Andreja Novakovic’s Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life isolates, with unusual precision, a single hinge in Hegel’s practical philosophy and turns the whole edifice on it: the claim that subjective freedom is best realized when ethical norms have sedimented as second nature, such that agents inhabit a rational order without the friction of perpetual self-scrutiny. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in demonstrating how this sedimentation neither abolishes reflection nor subordinates freedom to custom, but reorganizes reflection into graded, largely implicit operations that sustain, recalibrate, and occasionally transform ethical life from within. Through a carefully staged reading across the Philosophy of Right, the Encyclopedia’s “Anthropology,” and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Novakovic argues that the ordinary ethical standpoint is a normatively serious locus in which habit, culture, critique, and philosophical recollection interlock, and she traces in detail where each element secures, strains, or displaces the others.
The outer frame of the book presents an apparently paradoxical hierarchy and then methodically folds that hierarchy back into a circle. Hegel’s famous gloss on ethical life distinguishes an immediate relation-less identity between agent and norm, thicker than belief and trust, from more mediated relations that pass through conviction, reasons, and finally conceptual cognition; yet, as Novakovic emphasizes, the order of appearance tempts a progressivist misreading that Hegel himself undermines. The immediacy at the “bottom” already contains conviction and insight; the reflective “stages” often import extraneous standards and so distort what they purport to justify; and the highest cognition aims to render explicit what the lowest lives, not to supplant it. Hence what looks like a ladder is better read as a circle in which philosophical comprehension returns us to the embedded standpoint it began from, showing that the latter was never blind to begin with. The scholarly stake is to secure this ordinary standpoint as both rationally weighty and reflectively articulated, while also delimiting the risks of reflection that exceed their proper home.
The argumentative center of gravity is Novakovic’s reconstruction of Hegel’s second nature as a lived synthesis of spontaneity and normativity that becomes visible once one stops opposing habit to freedom. She begins by extracting from the Philosophy of Right a systematic demand: subjective freedom requires that one find one’s “willing and knowing” satisfied in institutions whose objectivity is themselves the realization of freedom; but the phenomenology of this satisfaction is not a perpetual checking of maxims against principles—it is an unreflective identity in which one’s self-feeling lives in ethical norms “as in an element indistinguishable from itself.” To misread that identity as a mere absence of reflection is to miss the work done by formation, habituation, and cultural participation in making the ethical laws ours in the right way. What calls for conceptual cognition, in Hegel’s terms, is not that reflection must be installed where there was none, but that reflection’s tacit operations must be recognized where they already sustain the ordinary life of right.
From this frame, the book’s composition sequence proceeds by tightening and then relaxing the focus of reflection. The first movement treats habit and the anthropology of second nature, where the danger of conflating human habituation with animal routine is most acute. Novakovic turns to the Encyclopedia’s “Anthropology” precisely because Hegel there treats habit as a general form capable of assuming ethical content, even though his examples initially cluster around coping with natural conditions. Situated at the juncture where self-feeling threatens madness through exclusive identification with particular sensations, habit appears as a civilizing discipline by which spirit acquires distance within immediacy—an internalized plasticity that makes determinate contents usable without being enslaved to them. Because “subjective” and “objective” spirit are not rigidly separable for Hegel, this anthropological account anticipates and conditions the ethical: the very form by which we take up and make ours what is given is later the form by which we take up and make ours the norms of right. This methodological circularity is part of what Novakovic insists upon: the anthropology cannot be cordoned off as pre-ethical psychology; it already sketches the structure that ethical habits must later fill with practical content.
In drawing a line through Kant, Novakovic clarifies the burden she assigns to habit. Kant treats habits as ethically suspect because they threaten to substitute mechanism for principle; virtue must be principled and so, in Kant’s vocabulary, cannot become a mere second nature without moral loss. Hegel’s riposte, as reconstructed here, is not to deny the value of principled insight but to deny that the presence of principle needs to present itself as deliberative self-legislation in each act. Freedom is not maxim-application at every juncture. When the content is right, the highest form of subjective freedom is the unforced ease of acting well; the need to pause, abstract, and derive what to do is a sign that the agent has not yet fully appropriated the ethical. Thus the ethical disposition is principled habit: not blind routine, but a standing, intelligible orientation that has descended into character. Novakovic emphasizes that Hegel’s own remarks warn against conflating conscientious action with reflective self-authorization; conscience is “true” only with true content, and in ethical life it ceases to exercise itself as withdrawal and becomes a stable disposition. In this way, the anthropology’s “sighted habit” underwrites the Philosophy of Right’s claim that subjective freedom is realized in second nature.
This defense of habit simultaneously creates and resolves a tension. If second nature is the life of freedom, how does one prevent its vitality from hardening into positivity? Novakovic keeps this anxiety in play by making “death by habit” a structural counterpoint to “ethical habit.” The very success of habituation risks dulling the susceptibility to reasons that originally animated adoption of those practices. The cure is not to replace habit with incessant reflection, but to locate within ethical life reparative modes of reflection that work at its margins and depths without tearing its fabric. In her second movement, culture and Bildung enter as the first of these modes.
Novakovic reconstructs Hegel’s account of culture as a practice that both presupposes and reproportions second nature. From the Phenomenology’s “Bildung” to the Philosophy of Right’s civil society, Bildung is the continuous production and reception of shared meanings; it is also an activity in which agents learn to view their own particular ends from increasingly universal points of view. By emphasizing work, social interdependence, and the system of needs, Novakovic shows that modern culture educates agents to take the standpoint of others, to see the many-sidedness of situations, and to let their comportment be guided by this widened gaze. This is reflection in a mild key: an inconspicuous, ongoing uptake in which one’s participation both constitutes and mirrors the cultural whole, sustaining commitment “in the face of growing indifference.” Such reflection does not aim to suspend the ethical; it affirms it by renewing the very second nature that would otherwise ossify. It is crucial that, for Hegel, culture in modernity is anchored in civil society; the market’s interdependence forces agents beyond parochial standards and inculcates sensitivity to universality in the course of satisfying particular needs.
The cultural detour bears two additional loads in Novakovic’s reconstruction. First, it widens the scope of ethical contribution beyond waged production: housework and childrearing are not condemned to Sisyphean repetition; they demand creativity and yield lasting goods internal to culture’s reproduction. Hence Hegel’s focus on the economic sphere does not require a narrow account of culture’s labor; a broader view of work as world-making makes sense of how domestic practices can be culturally formative and thus reflective in the appropriate, non-disruptive registers. Second, this culturalization of habit supplies a gentle mechanism of correction: by experiencing offense, friction, and negotiated standards across ever-wider relations, agents learn to loosen their grip on partial perspectives without needing to elevate themselves to a morally legislative standpoint. The result is a picture of ethical life as a lived education that works continuously on second nature—keeping it alive rather than letting it calcify.
The third movement—critique—presses the case where Bildung no longer suffices. If the ordinary standpoint is to be serious, it must include a way to identify and respond to practical contradictions that are not mere local frictions. Here Novakovic reactivates the method of immanent critique from the Phenomenology: a practice or norm is judged by its own measure, and its failure to harmonize norm and application becomes the standpoint for revision. In Hegel’s narrative, ancient “beautiful ethical life” dissolves under such pressures; yet modern ethical life, she argues, is structured to absorb critique without requiring the annihilation of its whole ship. The image is Neurath’s: we rebuild at sea, plank by plank. What is gained by this image, on Novakovic’s telling, is a concrete sense of how modern agents can criticize specific principles—the “planks”—from an embedded point of view oriented to the contradictions they concretely experience, rather than appeal to an external tribunal. What is lost, Hegel would insist, is nothing essential; modern ethical life’s multiplicity of freedom-conceptions makes it resilient enough to endure local overhauls without systemic death.
It is important that this is not an evasion of radical change but a qualified restriction on its necessity. Novakovic repeatedly underscores that Hegel neither guarantees harmony nor denies the possibility of deep conflicts. Poverty in civil society is her principal test case. On Hegel’s own account, poverty is not an accidental by-product of misfortune; it issues from the inner dialectic of the market, whose efficiencies generate overproduction, unemployment, and—uniquely modern—the emergence of a “rabble” detached from social participation. That civil society is “not rich enough” to arrest the excess of poverty despite an excess of wealth reveals a structural fissure at the institution’s center, not a peripheral blemish. This diagnosis, Novakovic contends, tacitly concedes the continued relevance of immanent critique in modernity: even a rational order contains sites where norm and practice may be brought into principled tension, calling for revision of the principles themselves. The presence of such tensions supplies both the object and the standard of critique from within ethical life; they also demonstrate that modernity’s boast of flexibility is tested, not presumed.
Novakovic’s treatment of critique carries a further methodological claim about self-sufficiency. If immanent critique takes its measure from the very constellation of norms whose application falters, then it needs no external theoretical apparatus to get started. One can, for example, bring the principles of universality and particularity in civil society into reflective tension when the market’s own logic produces exclusion, without appealing to a transcendent standard. This does not foreclose theoretical illumination; it denies that critique must be heteronomous. In the same spirit, she mobilizes instructive analogies—e.g., the jurisprudential learning from desegregation in the American context—to display how experience can disclose what was always already presupposed in a practice’s justification. The point of such analogies is not to import a foreign tribunal but to give concrete feel to how immanent criticism exposes contradiction and directs revision from within.
The final movement—science—returns to the book’s outer frame and solves the puzzle it set for itself: why does Hegel insist that adequate cognition of the ordinary standpoint belongs to conceptual thought if second nature is already rationally formed? Novakovic’s answer is to construe philosophical reflection as recollection rather than legislation. The ordinary standpoint knows—indeed lives—the rationality of its norms; what philosophy contributes is a recollective making-explicit that mends the ruptures tokened by restless, misdirected reflection and restores confidence in the reasons we already had. This scientific stance does not displace the ordinary standpoint; it achieves a circular reconciliation by showing how immediacy is “mediated”—by history, institutions, and the slow work of Bildung—and why the agent’s ease is earned rather than naïve. It is precisely because modern ethical life is provisionally justified—its claims answerable to future experience—that philosophy must refrain from issuing final verdicts. Novakovic marshals Hegel’s own methodological remarks to show that the Philosophy of Right cannot, in principle, foreclose the surfacing of new contradictions; its task is to display the inner rationality of what is actual to the extent that it is actual, and to equip us to recognize when actuality fails its concept.
What emerges, if one follows the book’s inner articulation, is an argument-like narrative in which each term—habit, culture, critique, science—congeals into the next by a necessary displacement. Habit secures the ordinary standpoint by rendering action intelligent without the drag of constant deliberation; but as its success grows, so does the risk of positivity, and thus the need for inconspicuous cultural reflection that affirms and renews the habituated. Culture, in turn, proves insufficient where contradictions bite; immanent critique must suspend and revise the very norms that habitual action was realizing. The possibility and direction of such critique are anchored in the order’s own principles, not imported from outside; yet the very occurrence of contradiction unsettles agents’ confidence in what they know. Philosophy enters to recollect and to conceptualize, repairing the cleavages reflection introduced by displaying how the immediacy of second nature is the achieved form of freedom rather than its abdication. In this way, the book’s composition sequence is itself a performance of the circle it attributes to Hegel’s text: each stage is both preserved and displaced, and the end returns to the beginning with altered self-understanding.
Throughout, Novakovic is careful to distinguish what is textually secured from what is advanced as warranted inference. It is textually secured that Hegel privileges an immediate identity with ethical norms over reflective endorsement and that he identifies second nature with the realm of actualized freedom; it is also secured that he worries about reflection’s “restless activity,” associates moral abstraction with a loss of objectivity, and treats poverty as an intrinsic product of civil society’s inner dialectic. These claims anchor the book’s central theses about habit’s priority and the ongoing necessity of immanent critique. It is inferential—though carefully argued—that Hegel’s anthropology of habit can be transposed upward to ground principled ethical habit; that civil society’s Bildung can be extended to account for undervalued forms of domestic labor as culturally constitutive; and that modern ethical life’s resilience legitimates the Neurathian image of piecemeal revision without collapsing into conservatism. The inferential moves are marked as such: they extend Hegel by internal criteria he himself supplies, but they also accept that some emphases, especially on plural cultural identities and on the breadth of culturally productive work, position the reading at the generous edge of the text.
Two tensions sharpen the book’s payoff. First, the apparent competition between principled insight and habituated action dissolves once one recognizes that insight may be already operative in the way one acts, even when one does not stage it in consciousness. Novakovic’s insistence here is not psychological but logical: reflection’s form is wider than its self-conscious exercise; the movement by which essence “shines” in seeming has a practical counterpart in the way agents’ reasons are sedimented in dispositions that see more than they say. To demand explicit maxims at the point of action is to mislocate the work of formation. Second, the worry that embedding critique within ethical life immunizes the order against deep change is met by the poverty case and by the avowed provisionality of philosophical justification: modern ethical life’s confidence is not that nothing can break, but that its principle allows repair from within. Where the ship must replace a bulkhead rather than a plank, the image does not preclude the operation; it insists only that even radical operations be launched from on board.
The upshot for reading Hegel today is unsentimental. To be at home in the ethical order is not to be asleep in custom; it is to be awake in a world whose norms have become one’s own voice. This voice does not chatter incessantly in the idiom of reasons because it has already learned to speak in the grammar of action. When that grammar falters—when a practice’s presuppositions undo its avowed aims—agents can hear the discord without leaving the language they share. And when reflection, in its skeptical exuberance, threatens to unhouse them from their own reasons, philosophy can show why their reasons were there before reflection arrived, and how reflection itself belongs to their life. On Novakovic’s reconstruction, this is Hegel’s sober claim: modern freedom is the achieved ease of second nature, cultured enough to reflect, brave enough to criticize itself, and modest enough to recollect what it already knows.
If one wants the book’s argument in a single movement, it is this. Begin from Hegel’s assertion that adequate cognition of ethical life is conceptual, but that ethical life itself is lived as a relation-less identity thicker than belief. Watch as habit is rescued from the charge of blindness by the anthropology’s form of sighted habituation, and then layered with the cultural reflections that keep it alive. Listen as contradictions make themselves heard at the heart of practices whose legitimacy had been presumed, and follow the planks that critique replaces. Finally, let philosophy recollect the circle by which immediacy is shown to be the very figure of mediation. In that circle, second nature is neither instinct nor mere routine; it is the achieved posture of freedom at home in a rational world—vigilant, corrigible, and conceptually self-possessed.
The final clarification is straightforward. Novakovic neither romanticizes unreflective life nor licenses reflection’s imperialism. Her Hegel gives the ordinary standpoint its due by showing how much work it already does: habit as principled disposition, culture as ongoing reflective participation, critique as immanent recalibration, and science as recollection. The distinctive contribution is to bind these together without remainder, so that each explains why the others are possible and necessary, and the whole illuminates why being subjectively free in an objectively rational order feels—when things go well—like acting without friction and, when things go poorly, like knowing from within how to set one’s house in order.
Simon Gros 
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