I. Action as an intrusion into an indifferent world

From the perspective of the sort of realist stance that Hegel takes to come most naturally to our everyday consciousness, the world is ultimately made up of separate, individual things, each of which simply is what it is, and is external to other things.Footnote ¹⁴ As we saw, from this perspective each thing has its own nature and its own material presence, separate from and external to that of other things—and so separate from and external to us, insofar as we are likewise concrete individuals within this world. The world, conceived in this way, must thus be indifferent to whatever particular initiatives or ends that we have a mind to realize in it. Moreover, it does not in any way solicit or demand action from us: it does not present itself as specifically needing our agency to address, rectify, fulfil, preserve, or transform it in any way, for the things we perceive around us are what they are with or without us, and do not in any way call upon us to concern ourselves with them or become involved in their unfolding.

Perhaps other living things, and certain animals in particular, on occasion actively solicit responses from us as agents, but it seems that they too would have just carried on being what they were had we never entered their environments in the first place. That is, they do not need us to be what they are—the principle that accounts for their individual being is independent of and external to that which accounts for ours—and so no lack or deficiency in their being would result if we as agents were taken out of the ontological equation altogether. Whatever particular solicitations they might make upon our agency thus seem contingent and dispensable relative to their essential natures, and as a result any actions we might undertake in response to these solicitations are likewise contingent and dispensable. Indeed, it is hard not to get the impression that, for the most part, animals would be better able to realize themselves without our interventions into their affairs, and often, when they do solicit specific responses from us, what they demand from us is precisely to be left alone.

Although we as agents might at times experience ourselves as answering to a deficiency that is actually there in the world—as for instance when we attempt to protect an injured bird from the aggressive pursuit of a cat, perceiving that the bird is at risk of dying and so needs our help—from the realist perspective that we are considering there can in truth be nothing in the objective situation itself that specifically solicits us into motion. All there are are positive, objective things or events, all occurring naturally, as they are bound to occur by the objective laws of nature, and if we do not like what is happening or find it deficient, that is perhaps an expression of who we are, or of our subjectively formed perspective on things, but not of how things are in themselves. The objective world itself does not of its own accord create gaps that need us, in particular, to fill them in, does not give rise to tensions that specifically require our decisions, our initiatives, to bring them to resolution.

Let us for a moment grant that there are actual deficiencies in the objective world. For instance, in our example we might consider the bird’s being batted around by the cat as an objective state of affairs that is contingent and deficient with respect to the bird’s natural capacity to realize itself.Footnote ¹⁵ That we ourselves experience such deficiencies personally as calls to action, that such situations implicate and motivate us as practical agents in the first place, that we could possibly find, in such situations, opportunities for our own individual self-realization or self-satisfaction as agents—again, all this seems to be something that reflects something about us, something perhaps about our own natural inclinations or our values and self-conceptions, rather than something as it were brewing in the world itself. That some of the deficiencies immanent in the world happen to be such that we, given our particular powers and limits, are in a position to rectify or resolve them, and that we are such as to feel motivated to respond to them, seems purely accidental from the point of view of the nature of this external world. In that case, we are really answering to ourselves, to our own particular natures or self-conceptions, and not first and foremost to something at play in the world itself.

If the world in which we act does not, on its own account, call for action on our part, if all the things we encounter simply are what they are independently of anything we as agents might do in relation to them, then all of our actions seem to take the form of intrusions. Like the stranger who barges in uninvited, we as agents barge into a world that would have gotten along just fine without us, introducing into it changes that are external and contingent with respect to what it really is in essence. From the realist point of view, one can give a full and adequate account of the nature of the external world of things without any reference whatsoever to our particular practical powers, to our specific character as free agents. And so the thought that we, taken as particular individuals among others within the objective world, should have some sort of privileged place in it, such that the world itself would need free agents, in particular, to somehow complete or fulfil or settle its character, seems to be wholly out of place.

If Hegel takes his philosophy to offer a challenge to this conception of action and to the realist assumptions that underlie it, it seems that Hegel must hold that the objective world in which we act is not simply external to our agency in this way. That is, he needs to hold that there is, after all, a sense in which the world itself does contain gaps or deficiencies that specifically call our agency into action. Also, he must hold that we act, not only on behalf of ourselves (on the basis of our needs, desires, or individual self-conceptions) as particular beings in the world, external to all others, but also on behalf of the world itself, taking up into our actions something inherently universal, something that transcends our immediate, natural particularity.

For instance, if it were the case that, in responding to the injured bird’s vulnerability in relation to the attacking cat, we were in fact acting on behalf of some genuinely universal concern—imagine some sort of cosmic principle of harmony between all creatures, say, something sought after, not merely by this or that being, but by the very order of nature itself, an order that the cat was threatening to disrupt with its attack—then our action would not need to be conceived as an intrusion into a sphere external and indifferent to it. Rather, the action could be understood as participating in a striving that was already prepared for by, already underway in, this sphere itself. Further, we would not have to treat whatever satisfaction we might obtain from engaging in such an action as evidence that we were, in the end, responding exclusively to our own particular natures—some sort of natural sympathy for the vulnerable, for instance. For it could very well be the case that we are the particular kind of being that is most satisfied when we are answering to universal concerns, when we know that our actions are, as it were, called for by reality itself. That we are such as to find satisfaction in such actions does not itself preclude them from having this universal import.Footnote ¹⁶

Now Hegel does not endorse such a cosmic principle of harmony, at least not in any straightforward sense,Footnote ¹⁷ but he is concerned to show that our actions can be such as to answer to some sort of universal force at play in the real. Since it is most obviously in the sphere of moral life that action claims to manifest, not just an agent’s own particularity, but something of inherently universal import, it is to Hegel’s account of this sphere that I now turn.

II. Moral action and its place in nature

It is perhaps in the sphere of moral life most of all that we are prepared to recognize the existence of objective situations that themselves solicit actions from us. To recognize some injustice, for instance, is to experience a sort of deficiency at play in the world. It is to recognize the actual, positive presence of a glaring absence, to recognize an existing situation that is in itself unsettled, and that as such cries out for some sort of active response that will address that absence or unsettledness and bring some closure. Even though it might be a situation that arises wholly independently of us, we can find ourselves as agents personally implicated in it. In that case we are suddenly put in a position in which a failure to offer a response that would somehow eliminate the deficiency and restore justice would be tantamount to permitting this deficiency to persist, and so inaction would constitute negligence on our part. Just as, when someone we know waves at us from across the street, we are suddenly put in a situation in which a response is called for, and in which no response is no longer an option (for not responding is now an active snub, whether we intend it or not); so too are those objective situations that we consider moral such as to implicate our agency in ways that we cannot control. It is as though such situations have a right to our action, and they themselves would be incomplete or unfulfilled without our active intervention, without our bringing things to their proper resolution. This is essentially what Hegel, in his discussion of morality in the Philosophy of Right, calls the ‘right of objectivity’ (PhR: §132 and R). This right concerns the capacity of the objective world in which the agent lives to demand or proscribe an agent’s actions unconditionally, regardless of whether the particular agent recognizes this demand or proscription for herself.

Now, it seems to be above all in our dealings with other selves that we as agents are solicited into moral action. Other selves are those specific external beings that themselves actively place demands and make claims on us, those worldly ‘objects’ that oblige us, in our capacity as free agents, to respond and answer to them. Indeed, according to Hegel’s much-discussed doctrine of interpersonal recognition, a self simply cannot be a self without engaging in relations of recognition with other selves.Footnote ¹⁸ For Hegel, then, the other is essentially incomplete without my active recognition, and so the very presence of the other is, as it were, a call to action, a call to engage in ways of being that recognize this other as a free self in its own right. It is this call for recognition that arguably stands as the ultimate source not only of moral obligation, but also of just institutions and law on Hegel’s account.Footnote ¹⁹ And it is the other’s real need for appropriate recognition that constitutes the most basic example of the sort of metaphysical deficiency that specifically mobilizes us into actions that would negate such a deficiency.

On this account, then, the naïve realist’s vision of individuals as self-sufficient, self-contained totalities, essentially external and indifferent to all otherness, simply fails to do justice to the essentially relational character of selves. And the domain of interpersonal recognition, then, would seem to be especially well-suited to demonstrating how our practical attitude enacts both a refutation of such naïve realism and a practical affirmation of the idealist’s privileging of a relational ontology. The moral and political philosophy of recognition, then, is arguably idealist through and through.

However, if we focus exclusively or even primarily on the intersubjective domain of recognition, we risk overlooking the full significance and scope of Hegel’s claim about the practical attitude as enacting a refutation of realism, and as demonstrating idealism actually at work in the world. Footnote ²⁰ It may well be that other selves, taken as a particular class of external beings among others, indeed call us to action in the ways I have described. But Hegel’s claim about the practical attitude, namely its distinctive capacity to reveal the inadequacy of realism’s privileging of the metaphysical integrity and substantiality of materially separated individuals, concerns our relations to all things—that is, to anything that our immediate, perceptual consciousness presents to us as a self-standing individual, external to us and to other things—not just to those particular ‘things’ we call other selves. Focusing primarily on our social relations, then, can serve to obscure the fact that, for Hegel, it is even in our practical relations with the natural world at large that we are engaged in a kind of practical refutation of naïve realism—that, for Hegel, even the natural world proves to be open to and in certain ways solicitous of our agency.

In fact, if we look to Hegel’s detailed discussion of Morality in Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we find that the key issue at stake there concerns not primarily the individual agent specifically in its relation to other agents, but rather the question of how to understand the relationship between the moral agent’s actions and the natural world in which it acts. More precisely, the question is whether the practical attitude specific to the moral agent is such as to commit this agent to treating the natural world as fundamentally external and indifferent to its most genuine, freely determined purposes (as in the realist’s ‘intrusion’ picture), or whether, on the contrary, it must implicitly posit nature as being fundamentally in harmony with it, as expressly accommodating, even requiring, its action. That is, for Hegel what is centrally at issue in our attempt to act morally is, at bottom, the metaphysics not only of moral agency itself, but of the natural world in which alone moral agency realizes itself: to be a moral agent is necessarily to become embroiled in the metaphysical question of whether the natural world is complete on its own account and thus wholly independent of our strivings (whether it is ‘free,’ as Hegel says), or whether we must conceive of nature as in some way deficient or indeterminate, and thus as itself calling upon our free agency to bring it to its fuller truth and resolution. As Hegel puts it, the moral agent’s relation to nature is based, ‘on the one hand, on the complete indifference and independence of nature and moral purposes and activity with respect to one another, and, on the other, on the consciousness of duty alone as the essential fact, and of nature as completely devoid of independence and essential being’.Footnote ²¹

So, for instance, Hegel sees the moral agent as struggling with the question of whether the given world of nature is itself constituted such that agents giving themselves over to universal, moral ends can count on being happy in this life, where happiness is construed expressly as ‘a consciousness of the unity of its [the agent’s] actuality with that of nature’ (PhS: M601, WC 396–7; translation modified ). Similarly, he sees the moral agent struggling with the issue of whether its naturally given, sensuous inclinations, conceived as the real impetuses to all concrete action, are inherently at odds with its moral strivings, or whether they must be such as to play a mediating role in bringing its moral intentions to actual fruition (PhS: M622, WC 408–9). Finally, the agent, as particular, is inevitably situated in the natural world alongside other particular beings, and its relation to this empirical manifold is such that, in taking up one side of it, other sides will be left out of account. Hence the question arises as to whether the concrete world is itself such as to lend itself to the sort of single, unified, all-trumping imperative that moral action demands, or whether such action inevitably becomes bogged down in the multiplicity and complexity of the concrete (PhS: M605, WC 400). In each case, the issue concerns moral agency’s way of taking up what nature is, and it is precisely this issue that structures Hegel’s immanent critique of moral life.

In this context, Hegel regularly draws attention to the fact that it is the moral agent’s practical attitude that itself enacts or demonstrates—in deeds rather than in thoughts or words—a response to this metaphysical question concerning the ultimate status of the natural world. For instance, Hegel argues at one point that, despite the moral agent’s express commitment to conceiving of the given world of nature as fundamentally indifferent to and independent of its moral ends (in that respect implicitly endorsing the realist’s treatment of the world as wholly external to our free agency), moral action itself embodies a rather different, we might say idealist orientation. According to this the natural world is not wholly other, but is rather introduced, through the movement of free action itself, into a higher, more complete, and self-consciously justified way of being. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel argues that, because the moral agent must perceive nature, in its present form, as being external to it and thus as inharmonious with its moral purposes, it must postulate such a harmony as merely ideal or as possible only in principle. On the other hand, however, ‘consciousness … proclaims through its deed that it is not in earnest in making its postulate, because the meaning of the action is really this, to make into a present reality what was not supposed to exist in the present [namely, the harmony itself]’(PhS: M618, WC 618; emphasis added). The practically engaged self-consciousness that is peculiar to the movement of moral action cannot fail to posit the actual world as fundamentally amenable to its moral strivings. In actually acting, it demonstrates its certainty that it is embodying a claim that is vindicated in the face of all potential challenges, and so it acts as though all reality were in itself receptive of its action’s coming to be. It acts as though it were doing the concrete work of a universal striving or will (the will that bears on everything, the will of reality itself, as it were) not just its own particular will (a will that would be external to, and thus potentially intrusive upon, the claims that other particular realities might make on it).

Further, all moral actions, as concrete events taking place in the natural world, will directly draw upon and incorporate natural forces within them (including the agent’s naturally-given impulses). Thus Hegel argues that, in practice, it cannot be that nature is wholly external to, independent of, and thus ultimately recalcitrant with respect to, the realization of moral action. On the contrary, the natural world must be fundamentally open to being thus incorporated; the given situation, including the given state of the agent’s natural impulses and needs, must be fundamentally receptive to the actualization of moral purpose, if moral action and the concrete practical attitude of the moral agent are possible in the first place.Footnote ²² Thus, for Hegel, moral agency—in its very claim to be acting morally, in its very performance of moral action—is involved in bringing to light a nature that is in harmony with moral freedom, a world that would be deficient without it.Footnote ²³ Or, we can also say, it demonstrates the objective existence of moral deficiencies or gaps at play in the given world itself, precisely by acting morally, and by thereby introducing into the fabric of this world something—the action itself—whose concrete reality can only be understood as a negation or redressing of such deficiency.

That the moral stance continues to be structured in terms of the ultimate opposition and externality between moral agency and nature, and insists on this opposition despite the fact that the concrete movement of moral action itself belies this opposition, constitutes a significant part of Hegel’s dialectical critique of the moral world view. For Hegel, then, we might say that part of morality’s problem is that it does not adequately heed the distinctive perspective on reality that moral action itself brings to the table, a perspective from the point of view of which the given world is not ultimately external to its own self-realization.

Though I cannot fully explore the claim here, I take it that Hegel’s argument for the priority of what, in contrast to morality, he calls the ‘ethical’ domain, hinges in part on ethical life’s having incorporated into itself this perspective on reality, this ‘practical idealism’ of the will. Thus, for instance, Hegel describes the practical sphere of the ethical as ‘spirit living and present as a world’ (PhR: §151), highlighting the notion that here the exigencies that press upon the agent are not merely subjective and internal to the agent (and thus external to the world the agent confronts), but are already at play in structuring the immediately given, concrete situations which ethical agents face when they set out to act. Here, then, agency is a matter of responding to what this concrete world itself calls for—that is, the world is such as to demand being addressed by action—rather than a matter of trying to impose something ‘pure’ and abstractly ideal upon a nature conceived as wholly alien or indifferent to it.Footnote ²⁴ From the point of view of ethical agency, then, the world of objective nature must be conceived not merely as a set of self-contained, practically-neutral things but rather in terms of the actual and potential practical situations to which they give rise.

To explore further Hegel’s conception of the relationship between the practical attitude and the natural world, I turn now to Hegel’s discussion of the right to property ownership. The most basic issue at stake here, we shall see, has to do with the agent’s capacity to realize itself in and through a natural world that is otherwise external to it, and in the course of his analysis Hegel sheds light on a particular way in which nature opens itself to being incorporated into the will’s self-realization.

III. The practical attitude and the ownership of inanimate things

The extended passage quoted at the outset of this paper, in which the basic link between the practical attitude and idealism is identified, is taken from Hegel’s discussion of the right to own property. Here Hegel’s focus is exclusively on the will’s relationship to non-personal things, to non-selves. Though it is nominally possible to own another person, Hegel argues that it is against right to do so, and his argument hinges specifically on metaphysical concerns—on what we might call the metaphysics of ownership itself in relation to the metaphysics of selfhood. As I will discuss further below, to come to own something, on Hegel’s account, is quite literally to become the substantial ground of its reality. That is, from an ontological perspective the owner and her various items of rightful property together constitute one being, a single, self-standing, concrete actuality. And because other selves are (at least implicitly) free and autonomous, and because as such they actively actualize themselves, and so are their own ground, it is in the end not metaphysically possible for one self to own another.Footnote ²⁵ Hegel thus identifies the world that the proprietary will confronts specifically as a world of things (Sachen), and stipulates that things are precisely the sorts of beings that lack any substantial capacity to realize themselves as autonomous centres in their own right, that lack the capacity to maintain their identities in the face of external forces that would determine them. As Hegel writes,

Although Hegel means to include animals and other living beings under the category of things, I will be focusing primarily on inanimate, naturally given objects, as I think these are the clearest example of such purely external things.Footnote ²⁶ For Hegel, we will see, such inanimate things are inherently incomplete and indeterminate when conceived in abstraction from the fuller interactional contexts in which they actually exist, and it is in particular our practical interactions with them that can bring them to a kind of stability and incorporate them into a higher, more complete ontological whole—that of the rational agent’s self-standing and self-affirming practical life—than they are capable of attaining on their own. It is thus the inherent, ontological deficiency of such things, as well as their inherent openness to being thus incorporated, that can be said to constitute a kind of solicitation of our free agency.Footnote ²⁷ In relation to them we can see how our agency is not, as in the realist account, an intrusion into a world that is wholly external to it, but rather has room opened up for it by the nature of the world itself.

A rock, unlike an organism or another person, does not care whether we crush it up into dust, or shape its material mass into some other form useful for our purposes. The rock is, in effect, indifferent to its own material integrity and individual presence, as it is to its various other determinacies, such as its shape and size. As Hegel would put it, it is fundamentally external to itself in these respects, or it is ‘indifferent to its determinateness’: its various determinations, the features that would seem to make it the specific object that it is and that distinguish it from others, are not held together by a substantial unity that maintains itself as thus determinate.Footnote ²⁸ There is no substantial ‘it’ that is destroyed when the particular rock is pulverized into dust that now floats through the air, and no unified individual ‘self’ or substrate—one that would warrant such expressions as the ‘rock in itself’—that affirms itself as a unified, self-same, concrete presence through ‘its’ various material changes. What such individual things lack is precisely some sort of inner identity or stable, substantial standard in relation to which we could identify what is proper to them as individuals, and what is merely accidental.

Whereas the specific realist position that we considered held there to be a kind of substantial integrity to the concrete individuals that we find around us in the perceptible world, in the case of rocks—and arguably of all other naturally occurring inorganic things—we are faced with individuals that seem indifferent to their very individuality and material integrity in basic ways. That such things are inherently indifferent to the individual forms they take on, and that their individual form is inevitably determined by what is external to them—that this determinability by others is inherent in their very being, such that they are inherently external to themselves—makes it the case that, in taking such things up into our practical projects, we are not thereby infringing upon some internal integrity, some way that individual things ‘naturally are’ on their own account. On the contrary, our transformation of such things into a form that manifests our purposes is in a way licensed by the very character of such things, by this very self-indifference.

In this respect, it may seem that our practical transformations of inanimate objects are not essentially different from the transformations that these things undergo at the hands of other inanimate objects: the sculptor’s chisel’s forming of the stone, it seems, is of essentially the same nature as the river’s much more gradual, but purposeless, formation of it, in that both involve external, mechanical processes, and both are grounded in the stone’s self-indifference and its fundamental openness to external determination. However, Hegel would argue that the mechanical processes at play in the sculptor’s case are really abstract moments in the concrete realization of a different, higher kind of reality than is possible in a merely mechanical, inanimate world. To anticipate: for Hegel the living body of the agent engaging itself with the rock, along with the chisel and the rock itself, together constitute the single, unified actuality of the self-determining, self-realizing movement of the agent’s own will, a movement that is realized precisely in and through the interaction of concrete, worldly things, but that is itself not reducible to these things taken in abstraction from this interaction.

The river’s external relation to the stone is, in turn, external and indifferent to the river itself. For its being formed as this individual river with this causal power in relation to the stone—as opposed, say, to its having the form of groundwater out of contact with the stone altogether—is likewise a matter of indifference to it, and is, in turn, just a product of further external forces acting on it.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, in a purely mechanical world comprised of individuals that are fundamentally indifferent to themselves in this way, there really are no independent, individual centres that can be singled out as causes or ultimate starting points of change, for the apparent capacity of each thing to originate change is itself purely a function of the external forces that are at work in shaping it, forces which are in turn a function of the mechanical forces that are shaping them, and so on. A genuine starting point that could sufficiently account for any actual change in the world is always deferred. Faced with this infinite deferral, we might appeal to the idea that each particular change is really just a function of the total system of all interacting objects, and though we might single out individual phases or moments, our selection will always be merely contingent abstractions from the point of view of this essentially continuous, ultimately indivisible totality.Footnote ³⁰ Either way, we find that the immediately apparent individuality and independence of such inanimate things—an individuality that, from the naïve realist’s point of view, was to be conceived of as the ultimate starting point and building block of our account of reality—proves insufficient to stand on its own. Such individuals cannot account for their own reality, but on the contrary reveal themselves to be inherently incomplete moments of something that transcends them.Footnote ³¹ For Hegel, this inadequacy is inherent in the very being of such apparently self-sufficient things: it is thus that they themselves, in their constitutive deficiency, implicitly call for a higher kind of being, one that can, as it were, answer for its own reality.

In the end, it is the self-affirming, self-realizing individual agent that answers this call: the immanent deficiency of the inanimate world makes room for a being that exists as its own centre, a being that is not wholly in the thrall of external determination, but that takes up otherwise external, inanimate forces and transforms them into manifestations of its own self-grounding, self-affirmed reality.Footnote ³² It is precisely this movement that stands at the heart of Hegel’s account of the right to property: in becoming the owner of property, the free will comes to affirm itself, and make itself actual and objective—gives itself concrete, worldly efficacy, as it were—precisely by appropriating what otherwise has the appearance of being independent of it. As Hegel says, ‘I, as free will, am an object to myself in what I possess and only become an actual will by this means’ (PhR: §45). Without something in the world it could call its own—minimally, the agent’s living body, along with this body’s natural capacity to turn the things in its immediate surroundings to the purpose of realizing itselfFootnote ³³—the will could never make an actual difference in the first place, could never become a concrete will. The will’s very efficacy, the very power by which it can realize itself in the world, requires that there be things whose objective presence is such as to carry or embody the will, things whose actuality is the actuality of the will itself—in short, things that the will can claim as its very own.

On Hegel’s account, the appropriated thing, though initially external, comes to have ‘my will as its substantial end, … its determination, and its soul’ (PhR: §44). When a thing is owned, it no longer has a self-sufficient reality or integrity of its own, but becomes most essentially an actual manifestation of the individual will’s affirmation of itself. Or rather, the appropriating will demonstrates, by its very act of assimilating the thing into its own actuality, that the thing never had a self-sufficient reality of its own, but was always incomplete in itself and essentially vulnerable to other-determination, inherently incapable of maintaining its individual integrity in the face of external forces.Footnote ³⁴ The person’s individual will, in contrast, is precisely a power of affirming and maintaining the person’s individual identity and freedom in the face of otherness, and it does so, in part, by incorporating other things, other ‘quasi-individuals’, into its own actuality—making them, in effect, extensions of its living body. It is this capacity of the individual will to, as Locke said, ‘mix itself’ into things that grounds the obligation that we feel in certain circumstances to ask the owner of an item of property whether we can handle the item or not, for this item is ‘possessed’ by the owner’s will, this will is quite literally present in it, and to handle it without permission would be a violation.

This complex metaphysical notion—namely, that a self-realizing individual realizes itself essentially in and through a negation of what is other to it, and that this negation itself demonstrates the metaphysical deficiency of the (otherwise apparently self-sufficient) other relative to the self-affirming individual that incorporates it—is basic to Hegel’s essentially dynamic, relational idealism. We see this notion play a central role particularly in Hegel’s conception of the distinctive being of living organisms, for instance. Indeed, Hegel regularly construes the animal’s basic act of eating as a kind of idealism in practice, and thus as displaying a practical refutation of naïve realism; for this act, like the will’s act of appropriating something as its own, involves a process of self-realization in and through a negation of what is other, and as such this act is also construed as demonstrating that the apparent independence and substantiality of the incorporated external thing (i.e. the food) is really a mere appearance (see PhR: §44 A; PhS: M109, WC77; and PhN: §246 A). More broadly, the animal is, on Hegel’s account, not merely a discrete body, separable from its external environment, but is essentially a breathing, eating, seeing, chasing body, and as such its very reality qua living inevitably takes the form of an ongoing interaction with the world (PhN: §362 and A). It is not that, in the absence of such interactions, the living being would die (although that is of course true). Rather, it simply is this ongoing interaction, and so in the absence of this interaction it simply would not be what it is; it would not have the form of a living being in the first place. But this suggests that the things it interacts with are not straightforwardly external to its body. Indeed, as incorporated into the animal’s constitutive life-processes they are just as much part of its living actuality as its own bodily organs, and so animal life realizes a situation in which the apparent externality and separate material integrity of these things—those features that the naïve realist ontology takes as absolute—is overcome, at least while the animal continues to be alive.Footnote ³⁵

Hegel’s conception of the idealism at play in the human practical attitude is clearly rooted in a very similar notion of the metaphysical status of the world with which we interact as we realize our agency. Indeed, it would seem that this notion ought to play a role, not merely in our understanding of property ownership, but also in our understanding of human action generally. For every action, conceived as an actual, concrete event of the will’s self-realization, will take the form of a movement of negating the immediate presence of things so as to realize in and through them a sense or an end that they do not straightforwardly contain in themselves. For example, an agent engages in an actual process of cutting a tree with a stone axe she has made, and a new kind of reality thereby comes to be—namely, the process of tree-felling, a dynamically-unfolding, futurally-oriented reality that is just as much objectively there as the untouched stone. However, this new reality realizes itself only as a negation of the given, material presence of the untouched stone, and it itself is a being within which the stone does not stand alone as a positive, independent, self-contained totality, but functions essentially as a moment among others within a dynamic, relational whole: the actual, concrete movement of tree-felling is what it is only as a gathering together of the stone’s durability and shape, along with the power of the living human body that wields it, along with the tree’s specific perviousness and resistance to the axe, and so on, and through this dynamic synthesis a new being takes place—the felling—that has a distinctive presence of its own.Footnote ³⁶ In the end, its presence is really that of the agent undertaking it, the presence of her will as she realizes herself, as an agent, precisely in and through these ‘negated’ things, precisely as the real ‘soul’ of these things. The stone-as-axe is what it is precisely in the context of this dynamic, relational whole in which the axe is actually at work in the process of cutting down the tree, or, we can also say, in the process of realizing the agent’s will and purpose.Footnote ³⁷ It is this whole working context of self-realization through otherness that provides the ultimate terms for understanding the stone’s reality as axe, and not merely those aspects of the stone’s reality that are present independently of its actual interaction with hand and tree.

IV. Agency as condition of individuation

In a passage in which Hegel argues that it is not possible to own generic natural elements, but only concrete individuals, he indirectly draws our attention to the possibility that it is the will’s concrete presence as a living, bodily individual that first provides the context in which such inanimate objects come to have the form of individual things in the first place. The breath of air or the mouthful of water can be possessed, not air or water as such, Hegel argues, drawing attention to how our individuality as agents is essentially correlated with the individuality of such inanimate elements (PhR: §52 R). In these cases, it is easy to see that we as individual living beings are the ground of the individuality of the inanimate thing, or at least that our respective individuality is constituted in tandem through a movement of interaction. For water or air would not take the form of individual breaths or mouthfuls without lungs and mouths, and, indeed, we can likewise say that we would not exist in the particular, individual form we actually do if there did not exist air and water that are actually individuated into breathable units and mouthfuls, and if there did not exist the generic elements that offered no fundamental resistance to becoming thus individuated.

Likewise, when we consider that such things as ‘this river’ or ‘this mountain’ are also singled out by us—by our perceptions, but also by our practical projects (say, swimming or climbing) in relation to them—from what would otherwise be an indifferent continuity of water or earth, we are brought to wonder whether these things too, which on the surface seem to have a kind of integrity and undeniable sensible presence of their own as individuals, are likewise the correlates of our own (and other comparable animals’) concrete relations to them.Footnote ³⁸ That is, in these cases it seems that the individuality of the things encountered is essentially correlated to our (and other comparable animals’) actual and potential interactions, and has no standing independently of this interactional context. If that is so, then the same practical movement in virtue of which we affirm and realize ourselves as individual agents in the world, is at once the movement that affirms and realizes the individuality of the things we as particular agents encounter—even if, in the end, our particular practical relation with the things at issue amounts to nothing other than a consumption of them (as in the drinking and breathing cases).

It may appear that such things as individual rocks are different, in that they seem to stand as separate individuals, discontinuous with and external to their surroundings, whether or not we encounter them. But our discussion of the inherent indifference of such things to their own individuality and determinacy seems to imply that, even in cases such as this, there is something inherently contingent and relative about the fact that the individual object happens to take the form that it does at any given moment. Although we ourselves may not have literally shaped the rock into its current form, there is a sense in which its being relative to our perspective, and other perspectives like ours, is more important, with respect to the rock’s being constituted as an immediate, separate individual, than the natural, inanimate forces that shaped it into its current form. For, as I suggested, the rock’s individuality is a matter of utter indifference and contingency relative to the other inanimate things that were involved in shaping it, things that are both external to it, and external to the particular forms they happened to possess while engaged in that shaping. In contrast we, as beings who actively comport ourselves in relation to such things, and who see them as the potential sites of our own practical self-realization as agents, are precisely the sorts of beings for whom their current individual shape does matter.

We might look at the point this way. We as individuals engaged in a practical attitude bring to the world the relatively short-term, finite temporality of our lives and of our projects—we bring the world into the ‘now’ of our practical experience—and from the point of view of the time-scale of our actual and potential interactions with the rock, the rock as it is right now appears to stand on its own, immediately discontinuous with the rest of the world. However, considered not from the point of view of our finite, embodied perspective, but in terms of the wholly objective (that is, subjectless or perspectiveless), long-term process of its geological formation and deterioration, it is best understood as an insubstantial, utterly contingent temporal phase of what is otherwise essentially a continuum. Thus it seems that our practical attitude is itself involved in generating the temporal field in which the rock first stands out as a separate, individual thing in the first place. Our practical attitude is, as it were, what lets the individual rock occur and make a difference as an individual, rather than as a merely passing phase in a continuum. As with the river or the mountain, the individual boundaries that we identify as mattering are correlated with our own concrete, practical potentials as individual agents.

In that case, our very encounter with such things, our immediate perception of them as external things that are separate from us, is already a kind of incipient ‘formative activity’ on our part. This is in the sense not that we materially shape the things with our bodies, but rather that we, in our practical attitude, are involved in giving rise to a world of individuals that can be thus shaped in the first place. The rock stands out, in its individuality, precisely as something that can, in principle, enter into relation, as something having the potential to be gathered, with other things and with my body, into a unified manifestation of our will. Its very individuality, its very separateness and immediate givenness, as something mediated by the practical attitude, is thus essentially a beckoning of the will.

It is thus that the practical attitude enacts a refutation of the realist construal of action as an intrusion into a being that has an ontological integrity of its own. If even the rock’s immediate presence is owed to the practical, relational context that we, as agents, set in motion in the world, then this amounts to saying that what grants it standing in its immediacy is precisely what undermines this standing, precisely what reveals it to be a contingent appearance.Footnote ³⁹ That we access the rock in a given moment, and treat its current state as a presentation of a complete, self-sufficient being, is to fail to appreciate its fundamental self-indifference and self-externality. This is, again, how our immediate, realist-oriented consciousness operates. As Hegel argues, however, our practical attitude does not accept such immediacy as absolute, but rather introduces the rock into a context of actual and potential action in which the rock’s very actuality is fundamentally mediated by otherness—at the very least, by the agent’s own body, which has the power to turn it towards a substantial purpose, most basically that of affirming the will in its character as self-affirming.

V. Concluding remarks: agency’s relation to animal life

I have focused the discussion on the practical attitude’s relationship to the inanimate world, but the issue of the will’s overall relationship to nature becomes significantly more complicated if we take into consideration the agent’s relation to living beings, and particularly to animals. As I suggested earlier, individual animals likewise enact a sort of practical demonstration of idealism, on Hegel’s view, in that they too have a stake in constituting the external world as something naturally amenable to their own self-realization. They are hardly the passive, externally-determined, self-indifferent individuals characteristic of the inanimate world. Rather, they exist as forging a determinate environment for their own lives, and, as is the case with human agency, their realization of themselves as individuals seems essentially bound up with a process of negating what is external.

Thus despite Hegel’s claim that animals, too, are external to themselves, and that they are therefore as much susceptible to being owned as inanimate things (see PhR: §44 A), the nature of the relationship between the will and animal life in particular would seem to be much more complex than the will’s relation to the inanimate world. Indeed, the fact that we, as embodied agents, are essentially alive, and that our every practical contact with the world is mediated by our own living bodies, would, it seems, need to play a significant role in our account of how the will realizes its freedom in and through a concrete engagement with external things. For the will’s exemplary capacity to demonstrate the truth of idealism by overcoming the apparent externality of the things must, it seems, be rooted at least in part in the way that the organic body of the agent realizes itself as living in and through its ongoing interaction with the world. Indeed, it seems that Hegel’s metaphysics of agency depends essentially on his metaphysics of life, even if, on the whole, Hegel is more concerned to highlight how the free will transcends our animality than he is to explore our continuity with it.