ‘alien will’ which ‘gives’ reason laws to be tested).

That law-testing reason can equally defend two contradicting laws reveals to consciousness the dialectical nature of justice, at least insofar as justice is understood as a principle worked out by an individual’s use of reason. We have seen that this reason cannot give laws, but neither can it verify laws given to it from the hazy background of ‘ethical substance’ within which it lives. Actual, concrete justice is thus only possible when this background comes to the fore – when we take as our subject matter the spirit in which critical reason comes about and which makes it possible for laws to be given or tested in the first place.