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The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Simon Lumsden
Simon Lumsden*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney, [email protected]
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Abstract

The notion of being-at-home-in-otherness is the distinctive way of thinking of freedom that Hegel develops in his social and political thought. When I am at one with myself in social and political structures (institutions, rights and the state) they are not external powers to which I am subjected but are rather constitutive of my self-relation, that is my self-conception is mediated and expanded through those objective structures. How successfully Hegel may achieve being-at-home-in-otherness with regard to these objective structures of right in the Philosophy of Right is arguable. What is at issue in this paper is however to argue that there is a blind spot in the text with regard to nature. In Ethical Life the rational subject's passions and inclinations are brought into the subject such that she is ‘with herself’ in them; with regard to external nature no such reconciliation is achieved or even attempted. In Abstract Right external nature is effectively dominated by and subsumed into the will and it is never something in which one is with oneself. It remains outside the model of freedom that Hegel develops in the Philosophy of Right. There is something troubling about this formulation, since it excludes nature from freedom, but also something accurate, as it reflects the unresolved attitude of moderns to the natural world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 42 , Special Issue 1: Naturalism and Sociality , April 2021 , pp. 96 - 113
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Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2021

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