I Introduction: Hegel as a critical theorist

In the Philosophy of Right,Footnote ¹ while presenting his theory of property, Hegel alludes to an antinomy which is supposedly already overcome in the discussions undertaken in this work. Due to ‘formal thinking’ of the concept of freedom, one may remain confined within the ‘antinomic’ assertion of two fixed ‘moments of an Idea’. The first is the abstract assertion that human beings are merely ‘natural’ and so free only ‘subjectively’, which leads to the possible ‘justification of slavery … [and] lordship in general’ in all its historical forms. The second is the affirmation that slavery’s character is ‘absolutely contrary to right’, based on the immediate concept that human beings are ‘spiritual’ and so free only ‘objectively’ (PR §57, 86–87).

According to Hegel, however, this antinomy is not in conformity with all dimensions of the concept of freedom, and is still situated within the ‘perspective of consciousness’, where, he points out, the ‘struggle for recognition’ must eventually occur. Yet the second point of view, in comparison with the ‘conceptlessness’ and ‘irrationality’ of the first, certainly ‘has the advantage that it contains the absolute starting point’, as Hegel explains in a note, for ‘slavery is something historical … belong[ing] in a situation previous to right’. Hence: ‘The point of view of the free will, with which right and the science of right begin, is already beyond that false [unwahren] point of view whereby the human being exists as a natural being and as a concept which has being only for itself, and is therefore capable of enslavement’ (PR §57, 87).

Apparently, then, the contents to be developed throughout the Philosophy of Right refer to a ‘form of life’ in which freedom is a necessary supposition, however mistakenly, merely implicitly, or inadequately it is comprehended. Freedom is necessary not only for the general self-interpretation of agents, but also for the very shape of social life as it manifests itself in shared values, practices and institutions. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right refers to a (typically modern) form of life in which subjective and objective components of freedom are already discernible, not only as a possible disposition in human reflection and action, but also as something objectively existing to an admittedly variable degree.

If modern life relies and depends on the multiple dimensions of freedom, then modernity’s own tendency toward self-criticism must first and foremost be critical of its own comprehension of freedom; as Hegel says: ‘Systematic progress in philosophy is nothing but knowing what oneself has said’ (W 4, 433–34). Hegel’s philosophy overall aims radically to embody modernity’s self-criticism, and even to criticize modernity’s own unexamined presuppositions about freedom and self-criticism. His efforts in the Philosophy of Right are intended primarily to present an immanent criticism of modernity’s most sophisticated comprehension of freedom, namely as self-determination. This is a challenging but necessary task, above all because between what we comprehend as freedom and what we produce in the world under this emblem as ‘freedom’s actuality’, there may well lie ‘the fetter of some abstraction (abstraktum) or other which has not been liberated into [the form of] the concept’ (PR 22).

II ‘Neo-Hegelianism’ and Critical Theory

Despite its diverse generations and exponents, Critical Theory is usually considered to be a tradition constituted by the often conflictual encounter between left-Hegelianism’s critical tendencies (especially as comprehended in Western Marxism), German philosophy from Kant to Husserl, and Freudian psychoanalytical theory. Amongst the most important authors who are usually connected to Critical Theory, Marx, Lukács, Adorno, Habermas and Honneth acknowledge Hegel’s philosophy as an unavoidable source of insights and even methodological inspiration. To begin with, I wish to consider the strongest and most recent return to Hegel in Critical Theory, that proposed by Honneth and delineated through the notion of ‘normative reconstruction’. Then, after examining Pippin’s key critique of Honneth’s Hegelian starting point in social theory and political philosophy, I will formulate the most general point of view for a critical-theoretical interpretation of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Right by focusing on the ‘normative authority of social practices’, particularly the connection between Hegel’s theory of normativity and his conception of freedom as self-determination.

Nowadays, when asking whether the required support for a specifically critical social theory is to be found in Hegel, one is led directly to Honneth’s recent model. Although Honneth’s entire trajectory cannot be reconstructed here, his most recent approach to social theory is to improve on his original strategy, which was already profoundly inspired by Hegelian guidelines. Honneth had attempted to reject Habermas’s dualistic system/lifeworld model by exploring the emancipatory and descriptive moral potential of immanently detectable ‘struggles for recognition’, an idea recovered primarily from the young Hegel. More recently, however, Honneth has supported a view on which Hegel’s later thought also contains significant motives for Critical Theory and even for its ongoing contemporary contribution.

According to Honneth, Hegel’s later work anticipated at least one constitutive feature of Critical Theory (Honneth Reference Honneth2009: 22–23). Critical Theory has always accounted for deficiencies in social rationality and social pathologies by establishing the normative idea of a concrete, rational, ethical universal that provides a background for critical investigation, yet is still not accomplished in the present social world (Honneth Reference Honneth2009: 23). Through this strategy, rationality is considered not only as intertwined with social-historical reality, but also as capable of measuring that reality’s distance from the historically available potential of reason. As Honneth says, ‘Hegel was convinced that social pathologies were to be understood as the result of the inability of society to properly express the rational potential already inherent in its institutions, practices, and everyday routines’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2009: 23).

Some characteristic traits of Hegel’s efforts in the Philosophy of Right are incorporated into Honneth’s delineation of the methodological framework for his own model of Critical Theory, that is, so-called ‘normative reconstruction’. To achieve the appropriate point of view from which my attempt at interpretation of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Right will be undertaken, it is first necessary to consider Pippin’s critical assessment of the Hegelian assumptions that are constitutive of ‘normative reconstruction’. Concerning the interpretation that I attempt to put forward here, Pippin’s thesis—that Honneth must have acknowledged Hegel’s ‘first philosophy’ (his logic and epistemology) as containing important presuppositions for reconstructivism—is decisive.

What mostly interests Honneth in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is obtaining a model for a theory of justice that is directly a critical analysis of modern society: ‘a theory of justice cannot be separated from concrete social analysis’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2014: 2). According to Honneth, Hegel’s social philosophy allows one to consider the constitutive spheres of modern society as an institutional embodiment of certain values and norms whose demand for actualization can indicate the principles of justice specifically related to each sphere. Because the Philosophy of Right fulfils this condition, Honneth states that it would support a ‘normative reconstruction’ (Honneth 2014: 24): a methodological framework constituted by a determined set of premises.Footnote ²

In The Pathologies of Individual Freedom (2010), Honneth emphatically affirms that with his attempt at an indirect ‘reactualization’ of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right he does not intend to rehabilitate Hegel’s ‘substantialist concept of state’, to appeal to the ‘operative instructions of the Logic’, or even to consider Hegel’s concept of ‘objective spirit’ in its ‘interconnection with the whole of the Hegelian system’ (Honneth Reference Honneth2010: 6). Nevertheless, according to Pippin, Honneth’s reconstructivism is indebted to some of the most significant ideas supported by Hegel’s thought: namely, the historicity as well as the sociality of freedom, and so ultimately the ‘sociality of reason’. Pippin argues that Hegel’s thesis that social freedom is recognition cannot be supported without appealing to Hegel’s most general theory of normativity. For example:

Pippin’s assessment of Hegel’s account of normativity is appropriately defined by Honneth and Joas in the preface to Pippin’s book, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit (2005), as ‘Hegel’s dynamization of Kant’s conception of self-legislation’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2005: 11). Furthermore, following Pippin, one can conceive the historicity of social theory and the sociality of freedom (as far as they constitute Hegel’s inheritance in contemporary Critical Theory) as the very unfolding of Hegel’s theory of normativity (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 36–64, 78).

III The ‘sociality of reason’ in the Philosophy of Right

The interpretation to be put forward here depends crucially on the possibility of so reading Hegel’s overall strategy in the Philosophy of Right that it does not simply reduce to a ‘monist substantialism’. I argue that some of the most notable paragraphs in the Introduction fortunately allow such a non-traditionalist reading:

It is not possible to elucidate here the complete connection between the Philosophy of Right and the ‘dialectical method’. However, in a notable paragraph within his Introduction, Hegel supports a transformation of Kant’s theory of self-determination into an immanent ‘theory of social objective reality’ (§31, 59–60), capable of grasping the intrinsic connection between the subjective and objective dimensions of rationality. In the case of social philosophy, this is properly actualized by the participation of agents in a multiplicity of shared practices endowed with normative authority.

Terry Pinkard, appropriating Sellars’s incipient reading of Hegel, put forward the idea that social reality is so intertwined with the objective dimension of rationality that its agents require ongoing engagement in potentially self-transforming practices of justification and legitimation in activities of reason-giving. The forerunner of this idea was probably Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following activity (Redding Reference Redding2007: 14). All this inheritance has been explicitly and convincingly transformed by Pippin into an illuminating strategy for the interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

However, these interpretative strategies have also considerably impacted on Critical Theory, particularly on how Honneth, based on a ‘pragmatist’ reading of Hegel’s social philosophy, attempts to recover and further develop the Western-Marxist thesis of an ‘intertwinement of rationality and social reality’ (Adorno and Horkheimer Reference Adorno and Horkheimer2002: XVIII). Honneth’s reading of Hegel thus combines a ‘pragmatist’ inheritance (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 273–74) with the discussion of ‘social suffering’ as it had been put forward by Western Marxism.

On the one hand, Honneth argues, Hegel’s concept of ‘objective spirit’ supports:

Accordingly, the violation of rational principles that are intrinsic to social reality produces pernicious effects for the self-relation of interaction partners as well, who in turn are not capable of completely disentangling themselves from these social relations. That is, the violation ‘is bound to have grave practical consequences that must be reflected in a “suffering from indeterminacy”’ (30).

On the other hand, Honneth goes on, in criticism of deontological morality, Hegel appealed with his conception of ‘ethical life’ to the idea ‘that in social reality, at least in that of modernity, we come across some spheres of action in which inclinations and moral norms, interests, and values are already fused in the form of institutionalized interactions’ (6). By insisting on this position, Hegel was able to object to the abstraction from the previous synthesis between normativity and shared practices, as well as from the one between reason and inclination (a practical legacy of Kant’s persistent ‘mentalism’ in epistemology). Thus, the general comprehension of social reality as intertwined with rationality made Critical Theory favourable to the idea ‘that our norms and values have absorbed enough rationality to be regarded as a social context whose moral guidelines we must generally consider to be beyond doubt’ (40–41).Footnote ³ Finally, Pippin consolidates this orientation, as he convincingly shows that Hegel’s conception of ‘objective rationality’ invalidates any ‘pre-institutional’ subjective perspective (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 262).Footnote ⁴

Thus, much more favourable conditions have been presented for a non-traditional reading of the general thesis of Hegel’s with which I began this section. From a systematic perspective, the ‘necessity’ of the concept of right has already been justified by its ‘deduction’ or ‘demonstration’, which Hegel understands to be ‘the route by which it has become a result’ (PR §2, 26). So the general task to be accomplished by the Philosophy of Right consists in:

Therefore, according to Hegel, the dialectical ‘methodology’ of the Philosophy of Right does not entail commitment to any kind of ‘monist substantialism’. It presupposes that it has been demonstrated that the concept of right is in principle appropriate for elucidating the normative context of modern institutions and practices, and thus is compatible with a modernity that has already dramatically turned freedom into its emblem (constitutive of its institutions and of its very self-comprehension). So right is to be considered from then on as the ‘concept’: as the ongoing tension between the normative authority of institutions, practices already valid and the legitimation processes by which modernity expects normative self-certification. The philosophical programme developed in the Philosophy of Right involves the demonstration of the ‘truth’ of our representation of social normativity as legitimized content through its being raised to the form of the ‘concept’, primarily by accessing the ‘linguistic’ structure of shared practices intertwined with modern forms of life. The bi-directional movement of accessing already factually valid norms, and eventually actualizing a configuration of these practices reshaped in accordance with the concept, requires the interpenetration of normative processes of legitimation and ‘hermeneutical’ access to shared practices endowed with normative authority (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 236–37).

As I will examine in more detail, Pippin’s interpretation can be considered as a critical appropriation of Kant’s concept of practical self-determination and as its transformation into a theory of practical normativity that dares to think about ‘actualizing’ freedom as an unavoidable component of an authentic, modern and free social life. If one understands Hegel’s post-Kantian theory of objectivity as his version of metaphysics, then one is also forced to conclude that ‘Hegel’s most basic thought [consists of] his way of working out the Kant–Rousseau insight about a fundamental kind of normativity based on autonomy according to the model of reciprocal authority and responsibility whose paradigm is mutual recognition’, something to be accounted for as ‘the master idea that animates and structures Hegel’s metaphysics and logic’ (Brandom Reference Brandom2002: 234).

IV Hegel and the development of the communicative paradigm in Critical Theory

Despite the frequent claim that there is a tendency toward a ‘repression of intersubjectivity’ (Theunissen Reference Theunissen1982: 317–81) in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a comprehensive hypothesis later appropriated by Habermas (Habermas Reference Habermas2003: 176), the interpretative strategy described above, though fundamentally concentrated on the ‘old’ Hegel, remains compatible with a broad comprehension of the communicative paradigm developed by Habermas within Critical Theory (Habermas Reference Habermas2003: 175). Even after having established the main features of his own thought in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas remains attracted to a certain Hegelian orientation. For instance, in his critique of political and philosophical modernity, he appeals to a Hegelian inspiration. In order to face the dichotomies occasioned by the ‘reflexive philosophy of subjectivity’ (W 2, 286), Habermas takes up the idea of a rationality intertwined with the intersubjective resources of a life form. This is suggested by the young Hegel in his discussions of the ‘causality of fate’ (W 1, 273), a theme which in turn also constitutes some of Adorno’s theoretical objectives since the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] (Reference Adorno and Horkheimer2002); see also Bernstein 2006: 19–50).Footnote ⁵ In fact, in chapter IV of The Theory of Communicative Action (1984), Habermas’s justification for adopting another model of Critical Theory, i.e., that it can overcome the difficulties associated with the critique of the instrumental reason attempted by the preceding generation, indicates a dispute around a viable pragmatist and intersubjective reading of Hegel.

The theoretical situation of the critique of instrumental reason is, in accordance with Habermas’s reading, pervaded by a ‘normative contradiction’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1990: 119). The absolutization of instrumental rationality ‘tears down the barrier between validity and power … As instrumental, reason assimilated itself to power and thereby relinquished its critical force—this is the final disclosure of ideology critique applied to itself’ (119). Thus, with the development of the ‘paradoxical concept of the nonidentical’ (129), Adorno sharpens the aporetic and ‘inhibited skepticism regarding reason’, and therein also deepens the deficit in the ‘normative foundations of critical social theory’ (129). Considering the drastic levelling toward which Dialectic of Enlightenment’s discussion of the specifically Western connection between rationality and domination tends, Habermas detects, as the condition for its catastrophist comprehension of modernity, the dialectical structure of the distorted relation between spirit and nature: ‘we can speak of distortion only insofar as the original relation of spirit and nature is secretly conceived in such a way that the idea of truth is connected with that of a universal reconciliation’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1984: 380–81).

The problem at this point is that, to make categorically explicit such a concept of truth, which can only be ‘interpreted via the guiding idea of a universal reconciliation, an emancipation of man through the resurrection of nature’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1984: 382), it would have to be based on a kind of previously available rationality, on which the process of reification would have then left its footprints. Since Adorno and Horkheimer’s conceptual framework does not possess such a dimension of rationality already available before the process of reification, they find themselves forced to ‘nominate a capacity, mimesis, about which they can speak only as they would about a piece of uncomprehended nature’ and in which ‘an instrumentalized nature makes its speechless accusation’. Actually, to offer justice to the nonidentical, they do not attempt—as is the case with Hegel’s theory of the speculative proposition (W 3, 57)—to eradicate the unspeakable, the somatic, the nonconceptual from the sphere of cognitive experience (W 8, 73), by restricting cognition to the unity of identity and difference. ‘For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought … it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured’ (Adorno and Horkheimer Reference Adorno and Horkheimer2002: 32). However, the critique of instrumental reason still reveals itself not to possess the conceptual context for making social suffering conceptually explicit, despite its general intention. According to Habermas, to recover from the deficit in its normative foundations, Critical Theory needs a conceptual framework capable of making conceptually explicit the social suffering that is occasioned by reification (Habermas Reference Habermas1984: 389).

Habermas justifies the pragmatist and intersubjective turn in Critical Theory by arguing that it is normatively necessary for social criticism to thematize explicitly, conceptually, from the perspective of the involved actors, ‘the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1984: 389). This is only possible if ‘the rational core of mimetic achievements can be laid open … in favor of the paradigm of linguistic philosophy—namely, that of intersubjective understanding or communication’ (390). Therefore, the very condition for mimesis, for the allusion to a violated context of social life, is revealed to be the normative idea of ‘an intact intersubjectivity’, a reconciliation made possible through ‘intersubjectivity free of coercion … that makes possible a mutual and constraint-free understanding among individuals in their dealings with one another, as well as the identity of individuals who come to a compulsion-free understanding with themselves—sociation without repression’ (391).

Notwithstanding his very detailed journey through issues and discussions in twentieth–century semantic and pragmatic orientations in philosophy of language, Habermas extracted his idea—that of putting ‘the cognitive instrumental aspect of reason in its proper place as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality’—from the young Hegel’s inspiring discussion of the causality of fate (Habermas Reference Habermas1984: 391). According to Hegel, ‘fate’ makes possible the reconciliation of the ‘criminal’ with the community by making him or her ‘feel’ the transgression as a violence of life upon itself (W 1, 345). In the politically and philosophically interesting fragments from the Frankfurt period, one is introduced to a preliminary formulation of Hegel’s late comprehension of modern society as ‘the system of ethical life lost in its extremes’ (PR §184A, 221). Hegel argues that the ‘subjective’ condition for life’s recovery of integrity, after its splitting due to crime, is the comprehension by the ‘criminal’ of his act as isolation from living totality, as a destruction of the previous unity of social life. That comprehension is based on life’s hostility provoked as fate. Consciousness of oneself as hostile already contains consciousness of the rupture of prior social ties with the community, and so consciousness of the prior character of the ethical and social bond violated by the ‘isolated’ act. In accordance with the idea of penalty as fate, the agent is referred, through the ‘isolated’ intention contained in the ‘crime’, to their belonging to the reciprocity of a life-world constituted by shared interests and mutual expectations concerning cooperation.

Therefore, the ‘causality of fate’ refers to ‘ethical life’s recovery force deflagrated by the complementarity of non-coercive communication and reciprocal satisfaction of interests’, and therewith to the experience of the common ground of existence through the dialogical relation of knowing-oneself-in-the-other (Habermas Reference Habermas1974: 791–92). The broadest significance of the discussion of the ‘causality of fate’ consists accordingly in that any kind of ‘individualized’ behaviour is to be considered as a derivative of social reality—as something that actually presupposes a social whole marked by the reciprocity of recognition and by diversified degrees of mutual satisfaction of individual interests. The individual action is perceived as a challenge to the integrity of ethical life as long as it represents its occasional self-estrangement, the forced sublation of its prior and original validity. ‘The dynamism of fate results instead from the disruption of the conditions of symmetry and of the reciprocal dependencies of an intersubjectively constituted life-context, where one part isolates itself and also alienates all other parts from itself and their common life’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1990: 29). The connection established by Hegel in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, between ‘struggle’ as general processes of ‘individualization’ and the ‘causality of fate’—as the shared perception of a previous and original socialization to which individuals owe their own biographies and the development of their practical-cognitive capacities—anticipates a perspective from which one can elaborate a theory of modernization based on the symbolically mediated structure of social intersubjectivity.

Habermas’s reading of the young Hegel coincides with the North American, neo-Hegelian thesis, supported by Pippin and Brandom and applying to the Philosophy of Right, that no pre-institutional comprehension of individual subjectivity is viable (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 262–65). However, despite its original dialectical intention, the critique of modernity (Adorno 2010: 269) succumbs to a confusion between genesis and validity, which is associated with the final unmasking of domination and power without the commitment to any emphatically normative dimension of validity. On the other hand, Habermas recovers some dialectical tendencies which anticipate the aporetics of the totalizing critique of reason (Habermas Reference Habermas1990: 126ff), at least according to the interpretation attempted below: namely, the interweaving between the context of meaning and the historical context of facticity, between validity and genesis (130).

Thus, according to Habermas’s interpretation, the dynamic of criticism in modern, capitalist society is initiated, in the critical tradition initiated by Hegel and Marx, by the ‘dialectic of living and dead labor, of ethical and systemic relations’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1984: 343). Habermas himself attempts to preserve this critical and emancipatory potential through the reconstruction of normativity experienced as the ‘negativity of divided life’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1990: 29), the rupture of the symbolic texture of social life. Therefore, it can be argued that the ‘old’ Hegel, if he actually maintains his early intuition concerning the unviability of a pre-institutional individual subjectivity, still belongs to precisely the same critical tradition as Habermas. Hegelian perspectives in Critical Theory would have preserved the same orientation that Habermas also follows (Habermas Reference Habermas2003: 186).

V The critique of modern freedom

Hegel thinks that the most challenging task to be accomplished by his Philosophy of Right is to conceive of freedom, the most emblematic modern ideal, in a way capable of corresponding to the historical dynamic of modernity. Freedom constitutes modernity’s self-comprehension as well as providing the most widespread value incorporated in modern institutions. Nevertheless, as Hegel generally attempts to formulate with his critique of modernity, modernity does not appropriately comprehend its own emblem, even if, as with Rousseau, Kant and Fichte, it conceives freedom as self-determination. An effective way to make sense of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Right is to consider how it is structured by a critical perception of insufficiencies constitutive of thinking freedom as one-sided, merely subjective self-determination. According to Hegel, these insufficiencies are mostly due to the fact that, despite all its efforts, the modern conception of freedom as subjective self-determination reveals itself to be incapable of actually escaping from (1) the ‘grammatical fiction of identity’ and (2) the mere ‘culture of free choice’, both factors which produce practical consequences in modern forms of life.

(1) The ‘grammatical fiction of identity’ is a kind of dogmatic, essentialist tendency, supported by language, towards conceiving freedom as a static, predicable property of a self-identical subject or substance—the will. In accordance with this ‘older method of cognition’, one presupposed ‘the representation [Vorstellung] of the will and attempted to set up a definition’ (PR §4, 36). Attempting to distance himself from this ‘older method’, Hegel argues that ‘the deduction that the will is free and of what the will and freedom are … is possible only within the context of the whole’ (PR §4, 36). The point of paragraphs §§5–7 thus becomes relatively clear, above all because of their connection with the developments presented in the Science of Logic and the interpretation of the free will in the ‘moment’ of singularity as ‘the concept itself’ (der Begriff selbst), what one could call the ‘disruption’ of self-determination’s dynamic. Hegel’s dialectic aims vigorously to destabilize the traditional essentialization of the self-determination process, according to which freedom is conceived of as a capacity manifested as a predicate by a self-identical subject. On the contrary, ‘this is the freedom of the will, which constitutes the concept or substantiality of the will, its gravity’ (§7, 41). Further, as Hegel himself concludes in his ‘linguistic’ discussion:

(2) Hegel considers that the ‘concrete concept of freedom’ (PR §7A, 42) is the ground of the abstract ‘moments’, and corresponds to the dynamic of self-determination without allowing the ‘reification’ of the will (or of freedom itself) (Adorno 1993: 74). This makes it more evident why even the modern, merely subjective comprehension of freedom as self-determination has not been able to escape from the epistemological and practical aporias associated with the interpretation of freedom as choice or arbitrariness (Willkür) (§15, 48). Hegel understands freedom of choice, as far as it constitutes the predominant conception of freedom, as ‘contradiction’, because it radicalizes the opposition between the constitutive ‘moments’ of will’s concrete freedom. The formal infinity of undetermined capacity of choice is situated above the diverse drives and modes of their satisfaction, and that second element thereby becomes the external and ‘finite’ content of self-determination. The general situation of freedom as mere choice is one in which the externality of content in relation to the subject is absolutely maintained. This is the paradoxical situation of an (in principle) still not determined and purely subjective form, completely independent, and yet precisely dependent on something external to be free. ‘Arbitrariness is rather the will as contradiction’, associated with the paradoxical contingency of a necessary content, so to speak.

That is why, considering the radical separateness of form and content, subjectivity and objectivity, indeterminacy and determination, Hegel connects arbitrariness to an epistemological position (a profoundly dogmatic one, as he attempted to reveal throughout the Phenomenology), which manifests itself from a practical point of view as centred on purely subjective self-determination (PR: §15, 49). This position is frequently and easily criticized from a determinist perspective (§15A, 49), partially because it has inherited the ‘empiricist dogmatism’ that insists on considering the content as ‘something encountered [ein vorgefundener] … not contained in that certainty and therefore comes to it from outside’. In this reading of the Philosophy of Right which highlights its contribution to the critique of modernity, this inadequate epistemological position can be considered to belong to a broader system of rationality which is predominant in modernity—as the theoretical manifestation of a practical paradigm associated with ‘formal self-activity [formale Selbsttätigkeit]’ (§15, 49).Footnote ⁶ Although it is not possible to go into this topic here, Hegel’s intention is to establish that a critique of modernity requires not only critical assessment in a political and practical context, but also a critique of the entire system of rationality connected therewith.

Arbitrariness (Willkür), which implies ‘the indeterminacy of the “I” and the determinacy of the content’, is not only the ‘commonest representation [Vorstellung] we have of freedom’, but also, because of this very ‘prevalence’, is the freedom of the will in its untruth, ‘for it shows not the least awareness of what constitutes the will which is free in and for itself, or right, or ethical life [Sittlichkeit]’ (PR §15A, 48–49). Appealing to the radicalized instance of arbitrariness, Hegel intends further to underline an inadequacy constitutive of ‘formal self-activity’ as practical rationality: its inability to penetrate immanently into the minutiae intertwined with concrete forms of life (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 262). Therefore, formalism, radicalized as arbitrariness, condenses the ‘bad infinity’ in terms of practical conceptuality (PR §16), eternally dissatisfied with the bare finitude of any determination, which has, in principle, a nature inappropriate to the purity of the form. Moreover, this ‘bad infinity’ is exacerbated, especially in a modernity in which processes of self-certification and self-justification tend to be radicalized, into a process that, because it is capable of structurally affecting the meaning of action and subverting participation in institutionally shared practices, might be considered not a merely psychological kind of suffering caused by indeterminacy (Honneth Reference Honneth2010: 28).

With this critique of the modern epistemological and practical ‘contradictory’ point of view related to the absolutization of choice, Hegel anticipates Marx’s discussion (from his youth to Capital) on the splitting—the dichotomy—of human beings between work force and individual existence, which in turn reflects the social contradiction between use and exchange value. More, Hegel anticipates the whole debate in Western Marxism from Lukács to Adorno about the experienced practical effects occasioned by the ‘divorce’ of form and content (Adorno 1993: 56). For Adorno, as for Habermas and Honneth after him, ‘Left-Hegelianism’ is the recovery of that Hegelian movement of self-criticism of a paradigm of rationality which, by discovering and making explicit its own inadequacy, detects and criticizes the pernicious effect of this unconscious insufficiency on experiential content:

Moreover, Hegel argues that the formalism consititutive of the modern paradigm of practical rationality, with which modernity strives for self-comprehension (Habermas 1995: 51) and normative self-certification, necessarily has an influence on modern life conditions. Therefore, this formalism manifests itself not only in epistemological terms, but also from a ‘social-ontological’ point of view, i.e., it affects the very social reality—the shared and recognized practices—which are incorporated in modern institutions, understood in a broader sense (Honneth 2008: 393).

According to Hegel, the universal consciousness in which single individuals are united through affirmative and reciprocal knowledge of one another constitutes ‘the form of the consciousness of the substance of all essential spirituality’ (W 8, 225). The general result of the recognition process is the ‘appearance of the substance’, i.e., the becoming–manifest of spirituality as existence. Nevertheless, with the formulation that designates the ‘true concept of self-consciousness’, the one that marks the phenomenological genesis of spirit—‘I that is we and we that is I’ (W 3, 144)—Hegel further circumscribes spirit as ‘the realm of the normative, as produced and sustained by the processes of mutual recognition, which simultaneously institute self-conscious selves and their communities’ (Brandom Reference Brandom2002: 222). By conceiving of positive freedom not only as mere self-determination of the individual (will), but as also concretized through being-recognized (Anerkanntsein) (W 4, 120), Hegel recovers a significant insight of his youth—‘Highest community is highest freedom, both in terms of power and its exercise’ (W 2, 82). Simultaneously, he introduces the very idea of an institutional basis which, primarily in modernity, is capable of serving conscious and reflexive practice as its appropriate mediation:

This argument plays a crucial role in Hegel’s critical assessment of modern and inadequate conceptions of individual freedom through the concept of the will that is free in-and-for-itself. I argue that Hegel’s efforts are an attempt critically to revise Kant’s (and Rousseau’s and Fichte’s) concept of freedom as self-determination, by comprehending it in light of the ‘Aristotelian’ question of the political actualization of free social life (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 117).

Pippin argues that the topic of sociality, based on the recognitive status attributed by Hegel to the ethical being (as far as it involves ‘ethical reflection “inside” the norms of an ethical community’), amounts to unfolding the internal relation of concept and actualization (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 141). Recognition works as this internal relation inasmuch as it allows the transition from subjectivity to objectivity, from ‘a priori’ to ‘a posteriori’, from reason as ‘form’ to history as the ‘content’. Anerkanntsein not only structures intelligibility, which is frequently defined through the ‘semantic thesis of idealism’,Footnote ⁷ but also the social-historical configuration (Gestaltung) that actualizes the self-conscious frame of the concept as a specific community (W 8, 302).

In the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel also associates the unilateral character of the modern comprehension of freedom, especially as it is radicalized in the subjective self-determination of arbitrarianess, with practical ‘effects’ that can be interpreted using such post-Hegelian ideas as ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, ‘reification’, ‘estrangement’ and ‘domination’. In PR §5, Hegel initiates his attempt to conceptualize self-determination as non-reified by conceiving of freedom through a dialectical interpretation. He suggests that the typical modern fixation on the ‘moment’ of negative freedom has considerable pernicious effects. At least in modernity, the capacity to abstract from every determination, understood as the emblem favoured by ‘pure thinking oneself’ (PR §5, 37) and by the ‘negative freedom or freedom of the understanding’ (§5A, 37–38), has become a practical condition of revolutionary upheaval, insofar as it requires abstracting from ‘determinations’ to which one more or less spontaneously adheres. Precisely because of this, it can also lead to perennial and fanatical dissatisfaction with any concrete institutional form of life. Referring to the French Revolutionary Terror, Hegel declares that it was:

Hegel’s notion of negative freedom is sufficiently broad to apply to diverse philosophies, within and outside modernity. According to Hegel, Kant and Rousseau are committed to a comprehension of freedom as self-determination, but their fixation on mere subjective self-determination produces in their philosophies certain resonances with the practical effects of the reduction of freedom to its negative ‘moment’.

One of the most pernicious practical effects of this modern fixation on the negative moment of freedom is the tendency to consider ‘drives, desires, and inclinations’ as being in themselves ‘pathological’ (PR §11, 45). On the contrary, Hegel contends, ‘this content, along with the determinations developed within it, does indeed originate in the will’s rationality and it is thus rational in itself’. In Hegel’s resistance to the modern (or even Western and Christian) common-place in dealing with the immediate or natural will, it is certainly implied that he instead conceives of it in accordance with the rational potential of drives and impulses, and therefore with the idea of ethical life as a re-configuration of drives through the form of rationality. Thus, with his defence of the rational potential of desires, impulses and inclinations, Hegel suggests not an ‘ontology of drives and affections’ but that ethical life and concrete freedom both have to do with the reciprocal and symmetrical interpenetration of individual pulsional structure and processes of rational legitimation. ‘The content of the drives and inclinations appears later as duties and rights—duties toward the subject, rights in and for themselves. Their content becomes thus valid’ (§11R, 45). Thus, it becomes easier to understand why freedom as contradiction, the most radical form of fixation on subjective self-determination as manifested in arbitrariness, is involved in a specific type of ‘bad infinity’ which Hegel calls the ‘dialectic of drives and inclinations’. This dialectic consists in the fact that:

Hegel highlights this ‘phenomenon’ (Erscheinung), this manifestation, as an ethical ‘symptom’ of the ‘essential’ contradiction in which the will as arbitrariness consists. The pure indeterminacy of the I relates itself to the drives, inclinations and desires in a sacrificial and oppressive way. Furthemore, when our relation to our pulsional nature manifests itself in this way, the pure will operates as ‘calculation’—as instrumental and strategic rationality—sacrificing its own nature for the sake of self-control, yet inadvertently producing heteronomy of the self. Because this is just another consequence—an intrapsychical manifestation—of the divorce of form and content, we might interpret the sacrificial attitude towards pulsional nature as a structural symptom of the typically modern form of social life as a ‘system of ethical life lost in its extremes’ (§184A, 221). Whatever might have been the case in pre-modern times, modernity continues to manifest a symptomatology associated with a sacrificial attitude of individuals toward their pulsional structures (§17, 50), because the formal freedom of arbitrariness has became institutionalized. To sum up, in a form of social life in which formal freedom has been profoundly institutionalized, individuals tend to maintain an attitude toward their drives and inclinations that is generally destructive and sacrificial, because the maximal satisfaction of one implies the postponing of the others. ‘If, then, I put all the others aside and committ myself to only one of them, I find myself in a destructive limitation, for by my very act I have relinquished my universality, which is a system of all drives’ (§17A, 50).

Therefore, according to Hegel, political modernity is associated not with a hierarchization of drives and inclinations (§17, 50), but with the intrinsic potential of the forms of institutional organization to establish a concrete universality out of and amongst them, a system of drives that do not tend to reciprocal domination and hierarchization but are ‘restored to their substantial essence’ (§19, 51).

VI Normativity and the dialectic of self-determination

The discussions above might allow for a more intuitive interpretation of PR §7, which summarizes Hegel’s dialectical comprehension of freedom as self-determination. To begin with, Hegel argues that continuing Fichte’s efforts in speculative philosophy requires ‘apprehend[ing] the negativity which is immanent within the universal or the identical, as in the “I”—a step the need for which is not perceived by those who fail to apprehend the dualism of infinity and finitude’ (PR §6, 40). This thesis is connected with the idea that the self-determination of the will, once it is coherently grasped as the dialectical unity of indeterminacy and determination, reveals itself as the concept of self-mediated singularity. Therefore ‘what is concrete and true (and everything true is concrete) is the universality which has the particular as its opposite, but this particular, through its reflection into itself, has been reconciled [ausgeglichen] with the universal’ (§7, 41).

However, the same interpenetration becomes more visible from a social point of view in §§21–24, in which Hegel expounds his key concept of the will that is free in itself inasmuch as it is free for itself—the universality that, as far as it constitutes the infinite form, the true infinity, has itself as object and end. Moreover, it contains the ‘the principle of right, of morality, and of all ethical life’ (§21, 53). In the present context, what primarily interests us is to further our interpretation of ‘bad infinity’ as an aporia occasioned by modernity’s insufficient comprehension of its own most significant emblem, freedom.

In PR §22, after referring once more to his critical assessement of the ‘quasi-linguistic’ tendency towards the ‘essentialist’ reification of freedom, Hegel argues that the in-itself and for-itself free will is truly infinite and indeed actually, effectively infinite ‘because its determination consists in being in its existence [Dasein]—i.e. as something opposed to itself—what it is in its concept’ (§22, 53). On the other side, based on a tendency toward essentialism favoured by its own paradigm of rationality (54), modernity tends to interrupt the dynamic fluidity constituted by the reprocity between indeterminacy and determination, infinity and finitude, existence (Dasein) and concept. As a result, practical normativity is fixated on a merely potential conception of infinity; incapable of accessing the immanent relation between concept and reality, infinity and finitude, it is a ‘merely negative and false infinity, which unlike true infinity, does not return to itself’. How can we interpret the social-political meaning of this ‘bad infinity’? From the viewpoint of a critical theory of modern society, ‘bad infinity’ results from a ‘hypertrophy’ of the merely subjective dimension of freedom, which becomes subjective self-determination with Rousseau, Kant and Fichte. ‘Bad infinity’ is a ‘logical expression’, a purely ‘conceptual expression’ of the typically modern disdain for and disparagement of institutions and shared practices as ways of actualizing freedom. Hegel frequently associates this tendency with affirmation of freedom predominantly in the figure of the exclusive singularity, as the freedom of an individuum. The subjective fixation on self-determination cannot escape the risk represented by methodological individualism.

Thus, the concept of ‘bad infinity’ summarizes the main types of unilateralism which inhere in the modern self-comprehension of modernity’s own legitimizing conception of practical normativity, types that therefore are intimately associated with a psychological and social-political symptomatology occasioned by this ‘deficient’ normativity. This includes fanatical forms of estrangement from and against institutional reality; a generally reductionist, sacrificial and calculating attitude of individuals toward their own drives and inclinations; and a structural, systemic loss of ‘substantiality’ (PR §§16 and 17, 50). On the other side, the will that is free both in and for itself (the principle of Hegel’s philosophy of right) attempts to overcome this very unilaterality from the perspective of social and political philosophy, and the theory of justice and normativity. This involves the apprehension of the necessary and unavoidable interaction between, on the one hand, the shared and institutionalized practices and, on the other hand, the paradigmatic form of legitimation which became predominant within modernity. We are dealing here precisely with Hegel’s reformulation of the modern theory of normativity:

In the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, the attempt to provide access to modernity’s social and historical dynamic through the interaction between legitimacy and institutional reality, conceiving of self-determination as intrinsically connected with actualization, constitutes Hegel’s uncommon and counter-intuitive, but important, ‘definition’ of right (Recht), which accommodates subjective and objective dimensions. ‘The subject-matter of the philosophical science of right is the Idea of right—the concept of right and its actualization (Verwirklichung)’ (§1, 25). This is a proposition profoundly informed by Hegel’s logic as the ‘all-animating spirit of all the sciences’ (W 8, 84). However, as regards the theory of practical normativity, this connection constitutes the basis of Hegel’s assertion that philosophy must be concerned above all with indicating and revealing the unilaterality and untruth of ‘mere concepts’ (bloße Begriffe). That is, it must be concerned with the critique of the understandings of objective reality to which we currently appeal, although they are actually incapable of taking into consideration their own institutional frame. Nevertheless, what must mostly interest philosophy is disentangling itself from ‘mere concepts’ in order to establish that ‘it is the concept alone … which has actuality in such a way that it gives actuality to itself’ (PR §1, 25). Philosophy must develop a theory of conceptual normativity which is able to include the thinking of its own actualization. Only a theory of normativity capable of corresponding to the desideratum of a comprehension of its own institutional frame can measure up to modernity’s most sophisticated emblem, freedom as self-determination, i.e., rational normativity as it provides itself with its own content, its own appropriate actualization. ‘The shape [Gestaltung] which the concept assumes in its actualization, and which is essential for cognition of the concept itself, is different from its form of being purely as concept, and is the other essential moment of the Idea’.

Hegel intends to explicate the scope of a theory of normativity which, from the point of view of modernity, can respond to the deepest demands of the bourgeois revolutions before him. Based on ‘mere concepts’ incapable of thinking through their own actualization, these revolutionary contestations had often vindicated or presupposed the intrinsic interaction between legitimation processes and institutional framework, although they were not completely aware of this. This allows us to perceive the effects of ‘insufficient’ rationality on the life-world, as well as to strive for a more appropriate actualization: ‘The unity of concept and existence [Dasein], of body and soul, is the idea. It is not just harmony, but complete interpenetration [vollkommene Durchdringung]’ (PR §1A, 26). Hegel’s theory of practical normativity deals, in simultaneous dialectical rhythm, with a comprehension of the institutional dimension as it has historically developed up to the present, as well as with the ‘subjective’ dimension— the one that concerned individuals appeal to in cases of ‘axiological breakdown’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 91, 267), and which Kant and Rousseau had raised to a semantically specific pattern (Brandom Reference Brandom2002: 234). Because of this ‘dialectical amplitude’, Hegel’s theory of practical normativity can consider insufficient and appropriate ‘actualizations’ of similar conceptual demands at the same time. Moreover, it has become necessary to develop an innovative conception of practical normativity because political normativity itself has demanded it. This is because the available, Kantian, paradigm of legitimation has proven all-pervasive but also unaware of, and therefore uncritical about, its own effects.

Insofar as Hegel’s theory comprehends freedom to be already partially incorporated in institutions (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 279), it represents a critique of the formalist tendency toward institutional abstractionism (Honneth Reference Honneth2010: 26–7). Moreover, inasmuch as Hegel’s theory not only demands the actualization of rational normativity, but also swings within the immediate and dialectical interaction between the objective and subjective dimensions of rationality, it connects normative social theory to the theory of justice (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 276). Thus it allows, for instance, that modernity should be legible in terms of the corrosion of ethical life caused by the absolutizing of the subjective dimension of normativity.

VII Concluding remarks

Hegel perceives the conclusion of the Introduction to his Philosophy of Right, especially the thesis that his conception of right is identical with ‘freedom as idea’ (PR §29, 58), as offering an opportunity for emphatic opposition to the efforts of the tradition that understood freedom as self-determination, namely Rousseau, Kant and Fichte. According to Hegel, Kant’s practical philosophy amounts to a purely coercive and restrictive definition of right. Although this is much more compatible with a purely negative concept of individual freedom as in Hobbes, it was already contained in nuce in Rousseau’s thesis that ‘the substantial basis and primary factor is supposed to be not the will as rational will which has being in and for itself or the spirit as true spirit, but will and spirit as the particular individual, as the will of the singular person in his distinctive arbitrariness’.

Hegel is accusing Rousseau—and Kant with him—of having conceived of freedom as self-determination in an excessively subjectivized way. What was supposed to be understood as an investigation of the interaction between subjective and objective dimensions of ‘freedom as idea’ became with Rousseau and Kant a practical philosophy focused on the individual capacity for self-determination. At this point, Hegel draws his scathing conclusion: if freedom as self-determination is merely an individual capacity, then, although modern agents might expect modern institutions and practices fortuitously to be compatible with the subjective dimension of freedom, the rationality behind social reality would have to be conceived of as generally extrinsic, external, coercive, estranged and necessarily oppressive. ‘Once this principle is accepted, the rational can of course appear only as a limitation on the freedom in question, and not as an immanent rationality, but only as an external and formal universal’ (§29, 58).

Anticipating the most general perspective of Western Marxism and Critical Theory, Hegel understands the most significant challenge faced by his practical philosophy to be not only that of carrying out the immanent reconstruction of the modern paradigm of rationality, but also of denouncing its effects on the life-world. Thus, he considers the excessive ‘subjectivization’ of self-determination as an insufficient philosophical perspective, and therefore reveals it as a dimension belonging within a broader process—the process in which modernity is itself victimized by the paradigm of rationality which has historically developed within it. However, when the process is considered in this broader perspective, one notices that its consequences and effects are not simply philosophical and theoretical, but also affect practices, institutions and modern life in general.

Hegel argues that Kant’s unilaterally subjective conception of self-determination is nothing more than the expression within modern practical philosophy of formalism, which is the unmistakable sign of the modern paradigm of rationality:

Accordingly, this paradigm is connected in multiple ways with the phenomena of ‘positivity’, ‘splitting’ and the disruption of modern ethical life (W 1, 321–22; 2, 20; 1, 339). Although self-determination as a paradigm of practical normativity was ‘invented’—historically created—within political modernity, the formal and subjectivized way in which modern practical philosophy understands self-determination deprives it of its critical force and amplitude, and above all of its ‘sacrality’ (its dialectical dynamic): the inextricable interaction of subjectivity and objectivity on which freedom’s true infinity is based. ‘Right is something utterly sacred, for the simple reason that it is the existence [Dasein] of the absolute concept, of self-conscious freedom. But the formalism of right—and also of duty—arises out of the different stages in the development of the concept of freedom’ (PR §30, 59).