In recent years, the ancient concept of second nature has become the focus of a growing volume of Hegel-related work in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of mind, and action theory. And for good reason: second nature allows us to think across, and seeks to bridge, fundamental antagonisms that have haunted modern philosophy since its inception – between the realm of law and the realm of reasons, necessity and freedom, inclination and duty. In social philosophy, in particular, second nature holds the promise of reconciling the painful modern rupture between the individual and her political community, reviving the goods and comforts of what have been called the freedoms of the ancients in the context of a modern Sittlichkeit.
There are, however, reasons to go beyond the widespread fascination with this Aristotelian concept. Hegel’s approach to second nature, after all, is ambiguous. On the one hand, and as a challenge to Kant, he believes that in modernity—like in ancient Sittlichkeit—rational ethical conduct should be habituated and, as such, become second nature. On the other hand, the very term ‘second’ nature already implies that this habituation always already proceeds against a given background, ‘first’ nature, that it spiritually sublates: against the realm of the biological, the raw, and the unmediated. The very idea of a ‘second nature’, thus, leads beyond itself and raises the question of its relationship to its unmediated counterpart.
In this spirit, the last decade has seen a renewed and sustained interest in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and Anthropology, as well as their relationship to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. A range of scholars, some of which are represented in this volume, have, in other words, started to refocus on the role that first – rather than only second – nature plays in Hegel’s political philosophy. Without denying Hegel’s insistence on the irreducibility of spirit to nature, these approaches show that natural life— phenomena such as embodiment, sexuality, reproduction, and mortality—continues to operate within political freedom itself, shaping its conditions, facilitating its realization, and marking its limits.
Extending this line of research, the guiding thought behind the present collection is that Hegel’s social philosophy cannot be adequately understood without sustained attention to his conception of first nature and its always-dynamic relationship with second nature. Setting out on this journey, we wanted to stay clear of two extremes: On the one hand, we wanted to resist the temptation to treat the givenness of first nature as a mere residue to be overcome and domesticated by the social institutions of Ethical Life. On the other hand, we wanted to avoid attributing to Hegel a form of biological determinism that bypasses his account of normativity, and treats first nature as itself immediately reason-giving. Instead, we gathered contributions that resist this bifurcation, showing that the ethical is neither simply opposed to nature nor fully emancipated from it. Rather, from the perspective of our authors, ethical freedom emerges through historically specific mediations between first and second nature—mediations in which the very boundaries between the two are dynamically negotiated and thus remain fragile, revisable, and normatively charged.
At stake in these debates is not only a more adequate interpretation of Hegel’s system, but also a set of pressing contemporary concerns, many of which could benefit from the kind of Hegelian frameworks that our authors develop. On the one hand, some aspects of the current “polycrisis” seem to reassert the limits of “first nature” to our ethical and political projects. These developments have made it increasingly difficult to sustain conceptions of politics that presuppose the manageability or neutrality of unmediated natural life. From this perspective, Hegel’s insistence that ethical and political institutions must reckon with mortality, embodiment, and reproduction appears less as a speculative excess than as a resource for diagnosing contemporary pathologies—pathologies that arise when political orders either deny their natural conditions or attempt to instrumentalize them without proper mediation.
In the prospects (and, indeed, ongoing reality) of climate catastrophe, the threat of recurrent pandemics, or the declining (or outright collapse) of birthrate in developed countries, nature seems to be making a “comeback”, reminding us that the modern dream of “overcoming” it was dreamy indeed. In this picture of the relationship between first and second nature, the latter would have to readjust itself to the former, or ethical life will face regression, ossification and death. For example, we might have to change or limit our energy consumption and tame the market economy, address demographic decline, or use technology to reduce social contact and potential viral infection. One could also mention in this context the rise of populist authoritarianism and proliferation of war—including the threat of renewed nuclear rearmament. Is death—probably our most formidable natural limit—making a comeback too? Hegel has much to teach us about ethical and political ways to readjust to, and even derive meaning from, this predicament.
Another aspect of the polycrisis, similarly related to first nature, does not necessarily threaten Ethical Life with physical death but with a range of pathologies—depression, anxiety, addiction—that threaten its cultural and political vitality. Here we might think about the epidemic of loneliness in Western societies, the substitution of human intimacy for social media and online pornography, or, most recently, the ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence. Such phenomena do not only call for recalibrating our ethical life to better accord with our natural needs and inclinations. At times, they also make us wonder whether our “first nature” is much more malleable than we used to think. Pushing against a simplistic picture according to which first nature is constant while second nature is variable and changing, we realize that our understanding of first nature, too, is historically reconfigured. If, for example, as some excited technologists speculate these days, very many people would soon live a life of leisure or boredom, not in need of working; if, to be even more speculative, human children could be produced not by pregnant people but in laboratories, what would this entail with respect to the ethical and political implications of first nature? How would this affect the domain of second nature, our ability to habitually recognize—respect, appreciate, even love—the other? Much too soon to give any answers, for sure, but Hegel’s thought about the relationship between first and second nature strikes us as an indispensable resource for formulating some of these pressing questions.
From the perspective of recent debates in Hegel-Bulletin, this collection intervenes at a point where questions of normativity, recognition, and social freedom have reached a certain level of theoretical consolidation. Much influential work has clarified how Hegel’s political philosophy grounds freedom in institutions of mutual recognition. Yet this very success has sometimes come at the cost of sidelining the natural conditions under which such institutions emerge, persist, and occasionally break down. By reintroducing first nature into the analysis of political life, the present issue intends to complement and complicate these debates: it asks how recognition itself depends on embodied capacities, affective attachments, generational reproduction, and vulnerability to loss. In this sense, the issue aims to extend ongoing conversations in the journal by shifting attention from the formal structure of freedom to its material and living conditions. Hegel’s thought, we contend, offers resources for rethinking these limits—not by collapsing politics into natural necessity, but by conceptualizing freedom as a form of life that, while itself negotiating the boundaries between ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, ends up confronting some given natural conditions it neither fully controls nor merely endures. In this respect, Hegel’s systematic ambition—to think nature and spirit as moments of a single self-articulating whole—acquires renewed relevance. The essays in this issue thus speak not only to Hegel scholars, but also to broader debates in social and political philosophy concerning embodiment, life-forms, ecology, and the conditions of collective agency.
First Nature, Second Nature, and Ethical Life
Before turning to the individual contributions in detail, we want to, once again, insist on a methodological clarification already implicit in what we said above. To foreground first nature in Hegel’s social philosophy is not to endorse the view that the boundary between first and second nature – the boundary between which parts of nature can be changed by human agency and which cannot – is itself fixed and ahistorical. To the contrary: the power of human agency waxes and wanes over time, and part of the ever-present mediation between first and second nature consists in drawing and re-drawing this boundary in light of emerging possibilities and limitations of human freedom. This process can, and often must, include that certain facts that were once considered part of our given first nature (from a contemporary perspective, we might think here e.g. of the putatively ‘biological’ sexes) are denaturalized, and instead shown to have lost, in this historical moment, their givenness for us. Yet, at the same time, this very historicity lets the task of this mediation never expire: society must always consider and reconsider this boundary, and then position itself vis-à-vis a first nature that constrains, enables and destabilizes ethical life without dictating its content.
Given this, it is unsurprising that a central motif running through the issue is the very distinction, and relationship, between first and second nature. First nature designates natural life insofar as it shows itself as given and immediate: the realm of organic processes, bodily needs, finitude, and natural determination. It encompasses not only biological life in a narrow sense, but also affectivity, drives, sexuality, and the temporal rhythms of growth, reproduction, and decay. Second nature, by contrast, names the domain in which spirit has already reshaped natural immediacy through habit, education (Bildung), social practice, and institutions, such that what is initially external comes to function as a medium of freedom.
Yet, as several contributions argue, second nature never simply replaces first nature. This already becomes clear when Hegel describes Sittlichkeit as a type of life: life, after all, as we know from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and Anthropology, maintains itself only by positively taking up what is external to it, by assimilating it, and bringing it into a higher form. This process can succeed but it can also fail: just like physical life, spiritual life is liable to regression, reification, or breakdown. Habits can ossify; institutions can become detached from the biological needs and energies they were meant to organize; and normative expectations can come to appear as alien impositions rather than expressions of collective life. This vulnerability is not an accidental defect, but an expression of the very structure of freedom as Hegel understands it. Freedom, precisely because it is finite, cannot secure itself once and for all. It must be reproduced, sustained, and renewed through living practices that are always precarious and always risk failure.
Indeed, Hegel is acutely aware of the pathologies that arise in the case of such failure. His critique of Plato’s Republic is exemplary. By abolishing the family and subordinating particularity entirely to political unity, Plato produces a stable but lifeless ethical order—one that suppresses the natural bases of individuality and thereby undermines freedom itself. Similar concerns animate Hegel’s criticisms of Stoicism and of abstract moralism, which demand an indifference to natural inclination that human agents cannot sustain without self-alienation. Nature thus functions in Hegel not merely as a background condition, but as a critical standard: ethical institutions can be assessed by how well they incorporate, transform, and sustain the – for this historical moment – ‘given’ natural dimensions of human life.
Hegel’s interest in both correspondences and ruptures between brute nature and rational, ethical life is apparent in each of modern Sittlichkeit’s three spheres, to begin with the family: it is, to be sure, an ethical expression and organization of our most deep-seated natural propensities, of the sexual urge, its reproductive function, the special vulnerability of the human infant—compared to other species—and thus its dependence on nurture and education. It is also clear that, for Hegel, such natural necessities were accommodated to varying degrees in different cultures and historical moments, and that he believes that the modern nuclear family has a claim for optimal rationality. And yet, even in modernity ethical arrangements around sexuality can, perhaps, lose sight of their natural limits and potentialities. What happens, for example, when marriage remains childless? Is that a problem and, if so, why? What, moreover, happens if commitments to other social spheres (in particular civil society or the labor market) diminishes romantic enchantment? If partners apply to intimate life the same assertive, consumptive, or even aggressive attitudes that rather belong in the market economy? Some of these questions precisely are taken up in contributions from Thimo Heisenberg and from Andreja Novakovic.
In civil society, in turn, Hegel sees a modern and optimally rational way to manage—and give creative meaning to—our material needs, the necessity of working, and the pleasures and cravings of consumption. When lay people talk about mutual recognition in Hegel—but also much of specialized scholarship—they tend to have civil society in mind. It is in this modern sphere that we see each other as autonomous yet vulnerable individuals, independent wellsprings of interests and values, and are called to respect and even honor our differences. Nevertheless, the forms of recognition embedded in civil society are grounded in natural propensities, or in Hegel’s understanding of humankind as a life form. As both Thomas Khurana and Italo Testa show in their respective contributions, attention to these basic layers of Hegel’s system can shed light on our understanding of its highest articulations. Such an understanding will also be a boon to evaluating break-ups and ruptures in the ethical texture of the market economy. Here, again, the Hegelian warning of what happens when we are nothing but “cogs in the machine,” living dead, may ring today louder than ever
Finally, even the political state—arguably the most “spiritual” or supremely ethical domain of Sittlickeit—has a firm grounding in Hegel’s understanding of first nature. As Gal Katz’s contribution reminds us, Hegel is part of a long political philosophical tradition that considers our mortality to be both the limit and condition of possibility of political life. It is membership in the state that helps us not only survive and avoid immediate death (as per Thomas Hobbes, for example) but also to imbue our eventual death with meaning, ultimately through self-sacrifice in war. This, in turn, raises questions about the vitality of the state and its politics insofar as it is fortunate enough to enjoy lasting peace.
Overview of the Contributions
Italo Testa’s “Recognition from First to Second Nature, and Back Again” reconstructs the natural genesis of recognition in Hegel’s Jena writings and traces its significance for his mature social philosophy. Against interpretations that treat recognition as a self-grounding, purely normative relation, Testa argues that recognitive capacities presuppose structures that emerge within first nature itself. Through a close analysis of Hegel’s accounts of organic individuality, sexual differentiation, and genus-life, the paper shows how proto-recognitive relations—such as finding oneself in another—are already operative at the level of animal life. These relations are not yet recognitive in the full sense, but they supply the affective and practical preconditions for the emergence of self-conscious agency. The paper then turns to habit and second nature to explain how recognition becomes stabilized and embodied in social practices and institutions. Crucially, Testa argues that recognition remains dialectically dependent on its natural origins: when this dependence is forgotten, social practices tend toward reification, abstraction, and ethical fragility. The paper thus provides both a genetic account of recognition and a critical framework for diagnosing its pathologies.
Thomas Khurana’s “Living by Recognition: On the Sociality of the Human Life-Form” approaches the nexus of nature and politics through the concept of the life-form. Khurana argues that human beings are social beings in a unique sense: unlike for other ‘social animals’ (such as ants and bees), for human beings the very membership in the life-form is itself socially mediated. We are human beings only in virtue of being recognized as such. This unique form of sociality renders human life both unusually open and unusually precarious: we can come to recognize beings with a substantially different biology than ours as participants in the human life form, but we can also render other members of the species homo sapiens as non-human. Social institutions that come to be charged with collectively regulating membership in the human life-form, Khurana concludes, often struggle with this openness and precarity (and come to discharge their task in paradoxical ways).
Andreja Novakovic’s chapter, titled “Erotic Desire in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” demonstrates the relevance of Hegel’s concept of immediate (or natural) desire to current-day public debate. Drawing on Katherine Angel’s feminist analysis of sexual consent and self-knowledge, Novakovic argues that sexual encounters provide a particularly illuminating case study for understanding Hegel’s experiential learning process described in paragraph 175 of the Self-Consciousness chapter. Through the pursuit of satisfaction, the desiring subject discovers that genuine fulfillment requires recognizing the object of desire as another independent self-consciousness, rather than as a mere instrument for gratification. This reading demonstrates how erotic desire, rooted in embodied “first nature,” becomes transformed through the structure of consciousness and social interaction. By examining the frustrations and revelations inherent in sexual encounters—illustrated through Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person”—Novakovic shows how the pursuit of desire initiates a dual discovery: learning what one is as a subject of desire requires encountering another subject who resists being reduced to an object.
Thimo Heisenberg’s “Hegel on Childless Marriage” confronts Hegel’s assertion in PR §173+Z that childless marriage is, in some fundamental way, incomplete. While it is tempting to disregard this view as yet another old-fashioned thing that Hegel has to say about marriage – and perhaps as a detrimental instance of biological determinism – Heisenberg argues that the view contains a surprising kernel of truth: the thought that a committed love relationship comes with a general social requirement, that, to truly care about one another as a couple, we also have to jointly care about somebody else. Unlike what Hegel says, however, this project of joint care does not need to manifest as care for one’s own children, but also can take the form of care for people that we are not related to, and even for collective subjects (such as e.g. political movements).
Finally, Gal Katz’s “The Power to Die: Mortality as a Condition of Freedom” revisits a largely forgotten dimension of Hegel’s practical philosophy: his account of death and mortality. Drawing on an early concept introduced in the Natural Law essay—the Fähigkeit des Todes, or “power to die”—Katz argues that mortality should not be understood merely as a natural limitation imposed on freedom, but as one of its enabling conditions. The human capacity to relate actively to one’s own finitude, most starkly expressed in the possibility of risking or renouncing one’s life, underwrites the subject’s ability to own her determinations rather than merely submit to them. The paper offers a careful reconstruction of how this capacity figures in Hegel’s early account of recognition and is subsequently transformed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. By situating mortality in relation to the lord–bondsman dialectic, ethical life, and Hegel’s reflections on war, Katz shows how death mediates between first and second nature: a brute natural fact that becomes, through social and institutional articulation, a condition of self-determination. In doing so, the essay challenges both existentialist readings that detach death from social life and normativist interpretations that marginalize finitude altogether.
Conclusion
Taken together, the essays in this special issue invite a reorientation of how Hegel’s political philosophy is read and mobilized. Rather than treating nature as a mere obstacle or background condition, they show that natural life is an indispensable, if unruly, partner in spirit’s self-realization. Political institutions emerge as attempts to organize, transform, and respond to the pressures of first nature—pressures that can never be entirely mastered, but whose suppression leads to ethical pathology and social fragility.
By foregrounding mortality, embodiment, reproduction, habit, and life-forms, the contributions collected here bring into view a Hegelian conception of freedom that is irreducibly living and finite. In doing so, they suggest why Hegel remains a valuable interlocutor for contemporary political thought at a moment when the entanglement of nature and politics has become impossible to ignore.
