Preface
One hears, even from those who appear most intent on taking philosophy seriously, the familiar refrain that form is something external, indifferent to the matter itself, and that everything depends only on the “thing” or “content.” One further hears the vocation of the writer—especially the philosophical writer—defined as the discovery of truths, the stating of truths, the dissemination of truths and correct concepts. But if one looks at how this vocation is actually pursued, one sees, on the one hand, the same old cabbage endlessly reheated and served out in every direction. No doubt such activity can claim a certain merit in the cultivation and stirring of minds; yet it can equally be judged a kind of industrious surplus, as if the essential were already available and only needed to be repeated—“for they have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” What is most striking, however, is the tone and the pretension that accompanies this traffic in truths: as though the world had lacked nothing until these zealous distributors arrived, as though reheated commonplaces were unheard-of discoveries, and as though they ought, above all, to be taken to heart precisely now, “in our time,” as if the mere date on the calendar could confer profundity. The appeal to the urgency of the present too often functions as a substitute for justification, a way of producing importance without producing necessity.
On the other hand, one also observes the contrary spectacle: what is issued as truth from one side is displaced, countered, and washed away by truths issued with equal confidence from other sides. In this crush of competing proclamations, what could count as neither merely old nor merely new, but as something abiding—something that does not sway with the rhetorical fashions of the day—how is it supposed to lift itself out of these formless oscillations of reflection? How is it to distinguish itself, and to vindicate itself, except through science? Only a scientific form of thinking—one that binds content to its method of generation and proof—can give a criterion by which alleged truths are not merely asserted and counter-asserted, but are exhibited in their grounding, their limits, and their necessity. Without that binding of matter to form, “truths” circulate like opinions that borrow authority from their delivery, their moral fervor, or their timeliness; with it, what is enduring can be separated from what is merely repeated or merely fashionable, because it can be shown to belong to the inner articulation of the concept rather than to the accidents of persuasion.
In any case, when we speak of right, ethical life (Sittlichkeit), and the state, the truth at issue is as old as it is publicly available: it lies open and is generally known in positive laws, in public morality, and in religion. The problem, then, is not that nothing has been said, nor that humanity lacks “materials.” The question is what further is required once the thinking spirit is no longer satisfied with possessing this truth merely in its immediate, given form. What is required is precisely that it be grasped—that it be comprehended as intelligible, not merely accepted as customary, commanded, or felt. And that means more than repeating a rational content; it means winning for that content a rational form, so that it can appear justified for free thinking.
Free thinking does not halt at what is given, even when what is given is supported by weighty authorities. It does not remain fixed at the external positivity of state power, nor at the mere agreement of people, nor even at the inward authority of feeling and the heart, nor at the immediate approving testimony of spirit as a kind of private certainty. All of these can sustain conviction, and in their way they may be legitimate vehicles of truth; but they are not yet justification for thought as thought. For free thinking begins from itself, and in beginning from itself it demands that it know itself united with the truth at the innermost point, not by deference and not by impulse, but by insight into necessity. The task, therefore, is to bring what is already rational in itself to the point where its rationality is also for thinking—where right, ethical life, and the state are not merely encountered as established facts or inherited norms, but are recognized as the articulated self-knowledge of freedom.
The simple comportment of an unprejudiced mind is to hold fast, with trusting conviction, to the publicly known truth, and to build upon this firm ground both one’s manner of acting and one’s stable position in life. Against this simplicity there soon arises, as if of its own accord, a supposed difficulty: amid the infinitely diverse opinions that circulate, how is one to distinguish and extract what is universally recognized and valid? It is easy to mistake this unease for seriousness and integrity—easy to hear in it the voice of conscientious thought that refuses to be naïve. Yet in fact those who pride themselves on this embarrassment are often in the position of not seeing the forest for the trees. The difficulty they lament is largely one they themselves have produced; or more sharply, their very posture of perplexity is the symptom that they want something other than the universally recognized and binding—something other than the substance of right and the ethical. For if the concern were genuinely with the matter itself, and not with the vanity of having an opinion and a distinctive mode of being, they would hold to substantive right: to the commandments of ethical life and of the state, and they would shape their lives accordingly. Their “problem” would not be how to invent a standpoint, but how to inhabit what already claims them as citizens and ethical agents.
The deeper difficulty comes from another side: the human being thinks, and in thinking seeks freedom and the ground of ethical life. This right is as exalted, as “divine,” as any right can be; for it expresses the dignity of spirit, which refuses to live merely by habit or authority. But this right is inverted into wrong when “thinking” is understood in only one way—namely, as the right to deviate from what is universally recognized and valid. Then thought imagines itself free only insofar as it separates itself from the common substance and congratulates itself on having devised something particular. Freedom is reduced to contrariness, originality becomes a criterion of truth, and the labor of comprehending the rational content of ethical life is replaced by the easier labor of difference-making. In that distortion, thinking no longer mediates the subject with the substance of right; it tears them apart. The result is not a higher justification of the ethical, but the substitution of private invention for what is binding, and the conversion of the very dignity of thought into a principle of arbitrariness.
In our time there is hardly any representation more firmly entrenched than the notion that freedom of thought, and indeed of spirit altogether, proves itself only by deviation from—indeed hostility toward—what is publicly recognized. Nowhere has this fixation taken deeper root than in relation to the state. On this assumption, a philosophy of the state appears to have as its essential task the invention and delivery of a “theory,” and not merely a theory but a new and special one, as though novelty were the very credential of thinking. When one watches this representation at work, one could be forgiven for believing that no state and no constitution has ever existed, or exists now; as if we had to begin wholly from the beginning, and as if the ethical world were waiting for a present-day act of thinking-up, investigating, and grounding before it could finally come into being. And “the present day” in this sense never ends: it is a perpetual now that renews the demand to start from scratch, as if the reality within which we already live were not already a determinate achievement of spirit. With nature, by contrast, one readily grants that philosophy is to know it as it is; one assumes that the philosopher’s stone, if it exists, lies somewhere hidden within nature itself—that nature is rational in itself, and that knowledge must seek out and conceptually grasp the real reason present in it, not the superficial shapes and accidents that happen to show themselves on the surface, but its eternal harmony as its immanent law and essence. Yet the ethical world—the state, that is, reason as it actualizes itself in the element of self-consciousness—is denied this same good fortune. It is treated as though it did not enjoy the fact that reason has in truth brought itself to power and effective force in this element, has asserted itself there, and dwells within it.
Instead, the spiritual universe is declared to be surrendered to contingency and arbitrariness; it is portrayed as godforsaken, such that—according to this atheism of the ethical world—the true is supposed to lie outside it. And at the same time, because one cannot help conceding that reason must somehow be “in” this world after all, the true is reduced to a mere problem: something that ought to be there, but is not there in any knowable, actual way. From this it then follows, with apparent propriety and even a sense of obligation, that every thinking person should take a run at the matter for themselves. But this obligation is now emptied of seriousness, because the philosopher’s stone is no longer sought; modern philosophizing congratulates itself on having spared us the search. Each individual is assured that, just as he stands and walks, he already has this stone in his possession—meaning, in effect, that mere possession of an opinion counts as access to the absolute. In fact, of course, many—indeed more than suppose it, and in a certain respect all—live within the actuality of the state and find their knowing and willing satisfied there. Those, at least, who are conscious of their satisfaction in the state cannot help laughing at these “approaches” and self-certifications; they take them as an empty game, sometimes merely amusing, sometimes dangerous, alternately entertaining and alarming. The restless bustle of reflection and vanity, together with the reception it meets and the resistance it provokes, could be left to develop on its own terms as a phenomenon with its own internal logic. But the damage does not remain confined to that bustle. It is philosophy itself that has, through this commotion, fallen into manifold contempt and discredit. The worst contempt is this: that everyone, as he stands and walks, is convinced that he is competent to pronounce on philosophy as such and to deliver a verdict on it. No other art or science is met with this final form of disdain—the presumption that one simply already possesses it and can therefore judge it from the outside, without discipline, without method, and without submission to its proper form.
In truth, what we have seen issue forth in modern philosophy, often with the greatest pretension, concerning the state, has more than justified anyone who felt like joining in to believe that they too could simply produce something of the same kind from themselves, and thereby “prove” that they were in possession of philosophy. The self-styled philosophy of the age has, moreover, explicitly declared that truth itself cannot be known, and that what counts as truth is rather whatever each person allows to rise up within them—out of heart, temperament, and enthusiasm—concerning ethical matters, especially concerning state, government, and constitution. One can hardly measure how much, on this basis, has been spoken directly into the mouth of youth; and youth, unsurprisingly, has let itself be so addressed. The saying “He gives to his own while they sleep” has even been applied to science, with the effect that every sleeper counted himself among “his own,” and what he received in this slumber of concepts was, predictably, goods of the same quality. A public exemplar of this shallowness—of what calls itself philosophizing—was supplied by Herr Fries, who did not blush, on a solemn occasion that has since become notorious, to present, in a speech on the state and constitution, a vision according to which, where genuine communal spirit rules, life in public affairs would come “from below” out of the people; living associations would consecrate themselves to each work of popular education and service, united by the holy chain of friendship, and so on. The core meaning of such shallowness is clear: it relocates science away from the development of thought and the concept (Begriff) and instead installs immediacy—direct “perception,” contingent imagination, and the accidents of inspiration—as the decisive source. In doing so, it dissolves what is richest and most determinate in ethical life. For the state is not a soft mass of sentiment; it is a richly articulated whole, an architectonic of rationality in which the circles of public life are distinctly differentiated, their rights and powers determined, and each supporting element—each “pillar,” “arch,” and “buttress”—holds to a strict measure so that the strength of the whole emerges from the harmony of its members. To let this cultivated structure flow back into the mush of “heart, friendship, and enthusiasm” is not to deepen ethical life but to liquefy it, to erase the very determinations through which freedom becomes actual and stable.
If Epicurus is said to have surrendered the world at large to chance, the proposal here is not exactly that the ethical world is already so surrendered; rather it is that it should be handed over to the subjective contingency of opinion and the arbitrariness (Willkür) of preference. With the simple household remedy of grounding in feeling what is in fact the product of the multi-millennial labor of reason (Vernunft) and understanding (Verstand), all the effort of rational insight and knowledge guided by thinking in the concept is, of course, conveniently spared. But that convenience is purchased at the cost of the very thing philosophy owes: not the manufacture of edifying moods, but the comprehension of the rational as it is actual. Goethe’s Mephistopheles—an authority of the right kind for this point—says approximately what must be said here as well: “Verachte nur Verstand und Wissenschaft / des Menschen allerhöchste Gaben – / so hast dem Teufel dich ergeben / und mußt zu Grunde gehn.” The contempt for understanding and science, when elevated into a principle of ethical and political thinking, does not free spirit; it abandons spirit to the devilish ease of formlessness, and thereby to ruin—because where the form of rationality is thrown away, the content that claimed to be “ethical” becomes indistinguishable from mere impulse, and the state is reduced from the actuality of freedom to a stage for private caprice.
It is immediately obvious how readily such a standpoint can also assume the guise of piety. For by what means has this restless traffic in opinion not tried to authorize itself? And once it armed itself with godliness and with the Bible, it imagined it had acquired the highest license to despise ethical order and the objectivity of laws. The insinuation is transparent: if one can speak in the name of devotion, then the binding character of public right can be dismissed as merely external, merely “human,” and therefore unworthy of spirit. Yet this is a misuse of piety rather than its fulfillment. Piety does indeed have the power to gather into a simpler mode of apprehension what, in the world, is articulated into an organic realm. It can wrap the truth—split out into differentiated institutions, norms, and offices—back into the unity of feeling’s intuition. But when piety is of the right kind, it does not insist on this region as the final court of appeal. It relinquishes the form proper to inwardness the moment it steps out from within into the daylight of development, into the disclosed richness of the Idea. And precisely then—when it moves from private inwardness into the sphere where truth must show itself in determinate relations—it carries with it from its inner worship a reverence for truth and for laws that are in and for themselves, elevated above the merely subjective form of feeling.
If piety remains authentic, its simplification is not a demolition of objectivity but a way of relating inwardly to what is objective. It does not convert immediacy into an excuse for contempt; it allows immediacy to be educated by the truth it honors. In that sense, the more piety becomes conscious of what it venerates, the less it will mistake arbitrary inspiration for the voice of spirit, and the less it will treat legal and ethical objectivity as a profane obstacle. The disclosed realm of the Idea is not the enemy of devotion; it is devotion’s truth made explicit. And the ethical order—laws, institutions, determinate duties—is not the mere shell of the spiritual life; it is one of the ways spirit comes to dwell with itself in the world, precisely by rising above the volatility of subjective moods into a form that can be shared, recognized, and held to account.
A distinctive form of bad conscience shows itself in the very rhetoric with which that shallowness inflates itself, and it is worth marking the pattern. Where it is most devoid of spirit, it speaks most incessantly of “spirit.” Where it talks in the deadest, most leathery manner, it is forever trying to smuggle in the word “life,” to parade itself as introducing “life” into things. Where it reveals the greatest self-interest of empty arrogance, it most loudly keeps “the people” on its tongue. But the characteristic sign it bears on its forehead—the mark by which it can be recognized—is hatred of the law. For what it cannot endure is precisely this: that right and ethical life, and the actual world constituted by them, are grasped through thought, and that through thought they receive the form of rationality, namely universality and determinacy. This—the law—is what that self-indulging feeling, and that conscience which relocates right into mere subjective conviction, with good reason experiences as its most hostile opponent. It senses correctly that law is not a decoration added from outside, but the very form in which the rationality of the matter becomes objective and binding. And because the “right” of feeling, as it understands itself, consists in reserving to itself the privilege of warmth—of remaining at home in its own particularity—it experiences the form of right as duty and law as a dead, cold letter, as a constraint. It does not recognize itself in the law, and therefore it does not know itself as free within it, because the law is the reason of the thing, and this reason does not permit feeling to take comfort in its own singularity as though that were the measure of the ethical.
For that reason law becomes a kind of shibboleth: the word at which false brothers and false friends of the so-called people give themselves away. Whoever genuinely wills the ethical substance will not treat universality and determinacy as enemies; they will recognize that without them there is no stable right, no shared obligations, no publicly intelligible freedom. Hatred of law is thus not an accidental excess of temperament; it is the telltale symptom of a standpoint that wants ethical life without its objective articulation, freedom without the discipline of universality, and community without the institutions that make recognition real. In that sense, the rhetoric of “spirit,” “life,” and “the people” functions as a moral alibi for what is in fact a refusal of rational form—an attempt to enjoy the prestige of the ethical while evading its binding character.
Once the quibbling advocacy of arbitrariness (Willkür) has seized the name of philosophy and has even managed to bring a large public into the opinion that such antics are philosophy, it has become almost a dishonor to speak philosophically about the nature of the state at all. It is therefore hardly blameworthy if jurists and practically minded men fall into impatience as soon as they hear talk of a philosophical science of the state. Still less should it surprise us that governments have eventually directed their attention to this sort of “philosophizing.” For in our circumstances philosophy is not practiced—as it was, for example, among the Greeks—as a merely private art. It has a public existence that touches the public, and it has this existence primarily, often exclusively, in state service. If governments have shown to the scholars dedicated to this field the confidence of relying on them entirely for the cultivation and substance of philosophy—though, if one wishes, this has sometimes been less confidence than indifference to science itself, with the professorship preserved only by tradition (as, so far as I know, chairs of metaphysics in France have at least largely been allowed to lapse)—then that confidence has often been poorly repaid; or, if one prefers to describe the attitude as indifference, then the resulting decay of thorough knowledge must be seen as the price paid for that indifference. At first glance, the shallowness in question might even seem the most compatible posture, at least with external order and tranquility, since it does not reach the substance of things; indeed, it scarcely even suspects that there is such a substance to be grasped. From a merely police standpoint it might have nothing against it, if the state did not also contain within itself the need for deeper formation and insight, and did not demand from science the satisfaction of that need.
But shallowness does not remain harmless. In the domain of the ethical, of right, and of duty, it leads of its own accord to the very principles that constitute shallowness in this sphere: the principles of the sophists, which we learn from Plato in so decisive a form. These are the principles that locate what is right in subjective aims and opinions, in subjective feeling and particular conviction. And from such principles there follows, with inner necessity, the destruction both of inward ethical life and of upright conscience, of love and right among private persons, and likewise the destruction of public order and the laws of the state. The significance that such phenomena must acquire for governments cannot be waved away by invoking the title under which they present themselves—especially when that title relies on the very confidence granted to office and on the authority of an appointed post, in order to demand of the state that it tolerate and permit to operate precisely what corrupts the substantial source of actions, namely the universal principles by which people live and act—indeed, even to permit the defiant posture that insists this corruption is “as it ought to be.” The old joke, “To whom God gives an office, to him he gives understanding,” is not a saying that one should be too eager, in our time, to assert in earnest. For office can confer authority, but it cannot substitute for science; and when the authority of an office is used to sanction what dissolves the rational universality of right into the contingencies of feeling and opinion, the state is confronted not with philosophy but with its counterfeit, now armed with institutional legitimacy.
In the renewed attention that governments have been compelled to give to the manner of philosophizing, one cannot fail to discern an element of protection and support—something the study of philosophy seems increasingly to require from several directions at once. For if one reads a great many productions in the so-called positive sciences, likewise in religious edification, and in other forms of indeterminate literature, one encounters not only the already mentioned contempt for philosophy—namely that people who thereby show themselves to be wholly backward in the formation of thought, to whom philosophy is something entirely alien, nevertheless treat it as something already “settled” for them and disposed of. One also finds, explicitly, attacks launched against philosophy as such, and its content—the conceptually comprehending cognition of God and of physical and spiritual nature, the cognition of truth—declared a foolish, even sinful presumption. Reason (Vernunft)—and again reason, and in endless repetition reason—is accused, diminished, and condemned; or at least it is made plain how inconvenient the unavoidable claims of the concept (Begriff) are to a large part of what would like to pass as “scientific” activity. Confronted with such phenomena, one is almost driven to the thought that, from this side, tradition is no longer venerable or sufficient to secure for philosophical study even mere tolerance and a public place. The very conditions under which philosophy has a public existence have begun to appear fragile, not because philosophy has lost its object, but because its form of cognition—its demand to grasp necessity rather than to trade in assertions—provokes hostility in quarters that would rather remain at the level of the given, the merely factual, the merely felt, or the merely repeated.
What is especially peculiar about the declamations and pretensions against philosophy that are common in our time is that they have a kind of right on one side, precisely because philosophy has been degraded, by the reigning shallowness, into something unworthy of its name; and yet on the other side these same declamations root themselves in the very element they ungratefully attack. For once this self-styled philosophizing has declared the cognition of truth to be a foolish attempt, it levels everything—much as Roman imperial despotism leveled noble and slave, virtue and vice, honor and dishonor, knowledge and ignorance—so that all thoughts and all materials are flattened into an undifferentiated plane. On such a plane, the concepts of the true and the laws of the ethical are reduced to mere opinions and subjective convictions; the most criminal principles, so long as they are held “with conviction,” are placed in equal dignity with those laws; and likewise the most barren and particular objects, and the most straw-like matters, are elevated to the same rank as what constitutes the interest of all thinking human beings and the very bonds of the ethical world. The result is not intellectual modesty but an inflation of arbitrariness: the refusal of objective criteria presents itself as liberation, and the dissolution of rational distinctions presents itself as profundity. Against this leveling, philosophy must insist that the difference between truth and mere persuasion, between ethical law and private certainty, is not a social prejudice but a requirement internal to thinking itself—because without the binding authority of the concept, everything that claims dignity can be made equivalent to everything else, and the ethical world is left without articulable bonds.
It should therefore be counted a good fortune for science—indeed, as I have indicated, it is the necessity of the matter itself—that this so-called philosophizing, which might otherwise have continued to spin itself on as an in-house scholastic wisdom, has been forced into a closer relation with actuality: with a world in which the principles of rights and duties are taken seriously, and which lives, in the daylight of consciousness, within those very determinations. In that way it has entered public use. Yet it is precisely this relation of philosophy to actuality that occasions the characteristic misunderstandings; and so I return to what I noted earlier: because philosophy is the inquiry into the rational, it is for that very reason the grasp of what is present and actual, not the erection of some beyond that “ought to be” somewhere God knows where—or, more truthfully, that exists only in the error of one-sided and empty ratiocination. I have remarked in what follows that even Plato’s Republic, which so often serves as the proverb for an “empty ideal,” essentially seized nothing other than the nature of Greek ethical life. And when Plato became conscious of a deeper principle breaking into that ethical world—one that could appear within it, in its immediate form, only as an unsatisfied longing and therefore as corruption—he had to seek, from within that very longing, a remedy against the corruption. But since that remedy had to come “from above,” he could initially look for it only in a particular external form of Greek ethical life itself, through which he devised a way to overcome the disorder; and in doing so he most deeply injured the very deeper drive at work there, the free infinite personality. Yet precisely by this Plato proved himself a great spirit: the principle around which the distinctive character of his Idea turns is the hinge around which the impending world-historical transformation in fact turned. Philosophy, when it is not vanity, learns to recognize such hinges within the present rather than to flee the present into a fabricated elsewhere.
What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational. This conviction belongs to every unprejudiced consciousness no less than to philosophy, and it is from this conviction that philosophy proceeds in considering the spiritual universe just as it does in considering nature. If reflection, feeling, or whatever shape subjective consciousness takes declares the present to be something empty and null, and imagines it “knows better” by going beyond it, then it is itself caught in emptiness; for it has reality only in the present, and so it becomes nothing but vanity. Conversely, if the Idea is taken to be merely an “idea” in the thin sense of a private representation lodged in opinion, philosophy grants the contrary insight: nothing is actual except the Idea. The task, then, is to recognize within the seeming of the temporal and the passing the substance that is immanent, and the eternal that is present—not to invent an ideal elsewhere, but to learn to see the enduring within what appears to be merely transient. For the rational—synonymous here with the Idea—when it is actual, enters external existence and comes forth in an infinite richness of forms, appearances, and configurations. It surrounds its kernel with a variegated rind in which consciousness initially dwells; only the concept (Begriff) penetrates this rind, in order to find the inner pulse and to feel it still beating within the external shapes. But the infinitely manifold relations that form themselves in this externality—this immense material and its regulation—are not the object of philosophy. If philosophy were to immerse itself in such matters, it would meddle in what does not concern it; it can spare itself the business of offering good advice on them. Plato could have omitted recommending to nurses that they should never stand still with children but always rock them in their arms; Fichte could have refrained from “constructing” the perfection of passport policing to the point that, as it was said, the portrait of the suspect should be painted into the passport alongside the description. In such productions no trace of philosophy remains, and philosophy can all the more leave such ultra-wisdom alone, since it ought to show itself most liberal precisely toward this endless mass of particular concerns. In this way science shows itself at the farthest remove from the hatred that the vanity of better-knowing directs at a multitude of circumstances and institutions—a hatred in which pettiness most delights itself, because only by hating does it come to a sense of its own importance.
Accordingly, insofar as this work contains a science of the state, it intends to be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and present the state as something rational in itself. Precisely as a philosophical writing, it must be as far removed as possible from the ambition to construct a state as it ought to be. Whatever instruction may lie in it cannot be directed toward lecturing the state about how it should be, but rather toward showing how the state—this ethical universe—ought to be recognized. The task of philosophy is to grasp what is, because what is, is reason. And as for the individual: each is, in any case, a child of their time. Philosophy is no exception; it is its time comprehended in thought. It is as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can leap beyond its present world as it would be to imagine that an individual can jump over their time, can jump over Rhodes. Hic Rhodus, hic saltus—here is Rhodes, here is the leap. If a theory really does claim to go beyond, to build a world as it ought to be, such a world may indeed “exist,” but only as opinion: a soft element into which anything whatsoever can be fantasized. One might even say, with a slight shift in the proverb’s accent: here is the rose, here dance—here is what is given to be recognized, not an elsewhere to be invented.
What stands between reason as self-conscious spirit and reason as existing actuality—what separates the former from the latter and prevents it from finding satisfaction in the latter—is the constraint of some abstraction that has not been liberated into the concept (Begriff). The dissatisfaction that declares the present void is often not the expression of a higher rationality, but the symptom of being bound to a one-sided universal, an empty “ought,” a fixed standpoint that refuses to let itself be concretized. To be free into the concept is not to abandon universality, but to let universality become determinate, to let it dwell in the actuality it itself generates and sustains. To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and thereby to rejoice in the present—not in the sense of complacency, but in the sense of intelligible affirmation—is the rational insight that constitutes reconciliation with actuality. Philosophy offers this reconciliation to those upon whom the inner demand has once fallen: to comprehend, and to preserve within what is substantial the freedom of the subject, just as it preserves within subjective freedom not a stance in what is particular and accidental, but a standing within what is in and for itself. Reconciliation, so understood, is not the silencing of critique, but the elevation of critique into knowledge: the point at which freedom no longer seeks its proof in mere opposition, and instead finds itself at home in the rationality of the actual.
This also supplies the more concrete sense of what was earlier characterized, in a more abstract way, as the unity of form and content. For form, in its most concrete significance, is reason as conceptually comprehending cognition; and content is reason as the substantial essence of ethical and natural actuality. The conscious identity of the two is the philosophical Idea. There is, to be sure, a kind of obstinacy—an obstinacy that does the human being honor—in refusing to acknowledge, in one’s disposition and commitments, anything that cannot be justified through thought. This principled insistence is characteristic of the modern age, and in its distinctive shape it is the proper principle of Protestantism. What Luther initiated as faith in feeling and in the testimony of spirit is the same movement that the further ripened spirit strives to grasp in the concept: to liberate itself within the present and thereby to find itself in the present, not by surrendering to it, but by comprehending it as the site where truth must be actual.
Hence the celebrated remark that a half philosophy leads away from God—where “half” names precisely that posture that reduces knowing to mere approximation to truth, a perpetual “almost,” neither fully committed to the necessity of the concept nor content to remain in immediacy—whereas true philosophy leads to God. The same holds with the state. Reason does not satisfy itself with approximation, which is neither cold nor warm and is therefore “spewed out”; it also does not satisfy itself with the cold despair that concedes that within this temporality things may go badly, or at best tolerably, yet insists that nothing better is to be had within it and that peace with actuality is therefore only a matter of resignation. The peace that knowledge provides is of a different sort: warmer, because it is not the numbness of surrender but the reconciliation of intelligibility. To know the rationality of the ethical world is not to declare every existing arrangement justified as it stands; it is to grasp the substantial principles by which the ethical world is what it is, to see where actuality expresses those principles and where it falls short of them, and to hold oneself within the present neither as a captive nor as a mere negator, but as a participant in a rational order that can be comprehended. In that way the unity of form and content ceases to be a slogan and becomes a lived standpoint: reason recognizes itself in its object, and the object appears not as brute fact but as the articulated presence of the Idea.
To add one more word about the business of “teaching the world how it ought to be”: philosophy, in any case, always comes too late. As the thought of the world, it appears only in time, after actuality has completed its formative process and made itself ready. What the concept (Begriff) teaches here, history necessarily shows as well: only in the maturity of actuality does the ideal emerge over against the real, and only then does thought grasp that same world in its substance and build it up, in the form of an intellectual realm, as a comprehended order. Philosophy is not the architect of an uncreated future that could be brought into being by good intentions; it is the self-knowledge of a world that has already brought its essential determinations to expression. That is why philosophy does not stand at the beginning of an epoch like a blueprint, but at its threshold like a reckoning. It articulates what has become, and in articulating it, it reveals the rational structure that was at work within the becoming.
When philosophy paints its gray in gray, a shape of life has grown old. And with gray in gray one cannot make it young again; one can only recognize it. The point is not that philosophy delights in decline or sanctifies fatigue, but that conceptual understanding is not rejuvenation by decree. Knowledge cannot restore immediacy; it can only comprehend it, and by comprehending it, place it within the order of spirit’s development. Hence the emblem: the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk. Philosophy’s vocation is not to chatter at noon about what might be, but to see, at twilight, what has been—and thereby to make intelligible the rationality that has been at stake in the life of an age, even as that age passes into another.
It is time to close this preface. As a preface, it was in any case permitted to speak only externally and subjectively, from the standpoint of the writing to which it is attached, and which it precedes. If one is to speak philosophically about the content itself, that content tolerates only a scientific, objective treatment. And for that reason any objection addressed to the author in a form other than a scientific discussion of the matter itself can count, for him, only as a subjective afterword and an arbitrary assurance—something that may express a mood, a posture, or a personal attestation, but does not touch the thing. Such replies can therefore remain indifferent to him, not out of personal disdain, but because philosophy is not answered by sentiments about philosophy; it is answered only where the object is taken up in its concept and argued through in its necessity.
Natural Right and Political Science
The philosophical science of right takes as its object the Idea of right: the concept of right and right’s actualization. Philosophy deals with Ideas, and for that reason it does not take its bearings from what are often called “mere concepts.” On the contrary, it exposes the one-sidedness and untruth of such abstractions. For the concept—in the strict sense, not in the loose way the word is commonly used to mean only an abstract determination of the understanding (Verstand)—alone has actuality, and it has it in such a way that it gives actuality to itself. Whatever is not actuality posited by the concept itself is only transient existence: external contingency, opinion, insubstantial appearance, untruth, deception, and the like. At the same time, the concept is not to be imagined as a bare inner rule hovering behind what happens to exist. In actualizing itself, the concept gives itself a determinate shape; and this shape is not an optional add-on, but an essential moment of the Idea. The Idea is not the concept without reality, nor reality without the concept, but the unity in which the concept’s self-positing actuality and its determinate configuration belong together. The configuration the concept gives itself is therefore, for cognition, the other essential moment through which the concept itself becomes knowable: it is what distinguishes the concept’s being “as concept” from its being present as a realized order.
Because the science of right is a part of philosophy, it must develop the Idea—as the reason (Vernunft) of its object—from the concept; or what is the same, it must attend to the thing’s own immanent development. The point is not to impose a framework from outside, but to watch the object articulate itself from within, according to its own necessity. Yet precisely as a part, this science has a determinate point of departure: a beginning that is itself the result and truth of what precedes it, and which therefore contains, in a compressed form, what would elsewhere appear as its “proof.” For that reason, the concept of right, in terms of its becoming, falls outside the science of right as such. Its deduction is presupposed here. The concept of right must therefore be taken up as given—not as an arbitrary assumption, but as a stabilized outcome already won in the larger movement of philosophy, which this science now inherits and carries forward into the domain where right must be exhibited in its distinctive forms and institutions.
By the merely formal, non-philosophical method common to the sciences, one begins by seeking and demanding a definition—if only for the sake of an external appearance of scientificity. In positive jurisprudence, however, even this demand is often of secondary importance, since its primary aim is to state what is legally right in the sense of what is right according to law: namely, which particular determinations are in force. Hence the warning—meant as a sober counsel, not a paradox—that omnis definitio in jure civili periculosa: every definition in civil law is dangerous. And in fact, the more disconnected and internally contradictory the determinations of a legal order are, the less possible definitions become within it. For a definition ought to contain general determinations, and precisely such generality immediately exposes what is contradictory—here, what is unrightful—in its nakedness. Thus, for example, within Roman law no definition of “human being” could be given without peril, since the slave could not be subsumed under it; the concept is violated in that status. Likewise a definition of property and proprietor would prove perilous when brought to bear upon many existing relations. In such contexts, definitions are not merely difficult; they function like a spotlight that reveals an implicit injustice by forcing the legal order to state its own universal claims.
When definitions are nevertheless attempted in this formal mode, their “deduction” is often drawn from etymology or, more typically, from abstraction out of particular cases while taking the feelings and representations (Vorstellungen) of people as the ground. The correctness of the definition is then placed in its agreement with prevailing representations. What is essential for science is thereby bracketed. With respect to content, the necessity of the thing in and for itself—here, the necessity of right—is set aside; with respect to form, the nature of the concept is set aside. In philosophical cognition, by contrast, the necessity of a concept is the principal matter, and the path by which it has come to be—the fact that it is a result—is its proof and deduction. Only once the content has been shown to be necessary in itself does a further, subordinate question arise: what in language and in common representations corresponds to it. Yet the concept in its truth and the concept as it appears in representation can not only differ; they must differ in form and shape. Even so, if a representation is not false in its content, one can often show the concept as contained within it and, in its essence, present there—that is, one can raise the representation into the form of the concept. But representation is not the standard and criterion of the necessary and true concept; rather, representation must take its truth from the concept, correct itself by it, and come to know itself through it.
If, on the one side, the older formal method—with its apparatus of definitions, syllogisms, proofs, and the like—has in many quarters more or less disappeared, a bad substitute has arisen in its place. This substitute is the manner of immediately taking up and asserting Ideas in general, including the Idea of right and its further determinations, as mere “facts of consciousness,” and then making natural or intensified feeling, one’s own breast, and enthusiasm into the source of right. If this method is the most convenient of all, it is at the same time the least philosophical—leaving aside other aspects of this view that concern not only knowing but immediately action. For while the first, merely formal method at least still demands the form of the concept in the definition and, in proof, the form of a necessity of cognition, the method of immediate consciousness and feeling elevates subjectivity, contingency, and arbitrariness (Willkür) of knowing into a principle. What the scientific procedure of philosophy consists in is presupposed here from philosophical logic: the method is not an optional technique, but the immanent movement by which the concept establishes its necessity and thereby gives right its proper form.
The non-philosophical, merely formal method that prevails in many sciences begins by demanding a definition—if only to satisfy an external appearance of scientific procedure. In positive jurisprudence this demand is already precarious, because that discipline typically aims above all to state what is legally right, i.e. which determinate statutes and determinations are in force; hence the sober warning that every definition in civil law is dangerous. Where a legal order’s determinations are internally unconnected or mutually contradictory, definitions are not merely hard to supply; they become impossible precisely because a definition must express general determinations, and generality has the unwelcome power to expose, in its bare form, what is contradictory—here, what is unrightful—within the alleged right. The case is instructive: Roman law, for example, could not safely define “human being” without making the slave a scandal, since the institution of slavery violates the very concept it would need to presuppose; and a definition of property or proprietor becomes equally perilous when set against relations that tacitly deny what such universals would have to mean. In the same formal spirit, the “deduction” of a definition is then often sought in etymology, or in an abstraction from cases that takes people’s feelings and representations (Vorstellungen) as its ground; correctness is measured by agreement with prevailing representations. Yet by doing this one pushes aside what is scientifically essential: with respect to content, the necessity of the matter in and for itself (here, the necessity of right); with respect to form, the nature of the concept (Begriff). Philosophical cognition inverts the priority: the chief task is the necessity of the concept, and the path by which it has come to be—its character as a result—is its proof and deduction. Only once the concept has been established in its own necessity does the secondary task arise of surveying what in language and representation corresponds to it. And since the concept in its truth and the concept as it lives in representation must differ in form and shape, representation cannot be the criterion of the true concept; at best, where representation is not false in content, it can be raised into the form of the concept by showing the concept at work within it. The concept is the measure; representation must receive its truth from it, correct itself by it, and come to know itself through it. If the older formalism of definitions and syllogisms has partly withered away, its replacement has often been worse: the practice of immediately asserting “ideas” (including the idea of right and its determinations) as mere facts of consciousness and then elevating natural or intensified feeling, one’s own breast, and enthusiasm into the source of right. This is the most convenient method and, for that very reason, the least philosophical: it makes subjectivity, contingency, and arbitrariness (Willkür) into the principle of knowing. What counts as philosophical method must therefore be presupposed from logic: philosophy proceeds only where the concept demonstrates its own necessity, rather than where immediacy proclaims itself authoritative.
Right is positive in general, first, by its form: it is valid in a state, and this legal authority is the principle for knowing it within positive jurisprudence. But right also bears positivity in its content: it is marked by the national character of a people, the stage of its historical development, and the web of relations bound up with natural necessity; it is marked further by the need for any system of statutory right to apply the universal concept to the particular configuration of objects and cases given from without—an operation that is no longer speculative development of the concept but an act of subsumption by the understanding (Verstand); and it is marked, finally, by the last determinations required for decision in actuality. Hence it cannot be philosophy that recognizes “heart-feeling,” inclination, or caprice as authorities opposed to laws; nor does the possibility that force and tyranny can enter positive right touch right’s nature, since that possibility is accidental to it. The point of indicating where right must become positive is to mark the boundary of philosophical right and to exclude the expectation that a systematic development of the concept could yield a complete statute-book of the kind an actual state needs. To turn the difference between natural right (philosophical right) and positive right into a relation of opposition and conflict is a major misunderstanding: their relation is rather like that of institutions to pandects—the living rational structure to its compilations and external determinations. In this respect Montesquieu’s historical stance is genuinely philosophical: legislation must not be treated in isolation and abstraction, but as a dependent moment within a totality—interwoven with the determinations that constitute the character of a nation and a time—so that, within that nexus, laws receive both their meaning and their (relative) justification. Yet one must hold fast to a decisive distinction. Purely historical inquiry—tracing the emergence of legal determinations and their “reasonable consequence” from prior institutions—has its dignity within its own sphere, provided it does not confuse development from historical grounds with development from the concept, and does not inflate historical explanation into an in-and-for-itself justification. A norm can be perfectly grounded and consistent relative to given institutions and circumstances and still be unrightful and irrational in itself; Roman private law offers many examples, since unjust institutions (paternal power, marriage relations, slavery) can generate “consequent” rules. Even where determinations are in fact right and rational, it remains one thing to show this by the concept—which alone yields the genuinely essential justification—and quite another to narrate the historical circumstances, needs, cases, and contingencies that led to their establishment. The common habit of calling the latter “explaining” or even “comprehending” often smuggles in the illusion that the essence has been captured, when in fact the concept of the matter has not even been spoken. Worse, by sliding from the absolute to the relative, from the nature of the thing to external appearance, one shifts the question of true justification into a mere justification by circumstances and inherited presuppositions. Indeed, where historical justification confuses external origin with origin from the concept, it frequently achieves the opposite of what it intends: if an institution is shown to have been purposive and necessary under certain conditions, and this is treated as an unconditional justification, the result is that—once those conditions have disappeared—the institution is thereby shown to have lost its sense and its right (as in the familiar apologetic arguments for monasteries that, once their historical services are cited as their ground, imply their superfluity under altered circumstances). These two standpoints can therefore remain indifferent to one another so long as each stays within its own sphere, but in practice they collide—especially when historical-minded jurisprudence treats philosophical criticism as ignorance. The exemplary case is the discussion, reported by Gellius, in which the jurist Sextus Caecilius rebukes the philosopher Favorinus for failing to “understand” the Twelve Tables: Caecilius rightly insists that laws must be fitted and bent to manners, forms of state, present utilities, and the vices requiring remedy, and that many such laws are perishable because their meaning is historical. Yet when he then defends an atrocious creditor’s law (even the grotesque provision permitting dismemberment without legal penalty) by offering a “good reason”—that its very horror would prevent its application—he exhibits the immortal fraud of understanding’s ratiocination: to give a good reason for a bad thing and suppose the bad thing thereby justified, while overlooking that the very principle invoked undermines itself (and while conceding elsewhere that excessive punishment defeats its own purpose). If someone insists that Favorinus “did not understand” such a law, one must ask whether “understanding” here means anything more than the trained capacity to be soothed by apologetics. And if another rebuke turns on philological trivia—whether jumentum includes a carriage—the philosophical issue is plainly not “misunderstanding” but the elevation of pedantry into a criterion of justification. The same confusion surfaces when one praises Roman jurists for consequential inference and even likens their trichotomies to Kant’s “development of concepts.” Consequence in inference is indeed a virtue of any understanding-governed science; but it is not the satisfaction of reason’s demand, and it is not yet philosophy. Indeed, one might even count as a higher practical virtue the inconsistency by which Roman jurists and praetors deviated from unjust institutions—only, being bound to the letter, they often had to rescue it with empty verbal distinctions and fictions (even absurd ones) that reveal how far mere consistency can be from right. To call such classificatory maneuvers “development of concepts” is, at best, a category mistake: it substitutes the comfort of schematic order for the labor by which the concept justifies itself and by which right is shown not merely to be posited, but to be rational.
The ground of right is, in general, the spiritual. More precisely, its place and point of departure is the will, insofar as the will is free. Freedom constitutes the will’s substance and determination, and the system of right is therefore the realm of freedom made actual: the world of spirit brought forth from itself, a “second nature” whose seeming immediacy is in fact the result of spirit’s own self-production. Right is not an external constraint laid upon an otherwise self-sufficient individuality; it is the objective shape in which freedom exists. In that sense the question “what is right?” cannot be separated from the question “what is a free will?” because right is the intelligible order in which willing is no longer merely inward or episodic, but has acquired a stable existence in institutions, norms, and recognitive relations that endure and bind.
With respect to the freedom of the will, one may recall the earlier, non-philosophical manner of proceeding. One began by presupposing a representation of the will and then tried to extract and fix a definition from it. After this, following the style of older empirical psychology, one appealed to various feelings and phenomena of ordinary consciousness—remorse, guilt, and the like—which were said to be explicable only on the assumption of a free will, and from this one constructed the so-called proof that the will is free. More convenient still is the shortcut that simply treats freedom as a fact of consciousness and holds that one must “believe” in it. Neither of these routes reaches what is decisive. That the will is free, and what will and freedom are—their deduction—can, as already indicated, take place only within the connection of the whole. Still, the essential outlines of the presupposition can be stated. Spirit is initially intelligence, and the determinations through which intelligence advances in its development—from feeling, through representing, to thinking—are the very path by which it produces itself as will. Will, as practical spirit, is the next truth of intelligence: it is intelligence that has taken itself up as self-determining activity in the world. I have set out this trajectory elsewhere, and I take it as a condition of entry here, since the doctrine of spirit (what is commonly called psychology) is, by and large, among the most neglected and impoverished regions of philosophical science. For the purposes of representation, however, the moments of the concept of will that are indicated here and in the following introductory sections—moments that follow from that presupposition—can be appealed to in everyone’s self-consciousness. Each person will find, first, that they can abstract from whatever content is given, and in the same act can determine themselves: they can posit any content within themselves as their own. And for the further determinations as well, each will have in their self-consciousness the exemplary material by which the concept’s moments can be brought into view—provided one does not mistake this appeal to inner experience for the philosophical proof itself, but treats it as a way of making present to intuition what the concept must justify in its necessity.
The will contains, first, the element of pure indeterminacy, or the pure reflection of the I into itself, in which every limitation and every content—whether immediately present through nature, needs, desires, impulses, or otherwise given and determined—is dissolved. It is the boundless infinity of absolute abstraction or universality: pure thinking of itself. Those who treat thinking as a special faculty separated from will, and who even go on to regard thinking as harmful to the will—especially to the “good will”—thereby show from the outset that they understand nothing of the nature of the will. For willing is not blind propulsion that later receives “thought” as an external ornament or obstacle; willing, in its truth, is inseparable from the self-relation that only thinking can articulate. This point will recur, because the temptation to oppose thought and will is one of the most persistent ways of missing what freedom is.
If this one-sided aspect of will—the absolute possibility of abstracting from any determination in which the I finds itself, or which it has posited within itself, the flight from all content as from a limitation—is what the will fixes upon as its freedom, then we have what must be called negative freedom, the freedom of the understanding (Verstand). It is freedom as emptiness, which, when raised to an actual shape and to passion, becomes fanaticism. Remaining merely theoretical, it appears in religion as the fanaticism of “pure contemplation,” a stance that seeks liberation by dissolving every determinacy into the void of abstraction. But turning toward actuality, it becomes—politically as well as religiously—the fanaticism that shatters all existing social order, removes individuals who appear suspect to order, and destroys every organization that attempts to re-emerge. This negative will experiences its own existence only in destruction. It may imagine that it wills a positive condition—say, universal equality or a universal religious life—but it does not in fact will the positive actuality of such a condition. For the moment such a condition becomes actual, it brings with it some order, some differentiation—both of institutions and of individuals. Yet differentiation and objective determinacy are precisely what this negative freedom can acknowledge only as a limit; and therefore it draws its self-consciousness from their annihilation. What it “means” to will can therefore be, on its own side, only an abstract representation, while its realization is nothing but the fury of destruction.
The I is, however, just as essentially the transition out of undifferentiated indeterminacy into distinction: into determining and positing a determinacy as a content and object. Let this content be given by nature, or let it be generated from the concept of spirit—the source can vary without altering the structural point. By positing itself as determinate, the I enters into existence as such. Here lies the absolute moment of finitude, or of the I’s particularization. Freedom is not only the power to withdraw into abstraction; it is equally the power to step into determinacy, to take on a content and thereby to be something definite. This second moment is therefore not a fall from freedom into constraint, but an essential moment of freedom’s own structure: the will is not a will at all unless it can determine itself, and determination entails particularity.
This second moment of determination is itself negativity, an overcoming, just as the first is—but it is the overcoming of the first abstract negativity. As the particular is in general already contained within the universal, so this second moment is already contained in the first; it is the positing of what the first already is in itself. For the first moment, taken as first and “for itself,” is not true infinity or concrete universality, not the concept (Begriff), but only something determinate and one-sided. Precisely because it is the abstraction from all determinacy, it is itself not without determinacy: it is determined as abstraction. And to be abstract and one-sided is itself its determinacy—its deficiency and finitude. The first moment, when absolutized, pretends to be pure universality, but in fact it is a particular posture: the posture of empty universality. The second moment therefore does not introduce finitude from outside; it reveals finitude as already implied in the first, and it raises the will from the poverty of mere withdrawal into the richer, though riskier, terrain of determinacy.
The distinction between these two moments appears in Fichte’s philosophy, and likewise in Kant’s, among others. To remain with Fichte’s presentation: the I as the unbounded (in the first proposition of the Wissenschaftslehre) is taken purely as something positive—thus as universality and identity in the sense of the understanding (Verstand)—so that this abstract I is supposed to be the true on its own. Limitation, the negative as such—whether as an external boundary given from without or as the I’s own activity—then “comes to it” as a further step (in the second proposition). What speculative philosophy had to accomplish, by contrast, was the further step of grasping negativity as immanent within the universal or identical itself—within the I itself. The need for this step remains entirely opaque to those who cannot even take up the dualism of infinity and finitude in the form it already has in immanence and abstraction, as in Fichte. For if one starts by treating indeterminate universality as a self-sufficient positive, then finitude can only appear as a foreign addition; whereas the concept demands that we recognize the universal as internally self-differentiating, such that determinacy is not an alien intrusion but the universal’s own self-specification.
The will is the unity of these two moments: particularity reflected back into itself and thereby returned to universality—singularity (Einzelnheit). It is the self-determination of the I in which, in one and the same act, it posits itself as the negative of itself, namely as determinate and limited, and yet remains with itself—that is, remains in its identity with itself and its universality—and, in the determination, closes only with itself. In this unity the will’s limitation is not a foreign cage but its own positing; and its being “with itself” is not an empty retreat but the preservation of itself in and through determinacy. The I determines itself insofar as it is the relation of negativity to itself; and as this relation to itself it is at the same time indifferent toward the determinacy it posits, knowing it as its own and as ideal—as a mere possibility. It is not bound by the determination as by an external chain; it is “in” it only because it places itself there. This is the freedom of the will: the freedom that constitutes its concept and its substantiality, as weight constitutes the substantiality of a body. Freedom here is not a sentiment of option, but the gravity-like center of the will’s being: the will is what it is only as this self-relating power to posit and to hold determinations as its own.
Every self-consciousness knows itself as universal—the possibility of abstracting from every determinate content—and also as particular, with a determinate object, content, or end. But these two moments, taken separately, are abstractions. The concrete and the true (and everything true is concrete) is universality that has particularity as its opposite, but a particularity that, by reflection into itself, is reconciled with universality. This unity is singularity, though not singularity in the immediate sense of “one” as representation pictures it, but singularity according to its concept. Indeed this singularity is nothing other than the concept itself: the concept as the living unity of universality and particularity in self-return. The first two moments—that the will can abstract from everything and that it is determinate (whether by itself or by another)—are readily conceded and grasped precisely because, taken on their own, they are untrue moments of the understanding (Verstand). The third moment—the true and speculative—is what the understanding refuses to enter. And yet everything true, insofar as it is grasped, can only be thought speculatively. The understanding therefore calls the concept “incomprehensible,” because it expects truth to be either a pure universal or a fixed particular, and it cannot bear the unity in which each is what it is only through the other. The proof and fuller exposition of this innermost point of speculation—the infinite as self-related negativity, the ultimate source-point of all activity, life, and consciousness—belongs to logic as purely speculative philosophy. Here it must suffice to note one further point of method: when one says “the will is universal” or “the will determines itself,” one speaks as if the will were already a presupposed subject or substrate. But the will is not something finished and universal prior to its determining, prior to the sublation and ideality of this determining. It is will only as this self-mediating activity and return into itself—only as the movement in which determinacy is posited, held as ideal, and thereby owned as the will’s own.
The further determinations of particularization yield the distinction among the forms of the will. To begin with: where determinacy takes the shape of the formal opposition between the subjective and the objective—where objectivity appears as an external, immediately given existence confronting the subject—there we have the formal will as self-consciousness. This will finds an external world already there. It experiences its content initially as subjective purpose, and the world initially as something other, standing over against it. Yet the will is not exhausted by this confrontation. As singularity returning into itself within determinacy, it is a process: the process of translating the subjective end into objectivity through mediation—through activity and through a means. In this form the will is essentially practical: it relates to the world not by mere contemplation but by making itself actual, by inserting its purpose into what is external and thereby giving its inner determinacy an outward existence.
At the same time, this opposition of consciousness—subject versus object—does not exhaust what the will is in truth. In spirit as it is in and for itself, determinacy is not merely something encountered or externally opposed, but is wholly spirit’s own and therefore true. In that higher standpoint the relation of consciousness belongs only to the side of appearance: it is the way the will shows itself under certain conditions, not the final account of its nature. For the purposes at hand, that merely phenomenal aspect need not be considered in its own right. The inquiry here is concerned with the will as the principle of right, and thus with the determinations in which freedom becomes objective, not with the full phenomenology of consciousness as such, which would require a different path and a different exposition.
In the second place, insofar as the determinations of the will are the will’s own—its particularization reflected into itself as such—they count not merely as formal “positions” over against an external world, but as content. What is at stake here is that determinacy, when it is not treated as something merely encountered, is the will’s self-specification: the will has within itself a manifold of determinations that belong to it as its own. Yet even as content, these determinations appear to the will under the form already indicated before: namely, as purpose. The content is the will’s end, first as inward or subjective in representing willing—in the sphere where the will holds before itself what it aims at, imagines it, and makes it present as something intended. But the will does not remain at the level of inward purpose. The same content is also purpose as realized and executed: a purpose that has passed through the mediation of an activity that translates the subjective into objectivity, and thereby gives the end an actual existence in the world.
The decisive point is that the will’s content is not “content” in the sense of a static inventory of desires or inclinations. It is content only as purposive determinacy: as something the will posits as its own and therefore as something it must either keep inwardly as an intention or carry outward into actuality through deed. In this way the inner and the outer are not two unrelated realms, one psychological and the other factual; they are two moments of the same structure. The will’s determinations are first present to it as subjective ends, and then—where the will is effective—they are made objective through mediated action. Right will later concern precisely the conditions under which this passage from subjective purpose to objective realization is not merely a private episode but an order that can be recognized, attributed, and held as binding within a shared ethical world.
This content, or differentiated determination of the will, is at first immediate. In that condition the will is free only in itself—that is, free for us, as observers who grasp its concept, but not yet free for itself. It is, so to speak, will merely as it is in its concept. Only when the will has itself as its object—only when it explicitly relates to itself, takes itself up, and makes itself the theme of its own activity—does it become for itself what it is in itself. Here lies a decisive threshold: freedom is not merely the possibility of self-determination; it is self-determination that knows itself, that is present to itself as such, and therefore can own its determinations as its own in a non-immediate way.
Finitude, according to this determination, consists in the fact that what something is in itself or according to its concept has an existence or appearance distinct from what it is for itself. The concept and its being-for-itself do not immediately coincide in finite things. Thus, for example, the abstract externality of nature is, in itself, space; but for itself it is time. Two points must be noted here. First: because the true is only the Idea, if one grasps an object or determination merely as it is in itself, or merely in its concept, one does not yet have it in its truth. Second: what something is as concept, or in itself, also exists; and this existence is a proper shape of the object itself (as space is, in the example), not a mere subjective addition. In the finite, the separation of being-in-itself and being-for-itself makes up at once its mere being-there (Dasein) or appearance. We will soon encounter this structure concretely—first in the “natural” will, and then in formal right, and so forth—where the disparity between what freedom is in concept and how it exists immediately becomes visible as a deficiency that must be overcome within freedom’s own development.
The understanding (Verstand) tends to stop at mere being-in-itself. It therefore calls freedom, taken in this way, a “capacity” or “faculty,” which in fact is only possibility. Yet it treats this determination as absolute and persisting. It takes freedom’s relation to what it wills, and more generally to its reality, as a mere application to a given material—something that does not belong to the essence of freedom itself. In doing so it deals only with an abstraction, not with freedom’s Idea and truth. For freedom is not a neutral power that can be attached to any content without being shaped by the act of attachment; freedom’s reality belongs to its essence, and the passage by which it becomes for itself what it is in itself is not an optional “use” but the very life of the concept.
The will that is free only in itself is the immediate, or natural, will. The determinations of difference that the self-determining concept posits within the will appear, in the immediate will, as an immediately given content. They are drives, desires, inclinations—the ways in which the will finds itself determined by nature. This content, together with its further developed determinations, does indeed arise from the rationality of the will and is therefore rational in itself; but as released into the form of immediacy, it is not yet present in the form of rationality. Put differently: what is at work here is not an alien irrationality imported from outside the will, but the will’s own rational content existing in an immature mode—existing as impulse rather than as conceptually justified determination. The content is certainly mine in general; it belongs to me, it is in me, and I can recognize it as what moves me. Yet the form in which it appears and the content itself remain distinct. The will therefore remains, at this level, a finite will: it is not yet at home with itself in its determinacy, because its determinacy confronts it as something simply there, something it “has,” rather than something it has freely made its own in thought.
Empirical psychology then narrates and describes these drives and inclinations, as well as the needs grounded upon them, as it finds—or believes it finds—them in experience, and it proceeds in the usual way to classify this given material. Such description and classification can have its uses, but it does not reach what is decisive: namely, what the objective of these drives is, and what this objective is in its truth once stripped of the form of unreason in which it first appears as drive; and also how that objective is shaped in existence, i.e. what objective forms it takes in the world. Those questions cannot be answered by merely listing impulses, because the truth of an impulse does not lie in its immediacy but in what it is implicitly aiming at and in the rational structures through which that aim can become determinate and actual. The exposition of that objective truth and its existent shape belongs to what follows.
The system of this content, as it is immediately found in the will, appears at first only as a heap and multiplicity of drives. Each drive is “mine” in general alongside others; and at the same time each is something universal and indeterminate, capable of many different objects and many different modes of satisfaction. In this shape the will is spread out into a manifold without yet having a determinate center of decision. It is not yet a unified willing, but a field of competing possible satisfactions, each of which can be pursued in more than one way. Precisely because each drive is both mine and yet not yet fixed to a single object, the will remains suspended in a doubled indeterminacy: indeterminate as to which drive will prevail, and indeterminate as to how any given drive will specify its object and satisfaction.
By giving itself, within this doubled indeterminacy, the form of singularity (Einzelnheit) as described earlier, the will becomes deciding. It is only as deciding will—only as will that resolves the openness of mere possibility into a determinate stance—that it is will in actuality. To decide means to sublate the initial indeterminacy in which each content is at first only possible. It is not enough that the will can satisfy drives; it must take itself together, select, and thereby posit a determinate content as the content that is to be realized. The will becomes real not by having many contents available to it, but by committing itself to one, and in committing itself, by becoming answerable for that commitment as its own.
Our language is instructive here. Instead of saying merely “to decide” (beschließen), it also says “to resolve oneself” (sich entschließen). The phrase registers that what is at issue is not only the selection of an object, but the self-determination of the will itself. The will’s indeterminacy is not a mere emptiness; it is a neutral yet infinitely fertile element, a primordial seed of existence, which contains within itself determinations and purposes and brings them forth from itself. Resolution is therefore not the imposition of an alien form upon a passive material; it is the will’s own emergence into determinacy. In resolving, the will does not merely choose among given drives; it constitutes itself as a singular agent who stands behind a purpose, and who thereby begins to convert the multiplicity of impulses into a unified practical identity.
Through deciding, the will posits itself as the will of a determinate individual and as something that differentiates itself outwardly against what is other. Yet, apart from this finitude in the sense of consciousness, the immediate will remains merely formal, because of the difference between its form and its content. It possesses only abstract deciding as such, while the content it selects is not yet content and work of its freedom. In other words, decision at this level establishes individuality, but it does not yet establish rational autonomy. The will can choose, but what it chooses still presents itself as given material—drives, inclinations, contingent satisfactions—rather than as a determinate universal that the will can recognize as justified. The will has become “someone’s will,” but it has not yet become a will that has made its content into something it can own as free.
For intelligence, insofar as it thinks, the object and content remain universal, and intelligence relates to them as universal activity. In the will, by contrast, the universal has essentially the meaning of mine: it appears as singularity. And in the immediate, i.e. formal, will this singularity is still abstract, not yet filled with its free universality. Here, therefore, the proper finitude of intelligence begins. It is not that thinking is finite and willing infinite; rather, the finitude of intelligence becomes acute precisely when intelligence is practical—when it is will—and must commit itself to a determinate content. The will is the site where universality is forced to take the form of “this,” of a particular end, and thus where the risk of being trapped in the merely particular becomes real.
Only by elevating itself again to thinking, and by giving its purposes immanent universality, does the will sublate the difference between form and content and make itself objective and infinite. This does not mean that will abandons particular ends; it means that it internalizes within its ends the universal determinations by which they can be justified as right, and by which they can be recognized as more than private preference. The “infinite will” is not will without limits; it is will whose determinacy is permeated by universality, so that in specifying itself it remains with itself as rational. Those therefore understand little of the nature of thinking and willing who claim that in willing in general the human being is infinite, whereas in thinking the human being—or even reason—is limited. So long as thinking and willing are still distinguished, the reverse is true: the thinking reason, precisely as will, is what resolves itself into finitude. It is reason that decides to be determinate, to be “this will” rather than mere universal contemplation. The question is whether this decision remains at the level of abstract singularity, or whether it becomes the self-determination of freedom that carries universality within itself.
The finite will, insofar as it is infinite only on the side of form—an I that reflects into itself and is with itself—stands over against its content: over against the differentiated drives, and likewise over against the various particular ways in which those drives can be actualized and satisfied. At the same time, precisely because it is only formally infinite, it is nevertheless bound to this content as the determinations of its nature and of its external actuality—though, as indeterminate, it is not bound to this drive or that drive in particular. The will’s infinity here is therefore ambiguous. It is “above” its impulses in the sense that it can take distance from them, survey them, and not be immediately absorbed in any one of them; but it is also “tied” to the realm of impulse as such, because this is the material through which its natural actuality is given. It can choose among contents, but it does not yet generate the content’s rational form from itself.
For the reflection of the I into itself, the content is therefore only possible: it may be mine, or it may not be mine. And the I itself is the possibility of determining itself to this or to another content—of choosing, among determinations that are, from this side, external to it, which is to count as “its” determinacy. This is the standpoint of choice as such: the will encounters a manifold of possible satisfactions and modes of realization, and because it is formally with itself it can select. Yet this selection is still governed by the externality of the options. The will is free in the minimal sense that it can choose; but it remains finite because what it chooses does not yet bear the mark of freedom’s own universality. The will is therefore, at this stage, the capacity to pick among given determinations, not yet the self-legislation of a rational content.
On this determination, the freedom of the will is Willkür—arbitrary choice—in which both elements are contained: the free reflection that can abstract from everything, and the dependence on an innerly or outwardly given content and material. Because the content that is in itself necessary as an end is, at the same time, determined over against that reflection as merely possible, Willkür is contingency in the mode of willing: it is contingency that has taken the form of a self. The will experiences itself as free because it can step back from any particular impulse and say “I could also do otherwise,” yet what it actually wills is still drawn from a stock of given drives, representations, and circumstances that it has not itself formed into rational content.
The most common representation people have of freedom is precisely this Willkür: a middle position between a will determined merely by natural impulses and a will that is free in and for itself. When one hears it said that freedom “in general” consists in being able to do whatever one wills, this can only be taken as a complete lack of cultivated thought—a state in which there is not yet even an inkling of what the will free in and for itself, right, ethical life, and the like are. Formal reflection—the formal universality and unity of self-consciousness—provides the abstract certainty the will has of its freedom; but it is not yet the truth of freedom. It is not yet true because it has not yet made itself into its own content and end. The subjective side is therefore still other than the objective side; and for that reason the content of this self-determination remains thoroughly finite. Willkür, instead of being the will in its truth, is the will as contradiction: a will that claims universality in its form (the “I can”), while remaining particular and contingent in its content (the “this happens to attract me,” “this is given,” “this is how things stand”). The contradiction is not moral hypocrisy; it is structural: the form of freedom outstrips the material through which the will is presently able to realize itself.
This also clarifies a well-known dispute from the era of Wolffian metaphysics about whether the will is truly free or whether the consciousness of freedom is an illusion. What was in view there was Willkür. Determinism rightly opposed to the abstract certainty of self-determination the element of content—content encountered as found, not contained within that certainty, and therefore coming to it from “outside,” even if this outside is nothing other than drive, representation, or, more generally, consciousness filled in whatever way. The decisive point is that the content is not yet the will’s own as self-determining activity as such. Where only the formal element of free self-determination is immanent in Willkür, while the other element is given to it, Willkür, if it is taken to be freedom itself, can indeed be called a deception. Much of what passes under the name of freedom in philosophies of reflection—including Kant’s, and the later completion of Kant’s flattening into shallowness by Fries—amounts to little more than this formal self-activity: the assertion of autonomy at the level of form, without the immanent generation of a rational content that would make autonomy true.
What the will chooses in a resolution it can just as readily cancel again. For the same power by which the I abstracts from every determinacy allows it to withdraw from the determinacy it has posited, to revoke the chosen content as this content, and to replace it with another. And because it can do this again and again—because it can move from one content to the next and continue this progression without limit—the will may appear to itself to have entered an “infinite” freedom. Yet it has not thereby gone beyond finitude. For each such content remains something different from the form of freedom itself, and is therefore finite; and the supposed infinity here is merely the endless alternation of finitudes, not the presence of the infinite within the determination itself.
What shows itself in this oscillation is the persistence of the very split that constitutes finitude: the separation between form and content. The will’s capacity to negate its determinations and swap them out does not heal this split; it merely repeats it under the guise of ever-renewed possibility. The opposite of determinacy—indeterminacy in the shape of irresolution or abstraction—is only the other, equally one-sided moment. If the will clings to determinacy only as something it can always discard, then determinacy never becomes its own in truth; it remains an external “this,” a temporary attachment. And if the will clings to indeterminacy as its supposed essence, then it remains trapped in the emptiness of pure possibility. In both cases, freedom is still formal: it is defined either as the ability to choose and unchoose, or as the refusal to be bound by any choice. Neither is the truth of freedom, because the truth would require a content that is not merely selected and replaceable, but one in which the will can recognize itself—one in which universality is immanent, so that determinacy is not the negation of freedom but its realized expression.
The contradiction that Willkür is appears, as the dialectic of drives and inclinations, in the familiar experience that they obstruct one another: the satisfaction of one demands the subordination or sacrifice of another, and so on. The will that lives at the level of impulse does not encounter a harmonious plurality but a restless rivalry of motives. Each drive is a simple direction of determinacy; it does not carry its measure within itself. It presses outward toward its object, but it does not, on its own terms, contain the principle by which it could limit itself, rank itself, or justify its claim against others. Precisely because each drive lacks an immanent measure, the act of subordinating one to another—or of sacrificing one for another—falls to a decision that is contingent.
That contingent decision is the work of Willkür. It may proceed with calculating understanding, asking in which direction “more satisfaction” is to be gained; or it may proceed by any other arbitrary consideration that happens to prevail. In either case, the point is not that calculation is always foolish or that impulse is always blind; the point is that, so long as the will’s criteria remain external to the drives themselves and external to the will’s own rational universality, the ordering of motives is accidental. The will becomes an arena in which impulses bargain, compete, or are suppressed, while the “I” experiences itself as free merely because it can shift the balance. Yet this shifting is not freedom in truth. It is the management of a conflict by a formal power of choice, without an internal standard capable of giving the conflict a rational resolution—one that would not simply exchange one preference for another, but would determine what ought to count as decisive.
With respect to how we judge the drives, dialectic presents itself in the familiar oscillation between two opposed verdicts. On the one hand, insofar as the determinations of the immediate will are immanent—belonging positively to the living natural will—they are taken to be good. In that sense one says: the human being is by nature good. On the other hand, insofar as these same determinations are natural determinations—hence opposed to freedom and to the concept of spirit as such, and therefore negative—one declares that they must be eradicated. In that sense one says: the human being is by nature evil. Both judgments seize on something real in the phenomenon: drives are indeed one’s own and therefore have a positive presence in life; yet drives are also immediate natural givens, and precisely as such they can stand in tension with the will’s claim to be free, i.e. to be determined from itself in the mode of the concept rather than from nature.
But at this standpoint—the standpoint where the will is still immediate and freedom is still Willkür—the decisive factor for either assertion is once again subjective arbitrariness. If one praises the drives as “good,” one has not yet provided a measure by which their goodness is to be distinguished from mere pleasantness or vitality; if one condemns them as “evil,” one has not yet shown how eradication could be anything other than an abstract negation of nature, or how spirit could actually live without the material through which it must first appear. In both cases one is making an absolute claim—“good by nature,” “evil by nature”—while still lacking the concept that would justify the claim. This is why the dispute does not resolve itself at the level of immediate willing. Without an immanent standard that belongs to freedom itself, evaluation vacillates between affirmation and denunciation, and the selection of one side over the other becomes a matter of Willkür: the same formal freedom that can choose among drives now chooses among doctrines about drives.
To be continued…
Simon Gros 
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