I. The ‘flesh’ in Merleau-Ponty and its Hegelian anticipation

The concept of ‘flesh’ appeared already in Merleau-Ponty's writings in the late 1940s (MPR: 191 de Saint-Aubert Reference de Saint Aubert2006).Footnote ¹ However, it is in the notes published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible that the notion became central in his thinking. There, Merleau-Ponty called it the ‘first concept’ (VI: 137) in the new language he sought to develop in order to accurately depict the ways in which human beings are inserted into their natural and social environments. This constructive task of building a new ontology is the positive counterpart to a negative assessment of modern philosophy and the contemporary sciences. For him, the latter's categorical apparatuses remain metaphysically ‘conservative’ (VI: 16) as they still operate with old antinomies, such as the dualisms of subject and object, the internal and the external, essence and existence, value and fact.

In this first respect already, a strong affinity exists between Merleau-Ponty and Hegel, namely the conviction that one of philosophy's key tasks is to develop a categorical vocabulary that does not reify and misrepresent, but instead correctly captures, the different kinds of dynamic interaction connecting and constituting entities, notably those interactions involving human beings as the beings that can know about them. The category of the ‘flesh’ aims to provide the right platform for this. At first, the notion denotes the human body in as much as the latter is animated, not just a mass of matter that is alive, but organized matter that displays purposeful modes of being in its environments. In his late ontology, Merleau-Ponty continues, as in his early work, to make the body the central pole around which can be developed a proper understanding of the different ways in which humans are in the world. The starting point of any accurate ontology, Merleau-Ponty repeats again and again (typically VI: 135), should be the fact of embodiment, as the perspective from which the complexity and depth of other ontological dimensions is revealed.

The primary experience remains perception, or rather ‘perceptual faith’. Whatever the biochemical, psychological or neurological accounts explaining how humans connect to their worlds in material terms (including their own internal life), all such explanations take as their fundamental precondition our insertion in those worlds, an insertion that is given to us in all its evidence and mystery as soon as we open our eyes or touch things around us. Vision and touch are those basic experiences revealing that we are always already placed in the midst of all those things about which we can take up a number of possible stances, including scientific ones. The innovation made by his late ontology is in the radicalization of the conclusions drawn from this focus on the perceiving body. Understood as ‘flesh’, the body perspective loses its idealistic undertones. The flesh denotes a body that is both at the same time the ground that allows us to take a stance upon the world, and what makes us a part of the world, a small region of the very same ‘grand spectacle’ (VI: 138). Embodiment is thus no longer just a new transcendental perspective. More fundamentally, it forms the original point from which the dual dimensions of the subjective and the objective, the internal and external, emerge. Yet since we are of the world through this point, the common ground it simultaneously reveals renders the duality of core categories intrinsically unstable. They each pick only one side of the same being. The ‘subjective’ is included in the ‘objective’ against which it takes up its particular perspectives; the ‘internal’ belongs to the very externality it appears to dissociate itself from:

The last two concepts, ‘reciprocal insertion’ and ‘intertwining’ (literally interlacing, entrelacs), capture well the ontological turn of Merleau-Ponty's late thinking. The reciprocal insertion and intermingling of human and world can be understood epistemologically: human intentionalities reveal aspects of the world that are in the world. This, however, merely rehearses the classical starting point of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty insists rather on the ontological dimension: the seeing body is in the world it sees, and the world is in the body, as it were, since the body is a part of the world, is made up of worldly stuff, since it processes worldly stuff. This means that the flesh designates not just animated human matter, but just as much the ‘flesh of things’, and the ‘flesh of the world’. The usual ontological dichotomies collapse; there is only one singular plane of being. ‘Flesh’ on this expansive understanding means no longer just organic matter but the indefinite depth of being, which entails a multiplicity of dimensions, and multiple potential interrelations of elements within it. In that mass of being, precisely because the emphasis is on ‘depth’, as soon as something is made ‘visible’, i.e. some aspect is brought into relief, inevitably some ‘invisible’ is also implied with it: potentialities, hidden dimensions, including the possibility for the ‘visible’ to be thematized symbolically through forms of expression and meaningful articulation.

This ontology's ultimate horizon is normative. Interpreters have highlighted the connections between Merleau-Ponty's own political reflections and his ontological inquiries (Coole Reference Coole2001; Deranty Reference Deranty2020). Many contemporary thinkers use the ontology of the flesh as their main conceptual framework in reflections in ethical theory (see in particular Diprose Reference Diprose2002; Daly Reference Daly2016), in feminist philosophy and gender studies (Olkowski and Weiss Reference Olkowski and Weiss2006), in critical race theory and disability studies (see Weiss Reference Weiss2015 as an excellent entry point). Bringing in the more grounded analyses of the lectures on the philosophy of nature (Toadvine Reference Toadvine2009), Merleau-Ponty's late work also has a significant impact in environmental philosophy (Abram Reference Abram1988; Cataldi and Hamrick Reference Cataldi and Hamrick2007) and in animal studies (Westling, et al. Reference Westling, Clingerman and Treanor2004; Churchill Reference Churchill, Diprose and Reynolds2014). In all these areas, Merleau-Ponty's late ontology provides a language and a framework that allows them to mobilize some fundamental normative insights. Sharing in the one world through forms of embodiment that are simultaneously individuating and overlapping means that experiences are always imbricated, groups are essentially related to each other, societies and cultures cannot insulate themselves. In this lies the inevitability of conflict and violence, since actions by necessity run up against each other and impact on the ends of other beings. Yet the sharing of the one world and the instability of ontological boundaries also provides the possibility for communication, generosity, cooperation and the shared enjoyment of expressive gestures. As he declared in his lectures on nature: what is ‘made comprehensible by this theory of the flesh’ is ‘an Einfühlung [empathy] with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies’ (N: 209).

Merleau-Ponty argued that the dimension of the ‘flesh’ had not found its proper name so far in the history of philosophy (VI: 147). This might seem surprising since the gesture of collapsing dichotomies had a direct antecedent in Hegel, and Merleau-Ponty was well aware of this (for instance VI: 95; Storey Reference Storey2009). Nevertheless, Hegel did not make ‘perceptual faith’, my incontrovertible presence in the world and of worldly things for me, the experience in which such intertwinings are most evidently revealed. For him the ontological unity of different orders, of the subjective and the objective in particular, is simply grounded in rationality, so that it is in complex, structured concretions, whether ‘objective’, in social organizations or in works of art, or ‘subjective’, in scientific and philosophical knowledge, that such unity is most clearly viewed. Those examples, not perceptual faith, provide the most visible ‘witnessing’ (Zeugnis) of spirit, of rationality acknowledging itself in real beings (see for instance in relation to social and political institutions, EPR: §147).

However, precisely because Hegel already took as his fundamental point of departure the reciprocal inherence of the objective and the subjective, his own theory of sensation, feeling and perception adumbrated insights that announced Merleau-Ponty's later reflections. If we focus on this part of the system, we uncover descriptions that anticipate the ‘intertwinings’ Merleau-Ponty was aiming to describe. Uncovering the lineaments of a ‘theory of the flesh’ in Hegel's texts helps to show that his normative vision might have been more expansive than appears if one focuses only on the part in which such vision is most explicitly broached, namely the part on ‘objective spirit’.

In the ‘anthropology’ section of the theory of subjective spirit, something approaching Merleau-Ponty's ‘flesh’ can be detected. This occurs at the moment when Hegel analyses the most primitive dimensions of subjectivity, captured by the notion of ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ (see Winfield Reference Winfield2010 and Testa Reference Testa and Stern2013 for the Aristotelian implications of understanding Seele as ‘psyche’). The soul designates subjective life in as much as the latter genetically emerges from the individual's embeddedness in natural and social worlds. Hegel makes it clear (PSP: §401) that for the human psyche both the material and the social worlds are equally implicated in ontogenesis. At that level, the two dimensions of the external and the internal, the subjective and the objective begin to delineate themselves, yet they remain indistinct as consciousness and self-consciousness have not yet developed.

‘External’, natural features are translated into qualitative modifications of the emerging self. The same is true of internal organic processes, which, qua organic, are also a part of the grand ‘macrocosm’ (PSP: §391). The medium through which the ‘external’ is thus translated into ‘internal’, qualitative features is the corporeity of the subject, her Leiblichkeit, and the latter's capacity to be affected, to feel and sense (PSP: §401). The different processes of ‘embodiment’ Hegel explores at this point all amount to a transformation of ‘external’ processes and features into ‘subjective’ bodily equivalents (Ikäheimo Reference Ikäheimo and Moyar2017: 433). This work of embodiment is at the genesis of the split dimensions of subject and object, yet the latter remain caught in the indistinction between ontological orders resulting from the fact the medium in which these dimensions emerge is simultaneously about and of the world. Hegel explicitly characterizes this initial level of embodied subjective life, as ‘unity of the inner and the outer’ (LPSP: 158).

Two aspects anticipate quite specifically Merleau-Ponty's later theory of the flesh. First, despite the qualification expressed above, Hegel himself emphasizes that this moment is foundational, genetically of course, but also, in a sense, transcendentally: ‘everything is in sensation, and if one wants, everything that comes up in spiritual understanding and in reason has its source and origin in it’ (PSP: §400R). And a few pages later: ‘the soul is the existing concept itself, the existence [Existenz] of the speculative’ (PSP: §403R).

This leads directly to a second major implication, when Hegel highlights the links between the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’. The ‘invisible’ first designates the distinction between the near and the far, what affects the subject directly and can be directly an object of intentionality, and what is attached to this ‘visible’ yet lies behind the immediate horizon, something that could be discovered but as yet remains imperceptible. Hegel refers to such a dialectic when he singularizes the general power of affectivity into particular natural worlds, and these natural environments in turn produce specific qualitative crystallizations in the subjective beings that inhabit them (PSP: §§391–94). All of these environments remain particularizations of the general world-soul and as such all represent different connected entry points into it. The invisible also denotes the latent potentialities that are present but remain as yet non-activated in actual sensations (PSP: 209).

Finally, the invisible denotes the symbolic productions that grow out of the ‘sensible’ and remain attached to it. In his theory of psychosomatics, or ‘psychic physiology’ (PSP: §401R), Hegel describes the two-way relations between the symbolic creations of conscious human action (such as ethical values, moral norms), and their physiological expressions in specific shapings of the human organs (both internal and external). Such psychosomatic processes ensure the two-way passage between ‘objective’ natural and social worlds and the internal world of the subject. External and internal forms of embodiment both testify to the subject being affected by the world and to its capacity to represent the world for itself. Hegel captured such circulation through the typically Merleau-Pontian equivocality of the notion of sense:

At this level of Leiblichkeit, however, subjective symbolization of the objective is not yet synonymous with the splitting of consciousness. We are still on a plane of indistinction, where flesh in the narrow, individual sense, the flesh of the world (the world in its multiple dimensions), and the flesh of ideas (the symbolic articulation of those world-dimensions) overlap without clear delineation.

Considered from the perspective of the finite human individual, embodiment is thus already the foundational moment for Hegel, in both a genetic and a transcendental sense. The conclusion he draws from this is an expansive theory of constitutive attachments, the idea that the content of an individual's subjectivity consists in all the attachments she has established with surrounding worlds and their objects:

Hegel uses the metaphysical scheme of the monad to make sense of this bi-directional bond between macro- and microcosm (PSP: 219; and Merleau-Ponty himself in VI: 223). From the point of view of ontogenesis, a human subject is but the whole world refracted into a singular point of view. This means that the reality of a subject, both in terms of its affective content and of its material reality, its ‘liveliness’ (Lebendigkeit), is nothing but ‘the totality of connections in which the human soul finds itself’. A few pages later, Hegel stresses the constitutive importance of immersion into one's particular worlds:

Or in the words he used in the 1827 lectures: ‘the content of the world is the human being's own inner content’ (LPSP: 130).

This is a radically relational theory of subjectivity. The paper's central claim is that this expansive relationality implies an expansive conception of normativity. In order to justify this claim we need to briefly recall, in the next section, what is the link for Hegel between ontology and normativity.

II. The normativity of relationality

By normativity is meant here, very generally, the perspective from which an individual or collective practice should be deemed right or wrong. This is a generic perspective that can translate more specifically into moral, legal or political prescriptions. Focusing on these areas might seem an undue restriction of the term's meanings since there is also a theoretical form of normativity, in which the core categories are the true and the false, and there are technical forms of normativity, in terms of the efficient and inefficient. In this paper, however, the focus is on the moral, legal and political senses of the term.

Like all classical philosophers, Hegel does not use the term itself. Instead, he talks of rights (Rechte), wrongs and duties (Pflichten) in a number of different areas and thus in a number of different senses. A practice is ‘right’ (recht without capital) if it abides by some Recht (a right). If a right exists, it defines a duty that those who are in relation with the entity at stake are under an obligation to fulfil. To not fulfil a right is wrong and is to commit a wrong (ein Unrecht).

Right for Hegel is a very broad concept. He defines it as any ‘existence [Dasein] of free will’ (EPR: §29). This denotes individual human beings, who are eminent representatives of free will, as ‘subjective spirits’, but also ‘objective’ concretions of spirit. The family, civil society, the State have rights. Individuals have duties towards these institutions as such, and not just towards other individuals who are part of them.

Right and wrong apply to ‘free will’ because they are categories that make sense in the dimensions of the objective and the practical. They have to do with the realization of spirit and freedom in the external world. The will is free for Hegel when it wills something in the world in which it can ‘find itself’, or ‘be at home’, and this occurs whenever ‘subjective’ intentionality and objective reality display some form of overlapping rationality. In that case, the subjective intentionality finds itself realized in the rational existence/Dasein in the world. When the specific normative duties attached to that objective existence are fulfilled by the subject, the latter at the same time realizes her own freedom, since she actually wills something she is in agreement with (given the assumption of shared rationality).

The definition of free will as ‘being at home’ in external reality captures Hegel's original conception of freedom as ‘concrete freedom’. The aspect of it that matters especially here is that the ‘other’ Hegel refers to when freedom is ‘concrete’ is not just ‘other’ in the logical sense, but also simply a real other. This comes out clearly in the most famous example of concrete freedom, in the Remark to §7 of the Philosophy of Right, in which the other is the one whom one loves. It is also made explicit in this passage from the 1827 lectures on the philosophy of spirit: ‘Concrete freedom means that in whatever determines, limits, or negates me, I nevertheless remain at home with myself [nur bei mir selbst bin]’ (LPSP: 67).

In this passage, ‘determination’ could be read in a formal, logical sense, but ‘limitation’ and ‘negation’ clearly point to real processes also.

Emphasizing this realist sense of ‘being with’ together with the notion of constitutive attachment issues in a greatly expanded view of normativity. As we saw in the previous section, the subject is nothing but the bundle of bonds linking her to her constitutive others. Given that concrete freedom for Hegel means being ‘at home’ in one's real others, and given that normativity for him is linked to the realization of concrete freedom, the expansive theory of relationality that can be found in his genetic account of subjectivity, when we consider subjectivity as ‘flesh’, should also therefore entail an expansive conception of normativity. From the point of view of the human being as a being inserted into her world through a ‘flesh’ that is hers but that also points to the multiple depth-dimensions of the bonds connecting her to her constitutive objects, many of which are not human, or maybe not even organic (for instance material bodies, natural elements, landscapes), it would seem that normative relations extend well beyond relations to other human beings. Indeed, in the paradigmatic Remark to §7 of the Philosophy of Right, the other Hegel talks about is a generic one: das Andere, not der or die Andere. Before we focus on these relations to non-human entities, more can be said on what the normativity of relationality entails precisely.

III. Normative implications of constitutive attachments

A common sense implication immediately follows from the notion of constitutive attachments. If what I am consists in nothing but the threads that tie me to others, so that I would die if those external realities disappeared, then specific normative regards are clearly owed to those others to whom I am constitutively related. The self cannot treat those constitutive others with indifference or indeed disrespect.

The first implication of this basic thought is merely negative. If I rely on ‘others’ to be what I am, then the continued existence of those others is a necessary precondition of my being. Even just at a basic self-interested level, I should care for the continuing existence of all those others on whom I essentially relate. In fact, Hegel acknowledged the right to exist as the most fundamental basis for any normative theory. Logically, this translates into the need to care for the conditions of my survival also (EPR: §151).

As we just saw, however, Hegel's conception of normativity is more demanding as it is linked to his account of freedom. The immediate, instrumental requirement just noted concerns the basic existence of the self, and as such is only an external precondition of freedom. Considering the other only in an instrumental sense, as a material condition of my own survival, is a type of relation that only allows for a very minimal sense of ‘finding oneself in the other’. In such a relation, I only find myself in the other negatively, as a negative condition of myself: if the other was not there, I would not be either. However, if I only consider the other as the negative condition of myself, this is also how I am at home in it, and it is therefore also the perspective I take upon my own self. In this case this is a very minimal perspective, to be or not to be.

Relations of freedom are those in which the other is considered not just negatively but positively, as a positive condition of the self. This is in fact the genuine sense of ‘constitutive’.

The first implication of ‘constitutive’ in this positive sense could still be instrumental: in this case, it is not just the bare existence or presence of the other that matters as a negative condition of my own self, but considering specifically how the other can contribute to my plans. This is how we relate to useful objects, and indeed to other human beings when we take an instrumentalist approach to the social world, for instance in market relations (EPR: §189). However, if we only ever relate to other human beings and even to non-human realities, like our natural environments, in this instrumental way, our freedom will miss some key features, for the reasons stated in the previous paragraph.

The more demanding sense of ‘constitutive’ is if the other is considered as a positive contribution to my own constitution precisely as other. Theunissen's (Reference Theunissen1994) Hegel-inspired concept of ‘communicative freedom’ articulates the idea well. In this case, the basic normative attitude is to be able to ‘be at home in the other’ by letting the other, or indeed helping the other, fully be what it can be. By participating in the other's full being, by ‘being at home’ in it, I equally constitute my own being in its fullest sense. Since I am ‘negated’, ‘limited’, and ‘determined’ by an other in whose being I can find oneself, such negation, limitation and determination is equally an assertion and expansion of my own self.

The implication of relating to the other in a positive, constitutive sense, is thus to ensure not just that it survives (as I am dependent on its existence for my own), not just that I can use it for my own purposes, but that it itself can be fully what it is, as much as is possible. This idea makes intuitive sense more particularly when it is formulated negatively: if I am nothing but my relations to the other and that other is somehow stunted in its growth, prevented from being what it is supposed to be or what it could fully be, then that directly affects me.

How do such normative implications apply to the different beings to whom the human subject relates ‘constitutively’? From the point of view of my immersion in the world, as ‘flesh’, it would seem that Hegel's other-oriented conception of normativity should not be limited to others like me but include many non-human entities. Given how expansive our constitutive dependency is, our normative outlook should not be restricted to relations of recognition. How exactly are non-human entities to be considered normatively, on the expansive account of concrete freedom suggested here?

IV. Normative relations to non-human objects

Before we answer this question, a serious objection must first be dealt with. It might be true that Hegel has an expansive view, ontologically and genetically, of the relations that are constitutive of a human self, a view that encompasses all kinds of beings, not just human ones. And it is true of course that his theory of freedom defines relations to others not just in negative but also in positive terms, as ‘being with’. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that he therefore supports an expansive view of the normative status of non-human beings. The reason why the conclusion cannot be drawn from the two stated premises is that he has a narrow conception of the subjects of freedom, and freedom, as we saw, is the basis for any mention of right and wrong for him. Only those beings who, like myself, are fully endowed with spirit can be subjects of rights. Being at home in the other only means respecting the other in the case of other beings like me. With inanimate things, it means imposing my will on them, shaping them and using them for my own ends, potentially destroying them if my own freedom requires it. To the extent that they are deprived of freedom, this applies fully to animals (EPR: §76, §§78–79, §§85–86). Indeed, in as much as different nations embody the development of self-reflecting reason in different degrees, those nations that are placed higher in the hierarchy of human development have a ‘right’ to subject others to their will (EPR: §351). Ontological relationality translates into duties towards the other only in the area of inter-human recognition and even there only with degrees and qualifications.

Two rejoinders can be made to mitigate the force of this objection. The first is to concede that Hegel's moral and political theory is indeed classical in its anthropocentrism so that the position this paper seeks to highlight might be inspired by and draw on some of Hegel's texts, but does not reflect his own view of which beings have intrinsic normative status. The second rejoinder, however, would qualify such a concession. In this, as on many other issues, Hegel's thought is full of tensions, such that it takes only a slight emphasis on some passages in his writings to highlight a line of thinking that might well contradict or at least problematize passages in other parts but is nevertheless undeniably present, or at least made possible by his own arguments. This is what allowed Theunissen (Reference Theunissen, Cornell, Rosenfeld and Carlson1991), for instance, to criticize Hegel's account of intersubjectivity in the Philosophy of Right for falling short of a truly relational account of communicative freedom that had been extracted precisely from his own writings (see Deranty Reference Deranty2002 on the issue of gender equality).

In fact, there are substantial sections in Hegel's writings where he seems to come close to the expansion of normative relationality discussed here, notably in his lectures on aesthetics.

In order to define aesthetic judgement as it applies to natural objects, Hegel opposes it to two other attitudes humans typically adopt towards the world. In them, an object is of interest only as a means to the subject's ends. In attitudes where the subject seeks to realize her ends for practical outcomes, typically in ‘desire’, the object is grasped cognitively only from the narrow, utilitarian point of view relevant to the subject and is subjected to her forceful intervention. In the theoretical attitude, the subject apprehends the object only as a token of its kind, aiming to find a universal within it, and how it relates to other objects through universal laws. In the aesthetic judgement, by contrast, the object is apprehended for its own sake, which means, both in its individual existence and in terms of what it is for itself. In opposition to ‘the practical interest of desire’, Hegel writes,

As he says later on, ‘the contemplation of beauty is of a liberal kind; it leaves objects alone as being inherently free and infinite’ (A: 114). Or in the formulation of the 1823 lectures: ‘art lets the objects be free, and is a free examination in the sense of letting the things exist over against itself’ (1823 A: 199).

To let the object ‘persist freely and on its own account’, to ‘cherish an interest in the object in its individual existence’, are inherently normative attitudes. We might call them forms of ontological respect (to let one persist freely) and of ontological sympathy (to cherish an interest in another). Yet, as the examples used in the sections on natural beauty show, the objects in question include any kind of being, from animals to natural environments to inanimate objects.

One might counter that the relation to the object mentioned here does not equate with the constitutive relations discussed earlier. Constitution and contemplation seem to be two different kinds of relations to others. However, if we consider what is the basis for a judgment of beauty for Hegel, the overlap is in fact substantial. Indeed, highlighting this ontological basis strengthens the case for making the aesthetic attitude a model for the kind of normative relationality this paper seeks to locate in his thinking.

What we find beautiful, Hegel argues, are sensuous exemplars of rationality as it manifests itself in the world, in other words of the ‘Idea’: ‘the beautiful itself must be grasped as Idea, in particular as Idea in a determinate form, i.e. as Ideal’ (A: 106). Rationality and freedom, however, are intimately related. The structure of concepts displays the same structure of ‘being with’ that defines concrete freedom. A concept is the unity in a singular being of particular moments brought together under a general, universal meaning. The universal is thus ‘at home’ in its determinations as it brings them together in an ‘ideal unity’. A concept represents an eminent illustration of concrete freedom (A: 109). Conversely, being concretely free for any being is displaying the inner articulation of the concept. The dialectic of the self that launches the Philosophy of Right is premised precisely on this equivalence (EPR: §§5–7).

Beautiful beings display structures that are formal, sensuous manifestations of the concept itself, and as such formally display structures that are characteristic of freedom. Genuine aesthetic contemplation captures precisely those two dimensions in the object. First, aesthetic contemplation is sensitive to the fact that the object's form displays the defining structures of the concept: the parts are separate yet articulated with each other; they are articulated around an inner unity, that is, they are indeed present as particular parts but have their independence ‘abolished’ by being parts of a whole. And this inner unity, the ‘soul’ of the whole in its parts, expresses itself as such, through features reflecting inner organization, or even, for higher beings, through purposeful movement and voice. Secondly, this perception of the object as an individual instantiation of the concept can also be characterized as sensing an approximate, material figuration of freedom itself in the object. This in turn explains why aesthetic perception is ‘of a liberal kind’: not only does it perceive the object ‘as being inherently free and infinite’, it ‘leaves the object alone’, in other words lets it be free. The freedom that is sensed in the object, a sense arising from it displaying the structure of the concept, is met by a freedom-respecting attitude towards it.

The beings that display most eminently the characteristics just discussed are living ones, and at the highest level, animals (A: 122–23). Generally speaking, however, we find beauty in any object in which we can recognize the kind of ‘ideal unity’ just mentioned. This begins even at the level of basic material formations, such as precious stones. Even in this case, Hegel does not hesitate to describe the ontological basis of the judgement of beauty by using the very same terminology he employs to characterize concrete freedom as a feature of spirit itself:

Hegel's aesthetic judgement is thus not contemplative in the detached, disinterested sense of the term. It is interested, yet not in the narrow, egocentric sense. Instead, a higher kind of interest is at play in aesthetic judgement, namely the interest humans have in seeing the freedom of the concept manifest itself in external beings. This is most particularly the case in the most eminent display of conceptuality in nature, namely life and its manifestation in purposeful movement and in forms of expression. When a human being judges a natural being beautiful, she shares in the latter displaying analogically the structure of freedom, which means, in the case of organic beings, in her liveliness and its material expressions. When we perceive a being in this way, we recognize in it the very same capacity that defines us in our core. This is a relation of identification and projection, a sharing of ontological status, paralleling the mechanisms of introjection and projection Merleau-Ponty highlighted in his Nature lectures (N: 210, 269, 271, 278). But if such ontological sharing is indeed witnessed, since it is a sharing of the capacity for concrete freedom, then the relationality that binds us to our world and its many objects has normative significance, not just ‘aesthetic’ in the traditional sense of the term.

Hegel himself already seemed to draw this normative conclusion. If indeed we ‘cherish an interest in the object in its individual existence’, then clearly we cannot do with it as we please. On Hegel's own account, that would directly contradict the freedom we recognize in it through contemplating its animated Leiblichkeit. On the contrary, if we ‘let the object persist freely and on its own account’, then we ourselves also grow in our own being through the commonality of our different yet germane Leiblichkeit. If being free is ‘being with’ the other in the positive, constitutive sense defined above, and if that other somehow displays features of freedom, then our relationship to the object takes on a normative dimension, cannot just be instrumental or even merely neutral. We have an intrinsic ‘interest’ in not only granting the object some form of respect but even making sure it is in a position to actualize whatever analogical features of freedom constitute it.

The aesthetic attitude to the world thus provides an apt model for what it means to let the other be, to partake in its being, and to grow ourselves in our being in the same process. The judgement of beauty is the kind of attitude humans show they can display towards any entity in the world when they let it be because they have recognized that they share a common ontological destiny. This does not mean that the precise content of normative responsibilities could somehow be drawn from aesthetic attitudes. It merely confirms that human individuals and collectives are capable of taking into normative consideration the beings on which they as a matter of fact depend for their own being.

The lectures on aesthetics stretch the normative consideration of non-human beings not just to inanimate formations, such as crystals, but even to natural formations that would seem to display only very vaguely a form of ‘ideal unity’:

In passages such as this one, Hegel extends the normative significance of a perception of organization and internal unity even to a random section of the world. When perceiving the environment in such a mode, the judgement of analogy between me and the object as representatives of ‘the concept’ might be stretched to its limits, but it is still sufficiently strong to justify an ‘interest’ in me. This interest, as this section has shown, because it is premised on the sharing of the flesh of the world, which for Hegel is conceptuality itself, is not just a contemplative one, in the usual sense of ‘aesthetic’, but also a normative one. From this flow practical normative consequences, along the lines already suggested: indifferent, instrumental treatment of this world, or even worse, active desecration of it, for instance through the ruthless exploitation of the resources it contains, would be a desecration of my own being. By contrast, letting the environment be, allowing it to flourish on its own terms, terms whose formal structures are sensuously perceived already in aesthetic judgment, is not something that I ought to do just because the environment's survival might be a condition of my own survival, but also because in my affirmative relation to it, its existence and flourishing are also vindications of my own and in the end are vindications of our shared ontological partnership.