Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Preface and Intro

Hegel's Philosophy of Right seems to provide some surprisingly ripe material for an examination of naturalism. It also seemed slightly more readable to me than much other Hegel.

The preface makes it clear that the project at hand is to prove that "the Right" - ie the concept of good and right laws in society - can be philosophically proven. And Hegel puts the idea that it can't be proven into the language of degeneration: his method (which he calls speculative, which is more philosophical than the "empirical" method but still scientifically based) "is essentially distinct from any other way of knowing" by virtue of its "mode of scientific proof." "It is only insight into the necessity of such a difference that that can rescue philosophy from the shameful decay in which it is immersed at the present time" (2). Hegel is attacking a philosophical method which- sense the old rules of logic seem to be in doubt - wants to toss scientific method into the dustbin altogether, and replace it with the belief that "that only is true which each individual allows to rise out of his heart, emotion, and inspiration about ethical institutions" (5). This transcendental way of knowing "the Right" is the enemy - it depends on "opinion and caprice" (6).

Hegel's manner of proving that "the Right" is considerably more difficult to follow, but it rests on a notion which is compatible with naturalism's vocabulary, if not in sync with its beliefs. Hegel does some very complicated stuff with the idea of determinism and free will, and ultimately produces something which sounds very much like Dreiser's famous opening to Chapter 8 of Sister Carrie.
Dreiser: "Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason."

Hegel's goal is to prove that, although the human will is constantly beset by these instincts, which he calls (anticipating Deleuze) "impulses, desires, inclinations, whereby the will finds itself determined in the will of nature" (25), the will can actually overcome these impulses and reach a state of greater rationality, which he calls both universality and the "essentially human."

P. 30: "This self-consciousness which apprehends itself through thinking as essentially human, and thereby frees itself from the contingent and the false, is the principle of right, morality, and all ethical life." I can't say I entirely understood Hegel's complex proof as to why this is possible, nor do I agree with him. But I think this overcoming is the core tenet in his belief in the Right; when he declares "An existent of any sort embodying the free will, this is what right is. Right therefore is by definition freedom as Idea" (33) he's articulating that Right is what happens when humanity achieves freedom, not by abandoning itself to its instincts, but by understanding that it can free to act not on instincts but in a purely rational manner - ie, when its subjectivity becomes the same as rational objectivity.

Wikipedia offers these thoughts: "The Philosophy of Right (as it is usually called) begins with a discussion of the concept of the free will and argues that the free will can only realize itself in the complicated social context of property rights and relations, contracts, moral commitments, family life, the economy, the legal system, and the polity. A person is not truly free, in other words, unless he is a participant in all of these different aspects of the life of the state."

I think this is just a more grounded version of what I was saying. In other words, if impulses drive us to be outside these structures, our reason drives us inside them. And thus "the Right" is achieved when we can reorient our will so that we subjectively desire to be enmeshed in the objectively useful framework just discussed by Wikipedia.

Finally, Wikipedia summarizes the rest of the book:

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing Hegel's three spheres of versions of 'right,' each one larger than the preceding ones and encompassing them. The first 'sphere' is abstract right, in which Hegel discusses the idea of 'non-interference' as a way of respecting others. He deems this insufficient and moves onto the second sphere, morality. Under this, Hegel proposes that humans reflect their own subjectivity of others in order to respect them. The third sphere, ethical life, is Hegel's integration of individual subjective feelings and universal notions of right. Under ethical life, Hegel then launches into a lengthy discussion about family, civil society, and the state.

Hegel also argues that the state itself is subsumed under the higher totality of world history, in which individual states arise, conflict with each other, and eventually fall. The course of history is apparently toward the ever-increasing actualization of freedom; each successive historical epoch corrects certain failures of the earlier ones, but Hegel does not seem to have figured out--and he admits as much--how the modern state can solve the problems of poverty and class division, something his successor Karl Marx would attempt to solve. At the end of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel leaves open the possibility that history has yet to accomplish certain tasks related to the inner organization of the state.


Erin Sez: Hegel (and Kant) seem to be frequently dealing with linguistic problems. they seem to believe that language can actually capture the truth. this pre-rupture (pre-wittgenstein?) approach is what leads them to believe they can answer these questions absolutely and universally - the very form of language leads them to them.