The Idea of the Good in Kant and Hegel repositions “the good” as a systematic load-bearing concept in classical German philosophy, arguing—through a deliberately cross-disciplinary set of studies—that the good functions as a structural principle spanning logic, ontology, practical reason, and social reality, and that its persistent entanglement with “evil” belongs to its very intelligibility rather than to an avoidable moral addendum. Its distinctive contribution consists in reconstructing, from within Kant’s and Hegel’s own architectonics, how the good simultaneously promises orientation and generates impasses: it demands determinacy while repeatedly undermining the criteria by which determinacy could be secured. The volume’s scholarly stake lies in showing that many familiar master-terms—freedom, reason, spirit, actuality, reconciliation—silently presuppose a theory of the good that has remained comparatively underarticulated, and in demonstrating that this underarticulation is itself philosophically productive.
The outer framing already signals an ambition that exceeds “ethics” in the narrow sense. The book appears under the auspices of Ljubljana University Press (with institutional support and a project-context explicitly tied to Hegel’s political metaphysics), with a bilingual apparatus that includes abbreviations calibrated to Kant’s Akademie edition and to major critical editions of Hegel, a concluding summary and Slovenian povzetek, a substantial bibliography, and an index that quietly reveals the breadth of the conceptual field mobilized: Plato and Aristotle as unavoidable prehistory; Augustine as a hinge for the positivity of evil; modern debates around normativity, recognition, teleology, agency, catastrophe, alienation. Even this paratext matters for the work’s internal logic: the book wants to be read as a constructed pathway whose “three parts” enact a movement from the impetus of the good, through the logic and particularity of evil, into a destabilized “between” where the good is forced to confront modernity’s characteristic forms of self-relation and self-endangerment.
The sequence begins, significantly, with an editorial introduction that refuses the comfort of an immediate moral familiarity. Vranešević’s opening orientation stages the good as both existentially ubiquitous and philosophically treacherous: its apparent self-evidence invites a Two-Worlds procedure within thought itself, where “the good” is treated as a luminous pole and “evil” as its shadowy other, thereby securing definition by opposition. Yet precisely this habitual procedure, he suggests, has a tendency to contaminate its own object. The binary program—good over here, evil over there—produces contradictions at the moment it is used to guarantee purity, because the mere conceptual adjacency of evil threatens to seep into the logic of goodness as a condition of its demonstrability. The introduction’s exemplary reference to theological attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence) is not a parochial religious detour; it is a diagnostic: whenever goodness is treated as absolute in a dogmatic opposition, either the absolute fractures (by admitting evil into its economy) or evil threatens to evaporate into unreality, and both outcomes disturb the notion of the good as an orienting principle. What is crucial is the methodological suggestion: the good has to be thought “in its own right,” and this “in its own right” can be reached only through a confrontation with the impasse generated by the attempt to secure it through its other. The book’s stance toward the good–evil relation thus begins as a kind of negative methodological discipline: the good will be treated as structurally inseparable from the tensions that arise when it tries to legislate itself as pure.
From this starting point the book’s composition sequence performs its first decisive displacement. Rather than remaining at the level of moral commonplaces (good manners, good faith, good reasons) and asking for their unity, it turns to the “idea of the good” as a concept with a history of systematic ambitions—Plato’s elevation of the good beyond virtue into a principle that functions as normativity for being, Aristotle’s resistance to an excessively general “good” that dissolves practical applicability, and then Kant’s radical inversion whereby morality is established in the form of law and the good is determined in obedience to that law. The book’s coherence depends on treating these as more than historical stations. They are methodological options: (i) a metaphysical absolutization of the good, (ii) a practical limitation of the good through life-forms and determinate excellences, (iii) a juridical-moral formalization of the good through autonomy and law. The central claim emerging through the volume is that Kant and Hegel inherit all three vectors and reorganize them, and that the good becomes the site where the reorganization is both most powerful and most vulnerable.
The first part, “The Impetus of the Good,” begins where many modern readings tend to end: in logic. This is already a polemical decision. It implies that the good cannot be restricted to a merely “ethical” predicate applied to actions, because the structures that make “action,” “reason,” and “world” mutually intelligible are themselves implicated in how “good” functions. Manchisi’s argument sets the tone by insisting on a distinction among substantive, predicative, and attributive uses of “good,” and by claiming that the logic of the good in Hegel’s Logic operates primarily at the attributive level—“good” as a form that binds to objects and thereby avoids emptiness. The stake is methodological: talk of the good becomes empty when it floats free of a structure that can generate determinate reference; yet the good, as practical idea, is precisely the impulse of determinacy, the drive to become objective. When Hegel defines idea as “the absolute unity of the concept and objectivity,” and when the good is presented as practical activity—willing, action, the drive “to bring itself about”—the good appears as an internal articulation of the idea’s self-differentiation: cognition as rupture of life’s immediacy into theoretical and practical activity, truth as knowledge’s drive, good as the drive to shape objectivity. The “impetus” is thus not psychological motivation; it is an ontological-epistemological schema in which rationality is understood as an active power whose very intelligibility requires a teleological-evaluative structure.
Yet this apparently confident beginning already contains the germ of the volume’s later reversal. Manchisi emphasizes that in the idea of the good, objective reality is, in Hegel’s own picture, cast as a “realm of darkness,” a resistant manifold in which orientation is obscure, while the concept is treated as the luminous source of order. The good, as impulse, posits a hierarchy: concept as good, reality as indifferent or even as evil. This is not an incidental metaphor; it exposes a problem internal to the Logic itself. If the good’s impulse requires a devaluation of the given world as a condition of its formative activity, then the good threatens to smuggle in a practical dualism—reason here, world there—at the very level where Hegel is supposed to have overcome dualism. The part’s first movement thus generates a tension that will haunt the rest of the volume: the good, when grasped as practical idea, both unifies concept and objectivity and reinstates their opposition as the very motor of its unification. The good becomes effective by experiencing objectivity as lacking. The book’s later analyses of evil will repeatedly return to this structure under different “phenomenological” disguises: the subject asserts itself as locus of universality, experiences existing universality as inadequate, and thereby turns its own particularity into a universal demand. The good, as impetus, already sketches the grammar of this danger.
The second contribution in the first part moves from the Logic’s schema to the lived predicament of moral determination. Ganzinger’s inquiry into Hegel’s confrontation with Kant’s moral formalism is important here because it refuses to treat the “empty formalism” objection as a merely external critique. He reconstructs a practical problem: the question “what ought I to do?” does not admit objective settlement through a universal moral principle, because any principle abstract enough to legislate universally remains incapable of guaranteeing unity among the multiplicity of particular duties that concrete situations impose. The text’s conceptual engine is the phenomenon of collision: duties, virtues, socially embedded obligations, and the salience-structure of situations generate conflicts that a purely formal law cannot adjudicate without remainder. Yet the alternative—handing determination over to conscience—becomes equally unstable, because conscience can conceal inertia and the refusal of action behind indeterminacy, and because judging consciousness can interpret any action as motivated by particularity rather than duty “as such.” The point is neither skeptical nor merely tragic. It is methodical: the determination of the good is achieved “negatively,” through the relinquishing of unilateral authority claims, in confession and forgiveness. Reconciliation appears as an enacted logic: it reconstructs intention and context such that justification becomes possible precisely by dissolving the pretension to singular, universal rightness. The good is thus known as the unity of duty only through the experience that such unity cannot be given positively as a rule; it is achieved through mutual recognition of finitude.
At this point the book’s internal dialectic intensifies. The first chapter’s “impetus” seemed to give the good a world-forming positivity: the concept gives itself objectivity. The second chapter’s reconciliation seems to award the good a socially mediated negativity: the good is what emerges when particular moral consciousnesses renounce unilateral universality. One can already sense how the first part is preparing its own displacement. The good’s drive to actualize itself, construed too straightforwardly, risks reinstating a dualism of concept and world; the good’s determination through reconciliation, construed too socially, risks making the good depend on contingent acts of relinquishment. The question becomes: what is the ontological status of the good’s “end”? Does the good have an end that can be actualized, or does it remain a regulative horizon whose realization dissolves the very structure of pursuit?
Vranešević’s essay on beginnings and ends presses exactly on this weak seam, and does so by moving from a logic of practical activity to a logic of temporalization. The good appears as that which is and ought to be, and hence as a universal end toward which finite ends strive to converge. Yet finite ends—satisfactions sought by subjects—collide; the convergence toward freedom becomes the scene in which evil can enter as persistence in one’s own satisfaction at the detriment of others. The good, then, seems to require an ordering structure that prevents the collision of satisfactions from becoming destructive. The problem, however, lies deeper than moral psychology. The good, as idea, presupposes the world and is its ultimate end. It demands a beginning—a formal decision that sets action in motion—without being deducible from a set of empirical motives that would reduce it to the pleasant or useful. The essay’s striking political analogy—monarchic signature as hollow yet symbolically decisive—serves to conceptualize how a formal moment can be both empty in content and necessary for actuality. The signature does not invent the law’s content; it inscribes the already-decided into the symbolic order. So too the good’s beginning requires a formal act that actualizes what is, in a sense, already structurally prepared. Yet the radical consequence is destabilizing: the good has no final signature, and hence no final end. The good is realized by “emptying out” the substantiality with which it first appears, dissolving and negating even the drive that sustained it. The “good world to come” becomes necessary as imagination precisely because the actualization of the good consumes its own motivating structure.
This is the first major displacement the volume performs within itself. The good begins as impetus: a drive that shapes objectivity. It becomes, in reconciliation, a negative unity achieved through mutual renunciation. It then appears, in the logic of beginnings and ends, as a horizon whose realization undermines its own horizon-structure. The good, realized, leaves behind a remainder that resembles nothing so much as the need to continue imagining it. The question “what is the good?” is thereby recast as “how can the good be both end and ongoing?” The book’s later turn to catastrophe will bring this to a contemporary edge, but the conceptual infrastructure is already here: the good’s relation to the end operates through an imagination that becomes vulnerable once the “end” itself becomes thinkable as annihilation rather than fulfillment.
Rödl’s meditation on non-natural goodness, which closes the first part, executes a complementary displacement: from ends and temporalities to the form of “good” as it first appears in practical thought. The essay develops a sequence of “forms” in which goodness is conceived, beginning with consequentialist representations of means and moving toward the representation of an end in itself—life. Yet “life” itself is articulated in a triplicity: inner process, outer process, genus process. The aim is not to provide a taxonomy of ethical theories, even if utilitarianism and Hobbes serve as points of triangulation. The aim is to express a logical development: goodness becomes intelligible only when the end is conceived as immanent to a life-form, and when the standards of goodness are understood as internal to the form of life rather than externally attached. But the decisive conclusion is that the goodness operative in practical thought is no natural goodness, because human life is no natural life in the relevant sense. The good is the life of spirit. This assertion does not function as an elevated slogan; it functions as a way of securing the good’s determinacy against both naturalistic reduction and empty formalism. If goodness is internal to the form of life, and if the relevant form of life for humans is spiritual life—life that relates to norms, reasons, self-legislation, and shared intelligibility—then the good becomes inseparable from the structures through which spirit actualizes itself. The first part thus ends by moving from the Logic’s “practical idea” to the “life of spirit,” bringing the good into the space where nature and normativity are neither separable nor simply identical.
With this, the book has constructed a layered concept of the good whose strengths are also its liabilities. The good appears as (i) world-forming impulse, (ii) socially enacted negative unity, (iii) horizon whose realization dissolves its own pursuit, (iv) spiritual life-form beyond natural goodness. The transition to the second part—“The Logic and Particularity of Evil”—is therefore not an episodic change of topic but the necessary consequence of the tensions already generated. If the good’s determinacy depends on spiritual life, then the failures and pathologies of spirit become internal to the problem of the good. If the good’s drive posits objectivity as deficient, then the logic of deficiency (negation, exclusion, self-reference) becomes constitutive. The book’s second part develops a thesis that could sound provocative if stated abruptly, yet emerges with systematic inevitability: evil has a logical place in the very architectures that aim to secure the good’s unconditionality.
Kobe’s essay begins from a Kantian impasse: within reason alone, unconditional practical necessity seems to find no stable place, and morality threatens to become a mere word unless reason and freedom are bound together so that morality is the causality of pure reason—autonomy itself. Yet this binding generates a profound explanatory deficit: how can amoral, let alone evil, deeds be possible if the will, insofar as it is free, is determined by pure reason? The essay reconstructs counterproposals and modifications, including attempts by figures such as Schmid and Reinhold, and then highlights the decisive shift in Kant’s Religion: a theory modified to make room for radical evil. But this “making room” is itself a principled disturbance. It suggests that the unity of reason and autonomy, treated as the condition of morality, cannot by itself account for the actuality of evil, and that any account must introduce a structure within subjectivity that allows for deviation from the universal while maintaining imputability. Here the volume’s conceptual stance becomes visible: the problem of evil does not merely obstruct a theory of the good; it reveals the internal tensions within the very form of moral law and autonomy.
Kobe then takes the Kantian problem into Hegel’s domain with a claim that reconfigures the entire horizon: the evil has a logical place. Two elements are required for such a place: the subject must be considered absolute, and there must be an incongruity within the absolute (within reason). This is an extraordinarily concentrated formulation. It implies that evil’s possibility depends on the elevation of subjectivity to the status of an absolute center—an elevation characteristic of modernity—and on the presence of a split or non-identity within that center that allows absolute self-relation to become deviation. Evil becomes “the most intimate form of the subject,” and irony appears as its extreme. The claim is not merely that subjects do evil; it is that the structure of absolute subjectivity includes a possibility whereby the subject asserts itself as universal and thereby corrupts universality. The second part’s guiding motif thus crystallizes: evil is not reducible to external temptation, psychological weakness, or mere privation; it is a positivity generated by the subject’s own form of self-related universality.
La Rocca’s work continues this line by reconstructing a logical form of evil that ties together Hegel’s Logic and the figure of the evil conscience (das böse Gewissen, glossed here as “evil conscience”) in the Philosophy of Right and the philosophy of spirit. She begins by stressing that “evil” in Hegel carries a logical characterization: a thought-determination whose self-identity is mediated through the negation of otherness (the negation of its own negative), and whose self-subsistence is affirmed abstractly by positing the other as null. This self-reference is parasitic: it requires the mediation it seeks to disown. The essay traces analogies between evil and structures like being-for-itself in the Logic, where “absolute determinacy” affirms itself through exclusion, thereby rendering its independence abstract because it relies on a relation of exclusion. Evil’s form becomes a pattern: identity achieved through exclusion that disavows its dependence on what it excludes.
The significance for the book’s overall argument is immediate. The good, in its most universal form, often presents itself as the universal that excludes the particular as mere deviation; yet in doing so it risks reproducing the abstract self-subsistence characteristic of the logical form associated with evil. The dialectic becomes uncomfortable: the so-called universal good can turn out to be evil, requiring redetermination. La Rocca interprets the “evil conscience” as a figure that exposes the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion in the realm of spirit, and she pushes toward consequences: the dialectic of good and evil can be understood as a dialectic of exclusion and inclusion, where universality persists only through its capacity to include what it had excluded by recognizing the mediation as its own.
The book’s second part thus intensifies the reversal implicit in the first. The first part had already shown that the good, as impulse, devalues reality and seeks to shape it; La Rocca’s logical analysis shows how the structure “I am universal by excluding otherness” belongs to the logical grammar that can be called evil. The first part had brought the good into spiritual life; the second part shows that spirit’s self-relation carries an inbuilt risk: universality can be appropriated as the subject’s own, leaving existing universality as a null remainder. The good’s effort to be pure universality can itself display the abstractness that produces evil. The volume’s guiding tension becomes sharper: the good seeks determinacy and universality, and the very forms through which it seeks these are capable of being seized by particularity as a universal claim. Evil thereby becomes a kind of “shadow” that is not external to the good but internal to universality’s self-actualization.
Jovićević’s essay, which closes the second part, develops the positivity of evil from a different entry point: Augustine. The move is decisive because it shifts the discussion from the logic of thought-determinations to the logic of sin as self-constitution. Augustine’s notorious pear theft functions as a phenomenology: the act’s “object” (the pears) lacks value; the pleasure lies in the forbiddenness itself. Evil thus appears as willing wrongness for its own sake, loving one’s own undoing. The point for Jovićević is conceptual: evil has an ontological function in constituting individual subjectivity. The sinful individual becomes individual through the act’s self-relation; evil becomes what is most peculiar and particular to the individual, graspable as subjectivity itself. The essay then returns to Hegel’s Phenomenology, to the section on evil and forgiveness, to analyze the idea of two evil individuals each claiming knowledge of the good on the basis of reason itself. Evil here appears as rational: it is the assertion of particularity as the locus of universal knowledge of good and evil. In such a context, the subject becomes a “natural force” embodying a “natural good” whose principles can neither be rejected nor verified because no external standpoint of verification is available. The book thereby sharpens a further tension: the good’s universality is threatened by the disappearance of shared criteria; evil thrives in the opacity that accompanies the pursuit of knowledge of the good.
At this point, the volume’s architecture has produced a second displacement. The first part had begun with the practical idea and ended with the life of spirit. The second part forces the reader to see that spirit’s life includes an evil that is neither accidental nor merely negative. Evil can be structurally necessary (as Hegel’s “general evil” bound up with subjectivity’s being-for-itself) and yet also imputable as individual guilt when the subject remains within particularity rather than universalizing it. The “place” of evil thus becomes simultaneously logical and ethical. The good’s aspiration becomes inseparable from the danger that the subject will seize universality as its own particularity. In other words, the book’s argument has by now shifted the meaning of “good”: it no longer names a stable content that moral law could simply command; it names the fragile and conflictual project of universalizing particularity without collapsing universality into a private principle.
These theoretical displacements prepare the third part, “Between Good and Evil,” which the book explicitly frames as oriented toward contemporary relevance. Yet the third part is more than an “application.” It stages a final conceptual reorientation: from the good’s systematic role within German Idealism to the good’s fate under conditions where the end itself becomes uncertain, and where the forms of collective life that might host the good (ethical life, humanity, shared species-being) appear threatened by self-generated catastrophe and social alienation. In this sense the third part functions as the volume’s final displacement: the good, which had been reconstructed as an internal principle of rational actuality, is confronted with historical conditions that render its traditional teleological horizon unstable.
Hergouth’s exploration of autonomy and Eigensinn (glossed as obstinacy or self-will, with attention to the reflexive force of eigen-) sits at the threshold between systematic ethics and socio-historical anthropology. The essay begins with Kant’s compact reasoning: freedom cannot exist within empirical necessity; freedom is possible only if the will has a non-empirical determination, reason; reason motivates through concepts and hence through law; freedom therefore requires autonomy, self-legislation grounded in reason. This Kantian structure resembles, at least formally, Hegel’s characterization of modernity as a refusal to recognize anything not justified by thought. Yet Hergouth’s objective is neither reconciliation nor simple opposition; it is to construct a bridge between Hegel’s general disapproval of obstinacy (as rigid refusal of the universal) and Hegel’s programmatic invocation of a kind of obstinacy that “does honour to humanity.” The essay thereby reconfigures the autonomy debate: autonomy becomes inseparable from a combative relation to “existing universality” (daseienden Allgemeinen, existing universality), and modern ethical life (Sittlichkeit, ethical life) appears as a perpetual agonistic duplication of universality, where individual compliance remains the individual’s compliance, preserving a difference that keeps universality from becoming mere immersion. The figure of the “obstinate bondsman” at the end of lordship and bondage becomes a conceptual spectre: it marks a form of submission that is simultaneously resistance, a “submission against,” in which universality of thought is employed in the service of individuality’s affirmation.
This intervention has sharp implications for the good. If Kant’s autonomy aims to secure the good through pure practical reason, and if Hegel’s modernity is characterized by a reason-demanding obstinacy that refuses heteronomous givens, then the good’s realization depends on a subject capable of binding itself to universality without annihilating its own individuality. Yet Hergouth’s reading underscores how precarious this binding remains: there is no smooth passage from law to action, from universality to individuality. The good, understood as realized freedom, thus requires an internal tension within the subject and within ethical order—a tension that can never be entirely resolved because its resolution would threaten to eliminate the very form of selfhood whose freedom the good is supposed to realize. The “between” in the third part is therefore already visible here: the good persists as an achievement that requires the continuing possibility of failure, resistance, and obstinate deviation, and therefore keeps evil’s structural proximity. The good that is supposed to actualize freedom requires a subject that can also universalize its own particularity in destructive ways. The third part thus inherits the second part’s lesson: evil is intimate to the subject. It adds a further one: the modern subject’s honourable obstinacy is itself the condition of a good that is no longer a static harmony but an ongoing, conflictual actualization.
Quent’s essay then shifts the volume onto a different register: the horizon of catastrophe. Here the volume’s earlier analyses of ends and the imagination of a good world to come are forcibly reoriented. To think about the good is to adopt a perspective of the end; the good is tied to finality, to the horizon in which actions can be understood as realizing a universal end. Yet in a contemporary condition marked by nuclear threat and climate catastrophe, action increasingly appears as the attempt to prevent an end that cannot be integrated into the perspective of the good—an end as annihilation. The relation between good, end-perspective, and negation becomes problematic. Negation ceases to function as a determinate moment within the movement toward the good and begins to appear as an absolute negation that blocks any integration. Drawing on Blanchot’s critique of Jaspers’s reflections on the atom bomb, the essay treats “humanity” as a self-generating whole and an absolute good, and asks what becomes of this idea when the end becomes thinkable as total destruction. The two event horizons—nuclear threat and climate change—carry different temporalities, and this difference matters: nuclear catastrophe concentrates the end into a sudden discontinuity; climate catastrophe stretches the end into an extended degradation whose “end” can be dispersed across time and unevenly distributed across populations. The question of humanity’s status becomes tense: does the appeal to humanity as an absolute good still organize action, or does it become an ideological placeholder that fails to grip the temporality of ecological transformation?
This is the point where the volume’s earlier logic of the good’s impetus and teleology is most radically displaced. The good as “absolute final end and aim of the world” presupposes that the world’s rationality can be actualized and recognized; the good as impulse presupposes that objectivity can be shaped as a world of ends. Quent’s analysis confronts this presupposition with a historical situation in which ends are increasingly framed through the avoidance of irreversible destruction, and where “actualization” can appear as acceleration toward catastrophe. The good’s form as an end becomes unstable: it persists as an ethical demand, and it loses its traditional capacity to structure the meaning of action. The good thus becomes haunted by a new negativity, one that does not easily translate into reconciliation or dialectical sublation. The very operation of negation—so central to Hegel’s logic and to the dialectic of good and evil—enters a state of conceptual crisis when the negation to be prevented is absolute.
The final chapter intensifies this contemporary displacement by shifting from eschatological horizons to everyday social relations under capitalism. Weyand’s study links the idea of the good to Marx’s early writings on alienation and to the critique of our present form of living. Alienation appears through four descriptions in the 1844 manuscripts, and the methodological insistence is that they can be understood only together, as moments of a single diagnosis: a relation between humans has gone wrong, becoming a poor way of establishing relation with others. The good here is not introduced as an external moral ideal applied to capitalism; it is implicit in the very concept of alienation, because alienation presupposes a conception of a human life-form and of what would count as its flourishing. Weyand’s argument emphasizes that seeking the good means seeking the good of humans as Gattungswesen (species-being, humans living together). Alienation therefore becomes a tool for criticizing living conditions and simultaneously a way of reflecting on the good: it indicates that the good, in modernity, must be thought as a social form of life whose institutional and economic structures enable or disable shared human actuality.
With Weyand’s chapter the volume completes its third major displacement. The good began as metaphysical and logical principle and was drawn into the inner structure of subjectivity and evil. It now becomes inseparable from social relations, production, and the possibility of non-alienated community. This displacement does not abandon the earlier systematic ambitions; it tests them. If the good is realized freedom, and if freedom’s realization depends on institutions, norms, and forms of life, then alienation appears as a direct deformation of the good’s actuality. Yet if the good’s horizon is destabilized by catastrophe and its social actuality is distorted by alienation, then the good cannot be thought as a simple unity that “includes” its negativity without remainder. The good’s systematic role must be reconstructed under conditions where the very form of totality might be threatened or rendered suspect. The third part thus retroactively transforms the earlier analyses: the good’s “realm-of-darkness” opposition in the Logic gains an uncanny contemporary meaning, as objectivity includes technological and economic powers capable of turning reason’s formative activity into self-destruction; the good’s reconciliation-model gains the question of whether mutual confession and forgiveness can be generalized into social forms adequate to structural domination; the good’s imagination of a world to come gains the burden of an apocalyptic imagination that no longer guarantees fulfillment and might instead express the need to prevent irreversible loss.
The book’s closing summary clarifies, in compact form, the arc it has enacted: the omnipresence of the good makes it difficult to define unambiguously; Kant addresses the “you ought to do the good” impasse by formulating the moral law first and determining the good accordingly, a “second Copernican turn” in which the good obeys the law rather than grounding it; yet Kant encounters difficulty descending to action, demonstrating determinism of the good, and explaining why a moral subject can act evil. Hegel attributes this to the abstractness and impoverishment of Kant’s reason, and develops a richer conception of reason where thinking and willing, universal and particular, subject and substance are involved in the concept’s self-determining activity; yet Hegel’s own account keeps the temptation in view: the particular will can make its particularity into a universal principle and thereby become evil. The volume thereby presents itself as providing tools for dialogue with contemporary orientations by engaging with the irreparable gap between good and evil.
What ultimately distinguishes the volume is its willingness to treat “the good” as a systematically productive problem rather than a stable solution. The good functions as the principle that promises unity—of reason, of duty, of life, of actuality, of community—while repeatedly generating forms of non-unity that demand conceptual articulation. The book’s method, across its contributions, tends toward a disciplined oscillation between logical reconstruction and phenomenological concretion: it moves from determinations of the good as practical idea (impulse, teleology, world-formation) to determinations of the good as lived ethical problem (collision of duties, hypocrisy of moral judgment, reconciliation), from determinations of evil as logical positivity (exclusionary self-identity, incongruity within the absolute) to determinations of evil as self-constituting individuality (sin, rational evil, the subject as bearer of universal knowledge), and from determinations of freedom as realized good (ethical life, autonomy, modern obstinacy) to determinations of the good’s contemporary vulnerability (catastrophic ends, alienated social life). The composition sequence itself enacts the thesis that the good cannot be stabilized within a single register: each register discloses limits internal to the previous one, thereby compelling a transition. The “impetus” of the good calls forth the question of determinacy; determinacy collapses into collision; collision yields reconciliation; reconciliation yields the problem of ends; ends yield the imagination of the good world to come; the good as life yields the non-natural life of spirit; spirit yields the logical place of evil; evil yields a dialectic where universal good can turn evil; this discloses modernity’s obstinate autonomy; autonomy discloses catastrophe and alienation. The work’s coherence lies in allowing each moment to be partially dissolved by the next without losing the thread that binds them: the good remains the concept through which the system’s unity and its fractures are read together.
The book’s contribution is not a new definition of the good offered as a doctrine, and it does not aim to provide a final adjudication between Kantian and Hegelian paradigms. It shows, with sustained conceptual rigor, how the idea of the good operates as a pivot where systematic philosophy becomes answerable to the reality of action, and where action becomes philosophically legible only by unfolding the structures that make evil possible. It clarifies that the good is thinkable as a structural principle precisely when it is treated as vulnerable to appropriation by particularity, to collapse into abstract universality, and to historical conditions that deform its teleological horizon. The volume therefore leaves the reader with an exacting task: to think the good in a way that sustains determinacy without purchasing it through exclusion, to think universality as actualizable without becoming the self-idolatry of a particular will, and to think the end—freedom, humanity, communal life—under conditions where the end can also appear as annihilation.
Simon Gros 
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