I. Kant's metaphysical questions

Freedom, when it is predicated of human action, is a matter both of a certain control over the things we do (and therefore over some of the things that happen to us) and of a certain appropriation—or at least the possibility of appropriation—of such things and the typical explanations of it—or reasons for it—that both we and others give. Indeed, when we speak of our ‘own decisions’ (in the broad sense that a change of residence, a contract, or a schedule may be our own decision), we mean not only that they have been made by us, and not others, but also that they are recognisable as ours, fundamentally due to the fact that they were taken for reasons that we consider good and relevant and because we are, as a rule, pleased when things happen in accordance with them. Obviously, it is not enough that the reasons invoked in the explanation of a particular action appear to us to be excellent reasons for so acting for us to consider that we are the ones who so acted. In general, as is natural, we think that there were many things we could have done, things that we had good reasons for doing, that we failed to do. It is just a little more difficult to recognize that we failed to do these things when others did not, acting possibly for those precise reasons.

In this sense, we can speak of a productive aspect of action and also of a quite different expressive aspect. As both are essential aspects of action, production and expression are internally related and we are consequently unable to recognize as our own actions events caused by ourselves whose raison d’être we abhor. On the other hand, we cannot determine whether we truly abhor these events, as well as the reasons that could move an agent to cause them, without taking into consideration what we have done or caused in the past.

So, we do not consider actions that appear to not express our intentions, aspirations and goals, to be our own. Conversely, we cannot consider as our own personal intentions, aspirations and goals those which do not have to be invoked—at least in an abstract sense—to explain our behaviour in circumstances similar to the current ones.Footnote ¹

Historically, these distinguishable aspects of human action have raised different philosophical problems. The expressive aspect of action has in particular raised intelligibility problems which we might call logical. Indeed, how can we recognize some actions as our own expression without having previously recognized some other actions or dispositions or mental states as equally expressive of ourselves? How should we take the final source of that expression to be, so that it makes sense to attribute ownership to it and a greater or lesser fidelity to that source? (Of course, if in order for such an action to be one's own expression, it would be sufficient for it to causally flow from a human being, then it would be senseless to distinguish between a productive and an expressive aspect of action.) Thomas Nagel refers to this logical problem when discussing the illusion of being able to choose everything in our own lives (including our principles of choice), replacing the preferences we discover in ourselves—many of which are inherited—by the fruit of a self-imposed work. This purpose is considered by Nagel to be self-contradictory, for ‘in order to do anything we must already be something’ (Nagel Reference Nagel1986: 118).

This is a logical problem posed by all phenomena of self-recognition. When I do not recognize myself in a mirror, this is obviously because the mirror image, for whatever reason, does not appear sufficiently like the image I have of myself. But if I would have no such image with which to compare, I would be unable to recognize myself in the mirror and also to fail to recognize myself in it (as undoubtedly happens to many animals, who are indifferent to mirrors). Now, as a result of what process can I take a mental representation of mine to be a representation of myself? We cannot simply assume that a similar process to the one that takes place before the mirror has previously developed in our minds, since this would simply reproduce—interiorize and reiterate—the difficulty that we wish to overcome.

Here, however, I will not take on this problem (which is well-known to scholars of German Idealism).Footnote ² Instead, I concentrate solely on those raised by the other highlighted aspect of action, which I have called the productive aspect. The problems traditionally raised by it are different. I would like to call them metaphysical problems, in a sense of the word that I take to be Kantian. Kant claimed, as is well-known, that there are only three proper objects of interest for traditional metaphysics: God, freedom and immortality (see KrV: A 337/B 395).Footnote ³ And he took freedom to be an absolute spontaneity or ‘a power of absolutely beginning a state’ (KrV: A 444 ff./B 472 ff.), in the context of a general review of the cosmological disputes over the ultimate condition—the unconditioned or absolute condition—of phenomena that make up the world.Footnote ⁴ One question that, according to Kant, necessarily arises in these debates is this: are there any causes that are not the effects of other causes, something like prime Aristotelian movers that move themselves without being moved by others? Or do all phenomena occur according to laws that bind one to the other necessarily as cause and effect? We may assume, of course, that if it makes any sense to speak of having control over one's own actions, it is because agents are the only causes of their actions. But how are we then to conceive of this originality and spontaneity?

Kant considered it to be an illusion or an illusionary appearance (Schein) of reason that we initially assume that since common causes act as the effects of other causes (which are conditions of the activity of the first and are in their turn conditioned) they cannot provide a sufficient or complete explanation of any activity or change. Accordingly, we allow for an unconditioned causality (the ‘absolute completeness in the origination of an appearance’ (KrV: A 415/B 443)) to do the job. In addition, all certainties that we could have—or believe we have—about the nature of that completeness would also be illusory. It appears to Kant that there are two possible ways of explaining one particular present phenomenon. We can argue both that only an infinite number of causes and effects could provide such an explanation, and that a final unconditioned cause must be postulated to supply it. However, Kant was of the view that the principle that everything that happens does so according to a rule (and that every event must be taken to be an effect) is objective, namely, a principle of the understanding without the application of which our experience of the world of phenomena is impossible. By contrast, he claims that the principle stating an absolute beginning of any kind is subjective, and, hence, a principle to which we are naturally led in our judgements but we cannot assert in order to settle metaphysical debates.

The conclusion that Kant drew from his review of cosmological debates, including this one about the place of freedom in nature, is that the positions had so far been adopted by way of dogmatic pronouncements. This was also the judgement that Hegel issued with reference to this tradition (see WL: 651/GW: 12: 154).Footnote ⁵ Now, can the difficulties posed by the Kantian idea of a radical spontaneity (and, in that sense, of productivity) be circumvented or solved in a different way? Kant himself opens a non-dogmatic, alternative path to overcome the problem, without just opting for one point of view. In the first instance, he suggests that the distinction between the appearance of things and things in themselves would resolve these fundamental problems. But that measure, as he was well aware, does not favour either the thesis of freedom or that of its lack. Perhaps it solves the conflict of reason with itself, in the sense that it made intelligible why apparently sound—at least necessary (see KrV: A 339/B 397)—arguments could serve as supports of contradictory statements (see KrV: A 501/B 529), but it does not satisfy the theoretical (and metaphysical) interest of reason in this matter.Footnote ⁶ To satisfy this, Kant suggests, in the second instance, taking what he considers to be the practical interest of reason in duty—in what to reason itself, as the guide of our behaviour, seems to be permissible, forbidden or compulsory—as a thread that would lead to an answer to the theoretical question (see KrV: A 805/B 833).

This new method leads Kant to well-known results. He argues that our experience as deliberating, deciding and acting beings, that is, as beings whose reason has a practical use, grounds an argument that in the end obliges us to regard ourselves as free agents. According to the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785, we can only act in accordance with the idea or premise or assumption that we are productive, free agents, and not passively determined by ‘pathological’ feelings to behave in a particular way (see GMM: 53 f./448, and KrV: A 328/B 385; also KpV: 60/42, 65/46, 133/105). This reflection would not offer a guarantee or metaphysical proof of our freedom, but it could definitely influence metaphysical debates on human powers. One may think that metaphysical subjects are, as Kant believed, beyond the reach of human knowledge, but nonetheless appreciate that, in practice, we cannot act according to just any metaphysical idea. Kant's argument can be considered anti-sceptic, to the extent that it shows that its findings are taken for granted, are presupposed to be true, by those who try to raise doubts. But it is surely more accurate to refer to it as a transcendental argument, to the extent that a reflection on what makes a priori possible a certain kind of experience—a practical experience in this case—is what led Kant to his affirmation of our agency.Footnote ⁷

The evaluation of arguments of this kind as the most effective, perhaps even the only effective ones, ensuring the affirmation of freedom (or the assumption of freedom), as Kant argues, is what probably leads Charles Taylor to attribute to the concept of action in Kant's work a primitive character. It would be primitive to the extent that the actions were not considered events with a special type of cause, but rather events ‘intrinsically directed’, ‘inhabited by the purposes’, in which purpose and action are ‘ontologically inseparable’ (Taylor Reference Taylor, Stepelevich and Lamb1983: 2). In this sense, as Taylor said, actions would be distinguished qualitatively from other events and would be recognized as actions by a special kind of knowledge, which he calls ‘agent's knowledge’.Footnote ⁸

The claim that Kant did not have a causal conception of action can indeed be challenged (since he never tired of saying that actions are events caused by representations of norms or just concepts), but nevertheless I consider it wise of Taylor to affirm that the transcendental arguments that Kant brandished provided an irreducible character to the concept of action:

In passages such as this one, Taylor shows that he has accurately understood the central nerve of the Kantian transcendental argument that commits us to the assumption that we are agents. According to both Kant and Taylor, the concept of agent is part and parcel of our most basic practical self-understanding. Moreover, they agree that it is not possible to act without asserting or putting into play a fundamental distinction between actions and events that are not actions.

I am not going to discuss the arguments that lead Taylor to subscribe to this Kantian view. Rather, I am interested in his thesis that not only Kant, but also successors of Kant such as Fichte and Hegel have a primitive concept of action. I shall not dispute the arguments he brings to support the attribution of a basic, irreducible, indispensable and ineradicable concept of action like the one of Kant to Fichte and Hegel.Footnote ⁹ While I doubt that such a concept is that of Hegel,Footnote ¹⁰ I will not challenge Taylor's own arguments to the contrary, only those of other interpreters who appear to agree with Taylor on this point.

One of these interpreters is Robert Brandom. Brandom seems to me to accept that Hegel's concept of agency is primitive (in Taylor's sense), and that Hegel relied on transcendental arguments for warranting an application to the concept and that, in the sense that ‘metaphysical’ seems to have in Kant's ‘transcendental dialectic’, the conception that Hegel had of action and agency is not metaphysical, that is, it does not involve taking sides in modern pre-Kantian debates about the unconditioned.

II. Post-Kantian non-metaphysical answers

I do not mean to imply that the interpretation of Brandom is directly inspired by Taylor's work. Like other non-metaphysical interpretations, it seems rather to arise from some concepts put into circulation by Wilfrid Sellars. It is difficult not to recognize in the social, normative, and non-ontological concept of freedom which Brandom has advocated since 1979 the profile of the irreducibly normative concept of person that Sellars presented in his celebrated essay on the scientific image of man in 1963 (see especially Sellars Reference Sellars1963: 38–40). On the other hand, Brandom holds Kant responsible for the central role that the concept of norm has played in epistemological, ontological and ethical debates of the last two centuries, even though it is only in Hegel, and not in Kant, that Brandom finds an unambiguous awareness of the fact that there is no philosophically interesting ontological debate on action, intentionality and freedom in addition to a debate on social norm-governed practices around actions.Footnote ¹¹

In any case, what is the normative, social and non-ontological concept of being free that Brandom ends up attributing to Hegel? According to Brandom, it is human communities, dealing in very different ways with things like, on the one hand, the distance between one galaxy and another or the temperamental behaviour of some cars and, on the other, such things as greetings, promises or misdemeanours, who establish a distinction of a conceptual type between what should be explained causally (what we call events, but not actions) and what is considered subject to the legislative authority of the community (what we call events but also actions). If a particular kind of arm gesture is a greeting, just as some conventional words appearing at the top of letters and messages are greetings, it is because the relevant linguistic community considers them to be so—no more and no less (see Brandom Reference Brandom1979: 188).

The differential treatment these things receive consists in actions being things that agents are held responsible for in a distinctive way. Brandom claims that actions involve commitments. As a result, agents are subjected by their communities to special kinds of normative assessment (see Brandom Reference Brandom2009: 32). Indeed, the community attributes commitments to agents and requires them to act in accordance with them.

But if these commitments are actually met, this is something which (according to Brandom) the community itself must judge by imposing an authority that belongs exclusively to it. That the distinction between actions and events is normative does not just mean that it separates what someone must answer for from that which nobody must answer for; whether the produced answers are appropriate is something that must be judged in accordance with established social norms. On Brandom's view, the justification for a normative judgement must in all cases only be provided through other normative judgements. Ultimately, it is norms implicit in discursive practices of the community that govern such judgements.

Reactions, attitudes and, generally speaking, sanctions that are normative institute the relevant norms. There are, of course, rewards and punishments that function as merely reinforcing conducts (one person says ‘if you touch my stuff, you'll see what you'll get’ and the other person touches it and gets slapped, and thereafter it does not happen again). But such sanctions are not required to ground discursive practices and where there are only punishments and thus behavioural conditioning, there are no discursive practices. Brandom labels genuine normative sanctions (sometimes internal sanctions) those which involve the granting or denial of licences (Brandom Reference Brandom1994: 42 ff.). For example, if I pass an examination, I am allowed to enrol for a superior one. And if I do not pay an association fee, I lose the right to vote at meetings that decide precisely what the obligations of the members of the association are. Brandom thinks that all sanctions instituting norms that govern discursive practices in a community could be of this very type:

It follows that all that is necessary to establish social norms is the existence of normative responses with respect to the conduct of those considered agents.

From this conception of the relationship between the obligations assumed by agents and the attitudes and normative reactions that constitute the recognition of those obligations or, in other words, the idea that normative statuses are normative attitude-dependent (see Brandom Reference Brandom2009: 61), it follows that the concept of norm and the normative concepts of agency and action are for Brandom primitive in the same sense argued by Taylor.Footnote ¹²

As noted earlier, besides being thought of as primitive, these concepts are also considered to be non-ontological, or non-metaphysical. This basically means that all it takes to be an action or be an agent is to be treated socially as—that is, to be recognized as—an action or an agent, respectively. Agency is meant to be a social object in the same sense in which a social function, role or authority are social objects, generated by a social attribution to members of a community. If I am an academic, it is to the extent that the right and the duty to act as such is recognized to me. I can—indeed I should—offer courses; I can make use of classrooms; I can and must mark the work of some students; I have a say in certain meetings of teachers; I am authorized to sign certificates of certain achievements and, due to all that, a corresponding salary is assigned to me. In the same way, for Brandom, being an agent means having some rights and duties to other people and things, for example: the duty to explain about my behaviour in certain contexts; the duty to believe what logically follows from what I think or, if I am not willing to do so, the duty to revise my opinions; also the duty of helping others in certain circumstances and doing my best to avoid some risks, hazards, accidents and the like or warn others before them, etc. To be an agent is, in this sense, to enjoy a certain social status.

What does it mean, then, that these statuses are consequently exhibited without displaying a special metaphysical condition? I think it ultimately means that the question of whether someone does act or not as befits the social function attributed to her and generally as expected of a full-blown agent is not a question about the ultimate (or unconditioned) origin of her behaviour or the absolutely necessary or non-necessary character of it, but rather, as stated, a normative question upon which a community can and must decide, according to its own standards. The distinction between being free and not being free would ultimately be, I insist, a distinction between ‘two ways of treating someone's behaviour’ (Brandom Reference Brandom1979: 192). The concepts of action and agency are not considered by Brandom to be ontological, or metaphysical, in the recognizably Kantian sense in which the problematic concepts of the Kantian antinomies are metaphysical.

It is also the Kantian general concept of freedom which is advocated by Brandom in his reconstruction of the philosophical legacy of German Idealism. Freedom would be constraint by norms, rather than constraint merely by causes. But to the extent that such a constraint is understood as a normative, social, and non-ontological issue, Brandom's concept would be specifically Hegelian. Kant can be interpreted as someone who does not believe that reason can produce non-sophistic syllogisms proving the existence of an absolute spontaneity. Since his concept of freedom is the concept of a peculiar causality, which is not an effect, he looks for arguments that (even if they did not prove the existence of such a causality) at least prove that we have to consider ourselves to be such causes. Brandom, however, attributes to Hegel a concept of freedom that involves neither the knowledge nor the belief in a special causality. In Kant's metaphysics of morals, the distinction between acting in accordance with duty and additionally acting out of respect for it is prominent. Yet Hegel supposedly did not accept the soundness of this contrast.

In Brandom's opinion there would have been, despite this, a fundamental similarity between the type of transcendental argument which led Kant to say that the idea of an absolute spontaneity has to form part of our self-understanding as agents, and the arguments that led Hegel to consider human beings as agents acting constrained by norms. For Brandom this constraint is ensured, so to speak, because our normative judgements cannot in any case be taken to be just disguised descriptive judgements of regularities. If some given behaviour meets a norm, it is not something that can be decided purely by paying attention to the similarity between one piece of behaviour and another, because particular pieces of behaviour differ from each other in endless ways and yet, they also resemble each other in countless ways. If behaviour meets a norm, it is something that can only be established by considering the relevant similarities, not the irrelevant ones, and thereby privileging certain comparisons over others (see Brandom Reference Brandom1994: 28 ff., 208). The fact that a behaviour does not satisfy a standard is therefore something that can only be decided according to a standard (see Brandom Reference Brandom1994: 638 f.).

But Brandom explicitly attributes to Hegel an argument in favour of this conclusion that even superficially seems to be Kantian. He purports to have found, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and specifically in its sixth chapter, dedicated to ‘Spirit’ (in the conclusion of it, to be exact), a grand transcendental-type argument against the intelligibility of the attitudes—like those that Hegel predicated of the Kammerdiener or gentilhomme de la chambre—that doubt the existence of a genuine answering to or response to or realization of norms in human conduct:

Brandom considers that Hegel, at the climax of his 1807 work, attempts to show precisely that, in practice, as say apparent agents, we are committed beforehand, at least implicitly, to the view that we are genuinely bound by conceptual standards. But if we are genuinely bound, then we are not purely apparent agents, but genuine agents, for which norms constitute a limitation. At this point Brandom appears to follow Taylor in concluding that Kant and Hegel were on the same boat.

I shall not discuss here the details of this interpretation of the ‘Spirit’ chapter of the Phenomenology. The most urgent and rather general question is this one: are arguments of the transcendental type, as Brandom assumes, those which Hegel's work provided about a ‘genuinely binding ourselves by conceptual norms’? A supporter of a similar non-metaphysical interpretation such as Robert Pippin thinks that Hegel's alleged disinterest in pre-critical and critical metaphysical discussions of freedom is an argument in favour of an affirmative answer to this last question.Footnote ¹³ But can it be true that Hegel was unconcerned with these popular metaphysical discussions?

As a matter of fact, Hegel declares that ‘the philosophy of spirit can be neither empirical nor metaphysical’ (GW: 15: 217), but he does so in a context in which the so-called metaphysical philosophy is taken for a philosophy of dead concepts, that does not deal with actuality, or the realization that concepts might have. It is also true that in the Encyclopaedia he pronounces in just a few lines on the disputes about the immateriality of the soul and the relationship between soul and body (see PSS: §389), making it clear that the soul was not a thing but nor, as was generally thought, was it absolutely self-sufficient with respect to the body or, as modern philosophers (Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz) have defended, something that only in God was related to the body. If we were to judge from this brief note, the soul could instead, therefore, be taken to be an activity and perhaps even a social function, since it is not a thing, or anything self-sufficient, or a monad. Finally, of course, his Philosophy of Spirit does not oppose the conduct motivated by desire or passion to the conduct that realizes a norm (‘Nothing great has been, nor can it be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead morality, and all too often a hypocritical one, which inveighs against the form of passion as such’ (PSS: §474R)), so we can be tempted indeed to claim it improbable that Hegel's concept of action is a metaphysical concept, in the relevant sense.

It is no less true than all of the above that Hegel himself considers a principal logical-metaphysical question to be that of whether and how a concept can be realized or can be regarded to be realized. Furthermore, it can be verified in his Science of Logic that it is not a transcendental argument that, for Hegel, leads to the conclusion that a concept can certainly be realized. In the remainder of this article, I simply intend to show these two things, thereby digging a trench to resist non-metaphysical readings of Hegel's philosophy of action.

III. Hegel's metaphysical answers

Hegel's ‘Doctrine of the Concept’—the third and final part of his Science of Logic—appears, in fact, as a grand argument about the sense in which a concept can be realized because it has given reality or actuality to itself.Footnote ¹⁴ Even if one does not accept Kant's view (or method of argumentation) about this, the logic of Hegel discusses very precisely the concepts of metaphysical profiles that are the basis of Kant's philosophy of action. What remains to be examined is whether Hegel's arguments in this terrain are similar to those of Kant and whether the respective conclusions are also similar.

As it happens, it cannot be said to be a reflection on social recognition and the so-called struggle for it, and on how to treat practically certain events and subjects, that leads Hegel in his logic to vindicate the self-realization of what he called the concept. If there is a metaphysical concept of agency in Hegel's philosophy, this is due to some logical difficulties regarding the very idea of agency that arise in the context of a science or understanding of abstract concepts like cause, activity, means, purpose, objectivity and others—a science that, unlike a Phenomenology of Spirit, does not begin by assuming that there is consciousness, and consciousness judges itself and struggles to enforce its judgements against another, even all other, consciousness. Hegel seems to think that, before he can discuss the meaning and application of the concepts of action, intention and will in the Philosophy of Spirit, such logical or metaphysical difficulties must first be addressed and solved.

The main difficulty, in this regard, is for him whether and how a concept can be non-contingently related to an object, so that the object can be considered the realization of the concept. Hegel discusses this in the final chapter of the section on Objectivity. This chapter is dedicated to the contradiction between the mechanical explanation of nature (or its explanation by mechanical causes) and the teleological one (or its explanation by means of ends), but not before having equated this antinomy to the antinomy between necessity and freedom (the second being, it seems, the general form of the first).Footnote ¹⁵ Of course, we can say that a mechanical cause is a means for producing an effect, at least from the point of view of those who are interested in that effect. But the fact that the cause serves the production of this effect does not seem to mean, or in principle does not mean, that it has this final effect as its purpose. In this sense, Kant had indicated in his Critique of Judgement that mechanistic, causal relations do not realize an end or, in other words, a concept.

Kant understood that an end is precisely the concept of an object to the extent that in the production of the object—or its reality—the concept has a role as a cause (see KU: B xxviii). It is more or less obvious that Kant took in this context as paradigmatic the use of the word ‘end’ when talking about human intentional actions. But obviously a logic, such as that of Hegel, cannot take for granted the legitimacy of this use. Hegel's logic, in so far as it has a metaphysical ambition, has rather to examine it, just as Kant had done in his critical work. It is also more or less obvious that the discussions on whether an objective process realizes a concept in a non-contingent way—to which Hegel devotes, as I have said, the final chapter of the Objectivity section—is a discussion about (among other things) whether the Kantian distinction between acting according to a law or for the sake of a law could have an objective sense.

One key to the discussion as it is developed by Hegel is, I believe, that the contingency of the realization of the concept (or norm or end) is for him strictly and inversely correlated to the effectiveness of its accomplishment. This is what I hope to show first.

In general, we believe that the means for the realization of an end can only be contingently related to the end. This could be labelled ‘the common Kafkian presupposition’. It seems that it is an essential feature of the means both that it is necessary for the realization and that its activity does not constitute the realization itself, but merely an approximation to it. Considerations of this kind could have led, for example, Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, to affirm the impotence of the will.Footnote ¹⁶ Hegel in fact considers that the objective means wear themselves out serving the purpose for which they were put into play (or for the sake of which they are used), so that the very effectiveness of their service as a means would be the cause of their undermining. Moreover, he arrives at the conclusion that it must be said, to begin with, that the activity of realization can do nothing else than provide more and more means. In this sense, in his own words, the end achieved is nothing more than a means.

Yet he writes:

These examples reveal an ambivalence in the means which Hegel will immediately exploit in order to turn the Kafkian conclusion upside down. What sense does it make to say that in order to satisfy the need for shelter the foundation, walls, beams and ceilings are merely a means, that they do not satisfy the need by themselves, and therefore do not realize the need that we regard as the end? As Hegel says in the passage quoted above, the stones and crossbeams make up the actuality of the end (or purpose) and their wearing each other out, one against the other, and facing the elements from which they shield us ‘correspond to what they are supposed to be’. He thus wants to lead the reader to the conclusion that reverses the Kafkian common-sense notion that what seems to be nothing more than a means is indeed, and must be treated as, the realized end itself, in so far as the different means interact appropriately with each other and with the medium in which they are deployed, and so satisfy effectively the need (see WL: 668/GW: 12: 170). An objective interactive work realizes an end, although we have to admit that it realizes it only provisionally, even that realizing it—in wearing out—will eventually make the means to fail to achieve it. Hegel's concluding remark is this: in the true (wahrhafte) objectification of the concept its determinateness is the indifferent externality (see WL: 668/GW: 12: 171). Or, to put it in other words: means-end or teleological relations are accomplished through mechanisms.

The second argumentative key of the ‘Teleology’ chapter results from the following ‘reflection’: what is the difference between a contingent though stable productive process and a process that does not contingently achieve an end state in a way that permits us to interpret the process as teleologically oriented? Or to put it in the Aristotelian-Kantian terms that Hegel adopts to frame the question: what is the difference between the external teleology of contingent matter-of-fact obtaining means-end relations and the internal teleology of processes that truly serve an end? For Hegel—as for Aristotle—it is the configuration of the process as a self-productive one that makes the difference. The effectiveness of the productive process can be considered non-contingent only if the output of the process is a self-maintenance loop. Hegel declares this to be the ultimate lesson of the chapter: ‘that purpose is attained in the means and the means and the mediation are preserved in the fulfilled purpose, is the final result of the external connection of purpose’ (WL: 669/GW: 12: 171).

On this basis, Hegel can progress in the following chapter of his Science of Logic (in the concluding section on ‘The Idea’) to state in opposition to Kant that the objective processes that we call life processes, where the parts of a whole actually behave reciprocally as both ends and means, that is to say, where they in fact benefit from each other and are actually produced reciprocally, form a reality completely permeated by the concept (see WL: 678/GW: 12: 181). It did not seem necessary to Hegel to understand how these vital or ‘organic’ processes had emerged in order to resolve whether or not they realize an idea. (On the contrary, Kant tends to think that if the idea of the whole, as a representation, had no role in its emergence, then a teleological judgement is not objectively justified). The only necessary condition to fulfil in order to submit such a verdict is that, in fact, these processes reproduce themselves (see Kreines Reference Kreines and Beiser2008). If they reproduce themselves, then they enjoy the requisite objective self-sufficiency: they exist purely because they are effective as productive processes. To understand objectively how this production process operates is to understand why such processes exist, and that, as self-production processes, they are ends in themselves. The judgement, in the above example, that the house provides shelter is based on a test for which the particular way the person who builds the house has a need for shelter is decisive. We can also say that a mere squiggle is a sign if it, in fact, serves as a vehicle of meaning, for which it needs to be interpreted in a certain way. But in the case of self-producing beings, the measure for the realization of the end is the perpetuation, or reproduction, of the mechanism or fabric in which they consist.

Hegel raises the living to the general logical model of the realization of a concept. Providing that where there is an effective non-contingent satisfaction of a need, there is an objective realization of a subjective end, we must say that where self-production is to be found, there is a realization that is not only objective, but, as I said, completely permeated by the concept. It is a concept, or the idea of an ‘organic’ whole, that provides the explanation of the living (that which Kreines calls its ‘complete reason’). In the self-production of the living we find realized, in the only way possible, the idea of unconditioned condition that Kant considered the central concept of rational cosmology (that is, the inherited metaphysics of nature).

This has several consequences, which cannot be properly discussed here. One that may be immediately drawn is that the realization of a concept, purpose, or norm is for Hegel an objective matter and, indeed, objective precisely in the sense in which Brandom (for example) considers that it is not.Footnote ¹⁷

Another consequence signifies a sort of advantage of this ‘metaphysical’ interpretation over the rival non-metaphysical interpretation, namely that the first can make comprehensible the attractions of the second, but without automatically tempting us to embrace it. The reason for this is that, to the extent that the spiritual is for Hegel a special case of the living, it exhibits a self-sufficiency analogous to the self-sufficiency of natural life regarding mere mechanisms (that is, physical and chemical processes, more or less simple, in which natural life is realized). Even if a material dependency exists of the spiritual on the non-spiritual, as there is of the living on the non-living, the spiritual exists as a product of itself and, therefore, should be explained by itself. But this does not mean that the spiritual is not objectively realized in non-spiritual processes.

My final conclusion is that, in view of Hegel's arguments in this decisive step of his Science of Logic—specifically, the thesis that the realization of a concept (and therefore of the living and the spiritual) is determined by objective processes—it makes little sense to say that the active and free character of the spiritual is ‘primitive’, in the sense argued for by Taylor.Footnote ¹⁸