Philosophers
In
Depth
Hegel on Action
Edited by
Arto Laitinen and
Constantine Sandis
Hegel on Action
Edited by
Arto Laitinen
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki
Constantine Sandis
Oxford Brookes University and NYU in London
paigrave
macmillan
Selection and editorial matter © Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 2010
Chapters © their individual authors 2010
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified
as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-0-230-22908-2 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10	987654321
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
To our families and
other immediate substantialities of mind
Contents
List of Tables	ix
Preface and Acknowledgements	x
Notes on Contributors	xii
List of Abbreviations	xvi
1	Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy
of Action	1
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis
2	Hegel and the Philosophy of Action	22
Charles Taylor
3	Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes	42
Dudley Knowles
4	Hegel's Social Theory of Agency: The 'Inner-Outer'
Problem	’	59
Robert B. Pippin
5	Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action in the 'Reason'
Chapter of the Phenomenology	79
John McDowell
6	Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action	97
Katerina Deligiorgi
7	Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences 119
Allen W Wood
8	Freedom and the Lifeworld	137
Terry Pinkard
9	Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right	155
Stephen Houlgate
10	Hegel on Faces and Skulls	176
Alasdair MacIntyre
vii
viii Contents
11	What Does it Mean to 'Make Oneself Into An Object'?
In Defense of a Key Notion of Hegel's Theory of Action 189
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch
12	Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency	212
Michael Quante
13	Hegel, Narrative and Agency	232
Allen Speight
14	Action Between Conviction and Recognition in Hegel's
Critique of the Moral Worldviews	244
Francesca Menegoni
15	Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons	260
Dean Moyar
Bibliography	281
Index	291
List of Tables
12.1 The Exemption-Excuse-Distinction	221
12.2 Hegel's map of our ascriptive practices	224
ix
Preface and Acknowledgements
This project resulted out of two coincidences followed by some dialecti-
cal reasoning. For both coincidences we blame Jonathan Dancy, under
whose auspices we first met (the subsequent reasoning was our own).
One of us, immersed in contemporary philosophy of action, hap-
pened upon a few articles (reprinted here) which made use of Hegel
in bold and persuasive ways. He approached the other, who had read
a little more Hegel, with the initially secret aim of commissioning him
to edit a book on Hegel on action for a new series that he was putting
together. The invitee in turn surprised the inviter by making a case for
collective action; it was not until a couple of years later, after the deed
was done, that they realised the full extent of their joint purpose. As
the final typescript is being prepared for the publisher, we find our-
selves co-writing a paper on the notion of Purpose in the Philosophy
of Right, and organising a related workshop. It's a long way back from
Hegel.
Edited books are, of course, written entirely by the contributors, and
we cannot thank them enough for their wonderful work and insightful
suggestions, as well as for and for accepting our invitation in the first
place. We would also like to thank Priyanka Gibbons and Melanie Blair
at Palgrave Macmillan for fully supporting the project from the very
outset, as well as Dan Bunyard for originally commissioning the Philoso-
phers in Depth series. Thanks also to the Press's two anonymous referees
for their helpful and encouraging reports and to David Joseph at Integra
for his meticulous work at the final stages of production.
In addition, are grateful to Alasdair MacIntyre, for permission to
reprint his 'Hegel on Faces and Skulls', originally published in his edited
volume Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays (Doubleday and Macmillan,
1972); John McDowell and Harvard University Press, for permission to
reprint 'Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action in the "Reason" Chapter
of the Phenomenology', which first appeared in English in McDowell's
Having the World in View (Harvard University Press, 2009); and Charles
Taylor and Springer for permission to reprint 'Hegel and the Philoso-
phy of Action', originally published in Lawrence Stepelevich and David
Lamb (eds), Hegel's Philosophy of Action (Humanities Press, 1983).
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
Special thanks to Edgar Maraguat for his help with the list of abbre-
viations, and to Michael Quante and Ken Westphal for being most
generous with their advice. For their invaluable assistance with the edit-
ing, index, and bibliographical work we thank Kirsi Reyes and Taavi
Sundell, both research assistants at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies. We also owe thanks to the Collegium for its institutional sup-
port, including the award of a Helsinki Collegium visiting fellowship to
Constantine in the summer of 2009 (when most of the work for the
volume was undertaken). Oxford Brookes kindly reciprocated by award-
ing Arto an international visiting fellowship in spring 2010, thereby
enabling us to wrap things up.
Finally, we thank our respective families, to whom we dedicate this
book, for living with and without us.
AL&CS
Helsinki and Oxford, April 2010
Notes on Contributors
Katerina Deligiorgi is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. She is
currently finishing a manuscript on autonomy, The Scope of Autonomy:
Thinking about the Morality of Freedom with Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, and
working on action theory in relation to contemporary neuroscience. She
is the author of Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment, an examination
and defence of the idea of a public use of reason; the editor of Hegel:
New Directions, a collection of contemporary readings of Hegel, and of
the peer-reviewed biannual journal, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great
Britain.
Stephen Houlgate is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Warwick. He is the author of Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Meta-
physics (1986), An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (1991,
2005), and The Opening of Hegel's Logic (2006). He is the editor of Hegel
and the Philosophy of Nature and The Hegel Reader (both 1998), Hegel
and the Arts (2007), and G. W.F. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right
(2008). He served as vice-president and president of the Hegel Society of
America and was editor of the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain
from 1998 to 2006.
Dudley Knowles is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University
of Glasgow. He studies political philosophy, ethics and the history of
these subjects. His publications include Political Philosophy (2001), Hegel
and the Philosophy of Right (2002) and Political Obligation (2010), as well
as many articles. His present research is concerned with freedom as a
political value.
Alasdair MacIntyre is Permanent Senior Research Fellow at Notre Dame
University and Senior Research Fellow at London Metropolitan. He
has written widely in philosophy since his first book, Marxism:
An Interpretation, appeared in 1953, authoring over 30 books, includ-
ing the influential triumvirate: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory,
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions of Moral
Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. He recently published
xii
Notes on Contributors xiii
an examination of the philosophical work of Edith Stein set against the
background of twentieth-century phenomenology entitled Edith Stein:
A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922, as well as two volumes of his col-
lected papers, The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays and Ethics and
Politics: Selected Essays.
John McDowell is Distinguished University Professor at Pittsburgh. His
publications include Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1994;
2nd edition 1996), Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard University Press),
Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Harvard University Press, 1998), Having
the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Harvard University
Press, 2009), and The Engaged Intellect (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Francesca Menegoni is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Padua. She has written many articles on moral philosophy and philos-
ophy of religion. Her books include Moralita e morale in Hegel (1982),
Finalita e destinazione morale nella "Critica del Giudizio" di Kant (1988),
Soggetto e struttura dell'agire in Hegel (1993), La "Critica del Giudizio" di
Kant. Introduzione alia lettura (1995), Le ragioni della speranza (2001), and
Fede e religione in Kant (2005). She is co-editor with Luca Illetterati of Das
Endliche und das Unendliche in Hegels Denken (2004).
Dean Moyar is Associate Prpfessor in the Department of Philosophy at
Johns Hopkins University. He received his B.S. from Duke University
and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His essays have appeared
in (among others) the Journal of Moral Philosophy and Hegel-Studien. He
is co-editor (with Michael Quante) of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit:
A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and the editor of the
Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy (2010). His book
Hegel's Conscience is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Terry Pinkard is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. His
publications include a number of articles as well as the books Democratic
Liberalism and Social Union (1987); Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of
Possibility (1988); Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (1994);
Hegel: A Biography (2000); and German Philosophy 1760-1860 (2002). He
is the editor of a new collection of Heinrich Heine's work and is currently
working on a new translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Robert B. Pippin is Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service
Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of
xiv Notes on Contributors
Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the
author of several books on German idealism, including Kant's Theory
of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions ofSelf-Consciousness; and Mod-
ernism as a Philosophical Problem. His latest books are The Persistence of
Subjectivity; Hegel's Practical Philosophy; Nietzsche, Psychology and First Phi-
losophy; and Hollywood Westerns and American Myth. He is a winner of the
Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and is a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American
Philosophical Society.
Michael Quante is Full Professor of Practical Philosophy at Westfalische
Wilhelms-University, Munster. He is the Speaker of the Centrum
fiir Bioethik and Associated Editor of the journal Ethical Theory and
Moral Practice. His books (in English) include Hegel's Concept of Action
(Cambridge University Press, 2004, pbk. 2007), Enabling Social Europe
(Springer, 2005; co-authored with Bernd v. Maydell et al.), Hegel's Phe-
nomenology of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 2008, со-edited with
Dean Moyar), Moral Realism (Helsinki, 2004, Acta philosophica Fennica,
vol. 76, со-edited with Jussi Kotkavirta) and Pragmatic Idealism (Rodopi,
1998, со-edited with Axel Wiistehube).
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch is Visiting Associate Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Magdeburg and Visiting Scholar
at the Institut fiir Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. His areas of research
include nineteenth-century philosophy and contemporary social and
political philosophy. He is the author of Hegels Begriff der Arbeit
(2002), Religidse Hingabe oder soziale Freiheit. Die saint-simonistische
Theorie und die Hegelsche Sozialphilosophie (2007), and 'Anerkennung' als
Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie (Habilitationsschrift, Frankfurt am Main,
2009). He has со-edited Heinrich Scholz. Logiker, Philosoph, Theologe
(with K. F. Wehmeier, 2005), Hegelianismus und Saint-Simonismus (with
L. Siep, H.-U. Thamer, and N. Waszek, 2007), and The Philosophy of
Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (with C. F. Zurn,
2009).
Allen Speight is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston Univer-
sity. He is a recipient of Fulbright, DAAD and NEH fellowships and
is the author of Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge
University Press, 2001) and The Philosophy of Hegel (McGill/Acumen,
2008). He is the author and translator (with Brady Bowman) of Hegel:
Heidelberg Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He has published
Notes on Contributors xv
numerous articles on aesthetics and ethics in German Idealism and
Romanticism.
Charles Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is
the author of over a dozen books including The Explanation of Behavior
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), Hegel (Cambridge University Press,
1975), Hegel and Modem Society (Cambridge University Press, 1979),
Human Agency and Language (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Philos-
ophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Sources
of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press,
1989), Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition (Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1992), Philosophical Arguments (Harvard University Press,
1995), and A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007).
Allen W. Wood is Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor at Stanford
University. In 2008-09 he was Professor of Philosophy at Indiana
University. He has taught at Cornell University (1968-96) and Yale Uni-
versity (1996-2000), and held visiting appointments at the University of
Michigan (1973), the University of California at San Diego (1986), and
Oxford University (2005). He is author of numerous books and articles,
chiefly on ethics and on the German philosophy from Kant through
Marx.
List of Abbreviations
Abbreviations for works of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831):
EG	Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im
Grundrisse. Dritter Teil: Philosophic des Geistes (1830)
in TWA, vol. 10. Philosophy of Mind. Being Part Three of
the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830).
Tr. W. Wallace, together with the Zusatze in Boumann's
text, tr. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Cited by paragraph (§) number.
EL	Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Erster Teil.
Die Wissenschaft der Logik (1830) in TWA, vol. 8. The
Encyclopaedia Logic. Tr. T. E Geraets, W. A. Suchting &
H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. Hegel's Logic,
being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1830). Tr. W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975. Cited by paragraph (§) number.
EN	Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Zweiter Teil:
Naturphilosophie (1830) in TWA, vol. 9. Hegel's Philosophy of
Nature. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830),
Part 11. Tr. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1970. Cited by paragraph (§) number.
Enz 1817 Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im
Grundrisse (1817) in GW, vol. 13, W. Bonsiepen &
K. Grotsch (eds), 2000.
GW Gesammelte Werke (1968-). Hamburg: Meiner. Cited by
volume and page.
/5 III fenaer Systementwiirfe III: Naturphilosophie und Philosophie
des Geistes. R.-P. Horstmann (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1987.
LA	Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Tr. T. M. Knox, 2 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
LPW Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction.
Tr. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975.
NP	Niimberger Propadeutik in TWA, vol. 4.
xvi
List of Abbreviations xvii
PH
PhG
PhilG
PhilS
PR
SL
SW
TWA
VG
VGPII
VPG
VPR
The Philosophy of History. Tr. J. Sibree. New York:
Dover, 1956.
Phanomenologie des Geistes in TWA, vol. 3. Also in
Hauptwerke in sechs Banden, vol. 2, Hamburg: Meiner, 1992;
and in Gesammelte Werke (GW), vol. 9, W. Bonsiepen &
R. Heede (eds), 1980. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Tr. A. V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by
J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. A new
translation by T. Pinkard (2010) can be found from
his website. Cited by paragraph (<I) number in Miller's
translation.
Philosophie des Geistes (1805/06) in GW, vol. 8.
R.-P. Horstmann (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1976.
Hegel and the Human Spirit. A translation of the Jena Lectures
on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6) with a commentary. Tr. and
ed. L. Rauch. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983.
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und
Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse in TWA, vol. 7. Elements of
the Philosophy of Right. A.W. Wood (ed.). Tr. H. B. Nisbet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cited by
paragraph (§) number. Remarks are indicated by an 'R',
additions by 'A', and margin notes by 'N'.
Hegel's Science of Logic. Tr. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1969; Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press,
1969; Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999.
Samtliche Werke, Jubilaumsausgabe in zwanzig Banden.
H. Glockner (ed.). Stuttgart: Frommann, 1927-1940.
Cited by volume and page.
Werke. Theorie-Werkausgabe. 20 volumes and register.
E. Moldenhauer & К. M. Michel (eds). Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1969-79. Cited by volume and page.
Die Vemunft in der Geschichte. J. Hoffmeister (ed.). Hamburg:
Meiner, 1955.
Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte der Philosophie II in TWA,
vol. 19.
Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte in TWA,
vol. 12.
Vorlesungen uber Rechtsphilosophie 1818-31, 4 vols.
K.-H. Ilting (ed.). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1973-1974. Cited by volume
and page.
xviii List of Abbreviations
VPR17 Die Philosophic des Rechts: Die Mitschriften Wannemann
(Heidelberg 1817-1818) und Homeyer (Berlin 1818-1819).
K.-H. Ilting (ed.). Stuttgart: Klett-Kotta, 1983.
VPR19 Philosophic des Rechts: Die Vorlesung von 1819/1820.
D. Henrich (ed.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983.
VPR21 Die Philosophic des Rechts. Vorlesung von 1821/22. H. Hoppe
(ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005.
VPW 'Vorlesungen uber die Philosophic der Weltgeschichte:
Berlin 1822/1823' in Vorlesungen / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel. K.-H. Ilting, H. N. Seelmann & K. Brehmer (eds).
Hamburg: Meiner, 1996.
VRP19 Vorlesungen uber die Philosophic des Rechts. Berlin 1819/1820,
nachgeschrieben von Johann Rudolf Ringier. E. Angehrn,
M. Bondeli & H. N. Seelman (eds). Hamburg: Meiner, 2000.
WL Wissenschaft der Logik I & II in TWA, vols. 5-6. Also in SW,
vols. 4-5.
Abbreviations for works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804):
Ak Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg von der Preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1902-. Unless
otherwise noted, writings of Immanuel Kant will be cited
by volume and page number in this edition.
Ca	Cambridge Edition of the Writings of Immanuel Kant.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992-. This edition
provides marginal Ak. volume and page citations.
G Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) in Ak, 4.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in Ca, Practical
Philosophy, tr. & ed. M. J. Gregor, 1996.
KpV Kritik derpraktischen Vemunft (1788) in Ak, 5. Critique
of Practical Reason in Ca, Practical Philosophy, tr. & ed.
M. J. Gregor, 1996.
КгV	A/В Kritik der reinen Vemunft (1781/1787) in Ak, 3 & 4.
Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. P. Guyer & A.W. Wood.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cited by
first edition (A) and second edition (B) page numbers.
MS Metaphysik der Sitten (1797-1798) in Ak, 6. Metaphysics of
Morals in Ca, Practical Philosophy, tr. & ed. M. J. Gregor,
1996.
VRL 'Uber ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu liigen' in
Ak, 8. 'On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy' in
Ca, Practical Philosophy, tr. & ed. M. J. Gregor, 1996.
1
Introduction: Hegel and
Contemporary Philosophy of
Action
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis
The aim of this book is to provide an in-depth account of Hegel's writ-
ings on human action as they relate to contemporary concerns in the
hope that it will encourage fruitful dialogue between Hegel scholars and
those working in the philosophy of action. During the past two decades,
preliminary steps towards such a dialogue were taken, but many paths
remain uncharted. The book thus serves as both a summative document
of past interaction and a promissory note of things to come.
We begin this introduction with some general words regarding the
philosophy of action before singling out reasons for exploring Hegel's
thought in relation to it. We next present a brief overview of studies con-
ducted to this day, followed by a thematic appraisal of the contributions
appearing in this volume.
1.	Action in philosophy
The categorization of something as an action instead of a mere bodily
movement involves a substantial conceptual framework which includes
the contested notions of intention, voluntariness, practical reasoning,
and motivation. The connection between such a framework and that
required for the conceptualization of natural events (a matter of equal
contention) is central to philosophical enquiry; it concerns, to use
Wilfrid Sellars' (1963, p. 1) phrase, the question of 'how things, in the
broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest pos-
sible sense of the term.' Appropriate investigation thereby calls for a
stereoscopic account of personal, social, and scientific reality. This can-
not be achieved without detailed reflexion upon a range of issues from
selfhood and agency to causation and explanation.
1
2 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Needless to say, there is no single correct way of categorizing philo-
sophical issues relating to action, not least because any attempt to do
so requires contentious presuppositions concerning the multifarious
relations between various phenomena and the concepts employed to
capture them.1 The following, not untypical, attempt to divide topics
into four thematic groups is nonetheless a prima facie intuitive one:
(i)	So-called 'action theory' which explores conceptual and ontologi-
cal questions concerning the very nature of action.
In contemporary philosophy (i) typically divides into questions
concerning (a) the relation of actions to events (especially move-
ments of the body); (b) action individuation and description;
(c) the categorization of action into specific types, e.g. mental acts,
speech acts, collective action, habitual actions, and negative acts;
and (d) further distinctions between actions that are intentional
and/or voluntary and those that are not. This all invariably leads to:
(ii) Accounts typically appeal to phenomena such as intentions, beliefs,
desires, volitions, and purposes, their precise relation to action
(identity, causation, expression, and so on) being a matter of great
dispute.
Accounts typically appeal to highly contested roles of notions such
as intention, belief, desire, volition, and purpose, whose precise
relation to action (e.g. one of identity, causation, or expression)
is an area of central dispute. Philosophers interested in such issues
divide into causalists and anti-causalists with regard to the nature
of action and/or its explanation. Debates here range over questions
in the 'theory of reasons' (such as that of the extent, if any, to
which the reasons for which we act might be termed 'causes' of our
actions and the question of whether or not we always act under the
guise of some perceived good) as well as questions relating to the
nature of explanation in history and the social sciences. Philoso-
phers divide further on the issue of whether or not there is a sui
generis form of agent causation and, if so, how it relates to that
of event causation. Such controversies on aggregate pave the way
towards:
(iii)	Philosophical accounts concerning the nature of agency.
Such accounts further explore normative and motivational issues
as diverse as those of control, deliberation, strength and weakness
of will, addiction and compulsion, practical reasoning, rationality,
justification, identification and alienation, self-actualization, bod-
ily awareness, selfhood and personhood, and agential knowledge.
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 3
Issues related to agency and control are closely linked with disputes
concerned with:
(iv)	Outlooks on free will and responsibility.
Contested areas of concern here include those of liberty, auton-
omy, criminal liability and culpability, mens rea, tragedy, fatalism,
determinism, and historical inevitability.
In both his Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right, as well as
the Encyclopaedia and his lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel tackles questions
relating to all four of the above areas of concern. What he has to say
about action, however, cuts across them and, indeed, frequently chal-
lenges some of the intuitions which underlie some of their most popular
categorizations.
2.	Engaging with Hegel
A natural way to relate Hegel to contemporary debates is by recon-
structing his take on issues that continue to vex us today. A case in point
is Alasdair MacIntyre's 'Hegel on Faces and Skulls' (Chapter 10) which
neatly transposes Hegel's attack on nineteenth-century physiognomy
and phrenology into a critique of recent attempts to provide neurosci-
entific explanations of everyday human behaviour.
Less directly, we might also learn much from the refreshing—if at
times counter-intuitive—stances which Hegel adopts. These appear to
involve the prima facie counterintuitive notion of a retrospective deter-
mination of intention (see Chapters 4 and 5), as well as the unlikely
conjunction of the claim that people are only responsible for what was
included in their 'purpose' and the suggestion that they may neverthe-
less be held responsible for what they did not even foresee, so long as
it is true that, as thinking beings, they should have known better (see
Wood, Chapter 7).
Hegel additionally provides us with a novel set of questions accom-
panied by an alternate systematic way of understanding their interre-
lations. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, the discussion of
tht nature of action, action-explanation, and agency is deeply embed-
ded within a lengthy internal criticism of various allegedly one-sided
views of a typically scientistic or individualistic persuasion.2 Similarly,
in both the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Right action is dis-
cussed ihthe broader context of an articulation of Hegel's own system,
whilst the more immediate context of the actualization of freedom
in social and institutional reality is closely related to questions of
4 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
responsibility-attribution.3 Hegel appears to move from questions con-
cerning freedom and responsibility (iv above) through the notion of
agency (iii) to remarks concerning the nature of action (i), all the while
leaving considerable space for interpretive disagreement with regard to
his stance on the nature of causation and explanation (ii). It is also
worth asking why certain issues left Hegel unmoved (the relation of
free will to physical determinism being an obvious case in point). Con-
versely, the evaluation of Hegel's thought cannot be seriously advanced
without recourse to a range of recent insights and distinctions. Charles
Taylor argues that the philosophy of action constitutes a particularly
fruitful entry point to Hegel's theory as a whole:
[F]or any highly systematic body of thought like Hegel's we can
reconstruct the whole from many perspectives. Each one gives us
something, though some are more illuminating than others. I believe
that looking at Hegel's thought from the angle of the underlying con-
ception of action provides one of the more interesting perspectives
on the whole.
(Taylor, 1983, p. 1; reprinted as Chapter 2 below)
If so then Hegel scholars have the very same reason for studying con-
temporary philosophy of action that philosophers of action have for
engaging with Hegel, namely to gain a fuller understanding of one's
primary object of study.
An interest in contemporary debates may inform radically different
approaches to Hegel (for examples, see §3 below). Pari passu, interpre-
tations must also face the common obstacle of the systematic nature of
Hegel's philosophy, it being well-nigh impossible to isolate his views on
any particular issue with no discussion of his system as a whole. This
is not to deny that we can reach free-standing insights into the nature
of human action through a careful reading of Hegel, nonetheless we
can better understand Hegel by immersing ourselves into independent
explorations of action. The essays in this volume demonstrate this, in a
variety of ways. Before taking a closer look at them, a brief overview of
previous work is called for.
3.	The action so far
Whereas so-called contintental philosophers concerned with action
(including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jurgen Habermas,
and Paul Ricoeur) have frequently engaged with Hegel, references to
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 5
him within 'analytic' philosophy of action have been few and far
between. Notwithstanding some positive exceptions in recent years,
mutual understanding between Hegelian and 'analytic' traditions has
been limited ever since Moore and Russell combated the likes of Bradley,
Green, Bosanquet, and McTaggart.
In his Preface to his 1968 book Action (based on Gifford lectures
he delivered in Aberdeen), the renowned Hegel translator Sir Malcolm
Knox (who had been a student of Collingwood's at Oxford) boasted
that it was 'incontestable' that what he had written was 'old-fashioned',
adding that 'it belongs to the pre-Wittgensteinian era, and indeed
smacks of the nineteenth century'.4 Knox, quite rightly, did not expect
the then dominating linguistic philosophers at Oxford to be impressed.
The then-rising naturalist philosophers in the United States, such as Fred
Dretske, were equally baffled:
Why, or how, the nonspecialist is supposed to acquire an interest, and
if so, in what, by this quaint mixture of Hegelian metaphysics and
moral exhortation escapes me. Everything gets sorted out into levels
or hierarchies. There are levels of action, levels of experience, and
levels of goodness. Directly or indirectly, each of these levels is related
to the various stages through which the mind passes while translating
itself into actuality. Action is the subjective potentiality actualizing
itself in and through the process of objectification (p. 104). The code
is tricky but, as I understand it, action is the mind seeping out of the
body.
(Dretske, 1971, p. 251)
For two traditions which had grown so far apart so quickly, what
happened in the years that immediately followed the lukewarm recep-
tion of Knox's book was nothing less than remarkable. Thanks to
the work of H. S. Harris, M. Inwood, C. Taylor, and others, as well
as an accompanying new range of translations, interest in Hegel was
unexpectedly revived within the English-speaking world. Taylor's Hegel
(1975), in particular, would become instrumental in connecting Hegel
to a number of 'analytic' concerns, paving the ground for his own
'Hegel and the Philosophy of Action', first published in Lawrence L.
Stepelevich and David Lamb's 1983 collection Hegel's Philosophy of Action
(and reprinted here as Chapter 2).5 Taylor's approach differs from Knox's
in seeking relevance to contemporary debates about action and avowing
that Hegel's central ambitious ontological thesis was 'dead' (Taylor,
1975, p. 538/cf. also Wood, 1990, p. 4).
6 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Two independent developments during the early 1990s would eventu-
ally serve as the catalyst of a wider interest in Hegel's Theory of action.
The first was the publication of Robert Pippin's Hegel's Idealism (1989)
and Terry Pinkard's Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (1994)
which collectively presented a more contemporary Hegelian system that
was 'non-metaphysical' (cf. Hartmann, 1972). The second took the form
of two landmark books by Pittsburgh philosophers John McDowell and
Robert Brandom, each displaying important affinities with Hegel (Mind
and World and Making it Explicit, both published in 1994). McDowell
(1994, ix) described both their works as prolegomena to a reading of 'that
difficult text', the Phenomenology.
During the same period came also the first monographs dedicated
exclusively to Hegel's notion of action, namely Francesca Menegoni's
Soggetto e struttura dell'agire in Hegel (1993) and Michael Quante's Hegels
Begriff der Handlung (1993, translated into English in 2004 as Hegel's
Concept of Action).6 The latter is the only book-length work to date
relating Hegel to action theorists such as Anscombe, Davidson, and
Goldman.
Continuing both developments, the past decade has witnessed a
stream of authored books relating Hegel to contemporary action-theory
in both the 'continental' and 'analytic' traditions. These include Bernard
Bourgeois' Hegel, les actes de I'esprit (2001), Allen Speight's Hegel, Litera-
ture and the Problem of Agency (2001), Franck Fischbach's L'etre et I'acte:
Enquete sur les fondements de I'ontologie modeme de Tagir (2002), Dudley
Knowles' Hegel and the Philosophy of Right (2002), Hans-Christoph
Schmidt am Busch's Hegels Begriff der Arbeit (2002), Gary Pendlebury's
Action and Ethics in Aristotle and Hegel: Escaping the Malign Influence of
Kant (2006), and Robert B. Pippin's Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational
Agency as Ethical Life (2008).
The movement has given us cause to think that the time was ripe for
an edited volume which summarizes, continues, and extends the dis-
cussion so far. Each of the chapters that follow engages with different
aspects of Hegel's response to tensions embodied in the dual notion of
human beings as being in some sense part of the natural world and
in another quite distinct from it. We have divided them thematically
into seven consecutive pairs, though other arrangements, highlight-
ing different interconnections, would have been equally valid.7 Some
of the paired papers offer conflicting viewpoints and interpretations
whilst others complement one another, be it through a continuation
of thought or by highlighting different aspects of the same idea. Most of
the chapters present entirely new work, but we also chose to include a
selection of the original pieces that inspired our project (Chapters 2, 5,
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 7
and 10). The remainder of this introduction is comprised of brief
overviews of each thematic pair.
4.	Expression and causation
In his seminal paper 'Hegel and the Philosophy of Action (Chapter 2),'
Charles Taylor focuses on the nature of action, in particular on what
distinguishes it from other kinds of events. He draws a contrast between
the causal view of action (originally held by many classical rational-
ists and empiricists and later developed by Donald Davidson) and a
qualitative or expressive view whose roots lie with Aristotle but which is
also associated with Herder, Collingwood, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein,
Anscombe, and Melden. Taylor identifies Hegel as belonging to the lat-
ter camp, in ironic proximity to the Oxford linguistic philosophers of
the 1950s and 60s which Hegelians such as Knox wanted to distance
themselves from (see § 3 above).
Causal theories of action maintain that intentional actions are a
subset of bodily movements, namely those caused in 'an appropri-
ate way' by a pairing of a belief and 'pro-attitude' which 'rationalize'
the action in some 'anaemic' sense (Davidson, 1963). By contrast, the
expressive view sees action as being 'qualitatively different from non-
action ... intrinsically directed.... inhabited by the purposes that direct
them, so that action and purpose are ontologically inseparable.' So con-
ceptualized, there exists an ontological difference between actions and
nonactions which cannot be captured in terms of their causal origin.
As a corollary, the qualitative view also denies the idea that actions are
caused by intentions or other 'mental states.' To say that action is the
bodily expression of thought and intention is to say that the body takes
on a certain mental form, but not that it is caused by it.
This idea that action is the expression of thought and/or intention has
since come to be the majority view amongst Hegel scholars. Many of its
assumed implications are challenged by Dudley Knowles, who in his
'Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes' (Chapter 3) defends a qualified
causalist reading of Hegel. Knowles compares Hegel's assertions to three
distinct (albeit intertwined) causalist doctrines: (i) the causalist theory
of action, (ii) the claim that action explanation is a species of causal
explanation, and (iii) the Humean theory of motivation.
He next argues that whilst it is true that Hegel would reject the
causal view of action this does not in itself exclude the possibility of a
causal account of actionexplanation (cf. Ruben, 2003). Indeed, Knowles
maintains that Hegel 'understood action explanation as causal in that
familiar understanding of it as Requiring two separate independent
8 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
existences/ Knowles' argument for metaphysical separability turns on
cases where intentions fail to be realized. He invokes 'the obvious
thought that actions may be successful or unsuccessful as manifesta-
tions of their directing purposes. "I was doing my very best to win the
match", says the tennis player, and this doesn't tell us whether she won
or lost'. Knowles adds that he consequently has 'very great difficulty
understanding how ontological inseparability can hold, win or lose.'8
Contrasting Hegel to causalism, he demonstrates, is no straightforward
matter.
5.	Sociality, constructivism, and retrospectivism
In 'Hegel's Social Theory of Agency: The "Inner-Outer" Problem'
(Chapter 4), Robert Pippin endorses Taylor's expressivism before asking
further why Hegel took sociality to inform the question of agency, viz.
that of specifying how actions might differ from (mere) events.9
According to Pippin's Hegel, we cannot separate actions from (other)
events 'without reference to a subject's take on what is happening and
why, without reference to an inner realm, or a self-relation... that can-
not be understood apart from social relations; my relation to myself is
mediated by my relation to others.' This is crucial for the distinction
between 'Tat' (deed, or thing done) and ‘Handlung’ (action proper).
This is partly because practical reasoning is a norm-bound activity
whose norms are not up to us but also because 'all agency requires
the assumption of some act-description and some self-ascribing of
intentions, and Hegel insists that we must treat the agent's own descrip-
tion and ascription as merely provisional.'10 Both self-description and
self-ascription are conceived of as being subject to social 'negotiation':
a form of social mediation and responsiveness required for the indeter-
minate to become determinate. Hegel is thereby presented as holding a
social endorsement theory of identification (what Hegelians call 'own-
ership' and Kantians 'self-constitution') that is in competition with
those offered by Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Velleman, Fischer, Watson et al.
These are all subjective in that they focus purely on the agent's will or
desires.
Such sociality motivates the idea of retrospective awareness about
intentions:
Only as manifested or expressed can one (even the subject herself) ret-
rospectively determine what must have been intended. And of course
it seems a bit paradoxical to claim that we can only know what we
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 9
intended to do after we have actually acted. But there is little doubt
that Hegel holds something like such a position.
In so rendering questions about agency relative to social practices and
the forms of life that give rise to them Hegel once more appears as an
unexpected precursor to Wittgenstein ideas. The nature of any given
action, so conceived, is not determined by its physical properties and
mental antecedents but, rather, only realized within some concrete
social community whose rules are determined by participants past and
present. It is a public deed that "realises and reveals" what the agent
intended. This is not to imply, however, that intentions are some-
how created after the deed (through some mysterious collective act of
backward causation), but only that intention-in-action should not be
thought of as a mental episode at all.
John McDowell, in his paper "Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
in the ""Reason" Chapter of the Phenomenology' (Chapter 5), also defends
a "social' reading of Hegel's account of action according to which "one
cannot unilaterally, independently of participation in a communal prac-
tice, give bits of one's behaviour the kind of meaning actions have'. He
warns, however, that it does not follow from this that "actions are what
they are by being taken to be what they are by other participants in the
practice'.
McDowell opposes Pippin's social constructivism with a realist
reading of Hegel according to which the central role of sociality lies not
in constructing reasons, conferring the status of a free agent, or negotiat-
ing what one's intentions were but, rather, in "opening the agent's eyes'
to such things, thus enabling them to gradually become responsive to
reasons as reasons, thereby becoming free, rational, agents that share
practices with others.
McDowell seeks to save Hegel from paradox by distinguishing
between (a) knowledge of what one has actually done (which is rou-
tinely a posteriori) and (b) knowledge of what one intended to do (which,
following Anscombe, he takes to be non-observational). In so doing he
appeals to Hegel's understanding of the Oedipus story in which the dis-
tinction between Tat and Handlung is invoked to show that it is the
'right of subjectivity' to deny that one's deed (of which we can only
have knowledge after the fact) was intentional: "Hegel's point is not that
there is ""an unusual retrospective determination of intention", but that
one comes to know one's bodily powers only in the exercise of them.'
McDowell thus also moves towards a new reading of what is going
on in sections V.B and V.C.a. of Phenomenology. What is at stake, on
10 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
his interpretation, is not a clash between one's own take and that of
others (a clash which already presupposes the self-image as an inten-
tional agent), but the very notion of being able to conceive of oneself as
an intentional agent. He ends his essay by diagnosing Pippin's reading
as being motivated by a misguided fear of relativism, and insuffi-
ciently responsive to concern with one's responsibility in the absence
of received authorities.
6.	From questions of agency to those of imputation and
responsibility
Hegel's treatment of action appears to be driven by the concern to show
that actions only make sense as actions within specific social contexts.
Katerina Deligiorgi's paper 'Doing Without Agency: Hegel's Social The-
ory of Action' (Chapter 6) explains how this concern is reflected in
four aspects of action theory. The first two bear directly on our dis-
cussion so far, whilst the last pair pave the way for the chapters that
follow.
Deligiorgi begins by critically exploring Pippin's retrospective view
which in its (strongest) epistemic version claims that we cannot ever
fully know what our (or anybody else's) intention is until the related
action has taken place.11 Deligiorgi argues that this view cannot accom-
modate the prospective nature of intention, suggesting instead that
Hegel is a non-cognitivist to the extent that he believes that 'avowals of
intentions are not descriptions of inner states, they are expressions of
commitment to act,' and so makes no claims to knowledge of any kind.
To the extent that whatever is known after the deed is relevant to the
evaluation of the intention (thus counting as knowledge of intention),
a minimal epistemic retrospectivism may be sustained in her view.
Deligiorgi also takes a stand on the ontological separability of action
and intention. She agrees (contra Knowles) with Taylor's contention
that there is a sense in which 'action and purpose are ontologically
inseparable', but notes that this only holds for 'actions' and not for
'deeds'. Deligiorgi next argues that, on Hegel's view, ascribable and
communicable intentions are integral to the category of action (as
opposed to that of deed), simultaneously maintaining that this logical
connection need not be understood in ontological terms (which is
not to say that Hegel himself is exonerated of ontological indulgement).
In addition, the explanation and evaluation of action is different from
the (nomological) explanation of deeds. Indeed, the explanatory power
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 11
provided by causal stories is no better than that of magical potions,
appeal to which invariably leaves us feeling cheated at the theatre.
Thirdly, Deligiorgi argues that it would be best to drop the idea
of agents as separate metaphysical entities (endowed with the sorts
of causal powers typically attributed to them by various agent-
causationists) and to look instead to the attributions of ownership and
responsibility. The ascription of action and intention to an agent thus
entails no metaphysical commitments to agents as the causal origins of
actions. Finally, the ownership of any given action can only be settled
from within the context of a forensic examination and moral evaluation
of both act and agent. Her contribution ends by outlining an account
of the relation between ownership and accountability, as mediated by
reason-giving practices. Deligiorgi here points out that the concepts
of imputation and responsibility are central to our understanding of
agency.
Allen W. Wood's paper 'Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Con-
sequences' (Chapter 7) focuses on precisely this last point, defending
the view that Hegel's non-Kantian accounts of action (Handlung), deed
(Tat), purpose (Vorsatz), and intention (Absicht) equip him with a set of
resources that suffice for a nuanced account of agential responsibility for
actions and their consequences.
Wood begins with the theme of imputation, exploring Hegel's (PR
§115-17) non-traditional criteria for distinguishing between 'deed',
which 'posits an alteration to the given existence', and 'action', which
a deed is only insofar as it is imputable to the will of the agent. Respon-
sibility for an action belongs to the subject only for 'those aspects of its
deed which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were
present in its purpose'.
This may appear to suggest that Hegel takes agents to only be respon-
sible for specifically intended results, Wood however points out that
the 'purpose' of a deed however includes not only what the agent
specifically intended or took as an end, but also what the agent knew
would occur, even if it was not desired. If a pilot bombing an enemy
military installation knows that the school next door is also going
to be destroyed (killing many innocent children), the death of the
children, and not only the destruction of the enemy installation, is
part of his purpose. The purpose of my deed may include even con-
sequences I did not know about, if they belong to 'the nature of the
action itself'. (PR §118R)
12 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Wood explicates that, for Hegel, this nature can be known through
rational reflection. So conceived, the purpose of the action includes fore-
seen as well as intended consequences, but also consequences which
the agent ought to have foreseen (even if she didn't). Hegel's theory
thereby deals with culpable ignorance (including cases of negligence,
carelessness, and recklessness). By contrast, Kant's understanding of
action as the expression of a subjective volition (or maxim), limits moral
evaluation to the agent's will.
Wood demonstrates how Hegel's account generates a more sophisti-
cated understanding of moral luck, according to which action is a vehicle
through which we make ourselves responsible for unfortunate conse-
quences of any risks we take (in those cases where we ought to have
knowledge of them). Such situations contrast with that of Oedipus,
whose deeds formed no part of his purpose.
7.	Freedom, right, morality, and the lifeworld
Chapters 8 and 9 relate Hegel's views on action to its broader back-
ground. In 'Freedom and the Lifeworld' (Chapter 8) Terry Pinkard
observes that, despite its obvious centrality, it is difficult to comprehend
what Hegel's concept of freedom amounts to. In fact, it is impossible to
do so without a thorough appreciation of his dialectical outlook. Hegel's
concept of freedom instantiates the general dialectical claim that key
concepts in terms of which we think contain 'contradictions' that can
only be satisfactorily grasped by 'reason' as opposed to 'understanding'.
Pinkard sheds light on this dialectical move in order to clarify three dif-
ferent aspects of Hegel's idea of freedom: (i) the structure of freedom
as 'being oneself in another' as 'independence achieved in another',
(ii) freedom's gradual development from nature; and (iii) a view of
history as the development of freedom in human societies.
The first issue to be addressed is that of the intelligibility of the
very idea of dialectic. Pinkard explains that while Aristotle views logic
as being solely concerned with the relation of concepts (inferential
relations of judgements such as 'cats are mammals'), Hegel takes the sub-
sumption of particulars under concepts to also be governed by rational
or logical norms. This is not only so in the sense of abstract under-
standing (which merely applies the abstract meaning of a concept to
a concrete case) but also in a stronger (proto-Wittgensteinian) sense,
according to which meaning is realized by use. What abstract under-
standing fails to capture is the difference that the realization of a concept
makes to its otherwise 'abstract' meaning.
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 13
Pinkard next explores the question of why freedom is to be under-
stood in terms of being at one with oneself in an other. Hegel rejects
voluntarist perceptions of freedom as a special kind of causality in favour
of the more Aristotelian notion of an "inner, moving principle', trans-
formed into a historical and social conception of freedom, actualized in
'outer' actions (as discussed by Pippin). The upshot of all this is that it
is necessary that there be a social context, a lifeworld, for freedom to be
actualized in action.
Yet it also matters to freedom what this social context or lifeworld
is like, as highlighted by Hegel's views on Antiquity and Modernity.
Pinkard maintains that, for Hegel, history is not an intentional, teleolog-
ical process in the sense that either individuals or some collective 'spirit'
aim at the goals of history. There is a logic of responses and failures
but it occurs blindly, behind the backs of individuals. In modern soci-
ety we find a gap between social reasons and conscience—a gap that
was only just opening up in Antiquity, alongside a gradual move from
self-sufficiency to freedom (as revealed in tragic dilemmas such as those
portrayed in Sophocles's Antigone). In modernity it is always possible
to ask whether socially accepted conceptions of normativity capture it
correctly. Accordingly, appeals to one's conscience have some authority
and appeals to what one 'really' meant play a role that did not yet exist
in traditional culture.
The theme of freedom is also taken up by Stephen Houlgate who in his
'Action, Right, and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right' (Chapter 9)
considers Hegel's account of the relation between human action and
moral evaluation as it appears in Philosophy of Right.
Houlgate provides a close reading elucidating the central notions of
freedom, right, person, subject, demands of right, action, and conse-
quences, intention, welfare and good. He stresses the importance of
the fact that Hegel's theory of action in the morality section is sand-
wiched between his discussion of abstract right (as a terminus quid)
and that of ethical life (as a terminus quo).12 Based on his reading of
the Morality section and the passages which precede it, he argues, pace
Quante (1993/2004), that, for Hegel, agents qua agents are characterized
not by mere 'freedom of choice' but by a 'consciousness of right' and,
consequently, genuine 'free will'.
Houlgate maintains that action proper is 'inherently subject to moral
demands', thus also entailing autonomy, true freedom, and the presence
of moral attitudes in the agent. He further claims that, for Hegel, 'moral-
ity' is characterized by tensions: it is a one-sided viewpoint pointing
towards Ethical Life proper. The ethical agent 'is one whose intentions
14 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
are not just formed by the agent himself but also informed by the laws,
institutions and shared habits of mind that constitute ethical freedom'.
Agents as members of such ethical life nonetheless also remain indi-
vidual 'moral' agents, 'despite being educated into the shared habits
of ethical life, we continue to face situations in which we understand
ourselves to be required to do good and to be the ones who ultimately
decide what specific actions the good demands of us.' Houlgate concedes
that for Hegel 'action can be understood initially without reference
to morality', but concludes that 'every genuine agent—that is, every
truly free agent—acts in the light of moral demands'. This includes
agents in the settings of an established Ethical Life (what Pinkard, in
his contribution, calls 'the modern lifeworld').
8.	Externalizing oneself
The next two chapters explore the ways in which Hegel did and did
not think that agents are external things or parts of objective reality,
to be understood and explained just like any other natural object, thus
adopting central Hegelian theme to mediate between reductive mate-
rialism and dualism. Alasdair MacIntyre's 'Hegel on Faces and Skulls'
(Chapter 10) makes a forceful case for the view that current neuro-
scientific explanations of human nature frequently share unfounded
assumptions with pseudo-sciences that enjoyed a revival in Hegel's time,
namely physiognomy and phrenology. MacIntyre notes that the phys-
icalist mistake of taking inner mechanisms to be the sufficient causes
of intentional behaviour is akin to the more ancient one of taking the
human face to be an effect of character as opposed to its expression.
The pseudo-sciences that Hegel attacked purported to study 'organs'
on the surface of the brain. Aspects of the Swiss poet and physiognomist
Johann Caspar Lavater's highly influential Physiognomische Fragmente
zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntis und Menschenliebe (1775-78) were
harshly criticized by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (in a 1778 review).
Hegel's critique of physiognomy in the Phenomenology of Spirit, like that
of Kant before him (in 1796/7's Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
is highly indebted to that of Lichtenberg. However Hegel went further
than both, extending his criticism beyond phrenology to 'any psy-
chological theory which claims to establish laws of the workings of
individual minds' (Acton, 1971, p. 39).
MacIntyre argues that the logic of Hegel's arguments thereby licenses
further extensions to (a) neuroscientific 'explanations' of action and
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 15
indeed (b) any mechanistic account of the relation between mind and
bodily movement. His outlook here shares important features with that
of Charles Taylor.
In 'What Does it Mean "to Make Oneself Into an Object"?'
(Chapter 11), Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch examines what Hegel
means when he characterizes human action with expressions such as
'to externalize oneself (sich entauflern), 'to make oneself into an object'
(sich zum Gegenstande macheri) and 'to make oneself into a thing' (sich
zum Dinge machen).
This question is important because the above expressions are used
frequently in Hegel's writings (most importantly the Phenomenology's
section on lordship and bondage), yet he never himself elucidates what
needs to be the case in order for an actor to externalize himself or make
himself into an object.
Almost no attempts have been made to clarify these notions in
the secondary literature, with several questions remaining unanswered:
what exactly is the notion of 'making oneself into an object'? Which
phenomena fall under the concept? Is it an intelligible concept at all?
Is it a useful concept from the standpoint of either action theory or
political and social philosophy?
Both the intelligibility and usefulness of Hegel's notion have been
challenged. One objection is that the very idea of making oneself into
an object is unintelligible because neither the aim pursued by an indi-
vidual nor the abilities he employs to realize it can become material
objects. Schmidt am Busch responds by demonstrating that what is
made an object is a 'purpose' (Zweck) to which the agent has a specific
relationship—the purpose must be the agent's own and one which he
could have rejected. Other worries include the suspicion that the idea
of 'making oneself into an object' is a romantic one that is useless for
social theory and social philosophy, and that it also rests on problem-
atic assumptions about something being 'fully given in the mind' of the
agent, or about all of the agent's traits and abilities being fully given
beforehand.
Schmidt am Busch explains why these objections are not well justi-
fied. He does so by way of a detailed analysis of the section 'Willen' of
the Philosophy of Spirit (1805/6). His discussion opens up the possibil-
ity of examining the relevance Hegel's notions of exteriorizing oneself or
making oneself into an object hold with respect to his theories of action
and work.
16 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
9.	Planning theory and narrative approaches to agency
Michael Quante's 'Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency' (Chapter 12)
explicates Hegel's vision of the agent as temporally extended by drawing
analogies with Michael Bratman's planning theory. On Bratman's view,
intentions are to be treated as elements of partial action plans which
play a role in practical reasoning that is vital to the spatio-temporal orga-
nization of our activities and to the cooperation with others. Quante
points out that, for Hegel, agency cannot be limited to the selective
execution of singular intentions but—at least in the case of beings that
persist through longer periods of time and enact a complex structure of
needs, drives and desires—also requires action plans.
According to Quante (in line with Chapters 4-8), Hegel does not sim-
ply derive this dimension of human agency from his metaphysics of
subjectivity (grounded on the theory of judgement in the Science of
Logic), anchoring it instead in our practice of excusing and critiquing
of actions (making it independent of his metaphysics of subjectivity).
Hegel subdivides the Morality chapter of the Philosophy of Right in
three subsections in each of which he contrasts 'a right of subjectivity'
(a prerogative that sane and responsible agents have) with a 'right of
objectivity' (whose demands agents are to meet as sane and responsible
individuals). Quante points out that Hegel distinguishes further between
three aspects or 'kinds' of sanity (particularly in the margin notes to PR)
and various strategies of exculpation.
The first subsection of 'Morality' studies the conditions under which
an event is an intentional action. To settle this question, Quante
argues, it is sufficient to establish that there is some description under
which the event is intentional, that some 'purpose' is involved (as dis-
cussed in Chapters 2-7). Such a 'purpose' is subjectively determined, yet
characterized as an isolated action. Temporally extended agency need
not therefore be involved. In the case of action plans, the transition
from 'purpose' to 'intention' is decisive: it is the transition from an
isolated intentional action to a full-blown temporally extended action,
with all the aforementioned functions. The transition to the third
section is less central for action-plan theory as it marks the difference
between universalized selfish goals, ('welfare'), and the proper moral
dimension of agency (the 'good' and 'conscience').
Quante discusses Hegel's analysis of our practice of ascribing respon-
sibility and accepting excuses with an eye to the kind of conception
of temporally extended agents it provides. For example, various sorts
of excuse are not easily admitted because, as a responsible agent, the
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 17
human being is "not just the individual aspect of this moment or this iso-
lated passion for revenge/ Hegel points to the rationality of the humans
whose nature consists in the fact that he is 'essentially universal in
character, not an abstraction of the moment and a single fragment of
knowledge/ For Hegel, exclusion from full responsibility is a serious
blow to the agent's dignity, much more so than just punishment (which
remains consistent with recognition of the agent's dignity).
The close connection between temporally extended agency and nar-
rative is the focus of Allen Speight's 'Hegel, Narrative, and Agency'
(Chapter 13). Speight positions Hegel in relation to past theories
of narrative agency (Arendt, Taylor, MacIntyre, Ricoeur) as well
as current debates between those who see narratives as somehow
inevitable (Dennett, Goldie, Velleman) and sceptics about its expan-
siveness (Strawson, Lamarque). His chief aim is to explore what
Hegel's philosophy might be able to contribute to these controversies,
and how.
Speight asks 'what exactly counts as a "narrative" approach to agency
and how might Hegel's account of agency involve such an approach?'
He begins by outlining (a) what makes for a narrative structure in gen-
eral and (b) what would characterize an agent as having a narrative
stance, distinguishing between three competing accounts of what makes
a structure a narrative (rather than a description of some other kind).
The causalist view (White, Carroll) holds that a narrative differs from
'annals' or 'chronicles' by including a causal connection between ear-
lier and later events. By contrast, the emotionalist view (Velleman) and
the normative view (Burwell) hold that this is too restrictive, stressing
instead the emotional cadence and evaluation of events; Speight argues
that Hegel would have largely agreed with them.
He suggests that the most distinctly Hegelian claim about narrativity
in agency concerns the stance from which any ethical agent is able to
reflect upon his actions and the justifications for them. For Hegel, this
stance can be said to be narrative in the sense that it always involves
retrospectivity, social inflection, and implicit holism. Speight thus demon-
strating that Hegel's account of narrative agency remains as relevant
today as it ever was.
10.	Conscience, ethical life, and agent-neutral reasons
The final pair of papers examines the tension between, on the one
hand, agents' convictions & agent-relative reasons and, on the other,
intersubjective, institutional, and agent-neutral reasons. Francesca
18 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Menegoni's 'Action Between Conviction and Recognition in Hegel's
Critique of the Moral Worldviews' (Chapter 14) discusses the tensions
between personal convictions and interpersonal recognition, focusing
on the passages of the Phenomenology in which Hegel criticizes Kant's
and Fichte's moral worldviews.
Menegoni first points out that according to Hegel, Kant's and Fichte's
moral doctrines are compromised by a deep antinomy which under-
mines their legitimacy. They disregard the effectual reality (Wirklichkeit)
of action, focusing solely on the purity of the will, thereby placing
enormous importance on conscience (Gewissen). On Fichte's view, an
immediate, infallible, sentiment constitutes the formal criteria of the
justness of our own convictions. By contrast Hegel—while not denying
that following one's conscience is sometimes the best thing to do—thinks
that such an outlook could easily lead to moral aberrations. To explicate
the precise role that Hegel preserves for conscience, Menegoni turns to
Kant's distinction between conviction (Uberzeugung) and plain persua-
sion (Uberredung). These have the same content but only the latter is a
purely private form of individual judgements. The former, by contrast,
has a communicative and public dimension that is of profound impor-
tance in Hegel's practical philosophy. For Hegel, the value and, indeed,
very existence of actions demands two conditions to be present: (i) per-
sonal conviction that determines the decision with which the agent
chooses one possibility from among many, and (ii) interpersonal recog-
nition that legitimizes individual conviction and distinguishes it from
mere persuasion.
On Menegoni's view, the interweaving of the perspective of the indi-
vidual (T) with the shared communal or universal perspective ('We')
is therefore the core of Hegel's theory of action. She thus also stresses
the role of language in which the moral conscience (Gewissen) is
expressed. It is essential that the Gewissen enunciates its conviction so
that it is made public and is properly distinguished from mere persua-
sion. Since language mediates 'between independent and acknowledged
self-consciousnesses', it is the vehicle which allows the individual to
declare his convictions, and be ultimately understood or refuted in a
confrontation or clash.
The volume's closing paper, Dean Moyar's 'Hegel and Agent-Relative
Reasons' (Chapter 15), reconstructs Hegel's views on this tension as
they progress from the concept of freedom—through abstract right and
morality—to ethical life, picking up loose threads from earlier chapters
along the way.
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 19
Moyar's aims are threefold: to unpack the basic conceptual device
of Hegel's practical philosophy viz. the free will which Hegel con-
nects tightly to his basic methodological device of self-consciousness
('Concept'); to render Hegel's complex architecture of normativity in
the Philosophy of Right more intelligible; and to show that Hegel has
resources within his theory for resolving some of the problems with the
contemporary ways of drawing the distinction between agent-neutral
and agent-relative reasons.
Moyar begins with Nagel's analysis of agent-relative reasons as hav-
ing a 'free-agent variable' or contain an 'essential reference to the
agent'. Everyone has agent-neutral reason to reduce the amount of
wretchedness in the world, but there may be agent-relative (a) 'reasons
of autonomy', that are not reasons for others unless they share those
same desires, projects, or commitments; (b) 'deontological reasons' that
prohibit certain acts (e.g. murders) even when these would maximize
impersonal good and (c) reasons stemming from 'special obligations',
namely from our relations to our family, friends, and communities.
We are presented with three difficulties in Nagel's way of drawing
the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons, Moyar
arguing that Hegel has resources the devise his own distinction with-
out such pitfalls. The problems are (i) Nagel's misguided demand for a
general form of reasons; (ii) the elusive meaning of his notion of an
'essential reference'; and (iii) the misjudged aim of preserving the unity
of value.
Every sphere of Ethical Life (family, civil society, state), Moyar claims,
is characterized by individuals acting on agent-relative reasons. In fact
a central function of the institutions of Ethical Life is to 'liberate' the
individual from the demand to aspire to agent-neutrality (the view
from nowhere) in his reasons for action. One benefit of this libera-
tion is that there no longer exists a requirement to act on reasons that
can be expressed in general form. Inspired by Bernard Williams, Moyar
holds that 'in many cases, such as family life, making sure that one
acts on a reason with general form would mean having "a thought
too many"'.
The distance covered between Taylor's opening words and Moyar's
closing remarks confirms not only that Hegel addresses the full range
of themes outlined in § 1 above but, more importantly, that he does so
from a challenging perspective that contemporary philosophy of action
cannot ignore without loss. There remains much work to be done and
we look forward to a future of mutual recognition and debate.
20 Introduction: Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Notes
1.	While the philosophy of action may be treated as an area of philosophical
enquiry in its own right, its concerns invariably overlap with issues in ethics
(especially moral psychology), the philosophy of history, philosophy of lit-
erature, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, legal philosophy (as it relates to
criminal law), philosophy of science, and a certain conception of the philos-
ophy of language. Hegel's own writings on action cut across all of the above
areas.
2.	The official task of Phenomenology is to provide a ladder to the standpoint
from which Hegel's own views become intelligible and justified (what those
views are, can be read from his mature system). Therefore Phenomenology
consists of an extended negative argument aimed at demonstrating that
none of the one-sided 'shapes of consciousness' discussed are adequate takes
on the nature of reality as a whole. Action is discussed in various sections of
PhG, mostly by way of criticism of one-sided physicalist or individualist the-
ories: (i) the Self-Consciousness section (the discussion of desire, recognition,
and work, cf. Schmidt am Busch below); (ii) in the section of Reason, both
observing reason (cf. MacIntyre) and self-actualizing Reason (cf. Pippin and
McDowell); and (iii) in the section of Spirit, for example the passages about
Antigone, the moral view of the world, 'Conscience', 'beautiful soul', and
'evil and its forgiveness' (cf. Speight, Menegoni and Deligiorgi).
3.	Hegel's exploration of the nature of human action is included in his discus-
sions of objective spirit which gets a briefer treatment in EG (see esp. EG
§§503-12) and a fuller articulation in PR. There, Hegel presents his theory
of action in the middle section titled 'Morality' (§§105-41). In this vol-
ume, many authors focus specifically on these passages (cf. Knowles, Wood,
Houlgate, Quante, Moyar). Hegel briefly touches the nature of action in var-
ious other parts of his Encyclopaedic system and in the lectures published
posthumously. In Logic he investigates, for instance the logic of 'inner' and
'outer' with reference to action (EL §140) and the nature of causation and
action (SL 561-2). In Philosophy of Nature he discusses organisms and animal
activity or 'practical relation to inorganic nature' (EN §359-66) and in the
Philosophy of Subjective Spirit he turns to various antecedents of action, such
as desires, practical feelings, impulses, and inclinations (EG §§469-82). In his
lectures on the philosophy of world history, Hegel looks at the historical sig-
nificance of actions of world-historical individuals; and in his lectures on
aesthetics he considers action in the context of different forms of art such as
tragedies. (For Hegel's views prior to Phenomenology, see esp. PhilG/PhilS, and
Schmidt am Busch's chapter below).
4.	Knox, 1968, p. 17. The dust cover promises that 'the wide range of the
author's argument and his numerous concrete examples present a challenge
to the contemporary linguistic philosophy which he rejects'. As Knox's book,
despite its Hegelian credentials, is not really about Hegel, Hegel-scholars
have so far paid little attention to it.
5.	The rest of Stepelevich and Lamb's volume chiefly approached Hegel through
socio-political concerns, a trend which continues to this day to; see, for
example, Siep 1992; Hardimon, 1994; Honneth, 1995; Williams, 1997;
Franco, 1999; Patten, 1999; Neuhouser, 2000; Rose, 2007.
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis 21
6.	See also Manuela Alessio's Azione ed eticita in Hegel (1996). Remarkably, in the
entire world of Hegel-scholarship there were only a handful of previous arti-
cles and book chapters analysing Hegel's notion of action, such as (Derbolav,
1965; Wiehl, 1971 and Inwood 1982.)
7.	Readers with highly specific interests may wish to use the index as their chief
navigator.
8.	There is an interesting analogy to visual perception here. Disjunctive theo-
ries claim that illusory perceptions or hallucinations differ fundamentally
from ordinary perception and that, consequently, we should not seek to
identify a highest common factor between successful and unsuccessful cases.
Knowles' arguments may suggest that defenders of the metaphysical insep-
arability thesis are forced to retreat to such a disjunctive view (for helpful
comparisons between perceptual and agential disjunctivism, see Haddock
and Macpherson, 2008).
9.	This challenges those contemporary views which assume that the perspec-
tives of other agents cannot play a direct constitutive role in the deter-
mination of action. It is worth mentioning, however, that Davidsonian
causalist accounts are tempered by a holism of the mental which pre-
scribes highly contextualized interpretive criteria for psychological attribu-
tion (cf. Davidson, 1970). On such a conception of 'mental events', social
reality plays a crucially central role in the characterization of action, albeit
indirectly.
10.	See Knowles's chapter for some reservations concerning this claim of 'provi-
sionality'.
11.	This implies, among other things, that there is no Davidsonian state of
pure intending to become acquainted with through either introspection (as
agents) or physiognomy and phrenology (as observers). Hegel's critique of
the latter attempt is updated by MacIntyre in Chapter 10 below.
12.	Cf. Derbolav, 1965.
2
Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
Charles Taylor
I want to attempt in this paper to relate Hegel's thought to a set of
perennial issues that have been central to the philosophy of action in
modern times. The objective is twofold. Understanding Hegel's contri-
bution to the developing modern debate on the nature of action helps
us to understand the historical development of this debate; and this,
I want to argue, is important for understanding the debate itself. At the
same time, articulating the theory of action that is central to Hegel's
philosophy helps us to see this philosophy itself in a new light.
Of course, for any highly systematic body of thought like Hegel's we
can reconstruct the whole from many perspectives. Each one gives us
something, though some are more illuminating than others. I believe
that looking at Hegel's thought from the angle of the underlying con-
ception of action provides one of the more interesting perspectives on
the whole.
I
We can, perhaps, identify one fundamental issue that has been open in
the philosophy of action in modern times. To do so, of course, requires
some interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, and this, as
always, can be subject to controversy. The precise question that defines
this issue was not asked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and is rather one that is central to our twentieth-century debate. But
I want to claim, nevertheless, that different answers to this question
were espoused earlier, as one can see from a number of related philo-
sophical doctrines that were expressly propounded, and that depends
on these answers. I hope the plausibility of this reading will emerge in
the course of the whole argument.
22
Charles Taylor 23
This being said, I will baldly identify my central issue in an unashame-
dly contemporary terms: what is the nature of action? Or, otherwise put,
what distinguishes (human) action from other kinds of events? What are
the peculiar features of action?
One family of views distinguishes actions by the kind of cause that
brings them about. Actions are events that are peculiar in that they are
brought about by desires, or intentions, or combinations of desires and
beliefs. As events, actions may be described, among other ways, as physi-
cal movements (although one would have to be generous with the term
'physical movements/ so as to include cases of nonmovement, as, for
example, with the action we would describe as 'He stood still/). In this,
they resemble a host of other events that are not actions. What dis-
tinguishes them is a peculiar type of psychological cause that they are
brought on by desires or intentions. Of course, to hold this is not neces-
sarily to hold that psychological explanations are ultimate. One can also
look forward to their reduction to some neurophysiological or physical
theory. But in that case the burden of distinguishing action from nonac-
tion would be taken over by antecedents differently described: perhaps
some peculiar kind of firing in the cortex, that was found to be the basis
for what we identify psychologically as desire.
A view of this kind seems to have been implicit in much of Donald
Davidson's work (cf. Davidson, 1973). But the basic conception goes
back, I believe, at least to the seventeenth century. A conception of
this kind was, in a sense, even more clearly at home in the basically
dualist outlook common both to Cartesian and empiricist philosophies.
Qua bodily movements actions resembled all other events. What distin-
guished them was their inner, 'mental' background. Within the bounds
of this outlook, there was a clear ontological separation between outer
event and inner background.
Against this, there is another family of views that sees action as qual-
itatively different from nonaction, in that actions are what we might
call intrinsically directed. Actions are in a sense inhabited by the pur-
poses that direct them, so that action and purpose are ontologically
inseparable.
The basic intuition here is not hard to grasp, but it is difficult to artic-
ulate it very clearly. What is in any case clear is that this view involves a
clear negation of the first: we cannot understand action in terms of the
notions of undiscriminated event and a particular kind of cause; this is
to explain it in terms of other primitive concepts. But for the second
view, action is itself a primitive: there is a basic qualitative distinction
between action and nonaction. To the extent that action can be further
24 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
explicated in terms of a concept like 'purpose/ this turns out not to
be independently understandable. For the purpose is not ontologically
separable from the action and this means something like: it can only
exist in animating this action; or its only articulation as a purpose is
in animating the action; or perhaps, a fundamental articulation of this
purpose, on which all others depend, lies in the action.
This second view thus resists the basic approach of the first. We can't
understand action by first identifying it as an undifferentiated event
(because it is qualitatively distinct), and then distinguishing it by some
separably identifiable cause (because the only thing which could fill this
function, the purpose, is not separably identifiable). One of the roots of
this doctrine plainly is Aristotle's thesis of the inseparability of form and
matter, and we can see that in contrast to Cartesianism and empiricism,
it is plainly antidualist. This is not to say that proponents of the first
view are necessarily dualist—at least not simply so; just that their con-
ception permits of dualism, whereas the qualitative distinction thesis
does not.
One of the issues that is thus bound up with that about the nature of
action is the question of dualism. Another that I want briefly to mention
here is the place of the subject. It is clear that the distinction between
action and nonaction is one that occurs to us as agents. Indeed, one can
argue plausibly that a basic, not further reducible distinction between
action and what just happens is indispensable and ineradicable from
our self-understanding as agents? That is, it is impossible to function as
an agent at all unless one marks a distinction of this kind.
In this context, we can understand part of the motivation for the first,
or causal theory of action, as lying in the aspiration to go beyond the
subjective standpoint of the agent, and come to an understanding of
things that is objective. An objective understanding in this sense would
be one that was no longer tied to a particular viewpoint, imprisoned
in the categories that a certain viewpoint imposes. If agency seems
to impose the qualitative conception of action, then the causal one
can appear as a superior analysis, an objective portrayal of the way
things really stand, of the real components of action an sich. This drive
for objectivity, or what Bernard Williams has called 'absolute' descrip-
tions (cf. Williams, 1978), was one of the animating motives of both
Cartesianism and empiricism.
Now Hegel is clearly a proponent of the second, qualitative concep-
tion of action. And indeed he emerges out of a climate in which this
conception was staging a comeback after the ascendancy of Cartesian
and empiricist views. In one sense, the comeback can be seen to start
Charles Taylor 25
with Leibniz, but the tenor of much late eighteenth-century thought in
Germany was of this stamp. The reaction against dualism, the recov-
ery of the subject, the conception of the aesthetic object in Kant's
third critique—all these pushed towards, and indeed articulated them-
selves through, this understanding of action. 1 now want to develop its
ramifications to show how central it is to Hegel's thought.
II
The first important ramification of the qualitative theory is that it allows
for what 1 shall call agent's knowledge. The notion is that we are capa-
ble of grasping our own action in a way that we cannot come to know
external objects and events. In other words, there is a knowledge we are
capable of, concerning our own action, that we can attain as the doers
of this action; and this is different from the knowledge we may gain of
objects we observe or scrutinize.
This qualitative distinction in kinds of knowledge is grounded on the
qualitative view of action. Action is distinct in that it is directed, aimed
to encompass ends or purposes. And this notion of directedness is part
of our conception of agency: the agent is the being responsible for the
direction of action, the being for whom and through whom action is
directed as it is. The notion of action is normally correlative to that of
an agent.
Now if we think of this agent as identical with the subject of knowl-
edge, then we can see how there can be different kinds of knowledge.
One kind is gained by making articulate what we are doing, the direc-
tion we are already imprinting on events in our action. As agents, we
will already have some sense, however dim, inarticulate, or sublimi-
nal, of what we are doing; otherwise, we could not speak of directing
at all. So agent's knowledge is a matter of bringing this sense to formula-
tion, articulation or full consciousness. It is a matter of making articulate
something we already have an inarticulate sense of.
This evidently contrasts with knowledge of other objects, the things
we observe and deal with in the world. Here we are learning about things
external to our action, which we may indeed act with or on, but that
stand over against action.
Now the first, or causal view, cannot draw this contrast. To begin with,
we can see why it wasn't concerned to: because the contrast is one that
is evident from the agent's standpoint; agent's knowledge is available to
the knower only qua agent, and thus from this standpoint. It cannot
be recognized as knowledge from the absolute standpoint. Thus for the
26 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
causal view, my action is an external event like any other, only distinct
in having a certain kind of cause. I cannot claim to know it in some
special way.
Of course, what I can claim 'privileged access' to is my desire, or
intention—the cause of my action. And here we come to the clos-
est thing to an analogous distinction within the causal view to that
between agent's and observer's knowledge. In the original formulations
of Cartesianism and empiricism, I am transparently or immediately
aware of the contents of my mind. It may be accorded that I intend
to eat this apple. But of the consequences of this desire or intention,
viz., my consuming the apple, I have knowledge like that of any other
external event; I observe it.
We might then contrast the two views by noting that the causal view
too recognizes two kinds of knowledge, but it draws the boundaries
quite differently, between 'inner' and 'outer' reality. But we would have
to add that this difference of location of the boundary goes along with
a quite different view of what the knowledge consists in. The notion of
immediate or incorrigible knowledge makes sense in the context of dual-
ism, of a separate domain of inner, mental space, of which we can say
at least that its esse entails its percipi. The contrast will be something like
that between immediate and inferential knowledge, or the incorrigible
and the revisable.
Once we draw the boundary the way the qualitative theory does, there
is no question of incorrigibility. We may never be without some sense
of what we are doing, but coming to have knowledge is coming to for-
mulate that correctly, and we may only do this in a partial or distorted
fashion. Nor is this knowledge ever immediate; it is, on the contrary,
mediated by our efforts at formulation. We have indeed a different mode
of access to what we are doing, but it is questionable whether we should
tub this access 'privileged'. Neither immediacy nor incorrigibility are
marks of agent's knowledge.
Now, in a sense, this idea of agent's knowledge originates in modem
thought with Vico. But since his work didn't have the influence it
deserved in the eighteenth century, we should perhaps see Kant as the
important seminal figure. Not that Kant allowed a full-blooded notion of
agent's knowledge. Indeed, he shied away from using the word 'knowl-
edge' in this context. But he made the crucial distinction between our
empirical knowledge of objects, on one hand, and the synthetic a priori
truths that we can establish, on the other, about the mathematical and
physical structure of things. In Kant's mind it is clear that we can only
establish the latter with certainty because they are in an important sense
our own doing.
Charles Taylor 27
Perceiving the world involved not just the reception of informa-
tion, but crucially also our own conceptual activity, and we can know
for certain the framework of empirical reality, because we ourselves
provide it.
Moreover, in Kant's procedure of proof of these synthetic a priori
truths, he shows them to be essential conditions of undeniable features
of experience, such as, for example, that we mark a distinction between
the objective and the subjective in experience, or that the 'I think' must
be able to accompany all our representations. Later he will show the
postulates of freedom, God, and immortality as essential conditions of
the practice of determining our action by moral precepts. If we ask what
makes these starting points allegedly undeniable, I think the answer can
only be that we can be sure of them because they are what we are doing,
when we perceive the world, or determine our action on moral grounds.2
Kant thus brings back into the center of modem epistemological
debate the notion of activity and hence of agent's knowledge. Cartesian
incorrigibility, the immediate knowledge I have of myself as a thinking
substance, is set aside. In its place come the certainties that we don't
have immediately, but can gain, concerning not some substance, or
any object of knowledge whatever, but the structures of our own activ-
ity. What we learn by this route is only accessible by this route. It is
something quite different from the knowledge of objects.
This has been an immensely influential idea in modem philosophy.
One line of development from Kant lies through Schopenhauer, who
distinguished our grasp of ourselves as representation and as will, and
from this through Wittgenstein into modem British analytic philos-
ophy, for example, in Miss Anscombe's notion of 'non-observational
knowledge' (cf. Anscombe, 1957, pp. 13-15).
But the line that interests us here passes through Fichte. Fichte's
attempt to define subject-object identity is grounded on the view that
agent's knowledge is the only genuine form of knowledge. Both Fichte
and Schelling take up Kant's notion of an 'intellectual intuition', which
for Kant was the kind of agent's knowledge that could only be attributed
to God, one through which the existence of the object itself was given
(B72, Critique of Pure Reason) or one in which the manifold is given by
the activity of self (selbstthatig, B68). But they make this the basis of gen-
uine self-knowledge by the ego; and then of all genuine knowledge in
so far as object and subject are shown to be identical.
The category of agent's knowledge has obviously taken on a cen-
tral role, has exploded beyond the limits that Kant set for it, and is
indeed, the principal instrument by which these limits are breached and
the realm of inaccessible nournena denied. But the extension of agent's
28 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
knowledge obviously goes along with a redefinition of the subject. He is
no longer simply the finite subject in general that figures in the Critiques,
but is related in some way to a single infinite or cosmic subject.
Hegel is obviously the heir to this development. He takes up the
task of demonstrating subject-object identity, and believes himself to be
alone capable of demonstrating this properly. What is first seen as other
is shown to be identical with the self. It is crucial to this demonstration
that the self cease to understand itself as merely finite, but see itself as
part of spirit.
But the recognition of identity takes the form of grasping that every-
thing emanates from spirit's activity. To understand reality aright is to
understand it as 'actuality' (translating Wirklichkeit), that is, as what has
been actualized. We see it as not just given, but produced or 'posited'
by spirit's action. This is the crucial prerequisite of the final state, which
comes when we see that the agent of this activity is not foreign to us, but
that we are identical to (in our nonidentity with) spirit. The highest cat-
egories of Logic, those that provide the entry into the absolute Idea, are
thus those linked with agency and activity. We move from the teleology
into the categories of life, and then from knowledge to the good.
The recognition thus requires that we understand reality as activity,
but it requires as well that we come to understand in a fuller way what
we are doing, up to the point of seeing what spirit is doing through us.
Coming to this point, we see the identity of the world-activity with ours.
Thought thus culminates in a form of agent's knowledge. Only this is
not just a department of what we know alongside observer's knowledge,
as it is for our ordinary understanding. Rather observer's knowledge is
ultimately superceded. But the distinction is none the less essential to
the system, since its crucial claim is that we only rise to the higher kind
of knowledge through a supersession of the lower kind.
And this higher knowledge is far from immediate. On the contrary, it
is only possible as mediated through forms of expression, among which
the only adequate medium is conceptual thought. And this brings us
to another ramification of the qualitative view, which is also of central
importance for Hegel.
Ill
On the qualitative view, action may be totally unreflecting; it may
be something we carry out without awareness. We may then become
aware of what we are doing, formulate our ends. So following on a con-
scious desire or intention is not an inescapable feature of action. On the
Charles Taylor 29
contrary, this degree of awareness in our action is something we come
to achieve.
In achieving this, we also transform our activity. The quality of
consciously directed activity is different from that of our unreflected,
semi-conscious performance. This flows naturally from the second view
on action: if action is qualitatively different from nonaction, and this
difference consists in the fact that action is directed; then action is also
different when this direction takes on a crucially different character. And
this it does when we move from unreflecting response, where we act in
much the same manner as animals do, to conscious formulation of our
purposes. Our action becomes directed in a different and stronger sense.
To become conscious is to be able to act in a new way.
Now the causal theory doesn't allow for this kind of qualitative shift.
Indeed in its original, dualist variant, it couldn't even allow for unre-
flecting action. Action is essentially caused by desire or intention, and
on the original Cartesian empiricist model, our desires were essentially
features of inner experience. To have a desire was to feel a desire. Hence
on this view, action was essentially preceded by a cause of which the
agent was aware. This amounted in fact to making conscious action,
where we are aware of our ends, the only kind of action. It left no place
at all for totally unmonitored, unconscious activity, the kind of action
animals engage in all the time, and we do much of the time.
And even when the causal theory is disengaged from its dualist or
mentalist formulation, where the causes of action are seen as material,
and hence quite conceivably largely unconscious, the theory still has no
place for the notion that action is qualitatively transformed in becoming
conscious. Awareness may allow us to intervene more effectively to con-
trol what comes about but action remains essentially an undifferentiated
external event with a certain kind of cause.
Now this offshoot of the qualitative view: that action is not essen-
tially or originally conscious, that to make it so is an achievement, and
that this achievement transforms it; this also is crucial to the central
doctrines of Hegel. I want to look at two of them here.
1. The first is what I have called elsewhere the 'principle of embodiment'
(Taylor, 1979a, p. 18). This is the principle that the subject and all his
functions, however 'spiritual' they may appear, are inescapably embod-
ied. The embodiment is in two related dimensions: first, as a 'rational
animal', that is, as a living being who thinks; and secondly, as an expres-
sive being, that is, a being whose thinking is always and necessarily in a
medium.
30 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
The basic notion here is that what passes in modem philosophy for
the 'mental' is the inward reflection of what was originally external
activity. Self-conscious understanding is the fruit of an interiorization of
what was originally external. The seeming self-coincidence of thought
in which I am apparently immediately aware of my desires, aims, and
ideas, that is foundational to Cartesianism, is understood rather as an
achievement, the overcoming of the externality of an unconscious,
merely instinctive life. It is the fruit of a negation of what negates
thought, not itself a positive datum.
This understanding of conscious self-possession as the negation of the
negation is grounded on the conception of action I have just been out-
lining. In effect, it involves seeing our mental life fundamentally in the
category of action. If we think of the constituents of mental life, our
desires, feelings, ideas, as merely given, as the objects that surround us
in the world are given, then it is plausible to think of our knowledge
of them as privileged. They appear to be objects that we cannot but be
aware of, if we are aware at all. Our awareness of them is something
basic, assured from the start, since it is essentially involved in our being
aware at all.
In order to understand mental life as something we have to achieve
understanding of, so that self-transparency is a goal we must work
towards, we have to abandon the view of it as constituted of data.
We have to understand it as action, on at least one of two levels, if
not both.
On one level, we have to see self-perception as something we do,
something we can bring off, or fail to bring off, rather than a feature
of our basic predicament. This means that we see it as the fruit of an
activity of formulating how things are with us, what we desire, feel,
think, etc. In this way, grasping what we desire or feel is something
we can altogether fail to do, or do in a distorting or partial, or cen-
sored fashion. If we think through the consequences of this, I believe
we see that it requires that we conceive self-understanding as some-
thing that is brought off in a medium, through symbols or concepts,
and formulating things in this medium as one of our fundamental
activities.
We can see this if we leap out of the Hegelian context and look at the
quite different case of Freud. Here we have the most notorious doctrine
of the non-self-transparency of the human psyche. But this is mediated
through a doctrine of self-understanding through symbols, and of our
(more or less distorted and screened) formulation of our desires, fears,
etc. as something we do. For although these formulations occur without
Charles Taylor 31
our willful and conscious intent, they are nevertheless motivated. Dis-
placements, condensations, etc., occur where we are strongly motivated
to bring them off.
But on a second level, we may also see the features of ourselves that
self-perception grasps not as simply givens but as themselves bound up
with activity. Thus desires, feelings may not be understood as just men-
tal givens, but as the inner reflection of the life process that we are.
Our ideas may not be conceived as simple mental concepts, but as the
precipitates of thinking. And so on.
Hegel understands mental life as activity on both these levels. In a
sense, the first can be thought to represent the influence of Kant. It was
Kant who defended the principle that there is not perception of any kind
that is not constituted by our conceptual activity. Thus there is no self-
awareness, as there is no awareness of anything else, without the active
contribution of the 'I think'. It was the contribution of the new richer
theory of meaning that arose in the wake of romanticism to see that this
constitutive thought required an expressive medium. Freud is, of course,
via Schopenhauer, the inheritor both of this Kantian doctrine and of the
expressivist climate of thought, and hence also through Schopenhauer
of the idea that our self-understanding can be very different in different
media, as well as distorted in the interests of deeper impulses that we
barely comprehend.
The making activity central on the second level is also the fruit of
what I want to call the expressivist climate of thought, which refused
the distinctions between mind and body, reason and instinct, intel-
lect and feeling, that earlier Enlightenment thought had made central.
Thought and reason were to be understood as having their seat in the
single life process from which feeling also arose. Hence the new vogue
for Aristotelian inseparability doctrine, of form and matter, of thought
and expression, of soul and body.
Hegel's theory is built on both these streams. Our self-understanding
is conceived as the inner self-reflection of a life process, which at the
outset fails to grasp what it is about. We learn through a painful and
slow process to formulate ourselves less and less inadequately. At the
beginning, desire is unreflected, and in that condition aims simply for
the incorporation of the desired object. But this is inherently unsatis-
factory, because the aims of spirit are to recognize the self in the other,
and not simply to abolish otherness. And so we proceed to a higher
form of desire, the desire for desire, the demand for recognition. This
too starts off in a barely self-conscious form, which needs to be further
transformed.
32 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
In this theory, activity is made central on both levels: (a) on the sec-
ond, more fundamental level, what is to be understood here, the desire,
is not seen as a mere psychic given, a datum of mental life. On the con-
trary, it is a reflection (and at first an inadequate one) of the goals of
a life process that is now embodied and in train in the world. Properly
understood, this is the life process of spirit, but we are, at the outset, far
from seeing that. So the active life process is primary, even in defining
the object of knowledge.
Then, (b) on the first level, the achievement of more and more
adequate understandings is something that comes about through our
activity of formulating. This takes place for Hegel, as we shall see later,
not only in concepts and symbols, but also in common institutions and
practices. For example, the institution of the master-slave relationship
is one 'formulation' (and still an inadequate one) of the search for recog-
nition. Grasping things through symbols, establishing and maintaining
practices are things we do, are to be understood as activities, in Hegel's
theory.
And so we have two related activities. There is a fundamental activity
of Spirit, which it tries to grasp through the various levels of self-
formulation. These two mutually conditioning activities are at first out
of phase but are destined in the end to coincide perfectly. That is because
it will come clear at the end that the goal of the whole life process
was that Spirit come to understand itself, and at the same time the
life process itself will be entirely transparent as an embodiment of this
purpose.
But this perfect coincidence comes only at the end. And it only comes
through the overcoming of noncoincidence, where what the pattern of
activity is differs from what this pattern says. And so the distinction
between these two dimensions is essential for the Hegelian philosophy:
we could call them the effective and the expressive. Each life form in his-
tory is both the effective realization of a certain pattern, and at the same
time is the expression of a certain self-understanding of man, and hence
also of spirit. The gap between these two is the historical contradiction
that moves us on.
And so for Hegel, the principle of embodiment is central. What we
focus on as the mental can only be understood in the first place as the
inner reflection of an embodied life process; and this inner reflection is
itself mediated by our formulations in an expressive medium. So that
all spiritual life is embodied in the two dimensions just described: it
is the life of a living being who thinks; and his thinking is essentially
expression. This double shift from Cartesianism, from a psychology
Charles Taylor 33
of immediate self-transparency, to one of achieved interiority, of the
negation of the negation, is obviously grounded on the qualitative
understanding of action, and the central role it plays here.
The mental life has a depth that defies all immediate self-transparency,
just because it is not merely self-contained, but is the reflection of
a larger life process; while plumbing this depth is in turn seen as
something we do, as the fruit of the activity of self-formulation.
Once again, we see that the Hegelian understanding of things involves
our seeing activity as all-pervasive. But the activity concerned is as it is
conceived on the qualitative view.
2. We can thus see that this offshoot of the qualitative view, which sees
action as first unreflecting, and reflective understanding as an achieve-
ment, underpins what I call the principle of embodiment in Hegel's
thought. But we saw above that for this conception reflective con-
sciousness transforms action. And this aspect too is crucial to Hegel's
theory.
His conception is of an activity that is at first uncertain or self-
defeating because its purposes are barely understood. The search for
recognition is, properly understood, a demand for reciprocal recogni-
tion within the life of a community. This is what our activity is in
fact groping towards, but at first we do not understand it in this way.
In a still confused and inarticulate fashion, we identify the goal as
attaining one-sided recognition for ourselves from others. It follows
that our practice will be confused in it purposes and self-defeating.
For the essential nature of the activity is not altered by our inade-
quate understanding of it; the true goal of the search for recognition
remains community. Our inadequacy of understanding only means that
our action itself is confused, and that means that its quality as directed
activity is impaired.
We can see this kind of confusion, for instance, at the stage where we
seek to answer our need for recognition through an institution like that
of slavery. We are already involved here with what will turn out to be
the only possible solution to this quest, viz., community; because even
the institution of the master-slave relation will typically be defined and
mediated by law, a law that binds all parties, and that implicitly recog-
nizes them as subjects of right. Within this framework, the relations of
domination, of ownership of man by man, contradict the basic nature
of law. If we think of our building and maintaining these institutions as
an activity we are engaged in together, which is how Hegel sees it, then
we can see that our activity itself is confused and contradictory. This is,
34 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
indeed, why it will be self-defeating, and why this institutional complex
will eventually undermine and destroy itself.
A new form of society then will arise out of the ruins of this one. But
the practices of this new society will only be higher than previous ones
to the extent that we have learned from the previous error, and now
have a more satisfactory understanding of what we are engaged in. And
indeed, it is only possible to accede eventually to a practice that has fully
overcome confusion and is no longer self-defeating if we finally come to
an understanding that is fully adequate.
But throughout this whole development we can see the close relation
that exists between the level of our understanding and the quality of
our practice. On this view, our action itself can be more or less firmly
guided, more or less coherent and self-consistent. And its being one or
the other is related to the level of our self-understanding.
We are reminded here of a common conception of the romantics,
well expressed in a story by Kleist, that fully coherent action must be
either totally unreflecting or the fruit of full understanding. The birth
of self-consciousness on this view disrupts our activity, and we can only
compensate for this disruption by a self-awareness which is total. Hegel
takes up this conception with an important difference. The crucial activ-
ity is that of Spirit, and it aims for self-recognition. As a consequence,
there is no such thing as the perfection of totally unreflecting activity.
The earliest phases of human life are even there phases of Spirit, and the
contradiction is present between their unconsciousness and what they
implicitly seek.
In sum, we can see that this ramification of the qualitative theory
of action involves a basic reversal in the order of explanation from
the philosophy that Cartesianism and empiricism bequeathed to us.
It amounts to another one of those shifts in what is taken as primi-
tive in explanation, similar and related to the one we mentioned at the
outset.
There I pointed out that in the Cartesian-empiricist view, action
was something to be further explained, compounded out of undif-
ferentiated event and a certain kind of cause. The cause here was a
desire, or intention, a 'mental' event; and these mental occurrences are
taken as primitives by this kind of theory, and part of the explanatory
background of action.
But the qualitative view turns out to reverse this order. The 'mental'
is not a primitive datum, but is rather something achieved. But more,
we explain its genesis from action as the reflective understanding we
eventually attain of what we are doing. So the status of primitive and
Charles Taylor 35
derived in explanation is reversed. One theory explains action in terms
of the supposedly more basic datum of the mental; the other accounts
for the mental as a development out of our primitive capacity for action.
IV
The qualitative view also brings about another reversal, this time in the
theory of meaning, which is worth examining for its own sake, as well
as for its importance to Hegel.
I said above that for this view, becoming aware of ourselves, coming to
self-consciousness, is something we do. We come to be able to formulate
properly what we are about. But this notion of formulation refers to that
of an expressive medium.
One way to trace the connection is this: if we think of self-
consciousness as the fruit of action, and we think of action as first
of all unreflecting bodily practice, which only later comes to be self-
understood, then the activity of formulating must itself conform to
this model. That is, our formulating ourselves would beat first a rela-
tively unreflective bodily practice, and would attain only later to the
self-clarity required for full self-consciousness.
But this is just what we see in the new expressive theories of mean-
ing, which arose in the late eighteenth century, and which Hegel took
over. First, the very notion of expression is that of self-revelation as
a special kind of bodily practice. The Enlightenment theory of signs,
born of the epistemological theories of the seventeenth century, made
no fundamental distinction between expressing and any other form of
self-revelation. You can see that I am afraid of a recession by the fact that
Гт selling short; you can see that Гт afraid of you by the expression
on my face; you can see that it's going to rain because the barometer
is falling. Each of these was seen as a 'sign' which points beyond to
something it designates or reveals. Enlightenment theorists marked dis-
tinctions between signs: some were by nature, some by convention. For
Condillac, there were three kinds: accidental and natural signs, and signs
by institution.
But the distinction they quite overlooked was the crucial one for an
expressivist, that between 'signs' that allow you to infer to their 'desig-
natum', like the barometer does to rain, and true signs, which express
something. When we make something plain in expression, we reveal
it in public space in a way that has no parallel in cases of inference.
The barometer 'reveals' rain indirectly. This contrasts with our perceiv-
ing rain directly. But when I make plain my anger or my joy, in facial
36 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
or verbal expression, there is no such contrast. This is not a second best,
the dropping of clues that enable you to infer. This is what manifesting
anger or joy is. They are made evident not by or through the expression
but in it.
The new theories of meaning, which start perhaps with Herder's cri-
tique of Condillac, involved a fundamental shift. They recognize the
special nature of those human activities that reveal things in this special
way. Let us call them expressive activities. These are bodily activities.
They involve using signs, gestures, spoken or written words. Moreover,
their first uses are relatively unreflecting. They aim to make plain in pub-
lic space how we feel, or how we stand with each other, or where things
stand for us. It is a long slow process that makes us able to get things in
clearer focus, describe them more exactly, and above all, become more
knowledgeable about ourselves.
To do this requires that we develop finer and more discriminating
media. We can speak of an embodiment that reveals in this expressive
way as a 'medium.' Then the struggle for deeper and more accurate
reflective self-understanding can be understood as the attempt to dis-
cover or coin more adequate media. Facial expressions do much to
make us present to each other in our feelings and desires, but for
self-understanding, we need a refined and subtle vocabulary.
This amounts to another major reversal in theory. The Enlightenment
account explained meaning in terms of the link of designation or 'sig-
nifying' between word and object. This was a link set up in thought.
In Locke's theory, it was even seen as a link setup through thought,
since the word strictly speaking signified the idea of the object. Mean-
ing is explained here by thought, which once again is seen in the
role of explanatory primitive. In this conception, expression is seen as
just one case of the signifying relation, which is seen as constituted in
thought.
But for the expressive theory, it is expression that is the primitive.
Thought, that is, the clear, explicit kind of thought we need to estab-
lish new coinages, new relations of 'signifying', is itself explained from
expression. Both ontogenetically and in the history of culture, our first
expressions are in public space, and are the vehicles of a quite unreflec-
tive awareness. Later we both develop more refined media, in concepts
and images, and become more and more capable of carrying out some
part of our expressive activity monologically; that is, we become capa-
ble of formulating some things just for ourselves, and hence of thinking
privately. We then develop the capacity to frame some things clearly to
ourselves, and thus even to coin new expressions for our own use. But
Charles Taylor 37
this capacity, which the Enlightenment theory takes as a primitive, is
seen here as a late achievement, a change we ultimately come to be able
to ring on our expressive capacity. The latter is what is now seen as basic
in the order of explanation.
In our day, a similar radical reversal was carried out in the theory of
meaning by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took as his target the theory that
emerges out of modem epistemological theory, to which he himself had
partly subscribed earlier. What I have called the Herderian theory is very
reminiscent therefore of Wittgenstein's.
But Hegel wrote in the wake of the earlier expressive revolution. And
one can see its importance for his thought by the crucial place in it of
what I have called the notion of medium. The goal of Spirit is clear,
self-conscious understanding. But the struggle to attain this is just the
struggle to formulate it in an adequate medium.
Thus Hegel distinguishes art, religion, and philosophy as media, in
ascending order of adequacy. The perception of the absolute is embod-
ied in the work of art, it is presented there (dargestellt). But this is in a
form that is still relatively inarticulate and unreflecting. Religious doc-
trine and cult bring us closer to adequacy, but are still clouded by images
and 'representations' (Vorstellungeri). The only fully adequate form is
conceptual thought, which allows both transparency and full reflective
awareness. But attaining our formulation in this medium is the result
of a long struggle. It is an achievement; and one that builds on, and
required the formulations in the other, less adequate media. Philoso-
phy doesn't only build on its own past. For in earlier ages, the truth
is more adequately presented in religion (for example, the early ages of
Christianity), or art-religion (at the height of the Greek polis). In coming
to its adequate form, philosophy, as it were, catches up. True speculative
philosophy has to say clearly what has been there already in the images
of Christian theology.
Thus for Hegel too thought is the achievement whereby our
expression is made more inward and clear. The attainment of self-
understanding is the fruit of an activity that itself conforms to the basic
model of action, in that it is at first unreflecting bodily practice and only
later attains self-clarity. This is the activity of expressing.
V
I have been looking at how the qualitative theory of action and its ram-
ifications underlie Hegel's philosophy, for which in the end everything
is to be understood in terms of the all-pervasive activity of Spirit. I have
38 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
been arguing that we can only understand the kind of activity here
involved if we have in mind the qualitative view.
But there are also some important features of human historical action
on Hegel's view which only make sense against this conception. I want
to mention two here.
1. The first is this: all action is not, in the last analysis, action of indi-
viduals; there are irreducibly collective actions. The causal view was
inherently atomist. An action was such because it was caused by desire,
intention, some 'mental' state. But these mental states could only be
understood as states of individuals. The mental is what is 'inner', which
means within each one of us. And so action is ultimately individual.
That is to say, collective actions ultimately amount to the convergent
action of many individuals and nothing more. To say 'the X church did
so-and-so' or 'the Y party did such and such' must amount to attributing
converging action to clumps of individuals in each case. For what makes
these events actions in each case is their having inner mental causes, and
these have to occur or not occur discretely within individuals.
By contrast, the qualitative view does not tie action only to the indi-
vidual agent. The nature of the agency becomes clear to us only when
we have a clear understanding of the nature of the action. This can be
individual; but it can also be the action of a community, and in a fash-
ion that is irreducible to individual action. It can even conceivably be
the action of an agent who is not simply identical with human agency.
Hegel, of course, avails himself of both of these latter possibilities.
In his conception of public life, as it exists in a properly established
system of objective ethics (Sittlichkeit), the common practices or institu-
tions that embody this life are seen as our doing. But they constitute an
activity that is genuinely common to us, it is ours in a sense that cannot
be analyzed into a convergence of mines's.
But for Hegel, there is a crucial level of activity, which is not only
more than individual, but even more than merely human. Some of what
we do we can understand also and more deeply as the action of Spirit
through us. In order to arrive at a proper understanding, we thus have
to transcend our ordinary self-understanding; and to the extent that our
common sense is atomist, we have to make two big transpositions; in the
first, we come to see that some of our actions are those of communities;
in the second, we see that some are the work of Spirit. It is in the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit that we see these transitions being made. The first
corresponds to the step from Chapter 5 to Chapter 6 (here Hegel speaks
of the community action by using the term 'Spirit'). The second is made
Charles Taylor 39
as we move through the discussion in the third part of Chapter 6 into
the chapter on religion.
2. Following what I have said in earlier sections, human action is to be
understood in two dimensions, the effective and the expressive. This
latter dimension makes it even clearer how action is not necessarily that
of the individual. An expression in public space may turn out to be the
expression essentially of a common sentiment or purpose. That is, it
may be essential to this sentiment or purpose that it be shared, and the
expression may be the vehicle of this sharing.
These two features together—that action can be that of a community,
and that it also exists in the expressive dimension—form the crucial
background to Hegel's philosophy of society and history. The Sittlichkeit
of a given society not only is to be seen as the action of a community,
or of individuals only so far as they identify themselves as members of
a community (an T that is 'We', and a 'We' that is 'I', PhG 4(177); it
also embodies and gives expression to a certain understanding of the
agent, his community and their relation to the divine. It is this lat-
ter that gives us the key to the fate of the society. For it is here that
the basic incoherence underlying social practice will appear as contra-
diction, as we saw with the case of the slave-owning society above.
Hegel's notion of historical development can only be properly stated if
we understand social institutions in this way, as transindividual action
that also has an expressive dimension. By contrast, the causal view and
its accompanying atomist outlook induces us to explain institutions in
purely instrumental terms. And in these terms, Hegel's theory becomes
completely unformulable. We cannot even begin to state what it is all
about.3
VI
I have been arguing that we can understand Hegel against the back-
ground of a long-standing and very basic issue in modern philosophy
about the nature of action. Hegel's philosophy can be understood as
firmly grounded on an option in favor of what I have been calling the
qualitative view of action and against the causal view.
I have tried to follow the different ramifications of this qualitative
view to show their importance to Hegel's thought. I looked first at the
notion of agent's knowledge, and we saw that the system of philoso-
phy itself can be seen as the integration of everything into a form of
all-embracing agent's knowledge. I then followed another development
40 Hegel and the Philosophy of Action
of the qualitative view, which shows us action as primordially unre-
flecting bodily practice, which later can be transformed by the agent's
achievement of reflective awareness. We saw that Hegel's conceptions
of subjectivity and its development are rooted in this understanding.
1 then argued that the expressive revolution in the theory of meaning
could be seen as an offshoot of this same view of action; and that Hegel
is clearly operating within the expressive conception. Finally we can see
that his theory of history supposes not just the expressive dimension but
also the idea of irreducibly common actions, which only the qualitative
view can allow.
One part of my case is thus that Hegel's philosophy can be illuminated
by making this issue explicit in all its ramifications. This is just in the
way that we make any philosophy clearer by spelling out more fully
some of its deepest assumptions. The illumination will be the greater
the more fundamental and pervasive the assumptions in question are for
the theory under study. Now my claim is that for Hegel the qualitative
theory of action is very basic and all pervasive, and the above pages have
attempted to show this.
Perhaps out of deference to Hegel's shade I shouldn't use the word
'assumption', since for Hegel everything is ultimately demonstrated. But
my claim stands that the thesis about action I have been describing here
is quite central to his philosophy.
But this is only one side of the gain that one can hope for in a study of
this kind. The other, as I said at the outset, is that we should attain some
greater understanding of the historical debate itself by situating Hegel
in it. I think this is so as well, but I haven't got space to argue it here.
What does emerge from the above is that Hegel is one of the impor-
tant and seminal figures in the long and hard-fought emergence of a
counter-theory to the long-dominant epistemologically based view that
the seventeenth century bequeathed us. This can help explain why he
has been an influential figure in the whole countermovement where this
has been the case. But what remains to be understood is why he has also
often been ignored or rejected by major figures who have shared some-
what the same notions of action, starting with Schopenhauer but by no
means ending there.
Perhaps what separates Hegel most obviously and most profoundly
from those today who take the same side on the issue about action
is their profoundly different reading of the same genetic view. For
Heidegger, for example, the notion that action is first of all unre-
flected practice seems to rule out altogether as chimerical the goal of
a fully explicit and self-authenticating understanding of what we are
Charles Taylor 41
about. Disclosure is invariably accompanied by hiddenness; the explicit
depends on the horizon of the implicit. The difference here is fun-
damental, but I believe that it too can be illuminated if we relate it
to radically different readings of the qualitative view of action, which
both espoused in opposition to the epistemological rationalism of the
seventeenth century. But I cannot even attempt to show this here.
Notes
1.	I have tried to do this in Taylor, 1979b.
2.	I have argued this further in Taylor, 1978b.
3.	I have developed this further in Taylor, 1978a.
3
Hegel on Actions, Reasons,
and Causes
Dudley Knowles
In a famous article, Charles Taylor sharply distinguishes two families of
views concerning the nature of action. In the first family, actions are
distinguished from other kinds of event by their having a certain kind
of cause: 'they are brought about by desires, or intentions or combina-
tions of desires and beliefs' (Taylor, 1985a, p. 78).1 A second family of
views regards 'action as qualitatively different from non-action, in that
actions are... intrinsically directed. Actions are in a sense inhabited by
the purposes which direct them, so that action and purpose are ontolog-
ically inseparable' (ibid.). Taylor suggests that this distinction is loosely
related to that of dualist and monistic accounts of mind respectively, but
this mark of difference is a distraction, not least since the most famil-
iar contemporary monistic account of mind and body is physicalist, not
idealist, and well suited to causal accounts of action. The fundamen-
tal distinction elucidated by Taylor is metaphysical or ontological: in
the first family of views talk of action entails reference to two distinct
events—distinct existences, to use the language of Hume—the action (or
'bodily movement', broadly conceived) and its typical cause (however
specified). In the second family of views the ontological inseparability
of action and purpose entails the existence of just one event—the action
itself. Taylor firmly places Hegel within the second, unitary—as he says
'qualitative'—family of theories of action.
There are other distinctions and debates hereabouts which should
frame our investigation of Hegel's views on action and these are closely
related to the distinction marked by Taylor. First (and this issue is
directly addressed by Taylor) there is the question of whether the reasons
which we use to explain action cause the action. A widely influential
Wittgensteinian thread of argument, developed in the 1950s by G.E.M.
Anscombe, A.I. Melden and W.H. Dray amongst others, holds that
42
Dudley Knowles 43
rational explanation, the explanation of action in terms of the agent's
reasons, is not causal explanation.2 Rather it is broadly hermeneutical,
tracing out the reasons in a wider network of mental states - beliefs,
desires, dispositions and values attributable to the author of the action
which illuminate what is done. As Anscombe says, 'To explain one's
own actions by an account indicating a motive is to put them in a cer-
tain light' (Anscombe, 1963, p. 21). By contrast, an opposing thread,
associated most conspicuously with Donald Davidson, insists that the
explanation of action is a type of causal explanation. Reasons work as
causes. In stating the reason why a person acted we give the cause of
the action. To be precise, we give 'a primary reason [which] consists of a
belief and an attitude... to know a primary reason why someone acted
as he did is to know an intention with which the action was done', and
crucially, 'A primary reason for an action is its cause' (Davidson, 1980a,
pp. 6-7, 12). This prompts us to ask whether the account of action
which Hegel provides is causal or non-causal. And to answer this ques-
tion we need to be very careful about the concept of causality which is
in place. It may well be that although Hegel believes human actions are
not caused by the reasons that agents have for performing them, this is
a consequence of his employing a model of causation that is orthogonal
to the modern debate about action.3
Finally, we should understand that Hegel's views on action may be
located against the background of a third (again, related) debate con-
cerning the nature of motivation. Once more we have two contrasting
positions which may be broadly characterized (or more likely carica-
tured) as Humean and Kantian respectively. On the Humean account
of action, a full account of a motivating reason will always specify a
desire or, more generally, some conative state, some practical attitude.
In the background is Hume's view that beliefs are motivationally inert.
Beliefs alone cannot move the agent to action. In contrast, the Kantian
claims that some beliefs do function in this way, directly moving believ-
ers to action. Moral beliefs, notably, play this role for Kant, but also,
according to some of his modern followers (Thomas Nagel is a con-
spicuous example) prudential considerations, present beliefs about how
the agent's self-interest may be promoted in the future, can motivate
directly (see Nagel, 1970).
One way of understanding Hegel's position on the nature of action is
to try to triangulate it by use of the oppositions charted above. That will
be my task in this paper. We should not expect it to be a simple proce-
dure. The Hegel cognoscenti will be very suspicious of such maneuvres,
and quite rightly. Where Hegel saw an opposition or contradiction, he
44 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
leapt to fashion an overcoming of its terms so that the truth in both
positions could be displayed in the dialectical Aufhebung. In fact we
shall see something of this in the outcome. It is not easy to pin down
Hegel's position if we keep all the oppositions in place as contradicto-
ries. To give a taste of the difficulties, suppose we announce straight off
that Hegel adopts the unitary position attributed to him by Taylor, and
that he takes the explanation of action to be fundamentally rational
or hermeneutical rather than causal. We shall then be very puzzled in
face of his insistence that, contrary to the Kantian view, action which
is self-determined, willed freely in and for itself, is always the product
of some desire or desire-like state, some pro-attitude which gives rise
to the agent's satisfaction in its accomplishment. This looks very much
like (or is an implication of) the dualist, causal picture which we have
discarded.
I
One of the most valuable features of Taylor's discussion is the way he
contextualizes Hegel's philosophy of action (as he reads it) in relation to
two central doctrines which he attributes to Hegel.4 The first is
the 'principle of embodiment'... the principle that the subject and
all his functions, however 'spiritual' they may appear, are inescapably
embodied. The embodiment is in two related dimensions: first, as a
'rational animal' that is, as a living being who thinks; and secondly,
as an expressive being, that is, a being whose thinking is always and
necessarily in a medium.
(Taylor, 1985a, p. 85)
The second doctrine concerns meaning, whereby Taylor sees Hegel as
heir to Herder (and precursor to Wittgenstein). According to this theory,
meaning is not to be explained in terms of thoughts which, notably but
not only, words signify, but rather in terms of the expressive activities of
persons in public space. Thus
Thought is the achievement whereby our expression is made more
inward and clear. The attainment of self-understanding is the fruit of
an activity which itself conforms to the basic model of action, that it
is at first unreflecting bodily practice and only later attains self-clarity.
This is the activity of expressing.
(Taylor, 1985a, p. 92)
Dudley Knowles 45
I shall not examine these framing principles directly. Rather I shall
look more carefully at the theory of action Taylor attributes to Hegel
by keeping Hegel's texts close to hand. In the Phenomenology, the Phi-
losophy of Right, and more sketchily in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel tackles
directly what we recognize today as central problems in the philosophy
of action. We need to examine these texts in detail—in a way that Taylor
does not5—to determine the value of his reading.
II
First, we need to see what it is in Hegel's explicit discussions of the
nature of human action that make it plausible to attribute to him the
qualitative position that Taylor outlines. What makes it attractive to read
Hegel as adopting the ontologically unitary view?
In Section I of PR, Part Two 'Morality', Hegel asks, how do we identify
an action amongst all the consequential alterations that take effect fol-
lowing an intervention (deed: Tat) in the world? Of all the things that
happen, for what is the agent responsible, wholly or partly? To what can
he attribute 'the abstract predicate “mine”'? (PR §115). Hegel answers
this question of attribution directly:
It is, however, the right of the will to recognize as its action
[Handlung], and to accept responsibility for, only those aspects of its
deed [Tat] which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which
were present in its purpose.
(PR §117)
This doesn't help us unless we know how to identify those elements of
what happened which were 'presupposed within its end' and 'present
in its purpose' and this isn't a mechanical task. It isn't a matter of
sharply distinguishing action and consequences, since this leads to
two dead ends: neither the utilitarian (consequentialist) method of
counting all the consequences, nor the Kantian route of discount-
ing all of them, will serve (PR §118R).6 Rather we need some means
whereby we can construct the action [Handlung] from the interven-
tion [T«f] and some sub-set of the consequences [Folgen]. Together
with the intervention, this important sub-set of consequences com-
prises the 'shape [Gesta/t] whose soul [5ee/e] is the end [Zweck] to
which the action is directed, [they] belong to the action as an integral
part of it' (PR §118). The action is shaped by its informing purpose,
its soul.
46 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
This looks very like Taylor's account, which has it, as noted above, that
'actions are in a sense inhabited by the purposes which direct them'.
Taylor's account looks right when we are considering directly the ques-
tion of attribution: exactly what action does the agent claim as his, what
does he accept responsibility for doing? And further, what do others
hold him responsible for doing? When we seek to answer these ques-
tions we have no alternative but to identify the action as shaped by
its soul—the purpose of the agent. In this context of establishing the
correct attribution, of fixing and recognizing responsibility, action and
purpose cannot be prised apart. But to fully determine whether Taylor's
reading is correct, and in particular, to evaluate Taylor's thesis of the
ontological inseparability of action and purpose, we need to examine
more closely the concept of purpose [Vorsatz] and then return to the
issue of ontological inseparability. To assist us, Hegel more fully articu-
lates the concept of purpose which is in play here in the second section
of the Morality part of PR—'Intention and Welfare'. But first, let us see
how he reaches this position.
Actions take place in an external world governed by physical laws
which determine the impact of human intervention and carry the
action forward into a future which the agent may or may not foresee.
As Hegel stressed in PR §118 the action will take a determinate shape
amongst the clutter of events consequent upon human intervention,
a shape fixed by the purposes of the agent. It would be a mistake, he
tells us, to identify this shape with the event at the point of interven-
tion, as though actions touch just one unit amongst all the things going
on, which unit then ramifies in a natural fashion. Action is not to be
thought of as lighting the blue touch paper. There is more to giving a
firework display than that. If Tom dies from his injuries 3 months after
Dick has stabbed him in the chest it's likely that Harry will charge him
with murder and he may well plead guilty. Tom's death is part of the
shape of action initiated by the stabbing and murder is the verdict,
the correct attribution. 'The truth of the individual is the universal, and
the determinate character of the action for itself is not an isolated con-
tent confined to one external unit, but a universal content' (PR §119).
The universal content is the intention. We identify actions in terms of
their purpose by characterizing the agent's intention and we do that,
not by breaking down the complex event in thought, taking apart and
examining the individual units (perhaps in the way Galileo takes apart
the flight of the cannon-ball into motion in two planes in order to
explain its trajectory), but by stating its 'subjective essence' (PR §119R).
And we do that by describing the action. The intention of the agent
Dudley Knowles 47
is a specification of the action under a description, the application of
a universal in the traditional sense of a general term? The universal
which is the truth of the individual action is a universal in the precise
sense of being a true description of the action (or a general property
to which the description refers). But which description? It is a common-
place of the modern philosophy of action that actions come under many
descriptions.
Davidson gives what has become the canonical example:
1 flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room.
Unbeknownst to me I also alert a prowler to the fact that I am at
home. Here I need not have done four things, but only one, of which
four descriptions have been given.
(Davidson, 1980a, p. 4)
Here we have one action under four descriptions—four different but
equally true accounts of what was done. We have three descriptions of
the action which characterize it as intentional and one that does not.8
I did not intend to alert the prowler to the fact that I was home although
my alerting the prowler was the same action as my flipping the switch,
turning on the light and illuminating the room. I am responsible for,
I can claim as mine, the action under any of the first three descriptions.
In so doing, 1 apply a universal term to the action, knowing full well
that this universal term is applicable. This is 'the right of knowledge' (PR
§117).
There is some structure to the available action descriptions, as
Davidson sees. We might explain my flipping the switch in terms of my
wanting to turn on the light and in consequence illuminate the room,
but not by my wishing to alert the prowler. Each characterization of the
action in terms of the agent's purpose prompts the question 'Why?' and
to answer this question we need to fully articulate the agent's particular
intention (PR §121). This move, from universality to particularity, is the
explanatory moment—the move from questions of attribution which
are settled when the action is described in terms of the agent's purpose
to questions of explanation. In spelling out the agent's particular inten-
tion we specify the subject's 'own particular content in its end, and this
is the soul and determinant [die bestimmende Seele] of the action' (PR
§121). It explains why he did it.
In suggesting that Hegel moves at this point from questions of attri-
bution to questions of explanation, I disagree sharply with Quante's
analysis of the text. Quante argues that 'because of the context in which
48 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
he develops his theory of action, Hegel provides no analysis of the
coming to be of actions (the causes of actions [der Handlungsursachen])'
(Quante, 1993, p. 173; 2004a, p. 129). Quante's view is that Hegel's
prime concern (the 'context' mentioned above) is with questions of
attribution—the correct identification of what is being, or was, done—
and, subsequently, justification. Whilst it is true that explanation does
not amount to justification—tout comprendre, ce n'est pas tout pardonner,
in my book—to evaluate an action (to justify or condemn), whether
one's own action or that of another, requires that one understand it in
the sense of being able to explain successfully what was done; one must
grasp fully the 'What' and the 'Wherefore' of it. I claim that this is not
only good philosophy, it is what Hegel is doing in this second section of
the Morality chapter.
Ill
To see this, let us revisit the context. Hegel has insisted in the Purpose
section (PR §§117-18) on the importance of the subject's knowledge of
what he is doing in the characterization of his purpose and hence his
action. He does not speak of the subject's 'prima facie' beliefs on the mat-
ter, nor does he insist at this point on 'the merely provisional character
of an agent's initial formulation of an intention'.9 The 'right of knowl-
edge' is the right of knowledge and it operates as a formal constraint on
correct attributions of responsibility. What form does this knowledge
take?10 At §120, Hegel gives us a formal answer:
The right of intention is that the universal quality of the action shall
have being not only in itself, but shall be known by the agent and
thus have been present all along in his subjective will; and conversely,
what we may call the right of the objectivity of the action is the right
of the action to assert itself as known and willed by the subject as a
thinking agent.
(PR §120)
This passage re-asserts the importance of subject's knowledge, but then
the right of the objectivity of the action qualifies the clown's licence that
this constraint might be thought to grant the unscrupulous agent who
attempts to describe all his actions in terms that would exculpate him
from blame or charges of wrong-doing. Ideally, the action descriptions
adduced by both the subject who claims responsibility and the observer
who ascribes it will converge, although in cases of absent or diminished
Dudley Knowles 49
responsibility (as Hegel notes) or in the problem cases thrown up in the
modern world/1 these interpretative streams may diverge.
The point of the curiously named right of the objectivity of the action
is not simply to serve as a restriction on the stories that subjects claim-
ing the right of intention can plausibly tell about what they have been
up to. It is to introduce the idea of the public intelligibility of actions.
Although it is true that my own way of understanding what I am doing
when I act is peculiar to me, being a type of 'non-observational' knowl-
edge in Anscombe's terminology (1963, §§8-9), this does not exclude
others' having knowledge of the nature of my actions. How do our
actions become intelligible to others and others' actions become intelli-
gible to us? Hegel's answer to this question is to display the explanatory
schema that we employ. How else could we proceed in an attempt to
respect the right of the objectivity of the action? We should notice fur-
ther that whatever explanatory schema will be employed by observers
will be transparent to the acting subject himself, since he, too, has the
capacity to explain the actions of others in light of their intentions.
As a rational observer himself, he will fully grasp how others will under-
stand his actions, and the alarm bells should ring if he anticipates a
discrepancy in the two accounts.
At this stage in our enquiry I should register my doubts about the
language of 'expression', as used by Taylor, and to a qualified degree
by Pippin.12 If the expressivist thesis is meant to exclude the possibility
of our giving a full and satisfactory explanation of the actions of oth-
ers through the use of some schema which displays the content of the
agent's intention, his reason for action, it should be rejected. This is
not to say that when we use any such schema (roughly it will be that
of rationality) the correctness or proper applicability of the proposed
schema is to be judged by seeing whether we always deliver the right
explanation of the actions of others when it is employed—or ever fail to
describe our own actions in the terms employed by others—but more on
this later.
But before we settle these matters let us look in more detail at the
schema that Hegel employs to display the particular content of the
action as this is understood by the subject when he knows what he is
doing and by the observer when she correctly understands the subject's
action. In specifying 'the intention from the point of view of its content'
(PR §122) we must explain '(a) formal activity itself, inasmuch as the
subject actively commits itself to whatever it is to regard as its end—
for human beings wish to act in support of whatever interests them, or
should interest them, as their own' (i.e. how what we characterize as the
50 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
subject's intention can move them to action) and (p) what it is in the
'natural subjective existence' of the agent—'needs, inclinations, passions,
opinions, fancies etc/—that produces the 'welfare or happiness' concomi-
tant on 'the satisfaction of this content'. (I cite and paraphrase PR §123
using Hegel's terms and italics.) Thus for an action to be fully intelligible
to us, whether the action be our own or that of another, we must char-
acterize it in such a way that we see what the agent was seeking (as a
source of satisfaction) and why they thought it was worth acting to get
(to reverse the order of (a) and (P) above.)
For Davidson, as noted above, we give the agent's primary reason
by specifying the intention as a belief and desire working in com-
bination. This is the heart of what is referred to nowadays as the
Humean theory of motivation.13 This is a cleaner account than Hegel's,
for sure, but it shares an important element: the centrality of desire
or some other pro-attitude (which gives rise in Hegel's story to the
agent's satisfaction when the action is successfully accomplished). This
should be no surprise, since in Hegel's initial account of the will in
the 'Introduction' to PR, Hegel has emphasized the ineliminability of
the element of particularization (PR §5) which generates as its content
'either its inner or subjective end as represented in the act of will-
ing, or its end as actualized and accomplished through the mediation
of its activity as it translates the subjective into objectivity' (PR §9).
He tells us that the 'immediate or natural will' which is free 'in itself'
has for its content 'the drives, desires and inclinations by which the will
finds itself naturally determined' (PR §11). Of course, the full account
of the freedom of the will—freedom in-and-for-itself—will give us a
lot more than this, but it will never give us, so to say, less, without
descending into the pathology of negative freedom, the will with-
out content (PR §5 &R).14 This is the point at which Hegel's theory
of action sharply conflicts with that of Kant, since for Kant actions
which have moral worth are motivated exclusively by duty. Not only
is there no room for desire and the like in the explanation of actions
of moral worth, the presence of any such motive will derogate from the
moral worth of the action since it will be tainted by the heteronymous
source.
IV
I have not criticized or defended this summary account of Hegel's
theory of action. But now that we have it in place we are in a position
Dudley Knowles 51
to review the central elements of Taylor's interpretative thesis and
comment on Pippin's revised version of it. Let us try to evaluate his
central claim:
the purpose is not ontologically separable from the action, and this
means something like: it can only exist in animating this action; or
its only articulation as a purpose is in animating the action; or per-
haps a fundamental articulation of this purpose, on which all others
depend, lies in the action.
(Taylor, 1985a, p. 79, my italics; see above, Chapter 2, p. 25)
Straight off, as a philosophical position, this looks implausible. Can't
I have a purpose or intention that I'm not presently acting upon and
which I haven't begun to implement at some time in the past, yet which
I can articulate clearly? Certainly I can have an intention to act in the
future—I intend to take up painting when 1 retire—without taking any
steps now to fulfill my intention. On the other hand, ordinary usage,
which I grant is an unreliable guide, should give us caution in using
'purpose' in just this fashion. I suppose one can intelligibly say 'it's my
purpose to take up painting', but to my ear this sounds odd (whereas
1 might describe my present actions of saving money or buying paint-
ing materials in terms of my purpose, viz., preparation for painting in
retirement). To speak of a purpose is most often to mark one's purpose
in doing something. Purpose, one might conjecture, is always operative,
being manifested in action (whilst this is not true of intention). We can
safely take such intuitions as cues towards or as intimations of (rather
than evidence for) a philosophical position.15 And surely the position
intimated is the one Taylor takes up.
We can concede this, however, without taking the further step of
denying the ontological separability of action and purpose. For we can
insist that the connection of purpose and action evinced in these intu-
itions is fundamentally logical rather than ontological. In stating the
subject's purpose we do no more than describe the action in terms of
its essence or soul—which is to say, the subject's particular intention.
Davidson makes this point in responding to those many thinkers16 who
argued that reasons for action are not logically distinct from actions.
He observes that it is always possible that one might describe an effect
in terms of its cause or a cause in terms of its effect. In such a case we
can construct an analytic truth attesting a logical connection between
cause and effect, but it's quite clear that such a logical relation does not
52 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
preclude the ontological separability of what are two distinct events.
'[S]uppose “A caused B" is true. Then the cause of В = A; so substitut-
ing, we have "The cause of В caused B", which is analytic' (Davidson,
1980a, p. 14). This deceptive analyticity may partly explain Hegel's talk
of the 'identity of cause and effect' and his thought that causal rela-
tions generate analytic propositions through their identity of content:
'Rain, for example, is the cause of wetness which is its effect:—the rain
wets; this is an analytic proposition; the same water which is rain is wet-
ness' (SL: 559-60; SW 4: 704-5. See also EL §153). On the other hand,
since it is quite consistent with the ontological inseparability of action
and purpose, the obvious truth that the description of actions in terms
of their purpose manifests a logical relation between action and pur-
pose does not demonstrate the falsity of Taylor's inseparability thesis
either.
We should not lose sight, however, of the obvious thought that
actions may be successful or unsuccessful as manifestations of their
directing purposes. 'I was doing my very best to win the match', says the
tennis player, and this doesn't tell us whether she won or lost. I have
very great difficulty understanding how ontological inseparability can
hold, win or lose. Fair enough: ontological inseparability isn't the same
as identity—that can be too swiftly inferred, as I suggested above. But
it does entail that the description of an action in terms of the pur-
pose or intention of the agent is importantly incomplete. As stated, the
description does not tell us whether the purpose was successfully accom-
plished, and this suggests that having the purpose or intention ('to win
the match') is one thing (or 'separate existence'), doing so ('winning') is
quite another.
Taylor has further arguments in support of the inseparability the-
sis. He suggests, along lines already noted above, that the qualitative
view can draw a contrast between two different kinds of knowledge, the
agents' knowledge 'gained by making articulate what we are doing, the
direction we are already printing on events in our action' (Taylor, 1985a,
p. 80) and 'knowledge of other objects, the things we observe and deal
with in the world' (ibid.). (Since the objects of this second kind of knowl-
edge presumably include the actions of other persons, this distinction is
crude and infelicitous and manifestly un-Hegelian; I don't explain the
movement of the billiard ball in the same way that I explain the move-
ment of the burglar I see prowling.)17 Next, Taylor tells us, 'the first,
or causal view, cannot draw this contrast' (Taylor, 1985a, p. 81). But of
course it can. It can explain the subject's first-person knowledge of what
he is doing as privileged ('non-observational'?), knowledge of the cause
Dudley Knowles 53
of the action, the reason, purpose or motive for which the agent acts,
and contrast this with the various forms of knowledge of other events,
including the actions of other persons. Taylor has it that this is an 'anal-
ogous distinction', but not the same, because first-person knowledge on
the causal account amounts to a transparent and immediate awareness
of the contents of the subject's own mind as explained (or otherwise)
in 'the original formulations of Cartesianism and empiricism' (Taylor,
1985a, p. 81). This strikes me as casual, spoof-historical bluster which
no opponent of the qualitative view worth his salt should accept. There
is no reason why the causal theorist should be tarred with the brush of
immediate and incorrigible agent's knowledge.18
Notwithstanding the slender grounds for attributing this hopeless
account of self-knowledge to the causal theorist, the alternative posi-
tion that Taylor develops—basically, that knowledge of the nature of
one's own actions is a social achievement, accomplished through his-
torically contextual processes of developing mutual recognition—is rich
and illuminating. It has been pressed further in recent times by Robert
Pippin, who also sees the articulation of this position as grounds for a
rejection of the causal account of action on Hegel's part (and, I suspect,
his own).19
Let us clear one problem out of the way before we settle this issue.
Hegel does reject a causal account of the explanation of actions if we
have in mind an explanation of the same kind as is used to explain
events in the non-organic * physical world—explanation, say, of the
motion of billiard balls or planets.20 But he well understands that, when
speaking of human actions, we employ the language of causality in a
loose or figurative sense [in uneigentlichem Sinne (SW 4: 708)] which
implies that 'the effect is nothing more than the manifestation of the
cause' (SL: 562; SW 4: 708). And in fact Hegel himself speaks in just
this loose fashion when he tells us that 'the cause of an action [Tat]
is the inner disposition in an active subject, and this is the same con-
tent and worth as the outer existence which it acquires through the
deed [Handlung]' (SL: 561; SIV 4: 706).21 In what remains of this paper,
when I speak of the causal account, it is the loose sense of causality
that I employ. Unlike Davidson, I do not insist that there is a causal law
(however far) in the offing, but I do say that cause and effect are distinct
existences and that there are two of them when we explain actions in
terms of the subject's intention. Like Davidson, I believe that we use the
language of causality in this context to signal that, of all the reasons
that might explain why the agent acted (comprising, in his terms beliefs
and desires that can be truly ascribed to the agent), the true explanation
54 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
of the action will be in terms of the reason or particular intention that
actually moved him, that is, caused him to act. To my mind, this is the
central issue in the modern agent causation debate and it is a useful tool
to interrogate Hegel's position.22
Keeping this in mind we should notice that there is nothing in this
causal story which should lead us to deny any of the rich and subtle
detail of how we come to understand (and misunderstand) what we do
in action that Hegel provides and that Taylor and Pippin (especially)
explore. There is nothing in the causal account that says that the expla-
nation of action is easy; that it is there to be had by the agent exploiting
her 'clear, automatic title to just what it was that was done'(Pippin,
2008, p. 153). There is nothing in the causal account that establishes
that a 'trumping priority can be given to the agent's own expression
of intention' (ibid.). Agents can perfectly well get it wrong in all of
the ways that Hegel, Taylor, Pippin (and Davidson) explore. In fact,
that they can get it wrong, that they may need to revise the accounts
they give of what they are doing or have done in light of the judge-
ments of others on their deeds when their intentions are exposed to
the cleaner air of the social world makes it even more important that
we identify the correct judgement of what was done as the explana-
tion of the action in terms of its cause. But this is not to say that we
should endorse Pippin's claim that 'Hegel insists that we must treat the
agent's own description and ascription, given ''unabstractability from
social context" as merely provisional' (Pippin, 2008, p. 150, my italics; see
below, 61).23
Further, the causal theorist can accept all the rich interconnections
between intention and action that occur when the action is a com-
plex event taking place over a considerable length of time, involving
many false starts, revisions, excisions, interruptions, re-orientations and
re-adjustments before the work is brought to completion. Pippin dis-
cusses the example of a poem, which is just right (Pippin, 2008, p. 161).
Poems (and many other works of art) can take years to see the light
of day and it is clear that causal explanation is beyond us—but then
so is correct attribution. Think of The Waste Land. Readers (and also
the author) can only attempt to describe what has been accomplished.
In point of explanation the matter is no different, but we do not believe
that fabulous complexity and an incomplete narrative exclude the pos-
sibility in principle of a causal explanation when events in the physical
world are the object of our concern.
The subject who insists on (and must be accorded) the right of knowl-
edge and the right of intention is not claiming a right to venture a
Dudley Knowles 55
tentative hypothesis concerning their own agency. In the standard case,
as we have seen, the right of intention and the right of the objectivity
of the action work together. One of the reasons why subjects generally
know what they are doing is that they understand perfectly well how
what they are doing will be received by others, since subjects regularly
operate as both agents and observers—as Hegel taught us.
V
I should draw to a conclusion. The thesis on which I have focussed is
Taylor's statement of the qualitative view, the claim that action and
purpose are not two distinct existences, but ontologically inseparable.
Taylor and Pippin both attribute this thesis to Hegel and believe it to
be broadly correct. I judge the matter differently. I believe the quali-
tative view makes most sense when we are considering the question
of attribution that Hegel tackles: of all the things that happen when
I intervene in the world for what can I claim (or be attributed) respon-
sibility, what can I claim (or what can be attributed to me) as mine?
Since these questions can be answered only by characterizing my action
in universal terms, by describing it in point of my purpose or, more
fully, as my intention, we establish a logical relation between action and
purpose. Action and purpose are inseparable in the description which
gives a correct attribution, disclosing the soul of the action. But on
my understanding—following Davidson, and as against that of Taylor,
Pippin and Hegel—this logical relation does not give us metaphysical or
ontological inseparability.
On the other hand, I read Hegel as claiming that when we seek to pro-
vide an explanation of the agent's action sufficient to broach questions
of justification and evaluation we need to give an accurate statement of
the agent's intention—a statement of his intention which is full enough
for us to see what the agent desires and hence why its accomplishment
gives him satisfaction and is a source of his welfare or happiness. Agents
have many co-existing desires and one action may turn out to satisfy
him and contribute to his happiness in different ways. So we need to
fasten on to the desire (or desires) that moved him in the circumstances
of the actual case if we are to see clearly why he so acted. We need to
identify the cause of the action. In doing so, we are using the concept
of cause in a loose fashion. We employ 'the common acceptation of the
causal relation [wherein]... cause and effect are conceived as two several
independent existences' (£L §153). Hegel is telling us that we (pun-
ters?) regard cause and effect as two distinct existences, although he may
56 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
believe that on a full understanding of the concept of causality we really
shouldn't. I believe that when we explain and evaluate our own actions
and those of others it is 'the common acceptance of the causal relation'
that we employ. I can see no reason to judge that Hegel denied that
this is how our practice of action explanation works. I conclude, there-
fore, that Hegel understood action explanation as causal in that familiar
understanding of it as requiring two separate independent existences.
Maybe that familiar understanding of agent causality is erroneous, as
Hegel believed—but that is a separate question.
Notes
1.	This paper was first published in G. Floistad (ed.), 1983, pp. 133-55. An ear-
lier version of this paper was read to the joint meeting of the Hegel Society
of Great Britain and the Hegel Society of America, convened to mark the
150th anniversary of Hegel's death (and, as I recall, perhaps incorrectly, the
inaugural meeting of the HSGB). Taylor's paper was subsequently published
as 'Hegel and the Philosophy of Action' in L.S. Stepelevich & D. Lamb (eds),
1983, pp. 1-18. It is also reprinted in this book as Chapter 2.
2.	See Anscombe, 1963; Dray, 1957; Melden, 1961.
3.	This (or something close) is Michael Quante's suggestion. See Quante, 1993,
pp. 236-41 and 2004a, pp. 177-81.
4.	Taylor is my stalking-horse in this essay. Late in the day, I read Robert
Pippin's Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008)
which takes much the same overall view as Taylor on the sorts of issue I've
mentioned though his conclusions are reached by a different route with a
much richer textual detail. I shall interweave Pippin's splendid work into
this discussion but do so opportunistically, without having given his whole
book the careful study it deserves.
5.	No fault is imputed by this claim. No one should doubt Taylor's command
of the Hegel texts.
6.	To caricature both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics—which is what Hegel is
doing in this passage. Careful and committed utilitarians and Kantians will,
of course, demur.
7.	To my knowledge, the salience of the idea of actions under a description
was first emphasized by G.E.M. Anscombe (Anscombe, 1957, §§4, pp. 23-6,
46-8).
8.	If we adapt this scenario to Hegel's terminology, as noticed above, of Tat
[deed, intervention] and Handlung [action], I think we have four descrip-
tions of the same 'deed' [ТдГ]. The three intentional descriptions characterize
it as an 'action' [Handlung], whereas 'alerting the prowler' does not. It is not
easy to make philosophical capital out of this distinction since Hegel, hav-
ing introduced it late in his philosophical career—it has no part to play in
the Phenomenology—does not apply it in a careful fashion (as Pippin notices
(Pippin, 2008, p. 148, n. 5; below, Chapter 4, n. 3)). Nor does Hegel state
exactly the basis of the distinction. Michael Quante and Robert Pippin give
Dudley Knowles 57
similar accounts of this distinction but, on my reading of it, they both go
wrong. Quante says
To describe an event as "deed” means to assume the involvement of
the will in the narrow sense—to grasp it as voluntary—without, though,
assuming in the description the perspective of the agent on his own act.
To describe an event as an action means, on the contrary, just this: assum-
ing the perspective of the agent himself, comprehending the event not
only implicitly as voluntary and intentional, but also understanding it as
the realization of the agent's intention.
(Quante, 1993, pp. 142-3; 2004a, p. 106)
Quante also claims that 'deed' and 'action' are sub-categories of 'act' [Tun]
at 2004, p. 16 (1993, p. 29). Pippin makes much the same point as Quante,
stating that 'the difference between a Handlung, or genuine action, and a
mere Tat, a thing done by me' is that the first is 'an action of mine' and
the latter is 'a thing done by me or because of me but not as an action
ascribable to me, and so as something done, but unintentionally' (Pippin,
2008, p. 148; cf. below, Chapter 4, p. 60) I say, every action is a deed, but
only some deeds—the intentional ones—are actions. The categories are not
exclusive, the terms are not contraries. See the final sentence of PR §122 for
a clear application of this terminology: T can be made accountable for a deed
only if my will was responsible for it—the right of knowledge’.
9.	The phrases in quotation marks are excerpted from Pippin, 2008, pp. 164,
172, with relevant discussion at points in between. I shall take up this
discussion later.
10.	I discuss this question in more detail in Knowles, 2002, pp. 174-83.
11.	Pippin mentions, as a pointed and helpful example of such divergence the
competing attributions of the self-styled 'freedom-fighter' and the society
which deems him a 'terrorist' (Pippin, 2008, pp. 160-1; See below, Chapter 4,
p. 70). It is worth stressing the familiarity of this phenomenon and the
exploitation of it by politicians and villains alike. We all understand what
is at stake when one party says, 'I'm a whistle-blowing civil servant protect-
ing the public interest', whilst the opposing camp insists 'You are a disloyal,
self-interested, criminal'. We may leave to the jury the issue of which is the
correct attribution.
12.	Pippin, 2008, 152ff. See n. 15 at 152 for Pippin's comparison of Taylor's
discussion with his own (see below, Chapter 4, n. 6).
13.	For a sophisticated recent account (and qualified defence) of this position,
see Smith, 1994, pp. 92-129.
14.	For a fuller story, see Knowles, 2002, pp. 28-53.
15.	So it matters not that the 'ordinary language' I adduce is English.
16.	Melden is his main target, but he mentions Kenny, Hampshire, Winch,
R.S. Peters and Gilbert Ryle as making much the same point.
17.	It is a major flaw in Taylor's thesis that he doesn't follow Hegel's project of
integrating systematically the self-understanding of the agent who claims
'the right of knowledge' and the related 'right of intention' with the route
taken by persons who exploit 'the right of the objectivity of the action' to
understand and explain the actions of others.
58 Hegel on Actions, Reasons, and Causes
18.	I have no doubt that Davidson would resist it, since he tackles a similar
charge directly in 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes'. He gives a variety of rea-
sons why one who is capable of 'first-person knowledge of their own pains,
beliefs, desires, and so on' may err, may not in fact have knowledge. Thus,
for example, 'you may err about your reasons, particularly when you have
two reasons for an action, one of which pleases you and one which does
not. For example, you do want to save Charles pain; you also want him out
of the way. You may be wrong about which motive made you do it [give him
an overdose of the painkiller]' (Davidson, 1980a, p. 18). Davidson, famously,
was neither empiricist nor Cartesian. I once said to him [something like] 'Your
holistic position strikes me as Hegelian'. 'Oh God', he replied, 'Wherever 1 go
some Hegelian pops out of the woodwork to tell me that. I haven't a clue
whether you're right—and couldn't care less [or something like that]', which
I thought was very funny.
19.	'Hegel's model wants to shift attention from the causal power of the doer as
critical in my ownership of the act to what he refers to as "making the act
my own," that is a recovery of it as one's own. The nature of agency will
be understood in understanding the nature of this recovery; not in under-
standing some originary causal power' (Pippin, 2008, p. 153). And see further
Pippin's footnote to this sentence (see below, Chapter 4, p. 63).
20.	'Further and above all, we must note', Hegel tells us, 'the inadmissible appli-
cation of the relation of causality to relations of physico-organic and spiritual
life' (SL: 562; SW 4: 707).
21.	Note that in this passage of SL,'Tat' is translated as 'action' (in PR as 'deed');
and 'Handlung' as 'deed' (in PR as 'action').
22.	I insist, though, that foregrounding the issue of which reason actually moved
the agent is not anachronistic. I agree with Pippin that '[Hegel] agrees that
having an intention is a function of having reasons and being able to take
up the question about which ought to be compelling, and so there must be a
reason which explains why 1 ended up doing what I did among many other
possibilities' (Pippin, 2008, p. 149; see below Chapter 4, p. 60). This follows
from what Hegel says about the double indeterminacy of drives, desires etc.
and the need for resolution at PR §12. (For discussion, see Knowles, 2002,
pp. 37-40.) I disagree with Pippin's appended note: 'That there is a rea-
son which best explains why someone did something does not, though, for
Hegel show that reasons must be causes. So he is not bothered by the fact that
phenomenologically it is next to impossible ever to distinguish "the" reason
which could causally explain why the act was done' (ibid., n. 9). I agree that
Hegel is impatient with the epistemological issue, but some correct reason
had better be available if we are to describe the action sufficiently carefully
to establish the agent's responsibility for it. Hegel's impatience, say at PR
§124 R, does him no credit.
23.	Pippin later suggests that this provisionality is quite universal: 'Hegel means
to insist yet again on the merely provisional character of an agent's initial
formulation of an intention, the "fact that he must learn from the deed,
the developed nature of what [one] actually did"... "What I truly intended"
can always only be formulated in a highly provisional, and temporally quite
sensitive ways' (Pippin, 2008, p. 172).
4
Hegel's Social Theory of Agency:
The 'Inner-Outer' Problem
Robert B. Pippin
I
The modern problem of agency is understood in a number of ways.1 The
most prevalent is: what distinguishes naturally occurring events from
actions (if anything)? Sometimes the question is: what, if anything, dis-
tinguishes responsible human doings from what animals do? The most
prominent approach has it that actions are things done intentionally by
individuals, purposely, for a purpose. This is sometimes said to mean:
acting from or on or because of an intention, although as we shall see
this nominalization can be quite misleading. Or, of the many possible
descriptions of some occurrence, it is an action if there is a true descrip-
tion which is intentional. If one follows Anscombe, this simply means
that if you ask a person why he is doing something he can express this
intention to explain himself, most often in the form of a reason. He
does not (except in extraordinary circumstances) describe why he is act-
ing in the way he might describe what caused his vision to deteriorate;
instead he reveals something about his own relation to his psycholog-
ical inclinations and aversions; his 'evaluative' relation to them, as it
is sometimes put (see Frankfurt, 1988; Taylor, 1985b). His acting inten-
tionally amounts to his having evaluated what he ought to do, and to
be acting in the light of that resolution. (So animals act purposively but
not 'for a purpose' in this evaluatively affirmed sense.)
So far, so good. Hegel agrees with this approach. He agrees that with-
out reference to a subject's take on what is happening and why, without
reference to an inner realm, or a self-relation, we will not be able to
identify the class of events that are actions. For example, Hegel explic-
itly makes the distinction so important in these discussions, between an
action of mine and a thing done by me or because of me but not as an
59
60 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
action ascribable to me, and so as something done, but unintentionally.
He calls this the difference between a Handlung, or genuine action, and
a mere Tat, a thing done by me. (As in the familiar examples, I turned
on the light and in so doing also I alerted the burglars. I intentionally
turned on the light and so that is my action, but I had no knowledge
(nor could I have reasonably been expected to have knowledge) that
there were burglars about, so while I did alert the burglars, that is a mere
thing done by me; I brought it about but only as a Tat. The only way
to make this distinction is by appeal to the subject's view of what he is
doing and why.)2
The next question is what is it to act intentionally, or from an inten-
tion. The question here is usually: how should the occurrence of some
mental event be understood so as to explain various body movements in
space? One answer is that such intentions are a special kind of cause, and
their being this special kind of cause—psychological states like beliefs
and desires—is what distinguishes actions. Actions are uniquely caused
by beliefs and desires. Philosophers who believe this usually also believe
that only causal explanation is, properly, explanation, and are usually
compatibilists and believe that freedom is compatible with such causal
status. Other philosophers also believe in unique causation but they
insist that beliefs and desires don't cause actions; I do by 'an act of will,'
a spontaneous act of resolve that can cause without being caused. This
is the free will party, or incompatibilists or voluntarists or libertarians.
Things get very interesting at this point because Hegel is neither a
compatibilist nor an incompatibilist in these senses because he does not
believe that the relation between inner state and outer deed is a causal
one at all, whether natural causal or could-have-done-otherwise causal.
He agrees that the subject's attitude is crucial in distinguishing actions as
such, and that the attitude at issue is an intention. He agrees that having
an intention is a function of having reasons and being able to deliberate
about which ought to be compelling, and so that there must be 'the'
reason which explains why I ended up doing what I did among many
possibilities.3 The capacity to manage this deliberation about practical
reasons in this way is the self-relation crucial to agency, an ability, as
Hegel says, both to have and to stand above considerations experienced
as inclining one towards and away from possible actions.
The thesis is that it is this self-relation (the self-relation that is sup-
posed to explain actions as unique types of events) that cannot be
understood apart from social relations; my relation to myself is mediated
by my relation to others. What does mediated mean here? One sense
meant by Hegel is fairly obvious. Practical reasoning is a norm-bound
Robert В. Pippin 61
activity (one wants to get the right answer about what one ought to do),
and the norms in question are not themselves simply "up to me'; they
reflect social proprieties, already widely shared, proprieties functioning
as individually inherited standards for such deliberation. Kant thought
that there was at least one norm not so inherited and socially medi-
ated: the form of pure practical reason as such, accessible to anyone by
abstracting from and putting out of play contingently desired ends and
attending only to such a form. It is well known that Hegel denied that
such a norm could be either action-guiding or motivating, and thought
that by contrast practical reasoning involved a responsiveness to social
norms; that one deliberated qua 'ethical being' (sittliches Weseri), not qua
rational agent, full stop.4
Secondly all agency requires the assumption of some act-description
and some self-ascribing of intentions, and Hegel insists that we must
treat the agent's own description and ascription as merely provisional.
This is the most unusual and original aspect of his account. Hegel
takes very seriously the fact that people can be wrong about their self-
descriptions (wrong about what doing that 'among us' would be) and
even wrong in their self-ascriptions, wrong about their own intentions,
and he orients a good deal of his position from this fact. Both aspects
are said to be subject to some sort of social 'negotiation,' some distinct
form of social responsiveness and mediation before the initially indeter-
minate can become determinate, all such that you would not be doing
that among us if the act, let us say, were not received as that, and you
have not executed your intention successfully if others do not ascribe to
you both the act description and the intention you ascribe to yourself.
It is in these senses that Hegel wants to tie together a self and other
relation, and it is the latter set of concerns, the inner-outer problem,
that I want to discuss in the following.
II
One obvious condition necessary for me to be able to act as a free agent,
to recognize my deeds as my own, is that I must be able to 'know my
own mind,' know my own standing attitudes, commitments, disposi-
tions, preferences, and so forth, and be able to engage in some sort of
reflection about the relative weight of various considerations, assess the
degree of my commitment, understand which consideration ought to be
acted on in any given situation, and so forth. Hegel may not accept the
standard picture of individuals exercising an exclusively intra-mental
deliberative faculty, but he clearly means to claim that there must be
62 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
some significant Independence' of the subject from what she is merely
inclined to do, that there is no causal or straightforward link between
the experience of some such motivating inclination and an action.
If actions are a distinct class of events, then explanations of why the
action occurred must appeal to such psychological items and the agent's
relation to them, and among the many things that happen because of
me, if there are some that I can be held responsible for (i.e. if there are
actions), it must be in virtue of such an appeal to the at least initially
divided 'inner' life of the agent and the manifestations of these items in
the 'outer,' publicly accessible world.
Now the unique features of all forms of self-knowledge have been an
enduring theme in modern philosophy, and have been taken by many
to lead easily into paradox and aporia. The situation is no easier in Hegel
and is made even more difficult by some extremely unusual things said
about self-knowledge and by what he claims about the inseparability of
self-knowledge and knowledge of the world and other agents, even what
he insists is a 'speculative identity' between the 'inner' and the 'outer'
in action. (In his Encyclopaedia Logic's treatment of 'inner' and 'outer,'
Hegel's predictable formula is simply: 'Hence what is only something
inner, is also thereby external, and what is only external is also only
something inner' (EL §140).)
As we shall also see, Hegel is going to make much of a theme
quite prominent in much contemporary writing on the subject: self-
ascriptions of intentions are not to be understood as based on observa-
tion; they are not reports of mental items. Such self-ascriptions must be
understood to express a resolve; they do not report a mental episode or
item that could then function as a discrete cause of a body movement.
When I express an intention, even to myself, I am avowing a pledge to
act, the content and credibility of which remains, in a way, suspended
until I begin to fulfill the pledge. But at this familiar point (an asym-
metry between first- and third-person claims, or common cause with
Anscombe (2000, pp. 13-15) on 'non-observational knowledge'), Hegel
veers off on his own.
In the first place it is clear that Hegel is out to re-conceive how we
should understand the temporality or temporal extension of actions, how
to understand their beginning and their realization, how to frame prop-
erly what is relevant to the beginning and what to the end or completion
of actions. That is, he is asking that we in effect widen our focus when
considering what a rational and thereby free agent looks like, widen-
ing it so as to include in the picture of agency itself a contextual and
temporal field stretching out backwards from or prior to, one might say,
Robert В. Pippin 63
the familiar resolving and acting subject, and stretching forward, one
might also say, such that the unfolding of the deed and the reception
and reaction to the deed are considered a constitutive element of the
deed, of what fixes ultimately what was done and what turned out to
be a subject's intention. (The ultimate goal is to break the hold alto-
gether of the notion of a moment of resolve or a moment of causal
efficacy.) It sounds a bit strange to try to say that all of that should some-
how be considered as more properly 'the subject acting on reasons,' the
socially and temporally embedded subject-who-acts, but that is the posi-
tion Hegel is advancing and that I would like to understand better. This
is all connected with a feature often described as distinctive of Hegel's
account of agency, but not yet, I think, well understood. Actions are
expressive, not merely the unique result's of an agent's executive powers.
What is displayed in what results (and the initial difficulty in, the social
complexity of, determining just what is displayed) is thus as important
to Hegel as any putatively unique causal path to those results. Actions
both disclose what an agent takes herself to be doing (sometimes to the
agent, and often obscurely and partially, never immediately) and man-
ifest some normative claim to entitlement so to act, all in a way that
raises to prominence an interpretive question in any action, even for the
agent: what was done and how could it have appeared justifiable?5 The
answers to such questions do not lie in the mind of the agent anymore
than answers to similar questions about what was made reside in the
psychological states of the artist. Hegel's model wants to shift attention
from the causal power of the doer as critical in my ownership of the act
to what he refers to as 'making the act my own,' that is a recovery of it as
one's own.6 The nature of agency will be understood in understanding
the nature of this recovery; not in understanding some originary causal
power. Hence the famous Hegelian Nachtraglichkeit, belatedness, in any
account of both individual and historical meaningfulness.
Such a social picture is playing a major role in Hegel's objections to
a causal or voluntarist theory of acting on reasons since the claim is
that no individually conceived agent can be said to have a proprietary
relation to what she has done, that she does not have clear title to just
what it was that was done; the proper act-description partly depends
on the established context of deliberation and action (what having this
or that practical reason could mean in such a context) and partly on
what intention and what act-description are attributed to you by others.
If that is so, then no trumping priority can be given to the agent's own
expression of intention; the true content of that intention can only be
properly identified by relation to an act description that will involve
64 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
many рге-volitional conditions and it will have to be provisional and
temporally fluid, unstable across time and experience, as it were.
This latter is probably the most counter-intuitive claim yet, because
Hegel will not treat intentions as discrete states that can play the requi-
site causal roles in a standard causal model of explanation, but anyone
who agrees with Hegel that there is something misleading in trying to
understand freedom by attention to some unique ex ante causal power of
a singular subject seems led into such a thicket. By the 'true content' of
the intention, I mean to refer to the most complicating factor in Hegel's
account, one already noted and to which we shall return in detail. That
is, Hegel's account of intentions is oriented from the fact that any treat-
ment of the subject's expression of her own intention must acknowledge
that, however privileged first-person authority might turn out to be,
agents can still greatly exaggerate both the degree of their own own-
ership of the intention (an experience of making up one's own mind
could be evidence of the success of some interested group's efforts to
control the way you view the issue) and they can exaggerate the degree
of the commitment expressed in an intention; their self-avowal can be
as much a fantasy-of-an-intention, rather than a genuine expression of
resolve, even though the expression may be sincere. The best author-
ity to ask when you are interested in what someone intends to do may
indeed be that person. But being the best authority does not mean being
an always reliable authority. I can also sincerely claim that I in fact exe-
cuted the intention when that is not the case, and I can describe what
I did in ways countered by everyone else in my social community. But
the first 'individuality-qualifying' condition (the factors said to be rele-
vant in what precedes the resolution and action) is also controversial on
its own.
The relevance of the actual social world that precedes any individ-
ual resolution to any proper explanation of an action is a much better
known aspect of Hegel's position. Partly this depends on claims in
Hegel's ontology that contest, in extremely controversial ways, our usual
intuitions about the ultimacy and self-sufficiently of the individual
human agent and her isolatable, discrete psychological states. Partly this
claim about the explanatory bearing of a range of prior social factors on
the possibility of agency itself stems from the fact that Hegel has not
separated what he considers the objective and subjective dimensions of
practical reason, and so has posed the question as: what could actually
count as reasons for a subject at a time in a given community to do or
forbear from doing something? And this has the historical implication
Robert В. Pippin 65
already noted, although certainly not the relativist implications it might
seem to have. What could count for Antigone as a reason to act could
not be what would count in the same way for Cordelia in Shakespeare's
play, however sincere and reflectively sophisticated both might be. And
subjectively, it is also important to note the possibility of the consider-
ation actually counting to a subject as justificatory, something we have
to stand behind, not just cite or invoke (not just 'how we go on'). It is
relatively uncontroversial that the degree of justificatory force possessed
by some consideration is not something an individual subject grants
or discovers by reflective activity alone. So to say that practical reasons
must be 'actual' to count as reasons is not only to make reference to
the objective, historical condition; it is also to say that the considera-
tions must be able to be motivating or 'internal' reasons for a subject
and cannot be merely or exclusively 'external' reasons. They can be said
to become such internal reasons only by means of a process of complex
socialization.
Indeed, Hegel's position is even stronger than this, although explor-
ing its full dimensions would be a longer story. This is because being a
subject or an agent is not treated by Hegel as an ontological or strictly
philosophical question, but as an achieved social status such as, let us
say, being a citizen or being a professor, a product or result of mutually
recognitive attitudes.7 This means just what it seems to: that different
historical communities establish this status in different ways, and there
is no truth-maker or fact of the matter they are getting wrong or more
and more right. So for Hegel, the explanation of the fact that ancient
authors do not seem to have what Christian metaphysicians call the
will, or that British philosophy of the eighteenth century ties normative
distinctions so much to the influence of the passions, or that Kantian
moral psychology describes agency as paradigmatically the capacity to
obey the dictates of pure practical reason, will all have to be explained
in a way that is profoundly historical. This is so even though it is also
the case that the attribution of such a status can, according to Hegel,
be more or less successful or more or less complete. Various elements of
the attributed status can involve internal incompatibilities and inter-
nally conflicting ideals that must still be overcome. As we shall see,
Hegel thinks that there is such a defect at the core of a modern notion
of agency based on ontologically distinct individual centers of unique intra-
mental causal powers. He is especially concerned about the deep logic
behind the notion of: inner intentions or resolutions causing external,
publicly observable body movements.
66 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
III
But besides these reflections on ontology, on what counts as a satisfac-
tory explanation, and on the objective dimension of practical reasons,
Hegel also offers a basic critique of a common modern picture of agency
itself, or how he wants us to understand the distinct logical structure
of agency, what we have come to understand, he claims, as the 'inner-
outer' relation. This introduces the issue of how the 'unfolding' of a
deed in time and for others, 'after' an agent has begun to act, is as essen-
tial a dimension of what makes agency agency as what 'precedes' the
putative moment of decision. His richest discussion of the issue is in the
second half of Chapter 5, on practical reason, in the Jena Phenomenology,
There he argues that our conventional modern understanding of agency
makes a distorting error by clumsily separating the inner intention from
the outer manifestation of the inner, and so in trying to explain the
action by reference to the isolated separate intention as prior cause,
and it is that case I would like to examine for the remainder of this
discussion.
The core claim in this critique is that we cannot determine what actu-
ally was a subject's intention or motivating reason by relying on some
sort of introspection, by somehow looking more deeply into the agent's
soul, or by some sincerity test. 'By their fruits shall ye know them,'
Hegel often quotes, and he might well have added 'only by their fruits
or deeds.' Only as manifested or expressed can one (even the subject
herself) retrospectively determine what must have been intended. And
of course it seems a bit paradoxical to claim that we can only know
what we intended to do after we have actually acted.8 But there is little
doubt that Hegel holds something like such a position. Consider, 'Eth-
ical Self-consciousness now learns from its deed the developed nature
of what it actually did...' (PhG ^469); or, 'an individual cannot know
what he is until he has made himself a reality through action' (PhG
<1401).
Or consider formulations, again from the Encyclopaedia, that go a bit
farther:
We are accustomed to say of human beings that everything depends
on their essence [Wesen] and not on their deeds and conduct. Now in
this lies the correct thought that what a human being does should be
considered not in its immediacy, but only as mediated through his
inwardness [Inneres] and as a manifestation of that inwardness. But
with that thought we must not overlook the point that the essence
Robert В. Pippin 67
and also the inward only prove themselves [sich bewahren] as such
by stepping forth into appearance. On the other hand, the appeal
which human beings make to inwardness as an essence distinct from
the content of their deeds often has the intention of validating their
mere subjectivity and in this way of escaping what is valid in and for
itself.
(EL §112A, translation altered)
However, as noted, the most concentrated and richest discussion occurs
in the Jena Phenomenology. In the two last sections of Chapter 5 of the
Phenomenology, Hegel attempts a sweeping, internal and quite unusual
'phenomenological' critique of the voluntarist position. He proposes
to show various ways in which the relation between what the deed
means to me, inwardly, as I intend it and given the reasons I take
to justify it, can easily come to be experienced by such a subject
as in some tension with the way the actual deed plays out, within
the external, social world. This tension is also shown to be height-
ened by the way the deed might be construed by others or resisted
by them (resisted interpretively, contesting the claim by the agent
about what was done). Since all of this stems from an abstract and,
he thinks, ultimately unsustainable strict separation between inner
motive and external manifestation, Hegel goes on to investigate how
this opposition might be resolved. And he engages in a wide-ranging
exploration of literary and historical types used as phenomenologi-
cal evidence, all unlike anything attempted before in the history of
philosophy.
The relevant discussion begins towards the end of 'Observing Rea-
son' when Hegel begins to introduce sweeping claims about agent and
action that anticipate the rest of the chapter. The clearest early sign of
what he is after occurs after his approval of Lichtenberg's joke about
physiognomy, that the right retort to anyone who says, 'You certainly
act like an honest man, but I see from your face that you are forcing
yourself to do so and are a rogue at heart,' is a 'box on the ears.' He
goes on,
The true being [wahre Seyn} of man is rather his deed; in this indi-
viduality is actual [wirklich}, and it is the deed that does away with
both aspects of what is merely intended [Gemeinte]-. in the one aspect
where what is "intended" has the form of a corporeal passive being,
the individuality, in the deed, exhibits itself rather as the nega-
tive essence, which only is in so far as it supersedes being. Then
68 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
too the deed equally does away with the inexpressibility of what is
'intended,' in respect of the self-conscious individuality.
(PhG 1322, translation altered)
Hegel means here that the actual deed 'negates' and transcends that
aspect of the intention understood as separable subjective cause, under-
stood as the mere occurrence of a somatic desire or passion or inclina-
tion to act, as well as the idea that one's real intention can only ever
be partly expressed in a deed, and so remains in itself inexpressible,
‘unaussprechlich.’ Contrary to both views: 'the individual human being
is what the deed is.' All such that if a person's deed, also called her' Werk/
is contrasted with the 'inner possibility' then it is the work or deed that
'must be regarded as his true actuality, even if he deceives himself on
this point, and turning away from his action into himself, fancies that
in this inner sense he is something else than what he is in the deed
(That)’ (PhG 1322).
Finally, there is an implication about this position that Hegel eagerly
accepts, but that raises a number of difficult questions, most promi-
nently in the ’die Sache selbst' section. For if there is no way fully to
determine what an agent intended prior to and separate from the deed,
if it's only and wholly 'in the deed' that we can make such a determina-
tion, then not only are we faced with an unusual retrospective test of the
true intention, even for the agent, it also follows that we cannot spec-
ify the action wholly by reference to such a separate intention. What
I take the act to be, its point, purpose, and implication, now has none
of the trumping authority we intuitively attribute to the agent. In such
an account I don't exercise any kind of proprietary ownership of the
deed, cannot unilaterally determine 'what was done.'9 This is, as it were,
subject to contestation within some concrete social community, the par-
ticipants of which must determine what sort of deed 'that' would be in
our practices, how our rules apply. My intention is thus doubly 'real':
it is out there 'in' the deed, and the deed is essentially out there 'for
others.' In describing agents who pride themselves on 'not caring what
people think,' and for 'having integrity' and for 'believing in themselves
no matter what the critics say,' and so forth, who believe that there is
what Hegel calls a Sache selbst (an inner essence, inner fact of the mat-
ter, true meaning of what was done) determined by my subjective take,
Hegel notes,
... in doing something, and thus bringing themselves out into the
light of day, they directly contradict by their deed their pretence of
Robert В. Pippin 69
wanting to exclude the glare of publicity and participation by all and
sundry. Actualization is, on the contrary, a display [Ausstellung] of
what is one's own in the element of universality whereby it becomes
and should become the affair [Sache] of everyone.
(PhG «J417)
From the view point of such a Mr. Integrity, Hegel reports, this (the
involvement of others) would look like 'flies' hurrying along to 'freshly
poured milk,' busying themselves with another's business, but Hegel
rejects this attitude and insists that with all action 'something has been
opened up that is for others as well, or is a subject-matter on its own
account.' Said another way, you may possess first-person authority about
whether you have resolved to do something and about what you take
yourself to have resolved; but that does not settle the issue of what you
have resolved. Avowing what you intend to do still leaves the matter
of whether you have truly resolved (or are only fantasizing), the degree
of your actual commitment, and what you have in fact decided to do
wide open. Practical attitudes about the future (intentions) require such
a distinction and a way of resolving the issue.
In his discussion of moral consciousness, especially moral, subjective
self-certainty in the chapter on spirit, Hegel, in a clear attempt simply to
recall what he takes himself to have established in this chapter, remarks,
The action is thus only the translation of its individual content into
the objective element, in which it is universal and recognized, and it
is just the fact that it is recognized that makes the deed a reality.
(PhG ^640, my emphasis)
He then recalls the discussion of die Sache selbst and distinguishes the
difference between the naive attitude of 'the honest consciousness' and
the more reflective self-certainty of conscience.
(I note that Hegel has not claimed (and will not claim) that some con-
sideration literally 'becomes' one's intention after one has acted, as if a
mental episode 'comes to exist' after the deed, or that others 'determine'
an agent's intention in this existential sense, all as if there is backwards
causation. In the vast majority of cases, one's prior, determinately for-
mulated intention unfolds and is expressed in actions taken to be just
those actions by other agents. It is the possibility of this not happening
in this way (or the possibility of an exaggerated avowal of some degree
of commitment or some self-serving insistence on a socially rejected act-
description) that interests Hegel and which suggests to him that this is
70 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
an ever present even if rarely relevant possibility and which he takes to
show that there is no privileged role for the agent's formulation.)10
Further, if it counts as a condition of the successful execution of an
intention that others apply the act description to the deed and attribute
the intention to me that I attribute to the deed and to myself, what
should we say about cases where the two come apart, cases where, say,
the socially authoritative view of some deed is 'terrorist act,' but it is
a massively unjust society, an apartheid state say, and many agents
want to count the act as the legitimate resistance of freedom fight-
ers? There are two Hegelian things to say about this but they are both
book-length topics (at least), so I can just mention them. First, Hegel's
picture of the conditions for such successful execution of an intention
presumes a social dependence that has objectively come to embody the
right relation between such dependence and independence. That is, his
account assumes such a realization of mutually recognitive attitudes
among agents, not the continuation of some version of the Master-Slave
dialectic. (In his terms, the philosophy of objective spirit presented in
the Encyclopaedia presumes the historical narrative that legitimates the
claim to count distinctly modern institutions as the decisive (if still not
fully complete) 'realization of freedom.') Secondly, Hegel wants to argue
that in cases like the apartheid one, the unequal positions of the partic-
ipants can be expected to result ultimately in the normative principles
involved losing their hold, creating a kind of crisis, requiring incompat-
ible and so untenable commitments over time, that unreason manifests
itself in a unique kind of human suffering, visible in examples that range
from Antigone, to Rameau's nephew, to the beautiful soul. It is part of
the task of the Phenomenology to demonstrate this ambitious claim, but
I cannot pursue that track in this context.
While there is a fairly standard sense in which you can be said to learn
later aspects of what you intended to do that you did not know ex ante—
as when you learn later that doing X unavoidably requires doing Y—the
sense of revelation (often of self-deceit) and even surprise stressed by
Hegel goes far beyond that. Correspondingly, he is not here just point-
ing to cases where a complex plan of action requires alterations in what
had been planned as effective means, cases where one can say the basic
intention remains constant or is reformulated in response to empirical
discoveries and new, unexpected turns of events. There is nothing in any
of the passages that indicates that Hegel wants to challenge any such
commonsensical qualification on 'what I intended.' When Hegel says
that it is the public deed that realizes and reveals what you intended,
he leaves open the possibility that you may have been ignorant of what
Robert В. Pippin 71
that gesture or expression would mean in this context, may have been
ignorant of what was necessary to realize the intention, how much more
difficult than intended it turned out to be, and so on, and so in such
cases you really did intend something that was not realized. What he is
most interested in are not cases where ignorance of various relevant facts
or unforeseeable contingencies explain why what was done ends up not
being what was intended, but cases where I find out that, while I sin-
cerely tell myself that I intend to achieve Y, I come to see that such an
intention was 'empty,' cannot really count as my intention.11
IV
Clearly the most difficult problem Hegel needs to address is whether he
can make any clearer what he means by such an inner-outer speculative
'identity' claim, whether he can especially preserve some intuitive sense
of the 'inner' in this claim. What would it mean not to separate clum-
sily inner intention as cause and external deed as effect, and yet not
wholly to absorb the former into the latter. (And all of this is not yet
to mention the considerations advanced in the first part of this discus-
sion: that what Hegel means by 'inner' is not intended to localize such
possible grounds for acting in isolatable mental states, but also means
to tie what becomes salient for an agent to the actualities of the social
world in which he or she lives and not simply to the results of indi-
vidual, reflective deliberation.) What would it mean, given all we have
seen about inseparability, to remain true to the 'thought that what a
human being does should be considered not in its immediacy, but only
as mediated through his inwardness [Inneres] and as a manifestation of
that inwardness'? (EL 112A, translation altered). (And this insistence on
what Hegel calls the 'right of intention,' my right to have attributed to
me only a limited range of the things that happen, where that range is
essentially determined by my subjective take on what I intend to do,
could be multiplied. All of this is so even if 'my subjective take' cannot
refer to temporally prior already determinate intentions, conceived as
states causally responsible for actions.)
Given these issues, we need to note that it is precisely this subjective
side of things that Hegel most emphasizes in the Moralitat section of the
Philosophy of Right. That is, as already noted, it is here that Hegel most
clearly recognizes there that there is a difference between an action,
‘Handlung,' a deed that can be attributed to me, and a mere deed,
‘Tat/ something that happened because of me (especially something
I may have done voluntarily but not knowingly), but which cannot be
72 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
attributed to me as something for which I bear responsibility or Schuld
(see PR §118, 118A). Further, this discussion also clearly shows that
Hegel freely concedes that in the execution of some plan, any number of
unforeseen and genuinely unforeseeable contingencies may intervene,
and what actually happens and what I intended may come apart, and
Hegel clearly does not want to hold me accountable, as if this outer
contingent event necessarily manifested what I truly, in fact, intended.
That is, as we have already seen, in passages cited previously about the
speculative identity of inner and outer, Hegel has no intention of cob
lapsing inner into outer. That would be in his terms a non-speculative
identity claim. More broadly, this subjective dimension is what Hegel
calls 'the right of the subject to find its satisfaction in its action' (PR
§121). This principle is of the utmost importance in Hegel's philosophy,
since it amounts to his interpretation of the philosophical significance
of Christianity, and therewith it is the foundation for his whole theory
of the modern world. So, most famously, for the Greeks, 'customs and
habits are the form in which the right is willed and done' (VPG 308,
PH 252, translation altered) and 'we may assert' of the Greeks 'that they
had no conscience; the habit of living for their fatherland without fur-
ther reflection was the principle dominant among them' (VPG 309, PH
253, translation altered),12 and therefore Greek ethical life 'is not yet
absolutely free and not yet completed out of itself, not yet stimulated
by itself' (VPG 293, PH 238, translation altered).
It is this dimension of action, what the subject takes himself to be
doing and why he considers that he ought to act in such a way, that
Hegel calls the 'subjectivity that makes up the determinateness of the
concept of right,' and so establishes what he calls the Standpoint or
Sphere of Morality. In a way typical of Hegel, he clearly wants to do
justice to this element of actions (as opposed to mere events), and to
try to understand the normative significance of attention to this (par-
tial but still crucial) aspect in our evaluation of action. Within certain
conditions, a moral standpoint, a heightened attention to the subject's
view of what she is doing, is appropriate and required. These conditions
include the very general and broad entitlement of all to be treated with
the dignity appropriate to free beings, beings with such an inner life,
their own 'right of subjectivity' (we ought not to murder or rob anyone
for our own gain, whether that person is a member of our Sittlichkeit or
not; we are not entitled to ignore their claim to lead their own life as
they determine it should be led). And the conditions under which such
considerations ought to be attended to also include certain objective
historical conditions. That is, by contrast with the usual claims for the
Robert В. Pippin 73
priority of a common ethical life and one's social roles within it, 'in peri-
ods when the historical actuality amounts to a spiritless and rudderless
existence, the individual is justified in fleeing from this actuality into his
inner life' (PR §138Z). Of course Hegel also clearly wants to understand
the limitations of this context and these conditions. This means under-
standing what goes on when this one dimension of a properly described
action is over-emphasized or relied on too exclusively, as in both his
famous appeals to and yet intense criticism of the rule of conscience,
'Gewissen'. (Already in the Zusatz to §108, he had noted the limitations
of an exclusively moral standpoint; in §121 he reminds us not to forget
the true identity of 'human self-consciousness' and 'the objectivity of
the deed' and in §124 he both repeats the Phenomenology's doctrine and
alternate emphasis—'what the subject is, is the series of his actions,'
and refers us directly to that book. In fact, read carefully, throughout
Moral it at, Hegel is constantly reminding his audience not to think that
the content of the intention, however important and ineliminable such
a subjective attitude is, can be determined apart from reliance on what
was actually manifested in the public social world.)
Hegel then proceeds to spell out the dimensions of this indispens-
able but still limited point of view, the moral point of view on agency.
I have the 'moral right' to expect that an action be attributed to me
(that I be deemed 'responsible') only in so far 'one recognizes as the
existence of this moral will only what amounts inwardly to a purpose'
(PR §114A, translation modified). And he goes on to analyze the rela-
tion between purpose and responsibility, Intention and Welfare, and
the Good and Conscience. (I don't have the space to follow him into
this particular jungle, but Hegel's position can be very easily misun-
derstood if this distinction between a genuine action and something
merely done by me is not stressed. We all know that a coerced action
should not be counted as a proper action of mine; it is not even done
voluntarily, much less intentionally, even if I, technically, produced it.
If we live in an extremely repressive society, we might also discount an
agent's degree of responsibility, concede that his public actions may not
reflect his true 'inner' commitments because the public world is objec-
tively such that she is not allowed such genuine expression. On Hegel's
account however, it must also be said that an agent denied such scope
for expression may not ever be able to know the 'truth' of his subjec-
tively 'certain' view of what his commitments/intentions are. Like many
of us, he must live in a state of suspension about whether he is actually
the potential hero he might take himself to be. But our intuitions can
then waver on this point. Direct coercion is one thing and is clearly
74 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
exculpatory; harsh repression and expected penalties are another and
clearly diminish the degree of responsiblity; mere social discomfort yet
another, until we reach what is simply the unavoidable cost of integrity,
when the lack of fit between avowed intentions and action must count
as evidence that the avowed commitments are mere wishful fantasies,
not intentions exogenously denied expression.)
But I should also note one of Hegel's most important and contro-
versial claims—both the priority and superiority of the standpoint of
'ethical life' to that of either 'abstract right' or 'morality.' What I have
tried to emphasize is that nothing in Hegel's treatment of the moral
standpoint suggests any tension with the Phenomenology's position on
the impossibility of 'separating' 'inner' from 'outer' in understanding
a deed. The Moralitat chapter certainly cannot be used as an inde-
pendent discussion of 'Hegel's theory of agency.'13 If it were, Hegel's
position would be misunderstood. Hegel is certainly conceding that
it does not 'correspond to right' to attribute a deed and an inten-
tion to someone on the basis simply of what happens and a person's
causal role in bringing it about. The moral insistence on the right of
knowledge, the right of the 'satisfaction of subjectivity' (Befriedigung
der Subjektivitat) and so forth, must be accepted, and that means qual-
ifying both the act description and the attribution of responsibility
in the light of the 'mediation of the inner.' But there is no tension
between the Phenomenology account and the Philosophy of Right, because
Hegel is clearly separating two distinct questions: what role should the
expressions of intention (and an agent's act description) play in a final
determination of what was done and who was responsible and to what
extent, and, secondly, how can we determine the content of any such
intention? The latter involves not only the interpretive task of know-
ing what doing this or that would mean in our community, but how
to understand the relation between what you actually did and what
was thereby expressed as your real intention, regardless of your own
avowals. These are obviously not easy tasks and they are subject to much
abuse.
If this is correct, it means that something like the presence of the sub-
ject in the deed must be understood carefully in order to grasp Hegel's
full position. Obviously in this account, sustaining a purposeful activity
over time, reacting in ways considered appropriate to obstacles, chal-
lenges, unforeseen circumstances, and so on is being treated here as
a norm-bound or rule-following activity. Individuals are not formulat-
ing intentions (in consideration of such norms) in some solipsistic way,
and they are clearly circumscribed in such formulations by a variety of
Robert В. Pippin 75
social conventions, proprieties, and so forth. One aspect of the success-
ful execution of an intention has to involve having attributed to you by
others the intention that you take yourself to have, and, given the role
of the intention in any act-description, by an agreement about what it is
you did.14 And this criterion presupposes, as the execution of intention
unfolds over time, an intentionally sustained sensitivity to such shared
understanding and normative appropriateness. You may intend to sig-
nal in a meeting that you wish to speak and so raise your hand. But if in
that society, raising one's hand expresses that one is communing with
one's ancestors and wishes to be left alone, then you did not signal any-
thing and so cannot be said to have realized the intention of signaling.
(If an intention is a subjective resolution that can be manifested in a
deed, then you cannot successfully intend what cannot be expressed in
a deed in that context, although you can imagine what it would be to
realize such an expression and in a self-deluded fantasy take yourself to
have done so. But you cannot intend to become Napoleon. You cannot
intend to float three feet in the air, and then blame gravity for thwarting
what you truly intended.)15 And as these passages about the right of sub-
jectivity indicate, you also cannot be said to have 'actually' manifested a
communion with your ancestors. (You didn't know that such a gesture
would mean that in such a context.) Or so Hegel wants his inner-outer
dialectic to work.
Put one final way, Hegel is clearly embracing the common-sense
position that intentions matter a great deal in what may be prop-
erly attributable to another as his or her deed and in our evaluations.
And he has no problem with the view that such intentions could
be beliefs about what outcome will occur if an agent acts a certain
way, desires about what outcomes should occur, and perhaps even
desire-independent beliefs about what ought to occur. But within the
tabulations and fantasies and wish-fulfillments of daily life, we often do
not know what we really believe and desire in any of these senses, and
won't really know until called on to act.
V
1 turn finally, and too briefly, to an underlying issue: the right way to
express the 'persistence of subjectivity' in the account I have ascribed
to Hegel. The subjective dimensions of Hegel's account of objective
Geist that we have seen so far are not manifestations of individual
beliefs readily available to conscious inspection, although they can be.
They can just as well be and mostly are, deeply implicit, habitual and
76 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
largely unchallengeable. But they are not wholly unchallengeable, and
so the clearest manifestations of the kind of subjectivity manifest in
such commitments occur when Hegel discusses the actual or imminent
breakdown of such proprieties, challenges within normative practices
that cannot be resolved in terms of such norms. So Antigone does not
just mindlessly 'act out' the role of what a sister does. When that role
must be integrated with the ethical life of the polls, when she is chal-
lenged on that basis, Antigone's being a sister has to become 'a view' that
she holds against other possible views, the prudence of Ismene, and the
opposition of Creon. It would be easy to imagine a confused Antigone,
absolutely certain she must do what a sister must, but bewildered by the
opposition of Creon and the hesitance of Ismene, acting only 'on faith.'
But this not what Antigone's near-fanatical assertion of her role involves.
So, it is in such moments of crisis and breakdown that the character of
these roles as commitments can come into view and can require address-
ing as norms. This doesn't mean that there is always available to subjects
a kind of Socratic independence, that a form of 'reflective endorsement'
is always on offer in a way we can be said to be responsible for not tak-
ing up. The subjective and the objective are far more tightly linked than
that in Hegel, and is fair enough already to say that the emergence of
such a dimension of subjectivity is itself, also, an essentially objective,
historical phenomenon. (As is well known, Hegel treats Socrates himself
as a manifestation of an objective crisis in the Greek polls.)
And we would need a consideration of any number of other exam-
ples in Hegel's attempt to form a typological and narrative account of
such experiences of dissatisfaction, before his understanding of how
this phenomenon of 'negation,' not finding anymore that the external
circumstances, roles, and events provide the reasons they once did, is
supposed to work. That would require among other things a re-reading
of the Phenomenology with such a question in mind, but at least we
would then be on the way towards understanding a number of Hegel's
most influential and important claims: that history (what has been done
and what is expressed in what has been done) is not merely illustrative
but essential in human self-knowledge; that the principles of a regime,
perhaps its constitutional principles, are only provisional expressions of
commitments, its actual commitments are expressed in what is actually
done (the beginning here of 'ideology critique'); the otherwise mysteri-
ous but much-cited claim by Hegel that we can only understand human
doings and makings when they are over, that philosophy comes on the
scene too late, that the Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk; and
perhaps above all, why Hegel finds both an ethics of intention and
Robert В. Pippin 77
an ethics of consequences so one-sided and unsatisfactory,16 and how
he proposes to defend a concept of freedom that involves neither the
inevitable unfolding of who one happens to be nor the spontaneous
initiation of who one wills to be.
Notes
1.	This paper is a revised form of what now appears as Chapter 7 in (Pippin,
2008).
2.	This distinction is made late in Hegel's career, later than the Jena Phenomenol-
ogy anyway, in PR §118A. But even here, having made the Handlung/Tat
distinction, Hegel does not strictly observe it and uses both Handlung and
Tat to refer to what properly are actions. I will follow him in this impreci-
sion, referring unsystematically either to actions or deeds, delineating mere
'things brought about by me' only when necessary.
3.	That there is a reason which best explains why someone did something does
not, though, for Hegel, show that reasons must be causes. So he is not both-
ered by the fact that phenomenologically it is next to impossible ever to
distinguish 'the' reason which could causally explain why the act was done.
4.	What Hegel calls a sittliches Wesen has much in common with what has come
to be called (after Margaret Gilbert, 1989) a 'plural subject.' See also (Laden,
2005).
5.	Understanding Hegel on action as an 'expressivist' account obviously owes
a great deal to Charles Taylor's path-breaking article, 'Hegel's Philosophy of
Mind.' (Taylor, 1985a; reprinted here as Chapter 2). But Taylor links his inter-
pretation to a Hegelian theory of 'cosmic spirit' and so understands human
actions as partly vehicles for the self-expression of Cosmic Spirit (pp. 83, 87).
I have disagreed with this account in Pippin, 1989.1 also have a much differ-
ent account of the sociality of action than Taylor's. And most importantly,
nowhere in Taylor's treatment does he link the possibility of 'recovering' an
action as mine with the problems of rationality, legitimacy and normativ-
ity, all of which, I am arguing, are crucial to Hegel's case. Taylor treats the
problem more as a question of hermeneutics, a restriction I don't think fits
Hegel's texts.
6.	The relation between an agent and a deed is not like that between the foot
and a soccer ball when the ball is kicked; the intending agent does not cause
bodily motion (a la Davidson) in the way the foot causes the ball to move,
but is rather to be understood on the model of an artist's somewhat pro-
visional and somewhat indeterminate 'plan' unfolding over time as the art
object takes shape.
7.	One drifts here easily into the language of Robert Brandom's 'semantic
externalisin' since it compresses and makes clear so many of the issues.
8.	But compare here Hare (1952) and Davidson (1980b). Cavell (1976) is also
quite right to point to phenomenon where someone interprets what I meant,
but I am dissatisfied with the way he puts something, but have as yet 'for
myself' no determinate alternative until someone puts it another new way
and I can now (and only now) say, yes that's what 1 meant, what I intended.
Cf. Cavell's remark, '... it may still seem, for example, that no present or
78 Hegel's Social Theory of Agency
future revelation can show what an earlier intention was' (Cavell, 1976,
p. 233). Cavell believes that this counter-intuition can be countered, and
so do I. It is what I tried to show in (Pippin, 2000c).
9.	Cf. 'A man's intention in acting is not so private and interior a thing that he
has absolute authority in saying what it is—as he has absolute authority in
saying what he dreamt' (Anscombe, 2000, p. 36).
10.	So no retrospective creation of intentions is at issue, and Laitinen (2004) is,
I think, wrong to suggest that might be an implication of what I am arguing.
11.	See (Cavell, 1976, p. 230), on the case of La Strada and whether Fellini can
be said to have 'intended' the allusion to the Philomel myth.
12.	See also Hegel's handwritten notes to PR §147, where Hegel again says
(astonishingly given characters like, say, Orestes) that'... the Greeks had no
conscience' (VPR 2: 553).
13.	This is my disagreement with (Quante, 1993)—an otherwise very helpful
book.
14.	By 'successful' here I mean more than that various events actually occurred
that an individual can interpret as consistent with and corresponding to
that individual's 'take' on what ought to happen and what was intended.
If this description and ascription are wildly at odds with the way the act is
acknowledged and responded to, we approach an alienation that borders on
schizophrenia.
15.	Again, this is a potentially confusing aspect of Hegel's position. A person can
certainly take herself to have formulated and to be acting on the intention
to become Napoleon. But because there is nothing she could do to realize
such an intention, she can't actually have intended it.
16.	See PR §118A. See also Bennett (1995).
5
Towards a Reading of Hegel on
Action in the 'Reason' Chapter of
the Phenomenology
fohn McDowell
1.	Human individuality is not just biological, not exhausted by the
singleness of a particular human animal. A fully-fledged human indi-
vidual is a free agent. A free human agent is not simply a human being
who moves in determinate ways. And it is not enough to add that the
movements are exercises of bodily control; that is something ordinary
animals also have. Freedom is responsiveness to reasons. It is not a nat-
ural endowment, not something we are born with, or acquire in the sort
of biological maturation by which an ordinary animal comes to be able
to control movements of its body and thereby to effect alterations in its
environment. Rational agency is a normative status. Understanding it
requires a social context.
That may be vague enough for nearly everyone to agree that it is
Hegelian. (Of course not everyone would agree that it is correct.) But
Robert Pippin's reading of Hegel gives a distinctive twist to a position
with this shape. In Pippin's reading, 'being a free agent—an actual or
successful agent—is said to depend on being recognized as one by oth-
ers whose free bestowal of this recognition depends in turn on their
being recognized as such free bestowers' (Pippin, 2004b, p. 128). Again,
'A priest, a knight, a statesman, a citizen, are not... natural kinds. One
exists as [a member of] such a kind by being treated as one, according to
the rules of [some] community. And the radicality of Hegel's suggestion
is that we treat being a concrete subject of a life, a free being, the same
way' (Pippin, 2004b, p. 133).
Pippin emphasizes how unconventional this is: 'It sounds quite
counter intuitive to suggest that one counts as a practically responsi-
ble subject by being taken to be one (clearly a cart before the horse
problem), but that is Hegel's position' (Pippin, 2004a, p. 302).1 He
79
80 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
notes a natural sceptical response (Pippin, 2000b, p. 156): 'Can't I be
free whether or not anyone else notices, acknowledges me, assists me,
expresses solidarity with me, etc.?'
I think the sceptical thrust of this question is well placed. And I do
not believe that is an objection to Hegel. Of course Hegel is not above
being counter-intuitive, but we should not find him so unless we have
to. And I think Pippin mislocates the undeniably Hegelian connection
between free individuality and recognition.
2.	A model Pippin offers, for the kind of status free agenthood is, is being
a speaker of a natural language (Pippin, 2000b, p. 162). I think it is an
excellent model. (And not just a model; I shall come back to this.)
Much of what Pippin says, on Hegel's behalf, about freedom is true, on
a certain assumption, about being a speaker of, say, English. That there
is such a status is a historical result, and the status has a normative shape
that is maintained and, in Robert Brandom's metaphor, groomed by the
continuing practice of a community. The idea of the status is inseparable
from the idea of participation in a communal practice. In that sense the
status is essentially social.
This is not uncontroversial; that is why I said 'on a certain assump-
tion'. Donald Davidson, for instance, argues that there is nothing
essentially communal about the ability to make oneself understood by,
say, doing what we call 'speaking English'. According to Davidson, the
idea we express by means of that specification of a thing one can do is a
mere construction out of possibilities of mutual understanding between
individuals who are (unsurprisingly, given their histories) such that their
expressions of this or that thought would sound much the same. What
we call 'the English language' is a concatenation of 'I'- 'thou' relations,
not a practice that is essentially the property of a 'we' (see Davidson,
1986).
If being a speaker of English is to be a model for a Hegelian concep-
tion of being a free human individual, Davidson must be wrong about
the idea of a natural language. But I need not discuss this here. For
my purposes in elaborating and exploiting Pippin's model, I can simply
presuppose that Davidson is wrong.2
The model is not just a model, because it is by being initiated into
one's first language that one comes to have a conception of reasons at
all. It is not that prelinguistic human beings are already responsive to
reasons (in a strong sense: to reasons as the reasons they are),3 and that
when they learn to speak they acquire a means to give expression to
exercises of that supposedly antecedent capacity.
John McDowell 81
The topography of the space of reasons is encapsulated in the con-
tent of concepts. And one does not acquire first one concept, then
a second, and so forth. There must be several concepts if there are
any. In Wittgenstein's image: 'Light dawns gradually over the whole'
(On Certainty §141).
When light has dawned, one is no longer dependent on one's teachers
for knowing what to do in the practice they have been initiating one
into. One has become a self-moving practitioner, able to make one's
own way around in the space of reasons, which includes being able to
be critical of one's inherited conception of its layout.4
Now suppose light has dawned for one, in the specific way that con-
sists in becoming a speaker of English. If there are other speakers of
English around, they will recognize one as a speaker of English. That is
not an empirical claim—as if speakers of English just happen to be good
at identifying others of their kind (like gay people, as some folk wis-
dom has it). Being a speaker of a language is not contingently connected
with the ability to recognize one's fellow-speakers. It includes that abil-
ity. It makes no sense to suppose someone might be a speaker of English
though people who recognize one another as speakers of English do not
recognize her as one, or she does not recognize them as fellow-speakers.
This is an a priori link between the status and the idea of recognition.
But consider a counterpart of Pippin's sceptical question: 'Can't I be
a speaker of English whether or not anyone else notices, acknowledges
me, etc.?' We needed that proviso: if there are other speakers of English
around. Suppose there are not. Suppose everyone around me dies just
as light is dawning for me, so there is no one to recognize me as a
self-moving speaker of English. It would be wildly implausible to think
it follows that I do not have that status. Suppose years later English-
speakers from the Antipodes arrive on the scene of the disaster that
I alone, of my local community, survived, and they recognize me to
be expressing thoughts in English. It would be wildly implausible to
think I had to wait for their recognition of me to acquire that capacity.
(Suppose I tape-recorded my thoughts while I was alone.)
The scenario is far-fetched, but it is perfectly to the point when we are
considering the thesis that one is a speaker of English by being taken
to be one. (Compare Pippin's claim, on Hegel's behalf, that 'one is a
practically responsible subject by being taken to be one'.) The answer to
the sceptical question is 'Yes'. We can respect a constitutive connection
between the status and a possibility of its being acknowledged, without
needing to accept that it is conferred by acknowledgement—that one has
it by being taken to have it.
82 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
Similarly with the status for which being a speaker of English is a
model, the status of being a free individual. As I said, it is not just a
model. Becoming a speaker of English is one way to become free, in the
sense of being responsive to reasons as such.
3.	Someone can manifest rationality only in responding to considera-
tions that she takes to be reasons. But nothing can count as a conception
of the layout of the space of reasons unless the considerations that the
subject takes to, be reasons are, at least on the whole, genuinely reasons.
(What 'genuinely' can mean here will become an issue in a moment.)
If we try to envisage too much error, the attempt undermines itself, by
making it impossible to suppose the subject is sufficiently in touch with
reasons to be able to be wrong about them.
Still, people can be wrong about reasons. Freedom can be more or
less fully realized, and its degree depends on the extent to which the
supposed reasons in the light of which someone acts are genuinely rea-
sons.5 When they are not, the weight of explanation falls through the
supposed reasons, and comes to rest on whatever accounts for the sub-
ject's taking them to be reasons—say, social subservience or the hold
of dogma. And if the ultimate explanation of an action is at that level,
the action is not perfectly free, not a full expression of the subject's self.
So the 'rational agency' conception of freedom needs a way to make
sense of the force of reasons as something one can be right or wrong
about.
Now the role of actual acknowledgement in Pippin's reading of Hegel
is sustained by a philosophical necessity that he thinks this requirement
imposes. To understand this, we need to consider how Kant's conception
of ethics seemed to him to be compulsory, and we need to consider
a Hegelian variant on Kant's view of how the bindingness of ethical
reasons needs to be understood.
A broadly Humean outlook may be framed as a scepticism about
the very idea of reason. But alternatively the materials of such an
outlook—natural tendencies and inclinations—may be used in a pur-
ported explication of what it is to be right about reasons. Such an
approach is also sometimes credited to Aristotle.6 Now Hegel would join
Kant in rejecting any such naturalistic reconstruction of reason. Kant
and Hegel would agree that one cannot build an authentic notion of
being right about reasons out of propensities that are simply given.
Hegel would join Kant also in rejecting a pre-critically rationalistic
intuitionism: a position that conceives the space of reasons as a pecu-
liar tract of reality, constituted independently of anything human, into
fohn McDowell 83
whose layout we are capable of insight by virtue of a more or less
mysterious faculty that we naturally, or perhaps supernaturally, have.
Kant sees no alternative except what has come to be called 'Kantian
constructivism'. If the normative force of reasons is, as against natu-
ralism, a subject matter for what Kant would recognize as exercises of
reason, but, as against intuitionism, not an independent reality, a topic
for discernment, the only possibility left, in Kant's view, is that we deter-
mine it ourselves, by legislating for ourselves in an exercise of pure
practical reason.
Hegel thinks this cannot work. The purity of Kant's legislating rea-
son consists in its having only formal considerations to guide it. Hegel
thinks it follows that Kant cannot provide for substantive content. He
concludes that we must take the normative force of reasons to impinge
on us not as possessors of pure practical reason, but as participants in a
concrete, historically situated form of life.
But Pippin's Hegel retains the Kantian idea that the only alternative
to naturalism and intuitionism is that the normative force of reasons
is instituted by self-legislation. And Pippin's Hegel, like Pippin's Kant,
takes this talk of institution very seriously. Pippin resists the suggestion
that the point of the self-legislation image is just to give vivid expression
to this thought: one is genuinely subject to some normative authority
only in so far as one can acknowledge its legitimacy. Pippin insists on
a reading of the self-legislation image according to which acknowledge-
ment is not just recognition of the legitimacy of norms—leaving their
source to be otherwise understood—but creates their legitimacy.
So in Pippin's reading, Hegel's departure from Kant is a move from one
constructivism to another. Pippin's Hegel replaces a position in which
norms are legislated by pure practical reason with one in which norms
are constructively determined in the recognitive practices of historically
actual communities. And he applies this not just to ethical norms, but
to normativity in general. Pippin's Hegel embraces 'a radical anti-realism
or constructivism about norms' (Pippin, 2000b, p. 163). He thinks this is
the only position left open to him: 'there is just nothing left to "count-
ing as a norm'' other than being taken to be one, effectively circulating
as one in a society' (Pippin, 2000b, p. 163).
The application to normativity in general includes the thesis I have
questioned, that the normative status of free agenthood is conferred by
recognition. So Pippin's Hegel thinks that thesis is forced on him: 'With-
out a possible Aristotelian appeal to the realization of natural capacities
in order to establish when one is really acting in a practically ratio-
nal way (realizing one's natural potential), and without an appeal to
84 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
a formal criterion of genuinely rational self-determination, this turns
out to be the only criterion left: one is an agent in being recognized
as, responded to as, an agent; one can be so recognized if the justifying
norms appealed to in the practice of treating each other as agents can
actually function within that community as justifying, can be offered
and accepted (recognized) as justifying' (Pippin, 2000b, p. 163).
4.	But this argument by elimination of alternatives is unconvincing.
It presupposes that we should model all uses of the idea of a topic
for investigation—something that calls for discovery as opposed to
construction—on a certain conception of how the idea works in, say,
astronomy. That is what makes it seem that realism about norms could
only be pre-critical rationalism. But we should query the model rather
than let it shape how we picture our dealings with norms.
The idea of participation in a communal form of life is needed for
a satisfactory understanding of responsiveness to reasons. But why
exactly? Not because it allows us to see rationality as a communally
conferred status, like being entitled to vote. We should not be fright-
ened away from holding that initiation into the right sort of communal
practice makes a metaphysical difference. In this respect achieving free
agenthood is quite unlike reaching voting age. Responsiveness to rea-
sons, the very idea of which is inseparable from the idea of communal
practices, marks out a fully-fledged human individual as no longer a
merely biological particular, but a being of a metaphysically new kind—
like Rousseau's citizen, in a conception that is surely an ancestor of
Hegel's thinking.
To belong to this metaphysical kind is to be able to find one's way
around in the space of reasons. That imagery expresses a realism about
reasons, but not the pre-critical rationalism Pippin rightly regards as a
non-starter for Hegel. Pre-critical rationalism is unacceptable because it
attributes unmediated independence to the space of reasons, as against
the communal practices that, to stay with the realist imagery, open our
eyes to its layout. (Such a picture of our relation to a subject matter is
already wrong about astronomy, though it is intelligibly more tempting
in that sort of context. I shall return to this at the end of this essay.)
Pippin's Hegel recoils into an equally one-sided attribution of indepen-
dence to the practices, refusing to countenance any sense in which
reasons have the independence, as against the practices, that the real-
ist imagery requires. The right response is a characteristically Hegelian
balance with independence and dependence on both sides. That yields
a realism of a different kind.
John McDowell 85
If affirming realism about some inquiry means crediting its subject
matter with unmediated independence as against the practices that con-
stitute the inquiry, then realism is certainly wrong about norms. That is
the point of rejecting pre-critical rationalism. But realism in that sense
is equally wrong about the subject matter of the natural sciences. If we
allow the label 'realism' to fit wherever there is a subject matter that
enjoys some independence with respect to our practices of inquiry, then
realism becomes available about norms no less than about the subject
matter of the natural sciences. Pippin's idea that normativity needs a
special treatment, an anti-realism or constructivism, is not Hegelian.
I conclude that the argument that Pippin thinks limits Hegel to
a communal constructivism about normativity in general, and about
free individuality in particular, is not cogent. I urged that we should
not attribute a counter-intuitive thesis to Hegel unless we must. Simi-
larly, we should not read him as convinced by a bad argument unless
it is unavoidable. Moreover, those considerations about dependence
and independence indicate that the argument Pippin takes Hegel to
be moved by is not just unconvincing, but out of tune with the
characteristic shape of Hegel's thinking.
5.	In Pippin's reading, the 'Reason' chapter of the Phenomenology con-
tains an expression of the conception of agency whose attribution to
Hegel I am questioning. If this reading is right, that trumps the Principle-
of-Charity considerations that are most of what I have said so far against
the attribution.7 The Principle of Charity says we should not attribute
bad philosophy to someone unless we must. But the attribution is
unavoidable if a text requires it, and Pippin thinks the 'Reason' chapter
requires attributing that conception of agency to Hegel. (Of course
Pippin does not think the philosophy is bad.) However, Pippin's reading
of the 'Reason' chapter is questionable.
Pippin writes, 'In the last two sections of Chapter 5 in the Jena
Phenomenology, Hegel proposes to show various ways in which what the
deed means to me, inwardly, as I intend it and given the reasons I take to
justify it, can easily come to be experienced by such a subject as in some
tension with the way the "actual" deed plays out and with the real or
external social world. This tension involves the way the deed might be
construed by others or contested by them' (Pippin, 2004a, p. 305). This
comes to a head, on Pippin's account, in the section on 'die Sache selbst',
whose moral Pippin summarizes like this: 'What I take the act to be, its
point, purpose and implication, now has none of the privileged author-
ity we intuitively attribute to the agent. In such an account I do not
86 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
exercise any kind of proprietary ownership of the deed, cannot unilat-
erally determine "what was done". This is, as it were, up for negotiation
within some concrete social community, the participants of which must
determine what sort of deed “that” would be in our practices, how our
rules apply' (Pippin, 2004a, p. 311, 2004b, p. 137).
To begin with a general objection, I am sceptical whether this can
be made out to cohere with Hegel's account of what drives the transi-
tions from one shape of consciousness to another in the Phenomenology.
A transition is compelled by 'experience' of failure to meet a crite-
rion. In the Introduction, Hegel explains that the criterion at any stage
is internal to consciousness. 'It is in it [consciousness] one thing for
another, or it has the determinateness of the moment of knowledge
altogether in it; at the same time, to it this other is not only for it,
but also outside this relationship or in itself; the moment of truth.'8
What compels a transition is a mismatch within consciousness, between
what the object is to it and what the object is for it, given the mate-
rials it has, at the stage it has reached, for a conception of the object.
(This may become clearer from some examples, which I shall give when
I sketch a reading of V.B.) 'Experience' in the Phenomenology is what
a shape of consciousness undergoes in becoming aware of tensions
within its self-conception, not between its self-conception and exter-
nal reality. No doubt it would be more natural to apply 'experience'
('Erfahrung') to awareness of how things play out in practice. But that is
not how the Introduction tells us the concept of experience is going to
function.
6.	In V.B. the target for consciousness is 'the actualization of rational
self-consciousness through itself'.9 This emerges out of V.A, where the
aim was an 'observationally' warranted identification of rational self-
consciousness with (an) actuality. The thought that the outer is the
expression of the inner should, in principle, enable consciousness to
understand itself as not other than what, thanks to that thought, it
would recognize as its own embodied self, actual precisely in being
embodied. But when consciousness is restricted to 'observation', the best
it can make of that thought is physiognomy and phrenology. This fail-
ure teaches consciousness that its identity with an actuality needs to
be understood in terms of its self-conception as an agent, rather than
established by 'observation', and that yields the new target of V.B.
The actuality in question should still be one's own embodied self.
So we can be more specific about the target of V.B: it is an understanding
of certain bodily goings-on as oneself acting.
John McDowell 87
What happens, in three different ways, in V.B is that an attempt at
such a conception on the part of consciousness—what itself acting is for
it—turns out in its 'experience', not to be a conception of itself acting.
To it its object is itself in action, hut when it thinks through what its
object is for it, it sees that falls short of being what it was supposed
to be.
First, consciousness tries to build what itself acting is for it out of an
idea of the satisfaction of appetite.10 What emerges in its 'experience'—
in its thinking through this attempted conception of its target—is that
in this conception it has not, after all, 'thrown itself from dead theory
into life' (1363), as the transition from V.A to V.B required. What was
meant to be itself acting is, for it, 'empty and alien necessity' (ibid.).
The idea of a happening motivated by the drive towards the kind of
pleasure that consists in satisfaction of appetite is not an idea of some-
thing with the significance of an exercise of agency. One might put
the point here by saying that consciousness, which has long been self-
consciously rational, realizes in its experience that this first attempt at
a self-conception as an agent takes it back to a merely animal mode of
being, somewhat as in the scepticism section of IV.B (1205).
Consciousness learns from this failure that if it is to survive this 'loss
of itself in necessity' (1366), the materials for its conception of the target
must include the idea of a necessity that is its own. This is the necessity
of 'the law of the heart'—a self-generated demand on what happens in
the relevant region of actuality, namely, still, what is in fact one's own
body. The hope is that an idea of something necessitated by the law of
the heart will be an idea of something with the significance of inten-
tional action. The hope is dashed because the actuality to which the law
of the heart is addressed is conceived as subject to an independent neces-
sity (1369). What consciousness hoped would be an idea of conformity
to a necessity of one's own turns out to be an idea of something under
the sway of that independent necessity (1372). Deranged by this fail-
ure to achieve a conception in which the law of the heart is efficacious,
consciousness blames its failure on its having aspired to a conception of
individual self-actualization (1377).
That leads into the third stage. 'Virtue' is a de-individualized descen-
dant of the law of the heart. 'The way of the world' is a descendant of
the alien necessity that thwarted the attempt to see the law of the heart
as efficacious, in the failure consciousness blamed on its aiming at indi-
vidual self-actualization. The hope now is that the idea of a victory for
virtue in a contest between these parties will be an idea of happenings,
in what previously figured as the domain of the alien necessity, with
88 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
something like the significance of intentional actions. The hope is that
such happenings will be intelligible as, in some sense, intentional in
that they conform to the descendant of the law of the heart—though
because the law has been de-individualized, they cannot be conceived
as conforming to the intentions of someone in particular. (There are
echoes of the renunciation of individuality in the final phase of IV.B.)
This hope is dashed because the imagined contest is only a sham fight
(SI386). Success in this project is failure. What it would be for virtue's leg-
islation to be efficacious is that an embodied human individual engages
in determinate behaviour. So in what consciousness wanted to conceive
as a victory over individuality, individuality prevails.
Consciousness learns from this that it was mistaken in supposing indi-
viduality was what stood in the way of its achieving a conception of
happenings with the significance of intentional actions. The result is a
conception of individual self-actualization as free exercise of one's bod-
ily powers CJ393). That is the shape in which consciousness finds itself
(having, as usual, forgotten the route by which it arrived at this position)
at the beginning of V.C.
Before I turn to V.C, let me emphasize a divergence from Pippin's
reading of V.B. On the reading I have sketched, consciousness in V.B is
working towards being so much as entitled to the idea that something's
happening in objective reality can be itself acting. Pippin's reading is
in terms of tensions between a subject's conception of its deeds and
how things play out. But that implies that consciousness has, already,
the idea that, in my reading, it is still working towards the idea of
its deeds: the idea of itself getting things done. I think this means
that Pippin misses some intriguing philosophy, in the way Hegel shows
consciousness progressing towards that idea.
7.	I shall consider only the first movement of V.C, and I shall be just as
sketchy about it, perhaps even sketchier.
V.C. starts with consciousness secure, for the moment, in a concep-
tion of its self-actualization as the free exercise of its bodily powers. It is
aware of the determinateness of its powers. But that does not figure for
it as a limitation on its freedom; it is only a specificity in the space of
possibilities that constitutes its being an agent at all ('the simple colour
of the element in which it moves'; ^399).
To begin with, consciousness conceives acting as a self-contained
unity that embraces circumstances, end, means, and work or achieve-
ment CJ401). But the place of achievement in this unity is hard to
preserve. It can easily come to seem that achievements are thrown
John McDowell 89
out by acting consciousness into a realm of actuality that confronts it.
In response, consciousness tries to keep a version of that self-contained
unity, in what it hopes will still be a conception of itself acting, while
not allowing that what happens in the realm of actuality that it takes
to confront it is relevant to the content of the conception. This is the
so-called honest consciousness (1412).
The lesson consciousness now learns in its 'experience' is that it can-
not get away with affirming that its doing is nobody's business but
its own. If the idea of doing something is to have application, some-
thing needs to happen objectively—that is, for others, in the sense of
being publicly available. This has the obviousness that characterizes
Wittgenstein's 'reminders'. It is not part of a controversial conception
of agency as up for negotiation in a communal practice.
Communal practice certainly starts to matter in this section. One
might say it makes its absence felt. The trouble this shape of conscious-
ness gets into is a loss of the comfortable conception it began with, of
itself acting by freely exercising its determinate bodily powers, its origi-
nal nature. At the beginning of the section, the determinateness of the
original nature merely fixed the space within which acting conscious-
ness exercises its freedom. But the work, the achievement, 'has received
into itself the whole nature of the individuality' (81405). So the extru-
sion of the work into an alien actuality takes on a look describable like
this: 'the work is thrown out into a state of existing in which the deter-
minateness of the original nature turns itself in the deed against other
determinate natures, encroaches on them as these others do on it, and
loses itself as a vanishing moment in this universal movement' (ibid.).
This is a picture of a meaningless clash of attempts at self-realization.
It is intolerable as a picture of what it is to act in a world in which oth-
ers act too. And that is suggestive of how this section contributes to the
final lesson of V: that one cannot make satisfactory sense of the target
conception, a conception of oneself getting things done, except in the
context of 'the ethical life of a people' (81441).11
The lesson this section thus puts consciousness on the path to learn-
ing is that agenthood, like citizenship in Rousseau, is not intelligible
except in the context of the idea of a communal life. As I argued ear-
lier (§4), this does not imply that agenthood in general, and particular
instances of that status such as having done this or that, are conferred
by acknowledgement from others.
One cannot unilaterally, independently of participation in a com-
munal practice, give bits of one's behaviour the kind of meaning
actions have. The significance of actions consists in their being practical
90 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
employments of conceptual capacities, and the idea of conceptual
capacities makes sense only in the context of a shared practice. But that
is not to say actions are what they are by being taken to be what they
are by other participants in the practice.
The point here is not peculiar to the practical employments of concep-
tual capacities that actions are. If one cannot make a putative conceptual
grasp on something—whether an action one is engaging in or a state of
affairs one confronts—convincing to people with whom one can oth-
erwise reach agreement, that should raise a doubt about the putative
conceptual grasp, given that the idea of conceptual capacities makes
sense only in the context of a communal practice. Perhaps the others
will come around; it may take time for the merits of new uses of con-
cepts to be recognized. Perhaps, though, one is only under the illusion
of a conceptual grasp. If things are as one thinks one takes them to be,
employing—one thinks—a concept that belongs to a certain communal
practice, the practice had better provide for at least a potential consen-
sus that things are that way. But that is not to say that things being that
way is constituted by such potential consensus. In fact it is not clear why
there should seem to be a need for anything that things being a certain
way is constituted by—except, of course, things being that way.
8.	In Pippin's reading, Hegel's treatment of action in the 'Reason' chapter
opposes a 'conventional modem understanding of agency', which
'makes a... distorting error by clumsily separating the inner intention
from the outer manifestation of the "inner," and so by explaining the
action by reference to the isolated separate intention as prior cause'
(Pippin, 2004a, p. 305).
Pippin's Hegel corrects this overemphasis on the independence of the
inner aspect of action, the intention, by a balancing assertion that the
inner depends on a socially constituted outer. Pippin thinks this leads
to some counter-intuitiveness, though he claims there is no conflict
with Hegel's affirmation of the 'right of subjectivity' in the Philosophy
of Right}2 He writes: 'Of course it seems a bit paradoxical to claim that
we can only know what we intended to do after we have actually acted
and in a way dependent on the reactions of others, but there is little
doubt that Hegel holds something like such a position. Consider: "Eth-
ical Self-consciousness now learns from its deed the developed nature of
what it actually did" '(the quotation is from PhG 4469) (Pippin, 2004a,
p. 308, 2004b, p. 136). If you have written a bad poem, Pippin's Hegel
says the poem you have written 'is a perfect expression of what your
intention turned out to be' (Pippin, 2004a, p. 312).
John McDowell 91
By framing the material as he does, Pippin implies that the educa-
tion of consciousness needs to overcome a reluctance to relinquish the
independence of the inner, reflecting that 'conventional modern under-
standing'. But since V.A, consciousness has been trying to see itself as
not other than its own outer actuality, by exploiting the thought that
the outer is the expression of the inner. The problem is not to over-
come a resistance on the part of consciousness to the idea that the
inner and the outer are interdependent. The problem is to enable it
to see how it can have that idea—as it wants to—in the face of intel-
ligible difficulties. And there is no reason to suppose the difficulties
depend on a prior inclination to exaggerate the independence of the
inner.
As for what Pippin takes to be Hegel's commitment to 'an unusual
retrospective determination of intention, even for the agent' (Pippin,
2004a, p. 311, 2004b, p. 137), I think this is a misreading.
Hegel is scornful of the temptation to evade answerability for bad
performances by retreating into a private sphere where everything is
supposedly all right. Someone who has written an unimpressive poem
must not be allowed to claim that he had a good poem in his mind, and
merely failed to get it out into the open. The inner poem is mythical;
the only relevant poem is the one he has written. But we can insist on
that, without needing to abuse the concept of intention by saying his
intention turns out to have been the intention to write that poem. It is
true that he has intentionally written that poem—he has intentionally
strung just those words together in just that order. But in realizing his
intention he gave it that specificity; he did not find out what it was all
along.
I do not believe Hegel holds the paradoxical position Pippin says there
is little doubt that he holds. In the very paragraph that Pippin cites
from (PhG 81469), Hegel goes on to say this: 'Actuality... does not show
itself to consciousness as it is in and for itself—it does not show the
son the father in the one who offends him and whom he slays, or the
mother in the queen whom he takes as his wife.' The allusions to the
Oedipus story make it clear that his topic in the remark Pippin quotes
is learning the nature of one's Tat as opposed to one's Handlung—to use
Hegel's terms for a distinction he makes much of in the Philosophy of
Right. Given a specification of what one has done in the sense of one's
Tat, it is the 'right of subjectivity' to deny that one did that intentionally.
It is routine, not paradoxical that one learns what one has done, in
that sense, from how things turn out. This is not learning what one's
intention was.13
92 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
9.	The social constructivism Pippin attributes to Hegel can seem to
imply relativism. Pippin interprets the developmental character of the
Phenomenology as, at least in part, a response to this threat. The Phe-
nomenology's progression is supposed to reassure us that our view of what
is a reason for what is not just one view among others but, on the whole
at least, correct, in the only sense 'correct' can hear in the constructivist
context. The idea is that our stance is displayed as the outcome of a
development that is progressive, in that each succeeding stage corrects
'the partiality of some prior attempt at self-imposed normative author-
ity' (Pippin, 2000a, p. 188). Pippin conceives this as a developmental
successor to, for instance, a transcendental vindication.
I want to end by objecting to this understanding of the developmental
character of the Phenomenology. To begin with, most of the Phenomenol-
ogy's progression has nothing to do with diminishingly partial attempts
at self-imposed normative authority. That would imply that the stages
are successive ways of trying to make a go of human life. But noth-
ing like that is in question until the shapes of spirit (see 1441). And,
secondly, even there, any shifts that come into view in the content of
conceptions of reasons (say in conceptions of what one owes to one's
kin) are, I believe, incidental to Hegel's point.
The point is to equip the consciousness that is the recipient of the edu-
cation recapitulated in the Phenomenology with a satisfactory conception
of what it is to be an autonomous inhabitant of the space of reasons at
all. Consciousness learned at the end of V that such freedom must be
understood in the context of 'the ethical life of a people' (ibid.). But one
is not autonomous if one is unreflectively immersed in a communal
form of life. And one does not become autonomous by merely opposing
what pass for norms in the society one is brought up in. (Followed gen-
erally, that is a recipe for the collapse of the social setting required for
anyone to have a chance of autonomy at all.) What is needed is aware-
ness that one is in touch with reasons only by virtue of one's formation
in a Sittlichkeit, combined with a critical attitude to the conception of
reasons one finds oneself with.14
What Hegel depicts as happening, when Greek Sittlichkeit becomes
untenable, is not that some specific constellation of putative norms
loses its grip. The shift he is concerned with is from a mode of life
whose normative shape is simply there as the context, unquestioningly
taken for granted, in which one acts, say as a man or as a woman, to a
way of being in which acting in conformity to one of the norms that
used to shape such a life is something for one to commit oneself to,
or not, as the particular individual one is. That is, initially, a loss of
John McDowell 93
situatedness in a Sittlichkeit, since to begin with there is nothing for sit-
uatedness in a Sittlichkeit to be apart from the unreflective immersion
that lapses with the onset of individuality. What needs to happen next,
through the vicissitudes—certainly historically situated—that Geist goes
through, is a laborious recapturing of Sittlichkeit, but without giving up
the individuality whose coming on the scene figures at first as a loss of
Sittlichkeit. The result is a certain conception, in a sense formal rather
than involving any specific content, of one's relation to norms iiber-
haupt. No doubt the content of putatively authoritative norms changes
with the shifts Geist goes through, but, as I said, I do not believe that is
Hegel's concern.
The Geist chapter culminates, then, in a consciousness that is once
again situated in a Sittlichkeit, but is now critically or reflectively oriented
towards the Sittlichkeit in which it is situated. I want to make a couple
of remarks about this invocation of a reflective or critical attitude.
First, there is a strand in the Introduction in which Hegel rejects the
idea that the Phenomenology's progress can be controlled by an aspira-
tion to take nothing for granted. Any attempt to direct critical reflection
at some shape of consciousness would have to rest on assumptions cur-
rently not in question. And such a procedure would not be an expression
of the radical scepticism that the Phenomenology aims to bring to com-
pletion. But that stands in no conflict with what I have said about the
culmination of the Geist chapter: that when Geist achieves full self-
consciousness, the content bf its consciousness includes an obligation
to adopt a critical stance. A critical stance was not sufficient to guide the
progress of consciousness, but that does not exclude its being part of the
result of the progress.
Second, the invocation of a critical attitude is not the routine move
it might seem to be. Its point here belongs with the point Hegel makes
by talking, in the Preface, about the project of overcoming rigidly deter-
mined thoughts or bringing them into a state of fluidity (PhG ^33). He
gives vivid expression to the thought with the image of the True as a
Bacchanalian revel (PhG 4147). The sober sense of this is that no puta-
tive conceptual grasp is ever sacrosanct, fit to be placed once and for all
in an archive of achieved wisdom. If one rejects a proposed conceptual
innovation for no better reason than that it flouts established ways of
thinking, one has violated the obligation to reflectiveness.
When one's consciousness has achieved the combination of individ-
uality and Sittlichkeit with which the Geist chapter culminates, one is
able, and obliged, to think for oneself—ideally, no doubt, in discussion
with others—about whether putative reasons really are reasons.
94 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
When we think about how to conduct our lives, there is nothing on
which to found confidence that we are getting things right, apart from
the persuasiveness of the considerations we find compelling. We can
step outside the discussion, and focus on the sheer fact that we are capa-
ble of being moved by reasons. And Hegel helps us to understand that
aspect of our self-conception. But that leaves us still needing to think
things out for ourselves.
If we find that responsibility alarming, Pippin's picture offers a kind
of comfort. We can tell ourselves that since we are constructing norms
for ourselves, the results of our activity are ultimately up to us, and
the developmental story assures us we are better placed than our
predecessors to do the constructing well.
I think the very fact that it offers this comfort makes the picture sus-
pect. It embodies an avoidance of the real difficulty of understanding
oneself as a modern subject. That topic is central to Hegel's philosophy
is a thought of Pippin's own, but I think Pippin's Hegel mishandles the
topic.
On Pippin's construal, as I said, the developmental character of the
Phenomenology is aimed at freeing a supposedly compulsory construc-
tivism from relativistic implications. But as I explained earlier (§4), the
constructivism looks compulsory only because of a bad picture of what
realism about norms would be: a picture according to which being open
to a reality not of our making would be letting it imprint itself imme-
diately on us. We can be encouraged into a picture of 'observational'
knowledge on those lines by its seeming to liberate us from the burden
of responsibility for getting things right. But that is a dubious motiva-
tion, and the picture is a bad one already in what might seem its proper
home. If we reject it, we make room for a conception according to which
norms are no less suitable as a candidate for a realistic attitude than, say,
the layout of the heavens.
So as Pippin understands it, the developmental character of the Phe-
nomenology responds to an anxiety—a fear of relativism—that is felt only
under the influence of bad philosophy. If one sees through the bad
philosophy, as I think Hegel does, one is invulnerable to that anxiety.
And Pippin's reading of Hegel does not properly deal with a differ-
ent anxiety that, as modern individuals, we are (in a way) right to feel,
or at least to be aware that we risk feeling: the anxiety of responsi-
bility. In reflecting about how to think and act, we cannot take on
trust the deliverances of any received authority. We are entirely on our
own. Full awareness of that fact and its significance is the result of the
Phenomenology's progression.
John McDowell 95
Reason gives us resources for reflecting about how to think and act.
And one starting point can be less vulnerable than another to illusions
of rational cogency, deriving from the continuing grip of traditions that
ought to be discarded. But even if we are convinced that our starting
point is as good as it could possibly be in such respects, that is not an
external ground for confidence in the results of our reasoning. There is
nothing outside our reasoning on which we could found confidence in
its results.
Hegel's aim is to equip us—the possessors of the consciousness that
has been educated by his work into full self-consciousness—with an
open-eyed awareness that is how things are for us. A conviction of
groundlessness can easily induce panic. If we allow ourselves to feel
that panic, we fall into characteristic philosophical attempts to alle-
viate it. The vision Hegel aims to convey is a clear-sighted awareness
of groundlessness, bringing with it the understanding that all such
attempts at grounding are misguided. Hegel aims to liberate us from
the felt need to have philosophy fill what, when we feel the need,
presents itself as an alarming void: the supposed need that expresses
itself in an empiricistic foundationalism, or in a rationalistic postula-
tion of insight into the independently constituted intelligible structure
of reality, or in a transcendental grounding for a conceptual scheme.
Or—to bring the point home to Pippin—in a developmental story con-
ceived as a successor and counterpart to a transcendental grounding.
There is no ground, and it was wrong to suppose there was any need
for one.
Notes
1.	I quote, here and later, from the text of which the published article is a
translation.
2.	For some discussion, see McDowell, 2002.
3.	An ordinary animal might flee in response to apparent danger. Danger is, in
one obvious sense, a reason for fleeing, but the fleeing of an ordinary animal
is not a response to it as the reason it is. That would require being able to
consider whether to flee, given a danger one takes oneself to face. This is
what I mean by speaking of responsiveness to reasons in a strong sense.
4.	We should not picture this as happening at an instant; light dawns gradually.
5. This is a thought of Pippin's. See Pippin, 2000b, p. 169, n. 10.
6.	I would question whether this is a correct view of Aristotle, but we need not
go into that here. I mention this reading of Aristotle only to make room for
a way Pippin sometimes puts things.
7.	Not all; the point about dependence and independence is not a Principle-of-
Charity consideration.
96 Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action
8.	184.1 cite by the paragraph numbers given in Miller's translation, since (with
a small amount of work) a passage so identified can be found in any text. But
I have not followed Miller's rendering.
9.	Hegel's title for the section.
10.	Epithumia as in Plato and Aristotle: a kind of motivating force that is by
definition aimed at pleasure.
11.	To make this more than suggestive would require much more detail than
I can go into here.
12.	Pippin argues this most extensively in unpublished work [Editors' remark:
since published as Pippin, 2008]. But see the parenthetical paragraph
(missing its final parenthesis) at Pippin, 2004a, pp. 306-7.
13.	In unpublished work [Editors' remark: now published as Chapter 4 above],
Pippin also cites, to document this 'paradoxical' commitment on Hegel's
part, PhG 1401: 'an individual cannot know what he is until he has made
himself a reality through action'. But the topic here is the 'original nature'.
Hegel's point is not that there is 'an unsual retrospective determination of
intention', but that one comes to know one's bodily powers only in the
exercise of them. This is not counterintuitive or paradoxical.
14.	This indicates a basis for thinking about the question how 'the ethical life of
a people' ought to be organized. It must have whatever features are necessary
for it to enable the formation of subjects who are free in that way. This is
the frame in which we should approach Hegel's thinking about 'rational'
modern institutions.
Doing without Agency: Hegel's
Social Theory of Action
Katerina Deligiorgi
Hegel's treatment of action is driven by the concern to show that actions
only make sense as actions within specific social contexts. The aim of
the paper is to show how this concern is reflected in four key action the-
oretical commitments. The first is non-cognitivism about expressions of
intentions. To the extent that whatever is known after the performance
is relevant to the evaluation of the intention and so counts as a piece of
knowledge regarding the intention, minimal epistemic retrospectivism
about intentions can be sustained. Second, ascribable and communica-
ble intentions are integral to the category of action. Third, the ascription
of intentions and of actions to an agent entails no metaphysical com-
mitments to agency as originating or causing actions. Fourth, ownership
of the action is decided in the context of the forensic examination and
moral evaluation of the action and the agent.
All four commitments assume that Hegel has a theory of action, but
does he? The familiar themes of philosophy of action, such as inten-
tion, will, and causation, are developed largely on an atomistic model
of agency. By contrast, Hegel is consistently critical of atomistic concep-
tions of agency and of individuality and seeks to show that to the extent
that our activities are recognizable as actions, they belong, together with
our practical reasoning and practical identities, to the totality he calls
Geist, In addition, in the contemporary discussion of action there is little
scope for engagement with the substantive, ethical, social, and political
issues that primarily concern Hegel.1 It comes as no surprise therefore
that those who are interested in Hegel's treatment of agents and their
actions tend to concentrate precisely on such substantive issues, seek-
ing to evaluate the kind of life his philosophical commitments allow us
to envisage.2 However, Hegel himself devotes considerable attention to
basic questions about how we act and how we recognize what we do
97
98 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
as actions in the Phenomenology and in the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of
Spirit.3 Whilst the argument in these passages is mainly critical of atom-
istic positions and assumptions, it also contains a set of positive theses
concerning (1) avowals and knowledge of intentions, (2) the relation of
actions and intentions, (3) agents and agency, and (4) action ascription
and ownership. This material contains elements of a theory of action
that is social to the extent that it addresses epistemic and metaphysical
questions about intentions, actions, and agents by referring them to the
communicative and evaluative practices in which these questions arise
and are ultimately decided.
1.	Intention: Not knowing one's mind
Hegel's position on intention has gained some notoriety because—as has
been argued, most recently and forcefully by Robert Pippin—it commits
us to retrospectivism about the determination of intentions: 'Only as
manifested or expressed in a social space shared by others... can one
(even the subject himself) retrospectively determine what must have
been intended' (Pippin, 2006, p. 136).4 'Determination' can be under-
stood in two ways. The first is as an ontological claim about the relation
of intention and action. Intention, Pippin argues, is not separable from
its performance. From this a number of claims are said to follow, chiefly
that intention is fully 'expressed' in what is done, so that there is no
leftover that 'remains in itself inexpressible', and, more sweepingly, that
what is done 'is' what the individual is (Pippin, 2006, pp. 136-7). I exam-
ine the relation between intention and action in the following section.
Here I want to focus on the epistemic interpretation of determination,
which involves a claim about our knowledge of intentions.
Epistemic retrospectivism states that 'there is no way to determine
what an agent intended prior to and separate from the deed' and that
such retrospective determination of intention holds 'even for the agent'
(Pippin, 2006, p. 137).5 Pippin is not just reminding us that agents
are sometimes wrong about their intentions (e.g. self-deception in the
case of sub-conscious desires). Rather he espouses a strong epistemic
retrospectivism which states (a) that the agent is not authoritative about
her intention, and (b) that the agent does not know her intention prior
to the act. John McDowell argues that this position makes sense for
actions but not for intentions. McDowell argues that learning what one
has done from how things turn out is 'routine'.6 As Hegel observes, the
'external existence of the action' is 'independent of the subject' and can
'pervert his action and bring to light something else than lay in it' (EG
Katerina Deligiorgi 99
§504). This reads naturally as a claim about the performance, stating
that aspects of the action are hidden from the agent prior to her acting
(e.g. in the case of unintended consequences, as in the familiar example
of turning on the light and alerting a burglar). What support is there for
Pippin's position then?
Pippin explains the motivation behind retrospectivism by identifying
a philosophical move that Hegel repeats 'in a variety of contexts, against
a variety of inner-oriented positions' and which, in its negative formu-
lation, states 'that we cannot determine what actually was a subject's
intention or motivating reason by relying on some sort of introspec-
tion, by somehow looking more deeply into the agent's soul, or by some
sincerity test' (Pippin, 2006, p. 136). The aim is to bar the search for
evermore basic psychological states to explain intention. A contempo-
rary target for such a position would be the Davidson of 'Intending',
who adopts an 'inner-oriented' position to the extent that he moves
from acting with an intention and acting intentionally to 'pure intend-
ing' (Davidson, 1980c, p. 89).7 This paper is interesting from a Hegelian
perspective because Davidson responds to puzzles about intention by
thickening the deftniens by ruling in deliberation and practical reason-
ing that for Hegel have already a public and social dimension and are
therefore 'outer-oriented'. In his treatment of action in general, Hegel
seeks to show how puzzles that arise for the mental states psychology of
'consciousness' are soluble in terms of 'spirit', the domain in which what
is—or assumed to be—inner is expressed, made explicit, spoken about;
in action, Hegel argues, 'what is in itself may become explicit for [con-
sciousness]' (PhG Я[401, TWA 3: 296), 'we see language as the existence
of Spirit' (PhG Ч1652, TWA 3: 478). However, outer-orientation neither
justifies nor entails retrospectivism. For this we need further argument.
The key quote on which Pippin bases his interpretation is: 'The indi-
vidual cannot know what he is, before he realises himself through the
act' (PhG 31401, TWA 3: 297).8 Because narrative matters in the Phe-
nomenology, before we examine what precisely is being said here, it is
important to establish where the quote occurs. The immediate context
is a portion of the chapter on 'Reason' devoted to questions relat-
ing to action. However, 'Reason' does not start with action but with
an examination of the success of the scientific programme of identi-
fying nomological regularities in nature and biology. Hegel turns to
action after he considers the failure of certain programmes, such as
physiognomy and phrenology, which sought to identify nomological
regularities that explain (and so also predict) human behaviour. Hegel's
verdict is that whilst these efforts fail because they misconstrue their
100 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
object in different ways, the project of rational analysis of action is a
sound one (PhG 1346, TWA 3: 262).9 This leads him to consider the
nomological investigations of early modern political and social theory,
which treat human agency as a natural category for which laws can
be discovered and formulated (e.g. Hobbesian laws of motion). Hegel's
overarching concern as it emerges from these passages is to identify 'the
rationality of certain ways of thinking about human social life and the
irrationality of others' (Pinkard, 1996, p. 87).10 To that end, he recom-
mends a position that may be called 'realist' about a whole range of
evaluative, normative, and communicative practices, which he gath-
ers under the term 'spirit'. He conducts his argument largely through
criticism of conceptions of agency that sustain 'inner-oriented' perspec-
tives on intention and action. Examples include the virtuous agent who
upon being asked about the meaning of his 'fine phrases' appeals to 'the
heart, which inwardly says what they mean-which amounts to admitting
that it is in fact unable to say what the meaning is' (PhG 1390, TWA 3:
290), and those who associate agency with self-endorsement behaving
'like naughty boys who enjoy themselves when they get their ears boxed
because they are the cause of its being done' (PhG ?413, TWA 3: 306).
It is here that the quote about the individual knowing himself through
the act occurs. Taken in context, it forms part of a cumulative argument
about the social 'reality' (PhG 1417, TWA 3: 308) of acting and intend-
ing provided the intention is expressed ('called' PhG «J414, TWA 3: 307,
given 'in words' PhG «J667, TWA 3: 491). The context gives us only a
general philosophical direction, however, not a specific argument about
intention, let alone about retrospectivism.
We need such an argument because retrospectivism is not just
'unusual' as Pippin admits, it is implausible. Unless intention is fixed
before the action, there is no way of telling whether we have been suc-
cessful in carrying out our intention or not (Laitinen, 2004, p. 60).11
We think of intentions as prospective, as guiding action, so, for instance,
the question arises of how we can distinguish intentions from predic-
tions (see Harman, 1999, 61ff.), or the extent to which foresight is an
essential part of intention (see Ginet, 1990). A more basic set of concerns
is about the agent's own knowledge of what she intends to do. Pippin
denies 'the privileged authority we intuitively attribute to the agent'
(Pippin, 2006, p. 137). This can have a rather awkward consequence.
While action requires a background of observational knowledge, such
that there is a window you can open, knowledge that you are opening
it does not require further observation. 'Your initial discoveries—"Lo, a
window!" and "Works fine, I see"—aren't followed by another discovery:
Katerina Deligiorgi 101
"Why, Гт opening it!" ' (Velleman, 2007, p. 20). Retrospectivism would
seem to commit us to the claim that in forming the intention there is
something I want to do but I do not know what that is until I act, so
the content of the intention that guides my action remains unspecified
until after the action.
At issue is knowledge of intentions. What the window-opening exam-
ple illustrates is that we know what we intentionally do without deriving
the knowledge from evidence about what we are doing. So how do
we know our intentions? Anscombe observes that answering this ques-
tion is tricky. It seems odd to say that when I paint the wall yellow,
meaning to do so, I know this empirical fact 'without observation'
(Anscombe, 2000, p. 50). She argues that it is worth grappling with this
difficulty because she thinks it important to call statements of intention
knowledge (Anscombe, 2000, p. 51). She considers, only to reject them,
various ways of resolving the difficulty by limiting non-observational
knowledge to knowledge about something inner, such as an 'interior
act of intention' (Anscombe, 2000, p. 47), or 'willing' (Anscombe, 2000,
p. 52), or some physical event such as a 'contraction of the muscles'
(Anscombe, 2000, p. 53). She then proceeds to develop her own solution
through her account of practical knowledge.
The upshot of this discussion is that our basic intuition about our
knowledge of our intentions is not problem-free. So we cannot simply
appeal to our intuitions about knowledge of our intentions to reject
retrospectivism. Something more needs to be said. I want to propose a
modified 'minimalist' interpretation of epistemic retrospectivism about
intentions. Because Hegel focuses on what the agent says about the
action, I begin with the cognitive status of avowals of intentions.12
The first problem for retrospectivism is its failure to account for the
prospective, future-oriented character of intentions. So I start by show-
ing how the modified version can do this. On the dispositional construal
of intentions, where intention is taken as a kind of motivational state, a
statement of intention is about one's motivational state, it is a report of
what the agent knows through introspection. This suggests that when
we ask someone what they intend to do, we are seeking to find out what
is going on inside their head and perhaps indirectly about their beliefs
about the future. Now this does not seem right. A parallel with another
type of interrogation might help here: if someone tells us that dangerous
weapons are concealed at a particular site, and we ask 'are you sure?' we
may get in reply a statement of the person's wholehearted commitment
to that belief. True, we are asking for reasons and we are given reasons:
our interlocutor's wholeheartedness. But this is not what we are after,
102 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
we want reasons that can count as evidence for the belief, for instance,
some external world facts that render it plausible. Similarly, when we ask
about someone's intentions, we want to find out 'what they are likely
to do, not what is going on inside their head' (Hamilton, 2008, p. 24).13
Again we may ask 'are you sure?'; the question is an invitation to recon-
sider the intention, it does not call for investigation of a person's state of
mind. On the model developed by Hamilton, avowals of intention are
'future-outer', that is, they are not reports of inner states but predictions.
'Prediction' can be confusing, for it can indicate a statement based on
evidence from past behaviour, for example, 'I am going to get drunk' is a
statement of likelihood given the kind of person I am. This is not what is
meant here. Prediction rests 'unambiguously on reason-providing ends'
(Hamilton, 2008, p. 33). It is possible of course to treat 'why?' questions
as seeking after evidential support, so if questioned, when I say 'I am
going to get drunk', a statistical answer is possible, 'because I always
do this at parties'. However, this would mean that the original utter-
ance was not of an intention, but of a reasonable expectation (one
can imagine the utterer being resigned to the prospect of imminent
drunkenness). If the utterance is of an intention, the answer must be
reason-providing, for instance, 'because these people bore me'. So the
appropriate discussion to have for this understanding of prediction is
whether drunkenness is the best strategy to deal with boredom, not
about behavioural probabilities. On this account, avowal of intention
is merely an expression of the agent's commitment to act.
How does this account of 'future-outer' avowals of intention fit with
retrospectivism? Strong epistemic retrospectivism consists of (a) the
agent is not authoritative about her intention, and (b) the agent does
not know her intention prior to the act. (a) does not make sense and
should be rejected. But we can start to make sense of (b) if we accept
that the statement about which the agent is authoritative is not a
piece of knowledge at all. Non-cognitivism can account for the odd-
ity of the exclamation, 'Why, I am opening it!', in Velleman's example.
It results not from the denial of direct—or on Velleman's terminology
'spontaneous'—knowledge, but rather from the application of concepts
such as doubt and discovery to the discussion of intention. On the pro-
posed interpretation, such problems do not arise. If I say 'I intend to
open the window' and do not do it, it is not because I am mistaken
somehow about my intention or mis-describe it. What I may be mis-
taken about is how well I have been responding to treatment for my
phobia of open windows, so I may be deluding myself, but in such
a case my appraisal of the situation has gone wrong, not my avowal.
Katerina Deligiorgi 103
Doing, or in this instance failing to do, can teach me something about
myself, though not about my intention. So in what sense is the mod-
ified position retrospectivist about knowledge of intentions? Well, in a
minimalist way.
Avowals of intentions are not descriptions of inner states, they are
expressions of commitment to act. Once the act is performed, however,
we have an extra element: we have the performance, which is laid out
for all to see, for example, painting the wall yellow. Once the agent
paints the wall yellow 'something has been opened up that is for others
as well, or is a subject-matter on its own account' (PhG 1418, TWA 3:
309). Now we, as onlookers, can evaluate the performance on the basis
of our knowledge of it: we can say this was a rush job, because the paint
is streaky and uneven. What is there for all to see is also for the agent
to see. The agent knows her performance just like anyone else gets to
know it. She too can see how the paint is applied. The kind of discus-
sion we can have on the basis of our knowledge of the performance
is different to the kind of discussion we can have on the basis of our
knowledge of the agent's expression of her intentions. When she states
her intention to paint the wall, we can challenge her about whether
it is a good idea, whether the goal is realistic, public-spirited, and so
on. After the act we, onlookers and agent, can still debate these issues,
but now we have an extra element, a piece of knowledge that is the
performance itself, so we can say things about the intention on the evi-
dence of the performance, for example, that it was misconceived. So,
to the extent that whatever is known after the performance is relevant
to the evaluation of the intention and so counts as a piece of knowl-
edge regarding that intention minimal epistemic retrospectivism about
intentions seems plausible. Knowledge enters into the determination
of intention but only retrospectively, because we only have knowledge
after the performance (of the performance).
2.	Action: Displaying oneself
As regards the ontology of action, retrospectivism appears to require that
prior to the performance there is nothing that can be identified as inten-
tion. I suspect that Pippin's aim in pushing this position is therapeutic,
that is, to disabuse us of the thought that when all is said and done there
is an inexpressible 'inner possibility' of the action that never sees the
light of day. Philosophically, the load-bearing claim is that intention is
not separable from its performance (Pippin, 2006, pp. 136-7). This need
not be cast in terms of ontological priority at all. All it states is that the
104 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
logical and forensic distinction between intention and action does not
correspond to an ontological distinction. In what follows I show that for
Hegel the category of action (not just performance) contains necessarily
the concept of intention.
In the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel contrasts action (Handlung) and deed
(Tat), arguing that action has to do with the goal (or purpose, Vorsatz)
that the agent identifies as her intention (Absicht):
Whilst any alteration as such, which is brought about by the activity
of the subject, is its deed [Tat], the subject does not recognize this
as its action [Handlung], but recognizes as its own [das Seinige] and
takes blame for that which is in the deed that was in its knowing and
willing, which was its purpose [Vorsatz].
(EG §504, translation altered)
With respect to form, the subject must have known and willed the
action [Handlung] according to its essential determination that con-
cerns the particulars [of the action]. This is the right of intention
[Absicht]. While purpose concerns [its] bare existence only, intention
is the substance and aim of action.
(EG §505, translation altered)
The key thing to note is that deed and action belong to two different
explanatory contexts. Deed is explicable (or opaque) to the extent that
it is considered as a discrete entity; it is 'any alteration as such, which
is brought about by the activity of the subject' (EG §504). Action is not
similarly stand-alone: it is considered as action to the extent that it is
relatable to goals identified as intentions by an agent.14 With respect
to its 'form', Hegel insists, action relates crucially to intention, which
is its 'substance and aim'. This is a 'formal' point about action: an
action is not a discrete element, a state or event, which we can seek
to explain by identifying its physical or mental causes, and so a cov-
ering law for it. Discussing action is already speaking in terms of the
reason-providing ends we communicate when we express our inten-
tions. Purpose is not sufficient to characterize action because deeds can
be purposeful without being actions, say a dog chasing a squirrel.15 Pur-
pose is part of action only to the extent that it is identifiable as intention
by an agent. Although in the Phenomenology the terminology is not as
clearly laid out, the basic position is recognizably the same. In the 'Rea-
son' chapter, the explanatory model of law-governed causal relations
between discrete items is shown to be unsatisfactory when applied to the
Katerina Deligiorgi 105
rational analysis of human agency. The argument is not that the concept
of deed precludes consideration of intentions, rather that, within the
causal framework to which deeds belong, intentions can be viewed only
in terms of whatever mental or physical stuff precedes and causes the
deed. At the end of 'Reason', Hegel signals the move beyond the causal
paradigm by introducing the notion of 'ethical substance' (PhG ^436,
TWA 3: 324). His aim, in both the Phenomenology and in the Philosophy
of Spirit, is to show the philosophical significance of ordinary attempts
to make sense of our actions in terms of intentions (those we express
ourselves and those we attribute to others) and, on that basis, defend a
conception of action that already includes intention as part of it.
Abandoning the notion of 'deed' in favour of that of 'action' does
not look like an attractive prospect for it means abandoning causal
nomological explanatory models. At a single stroke, human acts are
placed outside the worldly stuff we encounter daily and understand
nomologically. This runs the risk of rendering them mysterious. It may
be flattering to think that what we do constitutes a noble exception
that requires different explanatory models than those employed to
explain what ferrous particles do, but maybe we should not succumb
to this temptation. For one thing, there is ample evidence from clini-
cal psychology and the social sciences of the explanatory potency and
sophistication of causal models.16 Hegel does not dispute that all sorts
of things are causal and are truly asserted as such for human activities.
This is why he has the category of deed. What he is disputing is that
this actually tells us anything informative—any of the things we care to
know—about actions.
Action, Hegel writes, is the 'daylight in which consciousness wants
to display itself' (PhG ^396, TWA 3: 293). I will show what it takes to
attend to such a display by using an example; it comes from Wagner's
Tristan and is wonderfully discussed in an essay by Thomas Mann. The
immediate context for Mann's discussion is Wagner's use of mythic ele-
ments, in this case, magic potions, in plot-development. In Tristan, the
key episode occurs at the end of act 1. Tristan is charged with the task
of bringing Isolde, an Irish princess and his uncle's intended bride, to
his uncle's court in Cornwall. Isolde, still mourning the loss of her lover
who had been killed by Tristan, holds Tristan to account and speaks of
her determination to avenge herself of her lover's death and for the need
to atone for the past. She proffers a cup, which she believes to contain a
death potion, to drink to reconciliation and oblivion. Tristan willingly
accepts.17 But unbeknownst to the heroes there is a love draught in the
cup not a death potion. Once they drink, Tristan and Isolde appear
106 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
suddenly to each other as if for the first time. They call each other's
names and embrace. Such is the power of their present state that their
previous life appears unreal and dreamlike: 'What was my dream of
Tristan's honour?', Tristan sings. 'What was my dream of Isolde's dis-
grace?', replies Isolde. The detached observer might well feel cheated:
here is a woman who professes nothing but hate for this man, and plans
indeed to kill him; and here is a man, who so far acts as loyal servant
of his uncle, scrupulously adhering to the prescribed manners (Sitte),
and who accepts with seeming equanimity the logic of revenge; and we
are asked to believe that in a moment all their past life, including their
various choices, attachments, and commitments, count for nothing and
all this because of magic. From a modern perspective at least, magic is
hopeless as an explanation, because it tells us nothing.18
Let us modify the explanation and suppose that the cup contained
a potent combination of neuropeptides. We would have a cause, the
neuropeptide potion, and its effect, the embrace, or, better, neuronal
activity in the brain that causes the muscles to contract into an observ-
able embrace. Yet we still have the puzzle of their actions to solve.19
Neuropeptides help us tell a more plausible causal story, they do not
help with the task of understanding what these people do. As Mann
observes, characteristic of Wagner's music dramas is the way in which
mythic patterns and psychological observations are bound together;
Wagner takes the traditional 'magic, "love draught" motivation, used
in naive epic poetry, and fashions it into a mere means by which an
already existing passion is freed—in reality, the two lovers could have
been drinking pure water' (Mann, 1982, p. 722). According to Mann,
it is their expectation of imminent death that releases them from the
constraints of their respective roles and enables them to give free rein to
their passion. True, operatic heroes are hardly the stuff of daily life. Yet,
we understand their actions in terms of 'trying to stay true to a lover's
memory', 'trying to be a faithful servant to one's king', 'suffering', 'long-
ing', 'losing one's self control', that is, a whole host of ways we have
of making sense of the activities of human agents. It is to these ways of
making sense that Hegel seeks to focus our attention. The Hegelian posi-
tion of action is a consequence of what I called earlier Hegel's realism
about the evaluative, normative, and communicative practices, which
he gathers under the term 'spirit'. Descriptions that include psycholog-
ical attitudes form a central part of how we explain our behaviour to
each other. These, Hegel suggests, are genuinely explanatory—and so
sustain true counterfactuals—because they tell us something about the
constraints under which an agent acts.20
Katerina Deligiorgi 107
'With respect to the bare existence of the action', Hegel writes, 'my
part in it [das Meinige\ is formal insofar as the external existence of the
action is independent of the subject' (EG §504, translation modified).
The claim is odd. When I do something, I bring something about, wher-
ever we locate what I do, its existence cannot be independent of me, nor
my involvement merely formal; to the extent that I bring something
about, surely 1 am materially involved. But involved in what? What is it
that I do? This is the question Hegel invites us to ask. For a deed to have
the form of action purpose must be expressible as intention, which is the
substance and aim of the action (formally what the telos of action is the
realization of the intention). Hegel argues that this definition of action
reflects our reason-giving practices, paradigmatically when we are asked
to account for our actions. This is why he calls the connection between
action and intention a 'right' (Recht) of intention.21 Whilst the immedi-
ate context of this remark is not law (this is the topic of EG §488-502), it
is 'morality' and 'the volitional mode' (EG §503), accountability and the
attribution of responsibility remain central concerns throughout Hegel's
treatment of intention and action. His conception of action is forensic;
that consciousness 'displays' itself in action does not mean that some-
thing inner becomes outer but that action already belongs to the public
tribunal of objective spirit. We speak of action, when we speak of a
performance (whether actual or considered, whether involving moving
one's limbs or not, say, doing mental arithmetic) plausibly characteriz-
able in terms of its corresponding intention, the reasoning that leads to
the formulation of intention and, post actum, the action-relating reasons
to which we ordinarily appeal in trying to make sense of and evaluate
each other's activities.
While Hegel's treatment of action is motivated by hostility to reduc-
tivism of the mental to the physical, it has no quarrel with physical
descriptions of the mental, so long as the relation between the two is
articulated in terms appropriate for the kind of investigation under-
taken. So when studying mental phenomena, say feelings of trust,
for the purpose of seeing how brains respond to specific chemicals it
is perfectly appropriate to use the category of causation—or perhaps
covariance—and to show how oxytocin causes certain effects in the
recipients' brains, which they report using the language we normally use
in reporting mental stuff, 'feeling of trust' (Baumgartner et al., 2008). But
if say I give my money to someone to invest, and then my friend asks
'why did you do this?', I say 'Because I trust him', this 'because' is not
causal.22 The explanation of my behaviour is trust. How I came to trust
her, whether I am right in trusting her (she might be a smooth-talking
108 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
felon, or she might be going around with capsules of oxytocin or what-
ever) is another further issue that also belongs to the domain of Geist not
least when we argue about—and so give reasons for—the causal potency
of specific elements in complex structures such as human behaviour.
3.	Agency: Doing without
I have so far argued that for Hegel intentions are integral to the category
of action, opening action to a different kind of explanation and evalua-
tion than is available for the category of deed. I have also argued against
a dispositional model of intention. Characteristics of the agent can fea-
ture among the reasons for the intention and so be explanatory of the
action. They are not mental causes. In fact, nothing we identified so far
is a cause of the performance we identify as action. So how do actions
come about? In the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel addresses himself to what
agents do and say, and also want and aim for, but he does not identify or
defend any specific conception of agency.23 Instead, he appears to con-
sider essential features of agency, such as will and freedom of choice,
as somehow dispensable, reducible to their 'performative expression
[tatliche Ausserung, translation altered]' (EG §503). Once we consider the
actions that are its purported accomplishments, the will, this 'most inti-
mate reflection of subjectivity itself' becomes the 'annihilation of itself'
(EG §512). Before we examine the puzzle of the disappearing agency, let
us start with the puzzle of the 'annihilation of the will'.
Hegel describes the will as 'withdrawal into itself of intelligence' (EG
§468Z). The notion of withdrawal suggests an inner movement that is
at odds with at least one way of thinking about the will, namely as the
final link in a causal chain that brings about the act. On this empiricist
model, will belongs to an outward directed arc of mental states. But what
kind of mental state is 'will'? Locke spends a good deal of time trying to
analyse 'will' and concludes that it is 'a Thought of my Mind' (Locke,
1979, p. 629). This is what Hegel describes as withdrawal into itself of
intelligence, the will as some sort of thought that accompanies or ratifies
whatever it is I propose to do. And it is this model he challenges: if we
really want to think of will as belonging to an outwardly directed arc of
mental states, we had better figure out how 'as will, the mind steps into
reality [Wirklichkeit]' (EG §469). Unless we invoke some mechanism of
transubstantiation, the will understood as something inner and mental
that 'steps out' into something outer and physical amounts to noth-
ing. There are two issues here, a metaphysical and an epistemic one.
We are thinking about something mental, the 'will', and its worldly
Katerina Deligiorgi 109
effects and what we lack is a way of connecting the two. We are also
thinking of a term whose designation is knowable only by the subject of
the will and what we lack is a way of translating (inner subjective) will-
talk into (outer, public) action-talk. Hegel responds to both problems
by arguing that as long as we see will as the defining feature of agency,
we shall remain without the means of addressing our deeper concerns
with responsibility and accountability. So he counter-proposes what we
might call an error theory of agency. He seeks to show that we can speak
of agents and actions, and about the practices of owning up and being
held responsible, without assuming that there is a thing called 'agency'
to which these characterizations ultimately refer.
Hegel conducts the metaphysical portion of the argument in tandem
with an argument about (Kantian) normative ethics in the section of
'Spirit' called 'Duplicity or dissemblance'. The normative ethical con-
text serves to remind us that we care for agency and freedom because
we care for holding each other responsible for our actions. Things start
to go wrong when we seek to explain the difference between 'actuality',
that is the observable reality of events and states, which we under-
stand causally, and 'consciousness', the choosing, willing, acting agency,
which we postulate when we attribute responsibility. Hegel takes the
example of moral consciousness because it has a simple and clear pur-
pose as its intention, namely to bring about some state of affairs that is
moral. It is also in the nature of this moral intention that consciousness
does something about it, that it acts on its moral convictions. True moral
consciousness is one that acts, Hegel says, 'it is precisely therein that
the reality of its morality consists' (PhG ^[618, TWA 3: 454). However,
'the very doing or acting' displaces whatever good was done because, on
the causal story, 'what is to become real through action, must be so in
itself, otherwise reality would not be possible' (PhG «Ц618, TWA 3: 455).
In other words, we understand reality in terms of causal relations. So we
understand the reality of what moral consciousness does by considering
the circumstances and consequences of its act. But, as Nagel observes,
once we start thinking along those lines, the 'area of genuine agency,
and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink' (Nagel,
1979, p. 35).
Hegel confronts us with two options, either agency is something real
or it is not. If it is something real, then we might look for some mental
state or event that stands at the start of the causal story we are trying to
tell. To borrow a term briefly used by Chisholm, any such causal account
would be an account of transeunt causes. The problem with absorbing
agency in an account of transeunt causes is 'shiftiness' or 'shuffling' (PhG
110 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
4617, TWA 3: 453), as Hegel calls it. We can seek to pinpoint agency at
the level of observable movement, or muscle contraction, or neurons
firing but the limit by which we designate on which side lies agency
(the side about which it is appropriate to assert that such and such
are the doings of an agent) is not vindicable on this model. Nothing
separates out internally some stretches of the causal story from others.
So we shift and shuffle back and forth. We can try to get out of this
predicament by giving an account of immanent or agent-causation. The
difficulty with this, Hegel argues, is that we need the concept of imma-
nent causation to do two things at once: to be an unanalysable 'in-itself',
entirely apart in its 'perfectly pure' (PhG 4626, TWA 3: 460) and, at the
same time, to be a power to produce effects—we do not want a mere
'unrealized "thought-thing" ' (PhG 4630, TWA 3: 463).24 At this stage
of metaphysical entanglement, language gives out: the distinction we
sought between actuality and consciousness 'no longer exists not even
in words' (PhG 4631, TWA 3: 463).25 The conclusion towards which we
are edging is that agency is not something real.
What leads us astray is a certain concatenation of concepts: the
ground level issue, which is of primary concern, is accountability. It is in
this context that ascription of actions to agents and the extent to which
agents are responsible for their actions are an issue. 'Agency' is useful
as shorthand for consideration relating the ownership of the action and
the agent's power to do or leave undone. But we get easily sidetracked
into thinking that 'it' stands for something, for instance, a causative
force. Aristotle, for example, argues that 'the things of which the mov-
ing principle is in a man himself are in his power to do or not to do'
(Aristotle 1989, p. 49). He seems to link what originates in me ('the
moving principle') and what is up to me to do or leave undone. Hegel
wants to decouple notions of origination from notions of what is up to
me; the former is vacuous, whereas the latter is central to responsibil-
ity. This sounds counterintuitive; if we want to keep the sense that an
act is 'up to me', how can we give up origin?26 Hence the attraction of
the idea that agency is some sort of cause, a very special sort that differs
from event-type cause. If we stick with this basic intuition, however, and
attempt to identify agency as originating substance, we find ourselves
in the metaphysical dead-end described in 'Duplicity or dissemblance'.
Instead of 'agency' the notion of the agent in the performance of the
action suffices for our metaphysical and moral tasks.27 The key term here
is 'action'. 'Agent' is not a natural kind, it is a role one may perform in
certain contexts. Only some of these performances are actions. While
all of the following examples, '1 am doing mental arithmetic', 'He mows
Katerina Deligiorgi 111
the lawn', 'Gnasher bites the postie', describe activities done by agents,
only two of these are expressible in terms of goals that agents identify
as their intentions.28
The upshot of this discussion is that what we do not need agency
as a special metaphysical category. Theories of agency are responses to
a problem about accountability: intention is not sufficient to establish
ownership and so accountability. Notions of origination gain their plau-
sibility because they respond to this need.29 Hegel recognizes the need
to connect somehow action and agent, to be able to say of an action
that it is mine or hers. He states explicitly that "ownership as such [die
seinige iiberhaupt]' (EG §469) is a 'formal' feature of the will and in doing
so he proposes to replace the metaphysics of agency with the moral
metaphysics and epistemology of ownership. 'Ownership' has attribu-
tive function, it captures the idea that the action is the agent's for the
purpose of action ascription, including self-ascription. It is also about
owning up to an action and taking responsibility for it. As we shall see
in the final section, for Hegel, it is part of the process of owning up that
a decision is reached about attribution and about what is within the
agent's power to do or to leave undone.
4.	Ownership: Getting things wrong
A statement such as 'This action is mine' is not, for Hegel, a matter of
simple self-ascription; this is because 'action' is a complex concept and
the relation of ownership expressed has an aspect of moral responsibil-
ity, which a simple relation of self-ascription such as 'this pain is mine'
does not have. Whilst it is odd to say 'there is this pain 1 feel, but I'm
not sure whether it's mine' because it is hard to think how I might be
in error, Hegel argues that it is perfectly ordinary for me to be in error
about the action that is mine. How can we get ownership right then?
Ownership is a complex judgement. 'This is my action' attributes a
performance to the agent, the performance comes under some descrip-
tion, but what is described matters for the moral evaluation of the
action. Claiming ownership of the action belongs with practices of
accountability and attribution of responsibility and blame; the subject
'recognizes as its own [das Seinige] and takes blame [als seine Schuld]'
for the action (EG §504, translation altered). However, Hegel also states
that one recognizes as one's own the portion of the performance that
fits with the reason that was the intention of the action (cf. EG §505).
So ascription depends on the agent's picking out the portion of the per-
formance that she recognizes as her own and identifies with the reason
112 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
that was her intention. Such agent-bias is pretty disastrous for the tasks
of accountability and the attribution of responsibility and blame. It is
easy to imagine an agent claiming ownership only of that portion of
the performance that puts her in the best light. The agent is authorita-
tive with regard to the expression of her intentions—she is in a position
to communicate her commitments—but surely not with regard to the
description of the action that is relevant to the tasks of moral evaluation
(including evaluation of what was in her power to do or leave undone).
The agent's view may be well be sound, but it can also be self-serving, the
product of self-delusion, or simply partial. Equally though we might not
want the judgement, and so ownership, that is 'this is your action', to be
decided by others, because exactly the same holds for the observers as
holds for agents; soundness, opportunism, self-delusion, and partiality
are evenly spread.
Hegel does not spell out the conditions for successful ascription and
evaluation of actions. Instead he offers a narrative of success in the 'Evil
and its forgiveness' section of the Phenomenology. At issue is the structure
of action. 'Evil', or 'wickedness', signals the lack in the action that is not
yet owned. On the model of ownership given so far the agent claims
an action as her own by picking out the bit of the world in which she
sees her reasons reflected. This is a narcissistic model: only what is 'own'
is recognized. Action can thus be seen as an exercise in self-assertion,
a 'being-for-self' (PhG Ц668, TWA 3: 492). Narcissism aside, the model
seems too dramatic for mundane everyday actions. Should we be think-
ing here in the same way about, say, arm-raising; painting a wall yellow;
doing mental arithmetic; joining the revolution? I think we might, at
least to the extent that each action is discussable in terms of an agent's
reasons for doing it and recognizable as his or her 'own' by an agent.
These discussions and recognitions take place in what Hegel calls 'spirit'.
We already know that the concept of action requires a concept of owner-
ship of the action, what the discussion in 'Evil and its forgiveness' aims
to show is that the determination of ownership of an action is a social
activity. Hegel begins with a narcissistic model of ownership, which he
calls the 'hard heart'. The hard-hearted agent owns only what she rec-
ognizes as expressing the reason that was the intention of her action.
He calls this drawing of the boundaries of action the 'hard-heartedness
of being-for-self' (PhG ^670, TWA 3: 492). The agent's judgement about
her action, her 'being-for-self', is structurally primary because unless we
think of what she is doing in terms of intentions, which she is in posi-
tion to communicate and authoritative about, then we do not have an
Katerina Deligiorgi 113
action here at all.30 At the same time, the hard-hearted agent stakes her
claim of ownership in response to a demand issued from outside: the
subject is "enticed into openly confessing itself by the vision of itself in
the other' (PhG 51669, TWA 3: 492). This "vision of itself in the other' is
a judgement passed on the action by another. This second judgement is
not final, it is a stage in the process of ascribing the correct action appro-
priately. The process concludes when one side abandons "its subjectively
determined judgement, just as the other abandons its subjective charac-
terisation of action' (PhG 670, TWA 3: 492). Hegel calls this outcome "the
word of reconciliation [which] is the objectively existent Spirit' (ibid.).
In the context of Hegel's theory of action, reconciliation describes the
successful conclusion of the process of deciding ownership. The process
is public to the extent that we address someone when we state what we
are about to do or have done and we are addressed when asked to state
our case, say what we are about to do, what we have done. We address
and are addressed when we stake a claim on what is ours, when we own
and disown, and explain ourselves.
This narrative of ownership is criterially incomplete. Hegel offers no
guidance when one is confronted with specific ascription problems,
presumably because what is to count as "subjective', and so its aban-
donment, is context-specific. Be this as it may, a clearer distinction
between description for purposes of ascription and evaluation seems
desirable to avoid "shiftiness' and "shuffling' in setting the boundaries of
the action. Similarly underdetermined is the relation between different
types of explanation that are appropriate for deeds and actions respec-
tively. One can imagine a world in which causalist content replaces all
psychological talk (including of intentions) and communications such
as "don't be too hard on him, he's on an angiotensin II high' are com-
monplace. Context-specificity requires that we say that this is just the
shape of objective spirit in that world. This shows, however, that the
categories of deed and action are not stable and might even coalesce.
Within Hegel's overall philosophical project, how we decide to address
these issues depends on the view we take of the project itself.31 It is possi-
ble to resolve boundary disputes by referring them to particular points of
Hegel's philosophical system. Alternatively we can refer them to endoxic
appearances in Aristotelian fashion. This option has the virtue of pre-
serving the realist and social character of Hegel's theory of action, which
aims to show that we can make headway with the puzzles that prompt
us to look behind or beyond appearances, by attending properly to what
we do and say.32
114 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
Notes
1.	There is a resurgence of interest in the ways in which the concerns of action
theory can map onto questions of ethics, see Hornsby, 2004 and Smith, 2004;
Dancy, 2009.
2.	Examples of substantive treatments of Hegel's account of action in the
context of his criticism of Kant's moral philosophy include Wood, 1990;
Houlgate, 1991; Westphal, 1991; Habermas, 1999; Knowles, 2002. Examples
that focus on Hegel's social and political thought include Hardimon, 1994;
Neuhouser, 2000; Patten, 1999; Siep, 1992. Among the exceptions that focus
on action theory are Taylor, 1985a; Inwood, 1992; MacIntyre, 2006. Decisive
in awakening interest on action as a specific topic worthy of attention in its
own right is Quante, 2004a.
3.	A clarification is in order here. Hegel's concern for a holistic approach in
human matters means that he often discusses technical philosophical issues
in the context of substantive arguments about the good or the legal system
and so on, this is because he believes that we cannot think well about the
basics of action entirely in abstraction from issues of substance. This goes
also some way in explaining why even when he focuses on the technical
issues that concern us here, he still employs a heavily moralistic vocabu-
lary (e.g. das Bose, translated as 'wickedness' in EG and as 'evil' in PhG).
The reason he gives in the Philosophy of Spirit is that his use of 'moral'
must be understood as relating to volition, purpose, and intention: "'moral"
must be taken in the wider sense in which it does no signify morally good
only...here it signifies volitional mode, so far as it is in the interior of
the will in general; it thus includes purpose and intention—and also moral
wickedeness' (EG §503, 313).
4.	Pippin explicitly connects his interpretation to Wittgenstein, Anscombe and
Taylor and what he terms 'expressive' models of agency. Although see also
Pippin, 2008, pp. 147-79.
5.	Pippin (2006) does not distinguish between 'deed' and 'action' (though see
Pippin, 2008, pp. 164, 166). See also, Wood 1990, p. 140; Quante 2004a,
p. 105.1 discuss the significance of this distinction in Section 2. Throughout,
I reserve 'deed' for ‘Tat’ and 'action' for ‘Handlung'. Hegel also uses 'Tun'
which I translate as 'act'; 'act', 'performance', and 'activity' carry no special
philosophical significance in this paper.
6.	McDowell attributes to Pippin confusion about ignorance of action and igno-
rance of intentions (McDowell, 2009, p. 180; see above, Chapter 5, p. 91).
I think Pippin is not guilty of this, though I agree with McDowell that aspects
of Pippin's position must be rejected.
7.	Davidson's definition of intention as 'all-out judgement' brings into the con-
cept the deliberative and reasoning elements he excludes from it in the
opening lines of his essay. Cf. 'Someone may intend to build a squirrel house
without having decided to do it, deliberated about it, formed an intention
to do it, or reasoned about it... Pure intending of this kind, intending that
may occur without practical reasoning...' (Davidson, 1980c, p. 83, empha-
sis added). What is ruled out of pure intending at the start comes in the
definition of intention as all-out judgement in the end: 'a judgement that
something I think I can do, and that I think I see my way clear to doing,
Katerina Deligiorgi 115
a judgement that such an action is desirable not only for one or another
reason but in light of all my reasons' (Davidson, 1980c, p. 101).
8.	1 have slightly modified the Findlay translation, using 'before he realizes
himself instead of 'until he has made himself a reality' to avoid any
implications of the individual's antecedent ontological state. I translate ver-
wirklichen, Verwirklichkeit, and Wirklichkeit, as realize, realization, and reality.
Findlay sometimes uses 'actualize' for the same; this obscures the consistency
of Hegel's usage, the few instances in EG when Realitat is used in proximity,
I add Wirklichkeit in brackets.
9.	MacIntyre (2006; cf. below, Chapter 10) uses the argument on phrenology
to argue that Hegel rejects causality as relevant to human agents. On the
account developed here, Hegel merely points out that causality is explana-
torily appropriate for deeds but falls short when it comes to actions and the
sorts of things we want to say and include in our explanations and appraisal
of actions.
10.	The relevant sections are 'The realisation of rational self-consciousness
through itself' and 'Individuality which is real in and for itself'. Hegel's his-
torical and textual references are often obscured because absorbed into his
own philosophical vocabulary. The interpretation I pursue here is recon-
structive in that it aims to identify the elements of Hegel's argument that
form his position on action.
11.	A useful analysis is given in Laitinen, 2004. Laitinen attempts to steer a mid-
dle course between radical retrospectivism and what we might call 'I know
my own mind' Cartesian introspectivism.
12.	I use avowals, expressions and statements of intentions interchangeably.
Apart from his remarks about language and the general direction of the argu-
ment that indicate that the topic of intention is best approached from the
perspective of expression of intention, Hegel does not provide an argument
for focusing on avowals of intentions rather than intentions. An argument is
presented in Taylor (1985a; see above, Chapter 2) that is tied to Taylor's own
hermeneutic commitments. A contemporary defense of this position and
also relevant for understanding Anscombe on the topic is given by Moran
and Stone, 2009.
13.	Hamilton defends a 'future-outer' interpretation of avowals of intention and
possibly also of intentions themselves. Velleman regards intention as con-
sisting in prediction, but Velleman is cognitivist about intention expressions;
Velleman, 2007, esp. p. 98.
14.	A similar point is made by Taylor: '[a]ctions are in a sense inhabited by the
purposes which direct them, so that action and purpose are ontologically
inseparable' (Taylor, 1985a, p. 78). Note however that for Hegel purpose
and intention are distinguishable and it is intention that characterizes
action.
15.	Following Inwood (1992, p. 32) I take Vorsatz, purpose or goal, to describe an
'abstract' 'general' feature of the thing done or to be done that can be incor-
porated into an intention statement if it turns out we want to speak about
actions. Intentions are expressible paradigmatically in first-person future
tense propositional statements, whereas purposes are describable in third
person present or past tense propositional statements. Telic considerations
and explanations invoking aim, Zweck, are applicable to a very wide range of
116 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
cases, including actions, deeds (the dog chases the squirrel in order to catch
it), natural phenomena, and for Hegel, famously, historical phenomena as
well.
16.	Interesting recent examples that show the degree of complexity allowed in
causal models include Fehr and Falk, 2002; Erev and Roth, 2007. Note that
none of this need commit us to a version of causal theory, that is that a doing
a is an intentional action if it is caused by an intention to do a.
17.	This brief account skims over some of the complexities introduced in the
story through the interchange of word and music, for relevant discussion,
see Newman, 1991, esp. pp. 234-40.
18.	The argument here is the same as that used by Leibniz against occasionalism,
namely that occasionalism renders natural phenomena miraculous because
it is not in 'the nature of the things' how they behave, but rather in God's
will, Leibniz, 1988, p. 205. It is worth explaining the qualification 'modern'
here. The argument I propose is that magic fails as a causal story and also
that causal stories fail as explanations for action in the psychologically rich
notion of action I am developing here. To the extent that a non-modern
audience share such a notion of action and consider magic as offering a
causal story, they too would feel cheated. But it is possible that the modern
conception of magic as a (failed) causal story is wrong (see Phillips, 1993,
pp. 103-22). Since this is not the place to adjudicate how non-moderns see
magic, I limit the perspective of the argument to the modern one.
19.	A different way of saying this is that by giving the causal story we are simply
describing our puzzlement. So ordinarily we seek for alternative accounts,
accounts that tell us something about intentions and actions and why people
do things. When such fail us, as when all we have is a possible causal story
with no plausible 'intention action' connection, we are left puzzled and speak
of pathologies of behaviour. Powerful examples of this are explored at length
and with subtlety in the work of Oliver Sacks, see especially musicophilia and
musicogenic epilepsy in Sacks, 2007.
20.	The position I attribute to Hegel does not commit him either to the idea
that there is a stable core character or to the idea that an agent just by virtue
of being an agent is committed to a project of self-unification maximization.
The plausibility or otherwise of these positions does not affect the argument,
which is not about agents, but about what is explanatory for actions. The
importance of the distinction between deed and action—and the motivation
for Hegel's non-causalist account of action—becomes clear once issues of
accountability come into the picture; see Section 4.
21.	For a contemporary account of why just being goal directed is not action,
see Velleman, 2007, p. 190. Interestingly Velleman introduces the idea of the
good as constitutive of action and there are parallels with Hegel's treatment,
esp. in the 'Intention and Welfare' sections of the Philosophy of Spirit.
22.	The original non-causalist interpretation of Hegel's theory of action can be
found in Taylor (1985a, see Chapter 2), who pursuing a project initially
developed in The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), he offers a 'qualitative
view' that takes action as 'primitive' (Taylor, 1985a, or above, pp. 23-4).
Taylor associates this with a progressive movement from action as unreflect-
ing bodily practice to action as achieved reflective awareness (Taylor, 1985a,
Katerina Deligiorgi 117
or above, pp. 23-4). Taylor is concerned to with the broader picture in that
essay and so does not discuss or show awareness of the distinction between
deed and action, or purpose and intention. On the interpretation given here,
we can make Hegelian sense of action without commitment to the pro-
gressive understanding Taylor outlines. Also action does not function as a
primitive in this account, it is either the sum of relevant reasons or nothing:
'Action alters nothing and opposes nothing' (PhG 1396).
23.	Rather overstating the case, Pippin argues that Hegel is just not interested in
the post-Cartesian psychological categories with which Kant still grappled
(Pippin, 2008, p. 57).
24.	The obvious parallel here is with Chisholm (1966) esp. the references to Reid
on p. 22. See too Reid, 1788, p. 329.
25.	In the subsequent section, Hegel switches from metaphysical failure to the
problems of communication between agents about their actions in a discus-
sion that culminates in a dense analysis of confession and forgiveness and
the 'reconciling Yea, in which the two 'I's let go their antithetical existence'
(PhG 1671, TWA 3: 494).
26.	Contemporary agent-causation theorists for instance argue for the primacy
of origination in the agent; see Kane, 1996.
27.	On the metaphysics side, this notion is similar to Dancy's 'agent-in-acting'
to the extent that both notions allow us to refer to particulars and to relata
in causal statements. To use Dancy's example, 'His pushing her caused her
to fall over' describes what Hegel calls 'reality' fairly unproblematically, it
'asserts a causal relation between an agent-in-acting and an event' (Dancy,
2009, p. 408). What motivates Dancy is very similar to what motivates Hegel,
at issue in both cases is moral evaluation. However, Dancy presents his posi-
tion as deflationary about actions, whereas in Hegel this takes the form of an
error theory about agency.
28.	The claim that agents are not necessarily human has contemporary defend-
ers, see Hyman and Alvarez, 1998.
29.	The (retrospectively limited) appeal of the notion of the will has to do, as
Locke himself argues, with the ownership of the act. 'Man's Heart beats, and
the Blood circulates, which 'tis not in his Power by any Thought or Volition
to stop;... Convulsive Motions agitate his Legs, so that though he wills it
never so much, he cannot by any power of his Mind stop the Motion (as in
that odd Disease called Chorea Sancti Viti)... Voluntary then is not opposed
to Necessary; but to Involuntary' (Locke, 1979, p. 239). The same can be
said of Aristotle, the discussion in Book III starts precisely with the problem
of voluntariness for the purpose of 'assigning honours and punishments'
(Aristotle, 1989, p. 48).
30.	A parallel may be drawn here with Moran's argument that 'what the notion
of privilege comes to here is that if the agent does not know what he is doing
then no one else can know' (Moran, 2004, p. 68).
31.	This is the familiar and inconclusive debate about how we should under-
stand Hegelian 'science' (Wissenschaft). In a way that connects with the
nomological aspirations we described earlier we could say that Hegel pro-
poses a 'science' that develops the dialectic of the phenomena or concepts he
studies. The purpose of philosophy as 'science' would then be to identify and
118 Doing without Agency: Hegel's Social Theory of Action
vindicate the patterns of relation between the different aspects of appear-
ances. The systematic ordering of these patterns would then be a process
of establishing relations between the items studied. However, both the aims
and status of science remain a matter of debate.
32.	I am especially grateful to Jason Gaiger, Constantine Sandis and Arto
Laitinen for helpful comments on earlier versions of the article.
7
Hegel on Responsibility for Actions
and Consequences
Allen W Wood
When it comes to Hegel's philosophy, many serious errors and mis-
leading half-truths have wide currency. Regarding moral and political
philosophy, the most prevalent of these is probably still the false
image of Hegel as 'conservative, reactionary, quietist.' Not far behind,
however—and this is an error even more common among those who
actually know something about Hegel's philosophy—is the idea that
Hegel was an enemy of 'morality,' and a proponent of 'ethical life' as
opposed to the 'moral' standpoint. A related error is that 'morality' for
Hegel is only a nickname for Kantian ethics, so that Hegel's discussion
of morality consists only in his critique of Kant. No doubt Hegel is criti-
cal of individualistic moral and social philosophies, such as Kant's, that
he regards as proceeding in its abstraction from the social embodiment
of individuality in modern ethical life. 'The moral standpoint' is a term
that Hegel sometimes uses to refer to this philosophical one-sidedness
(PR §§33R, 135R). But at least in the Philosophy of Right, 'morality' is pri-
marily a name for that distinctively modern way of thinking about the
free will in which subjective freedom is its chief characteristic. Hegel's
exposition of 'morality' contains a theory of individual agency that dif-
fers significantly from Kant's. It is an alternative theory of moral action,
which Hegel endorses. Morality plays a significant and positive role in
the practical philosophy Hegel articulates in the Philosophy of Right.
1.	Imputability in Kant and Hegel
The unifying theme of Hegel's presentation of the moral will may thus
be regarded as the ways in which the subjective will bears responsibility
(in several different but related senses) for states of affairs that occur in
the external world. The exposition thus begins with Hegel's treatment
119
120 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
of the traditional topic of imputability (Zurechnung). A good point of
departure for our understanding of Hegel's treatment of moral subjec-
tivity generally, and his account of moral action more specifically is
therefore his account of the way individuals may be held responsible for
their deeds and for occurrences in the external world that are regarded
as the results of these deeds. And a good initial point of reference for
understanding this account is Kant's treatment of the traditional topic
of imputability in The Metaphysics of Morals.
Kant follows tradition in calling an action (Handlung) a deed (Tat, fac-
tum) insofar as it is possibly imputed to an author (Urheber, auctor) and
made the object of a judgment under laws by a suitable authority (iudex
sive forum) and a ground for punishment or reward (poena, praemium)
(MS 6: 227). More specifically what is imputed to an agent are the
results or consequences of a deed. Kant proposes some very clear rules
for it, based on whether the action is owed (required by a strict or per-
fect duty), or wrongful (contrary to duty), or meritorious (pursuant to a
wide or imperfect duty). The consequences of an action that is owed—
both good and bad consequences—are not to be imputed to the agent.
In the case of a wrongful action, all bad consequences are imputable,
but no good consequences are imputable; and in the case of a merito-
rious action, all good consequences are imputable, but no bad ones are
imputable (MS 6: 228).
These principles play a role in Kant's well-known late essay about the
right to lie, and its famous (or infamous) treatment of the example of
the murderer at the door.1 Assuming you are required to tell the truth
to the murderer about his intended victim's whereabouts, and you com-
ply with this duty, the death of the victim cannot be imputed to you.
On the other hand, if you lie to the murderer (thereby doing wrong),
and the victim (unbeknownst to you) has slipped away to a place where
the murderer (believing your lie) encounters him and murders him, then
the death can be imputed to you—as one of the bad consequences of
your wrongful action (VRL 8: 427).
We may have a hard time swallowing the assumption that you are
required by strict right to tell the truth to the murderer, but granted
that assumption, Kant's conclusions about imputation seem reasonable
ones. In general, Kant's principles of imputation give us quite reason-
able results when applied to imputation under the law. Kant's principles
do a very good job, for instance, of handling cases of liability to dam-
ages resulting from the deeds of agents that might affect the rights and
claims of others. If my action is one that was owed (strictly required)
under the law, and its omission not justified or excused in any way by
Allen W, Wood 121
special circumstances, then I should not be held liable for its conse-
quences, however bad—whether these consequences were foreseeable or
unforeseeable. It would be a sorry system of justice indeed that second-
guessed those who have done what they were required to do, making
them answerable for the bad results of actions the law required of them.
On the other hand, if I take it upon myself to perform a wrongful action
(which is, once again, not justified or excused by any special consid-
erations or circumstances), then it seems reasonable that I should bear
the burden of all the bad consequences (whether foreseen or unfore-
seen), since those consequences would not have ensued if I had only
done what was required of me. Others had a right to rely on my doing
what I should have: by doing wrong, I am the one who opened the
flood-gates to whatever bad consequences resulted, and those who suf-
fered damages should be able to recover from me the costs to them.
If it is a question of reward, then none seems due to someone who did
only what was required, and still less is a reward ever due to some-
one who acted wrongly. Reward is due only to someone who acted
meritoriously.
Kant's principles are clearly intended, however, to apply not only to
issues of right but also to the appraisal of deeds (imputatio diiudicatoria)
from a merely ethical or moral point of view (MS 6: 227). And here their
results seem far more questionable in many cases. They fail to counte-
nance judgments of imputation (both positive and negative) of which
we feel fairly confident, and they are also insufficiently appreciative of
situations of moral ambiguity. Here 1 am not thinking mainly of wrong
actions that may have good results, for which the agent might hope to
take credit—for it seems quite defensible that people who act immorally
should not be able to take credit for the contingent good consequences
of their bad behavior. More serious problems arise concerning owed
or meritorious actions whose consequences are mixed or ambivalent.
If I perform an action that was strictly owed, but whose consequences
turn out to be very beneficial, I may choose to deflect praise by say-
ing that 'I was only doing my duty'; but we may feel this would be
false modesty. On the other hand, if I perform an action that is owed,
or even meritorious, perhaps because of its consequences for one party,
but which also (without losing its status as required or meritorious on
that account) does some harm to another party (perhaps even a harm
I foresee with regret), then I don't think we are comfortable saying that
this harm was not imputable to me at all, simply on the ground that the
action was owed or meritorious. We tend to think that the harm is still
in some way imputable to me—perhaps that I even owe those who suffer
122 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
this harm some recompense for it, or at least an apology acknowledging
my responsibility for it (even if I can also rightly say that, since the
action was owed by a strict duty, I 'had no choice' but to do it). The
moral ambiguity present in such cases is not properly acknowledged in
Kant's account. We will find that Hegel's theory of imputation possesses
a degree of subtlety in this respect that Kant's does not.
There is an even more basic difficulty with Kant's views here, however,
that will exhibit an even sharper contrast with Hegel's theory of impu-
tation. This is that, apart from specific legal provisions, dealing with
liability to damages for the consequences of actions, the whole topic
of imputation of consequences might seem to look like an insignificant
afterthought in the context of Kantian ethics. This is because for Kant
the basic moral judgment of an action is apparently independent of its
consequences. Kant famously holds that the unlimited goodness of the
good will is entirely independent of its good (or bad) results—so that
the good will 'shines like a jewel for itself, as having its full worth in
itself. Utility or fruitlessness can neither add to nor diminish its worth'
(G 4: 394). Moral judgment is about the volition (good or bad) that is
exhibited in the action, which is to be gauged by the agent's maxim
in performing it, and not at all by its results. An action may be judged
right or wrong on account of the agent's end in performing it (since this
is often part of the maxim, and the agent's end goes to the goodness
or badness of the agent's will). If the action is successful, the accom-
plishment of its end will be among its results. But for Kant those results
matter only because they belong to the agent's maxim, or goodness
of will, and not because they occur in the world as something whose
imputation to the agent might make a difference independently of our
judgments about the agent's will.
Further, for Kant whether an action is owed, or wrongful, or merito-
rious, is to be judged according to its maxim, and the imputation of
its consequences is decisively shaped by this. It is difficult to see why,
outside legal contexts (where civil damages or the degree of gravity of
a crime might be at stake), a Kantian agent should be interested at all
in the imputability of consequences. All that really seems to matter is
the goodness or badness of the volition contained in the action (in its
maxim). If I have a good will, then of course I care about the good or bad
consequences (the utility or fruitlessness) of my good actions, because
this caring is part of what it is to set the good ends that go with having
a good will. But why should 1, or anyone, be concerned about whether
the fortunate or unfortunate consequences of my actions are imputable
to me? My purely moral evaluation of myself, before the inner forum of
Allen W. Wood 123
conscience, seems to be exhausted by the question whether my will is
good. If in fact we do consider the consequences of our actions relevant
to their moral evaluation, over and above the evaluation of the good or
bad volition that led to them (and this alone is what a theory of impu-
tation of consequences would be for), Kant has a hard time saying why
we should.
Hegel, by contrast, regards the moral will as primarily a relation to
external objectivity, and its value as a moral will depends on whether
and how what happens in the world can be imputed to it. We can see
this difference clearly in the differing roles played by the concepts of
'action' and 'deed' in the action theory of the two philosophers. For
Kant, an action (Handlung) is an expression of volition (of a maxim); a
deed (Tat) is an action insofar as its consequences fall under principles
of imputability to the agent (MS 6: 227). For Hegel, by contrast, a deed
'posits an alteration to the given existence (Dasein)’ (PR §115); and a
deed is considered an 'action' insofar as it is imputable to the will of the
agent (PR §117). In other words, for Kant, what is primary is volition,
which is taken as having a reality prior to and independently of the
changes it may bring about in the world; this is the basis of actions,
while deeds are actions considered in a certain way—in terms of the
imputability of their external consequences. For Hegel, however, there
is no morally significant volition apart from deeds; moral volition or
action is merely the way we consider deeds in relation to the agent,
as a volitional moral subject. For Hegel, in fact, the moral will itself is
constituted by the way deeds and consequences may be imputed to the
subject.
2.	Responsibility, purpose and intention
The starting point of moral action for Hegel is the deed—an alteration
in the objective world which is brought about in some way by the
moral subject. The most abstract and general relation of the subject
to its deed is that of being responsible for it (daran Schuld sein). Despite
the possible moral connotations of the word Schuld (which in German
can mean either 'debt' or 'guilt'), what Hegel means by 'responsibility'
in this sense is a merely causal relation, entailing that the action may
have the abstract predicate 'mine' applied to it, but not implying any
moral imputability whatever (PR §115). According to Hegel, the causes
of a historical event, which may be manifold, most of them having no
moral agency at all, are 'responsible for it' in this sense. Hegel thinks of
'responsibility' as well suited to the abstract understanding, which can
124 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
view any event in a number of different ways and treat any of a number
of factors as 'its cause':
Every individual moment which is shown to have been a condition,
ground or cause of some such circumstance and has thereby con-
tributed its share to it may be regarded as being wholly or at least
partly responsible for it. In the case of a complex event (such as the
French Revolution), the formal understanding can therefore choose
which of a countless number of circumstances it wishes to make
responsible for the event.
(PR§115R)
Moral imputability for Hegel turns not on 'responsibility' (Schuld sein
daran), but rather on the application of two other concepts, which Hegel
designates by the terms 'purpose' (Vorsatz) and 'intention' (Absicht).
Responsibility for an action belongs to the subjective will only for
'those aspects of its deed which it knew to be presupposed within its
end, and which were present in its purpose.’ This Hegel calls the 'right
of knowledge' (PR §117). The 'purpose' apparently encompasses every-
thing the agent was aware would happen, and not only those aspects
the agent specifically desired to bring about. But it excludes aspects the
agent had no way of knowing about, and also remote consequences of
the action, which might be brought about by 'external forces which
attach it to things quite different from what it is for itself, and impel it
to remote and alien consequences. The will thus has the right to accept
responsibility only for the first set of consequences, since they alone
were part of its purpose' (PR §118). As an example, Hegel cites Oedipus'
parricide as something not contained in his purpose, when he fought
with and killed the old man he met at the crossroads. Hegel thinks it was
part of the 'solidity' or 'noble simplicity' (Gediegenheit) of the ancient
conception of action that it did not recognize this subjective 'right of
knowledge' as we do in the modern world (PR §117A). This is an impor-
tant aspect of the way in which 'morality' is a distinctive characteristic
of modern ethical life that was lacking in ancient ethical life.
The 'purpose' of a deed, however, includes not only what the agent
specifically intended or took as an end, but also what the agent knew
would occur, even if it was not desired. If a pilot bombing an enemy
military installation knows that the school next door is also going to be
destroyed (killing many innocent children), the death of the children,
and not only the destruction of the enemy installation, is part of his
purpose. The purpose of my deed may include even consequences I did
Allen W. Wood 125
not know about, if they belong to 'the nature of the action itself' (PR
§118R). In general, for Hegel, the 'nature' of anything includes what we
would grasp about it from rational reflection on it and its connection
with other things (EL §23). In the case of a deed, these include con-
nections with its consequences (PR §118, VPR19: 94). Consequently, the
nature of an action includes all the consequences that would be known
by rational reflection: 'In general it is important to think about the con-
sequences of an action because in this way one does not stop with the
immediate standpoint but goes beyond it. Through a many-sided con-
sideration of the action, one will be led to the nature of the action'
(NP 230).
Hegel's talk about the nature of an action may be recognizable as
more familiar to us if we see how it relates to our judgments about peo-
ple when we say that they did (or did not) know what they were doing
(in the sense of fully realizing or appreciating what they were doing).
A mature adult is responsible for knowing what will, or may, result from
her actions (for instance, from starting a fire; or for a president: start-
ing a war, authorizing torture, deregulating the banking system). Not to
know this is perhaps a cognitive or intellectual defect, but it is a ground
for moral criticism and a basis for holding someone responsible for the
results of what they do, even when it differs from what they hoped or
expected.
This is how Hegel intends to deal with the example of an arsonist
who sets fire only to one house (or one stick of furniture) but ends up
destroying a whole neighborhood (PR §119). Hegel holds that the fully
developed consequences of the action belong to the arsonist's purpose,
because it belongs to the very nature of the act of setting a fire that it
may spread out of control: 'The dolus directus or direct purpose is, for
example, setting fire to the first piece of wood, and the dolus indirectus
contains all the further consequences. These belong to the nature of the
action itself, which posits their possibility along with it. The man must
know this' (VPR 4: 326, cf. EG §505). Some views might hold that the
agent is to blame in this case not for the spread of the fire beyond what
he directly intended, but only for being insufficiently attentive in think-
ing about how far the fire might spread. Those views might fault him
for not knowing what he should have known, but they cannot impute
to him the destruction of the entire neighborhood. Hegel, however, by
including the entire nature of the action within the agent's purpose, is
making the arsonist responsible directly and originally for all the pos-
sible consequences that he should have reckoned with, because these
belong to the nature of his action.
126 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
The 'purpose' of an action for Hegel marks out what the subjective
will is responsible for, or what objective occurrences may be imputed to
it. But it does not tell us everything we need to know about the action in
order to judge the agent's subjectivity from the standpoint of morality.
In order to make moral judgments we must also take into account how
the agent's subjectivity was related to these occurrences. This is comprised
within what Hegel calls the agent's 'intention' (Absicht). The purpose of
the bomber pilot, in the above example, includes both the destruction of
the enemy installation and the death of the children in the school. But
as a moral subject he is related to these two results in very different ways.
The first was his direct aim, the second only a regrettable consequence
of the way he had to carry it out under the circumstances.
As a subject, says Hegel, I am a thinker, and bring my actions and their
consequences under a 'universal.' This is what Hegel calls the action's
'intention.' But by a 'universal' here Hegel does not mean merely some
general description under which the action might fall (such as 'burn-
ing' or 'killing') but the consequences organized into a complex by the
agent's thought: this is a general point for Hegel about the philosophical
meaning of words like 'universal' and 'concept,' and the 'concreteness'
they involve (see EL §§9, 160, 164, R, 176-7, R). In this case, the 'uni-
versal' under which the agent brings the action and its consequences
imply a determinate act of abstraction, which Hegel connects to the ety-
mology of Absicht—'looking away.' It refers to the determinate thought
the agent has about a particular deed and the concrete complex of
actions and consequences it involves—especially that abstract aspect
of this complex that constitutes for the agent its 'subjective essence'
(PR §121A).
In a non-Hegelian philosophical jargon, we might call the 'intention'
of an action the 'desirability characterization' it would have for the
agent, or the 'description under which' the agent intended to perform
it.2 'The right of intention is that the universal quality of the action shall
have being not only in itself, but shall be known by the agent and thus
have been present all along in his subjective will' (PR §120). My action
should be judged according to the universals under which I know and
will it, and this judgment should take account of the descriptions under
which the action and its consequences were desired by me in perform-
ing it. In morally assessing my action, different aspects of the action,
belonging to its purpose, should be distinguished from one another
depending on whether they were willed by me as an end, or as a means,
or as a regrettable side effect. The pilot 'intends,' in this narrow sense, to
destroy the enemy installation, but not to kill the children. The arsonist
Allen W. Wood 127
'intends' to avenge himself by setting fire to his neighbor's antique chair,
but not to destroy the whole neighborhood. An agent, as a moral sub-
ject, is to be held responsible for his deed only by taking into account
the way he thought about it.
Notice, however, that here an 'intention' for Hegel is always the
intention of a deed—the way the agent has thought about some actual
alteration in the objective world. There are no morally significant inten-
tions independently of, or in abstraction from, actual deeds in the world.
This is one of the several meanings of Hegel's slogan-like pronounce-
ment: 'The truth of the intention is only the deed itself' (PhG 4[159).
Hegelian ethics, unlike Kantian ethics, does not judge 'intentions' (or
'maxims') apart from the deeds that embody them. The moral subject is
always an agent in the objective world, not a subject of mere 'volitions'
that are good or evil ('having their full value in themselves') irrespective
of whether they may or may not have any results. This is related to the
separate point that Hegelian intentions are also not subjective or mental
causes of deeds or occurrences. Instead, an intention is the way I think
about what I do in doing it, and morality should treat the thought and
doing as mutually necessary to each other.3
3.	The right of objectivity, and negligence
'To attempt to justify something in terms of its intention is to isolate
an individual aspect completely and to maintain that it is the subjec-
tive essence of the action' (PR §119R). The attempt, however, in Hegel's
view (as this quotation perhaps already implies), is not always success-
ful, and may often involve deception (or self-deception). This point is
due to what Hegel considers the essential complement to the 'right of
intention,' namely 'to what we may call the right of objectivity of the
action'—'the right of the action to assert itself as known and willed
by the subject as a thinking agent' (PR §120). The right of intention,
in other words, must not be seen as a right on the part of the agent
to have an action judged solely on the basis of the agent's own (per-
haps one-sided and self-serving) representation of it. The bomber pilot,
in our earlier example, has the right to have his action judged by its
aim of destroying the enemy installation, with the recognition that
killing the children was something he did only with regret. But he
also cannot treat the death of the children as something for which
he bears no moral responsibility at all (as Oedipus, in Hegel's view,
bears none for killing his father or conceiving children by his mother,
which belonged to neither his intention nor his purpose). The death
128 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
of the children belongs to the bomber pilot's 'purpose/ if not to his
'intention/
The moral agent is a thinking being, whose intentions are to be judged
by objective standards of thought. This is related to the point that inten-
tion, as well as purpose, takes account of the 'nature' of the action—the
'external connections inherent in its nature ... Hence in murder, it is not
a piece of flesh which is injured, but the life itself within it' (PR §119R).
If I injure a person's body in a way that rational reflection would recog-
nize as endangering their life, I may not disclaim responsibility for their
death by saying that I intended only to injure their flesh and not to take
their life. Hegel realizes, of course, that there might be difficult questions
here. It is often possible in fact to intend only to punch someone in the
jaw, and not realize that you might actually be risking killing them: 'It is
the nature of the finite deed itself to contain such separable contingen-
cies.' Where Hegel sees such ambiguities as coming to an end is with the
agent's awareness that an action is wrong according to objective stan-
dards. If an action that contributes to the agent's happiness happens
also to be wrong, a thinking agent is accountable for knowing this, and
his intention must be thought of as including not only 'promoting my
happiness,' but also 'doing something wrong.' Accordingly, the right of
intention is seen by Hegel as precluding or diminishing responsibility
for wrongdoing only in the case of 'children, imbeciles, lunatics, etc' (PR
§120R). The thinking agent is responsible not only for what she actually
thinks is right and wrong, good and bad, but also what she has reason to
think:
The right of the subjective will is that whatever it is to recognize
as valid should be perceived by it as good, and that it should be
held responsible for an action—as its aim translated into external
objectivity—as right or wrong, good or evil, legal or illegal, accord-
ing to its cognizance [Kenntnis] of the value which that action has in
this objectivity.
(PR §132)
One can be cognizant of many things that one does not actually know
or realize. If I have every reason to know that what I am doing is wrong
or evil, then I can be judged cognizant of that. I cannot disclaim respon-
sibility for my wrong or evil act on the ground that 'I did not know it
was wrong.' 1 cannot demand that my act be imputed to me only under
the intention 'that it was something good’ (e.g. good for me, as satisfy-
ing my momentary passion for revenge). 'Just as what the arsonist sets
Allen W. Wood 129
fire to is not the isolated area of wood an inch wide which to which he
applies the flame, but the universal within it—i.e. the entire house—so
too is the arsonist himself, as a subject, not just the individual aspect of
this moment or this isolated passion for revenge' (PR §132R). On simi-
lar grounds, I think we must say of the bomber pilot that the death of
the children belongs not only to his purpose, but also in a way to his
intention, even if it does not belong to his aims, narrowly considered.
It certainly belongs to his intention if we assume that it is wrong of him
(e.g. contrary to the right of war) to kill innocent civilians, and that he
is cognizant both of the fact that he is killing innocent civilians and that
this is contrary to the right of war. The intention in light of which an act
is morally judged, in other words, must take account of the agent's own
thoughts about the action, but it will not be limited to them if they do
not include everything relevant to what a thinking agent would know
about the nature of the action or its value according to the objective
standards of right, morality or ethics.
Because Hegel's account focuses attention chiefly on what the agent
knew about the action and its consequences, and on the agent's inten-
tion in performing the action, it might be doubted that he can give
an adequate account of our responsibility for consequences that result
from carelessness, recklessness or negligence.4 But the considerations we
have been examining provide us with a compelling and cogent answer
to this charge. Hegel considers both the purpose and the intention of
an action to include its nature—the complex of its consequences that
would have been brought to light by rational reflection—and also the
right of objectivity—the action's intention must include its relation to
laws and ethical duties. Therefore, these aspects of the action, and these
consequences, are imputable even if the agent is (negligently) unaware
of them.
Perhaps one might worry instead about whether Hegel's theory can
distinguish intentional wrong from negligence, since he imputes the
nature and ethical objectivity of an action to the agent irrespective of
whether the agent is actually aware of them.5 But there should be no
problem here either, as long as we can take account, in each of case, of
why a given consequence or objective ethical determination is included
in the action's purpose and intention—whether it is there because it was
actually known and willed by the agent, or whether it is there because it
belongs to the objectivity and nature of the action, although the agent
was thoughtlessly or carelessly unaware of this.
Someone might still worry that Hegel's account—by making us
responsible for negligent actions through inclusion of the relevant
130 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
aspects of the action and its consequences in its purpose and intention—
cannot explain the general moral fact that harm caused by negligent
actions is considered less blameworthy than the same harm caused
intentionally. For example, Hegel holds that someone firing a gun in
to the woods, intending to hit an animal but killing a human being, is
guilty of manslaughter but not of murder (VPR 2: 423, 3: 358, VPR17:
78). We might still wonder how Hegel can justify treating the negligent
causing of a death as less blameworthy than the intentional causing of
a death. But it seems to me that this too is a matter that he can say
ought to be settled on a case-by-case basis. It is surely true in the above
example that the careless hunter is less blameworthy than a deliberate
murderer would be.
Perhaps what we want is a justification for some supposedly general
truth that wrong actions done from negligence are always less culpable
than wrong actions done from malice. In that case, however, I question
whether this is a truth at all. For Hegel, the moral subject is a thinker,
and moral conduct is always to be measured by diligent adherence to
the standards of rational thought, and never merely by some sentimen-
talist conception of 'goodness of will' based on non-rational feelings.
Nor are rational standards applicable only to the deliberate volitions of
the subject, as a Kantian might suppose. Goodness or badness of will
is one kind of defect in a moral subject, but so are carelessness, negli-
gence and irresponsibility. And which defect is the more blameworthy
may depend on the details of the case. Sometimes we see government
officials (or academic administrators) do harm to an individual or group,
and it is unclear whether they do so out of hostility to those they harm
or out of mere negligence in performance of their duties. No doubt such
administrators act wrongly if they treat people maliciously, but there
might sometimes be mitigating conditions making their malice under-
standable, whereas diligence and care in the exercise of power may be
even a higher requirement on them, whose absence is quite inexcusable
and an even more serious moral failure than the presence of ill will.
I have seen some such cases in the academic world (and I would bet you
have too) where the degree of carelessness and irresponsibility required
to explain some official's abuse of power would have been so extreme
and outrageous that a more charitable interpretation of their behavior
is that they did the harm out of ill will.
4.	'Moral luck'
One set of issues about moral responsibility for consequences arises
in connection with what some philosophers call 'moral luck,' and
Allen W. Wood 131
especially about what Thomas Nagel has called 'resultant luck'—that is,
the fact that two agents, performing identical actions, may apparently
incur very different degrees of praise or blame, depending on differences
in the consequences of their actions that do not seem to be up to them
at all, but are due to good or bad fortune (Nagel, 1993, p. 60). Hegel's
views on moral responsibility have, I believe, some original insights to
contribute here.
First, because Hegel's account begins not (like Kant's) with abstract,
subjective 'volitions' but with actual deeds, his view challenges the facile
assumption that we should ever judge two agents to have performed
actions that are truly 'identical' even though they have very different
consequences. This assumption, Hegel thinks, is based on the notion
that one can isolate the subjectivity or 'inner' aspect of an action distinct
from its 'outer' aspect, and equate two 'subjectivities' in cases where
their 'outer' deeds are very different. Hegel's rejection of that notion is
blunt and emphatic:
What the subject is, is the series of its actions. If these are a series of
worthless productions, then the subjectivity of volition is likewise
worthless; and conversely, if the series of an individual's deeds are of
a substantial nature, then so is his inner will.
(PR §124)
What a human being does should be considered not in its immediacy,
but only by means of his inwardness and as a manifestation of that
inwardness. But with that thought we must not overlook the point
that the essence and also the inward only prove themselves as such
by stepping forth into appearance. On the other hand, the appeal
that human beings make to inwardness as an essence distinct from
the content of their deeds often has the intention of validating their
mere subjectivity and in this way of escaping what is valid in and for
itself.
(EL §112A, cf. EL §140)
There is no absolute point of comparison, then, between two people
whose deeds have had very different consequences, that might enable us
to say that they were 'inwardly the same' (hence in some sense 'morally
equal') and that the different consequences of what they did were due
only to factors 'external' to their moral subjectivity (and hence to 'mere
luck'). The doctrine presented in the above quotations might be taken as
a second distinct meaning to Hegel's slogan-like pronouncement: 'The
truth of the intention is only the deed itself.'
132 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
Hegel clearly does not hold, of course, that if an action is clearly
wrong—violating morality or ethics—it can ever be justified merely
because it happened to have good consequences. Rather, his thesis
is that the inner and outer aspects of an action must be considered
together and evaluated together, according to their systematic meaning.
Suppose, for instance, that the social act of providing alms to the poor
through private, voluntary (e.g. 'faith-based') charity has the system-
atic effect of keeping the poor wretched and oppressed. This systematic
result should lead us to revise (downward) our estimate of the moral
value of the inner subjective disposition to voluntary religious almsgiv-
ing. On the other hand, suppose Hegel is right that true beneficence, the
beneficence that truly helps those in need, is found only in 'the intelli-
gent universal action of the state' (PhG 4(425). In that case, the political
disposition to favor private, faith-based charity over state-run welfare
would be blameworthy (even if it is thought by misguided people to
be morally admirable); and the disposition to replace faith-based volun-
tary charitable giving with state-administered aid to the poor would be
the inner disposition that is truly to be admired and esteemed from a
moral standpoint. Such judgments, of course, have to be made from a
systematic consideration of the social meaning of these inner disposi-
tions, not merely on the basis of the accidental consequences of their
manifestation in some individual case.
Hegel does not deny, however, that it makes sense to say of what an
agent did that its consequences might have been very different from
what they were, and that these differences might have been due to con-
tingencies, perhaps unforeseen and unforeseeable, that were beyond the
agent's control. Here too he has reference to his example of the arsonist:
It is certainly the case that a greater or lesser number of circumstances
may intervene in the course of an action. In a case of arson, for
example, the fire may not take hold, or conversely, it may spread fur-
ther than the culprit intended. Nevertheless, no distinction should be
made here between good and ill fortune, for in their actions, human
beings are necessarily involved in externality. An old proverb rightly
says: 'The stone belongs to the devil when it leaves the hand that
threw it'. By acting, 1 expose myself to misfortune, which accordingly
has a right over me and is an existence of my own volition.
(PR§119A)
When Hegel says here that 'no distinction should be made here between
good and ill fortune,' he means that I cannot offer my ill fortune as
Allen W. Wood 133
any excuse for the harm I have caused (or for the failure of my fruitless
attempts to do good), by comparing the actual consequences of what
I did with some different and better outcome that I claim would have
occurred if only I had been luckier. In saying that when I act, I expose
myself to misfortune, and that it 'has a right over me,' Hegel is using the
term 'right' (as he often does) both in an everyday sense and also in his
technical philosophical sense, in which 'right' means 'any existence in
general which is the existence of the free will' (PR §29). In other words,
he is saying that in acting, I freely choose to expose myself to misfor-
tune, and this is what gives it a right over me, so that I am responsible
for its results.
When we act in the world, we pursue various aims under conditions
we did not determine, and the outcome often depends on factors we
cannot control. If I am a rational agent, I know all this before I act. As a
rational agent, I accept my finitude, and my exposure to contingency, as
a condition of acting. In so doing, I am accepting responsibility for the
results of what I do, even when these results are in some measure beyond
my power. In that sense, in choosing to act I also choose to expose myself
to good or ill fortune, and I freely posit both good and ill fortune as the
existence of my free will, giving them a right over me, making myself
responsible for what comes about as their result. My actions may meet
with good or bad luck, but in my very choice to act 1 opened myself up
to both possibilities, and I chose to incur the blame if things turn out
badly, just as I stand to deserve the credit if they turn out well. This
exposure to fortune is simply a general condition of our action, and so
we freely posit it along with any action. An action is a venture: it may
turn out well or badly, and by taking it we both seek a good outcome
and take responsibility for a bad outcome, knowing from the start that it
depends on factors beyond our control which way things will turn out.
A mature and rational human being knows all this, accepts it, and there-
fore does not attempt to escape responsibility for bad results by drawing
a distinction between good and ill fortune—claiming, for instance, that
he should get as much credit when things have gone wrong as if they
had gone right, or suggesting (enviously) that a more successful person
deserves no more credit because his success was due only to better luck.
Not all actions equally expose themselves to good or bad fortune.
An action that merely complies with a strict duty makes a minimal
venture. It exposes itself to the risk that what I do to meet my obli-
gation may misfire so that I fall short of meeting it. But beyond that, in
doing what is required of me I assume very little responsibility for what
may happen as a result, and I should get correspondingly little credit
134 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
for surprisingly good results and bear little burden of responsibility for
disastrously bad ones. On the other hand, if my action itself is more ven-
turesome, something not strictly required of me that seeks to achieve
some good I am not strictly required to produce, or that seeks to avert
some harm that it is not already my duty to prevent, then (to put it in
Hegel's terms) 1 'make good or ill fortune into the existence of my own
free will' to a much greater extent.
Hegel's theory acknowledges moral ambiguity to a far greater extent
than Kant's theory of imputability can do. Both the good and ill conse-
quences of a required action can be imputed to the agent, if they belong
to the nature of the action or if the agent has exposed himself to their
possibility in choosing the action. But Hegel's theory also implies some-
thing vaguely analogous to the Kantian theory of imputability that we
examined at the beginning. Actions that comply with strict duties posit
less of my freedom in good or ill fortune than acts that it is morally up to
me whether to perform. I am less responsible for their consequences, less
to blame if these turn out badly, and less to be credited if they turn out
surprisingly well. For I was only doing what I had to do, not venturing
anything. Projects that seek some good, analogous to Kant's meritorious
acts, leave themselves more open to good or ill fortune; 1 get the credit
if they turn out well, but must bear the responsibility if they turn out
badly. Actions that are wrong are also ventures—but ventures in evil,
and through them I open myself to blame for whatever harm 1 cause,
even if (like Hegel's arsonist) I do harm that far exceeds what I intended.6
Notes
1.	What Kant is saying in this essay, and about this example, has been very
widely, and very badly, misunderstood. People become fixated on this one
(apparently outrageous) example, like a deer caught in the headlights, and
what Kant is saying in the essay has totally eluded them. Kant's position may
not be wholly uncontroversial, but it is quite different from what it has been
commonly taken to be and far more reasonable than it has been given credit
for. But this is not the place to correct those misunderstandings. See Wood,
2008, Chapter 14.
2.	For an extensive and perceptive attempt to relate Hegel's theory of action in
this section to more recent 'analytical' approaches to action theory and phi-
losophy of mind, see Quante, 2004a. (This is a translation of Hegels Begriffder
Handlung (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993).) But the present article is
not the place for an evaluation of Quante's project or a general assessment
of the appropriateness and limits of interpreting Hegel through the lens of
analytical action theory.
3.	Hegel's entire treatment of the will in the Philosophy of Right begins with the
idea that freedom belongs to will as its essence, as much as weight does to
Allen W. Wood 135
body (PR §4, A). It treats will from the start as free agency, without asking any
questions about how it might be related to the causal mechanism of nature.
There is no word in German that answers precisely to the meaning of the
English word 'intention/ But Hegel's terms Vorsatz and Absicht might both
be loosely translated with that English word, and I think Hegel's distinc-
tion between 'purpose' and 'intention' is quite close to a distinction that
T. M. Scanlon has recently drawn between two ways in which we speak about
the intention of an action. " 'Intention' is commonly used in a wider and a nar-
rower sense. When we say that a person did something intentionally, one
thing we may mean is simply that it was something that he or she was aware
of doing or realized would be a consequence of his or her action. This is the
sense of 'intentionally' that is opposed to 'unintentionally': to say that you
did something unintentionally is to claim that it was something you did not
realize you were doing. But we also use 'intention' in a narrower sense. To ask
a person what her intention was in doing a certain thing is to ask her what
her aim was in doing it, and what plan guided her action—how she saw the
action as promoting her objective. To ask this is in part to ask what her reasons
were for acting in such a way—which of the various features of what she real-
ized she was doing were features she took to count in favor of acting in this
way" (Scanlon, 2008, p. 10). Scanlon's wider sense of 'intention' corresponds
to what Hegel means by Vorsatz; his narrower sense, to what Hegel means by
Absicht. To say that parricide was not included in Oedipus' Vorsatz (in killing
the querulous old man at the crossroads) is to say that he did not realize (and
could not have known) that he was killing his father, so that his act under
the description 'parricide' was unintentional. To identify the Absicht of an
action, the universal under which the agent brings it in acting, is to identify
the agent's reasons for doing it, or the features of the action (or its results) that
counted in favor of acting that way. If there is a difference between Hegel's dis-
tinction and Scanlon's, I think it has to do with the way Hegel means us to
consider (for the purpose of assessing an agent's responsibility for deeds and
their consequences) some of the ways in which moral subjects are accountable
for things they should have known, and should have thought of, even though
they did not. Hegel's theory of morality in fact makes quite strong demands
on agents in this respect.
4.	This is a charge made by Karl-Heinz Ilting, who thinks Hegel's account can-
not deal with negligence, or the distinction between foreseen and unforeseen
consequences of actions. Ilting, VPR17, n. 125, pp. 303^1.
5.	As I did, in Wood, 1990, pp. 143-4.
6.	Some philosophers, and even more often criminally minded politicians, like
to entertain the thought that a wrongful action might be justified, or at least
in some way redeemed, if its consequences are good. Some of Hegel's remarks
about the deeds of 'world historical individuals' might even be seen as sup-
porting this thought. But 1 do not think it would be correct to try to enlist
Hegel in support of this thoroughly evil thought. He is quite stubborn in
resisting every attempt to provide some kind of moral justification or excuse
for any form of wrongdoing. In discussing the crimes of world-historical indi-
viduals spirit has made the means of attaining a higher ethical order (VG
171/ LPW 141), Hegel is not referring to moral (or ethical) justification or
responsibility at all. He is employing an 'absolute' or 'world-historical' species
136 Hegel on Responsibility for Actions and Consequences
of justification that falls entirely outside both morality and ethical life (PR
§345). This is also not a justification any individual (e.g. Caesar) could ever
give for his own actions, but belongs solely to the reflections of the philo-
sophical historian, who is trying to grasp spirit's striving to realize its own
nature in the course of human history. Hegel's view is that from the stand-
point of abstract right, morality and ethics, world-historical individuals are
(as the so-called 'valet moralist' rightly says) merely criminals and villains;
Hegel thinks they pay the penalty for their deeds and suffer the loss—they
die early, like Alexander, are murdered like Caesar, or sent to St. Helena like
Napoleon (VG 1Q5/LPW 89). Hegel never suggests that they have been treated
worse than they deserve. If (like the valet moralist) we fail to see the supra-
moral justification for their crimes, we do no moral injustice to Alexander,
or Caesar, or Bonaparte; we merely deprive ourselves of the philosophical
understanding of historical events we might have had, and fail to appreci-
ate the rational theodicy of history into which Hegel is fitting them. These
justifications have nothing to do with the moral imputability of actions or
consequences. Hegel lists the slogan 'The end justifies the means' as fairly far
along in the list of attitudes and ways of thinking that embody evil—it is
worse than bad conscience, hypocrisy and probabilism, and just above Fries'
'ethics of conviction' (the corrupt theory that tries to pronounce justified an
action that is objectively wrong if the agent performed it in the mistaken belief
that it is right) (PR §140R). I think Hegel would be as reluctant as Kant is to
impute merit to someone who had done wrong, but whose wrongful action,
through the ironies of fortune, had produced good consequences. Rather than
this, Hegel would sooner revisit the question whether the action had really
been wrong after all, since an action whose outer results are 'substantial' gives
expression to an inner volition that is equally so: 'The truth of the intention is
only the deed itself.' But such a revision, as we saw earlier, would always have
to be based on a systematic consideration of the action and its results, not on
the accidental consequences of a particular action on a single occasion.
8
Freedom and the Lifeworld
Terry Pinkard
Hegel often speaks about freedom. It is, he says, the very 'essence of
spirit/ and all elements of 'the right/ so he also says, can only be justi-
fied to the extent that they are realizations of that freedom. However,
despite the obvious centrality of the concept of freedom for Hegel's
thought, Hegel himself never goes into any great depth to explain it.
When he does—paradigmatically in published form in his Encyclopaedia
and the Philosophy of Right and in his lectures on the philosophy of
history—he usually gives a rather quick definition of it in terms of being
'at one with oneself' (beisichsein), or in a couple of places, as being at
one with oneself in an 'other,' but he then promptly moves on to other
discussions.
For example, in the definition he gives of what he calls 'concrete free-
dom' in the Philosophy of Right, he says, that an agent is free even when
his will is limited if
within this limitation, he is at one with himself in this other, since
he determines himself and nonetheless remains at one with himself
and does not cease to hold fast to the universal.
(PR §7, Zusatz.; translation altered)
And in the Encyclopaedia, he notes (at one among many places and with
typical Hegelian density) that,
Spirit's freedom is not, however, merely an independence from
another which is outside the other; rather, it is an independence from
the other achieved in the other.
(EG §382)
137
138 Freedom and the Lifeworld
Likewise, he also notes in the Encyclopaedia, even if a bit puzzlingly, that
the genesis of the concept of freedom comes out of the philosophy of
nature:
We rightfully say that what rules in nature is not freedom but
necessity... This transition from necessity to freedom is not a sim-
ple transition but rather that of a gradual step-wise movement of
many moments, the exhibition of which constitutes the philosophy
of nature.
(Ibid. §381)
Finally, in his philosophy of history, he also claims in his famous short-
hand that the entire movement of history can be understood as the
progress of the consciousness of freedom, or, to cite his other equally
well-known shorthand for that movement, that history moves from the
idea that one is free to that of some are free and then finally to the idea
that all are free.
One can multiply the citations, but all of Hegel's claims come back to
the idea that freedom is to be understood as emerging from a philosophy
of nature (or even as being itself natural in some important sense), that
it involves being 'at one with oneself' in an other, and that world history
is some kind of progressive realization of freedom (or realization of the
'consciousness' of it).
Moreover, that Hegel's position on freedom amounts to a kind of com-
patibilism and not any version of claiming a special causal status for
agents—that is, that it does not amount to the claim that they exer-
cise a special noumenal or transcendental causality or any other form of
metaphysical libertarianism—has already, to my mind, been well estab-
lished in the literature, particularly in Robert Pippin's and Frederick
Neuhouser's work on the topic.1
Hegel clearly understands his concept of freedom to be the paradig-
matic instantiation of his more general dialectical claim about the
necessity for understanding how certain key terms of our lives involve,
as he notoriously likes to claim, something like contradictions and, to
invoke his most common diagnostic tool, are thereby supposedly mat-
ters that only 'reason' can grasp but which leave 'the understanding'
completely flummoxed. The first thing to clear up is thus the idea of
dialectic itself and whether we can make it intelligible to ourselves. Only
then can we grasp what it would mean to be 'at one with oneself in an
other' and what this has to do with the progress of the consciousness of
freedom.
Terry Pinkard 139
1.	Meaning, use, freedom
In working his own combination of Aristotle, Kant and Christianity,
Hegel transformed the Aristotelian metaphysics of potentiality and actu-
ality into his own post-Kantian, dialectical conception of the realization
of meanings in practices. Part of the motivation for this transforma-
tion had to do with Hegel's critique of the tradition in logic that Kant
inherited from Aristotle. From the beginning, logic was though to be
the science of the relations among concepts; in Aristotle's hands, that
had been formalized as the study of the syllogistic, that is, inferential,
relations among judgments. Many judgments, however, involved deter-
mining whether a certain particular 'fell under' the concept and not
with whether a concept was included in another concept. (If one said,
'the cat is grey,' one had to determine whether the particular was indeed
a cat and if indeed it was grey; 'cats are mammals' is a different type of
judgment.) If logical compulsion had to do with relations among con-
cepts, then the relation between a concept and a particular falling under
it could, at least so it seemed, be itself subject to logical compulsion, but
if it was not subject to logical compulsion, then it was also not subject to
rational compulsion. Thus, so Hegel concluded, the relation between the
'universal' and the 'particular' had to be conceived differently and if we
were to do that, it would also make a difference to 'logic' itself. To have
a grasp of a concept is thus not merely to be in possession of something
like a rule of inference but also to be in possession of something like a
rational capacity to see what it is required of us if we are to truly grasp
what the world is like when we make a judgment—or so went Hegel's
reconception of Aristotle's more ethical doctrine of phronesis, the art of
judgment.
To adequately conceive of such a relation, one had to understand not
how essences develop themselves in appearance, but with how we 'work
out' (ausfuhren) and 'realize' (verwirklichen) the meanings of our concepts
in practice (including the concept of an essence manifesting itself in
appearance). Hegel puts this distinction to use in his idea that we can-
not fully comprehend the content of our basic conceptions unless we
also see how those conceptions are put to use in actuality, and that part
of the logic of such concepts has to do with how the pressures on the
'abstract meaning' of concept—its meaning apart from its realization—
make a difference to the content of the concept over time. If so, then
to get at the logic of such concepts would require something different
than the way that 'the understanding' looks at things, which is always
from the standpoint of how to apply an 'abstract' meaning to a concrete
140 Freedom and the Lifeworld
case. Instead, we would need to look at the difference the realization
of a concept makes to its otherwise 'abstract' meaning. To see these
terms as having a logic to them in their realization would be thus to
adopt what Hegel (PhG Я136) called a 'science of the experience of con-
sciousness' of the path followed by such realizations—a logic of how
we make sense of those realizations and the disappointments and fail-
ures that follow in their wake. With some qualifications, we can phrase
this as a 'meaning/use' distinction: The meaning of a term cannot be
specified apart from its use, but its meaning, as a normative status, is
never reducible to (or simply identical with its use); or, to put it in
only slightly different terms, the actual use of a term makes a differ-
ence to its abstract meaning, but its abstract meaning has a 'normative
surplus' to itself that is not identical to its actual use. Its meaning is
the concept 'in itself,' and that 'in itself' develops as the concept is
realized.
This conception of concepts and their realization provide Hegel with
the means to work out his conception of the relation between 'inner'
and 'outer' so as to provide a less metaphysically weighted conception
of freedom.
To work this out, Hegel returned to Aristotle's conception of the will.
(Hegel did indeed think that the ancients actually had a concept of
the will—that 'the will' was not a post-Augustinian invention—and he
thought that their non-voluntarist conception of the will was more
adequate than our own.2) Thought and the will, Hegel says, are 'not
two separate faculties; on the contrary, the will is a particular way
of thinking—thinking translating itself into existence, thinking as the
drive to give itself existence.' (PR § 4, Zusatz). That is, the activity of will-
ing something is only another mode in which the conceptual is at work,
is realized in bodily doings.3 (The will is not, as it were, the separate
part of the mind, the lever one pulls to put deliberative judgment into
practice.4) On Hegel's diagnosis, it is in fact the very conception of the
difference between the 'inner' and 'outer' as the difference between two
separate 'things'—as mental states and bodily movements—which moti-
vates the more voluntarist conception of the freedom as being somehow
the result of an 'inner' act of will producing an action through some
type of non-standard causality. For Hegel, on the other hand, the issue
has to do not with the relation between two 'things' but with the rela-
tion of the contents—the 'meanings'—of the 'inner' with the 'outer.'
It is the voluntarist conception of freedom as a kind of special causal-
ity that Hegel rejects in favor of a more Aristotelian conception, which
he then turns into a historical and social conception of freedom and,
Terry Pinkard 141
so he thought, which allowed him to dispense with the terms of the
traditional metaphysics of the free will.
Aristotle conceived of an action as 'voluntary' when the 'moving prin-
ciple' was within the agent (or, as he puts it otherwise, when the agent
himself is the origin of the action) and the action is not the result of
an 'external force' (see Meyer, 2006, pp. 137-58)? Hegel restates and
modifies Aristotle's idea so that the 'inner, moving principle' is said
to become actualized, that is, when the 'inner' formation of an inten-
tion, made in light of a responsiveness to reasons, is actualized in an
'outward' action in conformity with the intention.6 Hegel restates and
modifies Aristotle's idea so that the 'inner, moving principle' is said to
become actualized, that is, when the 'inner' formation of an intention,
made light of a responsiveness to reasons, is actualized in an 'outward'
action in conformity with the intention. In its most succinct version,
an action is in conformity with the intention when the content of both
is the same (when the action is the intention fully realized). Put in a
slightly more fleshed out form, this takes shape for Hegel as the claim
that the interpretation of the complex, 'intention-action,' on the part of
the actor must be in conformity with the interpretation given by others,
who, for whatever reason, are called on or are in a position to assess the
action.
In Hegel's diagnosis, what both distinguishes Aristotle's conception
of the will from modern conceptions and which also exhibits the lim-
itations of Aristotle's account was the social and historical factor in
Greek antiquity, namely, that the potential depth of the gap between
'inner' and 'outer' had not yet itself fully opened up (or, rather, was in
the process of opening up). To be sure, this rested on a rather ideal-
ized if not romanticized conception of the ancient Greek polis, but the
idealization is not the issue for Hegel. For him, the romanticized polis
served a paradigm of a form of life in which there would be a widely
shared and sufficiently thick view about what kinds of behavior could
count as expressing such and such intention, so that, for example, the
intent to do something noble could only be expressed in such and such
ways and that other modes of expression simply could not count as
noble and thus if one therefore acted in that way, one could not be
said to have had a noble intention in the first place. To be sure, this
was completely compatible with the view that an agent could intend
to do something noble and nonetheless fail to act nobly because of
a variety of contingent factors (such as his changing his mind, being
prevented from doing so, suffering an accident, etc.). However, the
agent could not claim an action to be noble 'after all' on the grounds
142 Freedom and the Lifeworld
that his intention had been noble even if his actions or his 'deeds'
were not the kind of thing which were standardly taken to count as
noble.
This in effect amounted to a collectivity holding itself to certain
norms that were not only determinate ('thick') and widely shared but
which also appeared as rational. For Greek life, the rationality of the
norms was supported (again, on Hegel's admittedly romanticized con-
ception of Greek life) by the way in which each agent acting on those
norms (norms about what is to be done and the way the action is to
be executed) could be assured that the result would always be a spon-
taneously produced harmony of actions and therefore also a matter of
beauty. Each agent in forming his or her intention in light of the mutu-
ally held norms at work in that form of life speaks and acts with the
authority of the 'whole' behind him or her; the 'inner' that finds its real-
ization in such a social world is thus backed up by the apparent force of
something like reason itself.
For this reason, in his 1807 Phenomenology, Hegel called this form of
life the 'true spirit'; it was held to be the paradigmatic incarnation of
what it would mean in practice to be free as a matter of Beisichsein,
'being at one with oneself.' However, this paradigm, on Hegel's account,
necessarily failed fully to realize itself, since it generated within its own
terms a kind self-contradictoriness, which was sufficiently exhibited,
in Hegel's interpretation, in Sophocles's Antigone. The contradiction lay
between two equally valid interpretations of what it meant to be 'at one
with oneself.' On one view—itself given expression in Aristotle's writ-
ings on ethics and politics—at least some agents, namely, males of the
right status, were 'at one' with themselves by being self-sufficient in each
of their relations to others (or so Aristotle describes the truly happy,
the eudaimonic man). Once the contradictions in that way of life sur-
faced, the surrounding social world thus no longer offered an immediate
understanding of the correct relation between one's intention and one's
actions. To use Hegel's example: Antigone finds herself uncondition-
ally required to perform the burial rites on her brother, unconditionally
required to obey her uncle (Creon's) decree that she not do so, and
unconditionally required not to make up her own mind as to what
she is to do; thus, whatever she does is wrong—her actions will nec-
essarily fail to realize her 'noble' intentions. Where such tensions are
now in view, the question, 'What does she really intend and can any
action express it?' becomes a defining question that itself expresses or
even provokes a shift from a concern with self-sufficiency to a concern
with freedom, with matching the 'inner moving principle' with 'outer'
Terry Pinkard 143
performance and deed in some way that appeals to an agent's control of
the matter.
Part of Hegel's own thesis is that in modern life, that link between
'inner' and 'outer' has been irretrievably broken, not as a result of any
metaphysical fact about the 'inner' nature of the will, but because of
the way in which very different evaluative schemes at work in the mod-
ern form of life make the connection always provisional and render it
often up for grabs. In particular, the conditions of a modern, pluralist
society only make the link even harder to establish, since not merely
will there be a lack of agreement on what kinds of action 'naturally'
express such and such intentions, there will also be an open issue about
how to interpret the intention itself, both on the part of the actor her-
self and on the part of the others who are called upon to assess the
action.
If anything, what is disclosed to us in such cases is that our modern
lives make us, as Hegel puts it, into 'amphibious animals,' who must
live in 'two worlds which contradict one another.' (As examples, Hegel
cites 'duty for duty's sake, of the cold command against particular inter-
est... [of] the dead inherently empty concept, and the full concreteness
of life, between theory or subjective thinking, and objective existence
and experience.') (LA 54, TWA 13: 80) The feeling of perfect 'fit' between
the inner and the outer—between, for example, our embodied, emo-
tional lives and one's life in the market, as it were—is not available to us.
Nor is there any firm assurance that our responses to the world around
us are rational, that is, that the social reasons we cite can in fact be said
to be genuine reasons. Moreover, once the difficulties of self-sufficiency
have given way to a conception of freedom as the 'inner' finding its
realization in the 'outer,' the question of whether one's 'inner' is itself
genuine (or true) necessarily arises, since the genuinely free agent acts
in terms that are responsive to what is important, to what really mat-
ters to him or her. (That adds another complication to the story about
our growing awareness of our own contingency, a complication which
I shall leave untouched here.)
Moderns experience themselves as exposed to contingency with no
overarching 'fate' that will make it right in the end, and thus, or so it
seems, we end up not so much being reconciled to our fate as we end
up simply getting used to the play of such necessity and contingency.
That reconciliation in modern life takes the form of 'getting used to' our
conditions is not itself a metaphysical fate but a social and historical
destiny. (We might become reconciled to it if we were to think that the
whole is itself rational; Hegel thought he also could convince us of that
144 Freedom and the Lifeworld
too, but his success in that project is itself disputable, and, besides, it
would be the topic of another paper.)
2.	Inner, outer, practical spontaneity
In his own handwritten notes for his popular lectures on the philosophy
of history, Hegel sums up the relation between principles and action in
the following way:
Laws and principles have no immediate life or validity in themselves.
The activity which puts them into operation and endows them with
real existence has its source in the needs, impulses, inclinations, and
passions of man. If I put something into practice and give it a real
existence, 1 must have some personal interest in doing so; I must be
personally involved in it, and hope to obtain satisfaction through its
accomplishment.
(VPW 82)
So it seems Hegel's picture of willing goes something like this. In some
cases of willing, one has a putative reason for action that presents itself
(usually in the form of some good to be realized), and then one forms
the intention and acts.7 That is, thought makes itself practical when the
agent is presented with something which appears as a possible reason
for action; this appearance of such a possible reason is the prompt to
form an intention and act; and the apprehension of such putative reasons
is possible only through the particular sensibility of the agent (e.g. his
'needs, impulses, inclinations, and passions').
When something presents itself as a good, that is, as a reason for
action, the will—that is, thought, perhaps in the form of a reflective
deliberation, perhaps more spontaneously—must, as it were, authorize
it, give it the stamp of approval; a putative reason must become a real rea-
son. To have a will, therefore, is to have a conceptual capacity that has as
a 'moment' of itself an embodied agent located in a natural and social
world, and that element of embodiment in both the physical and the
social world is a component of the spontaneity of thought-as-willing.8
Since the will is a 'form of thought,' what distinguishes having a will
from what one might describe as a merely animal response to any per-
ceived good or evil is the capacity to grasp the reason as a reason—in a
sense that is possible to state in German, it is to grasp a Grund for action
as part of a system of Vemunft—that is, to be able to make judgments
which can serve in inferences. In doing that, one gives shape to one's
Terry Pinkard 145
will in resolving to do this and not that, that is, in putting limits on one's
willing, in moving oneself to do one thing and not another.9 In Hegel's
view, for self-conscious creatures the 'moving principle' at work is not
that merely of animal motion, which for animals is basically that of
the preservation of the species along with the preservation of itself as
an individual; it is the series of social reasons 'out there in the social
world' which themselves go beyond the merely natural goods of self-
preservation and propagation, however much they might have some
basis in those.10 Or, to put it yet another way, animals may have reasons
for action (such as fleeing from a predator or going after something for
food), but only self-conscious agents have the capacity to understand
the reason as a reason. That is, the agent must have the capacity to dis-
engage him- or herself from the action and to deliberate about whether
a putative reason is indeed a good reason, and that capacity must be able
to be effective in his or her action.11 (And, as any reader of Hegel knows,
this capacity to draw, or to set, the bounds or limits on things, is called
negativity.12)
Hegel thinks the crux of the issue lies with how we construe the com-
bination of the deliverances of our sensibility as offering us putative
goods—our sensibility in the sense of 'needs, impulses, inclinations, and
passions'—with the self-determination of the will. Now, if one sees con-
cepts and sensibility as two separable faculties (and thus sees 'the will'
and, say, 'inclination' as two separable faculties), one will be pushed
to see the conceptual activity on the side of the will as relatively for-
mal, as bringing the particular contents put forward by sensibility as
either being 'tested' by the activity of reasoning about them—where
the test will be something like seeing whether the putative reason
can become a reason we can share (if one thinks of these reasons as
intersubjective) or whether it is a universally binding reason (if one
takes a more traditionally orthodox Kantian approach)—or one will be
pushed to see the non-formal content supplied to the will as some-
thing along the lines of 'one's deepest commitments' or one's 'true self.'
This is analogous to a familiar move made in the theoretical sphere,
namely, that of construing conceptual capacities as formal and thus
as imposing some kind of 'scheme' on the neutral content of intu-
itions (a move Hegel also rejects). In both the theoretical and the
practical cases, 'the understanding' construes concepts and intuitions
in one case, and willing and sensibility in the other case, as two dis-
tinct 'things,' and it then worries about how to recombine those distinct
items. Moreover, in such a picture, the deliverances of sensibility can
only seem like limits externally imposed on the will, something it must
146 Freedom and the Lifeworld
accommodate, subdue or affirm, but not something that comes from the
will itself.
To see our conceptual capacities as informing our sensibility is to
reject that distinction. For Hegel, that means that in particular within
the practical sphere, one is to affirm a more Aristotelian understanding
of the way in which sensibility can be reshaped and informed by the
deliverances of conceptuality.13 To the extent that one's practical sensi-
bility has been informed by one's conceptual capacities, one can indeed
be said to be acting on reasons and not merely being triggered by some
sensible 'impact' to behave in a certain way, even in those cases when
one is not reflecting on what one is doing. (The requirement is that one
be in possession of a capacity, not a requirement that one always be exer-
cising the capacity.) Examples are easy to generate: Without reflection,
a person pauses to let somebody else enter a door first; a driver stops at
a red light; and so on.
The proper conclusion to be drawn is that there is, to use some terms
from Adorno, a form of practical receptivity at work in practical spontane-
ity, and that such receptivity is a component (a 'moment,' in Hegelian
terms) of our practical spontaneity (see Adorno, 1993, pp. 7, 140).14 Just
as one can be mistaken about what one sees—one can think one sees a
wild rose and be mistaken—one can think that a situation calls for, say,
intervention and be mistaken. The deliverances of both sensible recep-
tivity and practical receptivity are obviously not guarantees that what
they present really are what they seem to be.15
On the dialectical conception being sketched out here, pure practi-
cal reason as 'pure' spontaneity is dependent on its 'other,' namely, the
findings of practical sensibility if it is to carry out its tasks, and its other
is informed by itself. Awareness of these goods is awareness of things
that matter to us and thus have normative significance for us. Practical
reasoning is, after all, reasoning about goods and how to realize them,
and without some conception of the human form of life, there would
be nothing substantial enough for such a disembodied practical reason
to work on.
3.	Logic, orientation, the absolute
The goods on which practical reason depends are themselves biologi-
cal and social facts, the various shapes that a form of life has taken in
response to a variety of contingent factors. One could assume that these
goods automatically cohere with each other only with the support of
some kind of extravagant metaphysics and odd faith in the wisdom of
Terry Pinkard 147
social development. There is no a priori reason to think in advance that
these social facts actually cohere with each other, or at least no a pri-
ori reason that could be stated as any kind of methodological principle
(say, along the lines of 'everything always works out for the best/ since
everything clearly does not).
This might seem as if it were a special problem for Hegel, since he is
almost paradigmatically exhibited in histories of philosophy as a tele-
ological thinker who thought that history aims at a certain rational
conclusion to itself. Yet, in the paradigm sense of teleological expla-
nation, Hegel is not a teleological thinker at all. To explain something
teleologically, such as an action, is to explain it, at least partially, in
terms of the goal at which it aims. (e.g. it was in order to buy butter that
explains your going to the store this afternoon.) Yet for Hegel, there
is nothing at which either nature or history aims. Actors in history, for
example, do not do what they do in light of aiming at the so-called 'goal
of history'; they aim at other things, such as personal gain. 'Spirit' itself
does not self-consciously aim at anything in history. On the Hegelian
conception, instead of there being a goal at which actors aim, there is
instead supposed to be a logic of sorts that impels itself from one position
to another and which, in doing so, eventually exhausts its possibilities
until it ends up in the comprehension of itself as something like 'abso-
lute knowing,' a timeless grasp of its own contingency. This logic has
both a direction and an end-point, but it is not making its moves in
order to reach that end-point. (Such a logic exhibits more or less what
Kant in the third Critique called a 'purposiveness without a purpose.')
Hegel's metaphor of the 'cunning of reason' expresses just that, namely,
that something can have a logic to itself that limits the set of moves that
can be made in a particular sphere and whose development can there-
fore have a direction to itself even though nobody makes a move with
that goal in mind. This is the logic of concepts and their realization, or,
as we called it, the logic of 'meaning and use.'
What is striking about Hegel's Logic is that it is not external to the
agency for which it is the logic (as, say, classical doctrines of natural
law or stoic trust in cosmic reason would have it). Rather, agency is
bound by the norms that develop out of a logic of experience, which
itself develops out of those conditions in which an abstract meaning
in is put to use; Hegel's historical dialectic has to do with the way in
which historically this kind of use ended up where it did because the
logic of its own terms placed unbearable strains on itself. In that way, it
is also a logic of failure and response to failure, a response not of or by
individuals per se, but on the part of whole forms of life themselves. For
148 Freedom and the Lifeworld
example, the logic of Antigone is that of individuals seeking a kind of self-
sufficiency in orienting themselves towards the unconditional demands
of their situation, with the logical result of such agency, when taken as
self-sufficiency, failing because of the contradictions such norms impose
on agents from within the social conditions under which those norms
are realized. Or to put in more slogan-like form: Agency which takes its
orientation from the ideal of self-sufficiency is inevitably failed agency.
The developmental moment of the logic of self-sufficiency—the Greek
ideal—is that it puts pressures on itself within its own terms to develop
a logic of freedom but which it itself either does not have the terms to
develop or which are incompatible with its other authoritative norms;
that is, it puts pressure on itself to bring the outer and inner into har-
mony after they have come apart under the pressures imposed by an
institutional-normative life in which they were held together by widely
shared, 'thick' meanings, and that pressure places strains on the 'whole'
that it cannot sustain.
Hegel is not proposing the rather outlandish thesis that the Greeks
had no inner life—he obviously thought they did—but rather that the
inner life had not assumed the kind of authority it would come to have
in post-Christian life. More importantly, he is also not proposing the
kind of sociality thesis that currently hangs around some Anglophone
discussion in the philosophy of mind to the effect that first-person
authority is 'merely' socially construed authority (that it is more of a
social concession to individuals to grant them the authority over state-
ments about their own inner lives and is not based on anything more
than such a social concession). Hegel's point is that in post-Christian
forms of life, the individual agent's own interpretation of her own inten-
tions comes to have a greater authority in interpreting and assigning
the normative status of the agent herself than in previous times. This is
of course a slightly fancier, more academic way of saying that in post-
Christian culture, appeal to one's conscience plays a greater role in life.
Hegel's diagnosis of the role of conscience has to do with the way in
which the 'inner'—as an action on the way to realization—has been
decoupled from the action itself (as the 'inner' realized). 'What I really
meant' plays a role in a form of life that can no longer see the passage
from meaning to use as so closely linked as a traditional culture would
find it.
Hegel's well-known shorthand in his popular lectures on the philos-
ophy of history was to say that history had developed from the idea
that 'one is free,' to 'some are free,' to 'all are free.' To rephrase Hegel's
shorthand in other terms: It moves from 'Only one sets the terms of
Terry Pinkard 149
what counts as an action/ to 'Some set the terms/ to 'All collectively set
the terms without there being any fixed point to which the terms must
correspond/ Once the stage is reached where 'all are free/ the terms of
interpretation have thus been set into motion so that not merely are
there now contentious ways of interpreting actions (i.e. realized inten-
tions), there are also contentious ways for even the actors themselves to
interpret their own intentions. Once 'what I really meant was...' enters
the scene as potentially a valid claim, so too does, 'Don't blame me,
what I really meant was...', and whether or under what circumstances
that latter claim itself is to count as authoritative must therefore itself be
up for grabs in a modern form of life, where 'all' and not 'one' or 'some'
are the ultimate sources of authority. Once the social conditions for the
interpretation of action have splintered, all actions are open to interpre-
tation and thus all intentions (as actions on the way to realization) are
equally open to interpretation; with that, the attractiveness of the meta-
physical fantasy of somehow fixing either action or intention into a set
place has room to grow. If the collectivity had formerly been the source
of the authority of interpretation for intentions and actions, the temp-
tation for us moderns is to substitute the individual for the collectivity
as the final court of appeal and to see the individual in his inwardness
himself as the sole source of authority. (It follows from a long argument
in Hegel's works, but that too turns to be as self-undermining as the
Greek ideal had been.)
There is one obvious worry about this both as an interpretation of
Hegel and as a philosophical position on its own. Hegel characterizes
the modern form of life as based on freedom, even saying that freedom
is what matters absolutely to moderns. Does this Hegelian-Aristotelian
interpretation of freedom as the 'moving principle' being 'within' the
agent make it impossible to be free in modern conditions?
Hegel himself seemed to be of two minds about this. In his 1820 Phi-
losophy of Right—which existed in rough outline in Jena in 1806 and in
more or less complete form by 1817—he tended to be a bit optimistic,
if not triumphalist, about the issue. Although for 'us moderns/ the con-
tingency and pluralism of interpretation was more and more evident,
there was still a sufficient orientation to be gained from the kinds of
institutions in modern life, such as the status of basic rights, the author-
ity of a moral conscience that tries to justify itself in terms appropriate
to humanity as a whole (and not to a tribe or nation), and the par-
ticular practices associated with modern constitutional states, such as
nuclear families, civil society, regulated markets, civic associations and
the like. Inhabiting the statuses that these institutions and practices
150 Freedom and the Lifeworld
embody provides enough of an interpretative fit between 'inner' and
'outer' that they can be said to be realizations of freedom, the orient-
ing points around which the 'inner' can successfully be realized in the
'outer,' which do not carry with them any set of contradictions that
would bring the house down with them (as did the contradictions in
the key normative statuses of both the ancient, the medieval and the
early modern worlds).
On the other hand, in the middle to the late 1820s Hegel seemed to be
far less sanguine about the extent to which the modern world of markets
and nation states was the full realization of freedom. Passages in which
he expresses his worries about this come most frequently in his lectures
on the philosophy of art. For example, Hegel notes that unlike in Greek
tragedy, where 'it is eternal justice which, as the absolute power of fate,
saves and maintains the harmony of the substance of the ethical order
against the particular powers which were becoming more independent
(verselbstandigenden) and therefore colliding' (LA 1230, TWA 15: 565) in
modern tragedy we encounter something different:
In this case the sole spectacle offered to us is that the modern individ-
ual with the non-universal nature of his character, his circumstances,
and the complications in which he is involved, is necessarily surren-
dered to the fragility of all that is mundane and must endure the fate
of finitude.
(LA 1231, TWA 15: 566)
Since there is nothing about the absolute, the 'whole' within which
the life of the characters make sense—which what is at stake in such
tragedies—the only difference between a tragic ending (as in Romeo
and Juliet) and a happy ending (Hollywood's bread and butter) is what-
ever contingencies happen to be into play (even if there is a logic
of sorts that drives these particular characters to their doom given
the circumstances). Thus, Hegel tells us, since nothing is ethically or
metaphysically at stake in these cases, he himself prefers a happy
ending—and why not, he asks, since no great metaphysical issue is at
stake either way?16
This is another, slightly more concrete way of stating Hegel's Logic.
As an acting agent, no individual speaks any more with the authority of
the whole. (Actually, nobody ever did, but the terms of classical Greek
life made it seem rational to think that some did.) Thus, any attempt
to take any one element of life or thought (as bounded and finite) and
Terry Pinkard 151
elevate it to the status of the absolute, that is, to the status of something
fully intelligible, is bound to make life absurd. Modern tragedies thus
tend to move in the direction of tragedies of the absurd. Moreover, this
absurdity which we find in modern life is itself, curiously, fully rational
from a philosophical standpoint insofar as that life itself is the culmi-
nation of a logic that has landed itself in modern freedom. Or, again
to turn to Hegel's own words (at the conclusion of his lectures on the
philosophy of art, at least in Hotho's edition), 'The presence... of the
absolute... asserts itself only in the negative form of sublating every-
thing not correspondent with it, and subjectivity as such shows itself
self-certain and self-assured at the same time in this dissolution' (LA
1236, TWA 15: 573).
For Hegel, the whole makes sense in having a logic to it, but the
moments on their own, abstracted out of the philosophically intelligible
whole, do not. The only way to speak with the authority of the whole
is to speak philosophically, but philosophy, in Hegel's sense, necessarily
has to leave out much of what matters in life. (For that, we turn to art,
which Hegel says presents us with 'liveliness,' Lebendigkeit.)'7 In such a
case, where, say, politics is not going to be able to rely on such a full
reconciliation, perhaps something more along the lines of Habermas's
idea of communication—if it were reinterpreted as dialectical relations
of recognition in a form of life—would be the more appropriate way
of conceptualizing our political lives. However, politics can only offer
a finite mode of reconciliation, and any attempt to absolutize political
life—especially to absolutize the state—would be fully self-undermining
and absurd.
Where does that leave us? If life is viewed not from the standpoint
of the whole but solely within the finite point of view, then, on Hegel's
view, the daily activities of life may still indeed be fulfilling, there is
to be sure a good in seeking to end human immiseration, and there is
even a joy to be found, as Hegel says, in, for example, the modern lyric
as it heads in the direction of both the song (the Lied) and of music
in general.18 Perhaps modern art may provide us with what Hegel calls,
'objective humor,' the comic representation of our reconciliation of our
aspirations to totality and the inevitable failure to achieve it. Still, only
philosophy gives us the totality to which we aspire, although we can
only achieve it in, as Hegel puts it, 'theory or subjective thinking,' not
in 'objective existence and experience' (LA 54, TWA 13: 80). In the logic
of the modern lifeworld, we must remain the amphibious animals we
have become.
152 Freedom and the Lifeworld
Notes
1.	The key works here are Pippin, 2008; Neuhouser, 2000.
2.	At least according to the text we have of his lectures on the history of philos-
ophy, Hegel clearly thought the ancients, or at least Aristotle, had a concept
of the will. In this respect, his position resembles (at least superficially) that
of Irwin, 1992. See Hegel, VGP IIt p. 221: 'Practical philosophy is, however,
to be reckoned as belonging to the philosophy of spirit. It is from this that
the concept of the practical in general is determined—the will. Aristotle has
treated this is several works which we possess/
3.	What sets one into motion, sets one into forming an intention and then
to going about realizing it, is some good that, as it were, presents itself as
calling for this (and not that) in a way analogous to the way in which an
empirical object 'wrings' the judgment out of the perceiver. In both the case
of these goods and of ordinary perceptual objects, we have a first-person,
receptive encounter with them that in its pragmatic function in our lives
is not to be confused with the more neutral judgment that is made on the
basis of our perception of them. The observation, 'I see X/ may serve to
license the judgment, 'There is an X here/ but the two are distinct from
each other. Here I am drawing on an idea worked out in great detail by
Rebecca Kukla and Mark Norris Lance, 2009. To cite their own summary of
the view: 'Perceptual episodes are different from judgments, but not because
they are less conceptually articulated or inferentially fecund. Rather, they do
something different: they take up, acknowledge, or recognize the normative
significance of worldly events and objects. They put us into singular, first-
personal receptive contact with the world and thereby render us answerable
to it/
4.	Thus, in PR §12 Hegel speaks of resolving (beschliefleri) to do something,
which he again identifies with bringing the 'inner' into the sphere of the
'outer.' In §8, he makes it clear that the dialectical conception of the will
only applies to that account which tries to combine the commitment to an
objective world with an equal commitment to subjectivity; not everything
that has to do with willing is 'dialectical' or 'speculative' (his other term for
the same thing): As he puts it, 'The consideration of the will's determinacy
is the task of the understanding and is not primarily speculative.'
5.	Meyer attempts to show how Aristotle attempts to dialectically combine the
aspects of the idea that the origin of action is 'in' the agent with the two ideas
of an action's being accord with the agent's impulses and being the result of
an external force. For something to count as an external force, it must be
painful or regretted. She holds onto the idea that this is also supposed to be
a 'causal' account.
6.	'The voluntary would seem to be that of which the moving principle is in the
agent himself, he being aware of the particular circumstances of the action'
(Aristotle, 1998, p. 52). 'But actions and states of character are not voluntary
in the same way; for we are masters of our actions from the beginning right
to the end, if we know the particular facts, but though we control the begin-
ning of our states of character the gradual progress is not obvious any more
than it is in illnesses; because it was in our power, however, to act in this way
or not in this way, therefore the states are voluntary.'
Terry Pinkard 153
7.	PR §11: 'The will which is free as yet only in itself is the immediate or nat-
ural will. The determinations of the difference which is posited within the
will by the self-determining concept appear within the immediate will as an
immediately present content: these are the drives, desires, and inclinations by
which the will finds itself naturally determined/ This does not rule out the
obvious point that between the good presenting itself and one's forming an
intention, deliberation might also occur.
8.	What present themselves are putative reasons, that is, various items present-
ing themselves as goods; that such and such appears as a good is related
both to one's organic nature—food is the obvious example—and to various
idiosyncrasies of one's own tastes and abilities. This does not make 'good'
equivalent to 'what one wants'; goods are those items that fit into a scheme
of orienting points for a meaningful or flourishing life.
9.	Hegel divides animals from people not on the religious ground that ani-
mals do not have souls—on Hegel's account, they do have souls—but on
the ground that they cannot think, that is, cannot entertain reasons as
reasons in the sense mentioned above. To illustrate this, here are three
among many examples that could be cited: PR §4, Zusatz: 'Spirit is thought
in general, and the human being is distinguished from the animal by
thought.' See also §42: 'An animal can intuit, but the soul of the animal
does not have the soul, or itself, as its object but something external'; and
EG §468: 'In truth, however, as we have just seen, thought is what deter-
mines itself to willing and it remains the substance of willing, so that
without thought there can be no will and even the least cultivated per-
son also has a will only insofar as he has engaged in thinking; the animal,
on the other hand, is not capable of having a will because it does not
think.'
10.	In its subjectivity, the animal thus does not distinguish itself from the
species, whereas we do. See EN §322. In 1173 of PhG Hegel notes: 'But this
other life for which the genus as such exists and which is the genus for itself,
namely, self-consciousness, initially exists in its own eyes merely as this sim-
ple essence and, in its own eyes, is an object as the pure L' In both the
Phanomenologie and the lectures on aesthetics, he refers to human agents
as self-conscious animals, who go beyond mere animality by being self-
conscious. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 80; Hegel, Vorlesungen
iiber die Asthetik I, p. 112: 'Man is animal, but even in his animal func-
tions he is not confined within the latent and potential as the animal is,
but becomes conscious of them, learns to learns to know them, and raises
them - as for instance, the process of digestion - into self conscious science.
By this means Man breaks the boundary of merely latent and immediate
consciousness, so that just for the reason that he knows himself be animal,
he ceases to be animal, and as mind, attains to self-knowledge' (LA 80, TWA
13: 112).
11.	In one sense, this picture is fairly ordinary. The elements of the picture are
something like the following. One is presented with candidates for action—
with things that seem good or at least appear as possible goods—and one
forms an intention to act in light of one of those goods (reasons); to do this,
one must have the capacity to deliberate on such a formation of intention,
and to actually act in light of that intention.
154 Freedom and the Lifeworld
12.	In its most fully developed form, 'negativity' is thought's normative capacity
to set normative boundaries to itself, which Hegel calls 'absolute negativity,'
a kind of 'absolute self-relation' of thought to itself.
13.	See PR §19, on the 'purification' (and not the 'repression') of the drives,
and thus the theory of the virtues, as he remarks, would really be a 'natu-
ral history of spirit,' the ways in which 'the ethical' is 'reflected in the natural
determined character of the individual as such.' Unsurprisingly, Hegel goes
on to identify the virtues with an Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. See PR
§150. See also EG §395, where the reference to the 'natural history' of the
virtues is again brought up. I am omitting here Hegel's repeated insistence
that 'Intelligenz' is crucial to the free will; I agree with Hegel on this point,
but I am simply not stressing it here.
14.	Adorno also notes how this is formulated best in the language of Husserl's
phenomenology.
15.	That this may require something like a disjunctive theory of perception con-
nected with a disjunctive theory of practical receptivity is another story for
another time. (This reference to the way in which the disjunctive theory of
perception might extend into the practical sphere was pointed out to me by
Charles Travis.) See the extended Zusatz to EG §408, where he gives his gloss
on what Beisichsein means.
16.	'A happy denouement has at least as much justification as an unhappy one,
and when it is a matter of considering this difference alone, I must admit
that for my part a happy denouement is to be preferred. And why not?' (LA
1232, TWA 15: 567).
17.	This is argued brilliantly by Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modem Arts, 2010.
18.	'Lastly, lyric poetry approaches music, to a greater extent than is possible
by the use of rhyme alone, owing to the fact that its language becomes
actual melody and song. This leaning to music is completely justified too.
The material and subject-matter of lyric lacks an independence and objectiv-
ity of its own and is especially of a subjective kind, rooted solely in the poet
himself; nevertheless its communication necessitates an external support.
The more that all this is true, all the more does this subject-matter require for
its presentation something external and decisive. Because it remains inner,
it must provide an external stimulus. But this sensuous stimulation of our
hearts can be produced by music alone' (LA 1137, TWA 15: 449).
9
Action, Right and Morality in
Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Stephen Houlgate
1.	Quante on Hegel's concept of action
According to Michael Quante, 'Hegel's concept of action does not itself
imply the presence of a moral attitude in the agent' and so is 'morally neu-
tral' (Quante, 2004a, pp. 166, 171). For Quante's Hegel, there is thus
nothing inconsistent in 'the concept of a merely goal-directed ratio-
nal agent' who lacks moral concepts altogether (Quante, 2004a, p. 172).
Quante maintains that, for Hegel, the autonomy of the will requires the
presence of a moral attitude in the agent, but autonomy is not needed
for action as such. 'For actions', Quante writes, 'freedom of choice is
sufficient' (Quante, 2004a, p. 169). Whoever wants to argue that there is
a conceptual connection between action and morality, therefore, must
show that 'the consciousness of freedom of action cannot be created
through the concept of freedom of choice alone, but rather demandfs]
the concept of autonomy'. Quante suggests, however, that this cannot
be done if one adheres strictly to Hegel's 'descriptive' concept of action
(Quante, 2004a, p. 172).1
In my view, by contrast, one of Hegel's great achievements is to have
explained why human action is necessarily subject to moral evaluation.
It is true that action, as initially conceived by Hegel (in pars. 113-24 of
the Philosophy of Right), involves no moral attitude on the part of the
agent (and no autonomy).2 When the concept of action has been fully
unfolded, however, action proper is shown to be inherently subject to
moral demands (and thus to entail autonomy).
This is the case, for Hegel, because all action, however it is conceived,
is an expression of right (Recht). Quante notes that Hegel 'develops his
concept of action in the context of the philosophy of right' (Quante,
2004a, p. 89). Yet, as we have just seen, he thinks that 'freedom of
155
156 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
choice is sufficient' for action as Hegel understands it. He fails to recog-
nise, therefore, that, for Hegel, action is founded on and inconceivable
without the consciousness of right.3
The task of this essay is to explain why Hegel understands action to
be an expression of right and why he believes that action for that rea-
son proves to be subject to moral demands. The essay first examines
Hegel's account of freedom of choice (Section 2) and then explains why
he understands true freedom to be inseparable from right (Section 3).
It goes on to consider the distinction Hegel draws between the person,
for whom right is the 'abstract' right to own (and exchange) prop-
erty, and the subject, for whom right is the right to engage in action
(Section 4). The essay shows that, in Hegel's view, right necessarily
makes demands on the acting subject (Section 5), the first of which
is the demand that the subject take responsibility for his actions and
their consequences (Section 6). The essay then analyses the subject's
right to fulfil his intentions, and thereby secure his welfare, through his
actions (Section 7). It concludes by showing that, for Hegel, the unity
of abstract right and welfare constitutes the good, and that the acting
subject thus necessarily faces the moral demand to promote the good
(Section 8). The essay demonstrates, therefore, that action is subject
to moral demands, in Hegel's view, precisely because it is a distinctive
expression of right.
2.	Freedom of choice
Freedom, for Hegel, is not (as it is for Kant) merely an 'idea' that we must
presuppose if we are to regard ourselves as agents (see Kant, G 4: 448;
Allison, 1990, pp. 217-18). It is an achievement of embodied thought.
In the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes the three
acts of thought that together constitute our free will.
First, thought abstracts from every natural need and desire and
becomes conscious of its own 'pure indeterminacy' (PR §5). In this way,
thought frees itself from being determined by nature and turns itself
into a pure, abstract, self-thinking I. Second, thought turns back to the
needs and desires from which it has severed itself and freely identifies
itself with one or other of them. In this way, the abstract, indeterminate
I freely affirms or 'wills' a particular desire (PR §6). Third, in its very act of
affirming a particular natural desire, thought preserves its consciousness
of its freedom from nature. It knows, therefore, that it is not bound to
the particular desire it affirms, but can affirm a different desire if it so
wills (PR §7).
Stephen Houlgate 157
Taken together, Hegel maintains, these acts of thought constitute the
freedom of the will in its simplest form: the freedom to choose (wahlen)
a particular desire (or object of desire) (PR §14). Note that freedom of
choice consists in being able to, but not having to, affirm particular
desires or objects. I am free because I can pursue this or that desire and
so can do what I want. Note also that such freedom is what Hegel calls
a purely 'formal' freedom (PR §13). That is to say, it does not produce
desires from out of its own indeterminacy, but is the formal capacity to
affirm or deny particular desires that are given to it.
Freedom of choice is no illusion, for Hegel; indeed, he thinks it plays
a central role in modern civil society (see PR §206). He points out, how-
ever, that such freedom is more contradictory than we usually recognise.
This is due to the fact that freedom of choice is wholly dependent on
what is available for us to choose (PR §15; see also VPR 3: 137; Dudley,
2002, p. 34; Houlgate, 2005, p. 184). Freedom of choice is committed to
no content of its own: there is no desire or object that 1 have to choose
simply by virtue of being free to choose. On the contrary, freedom of
choice is the formal capacity to select between desires and objects of
which I know myself to be independent. The very structure of choice
means, therefore, that the desires and objects between which I am to
choose must be determined by something other than my freedom of
choice itself. In the first instance, such desires are determined and given
by nature. This means that, although I can indeed choose whatever
pleases me, I do not myself determine what pleases me: nature does (or,
as Hegel later points out, other people do) (see e.g. VPR 3: 593). This is
the moment of dependence at the core of choice.
3.	Freedom and right
If freedom of choice is dependent on whatever is available for us to
choose, true freedom is not dependent on what is given but wills and
affirms a content of its own. The only content, however, that is derivable
from, and belongs to, freedom itself is freedom. The truly free will must,
therefore, will and affirm itself and its freedom alone. The will that is
truly free and independent is thus ‘the free will which wills the free will'
(PR §27). Such a will not only is but also knows itself to be truly free.
Note that, with the logical transition from freedom of choice to the
truly free will, freedom comes to be associated with what Kant calls dif-
ferent 'categories of modality' (KrV A80; see Houlgate, 1995, p. 868).
Freedom of choice, as we have seen, consists in being able to select this
or that, but not having to do either. It is thus freedom understood as
158 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
'the possibility of determining myself to this or to something else' (PR
§14). The truly free will, however, must have its own freedom as its con-
tent and so must will itself; otherwise, its freedom is dependent on a
given content and so not genuine freedom. True freedom, therefore, is
governed by necessity, a necessity inherent in the very structure of true
freedom itself. The truly free will retains the capacity for choice and so
can choose not to be truly free; if it is to be truly free and independent,
however, it has no choice but to will and affirm its own freedom.4
The truly free will must also regard its freedom as something that
has actual existence. Freedom of choice involves actually exercising one's
ability to choose (see PR §6), but it consists above all in the continu-
ing ability to choose differently, the continuing ability to make an actual
choice. The choosing will thus locates its freedom in the potential to
do something. From the perspective of the truly free will, however, free-
dom of choice is itself merely the potential for, or 'predisposition' (Anlage)
towards, freedom (PR §22 remark). By contrast, the truly free will under-
stands its own freedom to be actualised potential, actualised freedom.
As Hegel writes, such a will 'is not just possibility, predisposition, or
capacity (potentia), but the infinite in actuality (infinitum actu)'. 'In the free
will, the truly infinite has actuality and presence', and has such actuality
in its own eyes, for itself (PR §22 and remark).
The free will has to understand itself in this way. If the will is to
regard itself as truly free, it must regard itself as actually being free,
rather than just as potentially free. Furthermore, if it regards itself as
actually being free, it must understand its freedom to have actual exis-
tence in the world, to have Wirklichkeit and Dasein (PR §22). Precisely
what this means remains to be seen. All we know at this point is that
the truly free will has a definite and distinctive form: the free will must
affirm the actuality of, and the necessity inherent in, its own freedom,
whatever that will turn out to mean.
When freedom is understood to be something actually existing and to
be that which must be affirmed by the free will, it is understood as right
(Recht). 'Right', Hegel maintains, 'is any existence [Dasein] in general
which is the existence of the free will' (PR §29). Furthermore, 'right is
something utterly sacred [etwas Heiliges uberhaupt]' and so that which
must be willed by the free will (PR §30). Right, in other words, is actually
existing freedom that requires affirmation by the free will (see Houlgate,
2008, pp. xxii-xxiii). Hegel recognises that not all civilisations in history
have employed the concept of right. He argues, however, that the truly
free will must will its own freedom, and so must understand its freedom
Stephen Houlgate 159
to be that which it must will, and so must regard its freedom as right.
For Hegel, therefore, there is no true freedom without a consciousness of
right.
The fact that true freedom is inseparable from right means that such
freedom is necessarily subject to normative constraint. This does not
mean that the free will is immediately subject to moral constraint, con-
straint by the idea of the good. It means simply that the truly free will
cannot just will whatever it chooses to, but must will what is required
by the very concept of freedom itself. As we shall see, Hegel under-
stands action to be a form of true freedom. As we shall also see, although
Hegel's theory of action leads to the idea of moral obligation, it does
not presuppose any idea of moral obligation. His theory of action does,
however, presuppose the idea of right. Pace Quante, therefore, it is not
the case, from Hegel's point of view, that 'freedom of choice is sufficient'
for action.
4.	Right, the person and the subject
Hegel begins his account of right by examining the free will that is imme-
diately aware of itself as the bearer of right, namely the will of the person.
The person knows himself to be an immediate individual in relation to
nature and other individual persons (PR §§34, 43). As a person, there-
fore, I understand right to belong to me as this individual, to be my own
right. At the same time, however, I know myself to be the bearer of right
that is universal and so belongs to all persons equally. For the most part,
my affirmation of my right and my affirmation of universal right coin-
cide immediately: in affirming my right to own property, I affirm the
universal right of every person to own property.
In crime, however, this coincidence breaks down, since I deliberately
set my own right above the requirements of universal right and violate
the latter for the sake of the former. In crime, therefore, a clear differ-
ence, indeed opposition, emerges between my individual will and the
willing of universal right (or what Hegel calls the 'universal will which
has being in itself') (PR §104). In punishment, the universal will is then
reaffirmed against the purely individual, criminal will. Hegel claims that
punishment thereby provides the transition from the sphere of 'abstract
right' to that of 'morality' (Moralitat). Moralitat, as we shall see, is the
sphere of the acting subject (Subjekt), rather than the person (PR §105).
As initially conceived, action is not governed by any moral demands,
that is, by any idea of the good (see PR §108 remark). Moralitat is thus
160 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
first understood as a sphere of action without morality. Hegel will demon-
strate, however, that when the concept of action is fully developed,
action turns out to be governed by moral demands after all.
The transition from punishment to Moralitat—the sphere of the
subject—is a logical one: that is to say, the logical structure of subjective
freedom becomes apparent when we consider (in our case, all too briefly)
the nature of punishment. In punishment, right is affirmed against "the
individual will which has being only for itself' (PR §104). The individ-
ual, criminal will is thereby made aware that, as a purely individual will,
it is not only distinct from but also subordinate to right. Accordingly,
the subject knows itself to be a merely individual will distinct from and
subordinate to right, too. Indeed, more so than the person, the sub-
ject knows itself to be a distinctive, particular individual subordinate to
right.5
Yet this identifies only one aspect of the subject. Punishment, Hegel
maintains, requires 'a will which, as a particular and subjective will, also
wills the universal as such' and affirms that universal—namely, right—
against the merely individual, criminal will (PR §103). This particular
will is identified in the Encyclopaedia and Hegel's lectures as the will
of the judge (Richter) (EG §501, VPR21: 97, p. 99; see also Peperzak,
2001, p. 294).6 The subject, therefore, must also be a particular individ-
ual who affirms universal right against the merely individual subjective
will. The subject thereby understands its own affirmation of right to be
what transforms right from that which must be willed into that which is
actually willed, that which is explicitly 'posited in the will' (VPR 4: 298).
Furthermore, the subject understands its own free affirmation of right
to be itself actually existing freedom (PR §106). As such, the subjective
will sees its own affirming and willing of right as itself rightful.7 It thus
sees itself as giving actuality and existence to freedom and right in two
senses: it gives actuality to right by affirming it, and it embodies freedom
and right in its very affirmation of right. For the subject, therefore, its
own particular, subjective willing of right must command respect and
recognition from any free will. Accordingly, 'the moral [moralisch] point
of view [... ] takes the shape of the right of the subjective will' (PR §107).
The person sees his freedom expressed and realised in the things that
he owns; the subject, by contrast, sees freedom realised in its very own
willing of freedom and right.
Since the subjective will sees itself as rightful, it sees its affirmation of
right as the willing of right and freedom by right and freedom. That is,
it sees itself as right that has come to be 'for itself' (Recht fur sich) (VPR 4:
296, 298).8 This in turn explains why the subjective will is 'infinite [... ]
Stephen Houlgate 161
for itself' (PR §105): the subjective will knows itself to be 'infinite'
because it knows itself to be purely self-relating, self-willing freedom
and right.9 As 'infinitely' free, the subject knows itself to be the free
and rightful determining ground of all that it wills. The will of children,
Hegel states in his lectures, is determined by their parents; the free sub-
ject, by contrast, knows itself to be a fully self-determining will (PR §107;
see also VPR 3: 328, 335).10 As we shall see, this means that the subject
freely determines its own individual actions and particular intentions
(and knows itself to do so). The right that the subjective will affirms is
thus not just right in general, but the right of self-determination, the
right to give itself a determinate identity that is wholly its own. It is the
right, not merely to own something else, but to be something of one's own.
5.	The subject and the demands of right
Hegel first considers the subjective will in its immediacy: the simple,
self-determining individual will. This will, Hegel explains, is 'abstract'
and 'formal', because it is characterised by the pure form of self-
determination, which (like that of the person) is the same in every free
individual (PR §108). Such self-determination, as we have just seen, is
constitutive of the 'infinitely' free subjective will, which is what the truly
free, rightful will has shown itself to be at this point in Hegel's analy-
sis. True freedom and right, therefore, first 'appear' (hervortreten) in the
individual will of the subject in the form of self-determination (PR §108).
Yet since the subjective will is a merely individual will, it is and knows
itself to be distinct from and subordinate to right as such or what Hegel
calls the 'will which has being in itself' (the truly free will) (PR §106).
This introduces a significant tension into the subjective will. On the
one hand, the subjective will embodies—and so is identical with—true
freedom and right, insofar as it is formally self-determining in its indi-
viduality. On the other hand, insofar as it is a merely individual will,
the subjective will is distinct from true freedom and right. Hegel partly
resolves this tension by maintaining that the subjective will is implicitly
or 'in itself' (an sich) identical with the truly free will, but not fully and
explicitly identical with it (PR §106 remark). Despite embodying true
freedom and right, therefore, the subjective will also stands in relation
to right as something distinct from itself and is subject to the demands
of the latter. The subjective point of view is thus 'the point of view of
relationship, obligation [Sollen] or requirement [Forderung]' (PR §108).11
Now, of course, for the person, too, right is that which the free will
must will. Prior to the emergence of injustice (Unrecht), however, there
162 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
is a happy coincidence between my individual will and universal right:
I immediately affirm the universal rights of the individual in affirming
my own individual rights. Only when I set myself against right in gen-
eral does such right assert itself against me (through punishment). In the
sphere of Moralitat, by contrast, right always asserts itself against me, and
so makes demands on me, even though my will embodies freedom and
right in its self-determination. Such demands confront me not just when
I violate right, but in the very exercise of my right to self-determination.
Indeed, what makes demands on me is the very right that I myself actu-
alise in determining myself. I am constrained in my free and rightful
self-determination by my own freedom and right as a subject.12
6.	Action and its consequences
The subjective will is distinct not just from right as such, but also from
the sphere of external objectivity or nature (and also from other sub-
jective wills) (PR §§108, 109, 112). This places its own limit on the
subjective will and makes the latter doubly aware that it is, indeed,
merely subjective. The subjective will, however, is and knows itself to
be the embodiment of freedom and right. Indeed, it knows itself to be
infinitely self relating freedom, to be a free will that always relates to and
affirms its own freedom. As such, therefore, it must affirm and relate to
its own freedom in the very sphere of objectivity that limits it. The sub-
jective will that knows itself to be the embodiment of right also knows
its freedom to be actually existing freedom. It must, therefore, see its free-
dom actualised in the realm of genuine external actuality, that is, in the
objective world around it. For both these reasons, the subjective will
must transpose and extend its own freedom and right into the sphere of
objectivity.
The will does so by first freely determining itself through giving itself
a specific content, aim or 'end' (Zweck) and then carrying out that aim
in the sphere of external objectivity (PR §109). The will understands
itself thereby to be actualising its own freedom because it knows that
what is carried out in the sphere of objectivity is and remains its own
freely determined aim (PR §110). In this way, the subject sees its own
self-determining freedom become something actual beyond its own sub-
jectivity in the external world. This process of carrying out one's own
freely determined aim in the external world is action (Handlung) (PR
§113). The subjective will must engage in action because it knows itself
to be the embodiment of right, or actually existing freedom, and so must
see its freedom actualised in the world. This is clear from §109 of the
Stephen Houlgate 163
Philosophy of Right where Hegel derives the necessity for action from the
need to give 'an immediate existence [unmittelbares Dasein]' to one's freely
determined aim.13 Indeed, Hegel maintains that his whole account of
Moralitat, including the derivation of action, welfare and the good, is
nothing but 'the development of the right of the subjective will' (PR
§107 remark).
Note that action, for Hegel, is not just the satisfying of a drive (Trieb).
A drive is similar to action in being 'a subjective determination of the
will which gives itself its objectivity' (EG §473, addition [tr. revised]).
Such a drive, however, is principally determined by nature, and its satis-
faction consists solely in the enjoyment (Genuss) it produces (EG §469,
addition). Action, by contrast, is the actualisation of a freely determined
aim. Note also that the choosing will is not capable of action, as Hegel
understands it. The choosing will does, indeed, identify itself with some
particular desire or object when it exercises choice, but it locates its free-
dom above all in the continuing possibility of making further choices.
It does not, therefore, understand its freedom to be that which it must
will and affirm as something actually existing: it does not understand its
freedom as right. Action, however, is nothing but the further actualising
of self-conscious right, the actualising of right beyond the subject in the
actually existing world. Pace Quante, therefore, freedom of choice is not
sufficient for action. Action, in Hegel's view, is always carried out with
the (more or less explicit) consciousness of right: it is the fulfilling of the
right of subjective self-determination.
Action brings about a specific change in the external circumstances
that confront the agent. In acting the agent has a certain idea
(Vbrstellung) of those circumstances. Since, however, the agent is finite
and has limited knowledge of the surrounding world, the circumstances
of that world may differ from what the agent understands them to be.
Consequently, the agent's action may bring about changes that differ
from those envisaged by the agent himself. Only what the agent does
freely and knowingly, however, counts as his action proper. Whatever
arises from our activity without our knowledge does not, therefore,
belong to our action as such, but is an aspect of our deed for which
we can disavow responsibility. Accordingly, Hegel concludes, 'it is [... ]
the right of the will to recognize as its action [Handlung], and to accept
responsibility for, only those aspects of its deed [Tht] which it knew to
be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its purpose
[Vorsatz]' (PR §117).14
Beyond the immediate change that it brings about our action also has
multiple consequences (PR §118). Some of those consequences 'belong to
164 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
the action as an integral part of it' and simply reveal the nature of the
action. Action, however, is the translation of our purpose into the exter-
nal world—the world that exceeds our finite idea of it—and can have
consequences far beyond those we can foresee. It is 'exposed to external
forces which [... ] impel it on into remote and alien consequences' (PR
§118). Once again, Hegel contends, the free agent has the right to accept
responsibility for only those consequences that are known by the agent
to belong to the action itself and are foreseen in the agent's purpose.
The circumstances of the external world are simply given to us: they are
not (except in certain cases) the result of our action or the expression of
our freedom. By contrast, the consequences of our actions—those, that is,
that are not 'remote and alien'—are the direct result of our action and
the expression of our freedom. Such consequences are, however, the way
our action takes shape and unfolds in the external world beyond our own
subjectivity. They constitute, therefore, what our action turns out to be,
not just in our imagination, but actually and objectively. Accordingly,
even they can differ from what we anticipate them to be.
These consequences belong to my action itself: they are my action in
the world.15 Such action is the actualisation of my freedom and right.
The consequences of my action, therefore, are what my own freedom
and right actually prove to be when they enter the world. Now my right is
what I, as a free will, must will. My objectively actualised right, embod-
ied in the consequences of my action, is thus something that I, as a free
will, must will, too. This establishes the first demand that my freedom,
right and action make on me as a subject: I have the right to consider as
my action only what I know (and freely affirm) my action to be, but at
the same time my own action—as I am carrying it out—demands of me
that I should know (and freely affirm) what it will prove to be objectively.
I have the right to accept responsibility only for those consequences of
my action that I foresee in my purpose, but my own action demands of
me that I should foresee what those consequences will actually turn out
to be.
Note that my action would not make such a demand on me if it
were, per impossibile, simply the expression of my freedom of choice.
It makes such a demand on me because, together with its necessary con-
sequences, it constitutes what my own freedom and right prove to be
beyond my own subjectivity, and my right is what I, as a free will, must
will. When I act, therefore, my own freedom, right and action assert
themselves against me and require of me that I should know and affirm
what they will prove to be objectively. As a free being, I can thus be held
responsible not just for what I know my action to be, but also for those
Stephen Houlgate 165
consequences that I should know it to entail (and so should include in
my purpose).
Hegel also points out, however, that there is no clear dividing line
between the necessary and the 'alien', contingent consequences of an
action (PR §118 remark). All action, he maintains, is exposed to luck
(Gliick), but it is not always clear where the agent's responsibility ends
and luck begins (VPR21: 114). What is clear is that all action in the
world will have some contingent consequences. Contingency and luck
thus form part of what my own action, freedom and right prove to
be objectively. Accordingly, they too require of me that I foresee their
occurrence. This does not mean that 1 am required to do the impossi-
ble and foresee all the contingent consequences that can follow from
my action; but it does mean that I am required to foresee that some
contingent, unforeseeable consequences might occur. Such contingency
has a right to be anticipated by me because it belongs necessarily to my
action in the world.16
7.	Intention and welfare
An individual action has necessary consequences because it stands in 'a
varied set of connections' (PR §119) with other occurrences, connections
that are governed by the laws of nature: given the nature of wood (and
the right conditions), lighting one part of the building leads directly
to the whole thing going up in flames (VPR 3: 369, 4: 325-6). These
connections confer a general 'nature', 'quality' or 'character' on to the
action that goes beyond the individual action itself.17 They turn light-
ing the piece of wood into arson and penetrating flesh with a knife into
murder (PR §119 remark). This general character is the character that
my own action has in the objective world. Since I, as a free being, am
also a thinking being (ein Denkendef) (PR §119), Hegel maintains that
I should know and understand the general character of my action in
the world. On the assumption that I am intelligent and so do under-
stand that general character, the action as a whole—arson, rather than
just the lighting of the wood—must be imputed to me (VPR 3: 367,
VPR21: 117).
My action demands of me, therefore, that I should know and accept
responsibility for not only the necessary consequences but also the gen-
eral character of my action. Once again, Hegel insists that this demand
is rooted in the very nature of action itself. My action in the world is the
objective manifestation of my own freedom and right; my right is that
which I, as a free being, must will; I must, therefore, will, affirm and take
166 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
responsibility for the general character that my action turns out to have
objectively. Hegel's point is not simply that other subjects may hold me
responsible for the general character of my action (though they may),
but that my own action demands of me that I should know and under-
stand that character properly. My own action asserts against me its right
to be understood by me. As Hegel puts it, the acting subject necessarily
confronts 'the right of the objectivity of the action' itself 'to assert itself
as known and willed by the subject as a thinking agent' (PR §120).18
My freedom of action requires of me, therefore, that I form a general
conception of every action I undertake. This general conception consti-
tutes the intention (Absicht) that I, as a thinking agent, must have in
mind when acting (PR §119). To be an agent, I thus have to know not
only that I am now inserting the knife into flesh, but also whether 1 am
thereby committing murder or carrying out surgery. If the action is to
be my own free action, however, I have the right to be held responsible
only for what I conceive myself to be doing, for what I intend by the
action (PR §120; see also VPR 3: 369). If I insert the knife intending to
save the person's life, I have the right not to be accused of murder if he
dies as a result. As Hegel is well aware, however, this right of the agent
to determine what counts as his or her action may well collide with the
right of the action itself—the right of the objectivity of the action—to
be understood properly by the agent.19
Hegel notes that the intention behind an action is significantly differ-
ent from the immediate purpose (Vorsatz) of the action. The immediate
purpose of the action is to bring about a specific alteration in the exter-
nal world around me (PR §119). Such a purpose does not need to be
shaped or formulated by reflection; I simply bring it immediately to
mind and decide to carry it out. The purpose is 'mine' just because I
decide to pursue it and, in pursuing it, know what I am doing.
My intention, by contrast, is my conception of the general or 'univer-
sal' character of the action beyond the immediacy of what I propose to
do. In Hegel's view, this cannot be brought immediately to mind, but
has to be formulated—more or less consciously—within the recesses of
my subjectivity.20 Consequently I am much more actively engaged in
determining the content of my action, and thus in determining myself,
when I frame my intention than I am when I decide on the immediate
purpose of my action. My intention thus belongs to me in a much more
intimate way than my immediate purpose does. My intention is the
aim that I have determined for myself from within myself—it is my very
own subjective aim in acting—whereas my Vorsatz is just the immediate
purpose I set myself.
5tephen Houlgate 167
The true freedom of the subjective will thus involves giving oneself
determinate intentions, aims of action that are most properly one's
own.21 By itself, however, this freedom still remains formal, without any
intrinsic content of its own. We are, indeed, free to formulate our own
intentions, but that fact alone does not ground any specific intentions:
it does not explain why one subject aims to commit murder, whereas
another aims to save a life. There must, therefore, be another source
within our subjectivity of the specific content of our intentions. This
source, Hegel maintains, is to be found in the particular natural 'needs,
inclinations, passions, opinions, fancies, etc' that distinguish each one
of us (PR §123; see also PR §37; VRP19: 56). My intentions, therefore, are
the general aims of my action that are freely determined and formulated
by me on the basis of my particular needs and inclinations. Such aims
are thus themselves quite particular to me—my particular general aims.
For Hegel, then, it is through formulating intentions that an individual
agent becomes fully and explicitly a particular agent (PR §121 ).22
Since they are my own particular aims in acting, my intentions consti-
tute the 'reasons' why I in particular act and so are the ultimate 'motives'
(Beweggriinde) of my actions (VPR 3: 373-4).23 My immediate action thus
serves merely as the means to the fulfilment of my intentions, which are
what principally interests me. One intention can also serve as the means
for the fulfilling of another: I can murder someone in order to steal his
money in order to buy something I desire (PR §122). It is always the
case, however, that my particular intentions—and not my immediate
purposes in acting—are 'the determining soul of the action' (PR §121).
This is not to say (as Davidson argues) that such reasons cause me to act
in a certain way (Davidson, 1980a [1963], pp. 9, 12). Action, for Hegel,
consists rather in freely carrying out intentions that we have freely formu-
lated for ourselves on the basis of our particular needs and inclinations.
Human action is the expression of the free, subjective will and so is
the free pursuit, not just of immediate purposes, but of intentions that
are particular to me. This is true, Hegel claims, even when 1 act in the fur-
therance of substantial, ethical aims, such as the welfare of my family or
of the state as a whole. If they are to motivate me to act on their behalf,
such ethical aims must become my particular concern. Accordingly, as
Hegel claims in one of his lectures, 'only the particular as such can act'
(VRP19: 57).24
My right to determine myself through action is thus, for Hegel, my
right to fulfil my particular intentions through action. That is to say,
it is my right to satisfy my particular intentions in action. The aim of
all free action, therefore, is the satisfaction of the particular subject,
168 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
where 'satisfaction' means seeing one's own intentions actualised and
objectified in the world through one's own action (PR §121; see VPR 3:
394). Since I am a thinking being, who does not just have individual
aims but also formulates general aims, I seek through my action not
just momentary, occasional satisfaction but the general satisfaction of
my particularity, or what Hegel calls 'welfare' (Wohl). Such welfare is
happiness (Gliickseligkeit) understood not just as that which I desire as
a matter of fact, but as that to which I know myself to have a right (PR
§123; see EG §505).
Yet Hegel does not lose sight of the fact that my right to satisfy my
particular intentions through action still has to confront the 'right of
the objectivity of action'.25 It is a freedom that is still subject to certain
demands. It has to reckon with the consequences of misfortune which
can prevent our intentions being satisfied but still be imputed to us;
and, even when we do gain satisfaction through our actions, we have
to recognise that our actions may not actually satisfy the intentions we
think they satisfy and in that case may be judged by others in the light
of the intentions that are manifested in them.26
We are also required to promote the satisfaction and welfare of other
subjects besides ourselves (PR §125). The subject has the right to sat-
isfy itself through its actions; as subjective and particular, however, it is
also distinct from and stands in relation to universal right, including
the universal right of subjectivity itself. That universal right, conceived
as something distinct from me, confronts me as the right of other sub-
jects. Since my freedom as a subject consists in affirming the right of
subjectivity, I must thus will and affirm the right of every other subject
to pursue its own welfare. Furthermore, just as I affirm my own right
through my own action, so I must affirm the right of those other sub-
jects through my own actions. Our obligation as free subjects, therefore, is
not just (as in the case of persons) to avoid violating the rights of others,
but to act positively in the furtherance of those rights (PR §112; see also
VPR 3: 345).27 This is an obligation that is imposed on me, it should be
noted, by my own affirmation of right, that is, by my own freedom as a
subject.
At this point, action becomes subject to a demand that begins to
appear 'moral' in the usual sense of the term (see VPR 4: 338, VPR21:
123-4, PR §126). This is because we are required to pursue through our
action an aim that goes beyond our own welfare and is universal. The
welfare of others or of all is, however, an imperfectly universal aim, since
it is, in Hegel's view, either indeterminate or impossible for a particular
subject to fulfil. A more suitable aim for a particular subject is to be
Stephen Houlgate 169
found in the Biblical injunction to love your neighbour as yourself (see
VPR21: 123, VPR 3: 395, 4: 338, Leviticus 19: 18, Matthew 19: 19).
Hegel insists that our right (and obligation) to promote the welfare of
ourselves and others must not lead us to violate the rights of the person.
In affirming right, we affirm all right; thus, 'an intention to promote my
welfare and that of others [... ] cannot justify an action which is wrong
[unrechtlich]' (PR §126).28 Only when one's life—one's very existence as a
bearer of rights—is under immediate threat, may one invoke the 'right
of necessity' (Notrecht) and steal to meet one's needs (PR §§127-8). The
free will, therefore, must affirm both the rights of the person and the
rights of the subject together. The unity of abstract right and welfare is
named by Hegel the good (PR §§129-30). The free will, therefore, must
will and affirm the good.
8.	The good
Hegel describes the good as 'the absolute and ultimate end of the world'
(PR §129). More specifically, the good is the ultimate aim of action.
Indeed, it consists in action itself; that is to say, the good consists in
the particular will both aiming at and acting in the furtherance of right
and particular welfare.29 The good, therefore, is truly free and rightful
action—'realized freedom' (PR §129)—understood as the ultimate aim
of action. It is freedom—the agent's own freedom as a person and as a
particular subject—conceived as that which the agent must will, affirm
and aim for in all his actions.30
Since the good is the unity of abstract right and particular welfare
(both of which must be affirmed by the free will), it has 'an absolute right'
in comparison with either of them taken separately (PR §130). The truly
free will that wills, and must will, its freedom must, therefore, will the
good above all else, since the good is the will's fully realised freedom. The
will that is and knows itself to be subject to the absolute, unconditional
demand to will the good is the moral will in the usual sense of the word
(VRP19: 61). Pace Quante, therefore, it is not true that 'Hegel's concept
of action does not itself imply the presence of a moral attitude in the agent'
(Quante, 2004a, p. 166). On the contrary, Hegel insists that my action is
genuinely free—and so genuine action on my part—only if I know that
I must will the good and whether the action concerned is actually good
(VPR21: 129, VPR 3: 412-13; see also PR §132). This is not to deny that
action is free even before we consider its relation to the good: the very
activity of formulating intentions and carrying them out in action is
already a free activity, in Hegel's view. Action is fully free, and so action
170 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
proper, however, only when the agent understands what constitutes fully
realised freedom, that is, what constitutes the good (PR §132).31
The free agent not only knows that it must will the good, but it also
recognises that, as a particular, subjective will, it is distinct from, and
stands in relation to, the good (PR §131). In other words, it knows that,
insofar as it is a particular agent, it is not good, but should be. What
converts the 'must' into a 'should' here is the fact that, as a subject,
I understand the good to assert itself against me and so to make demands
on me. There is, however, also something else to consider. The impera-
tive faced by the person lays down what he or she must do immediately:
'be a person and respect others as persons' (PR §36). The imperatives faced
by the subject, by contrast, lay down what the subject must do through
its own freely self-determining activity: in this case, the good is to be incor-
porated into the subject's intention and to become the aim of the latter's
own particular actions (PR §131).32 The fact that the good makes a
demand on my free, intentional action, and does not simply require
my immediate respect, is also part of what turns the 'must' contained in
that demand into a 'should'.
In my eyes, I am distinct from and fall short of the good because I am
a particular subject pursuing my own particular intentions. From my
point of view, therefore, the good is that in the face of which 'my par-
ticularity is only negative' and so 'must stand back' (zuruckstehen) (VPR
4: 354). What the good requires of me, therefore, is that I not pursue
my own particular intentions but affirm the good for its own sake alone.
The good thus confronts me as pure duty (Pflicht) that 'should be done
for the sake of duty' (PR §133). The good in itself is the unity of right and
particular welfare; yet due to its particularity the subjective will under-
stands itself to be distinct from and so to fall short of the good. As a
result, the will understands the good to set itself against the will's par-
ticularity and to command unconditional, purely dutiful allegiance. The
problem, Hegel notes, is that when the good is understood in this way,
it is rendered quite 'abstract' and 'indeterminate' (PR §135). The moral
will knows that it should do its duty, but the idea of duty itself does not
determine what the will should do.
Hegel famously praises Kant for having emphasised that acting out of
duty constitutes moral freedom (see e.g. VPR 3: 418). Equally famously,
he criticises Kant for reducing morality to an 'empty formalism' (PR §135
remark). It is important to note, however, that Hegel's principal aim in
his analysis of duty is not to provide a scholarly account and critique of
Kant's moral theory.33 It is to show that the inherent logic of free agency
itself imposes on all true agents an unconditional obligation to do what
Stephen Houlgate 171
duty requires of them, but leaves that very idea of duty indeterminate.
At the same time, Hegel does not forget that all true agents regard them-
selves as the authors of their intentions and their actions. All, therefore,
regard themselves as freely self-determining agents. The explicitly moral
agent exercises his right of self-determination by determining by himself
what duty requires him to do (PR §136). The moral agent determines the
content of duty through his conscience (Gewissen), which, Hegel main-
tains, is simply his own 'certainty [Gewissheit] regarding what is good'
(VPR 4: 348). The moral agent thus knows himself to be subject to an
unconditional obligation to do what is good, and he takes himself to have
the right, and the ability, to determine what the good demands of him.
The agent that truly wills the good, that wills the truly objective, con-
crete good, is, of course, the ethical [sittlich] agent. Such an agent is still
a particular subject, since, for Hegel, 'only the particular as such can
act' (VRP19: 57). Indeed, in contrast to the abstract idea of duty, ethi-
cal life (Sittlichkeit)—which comprises the family, civil society and the
state—actively promotes 'the right of individuals to their particularity',
including their right to satisfy their particular intentions (PR §154). The
ethical agent, however, is one whose intentions are not just formed by
the agent himself but also informed by the laws, institutions and shared
habits of mind that constitute ethical freedom (see PR §§ 142-54)?4
The ethical agent not only remains a particular subject, but he or she
also remains to a greater or lesser degree a moral subject in the sense we
have been examining (just as he or she remains a person). That is to say,
despite being educated into the shared habits of ethical life, we continue
to face situations in which we understand ourselves to be required to do
good and to be the ones who ultimately decide what specific actions
the good demands of us (see e.g. PR §207; see also Siep, 1983, p. 148).
My aim in this essay is to show that this distinctively moral attitude is
made necessary by the very nature of action as Hegel understands it.
Action, for Hegel, is not simply an event caused by reasons (by desires
and beliefs), but is an expression of freedom and spontaneity. The gen-
uinely free will, however, understands freedom to be that which it must
will, if it is to be free. It also understands its freedom to be something
actual (wirklich), rather than the mere capacity to choose this or that.
That is to say, the genuinely free will understands freedom to be right.
Action is thus itself the expression of right. Agents don't just do things
to satisfy their drives, therefore; they act in order to actualise their free-
dom and right, to display their rightful freedom in the world. At the
same time, agents know that they are particular subjects who stand in
relation to right and are thus subject to the demands of right. They are not
172 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
subject to the demands of any alien authority, however, but are subject
to the demands placed upon them by their very own freedom of action,
which as free subjects they must will and affirm. They are required to
accept responsibility for the actual consequences of their free actions
and to promote the particular welfare of others as well as themselves.
Furthermore, they are required to promote the right to welfare together
with the rights of the person. The unity of right and welfare, for Hegel,
constitutes the good. All free agents, therefore, are required to affirm the
good. The good, for Hegel, is not some transcendent reality, but is fully
realised, rightful freedom of action. The free will must will the good,
therefore, because it must will its own freedom if it is to be free. Action,
which is always the expression of freedom and right, must therefore
be subject to the unconditional demands of the good. Action can be
understood initially without reference to morality; Hegel's penetrating
account of action shows, however, that every genuine agent—that is,
every truly free agent—acts in the light of moral demands.
Notes
1.	Quante states that 'Hegel attempted to demonstrate that freedom of
choice'—and thus action—'and autonomy stand in a teleological relation-
ship', but that in so doing he had to 'have recourse to his speculative logic'
which, Quante notes, 'I cannot justify here'. In Quante's view, therefore,
Hegel's attempted demonstration starts from more than the mere concept
of action 'descriptively understood' and so does not establish a conceptual
connection between action as such and the moral attitude (pp. 172-3).
2.	If autonomy is simply free self-determination, then, as we shall see, action
even as it is initially conceived—without any moral attitude in the agent—
requires autonomy, for Hegel, since self-determination is the defining char-
acteristic of the subjective, acting will (see PR §107). If, however, autonomy is
the will's specific capacity freely to acknowledge the unconditional demands
of duty, then action as it is initially conceived does not require autonomy.
Quante understands autonomy in the second 'Kantian' sense as 'the pure and
unconditional self-determination of the will' (see Quante, 2004a, pp. 169-70,
and PR §135 remark).
3.	In contrast to Quante, Josef Derbolav, who was one of the first to write on
Hegel's concept of action, places the idea of right at the heart of Hegel's
analysis of action; see Derbolav (1965), p. 214.
4.	See VPR21: 50: 'Rational freedom, the will in and for itself, does not
choose, but also has necessity [Notwendigkeit]', 56-7: 'Right is necessary'. All
translations from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of right are my own.
5.	See VPR21: 99: 'The will for itself opposed to the universal will', 100: 'Sub-
jectivity is such only as determined by the particularity of the will', and
EG §503: 'the will is at the same time made a particular'. This moment of
particularity is well emphasised in Menegoni, 1997, pp. 130-1.
Stephen Houlgate 173
6.	Though punishment requires a judge, actual courts of law are, of course,
derived only later in the Philosophy of Right (see PR §§219-29).
7.	See VPR 4: 301: 'the subjectivity of the will is to this extent the existence of
right [Dasein des Rechts]'.
8.	The subjective will is, indeed, right-become-subjective, or the 'Subjektivitat
des Rechts'; see PR [TWA, vol. 7], p. 202 [Hegel's note to §104]).
9.	See VPR 4: 299: 'it [the will] is infinite for itself precisely as Idea, in having
right in it [dass das Recht in ihm sei]'.
10.	See Fischbach, 2004, p. 103: 'the will is infinite in its activity of self-
determination'.
11.	Will Dudley points out that the difference, coupled with implicit identity,
between the individual, particular, subjective will and the universal will
'allows us to begin to connect the moral will to the logical concept of judg-
ment' (Dudley, 2002, p. 40). The subjective will thus turns out (eventually) to
be subject to the judgement of morality, but also understands itself thereby
to be the power that judges what morality demands of it in specific cases
(PR §138). Francesca Menegoni notes that this connection of the moral will
and individual action with judgement, rather than the practical syllogism,
distinguishes Hegel's account of action and morality from that of classical,
Aristotelian ethics (Menegoni, 1997, pp. 132-3). This in turn suggests that
genuine subjective action, as Hegel understands it, is a distinctively modern
phenomenon and is not found (or at least is not predominant) in ancient
Greece (see PR §124 remark). Hegel also distinguishes between genuine sub-
jective action and the action portrayed in ancient Greek tragedy, which is
ethical action undertaken by heroic individuals, rather than action in pur-
suit of distinctively subjective aims and intentions (see VPR 4: 319-23, and
VPR21: 114-15). On Hegel's account of the differences between ancient and
modern tragedy, see Houlgate, 2007.
12.	A full account of the subject would have to examine closely the role
played by reflexion (Reflexion) in its emergence and constitution. The sub-
ject, for Hegel, is not only a 'mere' individual, but is a contingent individual
'reflected into itself' (PR §104 remark). As such, it is both at odds with true
freedom and right and infinitely free and rightful. These two aspects of the
subject are highlighted right at the start of the section on Moralitat: 'The
moral point of view is the point of view of the will in so far as the latter is
infinite not only in itself but also for itself (see §104). This reflection of the
will into itself and its identity for itself, as opposed to [gegen] its being-in-
itself [...], determines the person as a subject' (PR §105). In this essay, 1 have
not examined the role of reflexion directly but have simply pointed out that
the subject knows itself to be a merely individual will distinct from and sub-
ordinate to right and at the same time knows itself to be infinitely free and
self-determining.
13.	It is also in PR §109 that Hegel connects action to the infinitely self-
relating freedom, or 'infinite reflection' of the will into itself, mentioned in
the previous paragraph.
14.	Thus, only what we have freely and knowingly endorsed and undertaken
can be imputed to us; see VPR 4: 314.
15.	In this sense, it can be said that I know my action from its consequences; see
VPR21: 113: 'The consequences draw attention to the nature of the action
174 Action, Right and Morality in Hegel's Philosophy of Right
itself', and VRP19: 54: 'The consequences explicate the nature of the action'.
The demand that arises from this fact remains, however, in tension with my
right to consider as my action only what I foresee in my purpose. This is a
tension of which Hegel is well aware and which he thinks is inherent in the
standpoint of Moralitat (see n. 19).
16.	See VPR 3: 368-9: Tn acting, however, I expose myself to misfortune; I myself
do that from which misfortune can spring. Misfortune thus has a right
against me, [since] it is the existence of my own willing'. Since, as a free
agent, 1 am required to foresee that my action may have contingent conse-
quences, misfortunes that arise through my actions may be imputed to me,
even if I could not foresee them in particular (VPR 3: 368). The tragedy of
Oedipus is that he did not foresee that his actions could have unforeseeable
consequences; see Houlgate, 2007, p. 158.
17.	VPR 3: 363: 'general nature of the individual deed'; 4: 330: 'quality'; VPR21:
116: 'simple character'.
18.	This is not to deny that the 'rights of objectivity' are at the same time
'justified claims that others can make concerning the action of a subject'
(Quante, 2004a, p. 133). The rights that others have against me in this case
are, however, conferred on those others by my own action (see VPR 3: 370).
19.	See VRP19: 55: 'Over against the right of objectivity stands the right of sub-
jectivity. Here arises a collision that can be terrible'. The conflict and 'duality'
at the heart of Moralitat are highlighted in Menegoni, 1997, p. 143.
20.	Hegel talks in his lectures of the 'distance' of the universal from the immedi-
acy of the action (VPR21: 116). In the sphere of ethical life my intentions can
and do become settled habits of mind and in that sense come to be some-
thing of which I am 'immediately' aware (if I am conscious of them at all);
in the sphere of Moralitat, by contrast, they are understood to be products of
my own free activity.
21.	VPR21: 118: 'Subjective freedom means that the purposes that the human
being has are his own [seine]'.
22.	On the logical difference between individuality and particularity, see SL:
605-22.
23.	See also Wood, 1990, p. 141: 'we could say that the Hegelian intention is the
"internal reason" for the action, the reason that explains why the subject
did it'.
24.	See also PR §261 remark (Nisbet trans., p. 284): 'in the process of fulfilling
his duty, the individual must somehow attain his own interest and satisfac-
tion' and 'a right must accrue to him whereby the universal cause [Sache]
becomes his own particular cause'. In his fine article on Hegel's theory of
action Franck Fischbach emphasises that action, for Hegel, is always the
activity of a 'singular individual' (Fischbach, 2004, pp. 101-2).
25.	See PR §121: 'the subject, as reflected into itself and hence as a particular
entity in relation to [gegen] the particularity of the objective realm'. In this
respect, even though it is a conception of the general character of an action,
the intention reflects the subject's particular view of that action. In formulat-
ing an intention the subject isolates an aspect of the action and maintains
that it is the 'subjective essence of the action' (PR §119 remark; see also
EG §506).
26.	See, for example, VPR 3: 392-3, and also notes 15 and 16 above.
Stephen Houlgate 175
27.	In the sphere of abstract right we are not required to do anything positive
to promote the welfare of others. We are just required not to violate the
rights of others, and to permit others to exercise their rights as they see fit
(provided that they in turn respect the universal rights of persons) (see PR
§38). See Williams, 1997, pp. 182-4.
28.	Free subjects, who have to will and affirm right, may not therefore follow St
Crispin and steal leather to make shoes for the poor (VPR 3: 399).
29.	VPR 3: 408: The particular will, giving itself an existence in accordance with
the Concept, is the good'.
30.	On the difference between Hegel's understanding of the good and that of
Aristotle, see Ferrarin, 2001, p. 330: 'the ultimate end, which for Aristotle
was happiness and a good life, is now subordinated by Hegel to something
higher, the affirmation of spirit's freedom' (my emphasis). Indeed, Ferrarin
contends, 'a will opposing inclinations in principle, holding fast to itself to
affirm its freedom over externality [...], is unthinkable for Aristotle' (p. 340).
31.	Note that evil action, on Hegel's account, is still free action, since the evil
subject knows that he or she must will the good. Actually willing the good,
however, counts for Hegel as a deeper freedom than willing what is evil. For
Hegel's account of evil, see PR §§139-40.
32.	VPR 4: 345: 'the good, the true content for intention'. See Wood, 1990,
p. 145: 'Hegel conceives of the good will as the will whose insight and
intention accord with the good'.
33.	For a perceptive discussion of Hegel's critique of Kant's moral theory, see
Wood, 1990, pp. 154-73. Wood argues that Hegel is mistaken to claim that
'non-contradiction is the only moral criterion available to Kant', but that
'Hegel's deeper and more interesting thesis is that Kant is not entitled to
employ a principle with any content beyond the criterion of noncontra-
dictoriness' (p. 162).
34.	Since the intentions of ethical agents are themselves informed by shared,
public conceptions of appropriate action, there is no inherent tension
between the ethical agent's perspective on his action and that of others, as
there is in the sphere of Moralitdt. Provided that an agent's intentions are
indeed informed by the relevant shared conceptions of what is appropriate
(and that he is indeed an ethical agent), then what he takes himself to be
doing and what he is actually doing will both coincide with what is gener-
ally regarded as appropriate in the circumstances, with 'what is prescribed,
expressly stated, and known to him within his situation' (PR §150 remark).
The agent and the public will thus both recognise that the agent is doing the
right thing.
10
Hegel on Faces and Skulls
Alasdair MacIntyre
I
The Phenomenology of Spirit was written hastily. It is notorious that one
outcome of this is that arguments are compressed, that the relation of
one argument to another is often unclear, and that paragraphs of almost
impenetrable obscurity recur. The commentator is therefore liable to feel
a certain liberty in reconstructing Hegel's intentions; and the exercise of
this liberty may always be a source of misrepresentation, perhaps espe-
cially when Hegel's arguments are relevant to present-day controversies.
Nonetheless, the risk is sometimes worth taking, for although it is true
that to be ignorant of the history of philosophy is to be doomed to
repeat it, the joke is that we are doomed to repeat it in some measure
anyway, if only because the sources of so many philosophical prob-
lems lie so close to permanent characteristics of human nature and
human language. It is in this light that I want to consider Hegel's argu-
ments about two bad sciences—physiognomy and phrenology—and
their claims to lay bare and to explain human character and behav-
ior, and the relevance of those arguments to certain contemporary
issues.
Physiognomy was an ancient science that in the eighteenth century
enjoyed a mild revival, especially in the writings of Johann Kaspar
Lavater (1741-1801). The central claim of physiognomy was that char-
acter was systematically revealed in the features of the face. Character
consists of a set of determinate traits, and the face of a set of determi-
nate features. In some cases the cause of the face's being as it is the
character's being as it is, but in other cases certain experiences, such as
the experiences incurred in certain occupations, may leave their marks
both on the character and on the face. In this latter type of case the
176
A lasda ir Macln tyre 177
features of the face are not effects of the traits of character, but remain
revelatory of character.
In his discussion of physiognomy, Hegel begins by noting that its
adherents assert that their science makes a different type of claim from
that made, for example, by the adherents of astrology. Astrologers assert
that types of planetary movement and types of human action are cor-
related in certain regular ways; the connection is purely contingent and
external. But the face is an expression of human character; what a man is,
appears in his face. Hegel next notes the difference between this claim
as it is made by the physiognomist and this claim as it is made in every-
day life. Part of our ordinary human relationships is to read off from
each other's faces thoughts, moods, and reactions. But we do not treat
the facial expression simply as a sign of something else, the outer as a
sign of something inner, any more than we treat the movement of the
hand in a human action as a sign of something else, the inner meaning
of what is done, the intention. We treat the expression of the face and
the movement of the hand as themselves actions, or parts or aspects of
actions. In this connection Hegel makes four points.
It is not what the face is, its bone structure or the way the eyes are
set, that is the expression of character or action; it is what the face does
that is such an expression. We are therefore not concerned with mere
physical shapes, but with movements that are already interpreted. This
leads on to Hegel's second point. A man's character is not something
independent of his actions and accessible independently of his actions.
There is nothing more to his character than the sum-total of what he
does. Hegel here sides with Ryle in The Concept of Mind in his enmity to
the notion of dispositions as causes of the actions that manifest them.
The conjoint force of these two points is as follows.
When we see someone with a sad expression on his face, we do not
infer to an inner sadness he feels on the basis of an observed corre-
lation between such a physical arrangement of the facial features and
inner states of sadness. We read or interpret the expression as one of
sadness in the light of the conventions in our culture for interpreting
facial expressions. Notice that we have to learn how to do this in alien
cultures, and that no amount of correlating one observable character-
istic with another in the search for regularities would assist us in the
task of such learning. There is thus a difference between seeing a set of
physical features and seeing that set as a face and as a face with a par-
ticular expression, just as there is a difference between seeing a string
of physical shapes and seeing that string as an English sentence and as
a sentence with a particular meaning. To learn how to read a face or
178 Hegel on Faces and Skulls
a sentence is not to follow rules justified by observation that embody
a correlation between two sets of items, one of which is the physical
features or shapes.
What Hegel's argument has done so far is to show that the physiog-
nomist's treatment of the face as expressive of character, and the phys-
iognomist's treatment of the face as (at least sometimes) the effect of
character, cannot be combined without damaging inconsistency. Hegel's
two next points are still more damaging to the claim of physiognomy
to go beyond the pre-scientific understanding of facial expression to a
scientific knowledge of the causal relations allegedly underlying that
expression. He points out sharply how the rules that we use in everyday
life in interpreting facial expression are highly fallible. We can express
Hegel's point in this way: if someone is apparently glaring at me and
I accuse him of being angry with me, he has only to retort that he was
thinking of something quite different and I shall have no way to rebut
him by appeal to some set of rules for interpreting facial expression.
Hegel quotes Lichtenberg: 'If anyone said, "Certainly you behave like
an honest man, but I can see from your face that you are compelling
yourself to do so and are a villain underneath," there is no doubt that
every brave fellow so greeted will reply with a box on the ear.'
Finally—although Hegel makes this point earlier in the discussion—
our dispositions of character, as expressed in our actions, speech, and
facial expressions, are not simply given as physical features are given.
My bone structure can be altered by surgery or violence, but at any
given moment it is simply what it is. But my character is not deter-
minate in the same way as my bone structure, and this in two respects.
First, a disposition to behave in a particular way always has to be actu-
alized in some particular context, and the nature and meaning of the
action that manifests the disposition is in many cases unspecifiable apart
from that context. If I strike a man dead when he attacks me murder-
ously, my action does not have the same nature and meaning as when
I strike a man dead in a fit of bad-tempered gratuitous aggression. Dispo-
sitions that are actualized independently of context are like tendencies
to sneeze or to produce compulsive movements. Their manifestations
will be happenings that in virtue of their independence of context can-
not be viewed as intelligible behavior, except perhaps as nervous habits.
But about my action produced in a context, we can ask if it is appropriate
or inappropriate in the light of the norms defining intelligible behavior
in such a context; indeed this is a question that any agent can ask about
his own actions. In asking this, he has to characterize his actions in such
a way that he becomes self-conscious about what he is doing.
Alasdair Maclntyre 179
An agent, for example (my example, not Hegel's), may find himself
performing a set of multifarious individual actions. Becoming conscious
of the character of these, he becomes aware that his overall conduct
is jealous, let us say, or cowardly. But now he is able to place, indeed
cannot but place, his conduct qua jealous or qua cowardly in rela-
tion to what Hegel calls 'the given circumstances, situations, habits,
customs, religion, and so forth,' that is, in relation to the relevant
norms and responses of his culture. But to do this is to provide him-
self with reasons, perhaps decisive reasons, for altering his conduct in
the light of those norms and responses and of his own goals. It is
of the nature of the character traits of a rational agent that they are
never simply fixed and determinate, but that for the agent to discover
what they are in relation to his unity as a self-conscious agent—that
is, what they are in his personal and social context—is to open up
to the agent the possibility of exchanging what he is for what he
is not.
Moreover, the agent who does not change his traits may change their
manifestations. Indeed, for him to become conscious that he manifests
certain traits and so appears in a certain light is to invite him to do just
this. The relation of external appearance, including facial appearance,
to character is such that the discovery that any external appearance is
taken to be a sign of a certain type of character is a discovery that an
agent may then exploit to conceal his character. Hence, another saying
of Lichtenberg, in Uber Physiognomik, which Hegel also quotes: 'Suppose
the physiognomist ever did have a man in his grasp; it would merely
require a courageous resolution on the man's part to make himself again
incomprehensible for centuries.'
II
Yet who now is likely to be impressed by the claims of physiognomy?
Reading Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Mens-
chenkenntniss und Menschenliebe, with all its romantic whimsy—Lavater
on the basis of a youthful acquaintance associated piercing eyes with
power of memory, for instance—one might well ask, ought anyone ever
to have been impressed by such claims? Part of the answer is that we
should be interested in bad sciences, if only in order to illuminate
the contrast with good ones. The study of astrology, physiognomy, or
phrenology is justified insofar as it helps us to understand the character
of chemistry and physiology. But another part of the answer concerns
the way in which certain issues may be raised in just the same way by
180 Hegel on Faces and Skulls
bad sciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy, as by good ones,
such as genetics or neurophysiology.
In the case of phrenology some of the central theses actually sur-
vive through the history of physiology into the present day. It was, for
instance, a central thesis of phrenology that different types of activity
were localized in different areas of the brain. This thesis survives in a
somewhat different form, although our contemporary understanding of
localization is very different from that of the phrenologists. There is sec-
ondly the thesis, distinctively phrenological, that the different areas of
the brain correspond to different areas of the cranial bone, and that the
shapes of these areas, the famous bumps of the phrenologists, reveal the
different degrees of development of each area of the brain. It is scarcely
necessary to remark that this empirical contention is false. There is
finally the thesis that the local activity of the brain is the sufficient
cause and explanation of behavior, and that therefore the shape of the
cranium allows us to predict behavior.
Buried in these dubious contentions is one that is less obviously dubi-
ous, that is indeed familiar and widely accepted. I mean of course the
thesis that there are biochemical or neural states of affairs, processes,
and events, the occurrence and the nature of which are the sufficient
causes of human actions. This thesis wore phrenological clothing in
1807; today its clothing is as fashionable as it was then, only the fash-
ions are not what they were. Moreover, when Hegel attempted to rebut
the claims of physiognomy and phrenology, he did so in such a way
that, if his rebuttal is successful, it would hold against the thesis that
I have just stated, whatever its scientific clothing.
At this point, someone may object to my metaphor. The thesis, so it
may be protested, does not merely wear scientific clothing, it is itself part
of science and, because it is a scientific thesis, it is an empirical question,
and purely an empirical question, whether it is true or false. My reply
to this point, and what I take to be Hegel's reply to this point, occupies
a large part of the rest of the essay. But it is worth noting initially that
the thesis has survived the most remarkable changes in our empirically
founded beliefs about the anatomy, physiology, and chemistry of the
human body, and that, if it is a thesis in natural science, it is certainly
not a thesis at the same level as the contention that the shape of the
brain is partly the same as that of the cranium or that the nucleic acids
play a specific part in reproduction.
In the debate about phrenology in the early nineteenth century, the
attempt to challenge the thesis was undertaken by a number of writ-
ers very different from Hegel, and his project deserves to be sharply
Alasdair MacIntyre 181
distinguished from theirs. The standard statement of the phrenologi-
cal position was taken from the writings and lectures of Franz Joseph
Gall (1758-1828) and his pupil J. C. Spurzheim, who developed Gall's
doctrine, later claiming both that he had in fact originated some of the
basic ideas and also that his doctrine was very different from that of
Gall. Gall and Spurzheim drew maps of the cranium locating not only
character traits but abilities in different parts of the brain, and their man-
ifestations in what they took to be the corresponding parts of the skull.
Examples of traits are secretiveness, combativeness, and acquisitiveness;
examples of abilities are the power of speech and the power of imagina-
tion. Gall was charged by his critics with determinism, materialism, and
consequently atheism. Both Gall and Spurzheim denied these charges,
Spurzheim seeking to show that they held of Gall's version of phrenol-
ogy but not of his. The critics in question, notably Francis Jeffrey, the
editor, and Brougham, the lawyer, fastened all their attention on the
alleged causes, seeking to show that the mental cannot have a physical,
or more specifically a physiological cause. To show this, they rely on a
simple dualism of matter and mind, and the vapid naivete of Gall's and
Spurzheim's science is matched only by the vapid naivete of Jeffrey's and
Brougham's philosophy.
The spirit of their attack on phrenology is as alien to the spirit of
Hegel's attack as any could be. Hegel's opposition to Cartesian dualism
is of so thorough-going a kind that he would have had to reject all the
premises of Jeffrey's and Brougham's attacks. Nor is Hegel interested in
showing that there cannot be physiological causes of the type cited by
the phrenologists. His whole attention is focused not on the existence or
nonexistence of the alleged causes, but on the character of their alleged
effects. Hegel deploys a number of arguments that are closely allied to
his arguments against physiognomy in the interests of his conclusion
that 'it must be regarded as a thoroughgoing denial of reason to treat
a skull bone as the actuality of conscious life.... ' What Hegel means
by this is indicated by his further contention that 'It is no use to say
we merely draw an inference from the outer as to the inner, which is
something different...Hegel wants to say that if we regard the traits
of a rational agent as belonging to the type of item that can stand in
a genuinely causal relation to anatomical or physiological or chemical
states, then we are misconceiving the traits of a rational agent. Why
does Hegel think this? We can usefully begin from a point that Hegel
did not make in his discussion of physiognomy.
Traits are neither determinate nor fixed. What does it mean to say that
they are not determinate? 'Just as, e.g., many people complain of feeling
182 Hegel on Faces and Skulls
a painful tension in the head when thinking intensely, or even when
thinking at all, so it might be that stealing, committing murder, writ-
ing poetry, and so on, could each be accompanied with its own proper
feeling, which would over and above be bound to have its peculiar local-
ization.' Hegel's discussion in terms of the localization of feeling has of
course a specific reference to contemporary phrenology; but what he
goes on to say about local feelings can easily be translated into a thesis
about particular dispositions.
Feeling in general is something indeterminate, and that feeling in the
head as the center might well be the general feeling that accompa-
nies all suffering; so that mixed up with the thief's, murderer's, poet's
tickling or pain in the head there would be other feelings, too, and
they would permit of being distinguished from one another, or from
those we may call mere bodily feelings, as little as an illness can be
determined from the symptom of headache if we restrict its meaning
merely to the bodily element.1
What would the corresponding theses about dispositions be? Let us con-
sider points from two of Hegel's examples—those of the murderer and of
the poet. A given murderer, for instance, commits his crime because he
fears his own humiliation by losing his beloved. If we are to look at the
traits and other qualities manifested in his action, they do not include
a disposition to commit murder, but such things perhaps as a general
intolerance of suffering, a disposition to avoid specific kinds of humili-
ation, his love for the young woman, and so on. The same dispositions
might explain to precisely the same extent the same person's outbidding
others in giving to a deserving cause in order to impress the same young
woman. But just this fact puts in question the use of the word 'explain.'
Hegel makes this point in relation to phrenology: 'And again his mur-
derous propensity can be referred to any bump or hollow, and this in
turn to any mental quality; for the murderer is not the abstraction of a
murderer.... '2
Suppose that to this the reply is made that the same given set of dispo-
sitions may well produce quite different actions, but that this is because
the agent is responding to quite different situations (although in some
sense, in my example, the situations are certainly the same). So that we
explain the particular action by reference to a conjunction of a set of dis-
positions and some feature of the situation, we then explain the action
in an entirely familiar and unproblematic way by appealing to a gener-
alization of the form 'Whenever such and such a set of dispositions and
Alasdair MacIntyre 183
such and such a type of situation are conjoined, such and such an action
will occur.' To cite human traits in such an explanation would be pre-
cisely parallel to citing the dispositional properties of physical objects in
explaining physical events.
But this is to suppose that what the agent is responding to is some
conjunction of properties and not a highly specific and particular his-
torical situation. No empiricist would be prepared to draw this contrast;
for him, there is nothing to any specific historical situation but a set
of properties, the conjunction of which may as a matter of contin-
gent fact be unrepeated, but which is in fact repeatable. Why, then,
does Hegel insist on the contrast and deny this characteristic empiricist
contention?
A particular historical situation cannot on Hegel's view be dissolved
into a set of properties. One reason for this is that such a situation has to
be characterized in terms of relations to earlier particular events and sit-
uations. There is an internal reference to the events and situations that
constitute its history. So the English revolt against Charles I not only has
as key properties reactions to particular acts of Charles 1, but responses
to events and situations in the past as recent as acts of Elizabeth and
as far off as Magna Carta and the Norman Conquest. To respond to a
particular situation, event, or state of affairs is not to respond to any
situation, event, or state of affairs with the same or similar properties;
it is to respond to that situation conceived by both the agents who
respond to it and those whose actions constitute it as the particular that
it is.
Suppose that to this position some empiricist were to respond as
follows: that the agents treat the situation as particular and that the
situation is partially constituted and defined by reference to the par-
ticular events and situations, does not show that everything relevant
to explanation cannot be expressed in terms of repeatable proper-
ties. But this reply fails to notice one key point. Hegel would be the
last to assert the ultimacy of unanalyzed and unanalyzable particu-
lars (such as Russell's logical atoms). But he does assert what we may
call the ultimacy of concreteness. What the ultimacy of concreteness
amounts to is this: just as there are good conceptual reasons for holding
that existence is not a property, so there are good conceptual reasons
for holding that occurrence at some specific time and place is not a
property.
By a property 1 mean that kind of attribute which a subject of the
appropriate type (appropriate for that type of attribute) may or may
not possess, which a given subject may possess at one time but not at
184 Hegel on Faces and Skulls
another, and which may (although it need not) be possessed by more
than one subject. On such an account of properties, existence fails to
count as a property, because the appropriate type of subject cannot
either possess it or fail to possess it and because the appropriate type
of subject cannot possess it at one time but not at another. On the same
account of properties, occurrence at some specific time and place (for
example, at 3 p.m. in the year 1776 at the point where the Greenwich
meridian crosses the south bank of the Thames) fails to count as a
property, because any subject of the appropriate type (events, situa-
tions, states of affairs) cannot possess any particular example of this
attribute at one time but not at another and because any particular
example of this type of attribute cannot be possessed by more than one
subject.
It is properties about which we construct genuine empirical general-
izations of such forms as (СФхФх) and (СФхФу), in which the values of
variables of the type of Ф and Ф are property-ascribing predicates. But it
is on Hegel's view universals particularized in their concrete occurrence
to which we respond in our actions—particulars which we encounter
in the actual world as the intentional objects of our beliefs, attitudes,
and emotions. A poet does not take pride in his having written some
poem that has properties of such and such a kind, but in his having
written this poem. A murderer did not strike out at anyone who hap-
pened to have such and such properties but at this person. Just because
this concreteness is not constituted by a mere collection of properties, it
evades causal generalizations and so makes causal explanation, whether
phrenological or neurophysiological, inapplicable.
Note what Hegel is not saying. Hegel is not asserting that the move-
ments of the murderer's hand or the poet's hand do not have causal
explanations. Nor is he asserting that it is impossible that there should
be agents with responses only to the abstract universal and not to the
concrete. It is just that insofar as someone did respond to presenta-
tions of properties with the degree of uniformity that would warrant
the construction of causal generalizations, he would not be at all like
characteristic human agents as we actually know them and as they actu-
ally exist. It is a contingent empirical fact about human beings that they
are as they are and not otherwise, but in Hegel's philosophy there is no
objection to taking notice of such contingent empirical facts. Nonethe-
less, Hegel is not denying that it is logically possible for some human
actions to have causes, and he is not denying that some human actions
do or may have physiological causes. Let me draw a parallel with another
type of case.
Alasdair MacIntyre 185
Some Africans who believe in witchcraft point out that to explain the
onset of a disease by referring to bacterial or virus infection leaves unex-
plained such facts as that Jones should have been afflicted by such an
infection immediately after quarreling with Smith. 'What is the cause
of that conjunction?' they enquire, pointing out that Western science
gives no answer. Now, if indeed it were true that every event had a
cause, that event which is Jones-going-down-with-measles-on-the-day-
after-he-quarreled-with-Smith would presumably have a cause. But no
champion of the explanatory powers of natural science feels affronted
by the assertion that this is not an event with a cause or an explanation,
although the event that is Jones-going-down-with-measles certainly has
a cause and an explanation. So also, when Hegel allows that a cer-
tain kind of causal explanation will not give us the understanding that
we require of self-conscious rational activity, his argument does not
require him to deny that many properties of the agents engaged in such
activities will have such explanations.
I now return to Hegel's point that traits are not determinate or fixed.
I have argued that the indeterminacy of traits is an indeterminacy vis-
a-vis any action or given set of actions. From the fact that an agent has
a given trait, we cannot deduce what he will do in any given situation,
and the trait cannot itself be specified in terms of some determinate
set of actions that it will produce. What does it mean to say that traits
are not fixed? Let me reiterate the crucial fact about self-consciousness,
already brought out in Hegel's discussion of physiognomy; that is, its
self-negating quality: being aware of what I am is conceptually insep-
arable from confronting what I am not, but could become. Hence, for
a self-conscious agent to have a trait is for that agent to be confronted
by an indefinitely large set of possibilities of developing, modifying, or
abolishing that trait. Action springs not from fixed and determinate dis-
positions, but from the confrontation in consciousness of what I am by
what I am not.
It is a failure to notice this that on Hegel's view most of all underlies
those would-be sciences that aspire to give to observation the same role
in the study of human beings that it has in enquiries into nature. For
what we can observe in nature is, so to speak, all that there is to discover;
but what we can observe in human beings is the expression of rational
activity, which cannot be understood as merely the sum of the move-
ments that we observe. (For a Hegelian, Hume's failure to discover the
character of personal identity is the result of his fidelity to the methods
and criteria of observation.) From Hegel's position, a radical thesis about
experimental psychology would follow.
186 Hegel on Faces and Skulls
For a large class of psychological experiments, a necessary condition
for experimental success is that the stimulus that is administered or the
situation with which the agent is confronted shall have its effect inde-
pendently of the agent's reflection on the situation. The situation or the
stimulus must be the same for all experimental subjects; so one subject's
envisaging the situation in a particular way must not constitute that sit-
uation a different one from that which it is for a subject who envisages
that situation in some quite different way. Now, there is a real ques-
tion as to whether this requirement can ever in fact be satisfied except
in experiments in which the stimulus is purely physical (for example,
a variation in intensity of light) and the response purely physiological
(for example, a constriction of the pupil). But this question I shall put on
one side. What Hegel would assert is that even if such experiments are
possible, they are so different from the key situations in which rational
agents operate, that any inferences from the behavior of such experi-
mental subjects to behavior outside the experimental situation will be
liable to lead us into error.
Ill
Whatever else the arguments in this essay may or may not establish,
they do seem to show that between the Hegelian mode of understanding
human action and the mode that has dominated characteristic mod-
em thinking about the relevance of such sciences as neurophysiology
and genetics, there is a basic incompatibility. Hence, the refutation of
Hegelianism in the relevant respects would be a prerequisite for that
mode of thought and not merely that kind of positivistic refutation
to which Hegel has so often been subjected. Whether a more ade-
quate refutation is possible, I shall not discuss here. What I do want
to do, in conclusion, is to try to characterize Hegel's alternative mode of
understanding enquiry into human action.
Three features of Hegel's account stand out: the first is the way in
which each stage in the progress of rational agents is seen as a movement
towards goals that are only articulated in the course of the movement
itself. Human action is characteristically neither blind and goalless nor
the mere implementation of means to an already decided end. Acting
that is the bringing about of such an end by a calculated means cer-
tainly has a place, but a subordinate place, in human activity. That it
is only in the course of the movement that the goals of the movement
are articulated is the reason why we can understand human affairs only
after the event. The owl of Minerva, as Hegel was later to put it, flies
Alasda ir Macln tyre 187
only at dusk. The understanding of human beings is not predictive in
the way that natural science is.
The second feature of Hegel's account is the role of rational criticism
of the present in the emergence of the future. Hegel did not believe that
the future followed from the present simply as its rational sequel; this
he denies as strongly as Voltaire does. But it is in the working out of the
failure of the present to satisfy the canons of reason that the future is
made. It is this which involves Hegel in seeing history as composed of
sequences in which the actions that constitute later stages of sequences
involve reference to, and thus presuppose the occurrence of, actions that
constituted earlier stages of the same sequences. The sequences that
constitute history are themselves discrete and can stand in the same
logical relation to each other as can the stages of a single sequence. The
doctrine that all the sequences of history constitute a single movement
towards the goal of a consciousness of the whole that is absolute spirit
is a thesis certainly held by Hegel himself to be the key to his whole
doctrine. Yet some of Hegel's other theses as to human history, includ-
ing those that I have discussed, do not seem in any way to entail his
doctrine about the Absolute, and to be unwilling to admit the truth of
that doctrine ought not to be a source of prejudice against Hegel's other
claims.
A third feature of Hegel's account relates closely to his criticism of
physiognomy and phrenology. Historical narratives are for Hegel not a
source of data to be cast into theoretical form by such would-be sciences.
Instead Hegel sees our understanding of contingent regularities as being
always contributory to the construction of a certain kind of historical
narrative. History, informed by philosophical understanding, provides
a more ultimate kind of knowledge of human beings than enquiries
whose theoretical structure is modeled on that of the natural sciences.
It is outside the scope of this essay to develop or to assess Hegel's view
on this matter, but a concluding remark may be in place.
It concerns the question: if history is not a matter of general laws
and of theories, in what sense does it give us understanding at all? The
Hegelian reply is that the self-knowledge of a self-conscious rational
agent has always to be cast in a historical form. The past is present in
the self in so many and so important ways that, lacking historical knowl-
edge, our self-knowledge will be fatally limited. Moreover, this type of
self-knowledge could never be yielded by theoretical sciences that aspire
to explain behavior in terms of physiological structures and processes.
It is in fact just because our history constitutes us as what we are to
so great an extent, that any explanation that omits reference to that
188 Hegel on Faces and Skulls
history, as did and do the explanations of phrenology and neurophys-
iology, may explain the aptitudes and conditions of the human body,
but not those of the human spirit.
Notes
1. [PhG 1334, Editors' Remark].
2. [PhG 1335, Editors' Remark].
11
What Does it Mean to 'Make
Oneself Into An Object'?
In Defense of a Key Notion of
Hegel's Theory of Action
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch
I
In Hegel's Jena Philosophy of Spirit (PhilS) and the Phenomenology of Spirit
(PhG),1 many events, agents, and activities are described with the help
of the expressions 'to externalize oneself' [sich entaufem], 'to make one-
self into an object' [sich zum Gegenstande machen]2 and 'to make oneself
into a thing' [sich zum Dinge machen]. For instance, Hegel repeatedly
characterizes the exchange (purchase, sell) of goods and the comple-
tion of contracts (pertaining to private law) as events in which people
'externalize themselves' (PhilS 124; see also PhilS 123-4). Analyzing the
'beautiful soul' in the chapter on 'Morality' in the PhG, Hegel writes
that its shape 'lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make
itself into a thing, and to endure being' (PhG <1658). Finally, Hegel states
on several occasions that the activity of working is to be understood
as an 'externalization' (PhilS 123) or 'self-objectification' (PhilS 103) of
the acting individual who 'makes himself into a thing' (PhilS 103):
'In working, I make myself immediately into a thing, a form which is
being.'3
Similar formulations can be found at decisive points in the passage
of Hegel's oeuvre that has garnered the most attention from his inter-
preters,4 namely, his analysis of the relation between 'Mastery and
Servitude.' Here Hegel argues that the servant becomes an object 'as the
form of the thing' (PhG <]] 197) he produces, and that he thereby comes to
view the sphere of 'independent being as his own self' (PhG <J195). Hegel
grounds these theses in the statement that the servant's 'own negativity,
189
190 Making Oneself Into An Object
his being-for-itself' becomes an object for the servant "when he forms
the thing' (PhG <j[196).
Hegel's remarks can be traced back to the theory of the will that he
developed in his Jena period. Indeed, Hegel commences his investiga-
tion of the will in the PhilS with the following assertion: 'That which
is willing [das Wollende] wills, i.e., it wants to posit itself or make itself,
as itself, into an object.'5 Everything that is willing thus strives to make
itself into an object as something that is willing. For Hegel this striving
is an essential—if not the essential—aspect of every willful activity. (This
follows from his use of the 'i.e.' in the sentence cited above.)
If striving to make oneself into an object is a key feature of Hegel's
theory of willful activity, then it is also of huge interest for his theory
of action and of work. Action and work are, without a question, willful
activities for Hegel.6 Moreover, since Hegel claims to show that rational
(vemiinftig) social relations are to be understood as an adequate actu-
alization of his concept of the will (cf. PhilS 99-183), the striving to
make oneself into an object is also a key element of his institutional
theory—and thus of his political and social philosophy.7
In view of these findings, it is surprising that there has been next
to no attempt to determine the content and usefulness of Hegel's con-
cept of making oneself into an object.8 While many Hegel interpreters
and social philosophers working in the Hegelian (and Marxian) tradition
have emphasized how Hegel opens up a new understanding of work by
defining 'work' as the individual's making himself into an object, the
following issues remain unclear:
(i)	which qualities Hegel's concept of making oneself into an object
possesses;
(ii)	which phenomena fall under this concept;
(iii)	whether Hegel's concept of making oneself into an object is an
intelligible concept; and
(iv)	whether it is a useful concept from the standpoint of action theory
or political and social philosophy.
Let me briefly address each of these issues in turn.
(i)	In investigating this point, one must clarify (a) what exactly is being
made into an object when a human individual makes himself into
an object and (b) why, in such cases, an individual does not only
make some thing, but also himself into an object. Surprisingly, many
authors dealing with Hegel's concept of making oneself into an
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 191
object do not raise these questions at all. Some Hegel commen-
tators and philosophers in the Hegelian tradition have expressed
the view that specific abilities are objectified when a human indi-
vidual makes himself into an object.9 By contrast, Ernst Michael
Lange has argued that what is made into an object are the purposes
or intentions of the individual that is making himself into an object
(cf. Lange, 1980, pp. 38-49). In this context, it should be noted that
none of the present discussions provide a satisfactory treatment of
the question of the conditions under which an individual not only
makes some thing (e.g. specific abilities or purposes), but also him-
self into an object. The neglect of this question becomes even more
surprising once one recalls that Hegel himself emphasizes this very
aspect of 'making oneself into an object' in the first sentence of his
Jena theory of the will.10
(ii)	With regard to the phenomena falling under the concept of mak-
ing oneself into an object, it should be noted that many authors
proceed from the idea that only actions that are work may count as
cases of an individual 'making himself into an object/ treating this
point as if it were self-evident. Two factors may be responsible for
this situation. First, Hegel describes a specific form of work—that
of the 'servant' in the service of the 'master'—in a very prominent
passage of his work with the phrase 'to become oneself an object.'11
Second, Marx's influential interpretation of the PhG aspires to show
that already in Hegel, work is treated as a—if not the only—relevant
activity from the standpoint of anthropology.12 Speaking against
the thesis that a human individual can only make himself into an
object through his work, however, is the fact that Hegel himself
treats actions that are not work, either in his view or ours, as cases
of an agent's 'making himself into an object.'13 It therefore remains
to be investigated whether Hegel's concept of making oneself into
an object can be reconstructed in such a way that it becomes clear
why it can also refer to actions that are not work.
(iii)	It has recently been argued that Hegel's concept of making oneself
into an object is not intelligible (cf. Wildt, 1997, p. 106). Underly-
ing this argument is the claim that the term 'object' [Gegenstand] in
'making oneself into an object' can refer to a material object only.
At first glance the claim is supported by the fact that Hegel also
uses the word 'thing' [Ding] in many related contexts,14 and that
'thing' usually describes something material. If the word 'object'
in 'making oneself an object' refers to a material object, however,
then it is indeed unclear what it means for a human individual
192 Making Oneself Into An Object
to make himself into an object through an activity that he carries
out. For neither the aim pursued by an individual nor the abilities
he employs to realize this aim can become material objects. Conse-
quently the idea that a human being 'makes himself into an object'
would make 'in no way any sense' (Wildt, 1997, p. 106), and should
therefore be abandoned.
In view of this objection, it remains to be investigated whether
the expression 'object' in 'making oneself into an object' does in
fact refer to a material object. Only if this is not the case is there a
possibility of refuting the above claim that the idea that a human
being makes himself into an object 'in no way any sense.'
(iv)	While the notion of making oneself into an object is regarded as
fruitful by some authors,15 its usefulness has also been recently con-
tested on the basis of several different arguments. Jurgen Habermas,
for instance, has expressed the view that the concept of work as
making oneself into an object 'transfers [...] the romantic [...]
ideal of an individuality creatively realizing itself [... ] to the prac-
tical working life.'16 In Habermas's estimation, such a concept is
useless from the perspectives of social theory and social philosophy.
This is said to be due to the historical development of work.17
Axel Honneth, by contrast, offers an action-theoretical critique
of what he has termed the 'objectification model' [Vergegenstandli-
chungsmodell] of human action. In his view,
[t]he objectification model creates the mistaken impression that
all individual traits and abilities are something always already
fully given in the mind, and that they can then be subsequently
expressed in the act of production.
(Honneth, 1995, pp. 147-8)
If this thought is extended beyond the activities of 'production' to
include reference to other actions as well,18 two objections against
the concept of making oneself into an object can be derived from
it. Each of these rests on different claims.
The first objection can be put as follows: for an agent to objectify
something, this something must be 'fully given in [her] mind' before
the onset of the activity of objectification. If what is to be objecti-
fied is a technical 'ability,' then the agent must first know that she
possesses this ability and how she can employ it. Only then can she
objectify it by successfully implementing the appropriate ability.19
Understood in this way, the objectification model encounters the
objection that only practical activity can establish which relevant
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 193
'traits and abilities' the agent possesses. Does the agent really have
the ability that she intends to employ with her practical activity,
or does she mistakenly ascribe it to herself? In Honneth's view,
this question can only be answered on the basis of actions, and
not by means of what is given 'in the [agent's] mind' only, which
is precisely what he believes the objectification model erroneously
maintains.
The second objection might be captured in the following way:
the objectification model assumes that 'all' the agent's 'traits and
abilities' that are relevant for a practical activity must be some-
thing 'fully given in [her] mind' before the activity is carried out.
Only if this condition is fulfilled can the activity in question be
an objectification of that individual. So interpreted, the model
is unsuited to explaining human action because many activities
we consider actions involve—on the part of the agent—tackling
unforeseen problems for which she must find solutions by devel-
oping or employing abilities that she did not consider at first. Since
these aspects of actions are implicitly denied by the objectification
model, Honneth argues, this model creates a 'mistaken impression'
of the very phenomena it claims to explain.
Our discussion of points (i) through (iv) sheds light on a number of
objections that have been raised against the idea that a human indi-
vidual makes himself into an object. We might summarize these as
follows:
0-1 The idea of making oneself into an object is not intelligible
because neither the aim pursued by an individual nor the abilities
he employs to realize his aim can become material objects.
0-2 The idea of making oneself into an object is a romantic notion
that is useless for social theory and social philosophy.
0-3 The idea of making oneself into an object rests on the problem-
atic assumption that something can only be made an object if it is
'fully given in the mind' of the agent before the onset of the activity
of objectification.
0-4 The idea of making oneself into an object rests on the problem-
atic assumption that 'all' the agent's 'traits and abilities' that are
relevant for a particular action must be 'fully given in [his] mind'
before the onset of the activity of objectification.
Is Hegel's concept of making oneself into an object affected by such
objections? It is worth noting here that some of the objections outlined
194 Making Oneself Into An Object
above rest on incompatible claims. Objection 0-1 presupposes that
'making oneself into an object' means as much as 'making oneself
into a material object'; this, however, is precisely what objections 0-2,
0-3, and 0-4 exclude. Furthermore, Habermas's and Honneth's remarks
give rise to several objections (0-2, 0-3, and 0-4) that ascribe dif-
ferent—albeit not mutually exclusive—traits to the 'model' of making
oneself into an object. These findings explain why it cannot be the
case that all of the objections discussed in connection with points
(i) through (iv) are applicable to Hegel's concept of making oneself into
an object.
In order to evaluate the legitimacy of the above objections it is essen-
tial, in my view, to come to a more precise understanding of Hegel's
concept of making oneself into an object. In this context it is neces-
sary to clarify, among other things, what is made into an object when a
human individual makes himself into an object, and why in such cases
an individual makes not only some thing, but also himself into an object.
Moreover, conceptual analysis required in this connection should also
make clear why Hegel's concept of making oneself into an object can
refer to actions that are not work.
Surprisingly, the passage in Hegel's oeuvre in which the concept of
making oneself into an object is treated most extensively has not been
taken into consideration by many of the authors named above: this is
the chapter entitled 'Will' in the PhilS (cf. PhilS 99-118, esp. 99-103).
(The reason for this may be that the PhilS is a manuscript that Hegel did
not prepare for publication, and whose language remains in a very poor
condition.) Instead, many publications on Hegel's concept of making
oneself into an object rely on a passage in his work that says compar-
atively little about the topic and that presupposes the remarks in the
PhilS: the analysis of the relation between 'Mastery and Servitude' in the
PhG. This fact might explain the desiderata laid out above.20
In what follows I provide a detailed analysis of the thematically rel-
evant passages out of the chapter on the 'Will' in the PhilS. In so
doing, I shall demonstrate that what is made into an object when a
human individual makes himself into an object is a 'purpose' [Zweck]
(PhilS 99) to which the agent has a specific relationship. My analysis
will also explicate the sense in which the agent can be said to make
himself into an object. Furthermore, I explain why Hegel's concept of
making oneself into an object is not affected by the objections dis-
cussed above (0-1 through 0-4). I show that this concept does not
rest on the assumption that a human individual makes himself a mate-
rial object, and is therefore not unintelligible for this reason. Moreover,
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 195
I shall also explain why Hegel's concept cannot be criticized for being
a 'romantically transfigured [... ] ideal' that is useless for social theory
and philosophy. Finally, I demonstrate why Hegel's concept of mak-
ing oneself into an object does not presuppose that 'all' the agent's
'traits and abilities' relevant for an action must be 'fully' present for
him prior to carrying out the activity. Rather, what is objectified is
only adequately given in the process of the practical activity—even for
the agent himself. Hegel's concept of making oneself into an object is
left untouched by the above-mentioned objections—and for this reason
can be considered a concept that has the potential to be an attrac-
tive notion from the standpoint of action theory or political and social
philosophy.
II
Hegel begins his investigation of the will in the PhilS with the following
statement already cited: 'That which is willing [das Wollende] wills, i.e.,
it wants to posit itself or make itself, as itself, into an object.' (PhilS 99)
As mentioned above, Hegel thus holds that everything that is willing
strives to make itself into an object as something that is willing. And he
obviously believes that this striving is an essential aspect of every willful
activity.21
The three 'moments' of the will
What are the characteristics of the will to make oneself into an object?
To shed light on this question, it must first be noted that Hegel speci-
fies the 'concept of the will' (PhilS 100) by way of what he terms 'der
Schluss.' As Hegel says, willing is an activity that 'is the Schluss in itself'
(PhilS 100). In my view, Hegel makes this statement for two reasons:
First, he wishes to say that willing is an activity that realizes the structure
of the Schluss, which is one of the categories of his science of logic. And
secondly, he aims to point out that phenomenologically he takes willing
to be a Beschluss, namely, an activity through which a human individual
decides to do something. As an act of decision, willing has the following
characteristics:
(a) it is the universal, purpose [Zweck]; (b) it is the particular [das
Einzelne], the self, activity, actuality; (c) it is the middle (term) [Mitte]
of these two, the drive [der Trieb]. The drive is two-sided: [there is] the
side that has the content, the universal, which is purpose; and the
side of the active self.22
196 Making Oneself Into An Object
However difficult the passage is to understand, this much is certain—
willing is an activity that sets the following three 'moments' [Momente]
(PhilS 99) in relation to each other: (1) a self-consciousness, (2) a specific
attitude ('drive'), and (3) a universal 'content' [Inhalt] that can func-
tion as a 'purpose' [Zweck]. Hegel describes 'the particular' as 'the self,
activity, actuality' in order to take the following philosophical stance: as
self-consciousness ('the self'), a spatio-temporally individuated (and in
this sense particular) entity is not a thinking substance in the Cartesian
sense, but rather an activity [Tatigkeit], and it is characterized by a spe-
cific activity that is 'actuality' [Wirklichkeit] because it cannot fail: the
reference to oneself with the word 'I/ Indeed, this kind of self-reference
is characterized by the fact that the act of referring constitutes the
object of reference. Hegel makes clear that he sees a characteristic of
self-consciousness in this 'activity' not only in the passage at hand, but
also in other places in his work.23
As something that wills, however, a self-consciousness not only refers
to itself, it is also 'linked' to something else, namely its 'purpose.' What
this self-consciousness wills (or wants) is the execution of an action of a
certain kind, and this is something it is aware of. Since what it wills
(or wants) is specified by the purpose in a propositional way—as an
action of the kind X—Hegel says that the purpose is 'universal' or has a
universal 'content.'
Hegel's remarks also suggest that the 'drive' is the 'middle (term)'
between the particular self-consciousness and the universal content. But
how does the drive mediate between them? Of particular relevance to
this question is a passage in which Hegel specifies one of the 'ways' in
which the Schluss is realized through the act of willing. He writes:
The concrete way in which the Schluss is posited in the I is such
that all its moments are enclosed in the self as the universal, as
global, [so that] each moment now is the totality, and their opposi-
tion [Gegensatz] is merely an empty form for self-consciousness. What
constitutes the force of the Schluss or the will is that the self, insofar
as it has an external aspect, is in this very aspect taken back into
itself [...].24
What's important here is that self-consciousness considers what it wills
as its own purpose. Strictly speaking, self-consciousness cannot be said to
stand here in a relation to itself and to a particular purpose. Rather it
refers to itself as it stands in relation to the purpose. This point can be
elucidated by way of describing the attitude in question with the help
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 197
of the phrase 'I want that I do X.' When there is such a self-relation
in self-consciousness' relation to the purpose, then there is no "oppo-
sition' for the self between the different "moments' of the will.25 This
is because in its purpose the self is "taken back into itself/ as Hegel
puts it.
We thus have to ask: when is a self-consciousness "taken back into
itself' in its purpose? When does it regard what it wills as its own
purpose? Hegel writes:
(The Schluss, rounded in itself, is at the same time turned outward—it
is actual consciousness, although it is here enclosed within the I and
regarded as such.) Namely, the will is being-for-itself which has extin-
guished all foreign content within itself. But thus it is left without
an other, without content—and it feels this lack. [...] The nega-
tive, exclusive [element] is thus in the will itself—so that it is therein
concerned only with itself, and is thus that which is excluded from
itself. [In this way] the purpose stands juxtaposed to the self; [and]
particularity, actuality stands juxtaposed to the universal.26
The above passage thematizes the ability of the self-consciousness to
distance itself from its purpose. In such distancing, self-consciousness
is no longer "linked' to the "purpose' through the "drive'; it no longer
wills (or wants to do) X. Rather, it refers (i) to itself as a subject that
has the capacity to posit purposes, and (ii) to the "content' that was its
purpose as a possible purpose for itself. Thus, what is "without an other,
without content' is this self-consciousness, because as a result of its self-
distancing it has no "content' that it presently wills. (I assume here that
it only had that one purpose.)
From the Hegelian standpoint, a self-consciousness will only regard
what it wills as its own purpose if it believes that it can distance itself
from this purpose. If it believes this, however, then self-consciousness
is also convinced that the purpose to which it is linked by its drive is
posited by itself—for it believes, then, that it only has this purpose so
long as it wills it. Consequently, one can say that this self-consciousness
considers its will to do X as one way of realizing its freedom to posit
purposes. In Hegel's view, this freedom is a necessary condition for the
self-consciousness to refer to itself in its relation to the purpose, and
to realize the "way/ discussed above, in which "the Schluss is posited in
the I.' That Hegel advocates this position can be seen in the example
of his claim, cited above,27 that "the Schluss, rounded in itself'—that is,
the 1 which is "taken back in itself' in its purpose—is also something else:
198 Making Oneself Into An Object
namely, 'consciousness' enclosed within the 'I/ that is, the ability of
self-consciousness to distance itself from this purpose.28
Does self-consciousness' self-relation in its relation to the purpose
require the fulfillment of other conditions as well? The Jena PhilS cer-
tainly leaves this impression. As we have seen, Hegel supports the thesis
that the force of the will, that is, the persistence with which a self is
ready to pursue its purpose, can be explained with that individual's self-
relation in his relation to the purpose: 'What constitutes the force of the
Schluss or the will is that the self, insofar as it has an external aspect,
is in this very aspect taken back into itself However, the per-
sistence with which a self-consciousness pursues a purpose cannot be
explained by its ability to distance itself from its purpose, since a self-
consciousness can ascribe this ability to itself with reference to purposes
that it regards as trivial and is not willing to pursue with persistence.29
To be sure, if one assumes that self-consciousness considers the pursuit
of its purpose as important, then one can explain why it would want
to fight against resistance it might encounter when trying to realize its
purpose. From Hegel's statement regarding the 'force' of the will, it thus
seems to follow that a self-consciousness can only be related to itself
in his relation to the purpose when it finds this purpose important to
pursue.
Is this conclusion correct? I don't think so. Three arguments can be
made here. First, Hegel does not explicitly hold the above claim (that
a self-consciousness can only be related to itself in its relation to the
purpose when it finds this purpose important to pursue). Second, he
believes that every act of willing is an I's self-relation in his relation to a
purpose. (This follows from the statement, cited above, that 'that which
is willing wills, i.e., it wants to posit itself or make itself, as itself, into
an object.') In view of this it would be implausible that Hegel would
then claim that a self-consciousness can only be related to itself in pur-
poses it finds important to pursue. Third, Hegel sometimes characterizes
activities that do not seem to be regarded as important by the agent
as cases of that self-consciousness' se/f-externalization or making itself
into an object (cf. PhilS 123-4). In light of these findings we are justified
in concluding that it is not necessary that self-consciousness regard the
pursuit of its purpose as important in order for it be related to itself in
its purpose. And since Hegel does not introduce any other factors in this
connection, his reflections lead to the following conclusion: in order for
a self-consciousness to be related to itself in its purpose, it is both neces-
sary and sufficient that this self-consciousness ascribes itself the ability
to distance itself from its purposes.
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 199
It should be noted that in Hegel's view the self-attribution of the abil-
ity to distance oneself from one's purposes is socially constituted, namely
a component of a specific practice of recognition. Hegel supports this thesis
in the PhG (in the section on 'Mastery and Servitude') with the follow-
ing argument: a particular self-consciousness can only 'prove' (PhG 31187)
its claim 'not [to be] attached to any specific existence, not to the gen-
eral particularity of existence [Dasein], nor to life as such' (PhG 31178) by
successfully participating in a specific interaction. A discussion of this
(complex) theme goes (far) beyond the limits of the present discussion.30
The 'purpose'
In view of Hegel's understanding of making oneself into an object, his
understanding of the category of the purpose is of great importance.
With regard to the 'self' that is willing, Hegel writes:
there is also a lack [Mangel] which is positive in turn. (It is the pur-
pose; the form that it is mere purpose is incomplete being [das man-
gelnde Seyn]. [... ] first reality, which is imperfect [unvollkommen].3'
It is unclear what the two instances of the pronoun 'it' in this passage
refer to. However, the passage can be given a plausible—and philoso-
phically interesting—interpretation if one takes the first 'it' to refer to
'a lack which is positive,' and the second 'it' to 'the purpose.' Hegel's
statement can then be understood as follows: there is a lack not only
when a self-consciousness refers to itself as a subject that is able to posit
purposes, that is, as a subject 'without an other, without content'32; there
is also a lack that is constituted with the positing of a particular purpose,
and that lack is 'positive.' Hegel seems to hold that this second lack
consists in the fact that the purpose is 'mere purpose'—for in this 'form'
it is 'incomplete being.'
With this statement, Hegel claims that a purpose is an entity that devel-
ops itself, an entity that, as a component of a propositional attitude such
as 'I want that I do X,' is 'imperfect' because it is a 'mere purpose' and
has no (adequate) 'being.' In Hegel's view, the purpose develops itself
by taking on another 'form' in which it is not 'mere purpose' but rather
also has 'being,' and therefore is free from the above 'lack.' As we will
see below, this development is achieved through the practical activity of
actualizing the purpose.
By qualifying the purpose in its initial form as 'incomplete being,'
Hegel takes the view that a self-consciousness that has such a pur-
pose will immediately try to realize it. Because this is the case, willing
200 Making Oneself Into An Object
in Hegel's understanding immediately constitutes a practical relation of
the willing self-consciousness to the external world. (I will return to this
point further below.)33
Making oneself into an object
With regard to the realization of purpose, Hegel writes:
The main point is the content of the object. The object separates itself
from its drive, thereby acquiring a different form; it [now] is the drive
that is quiescent, that has become itself [and is] fulfilled in itself. The
lack was in the intuition [Anschauen] of the empty I—for this was
object to itself. It held the different moments of the Schluss together;
it—not being as such—was their subsistence; it was the first imme-
diate I, but I as such. The drive having been separated from the I,
it is released from the self—or the mere fulfillment held together by
being. [This is] the work of the I; it knows its activity in this, [... ] as
activity (not as in memory), but rather so that the content as such
is [posited] through it; this is because the difference [Unterschied] as
such was its own. The difference makes up the content, and that
alone is what is important here—that the I has posited the difference
out of itself or knows it as its own.34
As Hegel emphasizes, the 'main point' is the 'content' to which self-
consciousness is 'linked' through its drive: its doing of X. At first, this
content has the 'form' of being 'mere purpose' (F-l),35 and through its
actualization it acquires 'a different form' (F-2) in which it is not merely
purpose, but also has 'being.' As Hegel's remarks suggest, the content's
change of form takes place from the standpoint of the willing and acting
self-consciousness. How might this be characterized?
When self-consciousness decides to do X, the 'content' has the form
F-l. Self-consciousness can then be said to 'hold the different moments
of the Schluss together' and to be 'their subsistence' because the content
only exists as its purpose so long as it wills this. As we have seen, self-
consciousness has this conviction since it ascribes itself the ability to
distance itself from its purpose.36 In the form F-2, by contrast, the con-
tent also exists for the acting self-consciousness as a practical activity:
its doing of X.37 Since it then forms a component of the social world,38
and is thus given for other self-consciousnesses as well,39 the content in
the form F-2 can be said to have 'being.' For this reason, Hegel writes
that it is 'being' that now holds together 'the different moments of the
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 201
Schluss,' namely, self-consciousness on the one hand and the content as
its purpose on the other.
According to these observations, the content in the form F-2 has not
only 'being' (that is, exists an element of the social world that is given
for others as well), but also continues to be a 'purpose.' (This follows
from Hegel's claim above that the content in the form F-l is 'mere pur-
pose.' Accordingly, the content in the form F-2 is not mere purpose, but
also something else—namely, 'being.') This is why Hegel describes the
content in the form F-2 as 'the drive that is quiescent, that has become
itself [and is] fulfilled in itself.' How might this be understood?
For the acting self-consciousness, the content in the form F-2 is not
only a practical activity that it carries out, but also something that it
wants to do. It is the execution of what it has decided to do. For this
reason, the content in the form F-2 is the drive that is 'fulfilled in itself'
or, as Hegel writes in another passage, 'fulfilled being.'40
Because—or: insofar as—this is so, practical activity is the 'work of
the I.' Summarizing his findings, Hegel says that two things must be the
case in order that an activity possesses the character of such work. For
one, self-consciousness must refer to itself in its purpose. As we have
seen, this condition is fulfilled by self-consciousness' ascribing to itself
the ability to distance itself from its purpose. If this is the case, then self-
consciousness is convinced that 'the content as [its purpose] is [posited]
through it'—since in its view, it only has this content so long as it wills
it. Second, self-consciousness must 'posit [... ] out of itself' this content
as its purpose, that is, understand its (practical) activity as the (successful)
execution of what it has decided to do. If this is the case, then 'it knows
its activity in this' or it 'knows it as its own.'41
As I said above, Hegel supports the thesis that everything that is will-
ing strives to 'make itself an object.' And at the beginning of his analysis
of the actualization of purpose, he states that the I 'separates [the drive]
from itself and makes it its own object' (PhilS 101). These claims can
now be elucidated. Following from our observations till now, the will-
ing I makes itself into an object by successfully realizing something,
namely a purpose it has posited itself. For self-consciousness to consider
a purpose it pursues as having been posited by itself, it is both necessary
and sufficient that self-consciousness is convinced that it can distance
itself from this purpose.
At this juncture, the social conditions or aspects of making oneself an
object should be examined. As I have already said, Hegel regards the
self-attribution of the ability to distance oneself from one's purposes as
socially constituted.42 Furthermore, when he analyzes the concept of
202 Making Oneself Into An Object
the will, Hegel states that 'the particular content of the drive cannot
be specified as yet, since there is not yet any particular content. So far,
it [the drive] has none, since we have only got so far as positing the
[mere] concept of the will. What particular drives the I has follows from
the content of its world; this is [what constitutes the content of] its
drives.'43 The last sentence of this passage suggests that the conditions
for a successful realization of a purpose of a certain type are socially con-
stituted. If this is correct, then an individual can only posit and actualize
purposes—and thus make himself into an object—as a participant in spe-
cific social practices. It is clear that Hegel shares this view from other parts
of his work, for instance in the chapter on 'Observing Reason' in the
PhG, where he argues for a social externalism of the mental (cf. Quante,
2008a, p. 102).
In view of the usefulness of Hegel's concept of making oneself into
an object for a theory of action, it is important to consider how spe-
cific the 'content' discussed above must be from the standpoint of the
willing and practically acting self-consciousness. Let us assume that a
self-consciousness decides to write an essay about Hegel's theory of
action. In order to be capable of making itself into an object by writ-
ing this essay, must this self-consciousness, at the time of making the
decision,
(i)	have already fully worked out the essay 'in its mind'?
(ii)	have planned out in detail the different steps it will carry out when
writing the essay?
(iii)	know exactly which of its technical abilities and personal traits will
support the writing of the essay?
Were self-consciousness' making itself into an object (in the Hegelian
sense) to require the fulfillment of one or more of these conditions, it
would be of little interest to a theory of action. This is because Hegel's
theory would not be suited to conceptualize purpose-guided human
activities that possess a certain degree of complexity. It is evident that
the decision to write an essay about Hegel's theory of action is normally
made in a situation in which none of the above conditions are fulfilled.
It should therefore be emphasized that Hegel's writings provide no
evidence for the claim that self-consciousness' making itself into an
object is bound to the fulfillment of any of the above three conditions.
Hegel does not claim this, nor do his discussions suggest such a con-
clusion. In contrast, Hegel's emphasis on the persistence with which
a self-consciousness can pursue its purposes44 leads one to suppose that
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 203
even activities involving the elimination of difficulties or the solution of
problems unforeseen by the acting self-consciousness, and therefore not
encompassed by its planning, can be cases of a self-consciousness' mak-
ing itself into an object. For these reasons, we can state the following in
relation to our example above. In order to make oneself into an object by
writing an essay on Hegel's theory of action, a self-consciousness must
be convinced, when it makes such a decision, that its abilities and the
resources available to it are sufficient for carrying out this activity. How-
ever, it is not required for the self-consciousness at the time of making
the decision to (i) already have fully worked out the essay 'in its mind';
(ii) have planned in detail the steps it will carry out when writing the
essay; or (iii) know exactly which of its technical abilities and personal
traits will support the writing of the essay. Its making itself into an object
does not have to consist in bringing a mentally worked out text to paper,
or in the execution of a detailed plan related to the different steps of
the work or the use of technical abilities or personal resources. Conse-
quently, the self-consciousness can make itself into an object by writing
the essay even when these activities include (i) the acquisition of tech-
nical skills, (ii) the development of personal competencies, or (iii) the
solution of unforeseen problems. What is more, such activities can give
new information to the self-consciousness regarding its technical com-
petencies, personal traits or its attitude towards its activity—for instance,
by revealing to the agent how important writing the essay really is for
him.45
Ill
Our discussion so far has presented arguments with which the goals set
in Section I can be achieved. As we have seen, a human individual makes
himself into an object by successfully actualizing something, namely a
purpose, which he regards as having been posited by himself. According
to Hegel, for an individual to regard his purpose as one he has posited
himself, it is both necessary and sufficient for him to ascribe to himself
the ability to distance himself from this purpose. In turn, he can ascribe
this ability to himself only if he successfully participates in particular
social practices.
These traits of the concept of making oneself into an object explain
why activities that are not work can fall under this concept. Obviously,
a human being not belonging to the work world can posit and pursue
purposes to which he stands in the relation required by Hegel's concept
of making oneself into an object. For instance, an individual can make
204 Making Oneself Into An Object
himself into an object in the Hegelian sense by deciding to play the
piano and by successfully carrying out this decision.
On the other hand, it is self-evident that activities that are part of
the work world can also fulfill the criteria laid out in Hegel's concept
of making oneself into an object. Since the positing and pursuit of pur-
poses by which an individual makes himself an object can be related to
the production of material objects—but do not have to be—both work
that serves the production of material objects and work that does not
(for instance the provision of services) can basically be cases of making
oneself into an object. (In Hegel's view, however, this does not apply to
work that consists in repetitive and very simple bodily movements that
do not create room for workers to posit and pursue purposes.)46 Thus it
should be remembered that both activities that count as work in Hegel's
and in our understanding and activities that do not can fall under the
concept of making oneself into an object.
According to Objection O-l47 the idea that a human being makes him-
self into an object is unintelligible. This objection rests on the claim
that the word 'object' in 'making oneself into an object' refers to a
material object. According to this claim, it is unclear what it means for
a human individual to make himself into an object—for neither the
purpose that the individual pursues nor the abilities he uses to actu-
alize his purpose can become material objects. Consequently, the idea
that a human being 'makes himself into an object' would make 'in no
way any sense' (Wildt, 1997, p. 106), and would therefore have to be
abandoned.
However, Objection O-l does not affect what Hegel says about making
oneself into an object. With regard to the question of whether an event
can be an act of making oneself into an object, it is decisive for Hegel
how the agent understands (i) her purpose and (ii) her practical activity.
Only if she regards (i) her purpose as having been posited by herself and
(ii) her practical activity as a successful actualization of this purpose,
does she make herself into an object by means of a willful and practical
activity, according to the Hegelian view.48 Making oneself into an object
thus depends on a certain understanding (or a certain description) of
positing and actualizing purposes, but it does not require the agent to
make herself into a material object. Therefore, Hegel's concept of mak-
ing oneself into an object cannot be criticized as unintelligible with the
argument discussed above.
Some authors who do not share this critique view Hegel's concept
of making oneself into an object as a philosophically weak, if not
useless concept. Habermas has argued that the terms 'objectification'
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 205
and "externalization' (Habermas, 1982, p. 223) refer to a "romantically
transfigured' (ibid., p. 225) notion that conceptualizes human activity
according to the model of a "creative process of self-formation' or an
"individuality creatively realizing itself' (ibid., p. 224) For this reason, he
writes, the concept is useless for both social theory and social philos-
ophy (ibid., p. 225). Is this objection (0-2) justified when it comes to
Hegel's notion of making oneself into an object?
On the one hand, activities that are cases of making oneself into an
object in the Hegelian sense may well concern what might be called the
agent's self-image or evaluative self-understanding. As we have seen, a
human individual can make himself into an object through activities
whose performance is important to him under a certain description. For
this reason, an individual can confirm aspects of what he claims to be by
successfully making himself into an object—or shatter elements of his
self-image through his failure to make himself into an object through
certain activities. Furthermore, activities through which an individual
makes himself into an object can be bound to the formation of char-
acter traits or the acquisition of technical competencies; if this is the
case, then they can be described as the formative processes of an agent's
individuality or personality—that is, in terms of Bildung.49 On the other
hand, it should be noted that in Hegel's understanding an individual can
also make himself into an object through activities whose performance
is unimportant to him—and thus can neither confirm nor shatter his
self-image—and which are unrelated to the acquisition of relevant per-
sonal traits. Because this is the case, Hegel's concept of making oneself
into an object can also be applied to the analysis of "everyday' actions
that do not contribute to the "self-creative process of self-formation.'
Thus it would be inappropriate to follow Habermas in regarding the con-
cept as a "romantically transfigured' notion. And if this judgment cannot
be upheld, then it would be equally groundless to claim that Hegel's
concept of making oneself into an object is useless from the social-
theoretical and social-philosophical points of view. Rather, it remains
open how well the concept performs in these two respects.
Honneth's remarks on the "objectification model,' discussed in
Section I,50 raise two objections to Hegel's concept of making oneself
into an object, each of which rests on different claims. One of these
objections (0-4) starts from the assumption that before the activity is
carried out51 all the agent's "individual traits and abilities' that are rele-
vant for this activity must be "fully given in [his] mind.' Only under this
condition can the activity in question be an objectification of the act-
ing individual. I agree with Honneth that the concept of objectification
206 Making Oneself Into An Object
resting on this claim cannot adequately conceptualize human action.52
On the other hand, I have argued that Hegel's concept of making oneself
into an object does not presuppose that 'all' the agent's 'traits and abil-
ities' relevant for a practical activity must be 'fully given in [his] mind'
before the activity is carried out. As I have noted, Hegel's concept does
not exclude the possibility that in the process of a (complex) activity
through which a human individual makes himself into an object, per-
sonal 'traits' and technical 'abilities' that the agent had not attributed
to himself before taking on the activity turn out to matter. For this rea-
son, the above objection cannot be applied to Hegel's concept of making
oneself into an object.
What seems more interesting is the other objection that Honneth
raises (0-3). It rests on the following general assumption: What is objec-
tified is first of all ('always already') given as something in the mind
and, as such, exists independently of whether or not it is objectified.
Objectification itself then consists in bringing what is given in the mind
to expression. If what is objectified is the purpose to do X, then the
objectification model leads to the following conclusion: whether or not
an individual has the purpose to do X is independent from what he
does (or tries to do), and can in principle be ascertained without refer-
ring to the practical activities of the individual. This, however, is an
implausible view, which is not in line with our everyday way of ascribing
'things' like purposes. For this reason, Honneth is justified in criticizing
the objectification model that rests on the above assumption.
It should be noted, however, that Hegel's conception of action as mak-
ing oneself into an object is not affected by Objection 0-3. In fact, not
only does Hegel not endorse the inner-outer distinction presupposed by
the objectification model, he explicitly criticizes it. In the PhG Hegel
submits 'observing reason,' whose theory of action relies on such an
inner-outer distinction, to an internal critique whose goal it is to prove
that human action cannot be explained by means of the categories
employed by observing reason (cf. again Quante, 2008a). And in the
passage I have analyzed from the PhilS, Hegel implicitly criticizes the
premises of the objectification model.53 As we have seen, he develops
the position that an individual who has a particular 'purpose' will imme-
diately try to realize this purpose.54 If an individual decides to do X, he
therefore stands, in Hegel's view, in a practical relation to the external
world. If this is correct, then it would be inappropriate, strictly speak-
ing, for a purpose to be regarded as something purely in the mind,
for it immediately gives rise to the practical activity. Those of Hegel's
remarks analyzed above thus contain a repudiation of the distinction
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 207
that the objectification model assumes to exist between what is given in
the mind and external activities. His theory of action as making oneself
into an object is therefore unaffected by the objection that 'things' like
purposes are not purely inner entities and cannot be ascribed on the
basis of what is given in the agent's mind alone.55
To conclude: if my observations are correct, then none of the objec-
tions discussed in Section I can cast doubt on the usefulness of Hegel's
concept of making oneself into an object. As a result, it remains at least
an open question whether the concept is attractive for action theory or
social and political philosophy. In order to answer this question, one
would have to explore, among other things, a topic we could not deal
with in this paper: the relation between teleology and causality in the
case of actions. While Hegel is clearly of the view that human action
cannot be suitably analyzed by means of the category of causality,56 he
also advances the position that teleological processes in general preserve
causal relations in a 'sublated' [aufgehoben] form. Discussing how this is
to be understood and what consequences this has for Hegel's theory of
action would deepen our understanding of Hegel's theory of making
oneself into an object.57
Notes
1.	I use L. Rauch's translation of the PhilS and A. V. Miller's translation of the
PhG, which I have occasionally altered for the sake of clarity and consistency.
Changes to these translations are not noted. I cite Miller's translation by
paragraph (91) numbers. Since the PhilS is a manuscript, unpublished by
Hegel, that partly consists of fragmentary notes, I have included the German
original in the footnotes.
2.	Throughout this paper I use the phrase 'to make oneself into an object' as a
translation of the Hegelian sich zum Gegenstande machen.
3.	PhilS 123 ('[l]ch mache mich unmittelbar zum Dinge, Form[,] die Seyn ist, in
der Arbeit' PhilG 227).
4.	Including contemporary interest, for example, Brandom (2004), Honneth
(2008), Neuhouser (1986, 2009), and Quante (2010).
5.	PhilS 99 ('Das Wollende will, d.h. es will sich setzen, sich als sich zum
Gegenstande machen' PhilG 202).
6.	I shall explain in Section II below what Hegel means by 'willful activities.'
7.	I shall not be able to engage deeper with this aspect of Hegel's theory of the
will here. For my discussion of it elsewhere, see Schmidt am Busch (2002)
and, with reference to the Philosophy of Right, Schmidt am Busch (2007,
pp. 93-176). See also Siep (1979) and Quante (2004a).
8.	One exception is Lange (1980). I engage with Lange's analysis and critique
of Hegel's concept of making oneself into an object in Schmidt am Busch
(2002, pp. 40-6).
9.	This interpretation of Hegel's concept of 'making oneself into an
object' appears to be inspired by Marx's discussion of the objectification
208 Making Oneself Into An Object
[Vergegenstandlichung] of man's essential powers [tnenschliche Wesenskrafte].
Cf. Marx (1975, p. 302).
10.	As stated above, this sentence reads: 'That which is willing wills, i.e., it wants
to posit itself or make itself, as itself, into an object/
11.	As already noted, Hegel claims that the servant becomes an object 'as the
form of the thing' he produces, and that he thereby comes to view the sphere
of 'independent being as his own self.'
12.	In Marx's view, the 'outstanding achievement' of the PhG consists in the
fact that 'Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives
objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of
this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labor and comprehends
objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man's own labor’
(Marx, 1975, pp. 332-3).
13.	See above. E.M. Lange has rightly pointed out this feature of Hegel's theory.
Cf. Lange (1980, pp. 32-7).
14.	See, for example, the passages from Hegel cited at the beginning of this
article.
15.	Andre Gorz, for instance, sees work (as he believes Hegel has conceptual-
ized it) as a necessary and central component of a successful human life.
Accordingly, Gorz attempts to criticize present-day capitalism with refer-
ence to what he expressly traces back to Hegel: the concept of work 'in
the anthropological or philosophical sense,' namely work as the 'external-
ization by which a subject realizes himself, insofar as he objectifies himself
in the objective materiality of that which he creates or produces' (Gorz,
2000, p. 10). Cf. my remarks on Gorz in Schmidt am Busch (2001, 2003,
2009b).
16.	Habermas (1982, p. 224). Habermas bases his view on Charles Taylor's reflec-
tions on the development of an 'expressivist view' of the self during the
so-called Sturm und Drang, particularly in the work of Johann Gottfried
Herder. Cf. Taylor (1975, p. 15).
17.	Cf. Habermas (1982, p. 225). On the social theoretical and social philo-
sophical goals of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition, see my
discussion in Schmidt am Busch (2009a, 2010).
18.	Honneth discusses the objectification model with reference to the philoso-
phy of the young Marx. It is for this reason that he speaks of the activities of
'production.'
19.	It remains open whether technical abilities belong to what can be objectified
in Hegel's view. I will address this question in Section II of my essay, below.
20.	See above, on points (i) and (ii).
21.	As we have seen, this follows from Hegel's use of the 'i.e.' in the sentence
cited above.
22.	PhilS 99-100 ('... in sich beschlossen, Oder es ist der Schlufi in sich selbst; a)
ist es das allgemeine, Zweck; p) ist [es] das Einzelne, Selbst, Thatigkeit,
Wirklichkeit y) ist es die Mitte dieser beyden[,] der Trieb; er ist das
Zweyseitige, das den Inhalt hat, Allgemeines, der Zweck ist, und das thatige
Selbst desselben' PhilG 202).
23.	Cf. the beginning of the discussion in the 'Self-Consciousness' chapter in the
PhG.
24.	PhilS 100 ('die bestimmte Weise, wie jener Schlufi im Ich gesetzt ist, ist so daft
alle Momente desselben in dem Selbst als dem Allgemeinen oder der Kugel
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 209
befasst sind; jetzt [= jedes; SaB] das Ganze ist, und ihr Gegensatz nur leere
Form fiir das Selbstbewufttseyn. Dift macht eben die Krafft seines Schlusses,
seines Willens, dass es insofern [es] eine Seite hinausbietet, in dieser in sich
zuriickgenommen ist' PhilG 202).
25.	See Section II above.
26.	PhilS 100-1. ('(dieser in sich geriindete Schluft ist zugleich nach aussen
gekehrt, oder er ist eigentliches Bewufttseyn, das aber hier in Ich
eingeschlossen betrachtet wird.)—Nemlich der Willen ist fiirsichseyn, das
alien fremden seyenden Inhalt in sich getilgt hat; dadurch aber ist es das
anderslose, das Inhaltlose, und fiihlt diesen Mangel [...] Das negative, aus-
schliessende ist so im Willen selbst, daft er darin nur auf sich gerichtet ist;
er das von sich ausgeschlossene ist;—der Zweck dem Selbst gegeniibersteht;
Einzelnheit, Wirklichkeit dem Allgemeinen' PhilG 203).
27.	The passage reads as follows: 'The Schluss, rounded in itself, is at the same
time turned outward—it is actual consciousness, although it is here enclosed
within the I and regarded as such' (PhilS 100).
28.	As M. Quante has shown, this position is a main feature of the theory of
action in the 'mature' Hegel. Cf. Quante (2004a, pp. 56-97, esp. pp. 59-69).
29.	On this topic, see also Frankfurt (2004, p. 13).
30.	On this topic see, for instance, the studies referenced in note 4, as well as
Pinkard (1994).
31.	PhilS 100-1. ('es ist aber ein Mangel, der ebenso positiv ist; (er ist der Zweck;
die Form, daft er nur Zweck ist, ist das mangelnde Seyn. [... ] Setzen der
ersten Realitat, die unvollkommen ist' PhilG 203).
32.	See above, p. 197
33.	See Section III below.
34.	PhilS 101-2. ('die Hauptsache ist der Inhalt des Gegenstandes; er trennt sich
von seinem Triebe ab, dadurch erhalt er eine andre Form; er ist der beruhigte
sich selbst gewordne mit sich erfiillte Trieb; der Mangel war das Anschauen
des leeren Ich; denn dieses war sich Gegenstand; es hielt die Unterschiede des
Schlusses zusammen, war ihre Gleichgiiltigkeit, ihr Bestehen,—nicht Seyn
als solches, es war das erste unmittelbare Ich, aber als solches. Der vom
Ich abgetrennte Trieb ist er aus dem Selbst freygelassen, oder die blosse
Erfiillung dutch das Seyn zusammen gehalten—Werk des Ich, es weift sein
Thun darin, [... ] als Thun (nicht wie bey der Erinnerung) sondern daft der
Inhalt als solcher dutch es ist; weil der Unterschied als solcher der seinige
war; der Unterschied aus sich gesetzt [hat], oder ihn als den seinigen weift'
PhilS 204).
35.	See above, p. 199.
36.	See above, pp. 197-8.
37.	It should be noted that Hegel does not distinguish, in the passage quoted
above, between (1) the form the content has while the activity is being
carried out and (2) the form the content has as a result of that activity.
I introduce and discuss this distinction elsewhere; see Schmidt am Busch
(2002, pp. 27-31). In this paper it is not necessary to insist on this point.
38.	I assume here that the purpose cannot be actualized by intellectual activity
alone.
39.	It is, however, conceivable that other people do not describe the practical
activity of the self-consciousness as doing X. See below, note 41.
210 Making Oneself Into An Object
40.	PhilS 101. As mentioned above, this characterizes the perspective of the
acting self-consciousness.
41.	It is possible that one and the same activity be described by several members
of the same social world in different and even mutually exclusive ways: by
some as (successfully) doing X, and by others as an activity that is unsuited
to realizing a purpose of the type X. In view of this possibility it is con-
ceivable that the acting self-consciousness revise its original understanding
of its activity in light of other persons' descriptions of this event. If in the
course of such a revision it becomes convinced that it has not successfully
actualized its purpose X, then the conditions under which its activity can
be regarded as making oneself into an object in the Hegelian sense are
not—or are no longer—fulfilled. Furthermore, it is possible that the act-
ing self-consciousness—perhaps due to corresponding judgments from other
persons—come to the realization that it has pursued a purpose of the type Y,
and not a purpose of the type X as it originally thought it was pursuing
with his practical activities. In this case, too, the conditions under which
a self-consciousness makes itself into an object remain unfulfilled. See the
illuminating discussion of these cases in Quante (2004a).
42.	See above, p. 199.
43.	PhilS 100. ('welches der bestimmte Inhalt des Triebes ist, kann hier noch nicht
angegeben werden, denn er ist noch nicht bestimmt; er hat noch keinen;
denn es hier nur erst der Begriff des Willens gesetzt. Welche Triebe Ich
habe, difi ergibt sich erst aus dem Inhalte seiner Welt; diese sind seine Triebe'
PhilG 202).
44.	See above, Section II.
45.	According to what I said above, a self-consciousness which decides to do X
will immediately try to realize its purpose. In Hegel's view, the decision to
do X therefore constitutes a practical relationship between the willing self-
consciousness and its external world. Given our example—writing an essay
on Hegel's theory of action—one might, however, question the plausibility
of Hegel's position. Is it really the case that the decision to write an essay
is normally followed by immediate action? Isn't there—at least normally—a
temporal gap between such a decision and the activity of writing the essay?
In my view, Hegel could concede this last point without having to give up his
position outlined above. For he could say that somebody who has decided
to write an essay is determined—from the time of that decision on—to make
sure that he can actually write the essay. He will thus refuse to accept other
professional commitments if that keeps him from writing the essay, see to
it that he has sufficient time to compose the piece, and so on. Even if he
does not start writing the essay right after deciding to do so, his decision
has immediate practical implications. (A similar point is made in Korsgaard,
2009, pp. 124-5.) We are therefore justified in concluding that our above
example—writing an essay on Hegel's theory of action—can be analyzed
with the conceptual resources provided in Section II.
46.	Hegel himself supports the thesis that certain manufacturing and indus-
trial work cannot be activities by which workers can make themselves into
objects. Cf. PhilS 139^40. Cf. Schmidt am Busch, 2002, pp. 78-96.
47.	See Section I above.
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch 211
48.	To avoid misunderstandings, it should be emphasized that in Hegel's view
the conditions named in (i) and (ii) can only be fulfilled by participants in
social practices. As mentioned above, Hegel believes that the conditions for
a successful realization of a purpose of the type X are socially constituted.
(See above, p. 202.) Moreover, he believes that the question of whether or
not these conditions are fulfilled in a concrete case (that is, whether or not
a particular activity is doing X) is normally answered by the participants in
the relevant social practice—and not by the agent alone. This is why Hegel
believes that acting is an activity that is socially mediated. See on this topic
Pippin (2008, cf. also above, Chapter 4), which claims that even the true con-
tent of intentions is determined by the way in which the action is received
in the relevant social community.
49.	In the PhG Hegel uses such a description for the activity of the self-
consciousness of the bondsman. See TWA 3: 153.
50.	It may be helpful to recall Honneth's critique: '[t]he objectification model
creates the mistaken impression that all individual traits and abilities are
something always already fully given in the mind, and that they can then
be subsequently expressed in the act of production.'
51.	I will discuss the criterion named here ('before the activity is carried out')
further below.
52.	See above, Section I, on point (iv).
53.	See Section II above.
54.	In Hegel's view, as mentioned before, one of the characteristics of a purpose
is that it is 'incomplete being.' See above, Section II.
55.	As I hope to have explained, the objectification model makes the following
assumption: that which is to be objectified has to (1) exist prior to the process
of objectification and (2) be known by the agent. Arto Laitinen, by contrast,
discusses the possibility of purposes or intentions that (1) exist prior to their
realizations and (2) are known by the agent only retrospectively, that is, after
being realized. See the interesting discussion in Laitinen (2004). Within the
framework of my treatment of the objectification model, it is not necessary
to engage in a discussion with Laitinen.
56.	Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard have rightly emphasized this point. Cf., for
instance, Pinkard (2002, pp. 280-6) and Pippin (2008, pp. 147-79; see above
Chapter 4).
57.	I have presented different parts of my paper at a workshop entitled New
Thinking on Alienation (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, 14 January
2009) and a conference on Lebenswelt und Technik (University of Debrecen,
25 September 2009). I have greatly benefited from the discussion of my
presentations on each of these occasions and would like to thank the par-
ticipants for their comments and suggestions. Special thanks are due to
Arto Laitinen, Fred Neuhouser, Michael Quante, and Constantine Sandis,
who made some very helpful comments on an earlier version of my paper.
Finally, I would like to thank Julia Ng for translating my manuscript from
the German.
12
Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
Michael Quante
Weil der Mensch verniinftig ist, mufi er Vorsorge haben fiir die
Zukunft.
G.W.E Hegel
Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need,
in some way, to advert to this trio of features—to our reflec-
tiveness, our planfulness, and our conception of our agency as
temporally extended.
M.E. Bratman
In my analysis of Hegel's concept of action, devised 20 years ago,
I arrived at the result that Hegel anticipated 'insights from Anscombe
and Goldman' and developed a planning theory of agency similar to
the present-day philosophy of action Michael Bratman has proposed.1
In that study I did not pursue this latter aspect for the following two rea-
sons: On the one hand, I concentrated on the analysis of Hegel's concept
of action as it is developed in the Philosophy of Right; on the other hand,
1 restricted his philosophy action to the questions it raises as a discipline
of theoretical philosophy.2 Since the basis of Hegel's planning theory of
agency is primarily to be sought in his conception of autonomy and
his analysis of our practice of ascribing responsibility, I did not want to
trace this aspect of his philosophy of action within the framework I had
chosen at that time. Therefore, this essay is an attempt at partially filling
the gap that was left in the earlier study.
I
If one concentrates on those texts that are originally Hegel's and ignores
the lecture notes that have been so important in the reception, then
the core elements of Hegel's philosophy of action are to be found
212
Michael Quante 213
in his Phenomenology of Spirit and in his Elements of the Philosophy of
Right.3 However, the two works have different demonstrative targets,
and among Hegel scholars there is no unitary view as to how their
interrelation is to be determined. In the Phenomenology, Hegel devel-
ops a critique of a naturalist philosophy of action in the course of his
critique of a scientistic conception of the mental. This issue plays not
more than an implicit role in the Philosophy of Right and will not be
dealt with in this paper, even though this would probably designate a
difference to the conceptual framework of Bratman's account.4 On the
whole the conceptions of human agency Hegel unfolds in these two
works are not only compatible with one another, they also complement
and condition each other in regard to crucial aspects (cf. Pippin, 2008,
Chapter 6; or Chapter 4 above). Hegel's planning theory of agency, on
which I focus in this paper, is also present in the Phenomenology, but
there it is not analyzed systematically. Commenting on this aspect of
Hegel's philosophy of action with reference to the Philosophy of Right,
as I shall do in the following, is not meant to say that it is not con-
tained in his philosophy of action in 1807. But since Hegel's arguments
for the claim that our understanding of actions and intentions implies
the embedment of single action in more encompassing action-plans,
can better be understood in terms of the theory of the will devel-
oped in the Philosophy of Right, I will here concentrate on his work
of 1820.
Any systematic appropriation of Hegel's philosophy of action con-
fronts, on the one hand, the difficulty that he develops his philosophy in
the form of a system that is grounded on the categorial development he
expounded in his Science of Logic. Hegel works with metaphysical presup-
positions that seem to be neither self-evident nor indispensable for the
limited targets of a philosophy of action. The interpretation proposed
here tries to deal with this problem that is crucial for any not purely
immanent interpretation of Hegel's texts in the following way: Wher-
ever Hegel's planning theory of agency becomes visible through recourse
to the speculative-logical categorial apparatus, I do seek to illuminate
this connection. But I will try to avoid using the speculative-logical
categorial framework Hegel refers to—or the conceptual development he
imputes on it—as a justifying resource. The justificatory burdens should
rather be carried by the fact that Hegel can do justice to both our every-
day self-understanding as agents and our social practice of ascribing
responsibility. After all, Hegel emphasizes at the beginning of the Phi-
losophy of Right that the speculative-logical justification can be replaced
by referring to everyday experience of agency.5
214 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
The fact that Hegel developed his philosophy of action within a
philosophy of right has, on the other hand, an impact on the overall con-
ception. As a proponent of the retribution theory of law Hegel assumes
that the function of the institution of law is not primarily prevention
but retribution, that is, the retribution of damage and the penalization
of infringements of law.6 So Hegel's perspective on human agency is
retrospective in the sense that he looks at actions and agents by consid-
ering the results and consequences of actions. Accordingly, he proceeds
from our practice of ascribing responsibility, since in the Philosophy of
Right he does not treat law in a narrow sense, but our practices of mutu-
ally recognizing claims. Questions such as those concerning the (causal)
antecedents of an action or concerning the causal sequence of an action
as such are only indirectly taken into account.7 Within the framework of
a philosophy of action that is understood as a branch of theoretical phi-
losophy, such questions are generally asked on the level of act types;
within our ascriptive practice, however, they arise only on the level
of concrete past actions—for example, when one looks for exculpatory
reasons. In what follows, I will interpret Hegel's reference to everyday
self-consciousness in such a way that it includes the self-understanding
of our practice of ascribing and assuming responsibility as well as the
giving and accepting of excuses. Thereby we call on both the level of
speculative-logical justification and the level of our self-understanding
as members of a shared social practice as reference points for an inter-
pretation of Hegel's planning theory of agency.8 Hegel himself holds
that a philosophical justification can only be attained by employing
speculative-logical categories, so that the explication of his conception
based on our self-understanding of the practice of ascribing responsibil-
ity does not count as a justification in Hegel's sense.9 But as long as the
goal is to make plausible Hegel's planning theory of agency, it is unprob-
lematic to accept our practice of ascribing responsibility or of giving and
accepting excuses as a justificatory basis.10
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel introduces his concept of action in
terms of three clauses (cf. §113), where the second clause (§113 (p))
assigns the concept of action to the sphere of the logic of essence.11
This sphere is characterized by categories whose semantic content pre-
sumes the possibility of failure and therefore implies success as an ought
which need not be fulfilled in fact. Actions as autonomous realizations
of goals are, at the same time, objectivizations of reason and therefore
they are subject to the intersubjective standard of rationality. From this
it does not only follow that actions are interpretable and subject to rules.
Furthermore, Hegel holds that the concept of reason is such that acting
Michael Quante 215
cannot be restricted to the isolated execution of singular intentions, but
that in the case of beings existing over long ranges of time, who have a
complex structure of needs, drives, and desires, acting requires the for-
mation and pursuit of action-plans. Such action-plans allow the agent
to give his possible conflicting preferences a rational order and to aspire
to his well-being beyond the immediate satisfaction of desires; more-
over, they enable the agent to stabilize his preference structure over
time. This is important, as Hegel elaborates, not just from the agent's
point of view, for this is how his own well-being becomes realizable
over longer stretches of time. At once, the trans-temporally stabilizing
function of action-plans is a precondition for continuing cooperation,
since it is precisely through action-plans that the agent's reliability in
social space is made possible. Complex societies or the emergence of a
national economy would not even be thinkable without action-plans,
as Hegel explains in his analysis of civil society.
Hegel reveals this aspect of our concept of action in two ways: On the
one hand, he uses his theory of judgment as he elaborates it in the
Science of Logic, in order to justify the claim that self-determining reason
can only be realized in more complex judgments and intentions. In the
Philosophy of Right, this elaboration of the concept of action is sustained
by the progression from 'purpose'—an intention whose semantic con-
tent is isolated—to 'intention'—complex intention in whose semantic
content the single action is intended as an instance of an act-type or as
an instance of the application of a rule.12 On the other hand, Hegel high-
lights this dimension of our concept of action ex negativo, where this
concept can be understood as a necessary transition from the singular,
isolated action to the action within a web of action-plans and within the
mesh of a system of the agent's preferences. In the third section of the
Morality chapter, Hegel discusses various strategies of excuse. In doing
so he rejects a scheme of excuse in which the agent is reduced to a
momentous singular impulse which alone is said to have constituted
the content of his intention (cf. below section II.3).
Hegel's arguments anticipate central insights of the planning theory
of agency as Michael Bratman nowadays propounds it (cf. Bratman,
1987, 1999, and 2007). He derives this dimension of human agency not
just from his metaphysics of subjectivity, which forms the basis of the
theory of judgment in the Science of Logic, but he also anchors this aspect
of his philosophy of action in our practice of excusing and criticizing
actions or agents.13 This is why this aspect of Hegel's philosophy of
action is independent of his metaphysics of subjectivity, as the following
interpretation of Hegel's analysis of ascribing responsibility will show.
216 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
II
In the main section of the essay I will briefly comment on Hegel's
general argumentative strategy (1), before I go on to identify three
kinds of ascription Hegel differentiates employing his theory of the
will (2), in order to be able to explain his analysis of our practice of
ascribing responsibility and of accepting excuses with regard to the ques-
tion which action-theoretic conception Hegel takes as a basis of this
analysis (3).
1.	Hegel's general strategy
In his analysis of our practice of evaluating actions and of ascribing
responsibility, Hegel stresses that it is a matter of insight and knowl-
edge and that one should not treat the will in contrast to thinking or
knowing. He elaborates this point with particular emphasis in regard to
our moral practice:
The good is in general the essence of the will in its substantiality and
universality—the will in its truth; the good therefore exists without
exception only in thought and through thought. Consequently, the
assertion that human beings cannot know [erkennen] the truth, but
have to do only with appearances, or that thought is harmful to the
good will, and other similar notions [Vorstellungen], deprive the spirit
both of intellectual and of all ethical worth and dignity.
(§132R)
Hegel integrates this (metaethical) cognitivism into his theory of the
will, according to which the fundamental guises of right, morality and
ethical life are practical self-relationships of subjectivity that manifest
themselves in the actions and attitudes of empirical subjects. He views
the reality of objective spirit ascriptivistically, a point witnessed by the
derivation of the imperative ‘be a person and respect others as persons'
(§36) from the personality of the will.14 Being an agent, a person or
a moral as well as ethical subject is a normative status that is consti-
tuted through intersubjective recognition and consists in being treated
in accordance with 'the right and dignity [Ehre] of a human being'
(§132R). This status, however, does not only found the agent's right that
his action should be evaluated in accordance with his purpose (§117),
his intention (§120) and his understanding of the moral quality of the
action (§132). It further imposes on the agent the duty of justifying his
actions when faced with critique, of offering excuses for his actions if
Michael Quante 217
necessary, or of assuming the (legal or moral) responsibility ascribed to
him, where critique cannot be rejected. As it is familiar from his the-
ory of punishment, Hegel holds that releasing punishment is a serious
defiance of the offender, whereas through the recognition implied in
the punishment he is, qua principally responsible subject, ‘honoured as
a rational being' (§100N).15 In his philosophy of action, which in this
respect coincides with the Morality chapter of the Philosophy of Right,
Hegel contrasts the right of the agent with the right of objectivity in
such a way that the latter is not principally undermined by the former,
as it would be, for instance, if one took a non-cognitivist position or
a version of subjective decisionism that excludes intersubjective justifi-
cations and criticizability. At the same time, by distinguishing between
various rights of subjectivity and respective kinds of ascription he points
out that our practice of ascribing responsibility represents a complex
nexus of claims and cannot be reduced to irreconcilable contradictory
pairs.
2.	Three kinds of sanity
Hegel subdivides the Morality chapter of the Philosophy of Right in three
parts and in each of these parts he contrasts a right of subjectivity
with a corresponding right of objectivity; accordingly, he distinguishes
between three kinds of sanity. From an action-theoretic standpoint the
transition from purpose to intention is decisive, for this is where the
transition from an isolated intentional action to a full-blown action
occurs. In contrast, the transition from intention to welfare marks the
difference between universalized selfish goals, which Hegel treats under
the heading 'welfare,' and the proper moral dimension of agency, which
Hegel treats under the headings of the 'good' and 'conscience.' The
latter transition is not relevant to the question whether Hegel's phi-
losophy of action contains elements of a planning theory of agency.16
This is supported by the fact that Hegel treats the kinds of sanity
and exemption that correspond to the second and third rights paral-
lel to one another. Now, in a first step I want to designate briefly the
three kinds of right and the corresponding kinds of sanity. In a sec-
ond step I will describe Hegel's remarks on insanity as a strategy of
exemption.17
2,1	Three kinds of right and the corresponding kinds of sanity
Hegel treats the feature of the intentionality of actions, which consists
in the first-personal constitution of the intention-in-action whose struc-
ture he analyzes in §§110-2 under the category of purpose. According to
218 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
Hegel, it is the first-personal constitution of the purpose, expressed by
the irreducible use of 'I,' that distinguishes acting from mere experience
or undergoing. On the one hand, this is already an instantiation of the
structure of subjectivity, on the other hand, the purpose is characterized
in a way that the agent himself views and intends this intentional action
as an isolated action. The
purpose asserts the particular, [it asserts] that which connects with it
as an other, [which is] not contained in the purpose.
(§118N)
The respective right of knowledge (§117) thus concerns only the ques-
tion as to whether the event in question was an intentional action in
the first place. If one rejects an ascription of responsibility by pointing
out that the event criticized was no intentional action, then this is a
case of the strategy of exculpation which I will label 'categorial exemp-
tion.' For it involves claiming that the event in question does not fall
in the category of action. Hegel accordingly adds that the first kind
of attribution relies on the assumption that the event in question was
accompanied by a first-personal intention, in the first place. The 'right
of knowledge' (§117) thus includes that the event is only to be attributed
as an intentional action:
I can be made accountable for a deed only if my will was responsible
for it.
(§117)
Because of the first-personal constitution of the purpose, the human
being is involved in his actions as 'Denkendes, und dies Allgemeine'
(§118N), so that human agency is to be more than just the having of
isolated purposes:
[The] Human Being must have an intention in action, not just
purpose—for it is [a] thinking [being].
(Ibid.)18
Only this intentional structure allows the agent to devise more complex
actions and plans in which single actions are employed as 'means to
some further intention' (§122) and in which immediate impulses, Hegel
talks about inclinations and drives, are organized in such a way that
they yield a 'whole,' 'not contradicting itself' (§123N).
Michael Quante 219
The agent has the right to have 'known' the 'universal quality of the
action' (§120), which Hegel takes to be a 'judgment of the action; - deter-
mination thereof as something universal; order, class' (§119N). If one
criticized an assertion of mine as a lie, I could argue against this by
saying that I intended to convey comfort or to spare somebody. The
'intention belongs to the completeness of the action' (§120N), because
the human being as a rational being can know the general context of his
doing and make it the object of his planning. Accordingly, he must put
himself qua agent under this standard and recognize the 'right of the
objectivity of the action' (§120) as an instance of an act-type that can be
evaluated in ter subjectively. On Hegel's account, this is the 'other form
of sanity' (§120N); at once he restricts the standard of evaluation when
he writes that 'its universal nature [is], however, only the next species'
(ibid.).19
Thereby Hegel draws a line between the standard of evaluation for
the intention and the moral evaluation of action which he mentions
as a 'third' (§120N) kind of attribution at this stage and comes back to
later. To this corresponds the 'right of insight into the good' (§132R), to
which again corresponds the duty of conforming to the moral and legal
standards of social reality, since this dimension of our agency is based
on 'recognition' (§132N). This 'third sanity' (§132N) aims at the agent's
knowledge and insight, just as the other two, but thereby it at once
underlies norms of rationality and social norms to which the agent must
conform, for they are implied by his claim to be recognized as a rational
agent capable of moral self-determination. Since this second transition is
not relevant to the issue at hand, I will confine myself to this brief sketch
and move on to Hegel's account of general strategies of exemption.
2.2	Hegel's conception of exemption
In the remark to §120, Hegel for the first time goes into the strategies of
exemption we apply when we partially or completely exculpate an agent
from the responsibility for his action.20 In contrast to the rejection of
an ascription of responsibility—which I called categorial exemption—
which retreats to saying that the event in question was no action, Hegel
assumes that these cases are actions. His deliberations refer to the 'right
of intention' (§120):
This right to such insight implies that the responsibility of children,
imbeciles, lunatics, etc. for their actions is either totally absent or
diminished.
(§120R)
220 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
Whenever we recognize somebody as an agent by making him an
addressee of our ascription of responsibility, we treat him according
to "the right and dignity [Ehre] of a human being' (§132R). A cate-
gorical exemption is not restriction of this dignity if it refers only
to a singular case, that is to a concrete event. But if by applying
such a strategy of excuse it is said of a human individual that it is
incapable of forming first-personal volitional attitudes that are neces-
sary for intentional action, then we exempt this individual generally,
but possibly only for a certain stretch of time, from this recognitive
relation.
Since Hegel assumes in this passage that we are dealing with agents,
we must distinguish between the cases of 'complete' insanity and of
'diminished' sanity. The former would mean that we generally exclude
a human individual from the sphere of agents, the latter would mean
that we suppose diminished sanity, because the normal capacities of
adults required for intentional agency are not present. Thus the gen-
eral case of categorical exemption and the first case of this exemption
converge, since both refer to the agent and not to single actions of
his. With regard to the question of a more general decrease of san-
ity, one with reference to an individual, Hegel is very reserved. He
eventually takes it to be an empirical, philosophically not decidable
question whether such a deficit is to be judged as an attenuating
circumstance:
it is impossible to impose a definite limit [bestimmte Grenze] on these
conditions and the level of responsibility associated with them.
(§132R)
This is why Hegel wants to let this 'indeterminacy' of empirical sub-
jectivity 'be taken into account only in connection with imbecility,
lunacy, etc., and with childhood' (§120R). For, he argues, only obvious,
'pronounced conditions' can
annul [aufheberi] the character of thought and free will and allow us
to deny the agent the dignity [Ehre] of being a thinking individual
and a will.
(Ibid.)
This assessment is in line with Hegel's overall strategy of regarding
the exclusion of a human individual of the circle of addressees of
Michael Quante 221
responsibility ascriptions as a more severe sanction than the punish-
ment or critique of his actions.
On the whole we have to distinguish these cases with respect to
a variety of aspects, if we want to understand Hegel's considerations:
While exemptions aim at judging an agent, excuses aim at evaluat-
ing single events. This can lead to a general or gradual restriction of
the agent's dignity. We can give the following tabular illustration of
this:
Table 12.1 The Exemption-Excuse-Distinction
	Excuse	Exemption	Strategy
Purpose	Single event	Agent as a	Only generally
(intentionality)	(no action)	whole	possible
Intention The	Single action	Agent as a	Possible generally
Good		whole	or gradually
Status	No harm to	Harm to	
	dignity	dignity	
Hegel's reserved evaluation of the strategy of exemption is immediately
plausible; but it is just as evident that in our everyday practice we sub-
mit and oftentimes accept excuses when they are offered to us. It would
be more than surprising if Hegel, whose philosophy is characteristi-
cally realistic, had overlooked this basic trait of our ascriptive practice.
We shall see in the next section that this is not the case.
3.	Hegel's critique of the strategies of excuse
The critique Hegel gives of the strategies of excuse, to be found in his
philosophy of action, is based on three premises. Firstly, he assumes
a form of cognitivism concerning our evaluative and normative prac-
tice that warrants a principled criticizability and justifiability of actions.
If the human being renounces this claim, he renounces 'his dignity,
substantiality' (§132N). The corresponding rights of subjectivity and
objectivity are, secondly, safeguarded by 'the public nature of the laws
and the universality of customs' whose 'cognizance [Kenntnis] in the
sense of familiarity’ (§132R) can be presumed for a competent agent.
Thirdly, this means to assume universal, socially accepted standards that
are common knowledge, to which we always already refer in our practice
222 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
of ascribing responsibility and of criticizing and justifying particular
actions.21
Having emphasized that strategies of exemption are only justified
under severe conditions, Hegel turns to some strategies of excuse that
refer to particular actions. He mentions the 'momentary blindness/
the momentary condition of an 'excitement of passion, intoxication,
or in general what is described as the strength of sensuous motives
[Triebfedem]’ (ibid.) and rejects the view that this momentary conditions
of an agent can be regarded as 'grounds for attributing responsibil-
ity or determining the [nature of the] crime itself and its culpability’
(ibid.). According to Hegel, such excuses, although they only aim
at particular actions and not at the agent as such, are also recogni-
tions of his dignity, if by them 'the criminal's guilt' (ibid.) is to be
taken away.
Hegel's rationale, which is also interesting from the viewpoint of
philosophy of action, points to the rationality of the human being
whose
nature [...] consists precisely in the fact that he is essentially uni-
versal in character, not an abstraction of the moment and a single
fragment of knowledge.
(Ibid.)
As a responsible agent, the human being is
as a subject, not just the individual aspect of this moment or this
isolated passion for revenge.
(Ibid.)
The capacities in virtue of which human beings act responsibly do
not have to be exercised at every instance, but the general disposi-
tion to do so, which Hegel calls the 'inherent nature [of the rational
human being] as an intelligent being' (ibid.), is enough. But human
being would be denied this nature if 'his right to moral subjectiv-
ity' (ibid.) was only connected with the instantaneous exercise of
these capacities. It is only in 'cases of madness' that the human
psyche is 'so deranged' that the dispositional rationality is 'divorced
from the knowledge and performance of individual things [Dinge]’
(Ibid.). With these remarks, Hegel makes us aware of the fact that
our practice of ascribing responsibility presupposes complex concepts
Michael Quante 223
of actions and intentions as well as of the psychological structure of
agents.22 Only on this presupposition can our practice be conceived as
rational; if the rationality of the practice were presupposed, then certain
excuses could not be submitted, since they undermine precisely those
presuppositions.
So could or should our practice not contain excuses or so-called
'attenuating circumstances? A recommendation in favor of banning
excuses would be a deeply unsatisfactory and, given Hegel's remark-
able sense of reality, very strange result. But for two reasons this is
not in the least the case. On the one hand, Hegel allows for the
possibility of exemption, although he points out that the loss of dig-
nity this implies is a much greater harm than critique, blame or even
punishment. And on the other hand, he obviously did not overlook
that excuses for particular actions and also the acceptance of such
excuses are integral elements of our everyday practice. For this rea-
son, at the end of §132, in which this problem is dealt with, he
explains to the reader why he does not, in the Philosophy of Right,
further touch on the question as to which excuses we accept and
which consequences this yields for the evaluation of a particular
action:
The sphere in which the above circumstances come into consider-
ation as grounds for relaxing the punishment is not the sphere of
right, but the sphere of clemency.
(§132R)
Summing up, my interpretation of Hegel's analysis of our practice of
ascribing responsibility and of giving and accepting excuses shows that
Hegel explicates this practice within the framework of his theory of
will employing his speculative-logical determinations as a theory of
rights. Under the heading of the 'right of subjectivity' he contrasts
the agent's perspective with the 'right of objectivity,' under which he
subsumes both the objectivity of causal consequences and the objec-
tivity of intersubjective interpretations and evaluations of actions (and
of the agent) in social space. By means of this explication of our
practice, which relies on a general philosophy of action, Hegel distin-
guishes between three kinds of sanity (or insanity) that are associated
with different strategies of exculpation. Hegel's proposal for conceiv-
ing of our ascriptive practice philosophically can be illustrated as
follows:
Table 12.2 Hegel's map of our ascriptive practices
	Right of Subjectivity	Right of Objectivity	Kinds of Attribution	Strategy of Exculpation
Purpose and	‘the right of knowledge' (§117)	'contingency of	'being responsible for it'	Categorial Exemption
Responsibility	'the right of insight with respect to the action as such (see §117)' (§132R).	consequences' (§120R) 'Action in terms of individuality [Einzelheit] has a nature as such—external, immediate universality. Possibility that lies therein—precisely the possibility that contingencies tie on it' (§120N).	[Schuld sein] versus 'having responsibility for it' [Schuld haben] (§115R) 'First—action—a concrete—altogether that it is mine' (§120N)	No excuse for the action, since otherwise a category mistake would be committed (there is no action)
Intention and	'The right of intention is that the	'what we may call the right of	'the other form of sanity £	General exemption or local
Welfare	universal quality of the action shall have being not only in itself, but shall be known by the agent' (§120)	the objectivity of the action is the right of the action to assert itself as known and willed by the subject as a thinking being' (§120, translation modified).	its universal nature yet only as next species' (§120N) 'judgment on the action;—determination thereof as something universal; order, class (§119N)	excuse Graduatable (right up to denying the dignity of being an agent) 'The right to such insight implies that the responsibility of children, Imbeciles, lunatics, etc. for their actions is either totally
The Good and	'The right of the subjective will is	'the right of objectivity takes	'choice of the good and	absent or diminished' (§120R).
the Conscience	that whatever it is to recognize as valid should be perceived by it as good, and that it should be held responsible for an action [... 1 as right or wrong, as good or evil, legal or illegal, according to its cognizance [Kenntnis] of the value which that action has in this objectivity' (§132) 'right of insight into the good' (§132R).	the following shape: since action is an alteration which must exist in an actual world and thus seeks recognition in it, it must in general conform to what is recognized as valid in that world' (§132R).	evil—sanity in this respect' (§139N) 'Third Sanity—all depend on knowledge—like reality for me—in knowledge, consciousness is—theoretical—(otherwise animal)—not as I feel—but know' (§132N).	'The right of the subject to know [kennen] action in its determination of good or evil, legal or illegal, has the effect, in the case of children, imbeciles, and lunatics, of diminishing or annulling [aufzuheben] their responsibility in this respect, too' (§132R).
224
Michael Quante 225
III
It has become clear from our discussion of Hegel's conception that
his philosophical explication of our practice of ascribing responsibility
and of giving or accepting excuses systematically leaves some questions
unanswered and poses ensuing problems. Though Hegel has dealt with
them—partly in the Philosophy of Right, partly in other parts of his sys-
tem and in his Phenomenology—they can only be pointed to in this
essay. Besides questions of exegesis regarding the connection between
the part of Hegel's theory of the will expounded here and the overall
system, Hegel's explication touches on three systematic problems whose
relevance is independent of questions of Hegel scholarship.
1.	Causality and responsibility
Hegel was one of the first philosophers of law to have pointed out
(in §116) that there are cases in which I could be accused of harming
others in light of property relationships, although I did not cause the
harm or damage through my own action. But it is doubtful if Hegel
thereby commits to the claim that these cases involve a kind of respon-
sibility without a causal component. However, the opening phrase of
the next paragraph, '[t]he will as acting' (§117 transl. mod.), shows that
he focused more on the contrast between action and undergoing an
event than on that between causal and non-causal responsibility. The
fact that he mentions cases in which a third party is harmed by me
'as a mechanical body or living entity' (§116) as a second paradigm
counts in favor of this reading. For instance, if I unintentionally fall
down from a roof I had been cleaning and fall on and hurt another
person who had accidentally been standing there, according to Hegel
this counts as harming without one's own acting, which nevertheless
grounds—as we should understand §116—the ascription of responsibil-
ity and is 'more or less my fault' (ibid.). With regard to this last case it is
undisputed that there is a causal relation (which Hegel calls 'Schuld sein,'
roughly, 'being responsible'), but the causation by one's own action
(which Hegel calls 'Schuld haben,' roughly, 'having responsibility') is
problematic. It is essential to consider that Hegel characterized the spe-
cific nature of acting in opposition to mere doing and our practice of
ascribing responsibility by limiting the causal consequences to a sub-
set of the entire set of causal consequences. The moral point of view is
based precisely on this 'fragmentation of consequences' (§118R, transl.
mod.) which the 'heroic self-consciousness,' that takes on all causal con-
sequences of its doing, does not claim for the evaluation of what it does.
226 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
It lacks, as Hegel puts it, the 'reflection] on the difference between deed
and action' (ibid.). The subset of the set of all consequences the moral
consciousness allows to be attributed to it, since it is responsible (in the
sense of ‘Schuld haben') for it, is constituted by purpose and intention,
that is, by the setting of ends on the part of the agent.23 Hegel's entire
philosophy of action as a theory of the will is arguably conceptual-
ized finalistically; his systematic position is based on the absorption
of causal into teleological relations and not on the idea that the lat-
ter are acausal.24 For this reason he can presuppose the causal relation
that is the basis for a first relation of responsibility (‘Schuld sein') and
introduce a second relation of responsibility (‘Schuld haben') as relevant
to our ascriptions of responsibility. Hegel says clearly, as his discus-
sion in the section on 'Purpose and Responsibility' (Der Vorsatz und die
Schuld) shows, that our practice of ascribing responsibility is based on
ideas of causality and a practice of causal explanation that must be
integrated into a philosophical explication of intentional action and
responsibility. But this does not yet settle whether or not he has devel-
oped a systematically satisfactory solution to this problem—both on
the speculative-logical level of his system and in his explication of our
practice.25
2.	Hegel's cognitivist ascriptivism
In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes it unmistakably clear that he takes
a cognitivist analysis of our evaluative and normative practices to be
adequate. Practical reason relies on insight and knowledge, not on feel-
ing or (mere) opinion that must be reconstructed in a non-cognitivist
manner. Such a cognitivism, which forms part of the right of objectiv-
ity Hegel refers to, fits in well with a metaethical analysis that locates
the fundament of the evaluative and the normative in intersubjectively
justifiable beliefs or even in facts. It is consistent with such a position
that Hegel takes our practice of ascribing responsibility as the basis of
his explication, for it could turn out that the deep structure of this prac-
tice is constituted by beliefs or facts. His critique of the contrasting of
a theoretical and a practical capacity, which are for Hegel 'not at all 2
capacities' (§4R), provides the anchor for such a cognitivist conception.
But closer scrutiny reveals that Hegel did not defend such a conception
that is aligned to the paradigm of theoretical reason. The reality of the
evaluative and the normative are our practices including the recognitive
processes and ascriptions effective within them. Recognition includes
cognition (and thus insight and knowledge), so that the possibility of
critique and justification by reasons does exist; but the fundamental
Michael Quante 227
guises of objective spirit are relationships of will and thus of a voli-
tional nature. Beliefs and facts are not at issue, but self-relationships and
factual acts are, they manifest themselves in our agency and in our eval-
uative or normative practices of attribution; thus Hegel writes: 'What
the subject is, is the series of its actions’ (§124). This becomes clear, for
instance, in Hegel's formulation of the basic structure of the will as legal
command in the form of an imperative: ’be a person and respect others
as persons’ (§36). This derivation from the moment of the universality
of the will is only valid if Hegel conceptualizes the first-personal self-
reference not as a belief but as ascription, not as a theoretical but as a
practical attitude. Thus any systematic reconstruction of Hegel's Philoso-
phy of Right faces the challenge of connecting the ascriptivist foundation
of our evaluative and normative practices with a form of cognitivism.26
If it is meant to do justice to Hegel, it must not only overcome the
opposition of thinking and willing, but it must also avoid having the
possibility of justifying our evaluative and normative attitudes destroyed
by a subjectivist decisionism. In other words, it must connect Hegel's
critique of a psychology based on capacities (including its dualism of
theoretical and practical capacities or attitudes) with his theory of the
social constitutedness of self-consciousness.27
3.	The problem of evaluative standards
In the Morality chapter of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel defends two
opposed claims: on the one hand he takes—as an advocate of the auton-
omy of reason—the development of the moral standpoint to be an
uncircumventable progress of the historical development and a higher
development of the concept and the realization of freedom. This shows
up in that a rational practice of ascribing responsibility has to respect
the right of subjectivity in the three forms of (i) the right of insight in
view of the action as such, (ii) the right of intention and (iii) the right
of insight into the good. On the other hand, it is also clear in Hegel that
from this right of subjectivity ensues no subjectivism or a relativization
of the evaluative and normative standards to the beliefs and willing of
particular subjects:
But whatever I may require in order to satisfy my conviction that
an action is good, permissible, or impermissible—and hence that the
agent is in this respect responsible for it—in no way detracts from the
right of objectivity.
(§132R)
228 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
If one searched the Philosophy of Right for concrete answers to the ques-
tion as to what we are to do about the tension resulting from this
opposition in a given case, one would not make a find. In this sense,
Hegel's Philosophy of Right is not an ethical treatise;28 he rather con-
fines himself to showing that this tension is such that one cannot derive
skeptical conclusions and that there does not remain a persistent prob-
lem of justification. To show this he employs, on the one hand, his
premise of the social constitution of self-consciousness—and therewith
the social constitution of personal autonomy and personal respon-
sibility. Given these presuppositions one cannot assume an absolute
gap between the autonomous individual and the social world, whose
principled insurmountability could be an ontological reason for moral
skepticism. On the other hand, Hegel rejects skeptical consequences by
pointing out that the right of subjectivity and the right of objectivity—
in virtue of the generality of reason—do not normally conflict with each
other. For preserving the right of subjectivity it suffices that autonomous
subjects are in principle able to critically assess given norms and val-
ues in case of conflict. It is, however, not required for preserving their
autonomy that they make such a critical assessment in every case. The
right of objectivity can only be realized permanently—in stabile social
institutions—if the social world that is given for the individual is ratio-
nal, so that the individuals can identify with it. But under the conditions
of modernity, as we can read Hegel's theory of the will, this will only be
the case if there emerge social institutions in which we can realize our
individual autonomy.29
Hegel is known for the view that the task of philosophy is to con-
ceive and demarcate the rationality of that which is the case. Therefore
he distrusted its prognostic power and its prescriptive function. One
consequence of this attitude is that Hegel has left it to our practice to
determine how a conflict between the rights of subjectivity and objec-
tivity can be resolved in an ethically adequate way. His assertion that
the right of subjectivity does not 'detract' from the right of objectiv-
ity is covered by his premises only in the sense that it is not permitted
to infer from the possibility and factual givenness of such conflicts to
the absence of a right of objectivity, but only to the view that our
evaluative and normative practices have an irrational and subjective
foundation. His premises by no means cover the conclusion that it is
wrong to make room for the right of subjectivity in single cases. Either
Hegel gives no answer to the questions as to how large this room should
be or how its limits should reasonably be drawn; or he gives answers
that are nowadays inacceptable. The latter should not surprise us, given
Michael Quante 229
the distance in time of almost 200 years. Maybe we should even learn
from Hegel's general reservedness about the prescriptive power of phi-
losophy that some of our ethical problems cannot be solved with the
means of philosophical ethics, but only within societal and political dis-
courses. Even if we today do not share Hegel's belief in the principled
rationality of reality, there presumably is an alternative to Hegel's pro-
posal of illustrating the rationality of our practices with philosophical
means. This could at least lead to evidence for the case that at certain
places and in particular spheres these practices do not meet the stan-
dards of reason; at least in this sense, Hegel's is a critical philosophy of
action.
Notes
1.	See Quante (2004a), pp. 3, 77, fn. 25 and p. 154, fn. 64; the first motto
of this essay is a quote from notes to lectures Hegel gave in 1821/22, the
year after the first publication of the Philosophy of Right. So far the author of
these notes, that were edited by Hansgeorg Hoppe, could not be determined;
the quote is to be found on p. 228 of that edition. In his margin notes
to §120 of the published version of the Philosophy of Right, one finds the
following formulation by Hegel: '[The] Human being must have an inten-
tion in acting, not just a purpose—for [it is a] thinking being' (§120N); in
the following, references in the text are to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, I give
paragraph-numbers, adding 'R' when I refer to the annotation and 'N' when
I refer to Hegel's marginal notes to the respective paragraph. All quotations of
Hegel's marginal notes have been translated by David P. Schweikard, where
the mostly fragmentary syntax of the original has been retained.
2.	In doing so I granted that Hegel would not without reservation have con-
sented to this restriction (see Quante, 2004a, p. 4, fn. 4), since he holds that
a comprehensive philosophy of action must be developed within practical
philosophy; for instance, Stephen Houlgate subscribes to this view in his
contribution to this volume. Some critics of my interpretation have ignored
this doubled restriction of the interpretive approach I explicitly adopted at
the time.
3.	Another, yet only roughly developed, conception of agency is to be found in
the section 'b. Will' ['b. Willen'] in JS III: 186-9.
4.	For this topic, see Quante (2008a). Another crucial difference between
Bratman's overall approach and Hegel's theory of the will lies in the fact
that the latter does not base his conception on a Lockean theory of personal
identity; cf. Siep, 1992, pp. 81-115.
5.	According to Hegel, as he puts it in §4 of the Philosophy of Right, this
is only suitable 'to form an idea [Vorstellen] of them' (§4R) and not for
their philosophical justification which, he holds, must be carried out in
speculative-logical terms. He claims, however, that every acting subject
must 'have examples if the further determinations [of the will] within his
self-consciousness' (ibid.).
230 Hegel's Planning Theory of Agency
6.	This is not to be misunderstood as saying that the philosophical significance
of the institution of law is exhausted by this function, since Hegel hold that
this significance lies in the fact that law is the manifestation of freedom in
the sphere of objective spirit, that is in the social sphere. But the institu-
tion of law can only be this manifestation by fulfilling the aforementioned
function.
7.	This marks the decisive difference between Hegel's conception and the
planning theory of agency developed by Brand (1984).
8.	In this way the individual experience of agency is subsumed under the self-
understanding of a shared social practice. Since Hegel is committed to the
claim that self-consciousness is constituted by social recognitive processes,
I think this is systematically adequate; for this aspect of Hegel's theory of
self-consciousness, see Quante (2010).
9.	In Quante (2004b), I give a detailed statement of my arguments for think-
ing that the speculative-logical justificatory claims can be bracketed without
thereby ignoring Hegel's justification of them.
10.	Hegel himself justifies this form of reasoning that relies on our actual
practices for parts of our ethical practices on the systematic level of
speculative-logical justification by pointing out that this structure of default-
and-challenge is a moment of the structure of the will; for a detailed analysis,
see Quante (2005).
11.	The first clause captures the first-personal nature of intentions, the third
gives expression to the social constitutedness of agency; a detailed analysis
of these is given in Quante (2004a).
12.	I have analyzed Hegel's speculative-logical development of this connection
elsewhere; see Quante (2004a). So in this essay, I focus on Hegel's second
strategy for justifying his planning theory of agency.
13.	If one holds, as I have done elsewhere, that our ethical practice can suffi-
ciently be justified on the basis of the default-and-challenge-model, then this
justification is—pace Hegel—philosophically sufficient; see Quante (2008b).
14.	For a detailed analysis of this section of the Philosophy of Right, see Quante
(2004c).
15.	By contrast, punishment with the sole purpose of 'deterring and reforming'
(§100R) is a grave violation of the criminal's honor, since in that case he is
'regarded simply as a harmful animal' (ibid.). Hegel repeatedly points out
in this context that exemptions should not go against the agent's honor;
see §118N, §119R, §120N, §132R, and §137N; for more on Hegel's theory of
punishment, see Mohr (1997) and Willaschek (2004).
16.	Here Hegel's and Bratman's planning theories of agency overlap; both dis-
tinguish between the generalization implied by the transition from purpose
to intention and the specific demand of universality characterizing moral
intentions.
17.	For reasons that will become clear in due course I distinguish between
exemptions that refer to the agent from excuses that refer to single events or
actions.
18.	For Hegel, this 'must' represents, on the one hand, a requirement of rational-
ity and a moral requirement we mutually appeal to and enforce; on the other
hand, this points to the speculative-logical development that, on Hegel's
view, can be shown to be implied by the forms of judgment on which
Michael Quante 231
purpose and intention as well as moral attitudes are based (cf. his talk of
'immediate judgment/ 'judgment of reflection/ and 'concept-judgment' (§114N)
or of the 'reflection-predicate' (§119N); for an analysis of this level of Hegel's
concept of action, which is bracketed here, see Quante (2004a).
19.	We should understand the 'next species' as referring to the genus proximum;
consider the addition to §229 of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sci-
ences (1830). This logical category is obviously not sufficient for dealing with
questions concerning the evaluation of actions in ethical and legal contexts.
20.	The second remark refers to the disposition to moral insight concerning
which 'the right of the subject [...] has the effect, in the case of chil-
dren, imbeciles, and lunatics, of diminishing or annulling [aufzuheben] their
responsibility in this respect, too' (§132R). Since both these statements have
the same structure, I can focus on the variant quoted above.
21.	A counterfactual critique (Hegel mentions the formulations 'could have
known' ['hat wissen kbnnen'] (§132N) and 'you should have known this'
['du hattest dies wissen sollen'] (§137N)) becomes understandable only
against such a background of shared social standards.
22.	At this stage, I would just like to point out that this finding does not exclude
that our practice is itself a constitutive precondition of human beings' devel-
opment of these capacities; for further reflection on this issue, see Quante
(2009a).
23.	With his characterization of this relation ('consequences, as the [outward]
shape whose soul is the end to which the action is directed,' §118), Hegel
points both to the relationship between causality and teleology in general
and to the role of causal relationships within the context of organisms and
the mind-body-relationship in particular.
24.	At another place (Quante, 2004a, part III), I have shown why one should not
infer from Hegel's finalistic overall conception that explanations of action
contain no causal component.
25.	Quante (forthcoming) is dedicated to the analysis of this connection.
26.	For systematic reflections about these lines, see Quante (2007) and (2009b).
27.	The former is taken up in Halbig (2002), the latter in Quante (2010).
28.	It is a systematically far-reaching question what sort of structure such an
ethical theory would need to have, which would probably include an expli-
cation of the evaluative practice Hegel sums up under the term 'clemency.'
In any case, and if I view this correctly, it follows from his treatment of
excuses that on Hegel's account this cannot be a theory of rights.
29.	In Quante (2005), I have analyzed the anti-skeptical model of justification
Hegel employs here; for an interpretation of Hegel's theory of the will as a
theory of social institutions that overcomes the contraposition of liberalism
and communitarianism, see Quante and Schweikard (2009).
13
Hegel, Narrative and Agency
Allen Speight
The importance of narrative for the concept of agency is a topic that
has recently received renewed attention among philosophers. Signifi-
cant new discussions of narrative have emerged, especially among some
anglophone philosophers, as new questions about both the empirical
and normative narrativity of agency have arisen. Hegel's contributions
to such a debate might be thought to be too globally determinative,
inasmuch as he is still presumed to be the West's leading philosophical
'grand narrativist' when it comes to the question of finding meaning in
history; or it might be thought that Hegel's account of rational agency,
centered as it is on large institutional commitments such as family, civil
society and the state, would be insufficiently helpful for questions relat-
ing to an individual's own distinct life-pattern. In what follows, I will
discuss first what I take to be new and important in the character of
the current debate about narrativity in agency, as opposed to earlier
attempts a generation ago to integrate narrativity into accounts of ethics
and philosophy more broadly. I will then examine what Hegelian con-
cerns about agency might be said to have a narrative cast and suggest
what a specifically Hegelian notion of narrative agency might add to
the ongoing debate. In particular, a narrative account of agency of the
sort that Hegel articulates is important for an understanding of agency
that involves three well-known (but certainly not easily comprehended
or even widely accepted) Hegelian commitments: to what will be called
in what follows the retrospective, socially inflected and implicitly holistic
nature of the task of ethical reasons-giving.
1.	Current debate on narrative and agency
The notion of narrative agency enjoyed a certain heyday a genera-
tion or so ago, as the philosophical work of Charles Taylor (1989,
232
Allen Speight 233
Chapter 2), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), Paul Ricoeur (1984, 1992) and
Hannah Arendt (1958) placed the question of narrative at the center of
discussions of action, selfhood, value and interpretation. Recently, how-
ever, new philosophical attention has been directed toward narrative
agency, particularly from voices predominantly within the anglophone
tradition, some of whom (Lamarque, 2004, 2007; Strawson, 2004, 2007)
have directed sharp skepticism toward what they take to be the expan-
siveness of earlier claims about narrative. At the same time, there have
been renewed, perhaps even more expansive, claims on behalf of narra-
tive from very different sources with different philosophical aims, from
Daniel Dennett's (1988) well-known claim that '[we] are all virtuoso
novelists' (and hence, on his view, entirely fictional selves) to David
Velleman's (2003, p. 3) claim that the perspective on ourselves called
narrative carries with it a distinct kind of explanatory force (allowing
us to understand our selves as indeed fictive, yet somehow true self-
creations) to Peter Goldie's (2003a, p. 217) claim that 'when we are
trying to give an explanation of what happened, there is no possibility
that our explanation can cease to be narrative in structure' (and hence
part of what it genuinely means to have a perspective on one's self).
In giving an assessment of the current debate, it needs to be said first
that there are few contemporary cross-disciplinary terms of appeal that
are as polyvalent, not to say elastic, as 'narrative.' And Strawson's cri-
tique correctly begins to try to sort out what is at stake in some of the
quite different claims made on behalf of narrative: for example, the dif-
ference between the empirical claim that we happen to be creatures who
understand ourselves through stories and the essentially normative claim
made, for example, by Taylor (1989, p. 47), that it is a 'basic condition
of making sense of ourselves... that we grasp our lives in a narrative.’
Similarly, Strawson is right that the boldest earlier claims for narrative
failed to take into account the sort of distinction he draws between
the perspectives of narrativists and episodists—the former tending to
construe a temporal integrity through numerous life events and the lat-
ter inevitably unable to see life as more than a series of disconnected
episodes.
Yet there appear to remain some important elements of the appeal to
narrative that those who have argued in response to Strawson's skeptical
objections can reasonably make a case for. For one thing, human beings
do in fact employ some structures which can be said to have an iden-
tifiably narrative character (in comparison with other, non-narrative or
less-than-narrative structures) and it remains philosophically relevant to
try to say what such narrative structures have in common, even to try
234 Hegel, Narrative and Agency
to ascertain whether there are norms within some disciplines and gen-
res to the correct application of narrative structure. Secondly, with
respect to the question of agency, even if we grant that there is a problem
of episodicity such that not all persons are capable or desirous of con-
struing actions in their lives in terms of the larger integrity or unity of
life as a whole/ there are still ordinary actions from moment to moment
which may be viewed from an agent's narrative stance or perspective
and such a perspective may indeed, on at least some views of norma-
tivity, be a phenomenon which philosophers of action have to examine
and explain.1
If there remain, then, important open questions about the impor-
tance of narrative in contemporary philosophy—and a potential line of
applicability within philosophy of action more specifically—what might
an Hegelian account of narrative agency have to add to this current
debate? In the following sections, I will examine first the notions of nar-
rative structure and narrative stance and then show how these may be
useful for understanding some apparent commitments within Hegel's
philosophy of action.
2.	Narrative structure and narrative stance
There is certainly no question that narrative—both as an underlying
philosophical structure and as an explicit thematic issue—plays a large
role in Hegel's writings. Characteristically, Hegel's engagement with nar-
rative involves an unusually direct consideration of the specific narrative
patterns in the practice of existing disciplines, such as in the literary, his-
torical and artistic genres. The Phenomenology of Spirit, as is well-known,
makes a striking appropriation of literary works and genres, especially
over the course of its 'Spirit' chapter, as it takes up the significance of
tragic conflict as found in works such as Sophocles' Antigone, the comic
theatricality of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew and the notion of the self
as presented in the contemporary romantic novel. Moreover, as has
been argued recently, Hegel takes up these appeals to specifically literary
narrative within the larger project of the Phenomenology by 'emplot-
ting' them within an overall narrative structure that itself results in the
emergence of a self-reflective and philosophical account of the role of
literature (see Speight, 2001). Hegel's interest in specific forms of nar-
rative such as literary genres was by no means just a part of his early
philosophical life, however: sustained attention to narrative treatments
in various disciplines remains a part of his mature philosophical prac-
tice. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel examines various
Allen Speight 235
forms of narrative historiography as an important step on the way to
a philosophical treatment of history. And, as the so-called "father of art
history/ Hegel's careful historical contextualization of the moments of
symbolic, classical and romantic art, as well as the specific genres of
artistic expression, has an inherently narrative form.2
Hegel's treatment of these specifically literary, historical and art-
historical narratives is not simply part of a deference on his part to the
practices associated with specific disciplines but is ultimately connected,
I would argue, to the larger narrative structure of his philosophical
approach to agency. But what exactly counts as a "narrative' approach
to agency and how might Hegel's account of agency involve such an
approach? In order to trace this larger question, 1 will begin by exploring
the discussion in the current literature on (1) what makes for a narrative
structure in general and (2) what would characterize an agent as having
a narrative stance. I will then turn in the following section to Hegel's
appropriation of narrative structure and stance within the terms of his
practical philosophy.
(1)	Narrative Structure. What makes for a narrative structure? A common
theme that runs through the current philosophical discussion of narra-
tive is that for an account to be considered a narrative, something more
is required than just the inclusion of a chronological sequence. In Peter
Lamarque's formulation: "at least two events must be depicted... and
there must be some more or less loose, albeit non-logical relation
between the events' (Lamarque, 2004). But what sort of relation is
that? Three positions have emerged within the literature on what more
is required for there to be a narrative, stances which may be termed
respectively the causalist, emotionalist and normative stances.
Following Morton White (1965), Noel Carroll (2001c) has distin-
guished narrative in form from the annul as a mode of discourse
representing events as merely temporally ordered and from the chron-
icle as representing temporally ordered events that pertain to a single
subject: "The Eastern Roman Empire falls in 1453; the American Consti-
tution is accepted in 1789; Russia is defeated in 1905' is an example of
the former; "The French Revolution occurred in 1789; Napoleon became
Emperor in 1805; Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, after
which the Bourbons were restored' is an example of the latter. Narra-
tive, in the full sense, requires, by contrast, something more: in Carroll's
view, one has not yet constructed a narrative if all that one claims is
that event x preceded event y; there must be, on his view, a causal rela-
tion that narrative essentially represents—and more specifically a causal
236 Hegel, Narrative and Agency
connection on which earlier events in a sequence are at least causally
necessary conditions for the causation of later events, or are contribu-
tors thereto. For example: 'The Allies and the Central Powers had fought
themselves to a standstill, but then the Americans entered the war and,
as a result, Germany was defeated/
This causalist narrative view can be distinguished from two other
positions within contemporary philosophical discussion of narrative:
Velleman's notion of the 'emotional cadence' of narrative, and a third
position, articulated recently by Ismay Barwell, that narrative's func-
tion is directly related to an agent's 'evaluative' stance toward his or
her own actions. On Velleman's view, Carroll's causal account rules
out some legitimate narratives and fails to account for the distinctive
force that narratives have on us. Carroll had argued, for example, that
because it does not evince the proper kind of causality an account such
as 'Aristarchus hypothesized the heliocentric system and then centuries
later Copernicus discovered it again' could never be a story. Yet Velleman
claims that one might be able to construct a genuine narrative involving
these two events without inventing a non-existent or improbable causal
connection, and he adduces Aristotle's famous example about the statue
of Mitys, which 'killed the author of Mitys' death by falling down on
him when a looker-on at a public spectacle.' Such a causally unrelated
pair of events nonetheless has an emotional power over us: in Aristotle's
view, it is a story that may arouse our fear and pity; on Velleman's view,
the 'emotional cadence' or 'emotional resolution' provided by such a
story (or many other such examples, such as the story of the different
lives of twins separated at birth) is essential to the distinctive power of
narrative structure.
Ismay Barwell has suggested yet a third way of viewing narrative struc-
ture, one that has a close relation to Velleman's: narrative as offering
an evaluative sense of events. On Barwell's view, narrative often is con-
strued around constitutive relations (depending on conventions, social
rules and norms, rather than causal laws) or rationalizing ones (eval-
uations or appraisals that are again not causal in nature): 'supplying
reasons for evaluative judgments of events is as basic a storytelling func-
tion as explaining their occurrence' (Barwell, 2009, p. 57). As I will argue
in the following section, Hegel's stance toward the importance of narra-
tive structure for agency is not primarily a causal one, but rather comes
closer in ways to Barwell's view, with some gesture toward Velleman: if
we can give an Hegelian narrative of actions, what is required is some
sense of normative relationships—and these, according to Hegel, have a
dispositional importance for us, as well.
Allen Speight 237
(2)	Narrative Stance. Given what has been said about the structure of
narrative in general, what does this mean for an account of agency?
More specifically, what does it mean for an agent to have or to take a
narrative stance in the recounting and justification of his or her actions?
Velleman's account goes the furthest of the three perspectives discussed
in giving some account of how a generally narrative structure of events
can constitute an agentive perspective. For Velleman, narrative helps us
assimilate events not to a pattern of how things happen but to a pattern
of how things feel or what they mean—an emotional cadence that, on
his view, connects with the biological organism's desire for tension and
release. What this means for an agent's perspective on her own action
is that, in Velleman's view, there is a sort of 'fragmentation of practi-
cal reasoning' between instrumental rationality on the one hand and
narrative perspective on the other: we 'aim to do things for which we
have both an explanation, revealing why we came to do them, and a
narrative that helps to clarify how we feel about them or what they
mean to us.' In the following section, I will discuss how these two ele-
ments of practical reasoning on Velleman's scheme have to coalesce on
Hegel's view.
3.	Narrativity and Hegelian agency
What has been said so far about narrative structure and narrative stance
might shed some useful light on some of the more controversial com-
mitments that have been attributed to Hegel's philosophy of agency.
As I will argue in what follows, the most distinctly Hegelian claim about
narrativity in agency concerns the stance from which any ethical agent
is able to reflect upon his actions and the justifications for them: for
Hegel, this stance can be said to be narrative in the sense that it always
involves the following:
(1)	assessing in an inherently retrospective way what an agent's com-
mitments must currently 'mean' in the context of their appli-
cation within historical time as they have come to develop: an
Hegelian narrative agent is engaged retrospectively in the process
of justification with an eye to the revisability of judgments about
action;
(2)	arguing from an 'institutionally bound' stance, not a commitment-
free stance which seeks to justify commitments by reference to their
prudential advisability in an individualist context: an Hegelian nar-
rative agent is a socially embedded agent whose self-narration is
238 Hegel, Narrative and Agency
bound up with larger social practices and norms to which other
agents appeal in their self-narratives;
(3)	considering specific actions that have a particular meaning in the
historical unfolding of an institutional set of commitments in a way
that regards those commitments in the context of the whole field
of such action: an Hegelian narrative agent is implicated holistically
in a set of interlocking relationships that specific actions can make
more explicit.
These three narrative commitments of Hegelian agency—I will abbre-
viate them as commitments to the retrospectivity, social inflection and
implicit holism of the narrative stance—illuminate a number of vexing
features of Hegel's practical philosophy and provide a distinctive view
of narrativity in comparison with contemporary positions. Since these
commitments are very far from being standard ones in contemporary
philosophy of action, it is worth examining why each has been asso-
ciated with Hegel and what a consideration of narrativity in Hegel's
philosophy of agency might add to discussion about them.
(1)	Narrative and Retrospectivity: 'Retrospective significance/ as Carroll
has claimed, 'is a frequently occurring feature of narrative' (Carroll,
2001c, p. 125. See also Carroll, 2007; Velleman, 2005). Yet, as we have
seen, Carroll himself immediately makes clear that a merely retrospec-
tive stance is not sufficient for narrative. And, although it is clear that
Hegel's view of agency involves some element of retrospectivity, it is not
clear exactly what makes this part of the narrative commitment of his
practical philosophy. Some of the claims that have recently been made
for Hegelian retrospectivity in agency, it has been countered, appear
to run against many of our common sense intuitions about agency,
and also against the assumptions of much contemporary philosophy
of action. Does Hegel mean, for example, to assert an actual retrospec-
tive determination of intention or a retrospective awareness of what
intentional agency means? (see Pippin, 2008, pp. 147-79, or Chapter 4
above; Pippin, 2004c; McDowell, 2009 or Chapter 5 above; Laitinen,
2004).
I will begin this section with what I take to be the least controver-
sial of the claims about retrospectivity in Hegel's account of agency: the
role of retrospectivity in forming the ultimate justification of an action
and thus the stance from which an agent can place his action in the
context of staking a claim or taking responsibility. Most importantly,
this retrospective stance of justification or assessment tries to take into
Allen Speight 239
consideration that any practice, institution or commitment is what it is
only as enacted in single actions (so it must have an openness to the his-
torical development of norms as well as a sense of construing meaning
for a particular agent).
It may be, however, that Hegel's own stance is actually more radically
retrospective not merely about the narrative stance of justification but
also about the first-order task of saying what actually goes on when an
agent acts. Robert Pippin has argued that it is one of the philosophical
merits of Hegel's view of action that it levels a strong skeptical suspicion
toward accounts of the subject regarded as being ontologically distinct
and toward a notion of an agent's reasons isolatable as "episodic or dispo-
sitional and perhaps uniquely causal mental states.' If indeed we do not
start in our account of the philosophy of agency with assumptions about
a reified intention as something always separable from and causally
put into play in action, then the form of retrospectivity most inti-
mately associated with Hegel may be that involved with the project of
a narrativity of will, not just of the narrativity involved in the stance of
any ethical agent engaged in the practice of justification under reasons-
giving. Bluntly put: what might it mean to be an agent whose sense of
his own desire or will is always one that she is coming to terms with
after the fact? Hegel's boldest claim is that "an individual cannot know
what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.'3 A com-
plete answer to this question would require more attention than can
be devoted in this context, but Hegel's notion that an agent's own later
take on what he has done and the assessments of others after the fact
remain crucial for the determination of action does not imply a col-
lapsing of first-personal perspective or intentionality in behavioralist
explanation. The difficult position that Hegel appears to assert is thus
one that continually resists—as, in my view, all genuinely interesting
narrative must—the false separation of inner and outer.
(2)	Narrative and Socially Inflected Agency. On Hegel's view of narrative,
an agent confronts actions as embedded within a perspective that is
"institutionally bound' or connected to the larger structures of social
norms and practices. An agent's "local' narrative, if we want to put it in
these terms, has to be rooted in a more "global' narrative (or actually
set of narratives) connected with the social and ethical institutions of
the modern family, economy and state. This commitment to the social
inflection of narrative agency is one which may not so easily fit some
conceptions of narrative that center on the distinctiveness of patterns
within individual life; yet, as I will argue, in fact many contemporary
240 Hegel, Narrative and Agency
accounts of narrative implicitly rely on just such institutional norms or
practices.
On some contemporary individualist accounts of the narrative self,
for example, it is argued that an agent is simply constructing a nar-
rative whose only points of resistance with the world come from the
agent's own sense of what makes that narrative work. One obvious diffi-
culty faced by some such accounts of the narrative self is the subjectivist
nature of such narrative construction: what prevents an agent's nar-
rative from being simply the 'making up' of a good story to explain
away actions that are viewed by others in the community in another
light? An individualist account of narrative does not necessarily fail
to have resources here, since an agent's own quite distinct narrative
sense may often make her act in surprising ways that actually suggest
an underlying integrity: Harry Frankfurt's (1999, p. Ill) example of a
mother who intends to give up her child for adoption but who finds in
the end that she just cannot in fact do it.4 From an Hegelian perspec-
tive, however, such a story of an agent's own experience of something
she may want to call resistant integrity as told from her own perspec-
tive is in fact something which needs further narrative reflection on
the larger kinds of stories told in a given society about motherhood:
are there any mothers who view their own potential or actual moth-
erhood in a way which has nothing to do with existing norms of
motherhood in the society in which they live? Hegel's claim for social
inflection here of course does not mean that an individual mother can
construe herself only in acting in a socially conformist way. In fact,
as I will argue in the following section, Hegel is especially interested
in cases where agents attempt to articulate in their actions some ideal
(say 'motherhood') that they find demanded by but somehow miss-
ing in conventions of mothering. On Hegel's view, the very attempt to
articulate that ideal is something which is already in conversation with
existing social norms.
It's useful to compare Hegel's views here with Velleman's view of the
potentially fragmented perspectives that ordinary instrumental rational-
ity and narrative reflection can give to agency. For Velleman, an agent
in narratively attempting to make future acts continuous with her past
may well commit what the perspective of instrumental rationality must
regard as the fallacy of sunk costs ('1'11 just hang in there with the Ph.D.
program since I've already spent so much time on it'). The integra-
tion of narrative perspective into the overall account of agency enables
what Velleman calls the 'rational inertia of commitments' to provide a
'counterweight to opportunism.' As Velleman acknowledges, there are
Allen Speight 241
some notable difficulties involved in this asymmetry of practical per*
spectives: Velleman (2003) discusses here several well-known examples
of 'bad faith/ including Sartre's waiter and Hannah Arendt's warning
against fatalistic narrative self-absorption in her biographical sketch of
Isak Dinesen.5
Hegel of course hardly denies the potential for fragmentation in prac-
tical reasoning or the numerous opportunities for 'bad faith' presented
by narrative ethical reasons-giving (and in fact he spent an unusual
amount of time, within both the Phenomenology of Spirit (see the Section
on 'Conscience') and the Philosophy of Right (see §140), just catalogu-
ing the various ways in which moral bad faith can occur—from outright
hypocrisy and Jesuitical probabilism to the shifting ethics of conviction
and romantic irony). But what underlies his view of practical reason-
ing is a perspective under which affect and reason not only can but
must come together, if an agent is to be able to act in an appropri-
ately ethical sense. Hegel's attempt to ground this unified story is a
much longer effort than can be adequately addressed here, but it rests
on his attempt to find the sort of continuity between desire and the
emotional life on the one hand and reason on the other hand that had
eluded not only Kant's ethics but numerous attempts of his generation
to 'overcome' Kant. What especially enables modern ethical life, Hegel
thought, is the opportunity to act on reasons which connect with the
range of 'cultured' or correctly oriented emotional attachments to one's
legitimate 'own' (in home, work and public life): as he puts it in the
Philosophy of Right, the 'system' of ethical content is 'already present in
the will... as a multitude of various drives'; it is in their being given
the form of ethical reasons that they 'become the rational system of the
will's determination' (PR §§14, 19).
For Hegel, it is not merely that the articulation of a commitment
('I thee wed') may give, as Velleman argues, a 'rational inertia' to what
we have committed ourselves to—and hence a strengthened predictive
force behind our actually keeping such commitments. More deeply, the
articulation of a commitment has an expressive force that links an agent
to the commitments she has already taken to be essential to her iden-
tity and which are given expression as that commitment is put into
action. As Pippin puts it in his account of 'ethical reasons,' an action on
behalf of a family member is not undertaken on prudential ('what am
I going to get out of this?') or moral ('am I doing this for duty's sake?')
grounds. Both moral and prudential reasoning here present Bernard
Williams' familiar difficulty of having a chain of practical reasoning
that involves 'one thought too many': actions which Hegelian ethical
242 Hegel, Narrative and Agency
reasoning understands in terms of family love, occupational commit-
ment and loyalty to the public good are actions which are not justified
by reference to prudential or moral standards that stand outside of the
particular commitments involved.
(3)	Narrative and Implicit Holism: One of the elements of narrative which
may help account for its staying power in philosophy and other disci-
plines is that stories often carry a richness of potential meaning within
them that is insufficiently exhausted by existing explanatory analyses of
agency. Hegel himself was particularly drawn to formative literary exam-
ples of narrative richness—stories in which characters articulate values
that are inherent within a particular narrative conception of the world
but that lie implicit and unarticulated until an agent steps forward to
assert them in a way that inevitably brings more of that richness to
light. Such is Hegel's appeal to Antigone, whom he appears to see pre-
cisely as an agent whose actions find a new or hidden embodiment to
the meaning of 'family.' The newly explicit meaning that Antigone gives
to the family's traditional function in carrying out burial rites is one that
is articulated in a way that is hardly the result of some sort of blind alle-
giance on Antigone's part to that value: it requires instead an ongoing
explicit assertion in the face of much more moderate claims about what
is required of female members of the family (the views of her sister) or
overt attempts (on the part of Creon) to use political power to restrict
the family's and the sister's roles.6
The relationship between implicit whole and explicated specific value
means that there is of course in Hegel's account of ethical institutions
and agent's reasons a spectrum of agentive awareness. In fact, one of
Hegel's initial tasks in explaining what he means by ethical life or
Sittlichkeit in the Philosophy of Right is to sketch the range of reflec-
tive stances—from faith and trust to reflective rationality and adequate
cognition—that can characterize the ethical agent (PR §147). The most
self-aware agents are those who grasp with philosophical comprehen-
sion the interlocking nature of the various institutional commitments
of modernity—how the internal realm of the family presupposes some
external and educative role in civil society, for example, or how the var-
ious articulated elements of ethical life in the state entail one another.
Hegel makes clear, however, that an ordinary citizen's sense of his com-
mitment to family, civil society and the state is indeed one that can
be rational,7 and, given what we have said about his notion of the
expressivity entailed by such commitments, it is clear that ordinary
ethical agency indeed must have some narrative dimension for him.
Allen Speight 243
Since on Hegel's view of social change it is moreover frequently not
the philosopher who initiates larger shifts in the meaning of signifi-
cant institutional commitments, the narrative sense of individual agents
must remain an important feature of modern ethical life.
Notes
1.	Among recent defenses of narrative in this context, see Behrendt, 2007; Rudd,
2007; Schechtman, 2007; Goldie, 2003a, 2003b.
2.	I have used this term (both here and in my The Philosophy of Hegel, 2008)
with a nod toward Noel Carroll's (2001b) conception of a narrative philosophy
of art.
3.	PhG, 1401. A further issue that would need to be addressed in a complete
account of this topic is the relation between Hegel's PhG (where the issue of
retrospectivity appears to play a more thoroughgoing role) and the PR (where
the account of action and Hegel's new distinction between Handlung and Tat
are presented from a somewhat different philosophical context).
4.	Of course, Frankfurt resists the notion of narrative self-construction in the
context of agency more broadly.
5.	On the sunk-cost fallacy, see Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 35.
6.	For a longer discussion of Antigone's role in shaping Hegel's narrative sense
of agency, see Speight, 2001, Chapter 2, and Pippin, 2008, pp. 176-7; or
above, p. 76.
7.	'[T]he consciousness a citizen has of his country and its laws is a percep-
tion of the reason-world, so long as he looks up to them as unconditioned
and likewise universal powers, to which he must subject his individual will'
(EL §82 A).
14
Action Between Conviction and
Recognition in Hegel's Critique
of the Moral Worldviews
Francesca Menegoni
The dialectical encounter between personal convictions and interper-
sonal recognition is a theme which is often discussed in contemporary
ethical debates. This theme is faced with culturally complex realities
in which individual motivations, reasoning and choices are intimately
intertwined with the social and cultural contexts to which each individ-
ual belongs. The result of this dual-track confrontation relates individual
and public action to different normative sources. What establishes and
justifies or legitimizes individual actions does not count with regard to
intersubjective relations, and vice versa.
The interweaving of the perspective of the personal convictions of
a single individual (defined indiscriminately as a subject or a person)
with the perspective that is centered on interpersonal relationships and
intersubjective recognition constitutes the core of Hegel's concept of
action. As will be shown, this interconnection establishes as much the
reality of action as its worth. Consequently, this interconnection brings
into focus a decisive passage in the educational process of single indi-
viduals: (a) in the consciousness and realization of the self and (b) in
the collaboration in a communitarian work. Hegel does not consider
the two processes in succession, nor does he consider them in terms of
a hierarchical relationship, but rather as inseparable moments within
a whole. There is no formation or construction of the individual self
in absence of collaboration in a communitarian work, and there is no
universal work in the absence of the conscience and realization of the
individual self (Enz. 1817 §§434-7).
The dialectic of singular and universal that Hegel presents is inti-
mately connected to his criticism of situations that arise whenever
the individual shies away from this work of formation and—to use
244
Francesca Menegoni 245
Schelling's cryptic but appropriate formula—attempts to bring oneself
into 'intimacy with the center'.1
For Hegel, all of the manifestations that involve mutual recogni-
tion belong to a project which is described as the collaboration in a
universal work. This mutual recognition prevents the individual from
falling into solipsistic closure, and it characterizes every form of suc-
cessful communitarian life. Hegel's definition of this ideal is heavily
influenced by the ethical-political model developed in the Platonic-
Aristotelian tradition. This ideal allows for the measuring of the defi-
ciencies and failures of many existing realities and makes Hegelian
philosophy an excellent candidate for interpreting numerous social
pathologies.
The dialectic between personal convictions and interpersonal recog-
nition constitutes the heart of Hegel's practical philosophy as laid
out in Elements of the Philosophy of Right and in the various editions
of Encyclopaedia. With specific reference to the theme of action this
dialectic is analyzed in the section of Phenomenology of Spirit on moral-
ity (section 6C). These pages do not only represent the setting in
which Hegel investigates and evaluates the moral worldviews (moralische
Weltanschauungen) of his contemporaries, nor are they limited to out-
lining and criticizing the distortions created by the dialectic of moral
conscience intimately certain of itself (Gewissen). Above all, they consti-
tute one of the few texts in which Hegel confronts the question of the
reality and the value of morally and ethically qualified actions; so in this
paper I will focus on this section of Phenomenology.
Hegel provides a precise discussion of the foundations of the most
accredited ethical doctrines of his time (especially Kant's and Fichte's).
However, he goes beyond merely critical intention by isolating a num-
ber of elements that characterize effectual action as morally good or
evil, and by individuating its basic structure. The argumentation in these
pages proceeds in a clenched, all-together inelegant rhythm with twists
and repetitions that make reading irksome, if not repellent. Further, the
text contains diverse, interlocking perspectives that are not easily distin-
guishable from one another. We can generally trace the argumentation
back to the points of view of the T, the 'We' and the 'self' or 'self-
consciousness', with a clear prevalence of the first-person perspective
(singular and plural) over the second and third. In this text, compre-
hension of oneself and of one's own worth and recognition on the part
of others are inter-connected themes. At times, the self and the other
are compared, but more often the T and the 'We' are the focus. The
identification of the points of view of the 'I' and the 'We' of the 'for
246 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
oneself' and 'for another' comes only upon reciprocal and symmetrical
recognition among self-consciousnesses.2
Hegel's text explores a number of possibilities that arise the moment
the conscience questions itself on the quality of its actions. Such ques-
tioning may concern the motives, the intended outcomes, and the
directives that discipline the conscience in question. The justification
of the worth of the action can be based on each of these elements.
Depending on which element such justification is based on, it will give
rise to a 'moral worldview' which is founded upon internal or exter-
nal principles, formal or material principles. These are the perspectives
which present-day meta-ethics is faced with. However, contemporary
meta-ethicists do not seem to have any particular interest in Hegel's con-
ception, most likely because it cannot be easily categorized under any
of the alternatives just mentioned. This is due to the fact that Hegel's
practical philosophy is holistic. It tries to hold together the formal and
material as well as the ideal and real points of view.3
It is therefore interesting to trace some passages of the argumentative
strategy that Hegel puts into play in his analysis of action in this part
of Phenomenology of Spirit in view of a potential comparison with con-
temporary meta-ethical debate. To this end, I will analyze the following
three points: First, I will discuss Hegel's criticism of moral conceptions
which disregard the effectual reality of action. Second, I will highlight
the vital role played by convictions and personal decisions in such moral
conceptions. Third, I will explain the dual value of moral conscience
(Gewisseri) and of the language in which it is expressed. The result of this
close examination will be that personal conviction and interpersonal
recognition are equally necessary elements of action. It also follows
that the linguistic means with which that recognition is accomplished
should not be disregarded.
1.	The frustrations of the 'Moralische Weltanschauung'
Of the two concepts that enter into play in the section on morality
(6C), the first one, which is conviction, is certainly the more current
than is the second, recognition, which appears only at the end. Admit-
tedly, the notion of recognition is present throughout the chapter on
self-consciousness and the chapter on spirit. The latter derives from
the reciprocal recognition of the self-consciousnesses, according to
the well-known expressions of the 7' that is 'We' and the 'We' that
is 7'.4 As Ludwig Siep writes, it is also true that there exists an inti-
mate correspondence between the movement of recognition, which
Francesca Menegoni 247
is born on the plane of self-consciousness, and the movement of the
spirit. As a matter of fact, recognition fis the spirit under the aspect
of self-consciousnesses in interaction—interaction among individuals
and among institutions'.5 Nevertheless, if recognition is an essential
component for the realization of the interacting self-consciousnesses,
the developmental process of recognition is different from real recogni-
tion. The former concerns the unformed conscience and constitutes the
leitmotiv proposed by the Phenomenology of Spirit as subjection to the
hard discipline that brings the individual consciousness to leave nat-
uralness and immediacy behind in order to put itself on the path of
self-determination and self-realization. The latter is instead found in the
institutions produced by a community of free and equal subjects.6
Though the result of the whole Chapter 6 dedicated to 'Spirit' is
reciprocal recognition among self-consciousnesses, a reconciliation that
Hegel defines as 'absolute Spirit' (PhG 4670; GW 9:361), the three
sections (6A, 6B, and 6C) in which this is articulated move from situ-
ations characterized by an absence of recognition and remain in this
condition almost until the end of the chapter. The central feature of
the 'true' Spirit, the central theme of the first section (6A), is the con-
flict between human law and divine law, represented by the masculine
and feminine elements. Each of these elements is characterized in its
individuality by the non-recognition of the rights of the other. Only
accomplished actions (in this specific case criminal) make evident the
conflict between the two spiritual worlds and eventually resolve it by
passing to a new figure of the spirit, the juridical world. This is founded
on the exclusive, formal, and abstract recognition of the person.
Absence of recognition also characterizes the opposition between
faith and culture in the second section (6B). This clash sparks the strug-
gle between two opposing convictions and describes a conflict that
begins in a bloodless and subtle fashion, using the weapons of ideolog-
ical debate, but finishes violently. The consequence is that the so-called
'truths of Enlightenment' are either the explosion of absolute liberty in
terror or the escape into the interiority of individual moral conscious-
ness. New worldviews are born from the clash between Enlightenment
and superstition. These worldviews reflect new levels of awareness as a
result of the 'formed' consciousness relative to its self and relative to the
cultural worlds that it produces. This passage to the moral worldviews
is the subject of the third and last section (6C). This passage, at least in
the beginning, is characterized by the absence of recognition.
The theme of the 'moral worldviews' is split into two. On one side
there is real consciousness, which manifests itself in numerous, concrete
248 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
behaviors. On the other there is the manner of virtuous thought, the
tugendhafte Gesinnung, which enunciates its principle (as universal as it
is empty of determinate content) of acting out of pure duty. The dialectic
between the two consciousnesses, one real and the other ideal, gives the
setting to that which Hegel defines as a hornet's nest of contradictions
that expresses different modalities of conflict between what is and what
ought to be, and which ends with only one world of conciliation when
the two consciousnesses abandon the frontal opposition that sets them
against one another and each one finds itself in the other (PhG <1(671);
GW 9:362).
Overall, the moralische Weltanschauung brings to light the develop-
ments of the doctrine of the postulates of practical reason as these will
come to be expounded in Kant's later works on from Critique of Judgment,
to Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, to The Metaphysics of Morals.7
The contradictions which are found in the doctrine of postulates derive
from its being held between two opposing demands. The first is the need
to safeguard the possibility of thinking in terms of the notion of the
final purpose (Endzweck), the harmony between the ideal moral world
and the real, natural world. The second demand is the need to reconcile
the many particular purposes of single, concrete actions with the need
to realize the final purpose, the highest good.8 Many diverse moral per-
spectives flow together in the doctrine of moral postulates without being
adequately distinguished, primarily the teleological and deontological
perspectives. This appears evident in Kant's definition of moral perfec-
tion and happiness as ends and as duties.9 This convergence gives life to
conflict, as Hegel's exposition is quick to point out.
The first postulate points out the demand of harmony between the
acting consciousness and the real world, defined with the general and
encompassing term of 'nature'. The former derives its morality from the
law of autonomous reason. The latter is considered as a world with an
interior normativity all its own.10 Therefore, two spheres that submit to
different normative principles are in play. Critique of Judgment struggles
to bridge or to conceive of a path between those spheres. In fact, this
'path' constitutes the fundamental theme of moralische Weltanschauung,
as discussed by Hegel. The path begins by affirming the autonomy of
nature as well as moral activity, then discovers it needs to find an agree-
ment between the two spheres and their respective laws, and finally
does a somersault, privileging one of the two elements in question and
robbing the essentiality and worth from the other.
How and where does this somersault appear so evident? Hegel's
response is: when one pays attention to the 'movements of effectual
Francesca Menegoni 249
action'.11 If in fact moral self-consciousness wants to achieve harmony
between a moral view and natural reality, it is forced to project this har-
mony outside of reality. If instead one focuses on realizing particular
purposes, it is necessary to renounce achieving such harmony and, con-
sequently, one cannot accomplish the final objective represented by the
ideal of the highest good. In the first case, the deontological perspec-
tive is deprived of its foundation. In the second case, the entire object
of practical reason is sunk, and with it goes the teleological perspective
and the whole, Kantian moral conception is put in crisis.
In the subsection of Phenomenology dedicated to the critique of
moralische Weltanschauung (6C.a), it is clear that one must question not
only what must be done or not done in a deontological perspective,
or what purposes are most important and what are not in a teleological
perspective. These questions spring out of a larger one. The real question
that Hegel confronts is the problem of effectual reality. Hegel begins to
tackle this problem by denouncing the underlying vice which charac-
terizes the activity of postulating something that is thought of "as being
that is not yet actual'.12 According to Hegel, the difficulty that each sin-
gle, thinking 'self' has in harmonizing effectual reality and ideal moral
principles is a problem that Kant and post-Kantian philosophers have
been unable to resolve.
In light of this consideration, it is possible to organize and interpret
these convoluted topics in this section,13 boiling the entire discussion
down to the fundamental question of effectual reality (Wirklichkeit) of the
qualified moral action.14 If one reads the 'moral worldviews' (subsection
6C.a) in the light of action with the twofold aspect of its effectuality and
its worth in mind, the representation that we are confronted with loses
many of its troublesome aspects. Hegel's objective is to demonstrate
that the most respected moral doctrines of his time, beginning with
Kant's, are spoiled by a deep antinomy which undermines their legit-
imacy; a contradiction born from a lack of clarity in their foundations.
In demonstrating this, Hegel is fully in line with current meta-ethics.
Unable to reconcile the particular cases with universal principles,
the real with the ideal, these theories oscillate among contradictory
extremes and host a series of distortions or falsifications (Verstellungen)
(subsection 6C.b). From this, 'a whole nest of thoughtless contradic-
tions'15 arise, to use a Kantian expression that Hegel found particularly
pleasing. In the end, consciousness, tired of being sent back by one con-
trary or another and seeing that which it considers essential as projected
in an unreachable Beyond or in an unreal, abstract thought-entity, set-
tles for whichever moral view of the world, turns in on itself, and it is
250 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
the Spirit that is certain of itself, der seiner selbst gewisse Geist, that imme-
diately acts according to its own moral certainty (PhG 4631; GW 9:340)
(subsection 6C.c).
2.	Conviction and decision
The apparent breakaway, which comes at the end of the series of trans-
positions, is evidence of an innovative element: in order to escape from
the tangle of contradictions that paralyze it, consciousness, certain of
its identity and even more of its potential, cuts the Gordian knot and
decides to act immediately according to its own moral certainty. Hegel
will return to this point in the introductory paragraphs of Elements of
the Philosophy of Right (§12), where he underlines the importance of
the moment of decision which is present in real action. Faced with
the multiplicity of impulses and inclinations, the individual 'decides for
himself, that is, he frees himself from the many possibilities which are
prospected to him, he chooses one of them, and thus he becomes an
effectual (wirklich) will. The annotation to this paragraph appropriately
clarifies that German has two expressions for this. ‘Etwas beschliefien’
stands for to decide, to deliberate something. It means to remove inde-
terminacy in which the content is not yet fixed, but remains only
potential. 'Sich entschlieflen' stands for to decide for oneself This means
that 'one's own will that is a neutral element, but infinitely fecund (the
original seed) of all life, contains in itself the determinations and the
aim which it only produces starting from within itself.16
In liberating itself from the strings of the moral worldviews, con-
sciousness acknowledges the centrality of decisions. Its consequences
invest not only the translation of an internal content of consciousness
in the internal reality, but also the very foundation of the moral. In fact,
when moral consciousness (Gewissen) chooses to act according to its
own certainty, it does so with the conviction that this immediate senti-
ment does not err in individuating that which it must or must not do.
Here one finds a reference to what Fichte writes on the formal principle
of ethics in System der Sittenlehre: doubts or uncertainties do not derive
from the arguments which need to be infinitely proven, but from an
immediate, infallible sentiment that constitutes the formal criteria of
the justness of our own convictions.17
With this decision taken on the basis of one's own personal con-
victions, consciousness comes out of the tangle of affirmations and
counter-affirmations that describe effectual reality as both something
that has value and something that does not. Differently from the subject
Francesca Menegoni 251
of the 'moral worldview' (in 6C.a), who is convinced to act morally only
when he is conscious of fulfilling a pure duty and therefore does not act,
the moral 'conscience' (in 6C.c) is certain that duty is a manifestation
of its own knowledge and will.
Hegel thoroughly investigates the negative implications of the self-
referential nature of Gewissen. These constitute the core of his critique
of individual morality and the degenerations that it exhibits if it is
uncoupled from an objective frame of reference.18 The section of Phe-
nomenology being analyzed here (6C.c) contains an incisive statement
of the self-reference of the moral consciousness that is certain of itself.
Hegel states that, for the moral consciousness, the Self does not subsist
in virtue of the law, but the law subsists in virtue of the Self.19 The pos-
sible aberrations that derive from this proposition are duly noted. Hegel
describes them analytically in the concluding pages in the section on
'Morality' of Elements of the Philosophy of Right (§140 Anm.). There, he
lingers extensively in denouncing the hypocrisy of the moral conscious-
ness and its consequent overturning of the more radical immoralities.
In Phenomenology these aberrations are described synthetically, where
Hegel writes that in affirming its own rights, the Gewissen understands
well that its truth is self-serving (PhG 51631; GW 9:340).
Even if one must not neglect the possible degenerations which derive
from making the individual consciousness the foundation of norma-
tive, morally qualified action, nevertheless, the convictions expressed
by Gewissen should not be read as exclusively negative. They consti-
tute an indelible motive when one speaks of passing from the sphere of
intentions and mere proposals to real action.
Even Kant, who pays little attention to the effectual side of action,
remarks: 'As soon as one arrives at the moment of the de facto
action, consciousness speaks involuntarily and inevitably.'20 Fichte is
even more explicit in the System der Sittenlehre nach den Prinzipien der
Wissenschaftslehre, and more precisely where he discusses the passage
from the formal conditions of morality to its material conditions. Here,
he asserts that real action puts the consciousness in front of the alterna-
tive; to spend one's entire life in indecision and in an eternal oscillation
between the pros and cons, or to choose randomly (Gesamtausgabe IV,
164). The only way out is to trust in the rectitude of one's own moral
conviction, following the imperative 'always act according to that which
is the best conviction of your duty; or: act according to your moral con-
science' (IV, 156), because it never errs (IV, 174). 'The formal law of
morals in turn suggests the following: act absolutely according to the
conviction that you have of your duty; [...] that is the equivalent
252 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
of: attempt to convince yourself of what your duty is each time; [...]
and do what you can believe with conviction your duty truly is. Do it
simply because you are convinced that it is your duty' (IV, 156). In say-
ing this, Fichte explicitly appeals to the authority of Kant, who grants
Gewissen the task of acting as leitmotiv in the most dubious of moral
decisions.
Both Kant and Fichte effectively put enormous responsibility on
Gewissen. To make its reach understood, Kant cites the case (later used by
Fichte) of an inquisitor. He must condemn to death a good citizen found
guilty of heresy. Yet his consciousness rebels against the duty imposed
on it by the institution to which he belongs.21 The conflict of obedience
to an internal and an external normative source, exemplified in this case
by the inquisitor, holds true in all cases of consciousness entailed in day-
to-day choices; when one deals with assuming decisions that involve
acting with honesty or trickery, to choose that which is morally better,
more useful, or more important. This makes one understand, thanks to
the presence of different levels of value that Hegel individuates in the
structure of the moral consciousness, that neither Gewissen nor personal
conviction that gives it voice can be identified with the personification
of radical evil, even if they can, in fact, become so. Without personal
conviction, nothing can be accomplished and nothing is judged; there
is neither the effectual reality of the action nor the possibility to evaluate
its worth.
In this regard, it is enough to reflect on the incidence of per-
sonal conviction in day-to-day practices. Kant, the very author that
in Religionsschrift places the responsibility of radical evil on the lib-
erty of individual will, devotes important reflections on this subject in
the Critique of Pure Reason. Here, he defines conviction as 'holding as
true' (Furwahrhalten), characterized by many different degrees of reli-
ability (Zulanglichkeit). Both for him and Pascal, the touchstone that
allows evaluation of the degree of reliability is given by this wager: the
higher the position one is willing to put into play is, the more intense
and elevated is the conviction.22 Therefore, the practical reliability of
conviction is not unambiguous or tied up only to the interiority of
consciousness as a private fact. There are different degrees of intensity
involved that can be measured with an interpersonal comparison, which
is what comes out when a wager is made and accepted. Objectively
modest even under the cognitive profile, this conviction allows for the
formulation of hypotheses, provisionally assumed to be true, that are
fundamental in practical life to making decisions or giving initiative to
projects. In this, conviction reveals a notable potential for anticipation,
Francesca Menegoni 253
projection and action and constitutes an important motive in knowing
and in acting.23
Another aspect of conviction comes to light when Kant discusses
rational faith. Similarly, logical certainty is not involved, but it is moral
certainty that is key; a personal conviction that rests on subjective bases:
"therefore, I must never say: It is morally certain that there is a God etc.,
but: I am morally certain that there is a God etc.'24 This clarification here
is not casual, because one who says such a sentence must be disposed to
confront himself with the "certainties' of what others hold as true. He
knows that he must be explicit in what he believes in. He knows that
he must "confess' (bekennen) his own conviction, which can become a
shared conviction in a community of individuals only when they can
reciprocally recognize each other in this conviction.
Therefore, Kant distinguishes conviction (Uberzeugung) from simple
persuasion (Uberredung). Conviction has a communicative and public
dimension, whereas persuasion is limited to one's individual judgment.
While persuasion can give rise to a dangerous world of illusions, con-
viction opens up a common world founded on dialogue. This does not
entirely guarantee a respect of differences or reciprocal tolerance, yet it
constitutes the irrepressible condition of possibility for that respect.
3.	The double nature of Gewissen and the language
that conveys it
The communitarian dimension that is opened by the Kantian concep-
tion of conviction acts in profundity in Hegel's practical philosophy and
goes well beyond the critique of the possible moral degenerations of
individual persuasion. This aspect is evident if one looks at the structural
framework constituted by Gewissen, the foundation of the phenomenol-
ogy of real, morally qualified action. This is the theme of the section of
Phenomenology on morality. We have seen that, to be effectual or to have
value, action demands two conditions be present. The first is subjec-
tive and involves the personal conviction that determines the decision
with which the consciousness chooses one possibility among many. The
second condition is objective and comes from the interpersonal recogni-
tion that legitimizes individual conviction. Hegel ties these two together
when he writes that only Gewissen confers on the act (Tat) "subsistence
and reality' (Bestehen und Wirklichkeit) and that action has a real exis-
tence and value only in as much as it is recognized.25 This affirmation
allows for a distinction between two orders of considerations regarding
action: the first concerns its real existence; the second regards its value.
254 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
For the first aspect, the knowing of the one that acts, or in other
words, his personal conviction, is the absolutely necessary motive. With-
out conviction there are no decisions or actions. In evaluating the plu-
rality of circumstances that infinitely unfold backwards (as conditions
of possibility), laterally (as contributory circumstances or pre-existing
causes), and ahead (as consequences of the completed deed), Gewissen
considers its knowing, that is obviously incomplete under all points of
view, as sufficient and perfect for the production of that single, deter-
mined decision and action. The same holds true for the determination
of the content of an act: given that the formal and abstract notion
of pure duty potentially holds any form of content, individual con-
viction assumes the responsibility for filling the void and to abstract
duty with its content: "The doer, then, knows what he does to be a
duty, and since he knows this, and the conviction of duty is the very
essence of moral obligation, he is thus recognized and acknowledged
by others. The action is thereby validated and has an actual existence/26
To Gewissen, Hegel hereby attributes an absolute authority that possesses
the majesty to bind and to loose.27
In relation to the second aspect of action, namely its worth, Hegel's
lesson brings to the forefront how the effectuality of action is insepa-
rable from its evaluation. The two aspects, though distinct, are closely
interlaced for the following reasons. The assumption of responsibility
on the part of the individual moral self-conscience which is certain of
itself can find expression either (1) in service and collaboration to a uni-
versal duty, or (2) in an arbitrary fabrication of that which is good and
just. However, only real action makes this evident. It is in action that
the moral or immoral nature of the acting conscience comes out and is
counted.
In the first case, Gewissen is laden with positive connotations: 'It is
the moral genius which knows the inner voice of what it immediately
knows to be a divine voice', it is the divine creative force, solitary divine
worship given within one's self, and divine worship made in favor of a
community (PhG 4655; GW 9:352-3). Therefore, he who professes to act
with self-consciousness does not lie. However, it is essential that he says
it, that he enunciates his conviction. Saying it entails the exhibition of
his own reasons and their exposition for public confronting with the
understanding that these reasons are to be founded and defended in
comparison with other, equally valid reasons.28
In the second case, Gewissen is the source of radical evil. This does not
only take place in the most obvious of cases when the conscience cer-
tain of itself tries to legitimize fraudulent behavior, but it also takes place
Francesca Menegoni 255
when (and in this, Hegel's discourse assumes a tone of social criticism) it
gives life to a community of claims of 'excellence', founded on the reas-
suring reciprocity of conscientiousness, rectitude, good intentions, an
excellence (Vortrefflichkeit) with which the hypocrite gladdens himself
and fosters with great care. 'It is the hypocrisy which wants its judging
to be taken for an actual deed, and instead of proving its rectitude by
actions, does so by uttering fine sentiments.'29
The figure of the beautiful soul, which would like to merely utter
fine sentiments, is however called to action. It lives in anxiety of con-
taminating the splendor of its interior with action and so, in order to
conserve the purity of its heart, avoids contact with reality. This figure is
so well-known that it needs no further explanation. Instead, what merits
reflection here is the role assigned to language, starting from the reveal-
ing of its absence in regards to the beautiful soul. Just as it shies away
from action, it escapes the discourse and closes itself in silence. If lan-
guage is the means through which one actuates recognition between
opposites, then its absence radicalizes and exasperates the oppositions,
and removes the possibility of denouncing moral fabrications. This hap-
pens when false conscientiousness shrinks away from confrontation and
takes upon itself the right to judge the value of the action by extrapo-
lating it from its existence and assigning it an entirely different value
from what it was intended and produced for. If the action brings with it
fame, it is judged as a desire for fame. If it does not conform to the social
conditions of the individual, it is judged as ambition and so on. Thus
self-consciousness is either the 'valet of morality' (der Kammerdiener der
Moralitat), that speaks the language of distortion, or the hard heart that
responds to the confessions of acting self-consciousness with the obsti-
nate silence of someone who keeps to himself ('... die Stummheit, sich
in sich zu behalten': PhG <1665, 667; GW 9:358-9).
In order to overcome this moment of silence of the spirit, it is nec-
essary to return to and reflect on the dual nature of Gewissen. The
conviction of the spirit certain of itself is not only a synonym of closure,
isolation, hypocrisy, but it also brings with it infinite possibilities for
opening up when it puts itself to work for the community. If one keeps
this in mind, it is understandable why, metaphorically, Hegel says of
Gewissen that its life is hidden in God and that it leaves from this place,
manifesting itself in the language with which the community expresses
its own spirit, that is, itself. This may come as much in a religion as
in the ethical nature of institutions. From this point of view, the pas-
sage from Morality to Religion in Phenomenology of Spirit and that from
Moralitat to Sittlichkeit in Elements of the Philosophy of Right mirror one
256 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
another and are isomorphic. They both recognize that the reconciliation
between self-consciousnesses comes only through reciprocal recognition
and that this, in turn, only comes within a community.
In this perspective, it is not surprising that reciprocal recognition and
the absolute spirit appear already in the final section of the chapter on
the spirit dedicated to morality (see Siep, 2008; Halbig, 2008). This is
because at the end of this section, through the figure of Gewissen, Hegel
outlines the ontological (rather than merely ethical) structure of the
agent's subjectivity. The recognition that concludes this chapter is not
therefore a process in fieri, but instead is something real. It manifests
itself by means of an act of reconciliation that is entrusted to a world
of pacification: 'The reconciling Teu'30. In this word, all the possibilities
of Gewissen are held together, that is: (1) the certainty of oneself as con-
viction that must be expressed, (2) the struggle to leave oneself and to
confront oneself with the other, and last but not least, (3) the capac-
ity to find oneself in this other. This word, that conserves, partakes,
and realizes as much the individual conviction as interpersonal and
communitarian acknowledgment, is delivered with a metaphor laden
with meaning. It is defined as 'the God that manifests itself' among
self-consciousnesses, and expresses the necessity that the spirit man-
ifests in stories and in actions, beginning from that action which is
language.31
Exactly because language is action, and because the existence of action
depends on the Gewissen's self-conviction, language mirrors the com-
plexity and dualism of moral conscience. This can be the breath of the
beautiful soul or the backbiter of the valet of morality. It can be the
intolerant word of one who allows himself to judge the depths of
the soul or the ruthless silence of one who refuses to listen and com-
prehend the reasons of those who confess to having acted badly. But
because language mediates 'between independent and acknowledged
self-consciousnesses' (PhG ^653; GW 9:351), it is also the vehicle that
allows the individual to declare his convictions, and ultimately to be
understood or refuted in a confrontation or clash. As a mediator among
independent and acknowledged self-consciousnesses, language is action
that makes clear, argues, evaluates, and yields reasons for the accom-
plished tasks and for the reasons that determined them. Consequently,
language is what permits judgment on the quality of the action in
terms of real depth, practical efficacy, and moral value. The mediation of
language makes possible reciprocal acknowledgment from within a first-
person perspective. There, one realizes the circularity among opposites
that are no longer opposites, because the T is 'We' and the 'We' is T.
Francesca Menegoni 257
If this is the fundamental structure that holds up the determinations
developed in Hegel's social and political philosophy, its core framework
is already contained in the pages of Phenomenology of Spirit that we have
sought to analyze.32
Notes
1.	In Philosophischen Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit
und die damit zusammenhangenden Gegenstande (Sammtliche Werke Bd. VII,
372) Schelling singles out this radical manifestation of egocentrism as the
cause of evil. Reflection on egocentrism as the fundamental structure of
man is present in various contemporary writings, notably the work of Ernst
Tugendhat, 2003.
2.	'Das SelbstbewuRtsein ist an und fiir sich, indem, und dadurch, daft es fur ein
anderes an und fiir sich ist; d.h. es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes' (PhG 1178;
GW 9:109).
3.	For further development on this, see Siep, 2007; Ch. Halbig, 2007; Gesang,
2008.
4.	'Ich, das Wir, das Ich ist' (PhG 1177; GW 9:108).
5.	Siep, 1979, p. 93: 'Es kann nicht verwundern, daft die Struktur der
Anerkennungsbewegung derjenigen des Geistes entspricht: "Anerkennung"
ist der Geist unter dem Aspekt der Bildung des Selbstbewusstseins
in Interaktionen zwischen Individuen sowie zwischen Individuen und
Institutionen'.
6.	The struggle for recognition and the submission to a master is a phe-
nomenon which is at the origin of the co-existence of man and the
formation of States (EG §433). The same concept is expressed in the anno-
tation to §57 of Elements of the Philosophy of Right, where the point of view
of free will, principle and foundation of rights and the science of rights,
already goes beyond the point of view of the struggle for recognition and
the relationship with lordship and servitude.
7.	Hegel studied this last writing with particular attention until the end of
the Frankfurt years, after which he occupied himself with Critique of Prac-
tical Reason in Bern. Rosenkranz, who had been able to see this commentary
which was subsequently lost, underlines that Hegel especially lingered over
the morality of interiority in order to report their effects. These are oppres-
sion of nature and proliferation of the case histories of duties (Rosenkranz,
1977, p. 87).
8.	On the teleological meaning of this notion in the history of philosophy up
to Kant, see Bloch, 1959.
9.	Metaphysik derSitten, AA Bd. VI, 385.
10.	The Kantian doctrine of postulates, like the part of the Phenomenology that
criticizes it, is dominated by the first-person perspective. This is a conse-
quence of the overall structure of Kantian philosophy. In reference to this, it
is sufficient to remember how the great questions that sum up every interest
of reason, as much in the theoretical as the practical field, are formulated in
the first person (what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope for).
11.	'... die Bewegung des wirklichen Handelns' (PhG 41604; GW 9:328).
258 Action Between Conviction and Recognition
12.	'...dafi etwas seiend gedacht wird, das noch nicht wirklich ist' (PhG 1602;
GW 9:326).
13.	It would seem that Hegel has inserted earlier material in this passage, with
harmful consequences for the understanding of his argumentation. Klaus
Diising appropriately underlines the importance of the doctrine of practical
postulates as a testing ground as much for Hegel as for Schelling and Fichte in
light of the theoretical and practical foundation of their systems. See Diising,
1973, pp. 53-90.
14.	See Siep, 2007, p. 11.
15.	'ein ganzen Nest gedankenloser Widerspriiche' (PhG 1617; GW 9:332).
16.	'Statt etwas beschliefien, d.h. die Unbestimmtheit (in welcher der eine sowohl
als der andere Inhalt zunachst nur ein moglicher ist) aufheben, hat unsere
Sprache auch den Ausdruck: sich entschlieften, indem die Unbestimmtheit des
Willen selbst—als das Neutrale, aber unendlich Befruchtete, der Urkeim alles
Daseins—in sich die Bestimmungen und Zwecke enthalt und sie nur aus sich
hervorbringt'.
17.	See J.G. Fichte, System der Sittenlehre nach den Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre,
Gesamtausgabe Bd. IV, 169. For an explanation of the role of Gewissen in the
process of decision, see Moyar, 2007, pp. 51-79.
18.	I have discussed this in Menegoni, 1982.
19.	PhG 1639; GW 9:344: 'es ist jetzt das Gesetzt, das um des Selbsts willen, nicht
um dessen willen das Selbst ist'.
20.	Metaphysik der Sitten, AA Bd. VI, 400: 'wenn es aber zur That kommt oder
gekommen ist, so spricht das Gewissen unwillkurlich und unvermeidlich'.
21.	Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, AA Bd. VI, 186.
22.	Kritik der reinen Vemunft, AA Bd. Ill, 534. Just as Kant places the responsibility
on the force of conviction on how much each person is determined to wager
on it, as much as in System der Sittenlehre (Bd. IV, 168) Fichte writes that who
is very certain of his arguments is disposed to defend them at the cost of
eternal damnation.
23.	In this regard, it is enough to remember what Kant writes on pragmatic
faith, the conviction finalized in the possibility of assuming decisions and
engaging in action in absence of certainty. In fact, 'pragmatic' is that
'holding-as-true' to which one recurs when one wants to obtain a deter-
mined end in absence of certain knowing. Kant defines it as contingent
faith or subjective conviction and uses as an example the doctor called to do
something for a patient with a life-threatening disease, who does not know
the actual illness. The doctor examines the phenomenon and formulates a
diagnosis; another doctor, called to consult, expresses a radically different
conviction. The conviction that moves both of them is finalized by trac-
ing the appropriate means of achieving a real objective, which in this case
consists in saving the life of the patient. For more in-depth analysis of this
argument, see Menegoni, 2005.
24.	Kritik der reinen Vemunft, A A Bd. Ill, 537.
25.	'Anerkannt und dadurch wirklich ist die Handlung, weil die daseiende
Wirklichkeit unmittelbar mit der Uberzeugung oder dem Wissen verknupft,
oder das Wissen von seinem Zwecke unmittelbar das Element des Daseins,
das allgemeine Anerkennen ist' (PhG 1640; GW 9:345).
Francesca Menegoni 259
26.	1... es weifi also, was es tut, als Pflicht, und indem es diefi weifi und die
Uberzeugung von der Pflicht das Pflichtmafiige selbst ist, so ist es anerkannt
von den Andern; die Handlung gilt dadurch und hat wirkliches Dasein' (PhG
1644; GW 9:348).
27.	PhG 1646; GW 9:349.
28.	'Das BewuBtseins spricht seine Uberzeugung aus, worin allein die Handlung
Pflicht ist; sie gilt auch allein dadurch als Pflicht, daft die Uberzeugung
ausgesprochen wird' (PhG 1653; GW 9:351).
29.	'...es ist die Heuchelei, die das Urteilen fiir wirkliche Tat genommen
wissen will, und statt dutch Handlung, dutch das Aussprechen vortrefflicher
Gesinnungen die Rechtschaffenheit beweist' (PhG 1664; GW 9:357).
30.	'Das versbhnende J a’ (PhG 1671; GW 9:362).
31.	In emphasizing the centrality of language for recognition, Hegel renews
the teachings of Aristotle. Aristotle regards language as the central phe-
nomenon which enables us to explain what characterizes humans and the
manner of their relations to the world (Politics, I, 2, 1253a). The importance
of this Aristotelian intuition was recently recorded by Tugendhat in the
previously cited Egozentrizitat und Mystik. Tugendhat regards propositional
language as starting point for understanding many of the manifestations
that are regularly considered characterizing signs of the human being, such
as rationality, liberty, objectification of the self and the environment, the
self-consciousness of values and norms. If all languages have communica-
tive potential, only propositional language enables one to reflect by means of
reasons on what is true and what is good. Language also grants one indepen-
dence from the given situation, that is, theoretical and practical rationality
and liberty.
32.	Translated from Italian by Scott Stuart.
15
Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
Dean Moyar
Explicating Hegel's ethics through distinctions in reasons for action
is a project that seems to run counter to Hegel's self-understanding.
The most prominent mention of justification through 'good reasons' in
Hegel's corpus comes in the catalogue of degenerate forms of moral sub-
jectivity in Philosophy of Right (hereafter PR) §140. His worry, expressed
in his linking of acting on reasons to subjectivism in ethics, is that
reasons, when taken in isolation, can be manipulated by the moral sub-
ject to excuse unethical deeds or inaction. Yet there is another sense in
which Hegel's own action-theory, stressing as it does the role of inten-
tion in fixing responsibility and attribution, makes the contemporary
discourse of reasons a natural fit. Contemporary distinctions in types of
reasons can help us come to grips with the conceptual development in
Hegel's account of normativity.1 As a theory oriented by mutual recogni-
tion between free agents, Hegel's ethical theory is naturally described in
terms of social processes of giving and asking for reasons. In this paper
I investigate the place of agent-relative reasons within Hegel's account,
and how that account can help us better understand modern ethical
theory and practice.
The distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons has
proven very useful in recent moral theory. The distinction became
prominent in Anglo-American philosophy as a way of resisting the idea
that all reason and value must be of a single type, in particular as part
of the struggle to resist consequential!sm in ethics. Arguing for agent-
relative reasons has been a way to argue for the importance of the
agent's point of view and thus against the dominance of consequen-
tial considerations.2 Agent-relativity captures the importance of my
reasons for my actions, as against reasons, holding for anyone, that
some result (i.e., some consequence) be brought about in the world.
260
DeanMoyar 261
The distinction helps account for the richness and difficulty in living
a moral life, for it allows us to see the tension between the claims of,
say, helping others and living in the world in a way authentically one's
own. The frequent assumption that there is no such tension or con-
flict in Hegel's ethics is mistaken. Though he is optimistic that modern
individuals can achieve a non-alienating form of ethical freedom, he
does not conceive of this freedom as conflict-free. Hegel is suspicious of
theorists who focus on the conflict of duties in modern life, yet he is
quite willing to admit that negotiating such conflict is a central aspect
of modern ethical agency.
One of my two main aims in this paper is to interpret Hegel's com-
plex architecture of normativity in the Philosophy of Right in light of
the distinction. The distinction is especially useful in understanding the
transitions from Kantian morality to the morality of conscience to Eth-
ical Life. It is sometimes assumed that having overcome the standpoint
of conscience, the reasons of Ethical Life will be agent-neutral. I argue
that on the contrary all the individual's reasons for action in Ethical Life
are agent-relative. This might seem an unlikely conclusion given the
ways in which Hegel appears to submerge the individual agent within
an impersonal social substance. I argue that we need to distinguish the
questions of reasons and values in order to understand how the agent-
relative and agent-neutral factors work in his theory of Ethical Life. Most
importantly, while for Hegel the value carried by social substance is
agent-neutral, the values and reasons of individuals within that social
substance are not.
My second main aim is to show that Hegel has resources within his
theory for resolving some of the problems with the contemporary ways
of drawing the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction. I use contem-
porary theory to explicate Hegel's theory, but I also use Hegel's theory
to educate us about how we draw our distinctions. I therefore begin by
presenting the contemporary distinction and outlining three problems.
1.	The contemporary distinction
The contemporary distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative
reasons stems from the work of Thomas Nagel. In The Possibility of
Altruism (PA), Nagel distinguished subjective and objective reasons, and
he later adopted the terminology of Derek Parfit to call these agent-
relative and agent-neutral reasons. In PA Nagel holds that subjective or
agent-relative reasons contain a Tree-agent variable.' He contrasts two
formulations of one's reason for moving out of the way of an oncoming
262 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
truck: 'that the action will prolong his life,' and 'that the action will pro-
long someone's life' (Nagel, 1978, p. 91). The former reason is subjective
or agent-relative because the 'his' is a free-agent variable, while the latter
is an objective or agent-neutral reason.
After introducing the subjective/objective distinction in PA, Nagel
seems to undermine its importance with an argument that all subjec-
tive reasons must be backed up with objective reasons and values. He
writes:
The thesis which I propose to defend is simply that the only accept-
able reasons are objective ones; even if one operates successfully with
a subjective principle, one must be able to back it up with an objec-
tive principle yielding those same reasons as well as (presumably)
others. Whenever one acts for a reason, I maintain, it must be possi-
ble to regard oneself as acting for an objective reason, and promoting
an objectively valuable end.
(Nagel, 1978, pp. 96-7)
Nagel also states his thesis as a claim about the basis of all reasons: it is,
he writes, the 'thesis that all reasons must be derivable from objective
principles' (Nagel, 1978, p. 97). Though he stresses the objective princi-
ples, the intuitive force of this derivation model relies on a claim about
'promoting an objectively valuable end.' The distinction in reasons
thus depends on a parallel reasoning about values. In his subsequent
thought, Nagel is much more willing to grant that agent-relative reasons
may 'retain some independent force' even after the objective correlate
of the subjective reason has been appreciated.3 He also is clearer that the
distinction extends to value, and he thus writes of agent-neutral/relative
reasons and values.
In The View from Nowhere (VN), Nagel gives a concise definition of the
two kinds of reasons and his most detailed account of which kinds of
reasons fall on which side of the distinction. The distinction relates to
the central theme of VN, namely a distinction in perspectives or points
of view. The agent-relative essentially involves the perspective of the
specific agent, whereas the agent-neutral is defined as accessible in the
view from nowhere. Nagel defines agent-neutral reasons as follows:
If a reason can be given a general form which does not include an
essential reference to the person who has it, it is an agent-neutral rea-
son. For example, it is a reason for anyone to do or want something
Dean Moyar 263
that it would reduce the amount of wretchedness in the world, then
that is a neutral reason.
(Nagel, 1986, pp. 152-3)
Nagel thus thinks of agent-neutral reasons in consequentialist terms.
Consequences, conceived as states of affairs in the world, are easy to
view from 'nowhere/ when one thinks of oneself as a generic agent.
Nagel defines agent-relative reasons and values by the 'essential refer-
ence' they include to the person who has the reason. The language of
essential reference replaces the language of 'free-agent variable' from PA.
Nagel writes,
If on the other hand the general form of a reason does include an
essential reference to the person who has it, it is an agent-relative rea-
son. For example, if it is a reason for anyone to do or want something
that it would be in his interest, then that is a relative reason.
(Nagel, 1986, p. 153)
Nagel no longer holds that these reasons and values can be derived
from agent-neutral reasons and values. He gives a rather expansive set
of agent-relative reasons and corresponding values, consisting of three
main categories (Nagel, 1986, p. 164ff.): (1) 'Reasons of autonomy' are
those reasons generated by an agent's 'desires, projects, commitments'
(Nagel, 1986, p. 167). These generate reasons for me that are not rea-
sons for others unless those others share the same desires, projects, or
commitments. (2) 'Deontological reasons' are those prohibitions against
certain acts (e.g. murder) that function as reasons for the agent apart
from, and even contrary to, considerations of the impersonal good
that the action would achieve. It is here that the agent-neutral/agent-
relative contrast most closely tracks the consequentialism/deontology
contrast, for Nagel thinks of these as agent-relative mainly because of
a contrast with the maximization of good consequences. (3) Reasons
stemming from 'special obligations,' namely from our relations to our
family, friends, and communities. My attachments to others generate
agent-relative reasons because I place special value on these people
and communities, whose reason-generating value is thus relative to my
agency.
In what follows I focus on three major problems with Nagel's version
of the distinction. I present these briefly here and show in subsequent
sections how Hegel addresses the problems to arrive at a more satisfying
account of the distinction.4 The first problem concerns the requirement
264 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
that we must consider the 'general form' of the reason in order to deter-
mine whether there is an agent-relative reason in play or not. Let us
call this the General Form Problem. This requirement seems to involve a
commitment to a certain controversial conception of practical reason-
ing according to which when we act on a reason it is always a reason
in a general form that enters into our deliberation (or could on some
ideal reconstruction). This already excludes the conception of reasons
advocated by moral particularists (though not exclusively by them),
according to which one's reasons are provided by particular states of
affairs. It is the person in front of me in pain who provides the reason,
not the general consideration that whenever someone is in pain I am to
help him.5 The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction will be seriously
compromised if it requires that all reasons be expressed in general form.
The challenge is to preserve the distinction even if one rejects the claim
that all reasons take a general form.
The second problem is determining what exactly it means for a reason
to include an 'essential reference to the person.' 1 call this the Essen-
tial Reference Problem. The reference is essential because the agent takes
there to be a reason for him that is not necessarily a reason for others.
This is the sense of the agent-relative that Nagel tries to capture with his
example of something being in the agent's interest. In this case essential
reference seems to require just that the reason stem from some particular
instance of subjective concern. But this would make the agent-relative
anything that is a reason for an individual agent, since the concept of
interest is broad enough to include a virtually unlimited range of objects
(even donating to charity fulfills an interest of mine). The problem is
that essential reference so conceived says nothing about the end or
content that the agent is interested in, and nothing about what makes
the agent different from other agents. If the agent is just conceived as
numerically distinct from others, it is easy enough to say that a particu-
lar reason for an agent will be relative to that agent. But the force of the
agent-relative reasons (such as those generated by devotion to a baseball
team) comes not from personhood or agency as such, but rather from
an agent's specific goals and attachments. A reference to the agent is
essential for a reason only if there is something determinate about my
agency that helps generate the reason.
The third issue has to do with how to maintain a unified conception
of both reasons and of values. How can we theorize a relation between
the types of value and between types of reasons while resisting the urge
to make one the basis of the other? 1 call this the Interdependence Prob-
lem. While Nagel in PA claimed that the agent-relative (subjective) is
Dean Moyar 265
derivable from the agent-neutral (objective) and thus threatened the dis-
tinctness of the reasons, his position in VN threatens to bifurcate the
agent-relative and agent-neutral to an unacceptable degree. Korsgaard
has raised this problem as part of her attempt to undermine the dis-
tinction itself. She notes that Nagel's claims about value imply that
objective value, what is good-absolutely, is metaphysically distinct from
subjective value. She writes that his position seems to be what she calls
Objective Realism (which she associates with G. E. Moore), according
to which values are neutral because they exist independent of all sub-
jective concern (Korsgaard, 1996). Coupled with the demand that the
subjective be anchored in the objective, this would imply the odd thesis
that the valuings of individuals derive from value that is independent
of agents' concerns. Korsgaard's concern is that when the objective or
agent-neutral is conceived in a way abstracted from the subjective or
agent-relative, the normative grip of the agent-neutral on agents them-
selves goes missing. The worry addressed by Nagel's original argument
for derivation is that without a strongly neutral or objective basis for
reasons and value, the specter of a general relativism about values and
reasons raises its head. The challenge of the Interdependence Problem
thus is to theorize the distinction in a way that preserves the indepen-
dence of the two sides while establishing a clear relationship between
them. As we shall see, Hegel's understanding of reasons and values in
Objective Spirit is well-suited to providing a satisfying solution to this
problem.
2.	The free will and the reasons of morality
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel presents various conceptions of the
agent and practical norms as so many levels of 'right.' The challenge
for interpreting Hegel's position in terms of types of reasons is that the
developmental method he uses to construct his account of right does
not lay out the nature of the operative reasons in any clear-cut man-
ner. Hegel defines right as 'the definite existence of the free will’ (PR §29),
a rationally articulated activity that contains the logical moments of
universality, particularity, and singularity (Einzelnheit, often translated
as individuality) (PR §§5-7). Hegel conceives of these three moments
of the Concept as the moments of the self-reference of the I. Hegel's
analysis of the will's logical structure lends itself naturally to addressing
the Essential Reference Problem in Nagel's distinction between the agent-
relative and agent-neutral. Hegel's account is oriented by se/f-reference,
but his conception of self-reference is compatible with there being no
266 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
essential reference in the sense needed to secure agent-neutrality. Rather
than discussing these moments of the will in isolation, I proceed in this
section through 'Abstract Right' and 'Morality' to see the Concept at
work in the operative reasons.
Each level of right contains all three moments, yet one moment pre-
dominates in each of the three main spheres. Universality predominates
in the legal relations of 'Abstract Right,' which are based on the concept
of the person. In the reasons that I use in the actions distinctive of this
sphere I refer to myself as a person, which is a shape of the free will
that Hegel calls 'the will's self-conscious (but otherwise contentless) and
simple reference to itself in its individuality' (§35). This formal univer-
sal self-reference has no content and thus demarcates reasons that have
the same force for all agents. I am one person among others, and the
reasons operative in this sphere refer to legal relations that hold from
an external (neutral) perspective on actions. The main norms here are
respecting the property of others and honoring contracts. 'Because it
is a persons' property' or 'because we have a contract' are reasons that
are agent-neutral because nothing in the normative force of the reason
depends on the agent's specific characteristics.6 Of course the relations
of abstract right between persons take particular objects—contracts are
to perform certain services or transfer certain property. But the force
of the reasons simply stems from the legal practices and institutions in
which all individuals are considered identical. Abstract Right is atomistic
in that agents are considered as discrete units, and the reasons are agent-
neutral or impersonal because no determinate difference between agents
underlies the normative force of the reasons. The reference to the agents
is not 'essential' in a sense that can render the reasons agent-relative.
The transition from 'Abstract Right' to 'Morality' introduces the
agent's own particular perspective as a factor that must be taken into
account in determining reasons. What Hegel calls 'the right of the sub-
jective will' is a claim for the authority of the agent's point of view.
In Morality 'the will can recognize something or be something only in
so far as that thing is its own, in so far as the will is present to itself in its
subjectivity' (§107). Given this strong agent-oriented language, we must
be careful not to think that every kind of reason discussed in 'Morality' is
agent-relative merely because an individual must take something as 'its
own.' Both agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons are for an individual
in this sense. The trajectory of the conceptual development in 'Morality'
is to move from a particular self-reference to a conception of univer-
sal moral reasons.7 By the end of 'Morality' the agent's reasons will be
universal, taking others into account, and self-determined by particular
DeanMoyar 267
individuals. With the individual presuppositions of Morality, however,
the relation of the moments of particularity (of the agent-relative) and
universality (of reasons in general) is unstable even at the completion
of the development. It is this instability that necessitates the crucial
transition to Ethical Life.
For much of the first two sections of 'Morality' Hegel discusses formal
requirements of intentional action. These requirements do not demar-
cate a certain normative content, but rather set the terms on which
intentional actions can be attributed to agents (e.g. should one be held
responsible for patricide when one does not know it is one's father one is
killing). Hegel first thematizes the content of the reasons when he intro-
duces the agent's own 'welfare.' Welfare is initially a non-moral source
of agent-relative reasons (in the sense of not other-regarding), which in
the further determination of the will becomes moral and agent-neutral.
In the dialectical development of right, the purpose of individual wel-
fare quickly leads to the aim/purpose of 'the welfare of all’ (§125), a
source of agent-neutral moral reasons. This is an initially indeterminate
demand that provides no specific purposes. Hegel in fact raises the stan-
dard worry about this kind of agent-neutral, consequentialist reasoning.
He states that reasons of welfare cannot justify any action that is wrong
in itself.
Hegel's conception of the Good brings together the particularity of
the moral perspective and the universality of 'Abstract Right.' The Good
is a comprehensive formulation of objective value: the 'unity of the con-
cept of the will, and the particular will... realized freedom, the absolute and
ultimate purpose of the world’ (§129).8 We can think of the Good as a con-
sequentialized version of all the Philosophy of Right’s preceding shapes
('abstract right, welfare, the subjectivity of knowing, and the contin-
gency of external existence'), and on the surface at least it is solely a
source of agent-neutral moral reasons.9 Indeed, Hegel goes out of his
way to say that the only moral reasons available at this point are agent-
neutral reasons: 'all that is available so far is this: to do right, and to
promote welfare’ (§134). These abstract agent-neutral reasons are given
in general form, expressing the universality of the Concept to the exclu-
sion of the particularity. Hegel praises this universality and its expression
in Kant's motivational requirement of acting for the sake of duty alone.
He then critiques Kant's ethical theory for the agent-neutrality required
by the Categorical Imperative's form of lawfulness. In part this is an
argument against the general form requirement, which Hegel thinks
is an obstacle to thinking through the determination of particular rea-
sons. We can also see Hegel's charge of emptiness as the claim that the
268 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
reference in Kant's universal law and motivational requirement is not
the kind of essential reference required for the agent-relativity of the
singular individual's ethical actions.
The move from Kantian duty to conscience is naturally read as a
transition from agent-neutral to agent-relative reasons. The certainty of
oneself characteristic of conscience seems to establish reasons for me that
are not necessarily reasons for anyone. Hegel writes in PR §136,
Because of the abstract composition of the Good, the other moment
of the Idea, i.e. particularity in general, falls within subjectivity.
Subjectivity, in its universality reflected into itself, is the absolute cer-
tainty of itself in itself, the positing of particularity, the determining
and deciding factor—the conscience.
It appears that this particularity, this determining factor, is precisely that
essential reference to the person that marks the relativity of one's rea-
sons for action. We have to be careful here, though, for Hegel makes
it clear that the authority of conscience as a source of reasons presup-
poses that the agent actually wills 'rational content which is valid in and
for itself' (§137). In this section he writes that right and duty are not
'the particular property of an individual,' and that they have 'the form
of laws and principles' (§137). This suggests that these reasons involve
no essential reference to individuals and that they are given in 'gen-
eral form.' But since Hegel nowhere spells out such moral principles,
I take him to be offering here an abstract bulwark against subjectivism
and relativism, not an endorsement of a view of ethics as a catalogue
of principles. He just wants to emphasize that the agent misunder-
stands conscience if he thinks that his reasons are merely his own such
that he need not be able to explicate them in terms that others can
understand.
Hegel does endorse the claim—against the general form requirement—
that individual judgment about what specific action is right cannot be
reduced to a calculus of general agent-neutral reasons. The individual of
conscience must deliberate on action as a whole, arriving for himself at
a specific action. The complexity and specificity of moral judgment in a
modern context mean that many practical judgments do not transfer
easily to other cases, cases invoking different agents with other spe-
cific objects of concern. Conscience supports reasons for action that do
not take a general form, and this produces both decisiveness in moral
judgment and, as Hegel frequently points out, instability in the ethical
landscape.10
Dean Moyar 269
Apart from its role in judgment of specific cases, formal con-
science generates a category of agent-relative reasons, namely Nagel's
deontological reasons. As the seat of one's integrity, conscience marks
out a realm of reasons that are not automatically overridden by abstract
agent-neutral demands. If I say that it goes against my conscience to
kill someone, even if that does mean that several other people die, I am
referring to myself as a source of deontological reasons. These agent-
relative reasons of conscience are problematic, since it is not clear that
they can be supported by the recognition of any value other than the
individual's simple integrity. Hegel's own analysis of the perspective
from which these deontological reasons are generated highlights a prob-
lem with this form of agent-relativity. The idea that I cannot commit
certain acts, no matter what good consequences may result, could easily
produce the enervating inactivity that Hegel associates with romantic
longing and the beautiful soul.
Though conscience does support the idea of agent-relative reasons, it
is important not simply to identify conscience with action on agent-
relative reasons. If we do, we might think that Hegel's extended critique
in §140 of how moral subjectivity can go wrong is a blanket argument
against agent-relative reasons. Yet the critique works both against the
agent who thinks that his own agent-relative reasons make the action
right, and against the individual asserting agent-neutral reasons without
acting on them. Hegel's objection is not just directed against ways in
which the agent might seek to be a pure unaccountable source of rea-
sons, which by itself might support a reading of this critique as directed
against agent-relativity. Hegel's objection is also directed against the atti-
tude towards action that remains at the level of 'willing the good' in the
abstract.11 Hegel's reflections on this posture are intended to show how
abstract agent-neutral moral principles can also fail to count as reasons
for action. Typically they are wielded by the self-righteous judge, towards
whom Hegel's famous comment is directed—'those psychological valets
de chambre for whom there are no heroes, not because the latter are not
heroes, but because the former are only valets de chambre' (§124). The
psychological valet always finds something agent-relative in the action
in contrast to the (pseudo-) heroic ideal of someone responsive only to
agent-neutral considerations. Such agent-neutral reasons are more often
used to criticize others than they are actually acted upon.12
Hegel's double-edged critique is that within the context of Morality
the self-reference of the individual as a source of determinate moral rea-
sons is highly unstable. The universal and particular moments of the will
are not yet adequately integrated, so reliance on agent-relative reasons
270 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
can seem like an avoidance of 'real' agent-neutral reasons, while those
agent-neutral reasons can seem unfit for navigating concrete contexts of
action.
3.	Agent-Relative reasons in ethical life
The paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right that introduce Ethical Life
seem at first glance to imply that the reasons operative in this sphere
are agent-neutral. Hegel writes of 'a circle of necessity whose moments
are the ethical powers which govern the lives of individuals, and in these
individuals, who are accidental to them, these powers have their repre-
sentation, phenomenal shape, and actuality' (§145). The upshot of this
claim seems to be that the institutions do not rely on any particular indi-
viduals for their authority and reproduction, and that the reasons they
generate hold for any agent.13 Yet we must be very careful with Hegel's
claims in these introductory paragraphs. On my reading, Hegel's claims
about ethical powers are claims about the agent-neutral value realized
in institutions. These claims do not imply that individuals within the
institutions act on agent-neutral reasons. My thesis is that in fact every
sphere of Ethical Life is characterized by individuals acting on agent-
relative reasons}4 There is a story (that I tell in the next section) about
how the agent-relative reasons of individuality hook into the agent-
neutral values of institutions. The key point to appreciate up front is
that Hegel's split between individuals and institutions allows him to
make strong claims for the agent-relativity of the reasons of individuals.
The individual in Ethical Life possesses determinate and stable rea-
sons for action, rather than remaining in 'that indeterminate subjectivity
which does not attain existence' (§149). Both the moral agent who relied
on agent-relative reasons and the judge who wields agent-neutral rea-
sons suffer from this indeterminacy, and neither 'attain existence' in the
sense of performing an action backed up by stable reasons. The duties
of Ethical Life primarily take the form of 'necessary relations.' The sys-
tem of these relations replaces a 'theory of duties' that offers a catalogue
of those actions that anyone is obligated to perform qua human. Hegel
writes that 'The fact that the ethical sphere is the system of these deter-
minations of the Idea constitutes its rationality' (§145). It is not just that
the system as a whole is rational, but also that individuals, in occupying
various roles within the whole, can act on non-general reasons that have
their standing as reasons through the form of life, the shape of Spirit,
that provides the background rationality for the action. This rationality
is a function of organic interrelations rather than abstract universality.
DeanMoyar 271
The operative reasons bring to the fore the self-reference of the agent as
singularity. The agent refers to herself as having specific identities—as a
family member, citizen—that demarcate specific sets of duties.15
Hegel affirms the respect accorded to the agent's own perspective, and
he thus affirms the agent-relative character of the reasons. He writes
that the 'right of individuals to their particularity is likewise contained
in ethical substantiality' (§154). These individuals are dependent on one
another. But this interdependence is fully compatible with their lives
being guided by interests and attachments that set them apart from oth-
ers. The hallmark of modem ethical institutions is precisely this regard
for the particularity, the contingency, of individual agents.16 Unlike in
Morality, particularity is incorporated into self-conceptions that can be,
and are, recognized by others as valuable.
Hegel writes that a central function of the institutions of Ethical
Life is to 'liberate' the individual from the demand to aspire to agent-
neutrality. Individuals are liberated from the requirement to act on
reasons that can be expressed in 'general form.' In many cases, such
as family life, making sure that one acts on a reason with general form
would mean having a 'thought too many,' in Bernard Williams' phrase
(1981, p. 18). The pressure to conceive of reasons in terms of their
general form comes from taking reasons as having their force in iso-
lation from other reasons and from their context of application. The
idea behind the use of the general form is that it expresses what any-
one would have a reason to do in these circumstances. But this appeal
to 'what anyone would do' is not only useless, but actually pernicious
in Ethical Life, where the question is always what I should do, within
a complex context, with these particular interests and identities. Here
it is legitimate to refuse to answer the question about what 'anyone'
would do, because the question assumes that the particulars in one's
reasoning (one's wife, children etc.) are placeholders for a generic type
(a wife, some children) rather than the particular people they are. This
is not to say that one cannot make the move in reflection to reasons
with a general form, but reasons in that form are not typically what one
acts upon.
Examining the characteristic actions in the institutions of Ethical
Life shows that the operative reasons fall within two of Nagel's cate-
gories of agent-relative reasons. Nagel's category of special obligations
stemming from relationships is most evident in the first sphere of
Ethical Life, the family. It would not be wrong to say that fam-
ily relationships are constituted by the commitment to treat family
members differently—better—than others. I would not be a genuine
Tl'l Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
husband if I treated my spouse like I treat everyone else. My reasons are
highly particular, and thus not reasons that I can expect other people
to have.
Turning to Ethical Life's second sphere, Hegel's conception of Civil
Society correlates quite clearly with Nagel's first category, 'reasons of
autonomy.' Civil Society is the realm of infinite particularity where
individuals pursue their own economic well-being in competitive con-
texts as well as in particular associations of value. Hegel writes, 'The
concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs
and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness, is his own end,
is one principle of civil society' (§182). Hegel argues that the inter-
connections of individuals within the 'system of need' make it the
case that our reasons and values are not as particular, not as rela-
tive to ourselves, as we might think. He writes, 'But this particular
person stands essentially in relation to other similar particulars, and
their relation is such that each asserts itself and gains satisfaction
through the others, and thus at the same time through the exclu-
sive mediation of the form of universality, which is the second principle'
(§182). It is here that Hegel's strategy of finding the universal within
the particular, and thus relativizing the relativity of the agent's rea-
sons, is most clearly on display. I come back to this point in the next
section.
The remaining sphere of Ethical Life, the State, is in one sense an
arena of special obligations, expressed in Hegel's claims about patriotic
attachment to one's own State. But in another sense the State seems to
be a realm of agent-neutral reasons. It seems I do my duty to the State
for reasons that could belong to anyone (in that State) and for the rea-
son that the State accomplishes the comprehensive agent-neutral aim
of promoting the Good. Yet Hegel denies that the duty to the State is
purely universal in the sense that my reasons make no essential refer-
ence to myself as a particular. In his discussion of the union of 'right' and
'duty' as a union of two elements that are 'different in content,' Hegel
writes that it is 'of the greatest importance' to understand that the duty
towards the State must be connected to the individual's particularity. He
writes:
in the process of fulfilling his duty, the individual must somehow
attain his own interest and satisfaction or settle his own account,
and from his situation within the State, a right must accrue to him
whereby the universal cause becomes his own particular cause.
(§261)
Dean Moyar 273
The reasons for doing one's duties to the State are thus linked to one's
agent-relative reasons. At the same time, Hegel is wary that the State
not be seen as a mere service-provider for individuals. The above passage
does raise the question of how exactly we are to think of the individual's
relation to the State as a relation to 'divine ethical substance.' If individ-
uals are to think of their duty as grounded in reasons relative to their
own interests, doesn't this undercut the value the State has on its own
account?
I postpone answering this question until the next section, and first
consider a possible counterexample to my argument that all reasons for
action of individuals in Ethical Life are agent-relative, namely Hegel's
discussion of moral duties within 'Civil Society.' In discussing the bad
side effects of the markets, Hegel writes that there may even arise those
duties of beneficence often associated with agent-neutral reasons (he
actually writes that 'Morality has its proper place in this sphere' (§207)).
But rather than contradicting my thesis, this reemergence of seemingly
agent-neutral reasons actually confirms my claim that the characteristic
reasons for action of Ethical Life are agent-relative. These moral duties in
Civil Society are not agent-neutral duties to humanity as such, but rather
agent-relative duties of special obligation, for they arise through the spe-
cific practices of modern capitalist economies and are binding in so far
as agents are benefiting from those practices within a given State. Hegel
is forthright that Civil Society includes the practices that make people
poor and miserable. This is why there is a duty to help those in need (see
esp. PR §238). Only within Civil Society as a determinate context of need
does the abstract duty to do what I can to help others come into its own.
That is, the duty is an obligation because of the agent's participation in
the economic practices. Hegel writes that 'contingency in the satisfac-
tion of the latter [ends of welfare and of particular needs] makes even
contingent and individual help into a duty' (§207). We have a duty to
help those who suffer the ineliminable side effects of modern economic
practices. These duties are generated within this sphere itself, and draw
their actuality in part from the benefit for us (prosperous agents) of the
conditions that make others miserable. Central among these practices
are private property and contract. Since I have claimed that private prop-
erty and contract involve agent-neutral reasons, this discussion of Civil
Society may seem to conflict with my earlier claims.17 The point is that
the normative force of those reasons does not depend on any identity
other than sheer personhood. The normative force of the moral reasons
in Civil Society, by contrast, stems from our relationships to each other
in this system.
274 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
4.	Agent-neutral value and ethical institutions
I have focused my discussion thus far on the individual's actions and rea-
sons while mostly bracketing the role of the institutions. Understanding
each level, and the interaction of the levels, is essential for a full charac-
terization of Ethical Life. The two-level structure of agency in Ethical Life
is among the main sources of confusion in thinking about Hegel's view
of reasons and value. In this section I sketch the relation of the insti-
tutional and individual, and show how the agent-relative/agent-neutral
distinction bears on that relation.
We can begin from Hegel's suspicion about the role of individual acts
of charity in Civil Society. Hegel's main worry about charity is that it can
draw attention away from the institutional solutions to Civil Society's
problems. Hegel remarks that charity 'is mistaken if it seeks to restrict
the alleviation of want to the particularity of emotion and the contin-
gency of its own disposition and knowledge' (§207). He is saying that
the demand of individual beneficence has contingent conditions of sub-
jective realization and is contingent in its actual efficacy at alleviating
need. Hegel thinks that institutional (i.e., governmental) remedies for
social ills are to be preferred to charity, not only because the recipient of
charity would be better off getting the same help from public authority,
but also because the actual benefits possible at the level of institutions
and law so far outweigh the benefits of individual acts of charity. For
Hegel institutional action is based on agent-neutral reasons and aims
to realize the agent-neutral Good. Hegel glorifies the State, the highest
institution, in large part because of its ability to act successfully on such
agent-neutral reasons and to realize agent-neutral value.
What then is the relationship for the individual of these two levels, of
agent-relative reasons of individuals and agent-neutral reasons/values of
institutions? While I have defended the thesis that the reasons for action
characteristic of Ethical Life are agent-relative, clearly the individual
agent stands in a relationship to the institutions and their agent-neutral
value. Most agents do value not only their particular attachments and
occupations, but also the institution of marriage, the free market, and
the idea of the State in the abstract. We value the institutions for the
agent-neutral value that they provide and realize. But this valuing is not
typically the direct source of our reasons for action. Reasons for action
and beliefs in the value of the institutions must be kept distinct. When
Hegel writes of patriotism as a disposition [Gesinnung], he is referring to
a settled belief in the value of the institution of the State. Such disposi-
tional belief affirms the institutional framework and its overall purposes
Dean Moyar 275
at a very deep level. This framework is the context in which my individ-
ual purposes and agent-relative reasons are situated, but in most cases
the institutional framework is not directly my reason for action.18
The distinction here can be made clear by considering the reasons one
acts upon in specific cases, and by trying to replace those reasons with
the beliefs affirming the institutions as a whole. There would be some-
thing seriously wrong if my basic reason for my domestic actions—Why
are you getting up in the middle of the night to hold your crying baby?
Why are you taking your wife out to dinner on your anniversary?—
was always 'because I support the institution of the family.' Your family
members would be right to complain if this were the case. The belief in
the value of the institution of the family is more like a standing moti-
vational backup, operative mainly in crisis situations, when one—for
example—questions whether one wants to continue in a marriage at all.
Even then one's reasons for action should be agent-relative, and should
refer to this marriage, this spouse.19 The valuing of the institution is a
kind of bulwark against the vicissitudes of our relations, and a spur in
times of crisis to search harder for those reasons that bind us to our
particular spouses, careers, and so on.
This separation of individual and institutional levels allows Hegel to
provide a satisfying answer to the Interdependence Problem. I submit that
in the PR the interdependence of the agent-relative and agent-neutral
works at the level of value rather than at the level of reasons. For Hegel
there are subjective values (ends/purposes) that are nested within the
objective values (ends/purposes) of institutions, and that thus have an
objective basis. The ends that individuals pursue as valuable are not
reducible to the value expressed in the institutional form, but they
can be referred to that form as the horizon of their general intelligi-
bility. Hegel's way of backing up the subjective with the objective has
the great advantage over Nagel's of not mystifying the relation between
the two sorts of value. Objective value is not a metaphysically distinct
kind of value, but rather is represented by those institutions that have
developed over time through processes of mutual recognition. What
Hegel calls Geist, Spirit, progressively develops as a system of value and
of the increasingly diverse reasons individuals can employ in action.
According a distinct space for agent-relative reasons is one of the great
developments of modern ethical life.
We can now see too how Hegel deals with the Essential Reference
Problem in distinguishing between types of reasons. Recall that Nagel
had no clear way to distinguish between simple reference and essen-
tial reference to the agent. The modern practice of conscience and the
276 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
institutional contexts of Ethical Life have developed precisely in order
to secure space for the essential self-reference of modern singularity (and
this is why conscience immediately precedes Ethical Life). It is not just
that we concede these reasons to individuals, but we expect them to be
engaged with their actions in a way that is distinctively their own. This
does not lead to the disintegration of normative space and ethical sub-
stance because within that essential self-reference there is an implicit
connection to the objective values of the institutions.
5.	Reasons and ends
I would like to conclude with a brief comparison of Hegel's position
with Korsgaard's Kantian attack on the agent-relative/agent-neutral dis-
tinction. This comparison will allow us to see more clearly the work
done by Hegel's split between individual and institutional action and
value. Korsgaard holds that reasons are always shared, and thus not
agent-relative, because they stem from our common humanity. She
attacks Nagel's conception of agent-neutral value as an Objective Real-
ist conception, and finds that this renders his distinction of reasons
and values unintelligible. On Korsgaard's Intersubjectivist conception of
value, value arises through human interactions, much like on Hegel's
view of intersubjective recognition. Hegel and Korsgaard agree that the
agent-neutral should not be identified with consequentialist considera-
tions, for Hegel too holds that agent-centered claims (e.g. 'treat others as
persons') can be agent-neutral. Given the similarity between Hegel and
Korsgaard on several key points, it is striking how far they diverge on
the status of agent-relative reasons and value.
For Hegel the shared institutional context is key for securing the shara-
bility of agent-relative reasons. We have seen that there is nothing in
the idea of agent-relative reasons that requires that we think of them as
'merely my property,' as Korsgaard (1996, p. 297) charges. The reasons
can be communicated, and I can bring you to see why my reasons have
the force for me that they do. Such sharing of reasons for Hegel typ-
ically refers to the social practice or institution that is the context for
my valuing. If others understand the institution they will acknowledge
the force of my reasons even though they will not literally share my
reasons.
I have stressed that one's relation to one's particular valued people or
projects and the reasons stemming from those relations are immediate
in a way that is often lost in the process of communication or translation
to the abstract level. If I explain to you why I value my daughter and the
Dean Moyar 277
kinds of reasons she generates, I can do so with reference to the institu-
tion of the family and the value we place on the family's purposes, such
as raising independent persons. But in my everyday actions she does
not serve as a source of reasons solely because she is objectively valuable
and fits into the agent-neutral institutional aims. To see the Kantian
tendency to move to agent-neutrality, consider Korsgaard's example of
romantic love and her claim that its reasons are not agent-relative. She
writes:
Although I may not suppose that the happiness of my loved ones is
objectively more important than that of anyone else, I certainly do
suppose that their happiness is objectively good. The structure of rea-
sons arising from love is similar to that of reasons of ambition. I think
that someone should make my darling happy, and I want very much
to be that someone. And others may have good reason to encourage
me in this. But if I try to prevent someone else from making my dar-
ling happy or if I suppose that my darling's happiness has no value
unless it is produced by me, that is no longer an expression of love.
Again, it is a very familiar perversion of it.
(Korsgaard, 1996, p. 288)
To me this seems just plain wrong as a description of romantic love. Love
is not this selfless, nor should it be. The exclusion essential to romantic
love does not imply that my darling's happiness has no value unless it is
produced by me, but it does imply that I do not make an inference from
'someone should make my darling happy' to T want to be that some-
one.' What I want, among other things, is to be valued as exclusively as
1 value my beloved.
Though Korsgaard (over)emphasizes the objective goodness of an
agent's attachments and projects, she also curiously undervalues the
independent standing of our ends. Korsgaard writes that reasons 'spring
from our respect for one another, rather than from our respect for
one another's ends' (Korsgaard, 1996, p. 290). The ends themselves
do not generate agent-relative reasons because they only have reason-
conferring value if we recognize them as agent-neutral products of
humanity, since humanity is (the source of all value for Korsgaard).20
Hegel's account of objective value gives a much more independent
standing to the ends. The objective values have come into being through
the processes of recognition that have shaped the social practices.
One's agent-relative ends (values) are 'nested' within the agent-relative
ends (values). By placing the objective values in the institutions, Hegel
278 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
enables individuals to realize agent-relative values in pursuing their ends
and use agent-relative reasons without reflecting on their neutrality/
objectivity (their source in 'humanity/ in Korsgaard's terms). Korsgaard
would take issue with Hegel's conception of Ethical Life because it is
essential to Hegel's picture that freedom (humanity) be in the ends or
purposes. An adequate ethics is only possible according to Hegel if it is
oriented by a social system of ends rather than by the abstract original
value-conferring activity of end-setters. I take it that Korsgaard would
object to the Hegelian conception of the State, in particular, which Hegel
describes as a 'living God' precisely because its ends embody the Good
and it provides an overarching context for all other spheres of activity.
1 conclude with a few words about the intersubjective basis of value
and respect that is central to both Korsgaard and Hegel. By contrast to
Korsgaard, Hegel holds that it is because we respect ends that we are able
to sustain our respect for each other as subjects. Of course in principle
we all respect each other as persons and should treat each other as per-
sons. But to be a particular source of reasons is, in Hegel's terminology,
to be a subject, and we respect each other as subjects through the ends we
set and carry out. What sustains our civility, our respect for each other as
subjects, is that we recognize the general (if not the particular) ends that
we are pursuing. We do not need to see each other as reflective value-
conferers in order to recognize each other. This is why Hegel worries less
than many think he ought to about how much reflective insight indi-
viduals have into the practices in which they live. Of course reflection is
good, but we can respect those who do not query their ends because we
respect the ends themselves. Your reason may not be a reason for me,
but if I can recognize your ends as falling within our common practices,
that will be enough for me to know that you are rational.
Notes
1.	In my Hegel's Conscience, I examine Hegel's relation to the internal/external
reasons distinction, which is sometimes confused with the different distinc-
tion at issue in this paper.
2.	In the following I focus on Nagel's role in making the distinction current.
See also Scheffler, 1982; Dancy, 1993. For a good overview of the issues
surrounding this distinction, see Ridge, 2008.
3.	Nagel, 1978, p. vii. This passage comes from the postscript published 8 years
after the original.
4.	Of course it might seem anachronistic to say that Hegel is addressing just
these problems, since the language he uses to formulate the issues is need-
less to say quite different, and the background assumptions of his theory
are so much different than those of contemporary moral theorists. But in
Dean Moyar 279
so far as we can show that Hegel addresses the same concerns with agency
and normativity that concern us today, there is no obstacle to bringing his
thought to bear on the contemporary distinction.
5.	See Dancy, 1993, p. 195. 'The expression "if a reason can be given a general
form" raises in me unfortunate memories of his remark "If I have a reason
to take aspirin for a headache or to avoid hot stoves, it is not because of
anything specific about those pains but because they are examples of pain,
suffering or discomfort." The idea that every reason accepts a general form
of this sort without distortion seems to me to create a very strange test of
agent-relativity/
6.	In writing of 'normative force/ I am invoking what is sometimes referred to
as the bindingness, the Verbindlichkeit, of the laws, duties, etc.
7.	Hegel writes, 'it is the development of the right of the subjective will—or
of its mode of existence—whereby this subjective will further determines
what it recognizes as its own in its object so that this becomes the will's true
concept—i.e., becomes objective in the sense of the will's own universality'
(§107).
8.	The Good includes 'abstract right, welfare, the subjectivity of knowing, and
the contingency of external existence.'
9.	This is Hegel's way of bringing Kant's conception of the Highest Good down
to the earth. Contemporary ethicists sometimes write as if the idea that
deontological considerations can be consequentialized is a recent invention.
See Dreier, 1993. But Hegel is doing just that in the claim about the Good.
10.	I explore these issues in much greater detail in my Hegel's Conscience.
11.	I am referring to section (d) of the remarks to PR §140.
12.	Allen Speight (2001, pp. 119-21) raises the issue of agent-relative reasons in
relation to the conflict and reconciliation of the acting conscience and the
moralistic judge at the end of the 'Spirit' chapter in Hegel's Phenomenology.
The encounter in the Phenomenology that ends in 'forgiveness' is not identical
to the encounter between 'the Good' and 'conscience' in the Philosophy of
Right, but they are closely related. The defect in Speight's account is that
he assimilates agent-relative reasons to what Bernard Williams has called
'internal reasons,' linked to something in the agent's 'motivational set.'
13.	This impression is reinforced several sections later when Hegel writes that
'the self-will of the individual, and his own conscience in its attempt to
exist for itself and in opposition to ethical substantiality, have disappeared'
PR §152.
14.	I say 'proper to' because the agent-neutral reasons from the earlier spheres
remain as reasons even when we are in a context of Ethical Life. They are
not, however, duties that properly belong to Ethical Life.
15.	Drawing on the work of Christina Hoff Sommers, Allen Wood (1990,
pp. 211-13) writes of Hegel's distinction between duties of morality and
duties as 'necessary relations' as the distinction between 'equal pull' and
'differential pull' of our duties. This distinction overlaps with the distinction
between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons, but should not be assimi-
lated to it. Wood is writing only of 'duties to others,' whereas the claim about
reasons applies to reasons for action in general.
16.	Part of this liberation has to do with ethical motivation, for in 'Morality' it
seemed that one had to root out one's particular desires in order to genuinely
280 Hegel and Agent-Relative Reasons
act on moral reasons. In Ethical Life, by contrast, one can do what comes
naturally, though this presupposes that one's nature has been informed by
rational social practices.
17.	1 would like to thank Arto Laitinen for pressing me on this point.
18.	The picture is somewhat different for individuals actually employed by the
State at various levels, for their immediate ends are the ends of the State.
This also has implications for how we would have to revise Hegel's theory
for contemporary democracies in which voting is one of the characteristic
public actions. Because of our conception of democratic political participa-
tion we do value reflection for each individual more than Hegel did, but
that does nothing to blur the distinction between reasons for action within
institutional contexts and beliefs endorsing those contexts.
19.	This is structurally akin to the secondary motivation that Kantians such as
Barbara Herman and Marcia Baron associate with the Categorical Imperative.
See Herman, 1993, pp. 1-22; Baron, 1995, Chapter 4.
20.	At points Korsgaard (1996, p. 282) indicates a more nuanced thesis. She
writes, for example, of many possible sources of value, such as 'friendships,
marriages, local communities, and common interests....' Her conclusion is
ambiguous, for though she claims to have undercut the distinction, her clos-
ing remarks suggest that all she has accomplished is shifted the terms of the
debate to the sources of different kinds of reasons.
Bibliography
Acton, H. B. (1971). 'Hegel's Conception of the Study of Human Nature', Royal
Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 4, pp. 32-47.
Adorno, T. W. (1993). Hegel: Three Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Alessio, M. (1996). Azione ed eticita in Hegel. Saggio sulla 'Filosofia del diritto'.
Milano: Guerini e Associati.
Allison, H. E. (1990). Kant's Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Anderson, E. (1993). Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1963 [1957]). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (2000 [1957]). Intention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle (1989). Nichomachean Ethics, Tr. D. Ross, revised by J. L. Ackrill and
J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baron, M. (1995). Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Barwell, I. (2009). 'Understanding Narratives and Narrative Understanding',
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67(1), pp. 49-59.
Baumgartner, T., M. Heinrichs, A. Vonlanthen, U. Fischbacher, E. Fehr (2008).
'Oxytocin Shapes the Neural Circuitry of Trust and Trust Adaptation in
Humans', Neuron, 58(4), pp. 639-50.
Behrendt, K. (2007). 'Reasons to be Fearful: Strawson, Death and Narrative', in
D. D. Hutto (ed.) Narrative and Understanding Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 133-53.
Bennett, J. (1995). The Act Itself. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bloch, E. (1959). Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Bourgeois, B. (2001). Hegel, les actes de I'esprit. Paris: Vrin.
Brand, M. (1984). Intending and Acting. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Brandom, R. (1994). Making it Explicit. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, R. (2004). 'Selbstbewusstsein und Selbst-Konstitution', in C. Halbig,
M. Quante and L. Siep (eds) Hegels Erbe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 46-77.
Bratman, M. E. (1987). Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Cambridge Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Bratman, M. E. (1999). Faces of Intention. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bratman, M. E. (2007). Structures of Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burke, K. (1969). A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Carroll, N. (2001a). 'Art, Practice and Narrative', in his Beyond Aesthetics: Philo-
sophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 63-74.
281
282 Bibliography
Carroll, N. (2001b). 'Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art', in his
Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 100-17.
Carroll, N. (2001c). 'On the Narrative Connection', in his Beyond Aesthetics:
Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 118-32.
Carroll, N. (2007). 'Narrative Closure', Philosophical Studies, 135, pp. 1-15.
Cavell, S. (1976). 'A Matter of Meaning It', in his Must We Mean What We Say?
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213-37.
Chisholm, R. (1966). 'Freedom and Action', in K. Lehrer (ed.) Freedom and
Determinism. New York: Random House.
Dancy, J. (1993). Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Dancy, J. (2009). 'Action in Moral Metaphysics', in C. Sandis (ed.) New Essays on
the Explanation of Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 396-415.
Davidson, D. (1963). 'Action, Reasons and Causes', The Journal of Philosophy,
LX(23), reprinted in 1980d, pp. 3-20.
Davidson, D. (1970). 'Mental Events', in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds) Expe-
rience and Theory. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, reprinted
in 1980d, pp. 207-24.
Davidson, D. (1973). 'Freedom to Act', in T. Honderich (ed.) Essays on Freedom of
Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, reprinted in 1980d, pp. 63-82.
Davidson, D. (1980a [1963]). 'Actions, Reasons and Causes', in his Essays on
Actions & Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 3-20.
Davidson, D. (1980b [1969]). 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?' in his Essays
on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21^12.
Davidson, D. (1980c [1978]). 'Intending', in his Essays on Actions and Events.
Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 83-102.
Davidson, D. (1980d). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (1986). 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs', in E. LePore (ed.) Truth
and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Deligiorgi, K. (ed.) (2006). Hegel: New Directions. Chesham: Acumen.
Dennett, D. (1988). 'Why Everyone is a Novelist', Times Literary Supplement, 16-22
September.
Derbolav, J. (1965). 'Hegels Theorie der Handlung', Hegel-Studien, 3, pp. 209-23,
reprinted in M. Riedel (ed.) Materialen zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, vol. 2.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 201-16.
Diamond, C. and J. Teichman (eds) (1979). Intention and Intentionality. Essays in
Honour ofG. E. M. Anscombe. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Dray, W. H. (1957). Laws and Explanation in History. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dreier, J. (1993). 'Structures of Normative Theories', The Monist, 76, pp. 22-40.
Dretske, F. (1971). 'Book Review', The Philosophical Review, 80(2), pp. 251-53.
Dudley, W. (2002). Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy. Thinking Freedom. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Diising, K. (1973). 'Die Rezeption der kantischen Postulatenlehre in den friihen
philosophischen Entwiirfen Schellings und Hegels', in R. Bubner (ed.) Das
diteste Systemprogramm. Studien zur Friihgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus,
Bonn: Hegel-Studien Beiheft, 9, pp. 53-90.
Bibliography 283
Erev, I. and A. E. Roth (2007). 'Multi-Agent Learning and the Descriptive Value of
Simple Models', Artificial Intelligence, 171, pp. 423-8.
Fehr, E. and A. Falk (2002). 'Psychological Foundations of Incentives', European
Economic Review, 46, pp. 687-724.
Ferrarin, A. (2001). Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fichte, J. G. (1977 [1798]). 'System der Sittenlehre nach den Prinzipien der
Wissenschaftslehre', Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Bd. V. Werke 1798-1799. Stuttgart. Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
Fischbach, F. (2002). L'etre et I'acte: Enquete sur les fondements de I'ontologie modeme
de I'agir. Paris: Vrin.
Fischbach, F. (2004). 'Theorie de Taction et ontologie de 1'activite chez Hegel' in
J.-F. Kervegan & G. Marmasse (eds.) Hegel penseur du droit. Paris: CNRS editions,
pp. 97-112.
Floistad, G. (ed.) (1983). Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, Vol. 4. Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Franco, P. (1999). Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1988). The Importance of What We Care About. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, H. (1999). 'On the Necessity of Ideals', in his Necessity, Volition and
Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (2004). The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gesang, B. (2008). 'Der moralische Realismus und das Relativitatsargument',
Zeitschrift fur philosophische Forschung, 62, pp. 157-80.
Gilbert, M. (1989). On Social Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ginet, C. A. (1990). On Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldie, P. (2003a). 'Narrative and Perspective: Values and Appropriate Emotions',
in A. Hatzimoysis (ed.) Philosophy and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 201-20.
Goldie, P. (2003b). 'One's Remembered Past: Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and
the External Perspective', Philosophical Papers, 32, pp. 301-19.
Gorz, A. (2000). Arbeit zwischen Misere und Utopie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, J. (1982). 'A Reply to my Critics', in J. Thompson and D. Held (eds)
Habermas: Critical Debates. Tr. T. McCarthy. Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press,
pp. 219-83.
Habermas, J. (1999). 'From Kant to Hegel and Back again - The Move Towards
Decentralization', European Journal of Philosophy, 7(2), pp. 129-57.
Haddock, A. and F. Macpherson (eds) (2008). Disjunctivism: Perception, Action,
Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halbig, C. (2002). Objektives Denken. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog.
Halbig, C. (2007). Praktische Griinde und die Realitdt der Moral. Frankfurt a. M.:
Klostermann.
Halbig, C. (2008). 'Die Wahrheit des Gewissens', in K. Vieweg and W. Welsch
(eds) Hegels Phanomenologie des Geistes. Ein kooperativer Kommentar zu einem
Schliisselwerk der Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Hamilton, A. (2008). 'Intention and the Authority of Avowals', Philosophical
Explorations, 11(1), pp. 23-37.
284 Bibliography
Hardimon, M. (1994). Hegel's Social Philosophy. The Project of Reconciliation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hare, R. M. (1952). The Language of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harman, G. (1999). Reasoning, Meaning and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hartmann, K. (1972). 'Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View', in A. MacIntyre (ed.)
Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.
Herman, B. (1993). 'On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty', in her
The Practice of Moral Judgment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
pp. 1-22.
Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press.
Honneth, A. (2008). 'From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human
Sociality', in D. Moyar and M. Quante (eds) Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 76-90.
Hornsby, J. (1980). Actions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hornsby, J. (2004). 'Agency and Actions', in J. Hyman and H. Steward (eds)
Agency and Action, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-23.
Houlgate, S. (1991). 'Hegel's Ethical Thought', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great
Britain, 25, pp. 1-17.
Houlgate, S. (1995). 'The Unity of Theoretical and Practical Spirit in Hegel's
Concept of Freedom', The Review of Metaphysics, 48(4), pp. 859-81.
Houlgate, S. (2005). An Introduction to Hegel. Freedom, Truth and History. 2nd
edition [1st edition 1991]. Oxford: Blackwell.
Houlgate, S. (2007). 'Hegel's Theory of Tragedy', in S. Houlgate (ed.) Hegel and the
Arts. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 146-78.
Houlgate, S. (2008). 'Introduction' to G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy
of Right. Tr. T.M. Knox, Rev. S. Houlgate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
vii-xxxiii.
Hyman, J. and H. Steward (eds.) (2004). Agency and Action, Royal Institute of
Philosophy Supplement 55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyman, J. and M. Alvarez (1998). 'Agents and their Actions', Philosophy, 73,
pp. 219-45.
Inwood, M. (1982). 'Hegel on Action', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 13,
pp. 141-54.
Inwood, M. (1992). A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Irwin, T. H. (1992). 'Who Discovered the Will?', Philosophical Perspectives, 6,
pp. 453-73.
Kane, R. (1996). The Significance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowles, D. (2002). Hegel and the Philosophy of Right. London: Routledge.
Knox, M. (1968). Action. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Korsgaard, C. (1996). 'The Reasons We Can Share: An Attack on the Distinction
between Agent-Relative and Agent-Neutral Values', in her Creating the Kingdom
of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 275-310.
Korsgaard, C. (2009). Self Constitution. Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kukla, R. and M. Lance (2009). 'Yol' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space
of Reasons. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.
Bibliography 285
Laden, A. (2005). 'Evaluating Social Reasons: Hobbes vs. Hegel', Journal of
Philosophy, 102(7), pp. 327-56.
Laitinen, A. (2004). 'Hegel on Intersubjective and Retrospective Determination of
Intention', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 49/50, pp. 54-72.
Lamarque, P. (2004). 'On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative', Mind &
Language, 19, pp. 393-407.
Lamarque, P. (2007). 'On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life
Narratives', in D. D. Hutto (ed.) Narrative and Understanding Persons. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 117-32.
Lamb, D. and L. L. Stepelevich (eds) (1983). Hegel's Philosophy of Action. Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
Lange, E. M. (1980). Das Prinzip Arbeit. Drei metakritische Kapitel uber die
Grundbegriffe, Struktur und Darstellung derKritik der Politischen Okonomie von Karl
Marx. Frankfurt, Berlin and Wien: Ullstein.
Lavater, J. C. (1775-1778). Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Men-
schenkenntnis und Menschenliebe. Leipzig and Winterthur: Bey Weidmanns
Erben und Reich und Heinrich Steiner und Compagnie.
Leibniz, G. (1988). Philosophical Texts, in R. S. Woolhouse and R. Francks (eds).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Locke, J. (1979). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in P. H. Nidditch (ed.).
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press.
MacIntyre, A. (2006 [1972]). 'Hegel on Faces and Skulls', in his The Tasks of Phi-
losophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74-85. Reprinted here as
Chapter 10.
Mann, T. (1982). 'Leiden und Grosse Richard Wagners', in P. Mendelssohn (ed.)
Leiden und Grosse der Meister. Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer
Verlag, pp. 716-79.
Marx, K. (1975). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The Col-
lected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. 3. New York: International
Publishers.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (2002). 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism',
in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald and J. Kertscher (eds) Gadamer's Century: Essays in
Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
McDowell, J. (2009). 'Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action in the "Reason"
Chapter of the Phenomenology', in Having the World in View. Essays on Kant,
Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 166-84,
reprinted above as Chapter 5.
Melden, A. (1961). Free Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Menegoni, F. (1982). Moralita e morale in Hegel. Padova: Liviana Editrice.
Menegoni, F. (1993). Soggetto e struttura dell'agire in Hegel. Trento: Verifiche.
Menegoni, F. (1997). 'Elemente zu einer Handlungstheorie in der 'Moralitat'
(§§104-28)', in L. Siep (ed.) G. W. F. Hegel - Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts.
Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 125-46.
Menegoni, F. (2005). Fede e religione in Kant (177S-1798). Trento: Verifiche.
Meyer, S. S. (2006). 'Aristotle on the Voluntary', in R. Kraut (ed.) The Blackwell
Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 137-58.
286 Bibliography
Merker, В., G. Mohr and M. Quante (eds) (2004). Subjectivitat und Anerkennung:
Festschrift fur Ludwig Siep. Paderborn: Mentis.
Mohr, G. (1997). 'Unrecht und Strafe (§§82-104)', in L. Siep (ed.) G. W. F. Hegel.
Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 95-124.
Moran, R. (2001). Authority and Estrangement. An Essay on Self-Knowledge.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Moran, R. (2004). 'Anscombe and "Practical Knowledge"', in Hyman and Stew-
ard (eds) Agency and Action. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 43-68.
Moran, R. and M. Stone (2009). 'Anscombe on Expression of Intention', in
C. Sandis (ed.) New Essays on the Explanation of Action. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 132-68.
Moyar, D. (2007). 'Urteil, Schlufi und Handlung: Hegels logische Ubergange im
Argument zur Sittlichkeit', Hegel-Studien, 42, pp. 51-79.
Moyar, D. (2010). Hegel's Conscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forth-
coming).
Nagel, T. (1970). The Possibility of Altruism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nagel, T. (1978 [1970]). The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Nagel, T. (1986). The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, T. (1993). 'Moral Luck', in D. Statman (ed.) Moral Luck. Albany, New York:
State University of New York Press.
Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal Questions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Neuhouser, E (1986). 'Deducing Desire and Recognition in Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit', Journal of the History of Philosophy, 24(2), pp. 243-62.
Neuhouser, E (2000). Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Neuhouser, E (2009). 'Desire, Recognition, and the Relation between Bondsman
and Lord', in K. Westphal (ed.) The Blackwell Guide to Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 37-54.
Neuman, I. (2007). 'Oxytocin: The Neuropeptide of Love Reveals Some of its
Secrets', Cell Metabolism, 5(4), pp. 231-3.
Newman, E. (1991). The Wagner Operas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O'Shaughnessy, B. (1991). 'Searle's Theory of Action', in E. Lepore and R. Van
Gulick (eds) fohn Searle and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 271-87.
O'Shaughnessy, B. (2003). 'The Epistemology of Physical Action', in J. Roessler
and N. Eilan (eds) Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 345-57.
Patten, A. (1999). Hegel's Idea of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pendlebury, G. (2006). Action and Ethics in Aristotle and Hegel: Escaping the Malign
Influence of Kant. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Peperzak, A. T. (2001). Modem Freedom. Hegel's Legal, Moral, and Political Philoso-
phy. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Phillips, D. Z. (1993). 'Primitive Reactions and the Reactions of Primitives', in his
Wittgenstein and Religion. New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 103-22.
Pinkard, T. (1996 [1994]). Hegel's Phenomenology. The Sociality of Reason.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pinkard, T. (2002). German Philosophy 1760-1860. The Legacy of Idealism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bibliography 287
Pippin, R. (1989). Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pippin, R. B. (2000a). 'The Realization of Freedom: Hegel's Practical Philosophy',
in K. Ameriks (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pippin, R. B. (2000b). 'What is the Question for Which Hegel's "Theory of Recog-
nition" is the Answer?', The European Journal of Philosophy, 8(2), pp. 155-72.
Pippin, R. (2000c). Henry James and Modem Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pippin, R. B. (2004a). 'Hegels praktischer Realismus: Verniinftiges Handeln als sit-
tliches Leben', in C. Halbig, M. Quante and L. Siep (eds) Hegels Erbe. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. (A revised English version forthcoming in the
second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited by Fred Beiser.)
Pippin, R. B. (2004b). 'Recognition and Reconciliation in Hegel's Phenomenol-
ogy', Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/Intemational Yearbook of
German Idealism, 2, pp. 249-68.
Pippin, R. (2004c). 'Taking Responsibility: Hegel on Agency', in B. Merker,
G. Mohr and M. Quante (eds) Subjectivitat und Anerkennung: Festschrift fiir
Ludwig Siep. Paderborn: Mentis.
Pippin, R. (2005). 'Agent and Deed in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals', in Keith
Ansell Pearson (ed.) A Companion to Nietzsche. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pippin, R. (2006). 'Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel's
Jena Phenomenology', in K. Deligiorgi (ed.) Hegel: New Directions. Chesham:
Acumen, pp. 125-42.
Pippin, R. B. (2008). Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quante, M. (1993). Hegels Begriff der Handlung. Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog.
Quante, M. (2004a). Hegel's Concept of Action. Tr. D. Moyar. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Quante, M. (2004b). 'Spekulative Philosophic als Therapie?', in C. Halbig,
M. Quante and L. Siep (eds) Hegels Erbe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
pp. 324-50.
Quante, M. (2004c). ' "The Personality of the Will" as the Principle of Abstract
Right: An Analysis of §§34-40 of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right" in Terms
of the Logical Structure of the Concept', in R. B. Pippin and O. Hbffe
(eds) Hegel on Ethics and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 81-100.
Quante, M. (2005). 'Hegels pragmatistische Ethikbegriindung', in K. Engelhard
and D. H. Heidemann (eds) Ethikbegriindungen zwischen Universalismus und
Relativismus. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 231-50.
Quante, M. (2007). 'The Social Nature of Personal Identity', Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies, 14, pp. 56-76.
Quante, M. (2008a). '"Reason (...) apprehended irrationally": Hegel's Cri-
tique of Observing Reason', in D. Moyar and M. Quante (eds) Hegel's 'Phe-
nomenology of Spirit': A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 91-111.
Quante, M. (2008b). Einfiihrung in die Allgemeine Ethik, 3rd edition. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
288 Bibliography
Quante, M. (2009a). 'Verantwortung und personale Autonomies in J. Michel
and M. Backmann (eds) Physikalismus, Willensfreiheit, Kiinstliche Intelligenz.
Paderborn: Mentis, pp. 162-80.
Quante, M. (2009b). "Das Argument des Vollzugswiderspruchs: Annaherungen
an Carl Friedrich Gethmanns pragma-zentristische Subjektivitatstheorie', in
G. Kamp and F. Thiele (eds) Erkennen und Handeln. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, pp. 41-62.
Quante, M. (2010).' "The Pure Notion of Recognition": Reflections on the Gram-
mar of the Relation of Recognition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit’, in H.-C.
Schmidt am Busch and С. E Zurn (eds) The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical
and Contemporary Perspectives. Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. 89-106.
Quante, M. (forthcoming). 'Verursachung und Verantwortung in Hegels
Rechtsphilosophie', in R. Hiltscher and S. Klingner (eds) Zur Hegelforschung der
Gegenwart. Darmstadt: Wissenscaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (in print).
Quante, M. and Schweikard, D. (2009). * "Leading a Universal Life": The System-
atic Relevance of Hegel's Social Philosophy', History of the Human Sciences, 22,
pp. 58-78.
Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and Narrative. Tr. K. Blarney. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Tr. K. Blarney. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ridge, M. (2008). 'Reasons for Action: Agent-Neutral vs. Agent-Relative', in
Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition),
URL — http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/reasons-agent/.
Rose, D. (2007). Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. London: Continuum.
Rosenkranz, K. (1977). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Ruben, D-H. (2003). Action and its Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rudd, A. (2007). Tn Defence of Narrative', European Journal of Philosophy, 17(1),
pp. 60-75.
Rutter, B. (2010). Hegel on the Modem Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia. Tales of Music and the Brain. Chatam: Picador.
Sandis, C. (ed.) (2009). New Essays on the Explanation of Action. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Scanlon, T. M. (2008). Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schechtman, M. (2007). 'Stories, Lives and Basic Survival: A Refinement and
Defense of the Narrative View', in D. D. Hutto (ed.) Narrative and Understanding
Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155-78.
Scheffler, S. (1982). The Rejection of Consequentalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1859 [1809]). Philosophischen Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der
menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhangenden Gegenstdnde (Sammtliche
Werke Bd. VII), ed. К. E A. Schelling. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta.
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2001). 'Arbeit zwischen Marx und Hegel. Andre Gorz'
postkapitalistische Gesellschaftstheorie', Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie,
49(5), pp. 743-60.
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2002). Hegels Begriff der Arbeit. Berlin: Akademie.
Bibliography 289
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2003). 'Arbeit - ein philosophisches Problem? Neuere
philosophische Literatur zur Erwerbsarbeit und ihrer Zukunft', Zeitschrift fiir
philosophische Forschung, 57(3), pp. 446-56.
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2007). Religiose Hingabe oder soziale Freiheit. Die saint-
simonistische Theorie und die Hegelsche Sozialphilosophie. Hamburg: Meiner.
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2009a). 'Anerkennung' als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie.
Frankfurt: Habilitationsschrift.
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2009b). 'Persbnliche Autonomie, soziale
Wertschatzung und menschliche Natur. Zu den Grundlagen von Andre
Gorz' Gesellschaftskritik', in R. Zwengel (ed.) Ohne Proletariat ins Paradies? Zur
Aktualitat des Denkens von Andre Gorz. Essen: Klartext, pp. 85-95.
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C. (2010). 'Can the Goals of the Frankfurt School be
Achieved by a Theory of Recognition?', in H.-C. Schmidt am Busch and C. F.
Zum (eds) The Philosophy of Recognition. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 257-83.
Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. (2001). Rationality in Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sellars, W. (1963). 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man', in his Science,
Perception and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Siep, L. (1979). Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophic. Untersuchungen
zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophic des Geistes. Freiburg and Munich: Alber.
Siep, L. (1983). 'The "Aufhebung" of Morality in Ethical Life', in L. S. Stepelevich
and D. Lamb (eds) Hegel's Philosophy of Action. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, pp. 137-55.
Siep, L. (1992). Praktische Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp.
Siep, L. (2007). 'Hegel Ober Moralitat und Wirklichkeit. Prolegomena zu einer
Auseinandersetzung zwischen Hegel und der Realismusdebatte in der moder-
nen Metaethik', Hegel-Studien, 42, pp. 11-30.
Siep, L. (2008). 'Moralischer und sittlicher Geist in Hegels Phanomenologie', in
K. Vieweg and W. Welsch (eds) Hegels Phanomenologie des Geistes. Ein koopera-
tiver Kommentar zu einem Schliisselwerk der Modeme. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
Smith, M. (1994). The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, M. (2004). 'The Structure of Orthonomy', in Hyman and Steward (eds)
Agency and Action. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 164-94.
Speight, A. (2001). Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Speight, A. (2008). The Philosophy of Hegel. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University
Press.
Stepelevich, L. S. and Lamb, D. (eds) (1983). Hegel's Philosophy of Action. Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
Strawson, G. (2004). 'Against Narrativity', Ratio, 16, pp. 423-52.
Strawson, G. (2007). 'Episodic Ethics', in D. D. Hutto (ed.) Narrative and
Understanding Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 85-115.
Taylor, C. (1975). Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
290 Bibliography
Taylor, C. (1978a). 'Hegel's Sittlichkeit and the Crisis of Representative Institu-
tions', in Y. Yovel (ed.) Philosophy of History and Action. Dordrecht and Boston,
MA: D. Reidel, pp. 133-54.
Taylor, C. (1978b). 'The Validity of Transcendental Arguments', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 79 (1978-79), pp. 151-65.
Taylor, C. (1979a). Hegel and Modem Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Taylor, C. (1979b). 'Action as Expression', in C. Diamond and J. Teichman (eds)
Intention and Intentionality. Sussex: Harvester Press.
Taylor, C. (1983). 'Hegel and the Philosophy of Action', in L.S. Stepelevich and
D. Lamb (eds) Hegel's Philosophy of Action. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities
Press, reprinted here as Chapter 2.
Taylor, C. (1985a). 'Hegel's Philosophy of Mind', in C. Taylor (1985c), pp. 77-96.
A slightly modified version of Taylor 1983.
Taylor, C. (1985b). 'What is Human Agency?', in C. Taylor (1985c), pp. 15-44.
Taylor, C. (1985c). Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, vol. I.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tugendhat, E. (2003). Egozentrizitat und Mystik. Eine antropologische Studie.
Munchen: Verlag C.H. Beck.
Velleman, D. (2003). 'Narrative Explanation', The Philosophical Review, 112(1),
January, pp. 1-25.
Velleman, J. D. (2005). 'The Self as Narrator', in J. Anderson and J. Christman (ed.)
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 56-76, reprinted in J. D. Velleman (2006). Self to Self.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 203-23.
Velleman, J. D. (2007). Practical Reflection. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Westphal, K. (1991). 'Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral World View', Philosophical
Topics, 19(2), pp. 133-75.
White, M. (1965). Foundations of Historical Knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Wiehl, R. (1971). 'Uber den Handlungsbegriff als Kategorie der Hegelschen
Asthetik', Hegel-Studien, 6, pp. 135-70.
Wildt, A. (1997). Die Anthropologie des friihen Marx. (Fern Universitat Hagen,
Course Material).
Willaschek, M. (2004). '"Verhinderung eines Hindernisses der Freiheit" und
"Zweiter Zwang". Bemerkungen zur Begriindung des Zwangsrechts bei Kant
und Hegel', in B. Merker, G. Mohr and M. Quante (eds) Subjektivitat und
Anerkennung. Paderborn: Mentis, pp. 271-83.
Williams, B. (1978). Descartes—The Project of Pure Enquiry. London: Penguin.
Williams, B. (1981). Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, B. (1994). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Williams, R. R. (1997). Hegel's Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wood, A. W. (1990). Hegel's Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Wood, A. W. (2008). Kantian Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Index
ability, 60, 80-1, 158, 171, 192-3,
197-8, 199-201, 203, 274
Absicht, 11, 104, 124, 126, 135, 166
see also intention
acknowledgement, 19, 64, 78, 80-3,
89, 122, 134, 152, 172, 250, 254,
256, 276
see also recognition (inc. abstract
recognition)
action
as actualisation, see actuality (inc.
Actualization)
basic, 2
causation of, see causation (inc.
agent, event, backwards)
vs. deed, see deed
description, see description (inc.
under which; act-description)
vs. event, see event
explanation, see explanation (inc.
causal, rational)
expressive theories of, see expressive
(inc. expressivist)
free (inc. freedom of), 4, 155, 166-7,
172, 175
intentional, see intentional
motivation of, see motive,
motivation(al), motivating
vs. nonaction, 7, 23-5
as objectification, 5, 168, 189,
191-3, 195, 204-8,211, 259
philosophy of action, 1, 4, 5, 6, 16,
20, 22, 44-5, 47, 97, 212-15,
217, 221-3, 226, 229, 234, 238
plans, 16, 17, 213, 215
proper, 8, 14, 155, 163
qualitative theories of, see
qualitative (view)
reasons for, see reasons (inc.
operative reasons &
reason-giving practices)
theory, 2, 6, 10, 15, 114, 123, 134,
190, 195, 207, 260, see also
action, theory of (action) (inc.
Hegel's, qualitative, social)
theory of (action) (inc. Hegel's,
qualitative, social), 8, 10, 14, 19,
20, 22, 24, 34, 37, 40, 45, 48,
50, 97-8, 113, 116, 134, 159,
174, 190, 202-3, 206-7, 209-10
understanding of, 2, 12, 25, 33, 213
voluntary, 1-2
see also Handlung
activities, 8, 16, 21, 27-38, 44, 49-50,
61, 65, 74, 94, 97, 104-7, 111-12,
114, 140, 144-5, 151, 163,
169-70, 173-4, 180, 185-6,
189-93, 195-6, 198-211,248-9,
265, 269, 278
Acton, H. B., 15
actuality (inc. actualization), 3-5, 13,
20, 28, 50, 68-9, 71, 73, 86-9, 91,
109-10, 115, 139, 141, 158, 160,
162-4, 168, 171, 178, 181, 190,
195-7, 199-204, 209-10, 270, 273
Adorno, T., 146, 154
agency (inc. rational, expressive), 2-4,
6, 8-11, 16-18, 24-5, 28, 38, 55,
58-66, 73-4, 79, 82, 85, 87,
89-90, 97-8, 100, 105, 108-11,
114, 117, 119, 123, 135, 147-8,
170, 212-15, 217-20, 227, 229,
230, 232-40, 242-3, 261, 263-4,
274, 279
agent
causation, 2, 11, 54, 56, 110, 117
ethical, (inc. moral), 14, 18, 128,
171, 175, 237, 239, 242
free, 9-10, 14, 61-2, 79-80, 83-4,
143, 164, 170, 172, 174, 260
genuine, 14, 172
rational, 10, 61, 133, 155, 179, 181,
186-7, 219
responsible, 16-17, 222
thinking, 48, 127-9, 166
agential, 3, 11, 21
291
292 Index
agent-neutral reasons, see reasons,
agent-neutral (inc. objective)
agent-relative reasons, see reasons,
agent-relative (inc. subjective)
agent's
control, 132, 143
power, 110-11
responsibility, 58, 135, 165
self-image, subjectivity, 205, 256
aim, 13, 15, 30-1, 34, 36, 87, 96, 104,
107-8, 115, 118, 126-9, 133, 135,
147, 162-3, 166-70, 173, 192-3,
221-2, 237, 250, 267, 272, 274,
277
Alessio, M., 21
Alexander, 136
alien, alienation, 3, 78, 87, 89, 124,
164-5, 172, 177, 181, 208, 261
Alvarez, M., 117
Anderson, E., 243
animal, 21, 29, 44, 59, 79, 87, 95, 130,
143-4, 145, 151, 153, 224, 230
Anscombe, G. E. M., 6-7, 10, 27, 42-3,
49, 56, 59, 62, 78, 101, 114-15,
212
Antigone, 13, 20, 65, 70, 76, 142, 148,
234, 242-3
appraisal, 102, 115, 121, 236
Arendt, H., 17, 233, 241
Aristarchus, 236
Aristotelian, 13, 31, 83, 113, 139-40,
146, 149, 154, 173, 245, 259
Aristotle, 6-7, 13, 24, 82, 95-6, 110,
117, 139-42, 152, 175, 236, 259
arson, arsonist, 125-6, 128-9, 132,
134, 165
attitudes, (inc. pro-attitudes, moral
attitudes, practical attitudes,
recognitive attitudes), 7, 14, 43-4,
50, 60-1, 65, 69-70, 73, 92-4,
106, 136, 155, 169, 171-2, 184,
196, 199, 203, 216, 220, 227-8,
231, 269
authoritative, authority, 10, 13, 64,
68-70, 78, 83, 85, 92-4, 98, 100,
102, 112, 120, 142, 148-51, 172,
252, 254, 266, 268, 270, 274
autonomy, autonomous, 3, 14, 19, 92,
155, 172, 212, 214, 227-8, 248,
263, 272
avowals, 10, 62, 64, 69, 74, 98, 101-3,
115, 163
Baron, M., 280
Barwell, I., 236
Baumgartner, T., 107
behaviour, 3, 9, 88-9, 99, 102, 106-8,
116, 121, 130, 141, 176, 178, 180,
186-7, 248, 254
Behrendt, K., 243
belief, 2, 7, 23, 42-3, 48, 50, 53, 58,
60, 75, 101-2, 136, 171, 180, 184,
226-7, 229, 274-5, 280
Bennett, J., 78
blameworthiness, blame, 48, 75, 87,
111-12, 125, 130-4, 149, 223
Bloch, E., 257
Bose, das, 114
Bourgeois, B., 6
Brand, M., 230
Brandom, R., 6, 77, 80, 207
Bratman, M., 16, 212-13, 215,
229-30
Brougham, H., 181
Caesar, 136
capacity (inc. for action, choice,
understanding, conceptual), 35-7,
49, 60, 65, 80-1, 139, 144-6,
153-4, 157-8, 171-2, 197, 226,
256
carelessness, 12, 129-30
Carroll, N„ 17, 235-6, 238, 243
causal
connection (inc. origin, powers,
connection, relation, link, law,
potency, efficacy, path, roles,
responsibility, chain,
mechanism, status,
antecedents, sequence,
consequence, component), 7,
11, 17, 52-6, 58, 60, 62-5, 71,
74, 104, 105, 108-9, 117, 123,
135, 138, 178, 181,207, 214,
223, 225-6, 231, 235-6, 239
Index 293
explanation (inc. model,
framework, story, statement,
generalization), 8, 11, 43, 44,
53-4, 56, 58, 60, 64, 77, 105-7,
109-10, 115-17, 184-5, 226,
236
theories (inc. views, accounts,
theorists, paradigm) of action,
7, 8, 24-6, 29, 38-9, 42-4, 52-4,
63, 105, 109, 116, 152, 236
causalist (inc. anti-, non-) doctrines, 2,
7, 8, 17, 21, 113, 116, 235-6
causality, (inc. agent causality), 13, 43,
53, 56, 58, 115, 138, 140, 207,
225-6, 231, 236, 239
causation (inc. agent, event,
backwards), 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 20, 43,
54, 60, 69, 97, 107, 110, 117, 225,
236
causes, 2, 7, 23-24, 26, 29, 34, 38,
42-3, 48, 51-5, 58-60, 62, 66, 68,
71, 77, 90, 100, 104-10, 116-17,
123-4, 127, 130, 133-4, 167, 174,
176-7, 180-2, 184-5, 225, 254-5,
257, 272
Cavell, S., 77-8
character (traits), 17, 116, 150, 152,
154, 165, 176-9, 181, 185), 205,
222
of an action (inc. universal,
determinate, simple, general),
29, 46, 165-6, 174
(fictional) characters, 78, 150, 242
of intentions (inc. provisional,
future-oriented), 48, 58, 101
Charles, I, 183
Chisholm, R., 109, 117
choice (inc. freedom of), 14, 106, 108,
122, 133, 155-9, 163-4, 172, 224,
244, 252
cognitive, 101, 125, 252
cognizance (Kenntnis), 128, 129, 221,
224
commitment, 10, 19, 49, 61, 64,
69-70, 73-4, 76, 92, 101-3, 106,
112, 116, 145, 157, 210, 232,
237-43, 263-4, 271
Condillac, E. B. de, 35-6
conscience, 13, 17-20, 69, 72-3, 78,
123, 136, 148-9, 171, 217, 224,
241, 244-7, 251, 254-6, 261,
268-9, 275-6, 279
see also Gewissen
consciousness, 25, 33, 86-93, 95,
99, 107, 109-10, 140, 153, 185,
187, 197-8, 209, 224, 244, 247-53
moral (inc. honest), 69, 89, 109,
226, 247, 248, 250-6
of right, of freedom, 14, 138, 155-6,
159, 163, 243
shapes of, 20, 86-93, 95, 99, 107,
109, 140, 247-53
see also self-consciousness
consequences, 11-12, 14, 26, 45, 47,
77, 99, 109, 120-6, 129-36, 156,
162-5, 168, 172-4, 207, 214,
223-6, 231, 247, 250, 254, 260,
263, 269
constraint, 48, 106, 159, 162
Copernicus, N., 236
Cordelia, 65
Creon, 76, 142, 242
Dancy, J., 114, 117, 278-9
Das Seinige, 104, 111
Davidson, D., 6-7, 21, 23, 43, 47,
50-5, 58, 77, 80, 99, 114-15, 167
death, 12, 46, 56, 105, 106, 120, 124,
126-30, 236, 252
debt, 123
see also guilt; Schuld
deed, 8-12, 45, 53-4, 56-8, 60-1, 63,
66-71, 73-5, 77, 85-6, 88-90, 98,
104-5, 107-8, 113-17, 120-1,
123-8, 131, 135-6, 142-3, 163,
174, 218, 226, 254-5, 260
see also Tat
deliberation, 2, 60-1, 63, 71, 99, 114,
130, 140, 144-5, 153, 159, 219,
250, 264, 268
Deligiorgi, K., 10-11, 20, 97-118
Dennett, D., 17, 233
dependency, (inc. dependence,
independence), 13, 62, 70, 76,
84-5, 90-1, 95, 137, 154, 157,
178, 259, 264-5
Derbolav, J., 21, 156, 172
294 Index
description (inc. under which;
act-description), 2, 8, 10, 16-17,
24, 47-8, 52, 54-5, 56-7, 59, 61,
63, 69-70, 74-5, 78, 103, 106-7,
111-13, 126, 135, 204-5, 210-11,
277
desirability characterization, 115, 126
desire, 31-2, 34, 36, 38, 42-4, 50, 53,
55, 58, 60-1, 68, 75, 98, 124, 126,
153, 156-7, 163, 167-8, 171, 215,
237, 239, 241,255, 263, 279
Destruction, 124-6
determinacy (inc. indeterminacy), 9,
46, 58, 61, 69, 71-2, 77, 79, 88-9,
126, 142, 152, 156-7, 161, 167-8,
170, 171, 176, 178-9, 181-2, 185,
220, 248, 250, 264, 266-7,
269-70, 273
determination (inc. retrospective,
self-), 3, 10, 21, 68, 74, 84, 91, 96,
98, 103, 104-5, 112, 129, 145,
153, 161-3, 171-3, 219, 223-4,
229, 238-9, 241, 247, 250, 254,
257, 267, 270
determine (inc. retrospectively,
subjectively), 9, 16, 18, 27, 44, 46,
50, 66, 68-9, 71-4, 83, 86, 93,
98-9, 113, 133, 137, 139, 152-4,
156-7, 161-3, 166-7, 170-3, 182,
190, 210-11, 213, 228-9, 253-4,
256, 258, 264, 266, 279
dialectic, dialectical, 12-13, 18, 44, 70,
75, 117, 138-9, 146-7, 151-2,
244-5, 248, 267
Dinesen, I., 241
disown, 113
disposition, dispositional, 43, 53, 61,
101, 108, 132, 177-8, 182-3, 185,
222, 231, 236, 239, 274
Dray, W. H., 42, 56
Dreier, J., 279
Dretske, 5
drive (Trieb), 16, 50, 58, 87, 140,
153-4, 163, 171, 195-7, 200-2,
215, 218, 241
drunkenness (inc. going to get drunk),
102
dualism, 14, 23-6, 29, 42, 44, 181,
227, 256
Dudley, W., 173
Diising, K., 258
duty (Pflicht), 50, 120-2, 129-30,
133-4, 143, 170-2, 174, 216, 219,
241, 248, 251-2, 254, 257, 261,
267-8, 270-3, 279
Elizabeth, 183
ends, 11-12, 25, 28-9, 45, 47, 49-50,
61-2, 88, 102, 104, 122, 124, 126,
136, 162-3, 169, 175, 186, 226,
248, 258, 262, 264, 272-3, 275-8,
280
see also aim; purpose; intention;
goal
epistemic, epistemology, 10-11, 27,
35, 37, 40-1, 58, 97-98, 101-3,
108, 111
Erev, I., 116
ethical
action, 173, 245, 268
being, (inc. agent, subject), 14, 18,
61, 171, 175, 216, 237, 239,
242, 256, 261
freedom, 171, 261
life, 14, 19, 38, 72-4, 76, 89, 92, 96,
119, 124, 154, 171, 173-4, 239,
242, 243, 261, 267, 270-6,
278-9
objectivity, 129
reasons, (inc. norms, duties, aims,
worth, motivation), 82-3,
129, 167, 216, 232, 241-2,
280
self-consciousness, 66, 90
substance (inc. order, practices,
powers), 105, 135, 150, 230-1,
270-1, 273, 276, 279
theories, normative, see ethics
see also Sittlichkeit
ethics, 20, 56, 76-7, 82, 97, 109, 114,
119, 121-2, 127, 132, 136, 228-9,
231, 232, 241, 244-5, 250, 260,
267-8, 278-9
evaluation, 10-12, 14, 17, 48, 55-6,
59, 72, 75, 97-8, 100, 103, 106-8,
111-13, 117, 122-3, 143, 155,
206, 216, 219, 221, 223, 225-8,
231, 236, 252, 254
Index 295
event, 1-2, 7-8, 16-17, 21, 23-6, 29,
34, 38, 42, 46, 52-4, 57, 59-60,
62, 70, 72, 76, 78, 101, 104,
109-10, 117, 123—4, 136, 152,
171, 180, 183-6, 189, 204, 210,
218-21, 225, 230, 233, 235-7
evil (inc. and its forgiveness), 20, 112,
114, 127-8, 132, 134, 136, 144,
175, 224, 245, 252, 254, 257
exculpation, 16, 48, 74, 214, 218-19,
223-4
excuse, 16-17, 120-1, 130, 133, 135,
214-16, 220-5, 230-1, 260
existence (inc. independent
existences, outer existence,
Dasein), 8, 11, 18, 27, 42, 50,
52-3, 55-6, 73, 98-9, 104, 107,
117, 123, 132-4, 140, 143—4, 151,
158, 160, 163, 169, 173-5, 181,
183-4, 199, 253-6, 257, 265, 267,
270, 279
expectation, 102, 106
explanation (inc. causal, rational),
2-4, 8, 11, 14-15, 23, 34-7, 39,
42-4, 46-50, 52-60, 62, 64-6, 71,
77, 82, 90, 99, 104-9, 113,
115-16, 130, 147, 155, 167, 174,
176, 180, 182-5, 187-8, 193, 198,
206, 226, 231, 233, 236-7,
239—40, 255, 258
explanatory, 11, 34, 36, 47, 49, 64,
104-6, 108, 116, 185, 233, 242
expression, 2, 7, 10, 12, 15, 28, 31-2,
35-7, 39, 44, 49, 54, 63-Л 71,
73-7, 80, 82-3, 85-6, 90-1, 93, 97,
102-3, 108, 112, 115, 123, 136,
141-2, 155-6, 164, 167, 171-2,
177-8, 185
expressive (inc. expressivist), 7-8, 29,
31-2, 35-7, 39, 40, 44, 49, 63, 77,
114, 178, 208, 241-2
see also qualitative (view)
Falk, A., 116
Fehr, E., 116
Fellini, E, 78
Ferrarin, A., 175
Fichte, J. G., 18, 27, 245, 250-2, 258
Findlay, J. N., 115
Fischbach, F, 6, 173-1
Floistad, G., 56
force(s), 110, 124, 141, 152, 164, 196,
198, 236, 254, 258
normative, predictive, motivating,
expressive, explanatory, 96,
142, 196, 198, 233, 236, 241,
258, 262, 264, 266, 271, 273,
276, 279
forensic, 11, 97, 104, 107
foresight, 3, 12, 46, 71-2, 74, 100, 121,
132, 135, 164-5, 174, 193, 203
fortunate, fortune, misfortune, 12,
122, 131-4, 136, 168, 174, 279
Franco, R, 21
Frankfurt, H., 9, 59, 209, 240, 243
free-agent variable, 19, 261-3
freedom, 4, 12-14, 19, 27, 50, 60, 64,
70, 77, 79-80, 82, 88-9, 92, 108-9,
119, 134, 137-43, 148-51, 155-7,
197, 227, 230, 261, 267, 278
of action, 155, 166-7, 172, 175
free will, 3-4, 14, 19, 60, 119, 133,
134, 141, 154, 156-62, 164, 169,
171-2, 220, 257, 265-6
Freud, S., 30-1
Fries, J. E, 136
Gaiger, J., 118
Galileo, G., 46
Gall, E J., 181
Geist, 75, 93, 97, 108, 250, 257, 275
see also spirit
genius, 254
see also Wittgensteinian
Gesang, B., 257
Gewissen, 18-19, 73, 171, 245-6,
250-6, 258
see also conscience; consciousness
Gilbert, M„ 77
Ginet, C., 100
goal, 13, 17, 30, 32-3, 37, 40, 63,
103-4, 111, 115-16, 147, 155,
179, 186-7, 208, 214, 217, 264
see also purpose; intention; ends;
aim
God, 27, 58, 116, 253, 255-6, 278
Goldie, R, 17, 233, 243
Goldman, A. I., 6, 212
296 Index
Gorz, A., 208
guilt, 46, 123, 130, 222, 252
see also Schuld
Habermas, J., 5, 114, 151, 192, 194,
204-5, 208
Haddock, A., 21
Halbig, C., 231, 256-7
Hamilton, A., 102, 115
Hampshire, S., 57
Handlung, 8, 10, 11, 45, 48, 53, 56-8,
60, 71, 77, 91, 104, 114, 120, 123,
162-3, 243, 258-9
Hardimon, M., 21, 114
Hare, R. M., 77
Harman, G., 100
Hartmann, K., 6
Hegel, G. W. E, see everywhere
Heidegger, M., 40
Herder, J. G., 7, 36, 37, 44, 208
Herman, B., 280
hermeneutical, 43, 44, 77, 115
historical, 3, 13, 21-2, 32, 38, 40, 53,
63-5, 67, 70, 72-3, 76, 80, 83, 93,
115-16, 123, 135-6, 140-1, 143,
147, 183, 187, 227, 234-5, 237-9
history, 2, 13, 20-2, 32, 36, 39, 40, 67,
76, 80, 136-8, 144, 147-8, 152,
154, 158, 176, 180, 183, 187-8,
192, 232, 234-5, 257
Hoff Sommers, C., 279
Honneth, A., 21, 192-4, 205-8, 211
Hoppe, H„ 229
Hornsby, J., 114
Hotho, H. G., 151
Houlgate, S., 13-14, 20, 114, 155-7,
229
Hume, D„ 8, 42-3, 50, 82, 185
Husserl, E., 154
Hyman, J., 117
Idealism, 42
identity, 2, 27-8, 52, 62, 71-3, 86,
161, 173, 185, 229, 241, 250,
273
Ilting, K.-H., 135
imperative, 170, 216, 227, 251, 267,
280
imputation, imputability, 10-11,
119-26, 128-9, 134, 136, 165,
168, 173-4, 213
indeterminacy, 9, 58, 61, 77, 156-7,
168, 170, 171, 182, 185, 220, 250,
267, 270
individualism, 3, 20, 119, 237, 240
inexpressible, 68, 98, 103
injustice, 136, 161
inner, 8, 10, 13, 20, 23, 26, 29, 31-2,
38, 50, 53, 59-62, 65-8, 71-5, 86,
90-1, 99-103, 107-9, 122, 131-2,
136, 140-4, 148, 150, 152, 154,
177, 181, 206-7, 209, 239, 254
innocent, 12, 124, 129
inseparability, (inc. of action and
purpose), 7-8, 11, 21, 23-4, 31,
42, 46, 52, 55, 62, 71, 80, 84, 115,
156, 159, 185, 244, 254
instinct, 30-1
intellectual, 27, 31, 125, 209, 216
intending, 9-10, 12, 21, 26, 47, 51, 58,
64, 66-72, 75, 77-8, 85, 90,
98-102, 105, 114, 120-1, 124-8,
130, 132, 134, 141-2, 166, 193,
215, 218-19, 240, 246, 255, 269
intention, 1-3, 7-11, 14, 16-17, 23,
26, 28-9, 34, 38, 42-3, 46-76, 78,
90-1, 97-105, 107-9, 111-17,
123-4, 126-31, 135-6, 141-4,
148-9, 152-3, 156, 161, 163,
166-71, 173, 175-7, 191,211,
213, 215-21, 223-7, 229-31,
238-9, 245, 251, 255, 260
inner intention, 65, 66, 71, 90
real/true intention, 68, 74
intention-in-action, 9, 217
intentional
action, event, 2, 7, 10, 16-17, 47,
56-7, 87-8, 116, 170, 217-18,
220-1, 226, 239, 267
agent, agency, 10, 238
object, 184
process, 13
wrong, 129-30
intentionally, 57, 59-60, 73, 75, 91,
99, 101, 130, 135, 225
interdependence, 264-5, 271, 275
introspection, 21, 66, 99, 101
Index 297
intuition, 3, 23, 27, 51, 64, 73, 78,
101, 110, 145, 200, 238, 259
intuitionism, 82-83
Inwood, M., 5,21, 114-15
irrationality, 100, 228
Irwin, T., 152
Ismene, 76
Jeffrey, E, 181
justice, 121, 136, 150, 161
justification, 3, 18, 48, 55, 63, 65, 67,
84-5, 99, 120-1, 127, 130, 132,
135-7, 149, 154, 169, 174, 178-9,
213-17, 221-2, 226-31, 237-9,
242, 244, 246, 260, 267
Kane, R., 117
Kant, L, 6, 12, 15, 18, 25-7, 31, 43, 50,
61, 82-3, 114, 117, 119-23, 131,
134, 136, 139, 147, 156-7, 170,
175, 241, 245, 248-9, 251-3,
257-8, 261, 267-8, 279
Kantian, 9, 11, 31, 43-5, 56, 65, 83,
109, 119, 127, 130, 134, 145, 172,
249, 253, 257, 276-7, 280
Kenny, A., 57
Kleist, H. von, 34
knowledge, 3, 10-12, 17, 25-8, 30, 32,
36, 39, 47-9, 52-4, 57-8, 60, 62,
74, 76, 86, 97-8, 100-3, 124, 153,
163, 178, 187, 216, 218-19,
221-2, 224, 226, 251, 274
Knowles, D., 6, 8, 11, 20-1, 42-58, 114
Knox, M., 5-7, 21
Korsgaard, C., 9, 210, 265, 276-8, 280
Kukla, R., 152
Laden, A., 77
Laitinen, A., 1-21, 78, 100, 115, 118,
211, 238, 280
Lamarque, R, 17, 233, 235
Lamb, 6, 21, 28, 56
Lance, M., 152
Lange, E. M., 191, 207, 208
La Strada, 78
Lavater, J. K., 15, 176, 179
Leibniz, G. W., 25, 116
Leviticus, 169
Lichtenberg, G. C., 15, 67, 178
Locke, J., 36, 108, 117, 229
love, 105-6, 169, 182, 242, 277
luck (inc. moral), 12, 130-1, 133, 165
lying, 7
MacIntyre, A. C, 3, 14-15, 17, 20-1,
114-15, 176-88, 233
Magic, 11, 105-6, 116
Mann, T., 105-6
Marx, K., 190-1, 207-8
Matthew, 169
Maxim, 12, 122-3, 127
McDowell, J., 6, 9-10, 20, 79-96, 98,
114, 238
meaning, 9, 13, 31, 35-7, 40, 44, 63,
68, 89, 100-1, 126-7, 131-2, 135,
139-40, 147-8, 153, 177-8, 182,
232, 238-9, 242-3, 256-7
Melden, A. L, 8, 42, 56-7
Menegoni, E, 18, 20, 172-4, 244-59
mental, 2, 7, 9, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30-5,
38, 43, 60-2, 69, 71, 99, 104-5,
107-10, 112, 127, 140, 181-2,
202-3, 213, 239
merit, 120-2, 134, 136, 239, 255
metaethics, 216, 226, 246, 249
metaphysical, metaphysics, 5, 7-8, 11,
16, 20-1, 42, 55, 65, 84, 97-8,
108-11, 117, 120, 138-41, 143,
146, 149-50, 213, 215, 265, 275
Meyer, S., 141, 152
Miller, A. V., 116
mind, 5, 14-16, 20, 26, 31, 42, 53-4,
61, 63-4, 91, 98, 102, 108-9, 115,
117, 140-2, 147-8, 153, 166, 171,
174, 181, 192-3, 202-3, 205-7,
211, 231
misfortune, 132-3, 168, 174
mitigation, 130
modesty (inc. false), 121
Mohr, G., 230
Monist, 42
Moore, G. E., 5, 265
morality, (Moralitat), 14, 16, 19-20,
45-6, 48, 72, 74, 107, 109, 119,
124, 126-7, 129, 132, 135-6, 155,
159-60, 170, 172-3, 189, 215-17,
227, 245-6, 248, 251, 253, 255-7,
261, 265-7, 269, 271, 273, 279
298 Index
Moran, R., 115, 117
motive, motivation(al), motivating, 1,
2, 8, 10, 30-1, 43, 50, 53, 58,
61-2, 65-7, 87, 94, 96, 99, 101,
106-7, 116, 167, 222, 244, 246-7,
251-4, 267-8, 275, 279, 280
movement, bodily, 2, 7, 15, 23, 42, 52,
60, 62, 65, 79, 89, 108, 110, 116,
138, 140, 177-8, 184-7, 204,
246-8
Moyar, D., 19-20, 258, 260-8
Murder, 19, 46, 72, 120, 128, 130, 136,
165-7, 178, 182, 184, 263
muscle contraction, 101, 106, 110
Nagel, T., 19, 43, 109, 131, 261-5, 269,
271-2, 275-6, 278
Napoleon, 75, 78, 136, 235
necessity, 82, 87, 138, 143, 158, 163,
169, 172, 256, 270, 272
negligence, 12, 127-30, 135
Neuhouser, E, 21, 114, 138, 174, 211,
230
neuroscience (inc. neurophysiology),
3, 14-15, 23, 106, 110, 180, 184,
186, 188
Newman, E., 116
Ng, J., 211
nomological, 11, 99-100, 105, 117
non-observational, 10, 27, 49, 52, 62,
101
normative, 2, 17, 63, 65, 70, 72, 75-6,
79-80, 83, 92, 100, 106, 109, 140,
146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 159, 216,
221, 226-8, 232-6, 244, 248,
251-2, 265-7, 273, 276, 279
objective, 14, 20, 22, 24, 27, 38, 64-6,
69-70, 72-3, 76, 88-9, 107, 113,
123, 126-9, 135-6, 143, 151-2,
162, 164-6, 171, 174, 208, 216,
227, 230, 249, 251-3, 258, 261-2,
265, 267, 275-9
objectivity, 16, 24, 48, 50, 55, 57, 73,
123, 127-9, 154, 162-3, 166, 168,
174, 217, 219, 221, 223-8, 278
observational, 86, 94, 100
Oedipus, 10, 12, 92, 124, 127, 135,
174
onlooker, 103
ontological, 2, 6-8, 11, 23-4, 42, 45-6,
51-2, 55, 65, 98, 103-4, 115, 228,
256
opaque, 104
outer, 8, 13, 20, 23, 26, 56, 59-62, 66,
71-2, 74-5, 86, 90-1, 99, 102,
107-9, 115, 131-2, 136, 140-4,
148, 150, 152, 177, 181, 206, 239
ownership, 9, 11, 33, 58, 63-4, 68, 86,
97-8, 110-13, 117
Parfit, D., 261
particularism, 264
particularity, 13, 47, 50, 84, 104, 139,
160, 167-70, 174
Pascal, B., 252
patricide, parricide, 124, 135, 267
Patten, A., 21, 114
Pendelbury, G., 6
Peperzak, A. T., 160
Person, 124, 135
Peters, R. S., 57
phenomena, 2, 15, 116-17, 190-1,
193, 270
mental, 107
Philips, D. Z., 116
phrenology, 3, 14-15, 21, 86, 99, 115,
176, 179-82, 187-8
physical, 4, 9, 23, 26, 46, 53-4, 101,
104-5, 107-8, 144, 177-8, 181,
186
physicalist, 14, 20, 42
physiognomy, 3, 14-15, 21, 67, 86, 99,
176-81, 185, 187
Pinkard, T., 6, 12-14, 100, 137-54,
209, 211
Pippin, R., 3, 6, 8-10, 13, 20, 49, 51,
53-8, 59-78, 79-86, 88, 90-6,
98-100, 103, 114, 117, 138, 152,
211, 213, 238-9, 241,243
Plato, 96, 245
potion, magic, 11, 105-6
practical reason, see reason (inc.
autonomous & self-determining
reason), practical; reasoning (inc.
instrumental), practical
prediction, 100, 102, 115
predisposition, 158
Index 299
predisposition (Anlage), 158
process, 5, 36, 53, 65, 111, 113, 118,
141, 153, 162, 174, 180, 187,
195, 205-8, 211, 226, 230, 237,
244, 247, 256, 258, 260, 272,
275-7
life, 31-3
teleological, 13, 207
pseudo-science, 14-15, 176ff.
punishment, 17, 117, 120, 159-60,
162, 173, 217, 221, 223, 230
purpose, 2-3, 7-8, 11-12, 15-17, 23-5,
29, 32-3, 39, 42, 45-8, 51-3, 55,
59, 68, 73-4, 80, 85, 104, 107,
109, 111, 113-15, 117, 123-30,
135, 147, 163-7, 174, 191,
194-211
see also Vorsatz
Qualitative (view), 7, 23-6, 29, 33-41,
42, 45, 52-3, 55, 116
Quante, M., 6, 14, 16-17, 20, 47-8,
56-7, 78, 114, 134, 155, 159, 163,
169, 172, 174, 202, 206-7,
209-11,212-31
Rameau's Nephew, 70, 234
rational (inc. rational agency), 6, 29,
44, 49, 56, 61-2, 79, 84, 86-7,
95-6, 100, 105, 115, 125, 128-30,
133, 136, 139, 142-3, 147, 150-1,
155, 172, 179, 181, 185-7, 190,
215, 217, 219, 222-3, 227-8, 232,
240-2, 253, 265, 268
non-rational, 130
rationalism, 41, 84-5
rationalist, 7, 10
rationalistic, 82, 95
rationality (inc. instrumental
rationality), 3, 17, 49, 77, 82, 84,
100, 142, 214, 219, 222-3,
228-30, 237, 240, 242, 259, 270,
278, 280
rationalize, 7, 236
Rauch, L., 207
reason (inc. autonomous &
self-determining reason), 6, 9, 12,
20, 31, 67ff., 85, 90, 95, 99, 104-5,
138, 142, 147, 181, 187, 202, 206,
214-15, 227-9, 243, 248, 257-8
cosmic, 147
practical, 61, 63-6, 83, 146, 226,
249, 257, see also reasoning
(inc. instrumental), practical
a priori, 147
pure (inc. theoretical), 27, 146, 226,
252
reasoning (inc. instrumental), 3, 95,
107, 114, 145-6, 237, 244, 267,
271
practical, 1, 8, 16, 60-1, 97, 99, 114,
230, 237, 239, 241-2, 248, 264,
see also reason (inc.
autonomous & self-determining
reason), practical
reasons (inc. operative reasons &
reason-giving practices), 2, 8-11,
19-20, 42-58, 60, 64-6, 76-7,
79-84, 92-5, 101-2, 107-8,
111-12, 114-15, 117, 128, 135,
141, 145-6, 153, 156, 162, 167,
171, 174, 179, 232, 239, 241-2,
254, 256, 259, 260-8
agent-neutral (inc. objective),
18-19, 261ff.
agent-relative (inc. subjective),
18-19, 260-80
conceptual, 183
exculpatory, 214
external, 65
genuine (inc. real), 143-4
internal, 65, 174
motivating (inc. explanatory), 43,
66, 99
normative (inc. binding, decisive,
deontological, ethical, good,
justifying, & prudential), 19, 67,
145, 179, 226, 232, 236, 239,
24 Iff.
primary, 43, 50
putative (inc. possible), 93, 144-5,
153
social, 13, 143, 145
Recht, 107, 155, 158, 160, 169, 173,
259
see also right (inc. abstract right)
recklessness, 12, 129
300 Index
recognition (inc. abstract recognition),
17-18, 20, 28, 31-3, 79-81, 83,
112, 127, 151, 160, 199, 217, 219,
222, 224, 226, 244-59, 269, 277
mutual (inc. interpersonal,
intersubjective, & reciprocal),
5-6, 18, 20, 27, 53, 216, 245-7,
253, 256, 260
see also self-recognition
recognitive, 65, 70, 83, 220, 226, 230
reductivism, 14, 23, 107
regret, 121, 126-7, 152
Reid, T., 117
respect, 81, 160, 170, 227, 266, 271,
277-8
responsibility, 3-4, 10-11, 17-18,
45-9, 55, 58, 72-4, 94, 107,
109-12, 119-36, 156, 163-6, 172,
212-28, 231, 238, 252, 254, 258,
260
results (of action, activity, deeds,
deliberation, intention, or
reasoning), 12, 63, 71, 94-5,
120-2, 125-7, 133-6, 214, 234
see also consequences
retrospectivism (inc. retrospective
stance), 3, 8-11, 66-8, 78, 91,
97-103, 115, 117, 210-11, 214,
232, 237-9
reward, 120-1
Ricoeur, P., 5, 17, 233
right of the action, 48, 127, 166, 224
right (inc. abstract right), 12-14, 19,
33, 45, 54, 71—4, 84, 111, 120-1,
124, 127-9, 132-3, 136-7, 149,
155-7, 216-17, 219-20, 222-3,
224, 227, 231,247, 251,255,
265-72, 275, 279
see also Recht
right of insight, 219, 224, 227
right of intention, 48-9, 54-5, 57, 71,
104, 126-8, 219, 224, 227
see also Absicht
right of knowledge, 47-8, 54, 57, 74,
124, 218, 224
right of objectivity, 16, 127, 129, 174,
217, 223-4, 226-8
right of subjectivity, 10, 16, 72, 75,
90-1, 168, 174, 217, 222-4, 227-8
right of war, 129
Rose, D., 21
Rosenkranz, K., 257
Roth, A. E., 116
Rousseau, J.-J., 84, 89
Ruben, D.-H., 8
Rudd, A., 243
Russell, B., 5, 183
Rutter, B., 154
Ryle, G., 57, 177
Sacks, O., 116
Sandis, C., 1-21, 118, 211
Sartre, J.-P., 5, 241
satisfaction, 44, 50, 55, 72, 74, 76, 87,
144, 163, 167-8, 174, 215, 272-3
Scanlon, T. M., 135
Schechtman, M., 243
Scheffler, S., 278
Schelling, F. W. J. von, 27, 245, 257-8
Schmidt am Busch, H.-C., 15-16,
20-1, 189-211
Schopenhauer, A., 27, 31, 40
Schuld, 72, 111, 123—4, 224-6
see also debt; guilt; responsibility
Schweikard, D. P., 229, 231
science, 20, 85, 117-18, 139-40, 153,
176-7, 179-90
see also neuroscience (inc.
neurophysiology);
pseudo-science
self, 10, 20, 28, 31, 35, 61, 187,
195-208, 234, 244-5, 259
self-actualisation, 3, 20, 87-8
self-attribution, 199, 201
self-awareness, 34, 242
self-conception, 86-7, 94, 271
self-consciousness, 19, 20, 30-1, 34-5,
37, 66, 68, 73, 86, 90, 95, 115,
145, 147, 153, 163, 178-9, 185,
187, 196-203, 208-10, 214, 225,
227-30, 246-7, 249, 254-6, 259,
266
self-constitution, 9, 243
self-creation, 205, 208
self-deluded, 75
self-determination, 44, 84, 145, 153,
161-3, 171, 172, 219, 247, 266
self-endorsement, 100
Index 301
self-expression, 77
self-knowledge, 27, 53, 62, 76, 153,
187
self-legislation, 83
self-moving, 81
self-recognition, 33
self-reference, 251, 265-6, 269, 271,
276
self-reflection, 31, 234
self-relation, 59
self-righteous, 269
self-serving, 69, 112, 127, 251
self-understanding, 24, 30-2, 34, 36,
38, 44, 57, 205, 213-14, 260
self-will, 161, 279
Sellars, W., 1
Shakespeare, W., 65
Siep, L., 21, 114, 171, 207, 229, 246,
256-8
Sittlichkeit, 38-9, 72, 92-3, 171, 242,
255
Smith, M., 57, 114
sociality, 6-8, 77, 148
Socrates, 76
Sophocles, 13, 142, 234
Speight, A., 6, 17-18, 20, 232-43, 279
spirit, 3, 13, 15-16, 20-1, 28-9, 31-2,
34, 37, 44, 69-70, 71, 92, 98-100,
103-9, 112-14, 116, 135-6, 137,
142, 147, 152-4, 175, 176, 181,
187-9, 213, 234, 241, 246-7, 250,
255-6, 270, 275, 279
absolute, 187, 247, 256
cosmic, 77
objective, 20, 70, 107, 113, 216,
227, 230, 265
spiritual, 32, 58, 247
see also Geist
Spurzheim, J. C., 181
Stepelevich, 6, 21, 56
Stone, M., 115
Strawson, G., 17, 233
Stuart, S., 259
subject, the, 9, 24, 29, 44, 47-9, 51-4,
60, 62, 64, 66, 72-4, 82, 98, 104,
107, 109, 111, 113, 123, 127,
130-1, 156, 159-63, 166, 170,
172-4, 224, 227, 231, 239, 247,
250
subjective (inc. subjectivity &
subjectivist), 5, 10-11, 16, 24, 27,
40, 50, 67, 72, 74-6, 80, 90-1,
108-11, 120, 124, 126-8, 131,
151-3, 161-74, 215-18, 220-4,
227-8, 240, 256, 260, 262,
265-70, 275, 279
system (inc. systematic), 3-4, 6, 20,
22, 28, 38-9, 57, 113-14, 118,
121, 125, 132, 136, 144, 176, 213,
215, 225-7, 230-1, 236, 241,
250-1, 258, 270, 272-3, 275,
278-80
Tat, 8, 10-11, 45, 53, 56^8, 60, 71, 77,
91, 104, 114, 120, 123, 163, 243,
253, 259
see also deed
Taylor, C., 4-8, 11, 15, 17, 20, 22-41,
42-6, 49, 51-7, 59, 77, 114-17,
208, 232-3
teleological, 147, 172, 226, 248-9,
257
see also process, teleological
torture, 125
tragedy, 3, 150, 173-4
Travis, C., 154
tristan and isolde, 105-6
truth (inc. half-truths), 86, 119-20,
127, 130-1, 136, 153, 187, 216,
247, 251
Tugendhat, E., 257, 259
Tun, 57, 114
unconscious, 29-30, 34
unfortunate, 12, 122, 279
unitary, 42, 44-5, 213
universal, 17-18, 46-8, 55, 58, 69, 89,
126, 129, 132, 135, 137, 139,
159-60, 162, 166, 168, 172-5,
184, 195-7, 219, 222, 224, 243,
244-5, 248-9, 254, 266, 268-9,
272
universality, 47, 69, 145, 159, 216,
221, 224, 227, 230, 265-8, 270,
272, 279
universalized, 17, 217
Unrecht, 161, 169
utility, 122
302 Index
values, 43, 174-8, 184, 228, 242, 259,
261-5, 270, 272
Velleman, J. D., 9, 17, 101-2, 115-16,
233, 236-8, 241
volition, 2, 12, 114, 117, 122-3, 127,
130, 132, 136
volitional, (inc. pre-volitional), 64,
107, 114, 123, 220, 227
Voltaire, 187
Vorsatz, 11, 46, 104, 115, 124, 135,
163, 166, 226
see also purpose
Wagner, R., 105-6
welfare, 14, 17, 46, 50, 55, 73, 116,
132, 156, 163, 165-72, 175, 217,
224, 267, 273, 279
Westphal, K., 114
White, M., 17, 235
wholeheartedness, 101
wickedness, 112, 114
Wiehl, R., 21
Wildt, A., 191-2, 204
will, the, 11, 18, 45, 50, 57, 65, 108-9,
111, 114, 117, 123-4, 134, 140-1,
143-6, 152-3, 155, 157-63,
169-70, 172-3, 175, 190-1,
195-8, 200-2, 207, 210, 213, 216,
225-31, 241, 265-7, 269, 279
Willaschek, M., 230
Williams, B., 20-1, 24, 175, 241, 271,
279
willing, 50, 101, 104, 109, 140, 144-5,
152-3, 159-61, 174-5, 187, 190,
195-6, 198-202, 208, 210, 227,
252, 261-2, 269
will, moral, 73, 119, 123, 169-70, 173
Winch, P., 57
Wittgenstein, L., 5, 7, 9, 13, 27, 37, 44,
81, 89, 114
Wittgensteinian, 42
Wood, A. W., 3, 5-7, 11-12, 20-1, 58,
114, 119-36, 175,279
Zurechnung, 120
see also imputation, imputability
palgrave
macmillan
COl
Series Editors: Stephen Boulter and Constantine Sandis,». \ . oo1 es
University, UK
This volume focuses on Hegel's philosophy of action in connection to
current concerns. Including key papers by Charles Taylor, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and John McDowell, as well as 11 especially commissioned
contributions by leading scholars in the field, it aims to readdress the
dialogue between Hegel and contemporary philosophy of action.Topics
include: the nature of action, reasons and causes; explanation and justification
of action; social and narrative aspects of agency; the inner and the outer;
the relation between intention, planning, and purposeful behaviour; freedom
and responsibility; and self-actualisation. This book will appeal alike to
Hegel scholars and philosophers of action.
List ofContributors:
Katerina Deligiorgi, Stephen Houlgate, Dudley Knowles, Arto Laitinen,
Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, Francesca Menegoni, Dean Moyar,
Terry Pinkard, Robert B. Pippin, Michael Quante, Constantine Sandis,
Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch, Allen Speight, Charles Taylor, Allen W.
Wood
Arto Laitinen is Research Fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies. His publications include Strong Evaluation without Moral Sources
(2008), Dimensions of Personhood (2007, edited with Heikki Ikaheimo),
Recognition and Social Ontology (edited with Heikki Ikaheimo, forthcoming),
and a number of articles on mutual recognition.
Constantine Sandis is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes
University and NYU in London. He is the author of The Things We Do
and Why We Do Them (forthcoming) and editor of New Essays on the
Explanation of Action (2009) as well as A Companion to the Philosophy of
Action (with Timothy O’ Connor, 2010).
Cover illustration:A casting picture by
Fredeijc Leighton of the actress Dorothy
Dene in Sophocles' Antigone (1882, oil on
canvas).