I. The real and the effective

According to the most common interpretation, which appears to conform to the ordinary signification of these words, the statement in the 1820 Preface means: ‘that which is rational is real, and that which is real is rational’. It is evident what leads to such a reading, a reading that supports the most widespread understanding of Hegelian philosophy. By postulating that ‘all that which is real is rational’, Hegel eliminates contingency. At the same time freedom, which he continually evokes, is sacrificed to an implacable necessitarianism. Note that this kind of reading slips in the universal quantifier (‘all that which is real…’), which however is absent from the Hegelian formulation. One can also note the omission of the second clause, which proclaims the reality or rather the actuality of the rational. But these corrections do not fundamentally change the nature of the problem: Hegel’s idealism. For almost everyone Hegel remains the philosopher for whom being is nothing more than the clothing of the concept; he exemplifies the mad ambition of idealism to the point of ridicule: to ‘deduce’ or ‘construct’ everything that is, including—Krug maliciously noted—the pen with which the idealist wrote, and the pen of whoever was trying to refute him.Footnote ⁷ Starting from this assumption concerning Hegel’s idealism other vices can be detected in this philosophy, first what Rudolf Haym termed its ‘quietism’, its irresistible tendency to grant the ‘blessing’ of the ‘concept’ to everything that is, and to everything that is done, even the most revolting acts. From this follows the accusation of political conservatism, often associated with a metaphysical suspicion with regard to what can be understood as a blind necessitarianism. As Haym writes:

In the following century, commentators would go much further, seeing in Hegel’s philosophy an anticipatory justification of Nazi or Stalinist totalitarianism. Some interpretations—though not necessarily the most sophisticated—declare the existence of a logical entailment from the tyranny of the concept to tyranny itself.Footnote ⁹

In appraising these interpretations, it is important to start by noticing that in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia (1827), Hegel explicitly contests such interpretations of the Grundlinien Preface, whilst conceding that ‘some simple statements have given rise to expressions of surprise and hostility’.Footnote ¹⁰ To have Hegel say that ‘[all] the real is rational’ is to ignore the conceptual distinction established by The Science of Logic between Realität and Wirklichkeit. Acknowledging and fully taking into account the distinction between the reality of contingent and empirical Dasein, such as described in the first section of the Logic of Being, and the actuality, such as presented in the third section of the Logic of Essence, is essential for understanding Hegel’s meaning in the Preface. Hegel specifies in the Encyclopaedia:

As defined in the Logic the real is marked both by the finitude of its qualitative determination and by the variability of its quantitative limit. Therefore, the real can be different to what it is; even to the point of incessantly and necessarily becoming other than it is. This is the meaning of the being-nothingness-becoming sequence which opens the Logic.Footnote ¹² Being-there (Dasein), whose reality (Realität) is the reflected expression, is ‘being with a non-being’.Footnote ¹³ It is affected by a negativity which is inscribed, as it were, within its positive core: it is a mix of being and non-being, of being itself and being-other. However in what is usually called real this negativity remains wrapped up, so to speak, in the massive and ‘naïve’ positivity of the being-that, of what quite simply is:

The real is thus being-there in its insurmountable contingency and factuality, but also in the misleading evidence of its presence: it is what is there.

By contrast, actuality is ‘the essence that is one with its phenomenon’,Footnote ¹⁵ ‘the unity, become immediate, of essence with existence, or of inward with outward’.Footnote ¹⁶ In Hegel’s work this term designates being inasmuch as it coincides with its raison d’être (its essence or ground of being); the motor that drives this coincidence is what Hegel calls the concept. The result of this distinction is that whilst mediation in reality, in immediate being-there, only manifests itself in the corrupting form of becoming-other, of change, the actual, in contrast, is ‘exempted from transition’.Footnote ¹⁷ But the actual (das Wirkliche) is exempt from transition in the sense that its exteriority, its phenomenality or its existence do not suppose any Hintergrund, any background upon which its being or sense would depend. From a Hegelian standpoint reality is thus something entirely different to actuality; these terms correspond, as it were, to different levels of intelligence of what exists. It is possible for actuality to be entirely rational or conceptual, though the Logic does not explicitly declare this. In contrast, reality, the empirical real, is often far from rational: ‘For who is not acute enough to see a great deal in his own surroundings which is really far from being as it ought to be’.Footnote ¹⁸ Inasmuch as simple reality is inherently unstable, variable and not identical to itself, one could even conjecture that it lacks any rationality whatsoever.

II. The logical status of actuality

The previous analysis does not, however, suffice to address Haym’s criticism. Haym claims that the maxim from the Grundlinien Preface ‘crystallizes the duplicity of the whole system’ because it leads to a conclusion which is either contradictory or tautological by consciously playing on the two meanings of wirklich, empirical and ideal. If the term wirklich is understood in its everyday sense, that is, as meaning empirical reality, the Hegelian thesis is contradictory because it is evident—as Hegel himself agrees—that the real is filled with irrationality. One might as well claim that ‘the real is not real’. But if one distinguishes between Realität and Wirklichkeit, as the Logic does, the maxim from the Preface becomes a simple tautology. What is the actual in the Hegelian sense if it is not precisely that which, within the real, is capable of proving its rationality? The famous formula ‘what is actual is rational’ then says no more than ‘what is rational is rational’.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus in one version what is insisted on is the actuality that the rational has or should have, and so the Hegelian maxim takes on a revolutionary tone: the real must conform to what the philosopher considers to be rational. In another version it is the rationality of the actual (the given) that is emphasized, and one ends up with conservative conclusions: the real such as it is should be accredited with rationality since Hegel says ‘what is, is reason’.Footnote ²⁰ However this ambiguity, once assumed, gives rise to an unacceptable duplicity of the concept of Wirklichkeit: there would be an ‘empirical, phenomenal’ actuality, and there would also be a ‘true, rational’ actuality.

Can this objection be met? The charge is that Hegel is using the same term with two distinct and incompatible significations. To avoid this charge it is clearly advisable to maintain the conceptual unity of Wirklichkeit. The task then is to do this while also recognizing the semantic breadth of Wirklichkeit. This is a familiar challenge encountered repeatedly in Hegel’s thought, given Hegel’s intention to employ terms that restore the processual nature of all reality, the movement of being itself, making full use of the suppleness of vocabulary and despite the limitations of the propositional form. Hegelian philosophy takes advantage of the lexical polyvalence afforded by natural language. The best example of this is of course the famous Aufheben, Hegel underlining its double meaning of ‘to conserve’ and ‘to put an end’. He adds the following qualification, which holds for all the other terms that speculative philosophy uses in order to think the real in its process:

Indeed one could consider that the flexibility of natural languages (a word never has just one meaning, nor just one context for its use) is what makes them more apt than a formalized language for the expression of dialectical process. But it should be clear that mobilizing the resources of natural language is not the same thing as passively accepting all of its ambiguities. As such, we shall affirm that there is no confusion in Hegel’s texts between ‘reality’ and ‘actuality’, nor between the trivial meaning and the philosophical meaning of the second of these terms, even if Hegel does sometimes play on the closeness of these terms and on the intersection of their significations in ordinary language.

What then is the status of Wirklichkeit in Hegel’s Logic? First of all one must note the context of its analysis: it is not found within the doctrine of being, as is the case with ‘reality’, but rather within the doctrine of essence. This analysis thus does not belong to the study of thought in its immediacy, but to that of thought in its ‘reflection and mediation’.Footnote ²² This context indicates that actuality, in contrast to the simple Dasein, contains both inessentiality and essentiality, contingency and necessity, irrationality and rationality. Within actuality, there is a distance between the self and itself, an active reflexivity that contrasts with the immediate coincidence with self, or the determinateness that is characteristic of being-there or the real in its immediacy. In general, essence designates the negativity and reflexivity that are initially unnoticed but inherent to being in the apparent immediacy of its positivity or its existence: ‘Essence is past—but timelessly past—being’.Footnote ²³ Consequently, within actuality in the Hegelian sense of the term, immediacy and mediation coexist, as do exteriority and interiority, negativity and positivity; and they are each expressed on the other’s ground. The actual is the immediate that bears within it the trace of the mediation that structures it; it is an exteriority that is entirely invested by the interiority that it indexes; it is a positivity saturated with negativity. But in contrast to what occurs in the first two sections of the Logic of Essence (‘Essence as Reflection within the Self’, ‘The Phenomenon’), this distance from the self, this reflexivity is grasped in the movement of its reabsorption, and not in that of its emergence. This is the point of the distinction that Hegel makes between the appearance (Schein) of essence or its reflection within itself, the phenomenon (Erscheinen) of that essence, understood as manifestation of an ‘essential’ interiority within the exteriority or as its ‘existence’, and finally the (self-) manifestation of actuality.Footnote ²⁴ Wirklichkeit designates the mobile, processual coincidence of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, however the latter are termed: ‘substance’ and ‘accident’, ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’, ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. It is this process that Hegel calls manifestation (Manifestation) or even revelation (Offenbarung), if by revelation one understands the fact that the essential ‘interiority’ ‘is in and for itself nothing but this, to express or manifest itself in the exteriority’.Footnote ²⁵ In this manner, in contrast to the previously encountered forms of immediacy (being, existence, phenomenon), ‘the actual is therefore manifestation … that is, in its externality, it is itself and is itself in that alone’.Footnote ²⁶

To be more precise, the examination of actuality constitutes the end point of the dialectical analysis of essence (Wesen). In a brief comparison between the structures of essence and those of being, Hegel suggests that in a certain manner actuality is the being-for-itself of essence, just as existence and the phenomenon are its being-there:

In other words, with actuality, essence so to speak bends back upon itself, or reconnects with itself after having been exposed, with the doubling of existence and the phenomenon, to the risk of exteriority. But this does not mean that the actual has reabsorbed the essential figures of exteriority (existence, phenomenon) within a smooth spotless interiority. In one sense precisely the contrary is the case: actuality is solely exteriority, its interiority is exhausted in the outward expression of self. This property is explained by specific characteristics of the process of essence. Emerging from the initial massive duality of ‘indeterminate’ essence and ‘appearance’ to which being seems to be (provisionally) reduced in it, the process through which essence posits its determinations—identity and difference, foundation and founded, essence and existence, essentiality and phenomenon, interior and exterior—can be interpreted as an attempt to confront and overcome the ‘bad’ dualistic metaphysics that Hegel rejected. The thought of actuality, of that ‘essence which is one with its phenomenon’, supposes that one abandons any kind of understanding of what is on the basis of a presupposed ‘essential’ background.Footnote ²⁸ Actuality expresses the full coincidence of being and reason-for-being such that what is revealed is no longer positioned behind a ‘superficial’ being in which essence manifests itself. What Hegel says about the necessary in the passage on absolute necessity can be extrapolated to apply to actuality in general: ‘[it] only is because it is’.Footnote ²⁹ It is absolutely without remainder: this is its dimension of exteriority or existence. Yet it is because it is, it is itself the reason-for-being of its own being: this is its dimension of interiority or reflexivity.

This procedure of constituting a surface without depth, or rather a surface which is its own depth, leads—according to the end of the second book of the Logic and the beginning of the third book—from essence, as an interiority which is ‘shown’ or ‘appears’ in a network of external configurations, to the concept, as the free subject of an infinite self-affirmation which is its own proper ‘development’.Footnote ³⁰ In consequence, actuality, manifesting itself within itself, and not within a foreign or pre-given context, is in the end nothing other than the prefiguration of the concept, or in other words, freedom expressing itself—and it has to express itself—in the language of necessity. That is to say, the process of actuality guarantees the conversion of necessity into liberty: but in so far as it still bears traces of the dualities whose Aufhebung it makes up, it remains, Hegel says, ‘on the threshold of the concept’.Footnote ³¹

Wirklichkeit is therefore the becoming-concept of being, a being always already mediated by the negativity of essence, and nothing other than this becoming. Let’s allow that in Hegel’s terminology the rational is the concept.Footnote ³² One can thus say:

However, this rationality of the actual awaits an explanation, and it is precisely this explanation that is named the ‘concept’.

At this point we can affirm that the analysis of Wirklichkeit as undertaken at the end of the ‘objective logic’ presents the access of the rational to the position of subject of the reality, or of objectivity. Here subjectivity is understood not as an anthropological determination of the order of an ‘Ego’ but rather as the vitality of the concept itself, this concept ‘which, as dialectical, breaks through its own barrier and opens out into objectivity’.Footnote ³⁴ Reality is understood as the infinitely open field for the unfolding of an ‘objective thinking’, of a thinking production of being by and through itself. This latter expression does not state anything other than the immanence of thought to the world, to actuality in the logical sense of the term. Through its constitution actuality bears witness to the co-relativity of the ‘rational’ and the ‘real’ (understood as actuality):

In a certain sense Haym was not wrong to judge as either tautological or grossly contradictory the Hegelian identification of the rational with the real, and of the real with the rational. But a crucial qualification is required, however: the identity proclaimed in the Preface is not of the order of factuality or of the given; it is both the remit and the result of an infinite process of adjustment of concept and being, a process whose fundamental constitution is laid out in the Logic and whose concrete forms in all their variety are presented by the ‘real philosophical sciences’, in particular the theory of objective spirit. This is why—and without any need for conjectures about Hegel finally not retaining this formulation—the 1819–20 course on the philosophy of right exposes the 1820 Preface equation in terms of becoming and movement: ‘what is rational becomes actual, and what is actual becomes rational’.Footnote ³⁶

III. The ‘reason that is’

Given the previous analysis of the speculative meaning of Hegel’s statement for the ‘real philosophical sciences’, the next question concerns its implications for the doctrine of objective spirit, that is, for moral, political and legal philosophy. This is the question of the ‘relation of philosophy to actuality’, which, as Hegel writes in the Preface, has given rise to ‘misunderstandings’.Footnote ³⁷ Hegel’s response to this question derives from his conception of actuality, but it also goes a little further:

This passage accentuates a new consequence of the thesis of the actuality of the rational, a consequence that the rest of the Preface repeatedly underlines with a polemical intention (which I will not expand on here): it implies a rejection of any form of normativism. It is not philosophy’s role to prescribe what reality must or should be, since beyond the real or being, there is nothing apart from the emptiness of a self-referential and incantatory discourse. Rather the role of philosophy is ‘to comprehend what is […] because what is, is reason’.Footnote ³⁹ Let us explain this sentence. What is: of course this expression does not designate immediate Dasein at an empirical level, nor even the phenomenon or existence which are always maintained at a distance from the essentiality they reflect, but rather the actual, the present as presence and actuality of the rational. Reason: that is to say, not an abstract and normative reason which supposes it can teach the world how ‘it ought to be’,Footnote ⁴⁰ but rather a reason that is ‘the thought of the world’,Footnote ⁴¹ the thought that a world grants to itself, a world that discovers itself as a vehicle of truth and learns to consider itself as such. But if the equation of the actual and the rational signifies nothing more than the congruence of rationality with itself, the agreement of ‘reason as self-conscious spirit’ and ‘reason as present actuality’, then would this not mean that, despite what I have argued, Haym’s suspicion would be confirmed, the Hegelian formula revealed yet again to be no more than a flat tautology?

The answer to this question is to be found in what Hegel says in the Grundlinien with regard to Plato’s Republic, as well as in the courses on the history of philosophy. It is worthwhile comparing Hegel’s argument to Kant’s on the same subject.Footnote ⁴² The two philosophers’ strategies certainly diverge when it comes to the relation between ideality and normativity. Nevertheless they both attempt to recognize and legitimate a ‘tension of the concept’ in Plato’s work (to speak in the terms of the Phenomenology of Spirit). Hegel says that the Platonic city ‘passes proverbially as an empty ideal’Footnote ⁴³ precisely because it excludes anyone from having free choice with regard to their social position (which is imposed), their partner (sexual communism), or private property. The Platonic city eliminates everything claimed by the modern individual in the name of liberty. These policies effectively and coherently tend to ‘the exclusion of the principle of subjective liberty’.Footnote ⁴⁴ But this exclusion was not one of Plato’s whims or a totalitarian fantasy. It proves that he had understood better than any of his contemporaries to what degree the principle of personal autonomy contradicted the very essence of Greek Sittlichkeit. Personal autonomy was valorized by Greek philosophy in its claim that everyone had the right to think for him or herself. Greek Sittlichkeit, on the other hand, finds its purest expression in democracy and is described by Hegel in the following terms:

What the Republic proclaims is the incompatibility of Greek Sittlichkeit and its corresponding type of (‘substantial’) rationality with subjective self-determination. To use imagery one could say the Republic demonstrates the necessity of Socrates’ execution and perhaps also that of Christ—but developing this point would take me too far. For Hegel it is thus Plato’s great achievement to have anticipated, through his very attempt to eliminate it, the political impact of the emergence of ‘subjective freedom’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The universal will only be valid as universal if it accommodates the principle of particularity, and if it recognizes the right for subjects to think and will for themselves. The state will have to allow the development of a civil society that expands the logic of its ‘unilateral principle’ to its endpoint: such is the distinctive character of modern Sittlichkeit. Plato helps us think through this, albeit in an indirect manner. In the very same movement he ‘grasp[ed] … the nature of Greek ethical life’ and identified the ‘breaking into that life of a deeper principle’, a principle that would first destabilize that ethical form and then take its place.Footnote ⁴⁷ Plato revealed the full rationality of the polis and at the same time identified the historical limits of that rationality: by doing this he also exposed the inscription of all rationality within history. He thus demonstrated both the rationality of the actual (the Republic is an ideal type that determines the deeper meaning of Greek historical reality) and the actuality of the rational (what this philosophy forbade was precisely ‘the pivot on which the impending world revolution turned’).Footnote ⁴⁸

The equivalence of the rational and the actual, of reason that thinks and reason that is, is thus no more a tautological statement when one examines it in the sphere of objective spirit than it is when one examines it within a strictly logical context. Besides, who would simply suppose that the Platonic republic was a copy of the Athenian city, or even its inverted image? This equivalence occurs in the form of a process or a history. And this history, as the Platonic example clearly shows, is that via which objective spirit (Sittlichkeit) produces a thought image of itself, and by doing this works towards its own transformation. One can thus see how Hegel’s resolute rejection of normativism—philosophy always comes too late to tell the world how it ought to be—does not prevent the concept from having an intrinsic normative power. On the contrary, it requires this, if it is true that the idea ‘is not so impotent to remain solely at the level of what ought-to-be and not achieve actuality.’Footnote ⁴⁹ But this normativity remains immanent, internal to the domain of objectivity to which it applies. The concept or the norm should thus no longer be conceived as the product of a subjectivity defined anthropologically that would freely arrange and dispose of its own productions. Far from the separation of Sollen and Sein which would be the condition of all active normativity according to Kelsen,Footnote ⁵⁰ the norm of the true—the ‘rational’—is actively present in the heart of the historical world—the ‘actual’—‘as the rose in the cross of the present’.Footnote ⁵¹ By this we should understand, in my opinion, the following: the true—the speculative—is nothing other than the indication that, within a world not yet reconciled with itself and wrought with suffering and contradiction, the dimension of reconciliation (Versöhnung) is not only present in an implicit or potential manner but is genuinely actual because it alone allows a future to be thought for this world. But this future of the historical world, is it at base historical itself? Is it another figure of the world or another world?

IV. ‘Political philosophy’ as epistemology

What then does the doctrine of objective spirit as a philosophical science examine? The real, obviously, or rather the actual, whose immanent rationality or concept it extracts and expresses. As clearly shown by the example of the Republic, this does not mean that it is a flat copy of the real. To grasp the rationality of the actual is to drag into the light that impulsion, which sets in motion the real and carries it beyond itself; it is to think the contradiction whose resolution will be the flowering of a new world. The Grundlinien Preface contains some famous but mysterious statements in this regard. Let us select two judgements that at first sight appear to contradict each other: ‘philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts’;Footnote ⁵² ‘the important thing is to recognize in the semblance of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present’.Footnote ⁵³ How can philosophy be simultaneously the ‘daughter of its own time’ and the expression of a truth that belongs to no time, when its object by its very nature is historical? What exactly can a political philosophy possibly ‘speak of’ if it does not have a normative vocation and if its object—the State—is by its nature engaged in history and exposed to contingency?

A passage from the Preface leads towards a response to these questions:

That philosophy’s role is not to imagine what the State should be can be considered as established. As we have noted, Hegel judges any form of abstract normativism to be incompatible with what has been named his ‘presentism’: genuine thinking is always accorded with the present, or the actual. But what does it mean to say that philosophy’s role is to show how the State should be understood? From a standpoint like that of Haym or Ilting, this statement is proof of Hegel’s political ‘quietism’, or, to put it more brutally, his servility. Besides, does he not write to the German chancellor in 1821 that his Philosophy of Right is the ‘immediate auxiliary of the government’s good intentions’?Footnote ⁵⁵ But I think this claim can be understood in another manner if we take seriously the declared aspiration of this philosophy to be both the ‘exploration (Ergründen) of the rational’ and ‘the comprehension of the present and the actual’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Philosophy is a thought of what is actually present. Its vocation is thus to be a rational knowledge of actuality, or rather to allow actuality to reach within it and by means of its consciousness of its degree and of its own figures of rationality. Yet just as actuality is not identical to reality, the present thought by philosophy is not what occurs in a contingent manner, it is not what merely happens. Rather it is the timeless presence of the rational within the temporality of the event. As Hegel puts it in the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

One should add here that this eternity of reason, which is underlined in a deliberately provocative manner at the beginning of the Science of Logic, is not situated in any place that would be distinct from the real, that is, it is not ‘elsewhere’: it directly reveals what is, not as a hidden interiority that must be exhumed, but as the mediation that binds it to itself, that renders it actual (recalling that actuality signifies the coincidence of being and reason-for-being). Despite the use of a metaphorical register in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, which risks evoking the essentialist conception of truth found in the depths—the reference to a ‘motley covering’ that must be ‘penetrated’ to reach the ‘core’ of truth—within the theory of objective spirit Hegel maintains the teaching of speculative logic, which is that the revelation or manifestation that is the proper act of the actual in its rationality (in its becoming concept) is not that of an ‘other’ of the actual, rather ‘its being-there is only the manifestation of itself’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In these conditions, what finally is the object of political philosophy (or of the doctrine of objective spirit in Hegel’s terms), given that the object of the ‘real sciences’ could be defined in an analogous manner? What is it to teach ‘how the state should be understood’? It is to render evident the presence of what both ‘actually’ structures the real and attests its internal limit. It is to think the State (but also law, civil society, and even history) as the ‘image and actuality of reason’, it is to account for and measure that which, within its own internal constitution, goes beyond it: it is thus to think the State as self-transcending. Not in the sense in which there would be an absolute intangible metaphysical truth beyond the State and history. For Hegel infinite spirit does not have a place distinct from that of spirit in its subjective and objective finitude, it does not reside in an ‘intelligible place’. But rather in the sense in which the thinking of their truth (a truth which is never given) is that which, from the inside, manages to mark the limit of the configurations of objective spirit. This thinking assigns a limit to them simply because it belongs to the order of knowledge. Hence political philosophy is a political epistemology: as a thinking of the rationality within actuality, it fixes an insuperable frontier to each form or degree of the real world at the very same time as it identifies the share of rationality that it contains. This limitation is anchored in a logical anteriority (paradoxically expressed as a chronological delay: ‘philosophy comes too late’) of the thinking of the world (or of objective spirit) with regard to its being:

The conceptualisation of the actuality of objective spirit only comes to pass when night falls on the real; that is precisely when one of its figures ceases to be actual. This is why this thinking, philosophy, is only accomplished in the transgression of its object; that is, in revealing itself to be philosophy per se, and not simply ‘political philosophy’.