“the free will which wills the free will”: on marriage … · “the free will which wills the...

The Owl of Minerva 44:1–2 (2012–13)

© The Hegel Society of America - ISSN 0030-7580DOI: 10.5840/owl201311185 pp. 93–117

“The Free Will Which Wills the Free Will”: On Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

D. C. SchindlerThe John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America

Abstract: This paper aims to present Hegel’s conception of freedom—as “be-ing at home with oneself in an other”—in simple and straightforward terms. Drawing primarily on the “Introduction” to the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel outlines the nature of the will, and then the first part of the discussion of Sittlichkeit (ethical substance), in which the will finds its most concrete realization, the paper presents marriage as the paradigm of Hegel’s notion of freedom. Hegel’s abstract formulation, “the free will which wills the free will,” is fulfilled in marriage as a communal willing of community.

A common complaint regarding Hegel is that he ultimately leaves no place for freedom. The complaint is ironic because one could fairly easily argue that Hegel, at least nominally, accords freedom perhaps more importance in his philosophy than any other thinker before or even after him: not only is it the capstone of his anthropology,1 the foundation of his political philosophy,2 and the goal of history as he conceives it,3 but freedom represents the very es-sence of spirit,4 it is the inner principle of his philosophy of nature,5 and even appears within the structure of logic (!) as he conceives it.6 In a word, freedom is the heart of philosophy, for Hegel, and it is so because it is the heart of reality simply.7 If Hegel does indeed state these things clearly, whence arises the common complaint? An attempt to answer this question leads us to yet another irony: it seems to be the case that the very importance Hegel accords freedom transforms it to such an extent that many people find it distorted beyond recognition. In other words, it is not that Hegel has no room for freedom, but that what he means by freedom is not what anyone else does.

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94 The Owl of Minerva 44:1–2 (2012–13)

Admittedly, his general definition of freedom—“Being at home with oneself in an other”8—does not seem to have any evident correlate in the his-tory of thought.9 Of course, he himself was aware of this peculiarity, and once remarked that the concept of freedom was, of all the concepts in philosophy, the most frequently misunderstood.10 It is important to realize, however, that a misunderstanding, for Hegel, is almost invariably a partial understanding that mistakes itself for the whole. Accordingly, Hegel thought that the various conventional ideas about freedom, which indeed contain some indispensable truth, needed to be integrated, they needed to find their proper place within a more comprehensive understanding. Hegel thus aimed not to invent a new meaning of the word, but rather to articulate the genuine whole of which these more familiar ideas are parts or aspects, and in this way to discover their truth. Without a context to give these aspects of freedom purpose and meaning, Hegel felt that they could in fact turn out to be quite dangerous.

While we do not have, as Hegel did, the Terror of the French Revolution as a recent memory, the charge that the usual modern notion of freedom is, if not actually destructive, at least seriously impoverished, has become common enough that we ought to find the proposal of a more rich and comprehensive alternative notion worth considering. The purpose of this essay, thus, is to set into relief what appears to be most distinctive about Hegel’s notion of freedom, namely, its essentially social or communal character, and to attempt to do so in a brief, straightforward, and nontechnical way. Because of con-straints of space, we will not try to defend his particular notion of freedom, and will raise a couple of critical questions only in conclusion. But the ef-fort to give simple expression to Hegel’s notion can be judged worthwhile, we hope, for three reasons: first, because one cannot defend or criticize something in any event until one understands what it is; second, because what we will suggest is the most distinctive aspect of Hegel’s notion is rarely recognized—indeed, it is all but absent from the secondary English-language literature on Hegel;11 and, third, because this aspect presents what seems to be one of the most genuine alternatives available to the notion we are most familiar with from classical liberal political philosophy without being simply its opposite. We will pursue our aim here by offering an explanation of the notion of will that Hegel elaborates in the introduction to his Philosophy of Right, an explanation that takes its bearings from the context of the Philosophy of Right in Hegel’s system. Then, we will present the particular community of persons called marriage and family, which Hegel describes in part three

Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 95

of his book, as a paradigm of Hegel’s account of the will, and so a paradigm of freedom simply. We will end the presentation with a couple of questions for future exploration.

I. Hegel’s Notion of the Will

Preliminary Observations

Let us begin with what might seem the most obvious approach to Hegel’s political philosophy. In looking over the contents of Hegel’s 1820 book, The Philosophy of Right—which discusses rights, property, contracts, morality, and the various legal institutions that comprise social life in the modern state—one would naturally take this to represent his practical philosophy, as distinct from his theoretical philosophy (i.e. his metaphysics); in other words, this book would seem to deal, not with the essence of reality as grasped by the mind, but rather with the field of action, specifically with the laws, in both the moral and legal sense, governing human social behavior.12 This impression would seem to be confirmed by the fact that, in the book’s introduction, Hegel presents freedom as the essential basis of political order, and goes on to elaborate a conception of the will as a background for the discussion to follow in the body of the text. Thus, one would naturally assume, the will, as the power to choose and execute one’s judgments, is the faculty of action, it is that by which individuals enter into contact with one another in the public sphere, and the content of the Philosophy of Right would accordingly represent an articulation of the proper framework for this social interaction. Indeed, Hegel praises Rousseau for having recognized that the will and its freedom is the foundation of political order.13

But this apparently common sense approach to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right stumbles on two points, even before it undertakes a more detailed investigation of the content of the book’s introduction. In the first place, Hegel defines the idea of freedom in this introduction as “the free will which wills the free will.”14 If we understand the will as the individual’s power to choose, this definition would identify freedom with an individual’s choos-ing, not any particular good, but simply a capacity: choosing the power to choose. This, though, would be an utterly empty notion of freedom. Indeed, it would be radically individualistic, entirely closed up within itself, in which case we would be at a loss to explain how a notion of freedom as antisocial as this could form the basis for the political order Hegel describes in the rest


of the book. Moreover, choosing the power to choose bears not the slightest resemblance to Hegel’s general definition of freedom as “being at home with oneself in an other,” and so it cannot be a proper interpretation of what Hegel means by “the free will willing the free will.” The second obstacle becomes evident only when we step back and view things from a wider angle. It is curious that Hegel elaborates his notion of will, and the freedom that is its essence, not, as one might expect, primarily in the sphere of “subjective spirit,” which is Hegel’s philosophical anthropology, his discussion of the nature of the human being and the various elements that constitute that nature, but rather in the sphere of “objective spirit.” This sphere is the place wherein Hegel elaborates the social dimensions of the human nature he presented in subjective spirit, or more specifically, the actuality of that nature, realized in the world. If Hegel elaborates the meaning of will in the context of objec-tive spirit, it already suggests that he thinks of the will as an essentially social reality, which belongs to man specifically in his relation to others.

Let us examine the transition from subjective to objective spirit in Hegel’s system a little more closely. The “actual free will” appears at the very end of Hegel’s treatment of subjective spirit, marking the point at which spirit enters objectivity proper, and it is defined there as the “unity of theoretical and practical spirit.”15 It is important to note that Hegel tends to avoid the traditional terms “intelligence” and “will” in this context so as not to encour-age what he describes as the confusion that takes these to be two separate powers of the soul, which have their essence in themselves and then coor-dinate with the other only subsequently. As he put it in his lectures on the Philosophy of Right, this confusion supposes that “a human being thinks on the one hand and wills on the other, and that he has thought in one pocket and volition in the other.”16 Instead, for Hegel, each of these includes the other; each in fact is the other, or better, each represents the “whole spirit” under the aspect of one or the other relation to the world. Theoretical spirit is the subject’s having elevated the world (the object) through thought to the level of reason: we may say that it represents the “internalizing” of the world in the spirit. Practical spirit, then, is the “externalizing” of the spirit, as it were, into the world, or its becoming “objective.” In this case, the spirit determines the content of the world in terms of reason through praxis. This is why the emergence of practical spirit marks the transition into objective spirit. To speak of “actual free will” as the unity of these two dimensions is to affirm an “adequation” of the inside and the outside, the perfect realization


of the spirit in the world. Prior to the elaboration of a sophisticated “faculty psychology” in scholastic philosophy, Augustine—called by some the “discov-erer of the will”—conceived it, not as a separate power, but as the whole soul as active, i.e. as turned toward the good.17 Hegel may rightly be interpreted as recovering this “holistic” view of will (practical spirit), though in a distinctly modern idiom as productive rather than as appetitive.

Now, it is especially important to see that Hegel ascribes “will” to man specifically as spirit. We will say more about the social nature of spirit, in Hegel’s philosophy, in section II below. For now, we note simply that spirit represents man in his actual unity with what lies “beyond” him. The philosophy of subjective spirit has three main parts: the Anthropology, wherein Hegel discusses the soul as the internal unity, the animating principle, of the human organism; the Phenomenology, wherein he presents self-conscious subjectivity as the ego’s growing awareness of both itself and its other; and finally the Psychology, wherein he develops spirit as the unity of the self and other, subject and object. In a way that we will elaborate below, spirit is, as it were, man considered as already in the world, as already in relation to the “other,” and the “will,” then, is one of the ways of characterizing this relation. Typically, we think of the will as a faculty that the individual possesses in himself, as part of the make-up of his rational soul, a faculty that is what it is simply in itself, as an instrument that is essentially indifferent to any of the uses that might be made of it. But, for Hegel, this conception would represent a failure to think of will precisely in terms of spirit; instead, it is a conception that reduces the will, we might say, to the level of self-conscious subjectivity, insofar as it absolutizes the separation. He criticizes this view as that belong-ing to the understanding [Verstand] rather than properly to reason [Vernunft]:

The understanding stops at mere being-in-itself and therefore calls freedom in accordance with this being-in-itself a faculty [Vermögen], since it is indeed in this case a mere potentiality [Möglichkeit]. But the understanding regards this determination as absolute and perennial, and takes the relationship [Beziehung] of freedom to what it wills, or in general to its reality, merely as its application to a given material, an application which does not belong to the essence of freedom itself.18

Hegel’s aim, by contrast, is to define the will and its freedom in terms of actual-ity or completion rather than possibility or potentiality. His goal is thus to make realization the essential moment, which gives his view of the will an unfamiliar note of objectivity from first to last. For example, he describes property in The Philosophy of Right, not as an object one has the right to use as he wishes—i.e. a


thing to which he may externally apply his will however he sees fit—but as the objectivity of the will, and so in a certain respect as identical to the will itself:

Hence everyone has the right to make his will a thing [Sache] or to make the thing his will, or, in other words, to supersede the thing and transform it into his own, for the thing, as externality, has no end in itself, and is not infinite self-reference but something external to itself. . . . This manifestation [of the supremacy of the will over the thing] occurs through my conferring upon the thing an end other than that which it immediately possessed; I give the living creature, as my property, a soul other than that which it previously had; I give it my soul.19

If Hegel introduces the notion of free will as the culmination of subjective spirit, it is thus only in an abstract outline which then receives its essential features in the social sphere of objectivity.

This general sense of the will allows us, now, to reassess what is going on in the Philosophy of Right. It is not the case that Hegel presents a descrip-tion of the will as the individual faculty of choice in the introduction and then discusses the “application” of this faculty to the social order, that is, the “exercise” of the will in relation to a variety of objects, and ultimately to other human beings.20 Instead, we ought to see that the book is an unfolding of the objective manifestation of reason or spirit through the progressively complex dimensions of social life: rights, contracts, moral principles, con-science, family, economics, the police, the state, and world history. In other words, in the most proper sense, the will is not merely the protagonist of the book, but equally the plot and perhaps above all the conclusion. We do not know what the will is properly until the end.21 This allows us, incidentally, to read the book in a much more dramatic light. And it suggests, already, that Hegel’s understanding of will is not something essentially empty, as we might have feared, but rather quite full of content.

This broader view of the nature of the will in Hegel allows us to interpret properly the specific judgments he makes in his elaboration of the nature of the will in the introduction (§1–33). We will focus here in a rather schematic way on the three aspects that constitute the body of the introduction, namely, his account of the essential form of the will, his characterization of its proper content, and the unity of the two in the Idea of freedom.22 The discussion of the will in the introduction may be articulated thus:

A. The form of the will (§5–8)B. The content of the will (§9–20)C. The Idea of the will as unity of form and content (§21–28)


The Form of the Will

Regarding form, Hegel says that the freedom of the will is best described as “self-determination.”23 This definition is no surprise to anyone familiar with modern philosophy, but this familiarity makes it especially important to note that the phrase means something rather unfamiliar as Hegel uses it. While we would normally identify self-determination with the will’s power to determine itself, Hegel means primarily the accomplishment of that power, its results, though he does not mean this in a way that excludes the power that brings it about.

Self-determination, for him, can be analyzed into three distinct aspects or moments. First is the “self” that, prior to any particular choice, is indeter-minate, and indeed infinitely so: it is capable of almost anything. The self, considered in abstraction from anything to which it might direct its choice, is initially in a state of (relatively) infinite possibility. Hegel calls this moment “negative freedom”; it represents the native human ability to detach oneself from any particular reality, whatever it might be. Indeed, Hegel observes that this aspect of freedom is so radical that the self is able to detach itself from its very self: man is the only animal capable of suicide.24 It is important to note that he both criticizes this common view of freedom as dangerously inadequate in itself and also insists that it is an essential element of freedom more comprehensively understood.25 While this indeterminacy is intoxicat-ing, it is empty in itself, and so requires some determination. Second, then, is the choice that “negates the negation,” that is, cancels out the emptiness of sheer indeterminacy. This moment is a resolution, a settling on one option rather than any of the others, and so a specifying or concretizing, of the previ-ously open, but empty, possibility. According to Hegel, this aspect, like the first, “belongs to freedom, but does not constitute the whole of freedom.”26 The essential form of the will, finally, lies in the third moment, which is the unity of the two, the “self” and “determination” brought together as “self-determination.” What Hegel intends by the phrase in this context is that the self identifies itself with a particular choice, which means that the self embraces the choice as its own, as expressing something essential about itself. Self-determination, far from any power, is thus, we might say, the incarnation of the self, its becoming “real,” through a choice that gives it definite form.

Properly speaking, then, the will is not some thing existing in itself prior to any choice, but comes about in the choice insofar as it is embraced as expressing some truth of the will, and so affirmed as the will’s external


existence. Interestingly, Augustine presents a similar insight when, in his Confessions, he describes the state of unfreedom as the will’s not being identi-cal with what it chooses (non ideo est, quod imperat).27 As Hegel himself puts it, “the will is not complete and universal until it is determined, and until this determination is superseded and idealized; it does not become will until it is this self-mediating activity and this return to itself.”28 To put it simply, will is not the potency, the power that determines itself to one object or another; instead, while clearly including this point, the will is more adequately defined as the actualized potency of the subject’s unity with its object. We may thus articulate the form of the will in the following way:

A. Self (indeterminacy: the abstract infinite)B. Determination (particularity of choice: the finite)C. Self-determination (the unity of the two as concrete infinity29)

The Content of the Will

Now, self-determination is the essential definition of freedom, but it is as yet merely formal; it is only an outline of what freedom is, and not yet the real-ity of it. (This point is often missed by even some of the best interpreters of Hegel.30) The content of self-determination has yet to be specified. It is not just any choice with which the self is able to identify itself; the nature of the choice matters. As we have said, it ultimately has to be adequate to the nature of what chooses. By insisting on the significance of the content of acts of the will, Hegel may be said to be recovering an ancient view beyond the modern notion of freedom as indifferent power, though, unlike the ancients, he does not judge that content in relation to the good, but ultimately in relation to spirit.31 Initially, after specifying self-determination, Hegel observes that the self can identify itself with a particular choice precisely by recognizing it as one of its many possibilities, a recognition that allows the self to transcend the particularity of this determination and thus hold onto its infinite inde-terminacy even within this particular resolution.32 But if we stop here, we end up coming to a rest in something like the empty indeterminacy that Hegel had described as “negative freedom.” It is not enough to say that the self does not lose itself in the particularity of its choices; to be free in a real sense, the self has to find itself, positively, in some particular choice, specifically a choice with which it can identify truly because the thing chosen represents a reality adequate to the self.


Hegel thus turns, after presenting the form of freedom as self-determi-nation, to consider different kinds of content, which he (unsurprisingly) distinguishes into three types according to what makes them desirable, i.e. why they are chosen. The first consists of the things we choose simply because we want them. In other words, they are things that present themselves im-mediately to us on the basis of our natural drives, impulses, and instincts. The second are things that we choose, not because of a natural inclination, but simply because it is our choice. What Hegel means by the term he uses here, “Willkür”—the English translation, “arbitrariness,”33 works only if we understand the word in its etymological sense—is not just, as one might initially think, a choice that is totally random or groundless in the sense of having no natural end, but rather also the choice that one makes on the basis of reason, understood here precisely as what transcends nature. He thus mentions Kant’s notion of freedom—the autonomy of reason—as an example of what he means by the term.34

Interestingly, Hegel claims that “Willkür” is the “most common” notion people have of freedom, saying that this is what is meant when people de-scribe freedom as “being able to do as one pleases.”35 But for Hegel, neither self-determination as surrender to natural desires nor self-determination as the “formal self-activity” of reason are adequate. This latter is inadequate because it remains merely formal, identifying reason not with any substantial content but simply with itself in abstraction from all content, i.e. as nothing but internal self-consistency. Note, this criticism would apply equally to the conventional sense of Willkür (“I want to do whatever it is I want to do”) and the Kantian sense of the categorical imperative as the absence of con-tradiction. Though they may be completely opposed in one respect (absolute licentiousness is clearly at the other end of the spectrum from Kant’s rigor-ous deontologism), the two cases are the same insofar as they take the will’s (formal) unity with itself to be the essential point. According to Hegel, such a view will tend to define reason in opposition to nature.

The adequate content of will can be neither nature on its own nor reason on its own, but rather the unity of the two. At the end of his philosophy of subjective spirit, Hegel had described this unity as “happiness,” i.e. complete subjective fulfillment.36 Here, however, in the context of objective spirit, he identifies this unity—making implicit reference to Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man—with education.37 Schiller described education [Bildung] in aesthetic terms as the formation of the whole person, wherein the


life of the body becomes, so to speak, transparent to the soul, and the soul becomes substantialized by expressing itself directly in the body. Thus, the natural drives are not gratified simply in their “raw” immediacy, but rather in a specifically human or rational way, and reason’s ideals are not forcibly imposed on things, but brought about “organically,” we might say.38 As educated in this sense, we pursue our ends not merely in reference to ourselves in our material individuality, but at the same time as exhibiting cultural form, and so in an idealized manner. In other words, we not only achieve, we also represent; we give expression in our choices to what it properly means to be human simply. Through education, one no longer lives as a mere particular individual that is in principle, if not in actuality, opposed to all other individuals, but now specifically as man. Education, thus conceived, is the universalization of the human being—that is, a “turning toward one”—in a double sense: both uniting his nature and reason within, and uniting the individual and the community without. As an expression of Bildung, the content of the will becomes rational differently from the way it does in Kant, since it is now rational in a truly “objective,” and so in a more-than-merely-formal sense. The content of the will can thus be articulated in the following way:

A. Nature (instincts and immediate desires)B. Reason (formal self-consistency)C. Education (the unity of nature and reason and so concrete universality)

The Idea of the Will

It may seem at this point that we have reached a kind of adequation of the will to itself, insofar as the will is the objectification of Geist, and education represents an objective content that is now concretely rational. However, if we look back on the discussion so far, we see that we have the form of the will as self-determination, and its content as the universal; but the complete idea of freedom, for Hegel, is the unity of form and content. It is only when self-determination and concrete universality come together that we have a unity of will and reason, which is to say that we have spirit that has become objective. But what does the unity of self-determination and concrete uni-versality mean? It is only here that we come to see what is truly distinctive in Hegel’s notion of freedom: the free will is universal self-determination, or, indeed, “self-determining universality.”39 This means that free will is not merely an individual willing a supra-individual object, but a supra-individual willing of supra-individuality. In other words, freedom is the transcendence


of particularity not only in the object of the will, but also in the subject that wills. The Idea of freedom, which in Hegel’s terminology means the actual-ized essence as the unity of form and content, is a social reality. Because of this fact, it is not something that can be adequately described without refer-ence to the concrete institutions that constitute the political order. Hegel therefore presents it at the end of his discussion of the nature of the will in an essentially abstract formulation: “The abstract concept of the Idea of the will is in general the free will which wills the free will.”40 Expressed thus, and especially given the conventional notion of will, it is quite difficult, as we mentioned at the outset, to avoid misconstruing what he means here as a purely self-enclosed activity of the ego choosing its own choosing. But at the end of the introduction, we do not have a complete understanding of the will “in itself,” which we will then see applied to the elements of the political order. Instead, we have an abstract description of the end of political order, which will help us to learn what the will is along the path toward that end.

In sum, the Idea of the will can be articulated thus:A. Form (self-determination)B. Content (universality)C. Idea (self-determining universality, or the free will which wills the free will)

II. Marriage as a Substance

Our discussion so far has remained within the introduction of the Philosophy of Right. Having reached at the end of the introduction what we might call an essentially social concept of will, Hegel then turns in the book to present the various dimensions of politics and ethics as relative expressions of this will, which seeks its most adequate form. While we do not have the space here to enter into any details in this progression, it bears remarking that the notion of will he develops in the introduction allows him to interpret these dimen-sions in specifically social terms, which casts them in a new light with respect to the mainstream classical liberal tradition. Thus, for example, property is not just an individual’s possession, but precisely as such is the presence of the individual in the public sphere for which he has responsibility; rights are inherently social realities and thus coincide from the beginning with duties; morality is not simply about conscience or subjective intentions but objective actions in relation to others, and so forth. For our purposes, we are going to leap directly to what Hegel calls “Sittlichkeit” (sometimes translated as “Ethical life”)—a word that essentially designates community, the common


existence of individuals—because it is only here that Hegel says we have spirit actualized precisely as spirit.41 To understand why, we must first sketch in a few words what Hegel means in fact by spirit, “Geist.”

The Social Nature of Spirit

Hegel’s concept of Geist is certainly notorious; some find the notion downright spooky, for it conjures up an image of some disembodied master being, hovering over the world and from this distance hiddenly dictating the movements of history. It has become common, therefore, among Hegel scholars today, to dismiss any “metaphysical” or “transcendent” interpreta-tion of Geist and instead to translate his thinking into the apparently more credible categories of (Kantian) critical philosophy.42 But to do so ultimately sacrifices what is most distinctive in Hegel on the basis of a “straw man”—if the expression is appropriate in this context—for the transcendence of spirit is a fairly ordinary and evident part of life, even if this transcendence has not often been recognized by philosophers. Spirit, for Hegel, is not simply, as a well-known scholar puts it, “some sort of general consciousness, a single ‘mind’ common to all men,”43 but has a more concrete aspect. It emerges in the relation between subjects, i.e. in intersubjectivity, but it is more than just an interaction between individual subjects. Indeed, it is this “interaction” considered as having a certain reality in itself that is distinct not only from the particular individuals that constitute it, but also from their sum as discrete units. It is, so to speak, the “we-ness” of a coming together of persons, it is what one has in mind when one talks, for example, about doing a particular thing “for our relationship,” and one does not simply mean doing something for oneself or for the other, or for both people individually.

There is nothing particularly strange about this. But what is novel is perhaps the significance Hegel discovers in it, and this discovery is arguably the key to what makes his concept of freedom unique. For Hegel, this “we-ness” represents a distinctive kind of being, which is analogous to all the other sorts of beings we more readily recognize. In fact, he shows that he intends this analogy quite directly not only by calling this being substance [Substanz] (ousia), that is, using the metaphysical term common to the tradition, but indeed by describing the relation between what he calls an ethical whole and its members as like the relation between a substance and its accidents in natural philosophy.44 Just as, for Aristotle, a substance represents a whole greater than the sum of its parts—an “excess” expressed in the distinction of


form from matter45—so too do individuals who come together in a particular way (yet to be described) form something genuinely new, something that can be said to have a reality in itself, precisely because its members can legitimately make the whole an end in their individual activity. Indeed, for Hegel—and this is certainly a controversial point we will mention again at the end—hu-man community is in fact more perfectly representative of a substance than any natural thing because it possesses an end character (in Hegel’s language it has being in and for itself) more completely than any merely material thing can.46 If people have had difficulty coming to terms with Hegel’s notion of community as a substance, it may be because they take a material being as the paradigm of substance, and then of course cannot see how a community can be a being in this particular sense except perhaps metaphorically. But for Hegel, the analogy would properly move in the other direction.

The reason human beings are able to constitute an “ethical substance” is due to the “immateriality” of spirit. Matter, according to Hegel, is charac-terized by externality: partes extra partes.47 No two material things can occupy the same place at the same time; matter displaces itself. But spirit has the character of what we might call non-exclusionary, or self-transcending, in-teriority. (This is in fact what Hegel means by “absolute negativity,” which is what he says constitutes the essence of spirit.48) Two spiritual beings can be in quite a literal sense “of one mind,” because mind does not displace itself (or anything else in fact) in the way that matter does. This means that, insofar as I am spirit, I can be outside of myself—in understanding something distinct from myself, in encountering some reality in the world—without leaving myself behind, as it were.

Hegel explains, accordingly, that the mode of being specific to spirit is manifestation [Manifestation or Offenbarung], communication without loss, or the externalizing of the interior reality of its being without eliminating or even diminishing its interiority.49 But a spiritual being, obviously, cannot manifest itself precisely qua spirit, to anything other than another spiritual being. Even a particularly receptive pet does not ultimately suffice.50 If spirit is manifestation, and manifestation requires another spirit, the spirit cannot exist in isolation. In other words, there can be one spirit only insofar as there are (at least) two spiritual subjects, and indeed there can be only one spirit in this case, because spirit cannot be set over against spirit as one (material) thing against another. If two individuals are opposed, they are at best self-conscious subjects, but not yet spirit.


Simply put, “spirit” is a socially constituted reality. But that does not mean that spirit is not real: as we observed above, it is more real than physical being since it more properly exists “in and for itself” than any merely physical thing does. Nor does it mean that spirit excludes individuality. Because of the “non-exclusionary” character of spirit, each subject can call this socially constituted spirit truly “mine.” In the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel narrates spirit’s progressive coming-to-be, the moment that spirit in its most complete sense arrives on the scene in the developing texture of relations is in the act of confession.51 In this act, the one self-conscious subject discloses itself to the other, offers to the other, what was initially held back from the other, a holding back that had left the two opposed to each other as one individual against the other. In the confession, they are reconciled, they become one, and so we might say spirit is thus born. In this reconciliation, in this unification of two subjects into a single reality without compromise of their distinction from each other, we have the fulfillment of the memorable definition of spirit that Hegel had formulated earlier in the Phenomenology: the “absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.”52

This formulation allows us to understand what Hegel means by marriage in the Philosophy of Right, why he calls it a substance, and ultimately why it represents the reality of freedom in its most basic form. While the Philosophy of Right is an account of objective spirit, it is interesting to note that spirit as such does not emerge in the discussion in the first two parts of the book concerning “abstract right” and “morality,” for here we are looking at human beings as individuals in society53 or as self-conscious, inter-relating agents, and not yet precisely as members of a more encompassing whole. Spirit proper first emerges at the level of “Sittlichkeit,” in which individuals understand their individuality only within the context of a community that in some sense precedes them.54 Interestingly, it is also only here that we have freedom as an actual reality, which is to say, when spirit first becomes in principle adequate to itself. As Hegel says in the opening lines of his treatment of Sittlichkeit, “Ethical life is the Idea of freedom as the living good . . . [and] is accordingly the concept of freedom which has become the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness.”55 We recall the abstract formulation of the “Idea of freedom,” “The free will which wills the free will.” What was articulated at the


end of the introduction as an abstraction definition now explicitly becomes in this third and final section of the PR a “living good.”

Marriage

It is helpful to look at marriage in this brief account of Hegel’s view of freedom, first because marriage illustrates in a simple and vivid way what Hegel means by “Sittlichkeit,” and, second, because we are proposing that Sittlichkeit is in fact the “actual free will” that Hegel indicated at the end of the philosophy of subjective spirit, and so represents, so to speak, “freedom incarnate.” Needless to say, the description of marriage that follows is not at all meant to be a complete account of Hegel’s understanding of the institu-tion, but rather focuses only on those aspects immediately relevant to our discussion of freedom.56

Hegel first mentions marriage early on in part one of The Philosophy of Right in his discussion of contracts,57 but he does so only in order to insist that it does not belong under this heading: marriage is not for Hegel a contractual relationship, as, for example, Kant took it to be. What disturbs Hegel about Kant’s view of marriage is not immediately what disturbs most people—namely, that Kant considers marriage essentially a contractual exchange of property rights, the “property” in question being the spouses’ genitalia58—though this no doubt has a connection to the more basic problem. The more basic problem for Hegel is that the contractual view of marriage conceives the relationship, the union, as simply subordinate to the two individuals, it reduces marriage to the coincidence of two separate wills that therefore remain extrinsic to each other even in their apparent intimacy. In this case, the individuals are absolutized in their particularity, which means that the separate individuals are the basis of the relation, the reference point in terms of which it is understood. If individuals as such represent the foundation, the togetherness can only ever be a mere instrument relative to the two separate substances. There is a lot at stake here, since if we do not surpass individu-alism in marriage, we really cannot expect to surpass it anywhere: a purely contractual view of marriage means atomistic individualism absolutized. In this case, we have no spirit in what Hegel calls its truth.59 “There are always two possible view points,” Hegel observes, “in the ethical realm: either one starts from substantiality, or one proceeds atomistically and moves upward from the basis of individuality [Einzelheit]. This latter viewpoint excludes


spirit, because it leads only to an aggregation, whereas spirit is not something individual [nichts Einzelnes] but the unity of the individual and the universal.”60

For Hegel, by contrast, while marriage does have its origin in individu-als (and indeed in their power to choose) in some respect, since there is no marriage without two “separate” individuals “freely” giving their consent to one another, he nevertheless insists that its “essential basis” is something more. We can understand this “something more” most clearly in reference to the discussion of the nature of spirit, above. According to Hegel, “the precise nature of marriage is to begin from the point of view of contract—i.e. that of individual personality as a self-sufficient unity—in order to supersede it. That identification of personalities whereby the family is a single person . . . is the ethical spirit.”61 The marriage, and eventually the family, is a “single person” in the sense that it represents a basic, in fact, the basic, “unit” of the social order (ethical substance, we might say, is made up, not of atoms, but of molecules); it is a single whole that represents an irreducible point of reference for the individuals that constitute it, and a distinct agent in the broader social order.

Note, there is something truly unique about marriage in this: the act whereby two individuals form this community effects what we would have to call an ontological transformation: from two substances, we get a new substance, of which the two are henceforth members. How is such a thing possible? It can occur only by virtue of the nature of spirit, which, as we have seen, is manifestation, or self-communication. Seen in this light, the exchange of marriage vows can be interpreted as an act of reciprocal self-communication. What distinguishes this act from, say, a simple conversation, is two things: first, it is the communication of a totality of the self, and second, it is in principle definitive. What one communicates in the marriage vow is not some particular idea or experience, some aspect of my self or some possession, but rather myself as a whole person: I give myself to the other in such a way that I henceforward relate to myself always as belonging in a basic way to the other. We saw earlier that Hegel described the acquisition of property as a real-ization of will because, in the possession of property, I give to the thing, which has no “soul” itself, my soul. What is only intimated here, however, becomes perfectly manifest in the joining of oneself to an other in marriage.62 Second, this can happen only if it is definitive, a gift of myself rather than merely a loan, even an indefinite one. In one respect, the exchange of vows is a single moment, a single act of self-determination, but in another respect, it


is a moment that includes implicitly within itself all future moments under a particular aspect.63 Anything short of this would ultimately fail to bring into being a new substance, a true whole, a unity, rather than a simple aggregate of individuals. Moreover, this total communication of the self in the vow has to be reciprocal; it cannot be a communication unless it is properly received, and it can be properly received only in the form of a self-communication in response. A one-sided vow would be something more like a promise one makes to oneself to be devoted to an other, and so not a real communication, a bringing into being of ethical substance.64 Hegel affirms that marriage is necessarily monogamous, because only thus can it be the total, i.e. “undi-vided,” surrender of the person.65

In this sense, we ought to view the act of confession we referred to earlier as only a partial image of what has a complete form in the relation of marriage. It bears remarking, though we cannot explore it in the present context, that if marriage represents the first instantiation of objective spirit proper in the Philosophy of Right, it is not the last one. Hegel develops the notion of ethical substance beyond marriage and family, which he refers to as its natural existence, through the complex dimensions of civil society, and then, most comprehensively for him, in the state. A full treatment of freedom in Hegel would require a reflection on the essence of these dimensions, and how what we have described in relation to marriage relates to them.66 Our specific purpose here, however, is not even to sound out Hegel’s views of marriage and family per se, but simply to take marriage as a basic example to illuminate what Hegel means by freedom. And it is to this that we now turn.

III. Marriage as Freedom

For Hegel, marriage, as the fundamental instance of Sittlichkeit, is freedom in its most basic sense. It is only when we grasp the peculiarity of this asser-tion that we grasp the novel sense of the will that Hegel is proposing. What is being claimed here is not that marriage is one of the best uses of freedom, i.e. one of the best choices one can make, nor that marriage can exist only by virtue of the self-communication that human beings are capable of because they are free, nor even that, within the bonds of marriage and the kind of disciplining of our natural drives that they entail, individuals can become and be free in a profound and rich sense. All of these things are certainly true, and Hegel would of course want to affirm them. But the claim is more basic: these are all true because marriage is freedom, it is the real existence of


freedom in the world; as spirit in a nutshell, so to speak, marriage represents the proper subject of freedom in which individuals share by belonging to it. Human beings can be free in a real sense, for Hegel, only by virtue of mar-riage or of human communities that bear some analogy to marriage. In other words, speaking more generally, the existence of freedom requires belonging to a whole that is larger than oneself as an autonomous individual, so that autonomy represents at bottom, not the essence of freedom, but a threat to it. Note, this makes sense of his critique of “social contract” theories of political order: they take as foundational the deliberate exercise of will, and so will in its individual existence, rather than recognizing that the individual exercise, to be fully free, must be rooted in an individual-transcending “ethi-cal substance.”67

Let us, in this last part, briefly review the essential elements of Hegel’s interpretation of the will that we presented in part one and consider how marriage as the natural form of Sittlichkeit exemplifies these. In the first place, we saw that the formal definition of the will, the essence of which is freedom, is self-determination, meaning not the power to determine oneself, but the actual determination of the self in a particular choice with which the self can identify. Significantly, in his 1822–23 lectures, Hegel gave as an example of such an identification of the self with a particular determination the phe-nomenon of “friendship and love,” in which we limit ourselves by binding ourselves to an other, but come to know ourselves in this limitation.68 In other words, we might say that, instead of being less than we were before the particular choice, we are more; paradoxically, the limitation has expanded us. The choice of marriage, the act of will in which one gives oneself to the other, so that the self and the other are henceforward one, is the very form of self-determination as Hegel had defined it in the introduction. In this respect, we could say, quite in contrast to the normal view of the matter, that one comes to have a will, properly speaking, through and by virtue of the definitive self-communication in the act of consent. Prior to membership in a community, one has a potential will, but not a real one—though of course we would have to add that there can scarcely be conceived such a thing as a human being without some such membership, and so without will in some form.

Second, we explained that that in which one determines oneself realizes freedom only to the extent that it is rational, i.e. adequate to reason in Hegel’s sense. This means that it is universal not only in its content—as a genuinely educated act would be—but also in its form. Meeting this criterion requires


more than an individual transcending his particularity in the use he makes of his will; it requires, as we saw, that willing itself transcend particularity. Hegel described the concrete Idea of freedom as self-determining universal-ity, which means it is not an individual’s determining his own interest, but is a community determining together what is to be pursued. In other words, will proper is not just a willing of a common good, but a common willing of a common good, i.e. a joint willing in which we have a single act carried out by more than one subject. Here, too, we see how marriage is a paradigm of freedom.

Finally, we return to Hegel’s abstract, or merely formal, description of the will in its complete Idea, which means in its realized or actualized form, namely, “the free will which wills the free will.” While it may seem, upon first hearing this description, that Hegel gives expression to the most empty and egotistical existentialist nihilism, as we suggested at the outset, it has become clear by now that this would be the case only if we took for granted a notion of will as an individual’s power to choose. But we have seen that, for Hegel, the will belongs most specifically, not to the isolated individual, but to spirit, which is to say that the most proper form of will is a shared will. Moreover, the will is not in the first place a power that can be indifferently applied to one content or another, but a realized actuality; thus conceived, it is full of content, it embraces in principle the whole of the world as the place wherein human community comes to be. Understood in this way, marriage, in which two individuals become one spirit through a reciprocal pledging of themselves, provides a paradigm of free will willing free will, which we can now translate into the terms of the “living good” of the ethical substance of marriage as two people jointly willing their togetherness and all that it entails. For the very same reason, marriage becomes a basic illustration of what it means for spirit to become objective, and so for freedom to become reality. According to Hegel’s general definition, freedom is “being at home with oneself in the other”; in the one-flesh union of marriage, we might say, spirit makes a home.

The notion of freedom that emerges from this account of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is admittedly an uncommon one. But Hegel insists that his conception is the truth of the common conception, which means it goes beyond the common views in a manner that includes them, i.e. to fulfill what they intend in a more adequate way than they themselves can manage. And, indeed, it would not be very difficult to make this claim plausible. To


be sure, this is not to say that there are no criticisms, even fundamental ones, to make. In closing, we mention three questions that arise:

1) One would want to ask whether Hegel has a sufficiently analogical sense of substance which would allow one to affirm the substantial reality of community without having simply to supersede the substantiality of the individual human beings that make it up. If substance is meant univocally, then in order for two spouses, for example, to form a substance together, they would have to cease to be substances in themselves; they could not be “one flesh” and still remain two persons. More generally, an analogical notion of substance would allow Hegel to say that a community is a substance without having to say that the individuals that make it up are merely accidents of that substance. Clearly, Hegel wants to affirm that, in spirit, each individual is a whole even in constituting a whole together, but an analogical conception would allow one to affirm this without having to say, as Hegel does, that each is identical to the whole—which may be the case in the Trinity, but does not seem possible anywhere else.

2) One would also want to ask whether Hegel affirms a sufficiently ecstatic notion of spirit, which can not only remain with itself in the other, but also be with the other even in the self—that is, not only “bei-sich-sein-im-Anderen,” as Hegel defines freedom, but also “beim-Anderen-sein-im-Selbst.” While Hegel never fails to affirm a kind of transcendence in the sense of a going beyond the self to the other—contrary to what his critics sometimes charge—it remains true that he will often seek to avoid the fragmentation that such transcendence could entail (the affirmation of a merely extrinsic and indifferent “other”) by resolving difference in a return to the self. Would it not be possible to avoid fragmentation not only by expanding the self to include the other, but at the same time to subordinate the self in a certain respect to the other who remains transcendent in relation to the self? In line with the emphasis on mutuality in recent interpretations of Hegel,69 we have proposed a reading of freedom in the Philosophy of Right that foregrounds a communal spirit beyond the individual self. It becomes harder to discover a mutuality with respect to the other, however, when one reaches the most complete actualization of spirit, for Hegel, which occurs in the State. The spirit of the political community, at this level, seems to be entirely self-enclosed,70 which leads one to wonder whether this ultimate sense of spirit would tend to compromise the self-transcendence in community we have sought to highlight in our interpretation of freedom, or indeed whether, from another


perspective, the emphasis on mutuality in marriage, as we have interpreted it, would have implications for the understanding of spirit as such in its more complete actualization.

3) Finally, one would want to ask what is gained and what is lost by thinking of freedom as the will’s adequation specifically to spirit rather than “to the good,” as the classical tradition would have it. The Platonic notion of the good entails a radical kind of transcendence that is nevertheless different from the Kantian deontologism, which is indifferent to nature. Would it not be possible to think through a social conception of freedom along Hegelian lines, but as founded most basically on the good rather than on spirit? Or perhaps: on spirit, but as ultimately relative to the good? It may be the case that such a project would end up departing irreconcilably from Hegel on some basic points, but on the other hand such an approach would seem to call for the more “ecstatic” conception of spirit we alluded to in the previ-ous question, and indeed would also entail a more analogical conception of ethical substance.

Nevertheless, it would seem possible to explore these questions, to develop these criticisms and their implications, without simply giving up the great depth and remarkable comprehensiveness of Hegel’s notion. In an age in which anxiety about social fragmentation grows in tandem with the multiplication of “means” intended to increase freedom, a notion of freedom that is genuinely communal, not only in content but also in form, has reason to claim, at the very least, our serious and critical attention.

NOTES

1. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (= PM), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830); Volume 20 of the Gesammelte Werke, Rheinisch-Westfällischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Hegel-Archiv der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), §481–482.

2. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (= PR), trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), §4.

3. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 22; Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 11 of Sämmtliche Werke (Jubiläumsausgabe), ed. Glockner (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1927), p. 47.

4. PM, §382: “For this reason, the essential, but formally essential, feature of spirit is Liberty.” (Here, and everywhere else in this essay, the translation of “Geist” as “mind” has been changed to “spirit” for the sake of consistency.)


5. As Hegel explains at the end of the Logic, nature represents the externality of the concept, which, having reached freedom, can “release” particularity from itself, in order ultimately to be recovered internally in freedom as spirit: The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1969), 835–36; Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff. (1816), ed. Hans-Jürgen Gawoll according to the text of Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, ed. Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke (1981) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1994), 246–47.

6. According to Hegel, freedom is the most proper feature of the concept: Encyclopedia Logic (= EL) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), Enzyklopädie (1830), §160.

7. PM, §384 Anmerkung (A): “liberty and intelligible unity is . . . the theme and the soul of philosophy.”

8. EL §24, Zusatz (Z) 2.9. According to Thomas Lewis, Hegel’s notion of freedom does not lie so squarely within

the Western Liberal tradition: Freedom and Tradition in Hegel: Reconsidering Anthropology, Ethics, and Religion (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 1.

10. “No Idea is so generally recognized as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions (to which it therefore actually falls a victim) as the idea of Liberty: none in common currency with so little appreciation of its meaning” (PM, §482, A).

11. This is not to say that the “communal” aspect of freedom that we will highlight in the following has been altogether ignored. Indeed, the theme of “recognition” has often been a point of emphasis in contemporary Hegel scholarship, and even the essentially “institutional” and “intersubjective” aspects of freedom have recently been drawing attention: see e.g. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which is devoted to showing this. Nevertheless, as becomes evident in Pippin’s book, the intersubjective aspect (the recognition granted—ultimately institutionally—by others which is an essential element of an action’s being genuinely rational) is highlighted as essential to the freedom specifically of the individual agent. What we will be suggesting here is unique in Hegel is precisely that will, and so freedom, belongs most basically to the “supra-individual” subject, the “ethical whole.” Richard Dien Winfield makes a similar suggestion in his interpretation of Hegel’s notion of will: “Freedom As Interaction: Hegel’s Resolution to the Dilemma of Liberal Theory,” in Hegel’s Theory of Action, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich and David Lamb (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), 173–90, but his presentation focuses on the social dimension of property rather than on the structure of Sittlichkeit in itself, which will be our focus here.

12. Two authors associated with this approach in recent literature are Allen Wood (Hegel’s Ethical Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]) and Frederick Neuhouser (Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000]).

13. PR, §258, A.14. PR, §27.15. PM §481.16. PR, §4 Z; cf., PM §445.17. See Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth

Century (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 111.18. PR §10 A.


19. PR, §44 Z.20. Hegel explicitly criticizes the view of will as a faculty that applies itself to external

objects: PR §10 A.21. As Hegel explains, “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 Z).22. We will thus not be discussing the initial sections of the introduction (§1–4) and the

final sections (§29–33), since these do not directly concern the nature of the will (though §4 makes the crucial point that freedom is the essence of the will). The preliminary sections, §1–3, identify the subject matter of the book as right [das Recht]; §4 introduces the notion of will in relation to right; §29–32 present right as the Idea of freedom, and the final section describes the division of the main body of the text.

23. PR, §7.24. PR, §5 Z.25. PR, §5 Z.26. PR, §6 Z.27. Confessions, book VIII, chapter 9.28. PR, §7 A. Emphasis added.29. Hegel observes that infinity proper is not opposed to the finite, but includes it, so

that the appropriate image for it is not the line, which has one point coming after the other without end, but the “closed” circle: PR, §22 Z.

30. According to Richard Schacht in his classic essay “Hegel on Freedom,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 289–328, Hegel defines freedom as “rational, self-conscious self-determination.” While this is certainly a part of Hegel’s definition, it is only the formal part, which requires concrete substantialization to be properly understood.

31. Of course, one might argue that, for Aristotle, the ultimate good, that which moves all things by being loved, is in fact precisely nous as actualized. This is essentially what Hegel has in mind, and it is not accidental that he ends his Encyclopaedia with the citation of this passage in Aristotle. It is the conclusion of his system, though he interprets actuality (unlike Aristotle) in a specifically historical sense.

32. PR, §7.33. PR §15. Knox translates the word similarly.34. Allen Wood remarks that Hegel misrepresents Kant here since Kant “does not mean

by this that we act most freely when we act arbitrarily.” See Wood’s editorial note: PR, 399n2. But, as we explain here, this is not in fact what Hegel is imputing to Kant.

35. PR, §15 A.36. PM, §479–480. Allen Wood explains that Hegel ultimately elevates freedom above

happiness as man’s final good: Hegel’s Ethical Thought, 69–71.37. PR §20. One might think Hegel means Rousseau here who interpreted education as a

reconciling of natural desire and social duty. But he refers the reader to his later presentation of education (§187) in PR, in which he insists that Bildung is not, as some have thought, a corrupting alienation from nature. It is clear that Rousseau is the target of his criticism here. By contrast, he describes education in §20 as the purification of the external world of “barbarity,” which is a key term in Schiller, for whom it represents the subordination of the


rational to the sensual. One of the main themes running through Schiller’s philosophical works is the reconciliation of reason and nature that does full justice to both.

38. See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), especially the central fourteenth letter: 94–99.

39. PR §21.40. PR §27.41. PR, §156, §156 Z.42. The “classic” text representing the non-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel is Robert

Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also the work of Terry Pinkard (e.g. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]). For a critique of the “anti-metaphysical” view, see Adriaan Peperzak, Modern Freedom: Hegel’s Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 5–19.

43. Robert C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Concept of Geist,” Review of Metaphysics 23:4 (1970): 642–61, here 642.

44. PR §156 Z.45. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII.10.1035a–1035b2.46. See for example PR §146 A.47. See Introduction to Philosophy of History, 20 [44].48. PM, §381: “Negativity,” here, indicates the spirit’s ability not to be simply identified

with any exteriority, or immediately posited determination; but to describe this negativity as absolute, on the other hand, is to say that the spirit is also not opposed to exteriority.

49. PM §383.50. Hence the heartbreakingly beautiful tragedy in Chekhov’s story “Misery,” in which a

horse-and-carriage cab driver fails repeatedly to communicate his suffering to the indifferent souls that hire his services, and is brought finally to pour out his heart, at the end of the night, to his horse. But the cause of his suffering is the death of his son the previous week.

51. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §671. Die Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), 361–62/441–42.

52. Ibid., §177, Hoffmeister 108–09/127.53. The term Hegel uses in the section on “abstract right” is “person,” which is meant in

the Roman legal sense rather than in the modern “personalist” sense. It represents, for Hegel, a public actor understood as a wholly particular agent (see PR §35 A).

54. Hegel makes reference to the “Penates” at two points in this context, when talking about marriage (§163 A), and about the State (§257 A), an imaginative picture meant to invoke the piety due to a reality that in some sense comes from “elsewhere,” i.e. is not simply the product of individual human wills.

55. PR §142.56. For a fuller treatment of marriage, see, for example, R.J. Siebert, Hegel’s Concept of

Marriage and Family: The Origin of Subjective Freedom (Washington, DC: University Press, 1979).57. PR §75 A.58. See Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,

1999), §24, 87–88.


59. See PR §29 A, where Hegel, describing Rousseau’s notion of right, contrasts “true spirit” with “will and spirit as the particular individual, as the will of the single person in his distinctive arbitrariness.”

60. PR, §156 Z.61. PR, §163 A. What is left out of the passage quoted is a description of the spouses and

children as “accidents” in relation to the family as substance, and a reference to his discussion of the substance-accidents relation in the EL §151.

62. The point in this comparison is not to present marriage as a kind of acquisition of property, but just the opposite: to conceive of the acquisition of property by analogy to the vow of marriage.

63. This is why Hegel affirms that marriage is by its very nature indissoluble, though he concedes that there may be difficult circumstances under which the state might permit divorce (see PR §163 Z).

64. Wendell Berry imaginatively presents a “one-way vow” of sorts in his novel Jayber Crow (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2001), but arguably he offers this as an extension of the “ethical substance” of the community in broken circumstances.

65. PR §167.66. This theme is explored further in chapter six of D.C. Schindler, The Perfection of

Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 301–72, entitled, “The ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and the ‘We’ that is ‘I’: On the Sociality of Freedom in Hegel and its Excesses.”

67. PR, §258 A.68. PR, §7 Z.69. See, for example, Robert Williams’s Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 1998).70. Evidence of this is that Hegel seems to allow states to relate to each other only in a

manner analogous to the individualism of civil society (for an observation along these lines, see Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002], 335). This makes sense if indeed the state is a self-enclosed totality, or, as Hegel puts it, “an absolute and unmoved end in itself,” PR, §258.

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