I. The power to die

We begin, then, with the natural law essay of 1803. There, Hegel critiques ‘[t]hat view of freedom which regards it as a choice [Wahl] between opposite determinacies, so that if +A and -A are given, freedom consists in determining oneself either as +A or as -A’ (Hegel Reference Hegel and F2004: 136).Footnote ⁵ This view, he says, ‘must be utterly rejected’ since the subject’s freedom is limited to choosing between given properties. He calls such a property ‘compulsion’ (Zwang) in the sense that it limits the compelled subject’s freedom, her self-determining activity. On the view Hegel rejects, the subject is not purely self-determined but rather passively determined by such compulsions. By contrast, Hegel continues, ‘nothing is external’ to the free or self-determining subject.

Let us call the view that Hegel critiques the choice conception of freedom. The question arises whether, as natural, embodied creatures, we have any other way to conceive of our freedom. We seem to be confronted by the options the existing world offers us, forced to choose—if not one then another. Perhaps, though, we could avoid making choices altogether?

In his ‘Anthropology’, Hegel says that moody teenagers of a certain kind try to do precisely that, namely, avoid doing or being one thing or another. His verdict is clear: ‘if a man does not want to perish […] then he must accept the conditions set for him by the world’ (2007: §396Z).

Here we see why death appears as antithetical to freedom in the sense of self-determination. It is because of the horizon of finitude, of ‘perishing’—that we have to make choices. Even not making a choice is a kind of choice, indeed one that may lead to death faster. If the options the world gives us are compulsions or limits on our freedom, then death is the condition of their appearing as such. We could say that it is a more fundamental limit that conditions all the other natural limits on our spiritual self-determination.

Is it the case, then, that as natural creatures, we cannot but make choices? Yet Hegel, as we have seen, rejects the choice conception of freedom. This suggests that when he says that a man ‘must accept the conditions set for him’, he has in mind something different than choosing a given option, thereby succumbing to an external determination or ‘compulsion’. The question is how to reconcile two ideas: that we are fully self-determined and must engage with the world as it is given lest we die? A clue to answering this question appears a bit later in the essay. ‘Pure freedom’, Hegel writes, is

In making sense of this obscure passage, let us begin with the claim, ‘death is the absolute subjection’. The semantic proximity of Zwang with Bezwingung betrays Hegel’s sensitivity to the problem of self-determination versus mortality as it was just explicated. Not only does my mortality limit me, it absolutely limits me. Indeed, it is the fundamental, absolute limit on my freedom that conditions all other limits. This feature of death accounts for one difference between compulsion and subjection, Zwang and Bezwingung. The latter denotes the consummation of the former. One is subjected in so far as compulsions have reached an ultimate intensity. There is, however, a second difference, which suggests the reason why death, despite being an absolute limitation on the subject, also makes her absolutely free. Thus, Bezwingung could entail that a Zwang has been possessed or owned by the subject, becoming an aspect of her freedom or self-possession. Think, for example, of gay identity as Michel Foucault explains it in the History of Sexuality, namely as an external, coercive limitation that has been reclaimed or owned by the coerced subjects, becoming the basis of their freedom.Footnote ⁶ Much closer to our topic, and as the following discussion will suggest, one could think in such terms about the bondsman in Hegel’s famous dialectic. The bondsman becomes a subject—freer than his lord—through identifying with the labour from which he is initially alienated. Labour—to which he is first coerced, the reason for his shame—is internalized, becoming the basis of his freedom and honour. I have chosen to translate Bezwingung to ‘subjection’ since the latter denotes a total submission to a coercive other, yet suggests that this process can be owned by the subject, and thereby subjectivize or individualize her. In saying that death is a subjection, then, Hegel contends that it is a self-limitation and, as such, not only a hindrance to freedom but its condition. Another way to put it: death is a limiting condition of freedom.

But in what sense is death a self-limitation? The distinction between death and mortality—or rather, death and ‘the power to die’ as Hegel puts it—is of essence here. As he says, ‘pure freedom is in its appearance death’, namely, death seems like a merely given, natural event that befalls the subject and thereby appears as an (external) limitation, subjection in the first sense of a consummated compulsion. However, in so far as the subject comes to understand her mortality as a condition of her freedom, she can represent it as a self-limitation, namely, subjection in the second sense of self-possession. Hegel imbues mortality with an agentive, active sense. It is not (only) the fact we are doomed to die, but our capacity to die voluntarily, hence ‘the power to die’.

It seems, then, that it is by having an account of ‘the power to die’, that we can get in view the kind of attitude towards death that Hegel has in mind. In the following I attempt to develop such an account.

In a number of places Hegel offers a revealing take on the anthropological difference. ‘The human being alone is able to abandon all things, even his own life: he can commit suicide’ (PhR: §5Z). The brute animal, by contrast, ‘cannot mutilate or destroy itself’ (PhR: §47R); rather, it always remains ‘in a determination which is alien to it to which it merely grows adapted’.Footnote ⁷ In other words, the animal’s bodiliness remains something given, an external determination. By contrast, it is because the human subject can renounce or disown her life, that she can also endorse or own it. ‘I have these limbs and my life only insofar as I so will it’ (PhR: §47R), and this willing, in turn, is conditioned by the capacity for destroying or mutilating them. To be sure, Hegel does not deny that the human subject is a natural entity, a ‘living body’. But the human being, he adds, is also a ‘person’, and as such has the task of taking possession of her naturalness. This taking possession is conditioned by the capacity for dispossessing oneself, namely, by way of suicide.

It seems, then—provisionally speaking—that the agentive mortality Hegel has in mind, ‘the power to die’, is the power to kill oneself. To be sure, one could object that one’s capacity to kill oneself—especially when life is miserable and unfree—hardly makes it the case that one owns or possesses one's life. In response, let me stress that I have a very weak yet fundamental sense of ‘owning’ in mind. Never mind how hateful I am of my life, how objectionable and alien I find it, in so far as I can terminate my life voluntarily, there is a sense in which, as long as I do not exercise this capacity, I will my life; as such, my life is something I am responsible for. This sense of willing (or owning), to be sure, is very weak or minimal, precisely because it may coincide with a range of negative attitudes towards one’s life. Moreover, Hegel would agree that the power to die is hardly enough for generating the achievement of individual self-possession. Activities such as work and love, all in the context of a rational social order, are necessary for a robust and enduring individuality. And yet, the power to die remains fundamental for attaining individual freedom in the sense that without it, any number of activities or positive attitudes towards one’s life would remain what Hegel calls—in speaking about nonhuman animals—mere adaptation to given or externally determined ‘compulsions’. If not for the power to die, a person may love her life, or believe she loves it, but this feeling would be, indeed, only a feeling, rather than a feeling rationally warranted. When I say, therefore, that the power to die is a limiting condition of freedom in the sense that, through this ability to limit myself, I can own or will myself, I have in mind this minimal yet fundamental sense of owning.Footnote ⁸

Incidentally, this point calls for a clarification concerning what I called above the choice conception of freedom. The discussion so far shows that, while Hegel does not reduce freedom to choice, his conception of subjective freedom does not preclude choice. Thus, in so far as the human subject has the power to die, remaining alive is an exercise of freedom. And, as part of being alive, the subject can (indeed has to) make choices (e.g., what job to pick, whom to marry, what road to take when two roads diverge in a forest). The choice would be free in virtue of the more basic operation of the power to die, namely, the ability to negate any option. If ‘choice’ is the voluntary act of affirming (or even acting upon) one option among many, we may call the more basic voluntary act ‘resolution’. It is the subject’s owning of her very subjectivity or individuality as a condition of freely making choices—which is premised on her power to disown her individuality through death. We can say, then, that the capacity to make choices is a necessary but insufficient condition of subjective freedom.

To see what is at stake, consider first a case of ordinary language, say the above example of a gay person owning her identity as gay. Intuitively, this operation—voluntary as it surely is—has a different logical and psychological function than making choices. Unlike this or that choice, sexual identity presents itself as necessary, as flowing from the subject’s basic condition, yet the subject still has the freedom to either negate or to own it. Negating would amount to resigning oneself to a passive and repressed life of unfreedom as a whole. Any choice being made in such a life, free as it may seem, would in fact be tainted and undermined by a more basic failure of freedom. And yet, we have to presuppose the possibility of such a wholesale negation of gay identity as to make the opposite operation—owning this identity—properly free. What I call ‘resolution’ is the basic operation of owning (or negating) one’s identity—becoming an individual or a subject—which then lends freedom to specific choices made in this capacity. While my example concerns sexual identity, we tend to apply the concept of ‘resolution’ in any situation that concerns not a choice between options but when we have to own or negate a course of action that presents itself as necessary, as essential to who we are (say, not picking this or that job, but whether to become a working adult, not choosing between this or that marital partner, but whether to marry or raise a family, and so on).

I propose that Hegel thinks of our mortality in analogy to gay identity in this example. To be or not to be may sound like a ‘choice’ (these are two options, after all) but it is in fact a summons to make a resolution. Only because the human subject has the power to resolve not to be—the power to die—can they be said to exercise their freedom in remaining alive, that is, own their mortality and, by extension, choices they make in this capacity.

While the last two paragraphs appeal to a distinction between choice and resolution in ordinary language, Hegel himself makes this distinction in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right, namely, between wählen (choosing, PhR: §14), and etwas beschließen or sich entschließen (two phrases that Hegel says are interchangeable, and both can be translated as ‘resolving’ or ‘deciding’, PhR: §12R). To be sure, an explication of Hegel’s mature (and dense) account of the will is beyond the scope of this paper, whose goal is rather to unpack the early concept ‘the power to die’. That said, I would like to make a few brief comments on Hegel’s notion of ‘resolution’, if only to show that the distinction between choosing and resolving has a basis in Hegel’s own thinking.

To begin, Hegel presents the concept of ‘resolution’ (or ‘resolving will’) right after the concept of ‘natural will’ and before the concept of ‘choice’ (or ‘arbitrary will’), suggesting that resolution has logical primacy over choice. He seems to think of resolution as the transition from being a passive container of ‘drives’ (in analogy to nonhuman animals, PhR: §11Z), to owning one’s status as a rational and responsible individual: ‘By resolving, the will posits itself as the will of a specific individual’ (PhR: §13). Resolving, I suggest, is not picking a given drive and acting on it (that would be ‘choosing’) but the more basic operation of owning one’s finite life and the drives it contains, as if one says to oneself: ‘I am this (natural) me’. Hegel illustrates this by talking about what it would mean not to affect this operation. He speaks of the ‘over-refined sensibility’ of people who try to avoid resolving altogether, chastising them—in reference to Goethe—as having a ‘dead disposition’ (PhR: §13Z). Who are such people? Among others, I think he has in mind the overly sensitive teenagers he alludes to in the ‘Anthropology’ (see above; maybe like Goethe’s young Werther), those who try to escape or avoid adulthood. The contrast of choice is with making another choice (so choosing between given options); the contrast that Hegel draws with resolution is avoiding any resolution, thereby escaping one’s destiny as a rational individual.

While in this account of the will the early concept ‘the power to die’ is nowhere to be found, there are clear allusions to finitude. Hegel says, for example, that ‘thinking reason, as will, is [reason] resolving on its own finitude’, adding that this operation amounts to ‘imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity’ (italics added; PhR: §13R). Resolution, then, has to do with accepting and contending with one’s finitude, the latter being what I called above a ‘limiting condition of freedom’. It is thanks to such a basic operation that one’s choices are the choices of a responsible subject—so choices that are properly free.

One reason why Hegel does not address death directly in the introduction to the Philosophy of Right might be that his discussion there is ‘logical’ rather than ‘developmental’. In other words, he is concerned with laying out different moments of the will rather than with tracing the psychological or social processes through which individuals actualize such moments (as in the Phenomenology, or the early natural law essay). Therefore, even if we are now clearer about the logical or structural status of the power to die—as resolving, rather than choosing—we should return to tracing its development. How does a subject set a limit to itself, becoming finite or ‘resolving’? Does it have to do with the capacity to commit suicide, as I suggested above?

I believe the answer is negative. Defining the power to die in terms of the capacity for suicide is ultimately false. Hegel, after all—like other philosophers of his generation—opposes suicide. He says, rather, that death must ‘come from outside’ (von fremder Hand), be it another person or a natural event. Hegel also notes that suicide, in most cases, is not rationally motivated at all (‘product of inner derangement’, PhR: §70Z) or prompted by petty pride (‘the bravery of tailors and maidservants’). Hegel’s problem with suicide, then, seems to be twofold: (1) that it is a killing prompted by the agent herself; and (2) that it is not prompted by the agent’s self-understanding as free or self-determined. The latter, I believe, is the decisive factor. If the power to die is a condition of freedom, then it should demonstrate that the agent, being committed to self-determination, can negate any external determination whatsoever. Therefore, if the agent merely caves in to misery, she chooses one compulsion over another—in line with the choice conception of freedom that Hegel rejects. If, moreover, she’s driven by a fit of derangement, she cannot even be said to be choosing anything, indeed she loses her status as a rational subject. It is pertinent that Hegel is impressed by pagan heroes such as Hercules and Brutus who killed themselves in order to avoid a life of unfreedom. While Hegel ultimately says that even heroes do not have the right to self-killing, the fact that he singles out such cases suggests his primary problem with suicide is that normally it is not motivated by an ideal of self-determination.

With these considerations in mind, we should revise my provisional definition of the power to die. Rather than the capacity to commit suicide, it is (1) the capacity to die voluntarily (2) for the sake of self-determination. Accordingly, in the natural law essay, the link between death and individual freedom does not lead to a discussion of self-killing but rather to the idea that an individual must be willing to fight for freedom despite the danger of death. A similar movement occurs in what is probably Hegel’s most famous discussion of death-related freedom, the life-or-death struggle for recognition in the Phenomenology. I would like to turn to a reading of the struggle and the subsequent lord-bondsman dialectic. Both will expand my account of the power to die and its constitutive role for individual freedom.

II. The power to live

As the story goes, two subjects—or ‘self-consciousnesses’—face each other. Each feels the presence of the other to violate his self-possession. In so far as the other, for example, sees me in a certain way, let alone makes me behave in a certain way, then there is a sense in which I am ‘out of myself’. In terms of the natural law essay, each subject constitutes a compulsion for the other. In attempting to negate, indeed abolish this compulsion, for the sake of demonstrating their self-determination, each exercises his power to die. As Hegel famously puts it, ‘[t]he individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶187). In showing that I am willing to die, I show that I have the ability to avoid any option offered to me by the other. I demonstrate my power to absolutely negate any external determination, thereby asserting my full-fledged self-determination. Set in these terms, we can see why both subjects exercise the power to die, which I defined as one’s capacity to die voluntarily for the sake of self-determination.

Having said that, the extent to which either exercises the power to die remains limited or initial. The problem, to be sure, is not that in Hegel’s narrative both parties remain alive. A practical capacity to do x for the sake of y (e.g., to travel across the world for the sake of meeting a lover) can be demonstrated by a resolute action even if it does not lead to consummating x, e.g., if I found my lover before completing the worldwide journey. By analogy, one could demonstrate a capacity to die voluntarily for the sake of self-determination even if one remains alive.

Rather, the reason why either subject’s exercise of the power to die remains minimal is, I propose, that at least initially neither understands what dying means. For Hegel, after all, there is no proper willing without knowing what one wills: ‘what I will I represent to myself as my object’ (PhR: §4Z). If I merely reach out for a piece of food without being able to represent it, understanding what it is that I desire, I cannot be said to properly will this food. In such a case, I approximate the animal, which ‘has no will, because it does not represent to itself what it desires’. To be sure, ‘knowing’ what I will comes in degrees. The child, for example, may reach out for an apple, representing it as such, yet her understanding of what an apple is—how, say, it fits into a larger semantic context—is limited. Similarly, I suggest, I may represent myself as taking the risk of death—so there is a sense in which I will death—yet my understanding of death may be limited, and hence my willing falls short. This, I believe, is the case with the fighting subjects.

It seems clear that for Hegel understanding death means, at the very least, fearing death. Fear of death, in turn, is the overwhelming experience that one’s own, unique life, is on the verge of extinction. The combatants initially lack an understanding of death since only at some point, and only one of which, is said to be experiencing the fear of death, which, in turn, makes him cease the fighting and submit to the other subject, thereby becoming his bondsman. It follows that up to that point neither subject experienced the fear of death. They were fighting to death but, since they did not fear death, their willing was lacking. As such, they exhibited only a limited exercise of the power to die. We can think of them along the lines of two ‘hot-headed’ young men who are too easy to get into a brawl without a proper understanding of the stakes or potential consequences. This suggestion aligns with Hegel’s claim that the combatants subscribe to a rudimentary conception of freedom, ‘negative freedom’).Footnote ⁹

These considerations invite yet another revision to my account of the power to die. It is the (1) capacity to die voluntarily, (2) for the sake of self-determination, (1a) having experienced the fear of death. Moreover, my interpretation of the struggle, much as it shows the minimal extent to which the parties had realized the power to die, also points to a way forward. If exercising the power to die must proceed from the fear of death, then there is one subject who seems well positioned to realize this power to a greater extent. By looking at that subject, we can expand our account. This subject is, of course, the bondsman.

The bondsman ‘has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations’ (PhG: ¶194). As such, he satisfies condition (1a) for exercising the power to die. And yet, in other respects it may appear as if the bondsman exercises it to a lesser, if any, degree compared with the fighting parties in the previous moment in the dialectic. Just because of the fear of death, the bondsman has ceased fighting, rather submitting to the other, who thereby became his lord. Not only did the bondsman not demonstrate his commitment to self-determination, arguably he has renounced this commitment altogether.

And yet, this formulation fails to take account of the underlying dynamic. To appreciate this dynamic, let me make a point about the concept of free power. It goes without saying that a subject can be said to have a certain power only if this power can be actualized. And yet, I would argue, there is another side to this coin. A capacity counts as a power only if the subject could also not actualize it. Thus, for example, I have the power of writing academic papers if I can, in fact, write such papers. But if I cannot but write academic papers—if, in other words, this activity is compulsive, something I cannot negate—then this activity is not a power but a ‘compulsion’ (Zwang).Footnote ¹⁰

Therefore, I argue, to exercise the power to die, a subject must be able to hold back on it, which means that the power to die is at the same time the power to live. If exercising the power to die means negating any limit—compulsion—for the sake of self-determination, then holding back on it—exercising the power to live—means conceding or enduring a limit on my self-determination. Crucially, dying and living are internally related if they are to count as exercises of freedom as self-determination. It is only because the subject can die voluntarily—has the power to die—that it can be said to live voluntarily, namely, have the power to live.

With this conceptual point in mind, let us return to the dialectic. While the bondsman is what my discussion drives at, it would be helpful to consider the lord first. His triumph in the life-or-death struggle, and the utter security that he thereby acquired, has removed any acknowledged limits on his negating activity. Of course, in so far as he is a natural creature, there are limits to his activity, yet he does not know them as such. Hegel brings out this point by considering the lord’s desire. Desire initially appears as simple negation: in satisfying a desire I negate an external determination, leaving nothing in its wake. I nullify it, as it were. When I desire an apple, for example, I represent myself as externally determined by the world (be it the apple or the desire for it sensed in my body), yet if I can immediately and easily satisfy the desire, I completely negate this external determination, reinforcing my self-determination. The ease and immediacy in which the lord’s desires are satisfied—thanks to the labour of the bondsman—gives him the privilege of remaining ignorant of his limits as a natural subject. If desire is so momentary—so quickly satisfied—the swift sense of limit only reinforces the satisfying sense of being unlimited. For the lord, Hegel says, ‘[d]esire has reserved for itself the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self’ (PhG: ¶195).

The lord’s privilege, however, is also his doom. His self-feeling remains hollow, lacking a substantial self: ‘But that is the reason why this satisfaction is only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence’ (PhG: ¶195). By contrast, Hegel tells us, it is the bondsman who acquires a ‘sense of his own self’ (eigner Sinn), namely, an acknowledged identity or selfhood. Since the lord sets clear limits on the bondsman’s freedom—indeed he must obey the lord—his desire remains unsatisfied, at least for a while. Indeed, he must work in order to (partly) satisfy it. In so far as his desires remain unsatisfied, the bondsman represents his limits as limits, and gains a knowledge of himself as limited and specific. Over time, moreover, his work modifies the objective world and makes him recognize himself as effective and accomplished. He thereby does not only know his limits as such; he also comes to endorse them. It is thanks to such limits that he has become the individual he is. This knowledge and endorsement of limits, I suggest, is Hegel’s idea of selfhood. ‘Through the discovery of himself by himself’, Hegel writes, ‘the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a sense of his own self’ (PhG: ¶196).

So far for a gloss on the dialectic. But how is this dynamic informed by the power to die? I have argued that the power to die coincides with the power to live, namely, the freedom not to die voluntarily in the face of external determination. Having the lord’s trajectory in view, we can see why he ceases to exercise the power to die or live. Indeed, he lives—even with much pleasure—but his life is not an exercise of the power to live precisely because he has the privilege of not experiencing limits, as his social position allows him to immediately negate them. As such, he does not exercise the power to live, which is the power to endure a limit. If death, as we saw earlier, is the ultimate limit, then the lord’s narcissistic life reflects a denial or oblivion of death.

We can now return to the bondsman: he did exercise the power to live in so far as he ceased fighting, accepting a limit on his self-determination. To be sure, in real time the bondsman seemed to have renounced his agency altogether, as death appeared in the form of an overwhelming fear and forced him to submit. In retrospect, however, it is this surrender that, over time, made possible the acquisition of a substantial self. In this later point, the subject can recognize his initial compulsion as a moment of agency, a decision or resolution to live that turned out to generate meaning and value. In so far as the subject comes to know and own his finite or limited life as finite or limited, he retroactively understands his sticking to life as voluntary, an exercise of the power to live for the sake of self-determination. This realization, in turn, has implications for the bondsman’s experience at present. After all, much as the bondsman now has a sense of himself and his accomplishments, he still works on pain of death. He is aware that if he stops working, he may be exposed to the lord’s deadly rage. And yet, just because he now also recognizes the value of his life, he can understand his sticking to life as a voluntary decision.

This consideration invites a final addition to the definition of the power to die. To recall, I have argued that a subject cannot be said to be willing to die voluntarily if he does not understand what dying means. I have also suggested that dying means, at the very least, fearing death, and the fact the bondsman—unlike the lord—experienced it, demonstrates the greater extent to which he exercises the power to die. We can now note another element of the meaning of dying, namely, that one’s unique and valued life, one’s selfhood, would terminate. Since the lord lacks a proper selfhood—his life is rather a frenzy of fleeting enjoyment—he fails to understand death. The bondsman, by contrast, is both fearful and knows what he is fearful for—his selfhood—so he exercises to a greater extent the power to die/live. His fear of death and the value he accords to his life are two sides of the same coin.

To be sure, the bondsman’s exercise of the power to die/live still falls short. While he is aware of his power to die, and of his voluntary agency in sticking to life, he has not yet fully demonstrated his willingness to die. Even if historically he had—before submitting to the lord—he was then not yet familiar with the fear of death and had no sense of his unique self, thereby this exercise lacked the element of understanding. To be fully self-determined, he should show that he is willing to die now, at present, when this understanding is explicit. Only then will his sticking to life be properly and fully voluntary, an act of self-determination.

III. The power to die and modern ethical life

Nothing is more first nature than death. Such a statement may sound empty at first—what makes death more natural than any number of natural phenomena? The statement’s significance emerges once we bear in mind Hegel’s contrast between first and second nature. As spiritual, self-determining creatures, we can incorporate brute or first nature into our rational system of habits, what Hegel calls second nature. We can, in other words, recognize the rationality of brute nature, harnessing it to our practical purposes. Death, by contrast, appears as precisely that which frustrates or negates our commitments as spiritual creatures. As Hegel puts it, death is ‘the immediate natural materialization, not an act of self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶452).

Human civilization, to be sure, has found multiple ways to tame death, though this mostly amounts to denying this significance.Footnote ¹¹ This, for example, was the case in Hegel’s depiction of the ancient Greek polis, where death was conceived as the beautiful endnote of a happy and well-rounded life. As such, he says in the Lectures on Aesthetics, death was ‘surrounded by cheerful images’. And yet, Hegel immediately declares: ‘we cannot say that the Greeks interpreted death in its essential meaning’ (Reference Hegel1975: 522). The reason for this is that they did not yet have sufficient consciousness of themselves as self-determining individuals. He writes: ‘life has [an] infinite value for self-consciousness only if the subject as spiritual and self-conscious is the one and only actuality, and now in a justified fear must [imagine] himself as negated by death’ (1975: 523). Only if we conceive of our freedom according to Hegel’s definition of it—namely, freedom as self-determination, striving to be the authors of all our properties—then death appears as the ultimate external determination, the necessary failure of our striving. As such, it is terrifying. The good news is that, as modern individuals, Hegel thinks we are well positioned to face the proper significance of death, and moreover, that a rational modern state could make it bearable, even meaningful.

By explicating the concept of ‘the power to die’, I have sought to trace what Hegel means by the ‘essential significance of death’ and his claim that we, as moderns, are well positioned to understand it. As I argued, Hegel does not deny that death appears as a brute external limitation on our freedom, a ‘constraint’. However, by tapping into our ‘power to die’, we can acknowledge that this limitation is also a condition of our freedom. As the ‘power to die’, this capacity allows us to negate any external condition; as ‘the power to live’, this same capacity allows us to stick to our mortal life, imbuing it with a unique and valued selfhood.

And yet, for Hegel neither knowledge nor action are merely individual achievements. If ‘the power to die’ represents a proper understanding of death, then it must be thanks to social conditions that allow people to exercise this power and thereby express this understanding. Such social conditions cultivate a concrete system of habits—a second nature—that reflects a better attuning to our mortality. First nature is thereby incorporated into second nature in ways that were not yet available in pre-modern Ethical Life.

What is it about modernity that makes it easier for people to exercise the power to die? While a comprehensive answer to this question is beyond the scope of this paper, we can nonetheless outline some key ideas, revolving around the figure of the bondsman as I discussed it above. If the bondsman embodies a relatively advanced exercise of the power of death, the question becomes: in what ways the modern subject exhibits relevant features of the bondsman, and in what ways he goes beyond him—perhaps exercising the power to die to an even greater extent.

Let me begin by listing again the conditions a subject must meet if he is to count as exercising the ‘power to die’. To recall, at the end of Section I, the power to die was defined as (1) the capacity to die voluntarily (2) for the sake of self-determination. In Section II, I suggested a number of conditions that follow from it. The subject must (1a) fear death and (1b) value his unique life. These further conditions are included in (1) in so far as they make explicit what an understanding of dying is. This suggests that in some circumstances the subject would rather decide to stick with life. Only because he can make this resolution—call it ‘the bondsman’s resolution’—can he be said to also have the power to make the opposite resolution, namely, to die.

Now, I believe Hegel’s ideal of the modern citizen meets these conditions, especially once we juxtapose it against the citizen of ancient Sittlichkeit. Let me start with (1b). Hegel is clear that the modern subject must be able to represent his central life activities—in particular his working and married life—as an expression of personal, even unique, preferences. Thus ‘the essential determinant’ of one’s career is ‘the subjective opinion and the particular arbitrary will, which are accorded their right, their merit, and their honour in this sphere’ (PhR: §206). Hegel makes a similar point in his discussion of marriage, arguing that in modernity ‘it is infinitely particular uniqueness which asserts its claims’, namely, in the decision with whom to spend one’s life (PhR: §162R). Hegel contrasts these modern phenomena with the ancient world, in which the course of one’s life is determined by the community. He references, in this connection, Plato’s Republic, in which ‘the allocation’ to specific jobs ‘was left to the rulers’ rather than to individual decision. In so far as modern subjects choose and shape the course of their lives they are more likely to value it in a way that makes them better understand their mortality, namely, they represent death as the loss of something unique and precious.

To be sure, one could argue that there are other ways to value your unique life. In his comments on ancient Athens in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel depicts Athenian citizens as performing their virtuous individuality to others and marvelling in the recognition they earn for it. This sounds like a way of valuing one’s uniqueness and, importantly, it was possible just because free citizens did not work—thanks to an underclass of slaves that worked for them. Indeed, as Hegel says, slavery was a ‘necessary condition of a beautiful democracy’ (Reference Hegel2001: 273). Following Hannah Arendt in the Human Condition, we can add women to this underclass, which consists of those whose ‘life is laborious’—be it productive or reproductive labour—‘devoted to bodily functions’ (1970: 84). It appears, then, that work is not a necessary condition for valuing one’s unique life. Therefore, it is not clear in what way it makes the modern citizen—who, unlike its ancient counterpart, does work—exercise the power to die to a greater degree, making him more attuned with his mortality.

In order to respond to this objection, we should bear in mind another feature of the power to die, namely (1a) the fear of death. For Hegel, I suggest, one’s life is sufficiently imbued with value only if it is lived under the shadow of death. Thus, I value my life only if I stick to it despite the limit it sets on my freedom, not (only) because it is ‘fun’ or enjoyable. Only in such a scenario do I demonstrate my valuing, sticking with life despite the temptation to die. This, after all, was the case with the bondsman. The Athenian citizen could not have valued his life in this way because he did not have to deal with his mortality by way of doing labour. Having slaves (and women) to protect him from the hard challenges of life, he lacked a proper understanding of death—lacking both a valued self and the overwhelming fear of losing it. As such, the Athenian citizen approximated the hedonistic position of the lord in the Phenomenology.

By contrast, the modern citizen is essentially a worker. Even if he has a broad range of choice with respect to his work, the fact that he must work is not a choice. And Hegel is clear that the fear of death is always looming in the life of the modern worker, even if normally we do not attend to it. In the ‘Anthropology’, to recall, he says that ‘if a man does not want to perish […] then he must accept the conditions set for him by the world’ (2007: §396Z). Since we, as modern subjects, stick with work life, despite the challenges and pains that it occasions—having our mortality at least tacitly in mind—we demonstrate our valuing of a unique selfhood which is thereby continuously created and sustained. By willing to live despite challenges—accepting a limit on our self-determination—we could also be said to be willing to die for the sake of self-determination.

To be sure, this point may seem to be in tension with the fact that the life of the modern, ‘bourgeois’ worker is much more comfortable than the pre-modern bondsman. In modern civil society—both in the lived experience of many, and in Hegel’s own depiction—professional life is often about success and recognition, rather than about survival. So, in what sense is our mortality an aspect of our experience as modern workers? To respond to this objection, consider that a conscious or outwardly experience of success does not preclude a tacit and less conscious death-related anxiety. Based on the considerations above, I insist that, for Hegel, labour always has reference—tacit as it may be—to the labourer’s mortality. By analogy, Hegel considers sexual experience as such to have reference to mortality—reproduction being the species’ way to transcend the individual’s death—all while suggesting that sexual lovers forget about mortality in the heat of love (and arguably, it is the need to avoid the shadow of death that makes this experience all the more intense).Footnote ¹² As Freud will later teach us, conscious experience often testifies to unconscious experience that is in conflict with it—in this case, a conscious experience of professional success would count as a way to avoid or ‘defend’ against an unconscious mortal anxiety. Moreover, even if many workers are able to consciously avoid their mortality through professional success (or, for that matter, intense romantic experiences), there are other facets of modern Sittlichkeit that are designed to remind them of it.

And this leads me to my final point. I have indicated two respects in which the modern citizen—in contrast to the ancient—embodies the figure of the bondsman. As having a unique self—forged by work and fear of death—he can be said to exercise the power to die to a greater extent. But what about actually demonstrating the willingness to die, what the bondsman—as we have seen—has not yet done? My suggestion is the following: if the market economy and married life are the social spheres in which the modern subject exhibits and values his unique selfhood, it is through his affiliation to the third sphere of modern Sittlichkeit, the state, that he demonstrates his willingness to sacrifice his selfhood for the sake of self-determination. The relevant event is, of course, war, which Hegel insists is a necessary and rational element of political life. Through orienting oneself to the (realistic) possibility of violent conflict, the modern citizen contends with his mortality. In this respect, the modern individual goes beyond the figure of the bondsman, exhibiting the power to die to the fullest extent.

To be sure, one could argue that the modern individual—even when he or she is a ‘patriotic’ citizen—is much too distant from the experience of war compared to ancient (or, more broadly, pre-modern) people. If this is the case, the suggestion that war is a way in which the power to die is exercised in modernity may seem farfetched. To such an objection four points are in order. First, it is doubtful whether this alleged peacefulness of the modern individual extends beyond the post-WW2 period as it played out, specifically, in the liberal West. It would be a mistake to derive from this limited temporal and geographical experience observations about modernity as a whole. Second, my point does not concern modernity as such but rather Hegel’s ideal of modernity. It could very well be the case that Hegel would look critically at the fact that, in the post-war period—in virtue of its relative peacefulness—individuals could avoid their own mortality and thereby exercised the power to die to a lesser extent. Finally, one could interpret Hegel’s point about the necessity of war not as requiring participation in an actual war but as the notion that individuals must see war as a real possibility. We could distinguish, in this spirit—even in the post-war period—between the ‘cold war’ and the so-called ‘Pax Americana’ since the 1990s (crumbling as it is in recent years) and argue that, during the cold war, people could envision themselves summoned to sacrifice their lives in a way that is less available in the last two or three decades. Such envisioning was part of the fabric of citizenship—instilled through national myth and history, the education system, the media, and so on. As such, the power to die was incorporated into social institutions and experienced as a ‘second nature’. The fact that Hegel insists on general draft in times of emergency (PhR: §326) supports this interpretation (in contrast to the pre-modern state in which warfare was the exclusive business of a particular class).