The core aim of Khurana's book is to show that the notions of ‘life’ and ‘freedom’ are deeply connected, much more than we usually tend to think. It's not only that in order to be free one must, obviously, be living: rather, for Khurana, the basic structure of life intrinsically shapes the nature and anatomy of human freedom. Grasping the constitutive relationship between life and freedom is therefore the goal of the book, as well as a necessary condition for understanding freedom itself.
In order to pursue this goal, Khurana embarks on a detailed journey through the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Specifically, Khurana's own notions of ‘life’ and ‘freedom’ are in a sense products of how those concepts figure in Kant and Hegel. The volume itself is a detailed critical analysis of their positions and the relations among them.
As the Introduction explains, the general approach of the book is not historisch but rather systematisch, so Khurana does not dwell on historical considerations but provides a rational reconstruction of the arguments of the two authors. It is via such analysis of Kant and Hegel (pursued, so to speak, ‘from within’) that Khurana offers his main philosophical insights. The book thus belongs to the tradition reanimating classical insights for current philosophical discussion.
The journey that Khurana takes us on is quite impressive (the volume contains more than 1 million characters, according to my rough estimate, which makes it longer than the Phenomenology of Spirit). The book is divided into two main parts—the first devoted to Kant (29–263), the second to Hegel (277–505)—which are connected by a short ‘transition’ (264–74). The body of the text incorporates some previously published articles, which are integrated here in an organic way.
To elaborate his views, Khurana not only provides a detailed analysis of the texts, but also builds on a variety of insights that have been developed in debates around Classical German Philosophy in recent years (debates on the notions of ‘autonomy’, ‘normativity’, ‘recognition’, ‘second nature’, ‘social ontology’, ‘additive/transformative’ takes on rationality, etc.). He makes a conscious intervention into contemporary discourse. The result is that Khurana builds a comprehensive overview of the debates surrounding the thought of Kant and Hegel in recent decades. Bringing these various debates into focus is an interesting and significant accomplishment of this book.
Given the size and scope of the volume, I will proceed selectively: I will reconstruct and comment on one of its main lines of argument concerning the nature of life and freedom, leaving aside its discussions of minor (though interesting) historical and interpretative claims.
The book's starting point is a particular conception of freedom, primarily understood not as an agent-causal power but in terms of normative autonomy, i.e., as the capacity to obey one's own law. That autonomy is the essence of freedom is the claim of the book: a premise not under discussion. Another grounding premise is that such an understanding of freedom is one of the leading thoughts underwriting Classical German Philosophy.
Those familiar with debates in this area will know that the conception of freedom as autonomy often appears as self-legislation: from this perspective, to be autonomous means to be subject only to normative constraints of which oneself is the author. Yet the notion of a subject—whether understood as an individual or a collective—that itself creates the law to which it is subject has been recognized as paradoxical. It leads to a situation often called the ‘Kantian Paradox’ and cannot account for genuine normative authority. In the formulation of Robert Pippin, who intentionally exaggerates the issue: ‘I am only bound because I bound myself, so I hereby unbind myself’ (Pippin 2008: 74). Khurana starts from this problem and from the well-known portrayal of Classical German Philosophy as a tradition seeking a way out of this paradox of self-imposed normative authority. One of the core aims of his book is to draw from Kant and Hegel in order to offer a viable alternative to this conundrum.
Khurana's first step in that direction is to adopt a different (though equally famous) paradigm for thinking autonomy. Instead of self-legislation, he argues that autonomy is best understood in terms of self-constitution. According to the constitutivist view, autonomy should not be considered as an act of self-submission to norms but rather as the capacity to constitute one's own being. To understand self-constitution, according to this stance, one has to look to the phenomenon of life. Self-constitution is the basic feature of life: living organisms are in fact the kind of beings that constitute themselves according to their own norms. Khurana recovers this basic thought of constitutivism by suggesting that organisms do not give themselves norms; they are their own norms. That is, as organisms, we obey laws that ‘specifically define us [die uns spezifisch ausmachen]’ (509). Khurana carefully traces the development of this constitutivist idea as it is elaborated first in Kant and then in Hegel, claiming that there is a common thread between the two. Living beings are a model for thinking self-constitution (Kant), or they are the very first instance of self-constitution in the world (Hegel). In making this connection, Khurana makes particularly vivid those current views identifying a particular version of constitutivism in Classical German Philosophy (see Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard2009 and, to an extent, Thompson Reference Thompson2008). While Kant hesitates in linking self-constitution to freedom (suggesting only a mere analogy between the two and eventually claiming that freedom is instead a transcendental capacity), Hegel takes the self-constitutivist thought seriously and elaborates it, locating it at the core of his theory of freedom. Khurana thus follows Hegel's articulation of this thought, first focusing in detail on Hegel's notion of life (and its basic activities: assimilation, reproduction, etc.) in the Philosophy of Nature and then analysing how it is connected to freedom in the Philosophy of Spirit. This makes up the second part of Khurana's book.
In the wake of Hegel, it becomes clear that self-constitution is only one side of Khurana's story about freedom: self-constitution alone is not a sufficient condition for freedom (otherwise all living beings would be free ipso facto). It is therefore a mistake ‘to identify autonomous norms with constitutive norms’ (509). For Khurana, something else is necessary: namely, self-consciousness. On the one hand, Khurana follows philosophers such as Pippin in thinking that the best way to understand both the emergence and nature of normative self-consciousness is to view it as a social achievement. On the other, contrary to Hegelians such as Pippin, Khurana does not think that such an achievement involves radically ‘leaving nature behind’. It is not a step out of nature made by attribution of deontic statuses or taking a normative stance. On the contrary, for Khurana, the attainment of self-consciousness is in an important way life's own achievement: a result of life's inner development. Reference to ‘life’ thus must be an integral part of our story about sociality and freedom.
For Khurana, this is also Hegel's position (correctly interpreted). Indeed, Khurana's account of how living beings can establish self-conscious, normative relations with themselves is powered by Hegel's Philosophy of Sprit. Khurana carefully reconstructs Hegel's description of the progressive emergence of self-consciousness as a result of a series of steps that transform ‘natural’ (i.e., living, self-constituting) beings into ‘social’ (i.e., living, self-constituting, but also self-conscious and normatively responsive) beings—or rather, spiritual beings.
This process of transformation has several steps: here Khurana takes into consideration Hegel's Anthropology, Phenomenology and Objective Spirit. Notably he skips the Psychology, which does not even get mentioned as part of Hegel's text (cf. 396–97, 24–36), but I cannot discuss that absence here. Khurana's reconstruction presents the first step out of merely natural life towards the constitution of self-conscious normative life as the formation of ‘habits’. The notion of habit designates a natural process that enables a living being (that is not yet a ‘social’ being, 435), in a certain sense, to overcome its original or ‘first’ nature (by denying some of its basic natural drives). This opens up space for the development of self-conscious normative capacities. Habits, however, are not sufficient to produce self-consciousness. For the latter to emerge, the classical theme of ‘recognition’ (and therefore sociality) must enter the picture. Contrary to some readings, Khurana distinctly stresses the struggle for recognition in Hegel as a struggle between living beings: life, although often neglected, has a pivotal role and is essential to understanding both the development and the outcome of the struggle (to put it in Khurana's words, life ‘is the medium in which subjective spirit realizes itself’, 452). As a result, the upshot of the struggle is not the production of a social relationship that departs from life and nature, but rather the production of a new form of living beings: i.e., self-conscious living beings.
To understand the role that life plays in this context, the key notion is ‘transformation’. Khurana draws from another recent source to articulate this view: Matt Boyle's distinction between transformative and additive models of rationality (Boyle Reference Boyle2016; Kern and Kietzmann Reference Kern and Kietzmann2017). For Khurana, as for Boyle, self-consciousness is not something that adds onto other allegedly natural capacities of the living being; it is rather something that ‘transforms’ the structure of one's life in its entirety, endowing it with a different form. ‘The difference between living and self-conscious being is conceived as a difference in the form of self-constitution’ (511). Khurana ends up defending a rather particular position on the nature of normative self-consciousness. On the one hand, he says that the transformation into self-conscious being is ‘continuous’ with nature (it is after all a transformation of life, in which life is preserved but takes on a different form). On the other hand, he claims that becoming normatively self-conscious is a deeply ‘discontinuous’ process, for it not only requires a social struggle but also cannot be seen as a natural development of some biological capacity (as some current neo-Aristotelians would argue). Such an achievement therefore is not a natural achievement. Moreover, becoming normatively self-conscious turns living beings into beings ‘of a fully different type’ (ganz anderer Art, 452). The way in which self-conscious beings are in the world is therefore ‘natural’ only in a very specific sense.
As I have tried to emphasize, this view presents a tension that was already partially present in Boyle. On the one hand Khurana wants to say that self-conscious, norm-responsive beings are living beings and therefore are in some sense natural beings; but on the other he claims that such self-consciousness is the result of a radical break with nature, a non-biological transformation that turns original (vorgegebene) natural life into something else, something that is only secondarily natural. In a sense, Khurana wants to have it both ways: he wants self-consciousness to be both natural and not.
This places a considerable burden on his notion of ‘second nature’. The way in which Khurana deals with this concept is one of the most original insights of the book and constitutes a key element of his philosophical proposal. Following Christoph Menke, Khurana makes the inherent tension of this idea a point of strength. He argues that one has to acknowledge the essential and ineliminable tension between the mere natural (living) dimension of nature and the constant attempt to overcome it manifested by the social normative dimension we inhabit as rational human beings. For this reason, ‘second nature’ is an essentially ‘dialectical notion’. It is a ‘critical concept’ (508) that plays a fundamental role in articulating the passage between the two spheres and is necessarily ‘precarious’ (24, 520)—open to further collapse, shaping and development. This view is at the very heart of the position that Khurana labels ‘dialectical naturalism’ (518), which grounds the prospective programme of ‘critical theory of second nature’ he proposes at the end of the book.
Though I have no space to do so fully here, we should look closely at the relation between second nature (thus understood) and freedom. Khurana's conclusion is that we eventually understand realizing freedom to be dependent on ‘production of a second nature of the right kind’ (527)—but this closing remains a promissory note. Khurana does not tell us how this ‘production’ should be understood. Yet regardless of how it is conceived, this kind of production must take into account the essentially dialectical and conflicting relationship between our two natures: both our first biological one and our second, sittlich, social one. ‘Spirit can free itself from nature only insofar as, on the one hand, it remains referred to given living nature and, on the other, it realizes itself as nature of a different kind’ (476, my emphasis). This tension is the distinctive mark and starting point of Khurana's ‘critical theory’, at which the book hints in its final pages.
How can we assess this book? Its scope and extraordinary wealth of detail without doubt make it one of the most comprehensive and original contributions on this topic. The very careful reconstruction of the texts and Khurana's engagement with a wide range of secondary literature yields detailed insights about Kantian and Hegelian concepts. However, I think the absence of sustained engagement with contemporary views on ‘life’ and ‘nature’ is rather noticeable. Khurana's notions of ‘life’ and ‘nature’ are entirely framed in Kantian and Hegelian terms. Not much effort appears to be devoted to translating these notions into the philosophical vocabulary of other disciplines of philosophy. This has two consequences: first, such a reconstruction ‘from within’ runs the risk of too easily convincing some Kantians and Hegelians, while remaining unintelligible to those who do not share the Hegelian idiom or its basic insights. This applies in particular to the notion of ‘life’ at the core of the book. Is the Kantian-Hegelian construal of ‘life’, based on nineteenth-century biology (and relying on its notions of ‘assimilation’, ‘irritability’, ‘reproduction’, etc.), still an adequate starting point for current discussions? Is it an empirically defensible and philosophically convincing ground upon which to articulate a view of freedom that is also useful in other philosophical areas? Khurana implicitly seems to say ‘yes’, but he does not do much to convince his non-Kantian and non-Hegelian readers. That seems unfortunate, since there are current strands in the philosophy of biology that take the idea of ‘self-constitution’ very seriously, discussing it under the heading of biological autonomy (Moreno and Mossio Reference Moreno and Mossio2015) or autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela Reference Maturana and Varela1980). This literature is not directly Kantian or Hegelian but many authors explicitly acknowledge connection to or inspiration from Classical German Philosophy (e.g., Kaufmann Reference Kauffman2000; Cooper Reference Cooper2018). The fact that Khurana does not take such work into account—he only mentions Canguilhem as a possible interlocutor on ‘normativity of the living’—makes it difficult to fully evaluate the payoff of his systematisch thesis. Moreover, this fact gives the (wrong) impression that one has to buy into a concept of life drawn from Kant and Hegel in order to believe Khurana's case. The same applies to the notion of ‘habit’ and its description: Khurana does not attempt to establish much dialogue with other (possibly concurrent views) on the nature of habits.
Another element possibly missing in the book is context: recent years have seen increasing scholarly interest devoted to the numerous views on nature, life and organism emerging around and mediating the link between Kant and Hegel—such as the work of Schelling, Oken, Eschenmayer or Romantic Naturphilosophie (Richards Reference Richards2002, and the materials now collected in Zammito Reference Zammito2018, Gambarotto Reference Gambarotto2018). Khurana does not seem to consider the relevance of practically any of these interlocutors. Although its focus on ‘life’ is in a sense new, Khurana's book only addresses Kant and Hegel and therefore reinforces a very popular path in recent study of Classical German Philosophy that moves directly from Kant to Hegel. Considering such contextual positions is not only a matter of historisch interest but can also have a substantial influence on our perspectives on self-constitution and life, calling into question the supposedly simple continuity between Kant and Hegel.
These, however, are only minor issues in an important book that powerfully carries the notion of ‘life’ back into various current conversations, paving the way for a variety of impactful questions both systematisch and historisch in nature. Khurana's impressive work offers a truly notable contribution to many different disciplines of philosophy and marks a turning point in the ongoing scholarly discussion of these topics.
