G.W.F. Hegel

Dudley Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754627265
• eBook ISBN: 9781351935111
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Hegel is notable for his distinctive contribution to the perennial concerns of political philosophy. He outlines a powerful account of freedom as both a personal and social achievement, discussing theories of personal rights, private property and punishment. He articulates a social analysis of human action and criticizes Kantian ethics. His theory of self-actualization locates our social identities within 'Ethical Life' - the institutions of family life, civil society and the state - expressing a unique variety of rationalist conservatism. In this volume some of the finest interpreters of Hegel writing in English explore this distinguished heritage and explain its contemporary relevance.

Part I
The Distinctive Character of Hegel’s Approach to Political Philosophy

[1]
Hegel’s Doppelsatz:
A Neutral Reading

ROBERT STERN*

IN THE PREFACE to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes one of his most well-known and frequently discussed remarks:

What is rational is actual;

and what is actual is rational

This conviction is shared by every ingenuous consciousness as well as by philosophy, and the latter takes it as its point of departure in considering both the spiritual and the natural universe. (GPR, 24–25; EPR, 20)¹

Sometimes known as the Doppelsatz (or “double dictum”),² this saying has been seized on by Hegel’s critics as a summation of his conservatism and quietism, whilst his defenders have argued that this is not so, and that read correctly it in fact harbors a critical dimension that allows the Philosophy of Right as a whole to be read in a progressive way.

It is perhaps a sign of the growing respect for Hegel and his thought that the conservative reading of the Doppelsatz has lost virtually all support (at least among Hegel scholars), while the critical or progressive reading holds sway.³ My aim in this paper is not to return to the conservative reading; but I want to argue that the Doppelsatz should not be given a critical reading either, so that the position I offer is neutral between the two. My claim will be that when Hegel identifies what is actual with what is rational in the Doppelsatz, his intention is not to offer a normative assessment of what is actual (as both the conservative and progressive readings assume, differing only over what exactly is being normatively endorsed); rather, it is to suggest that genuine philosophy must be committed to reason in its methods of inquiry, if it is to properly undertake an investigation into the “spiritual universe” as well as the “natural” one. On my view, then, Hegel identifies what is actual and what is rational in the Doppelsatz not in order to say that the actual is right or good (to “legitimate” or “sanctify” the actual, as it is sometimes put⁴), but to remind his readers that philosophy has a basic commitment to reason as the proper way to engage with the world at a fundamental level (the level of what is actual); it is this that makes the identity of what is actual with what is rational a “point of departure” for philosophy. The Doppelsatz is thus a defense of philosophical rationalism, rather than a normative claim about was ist wirklich in either a conservative sense (as simply what is) or a progressive sense (as what is when properly realized).

I will begin (in §1) by briefly outlining the way in which the debate concerning the Doppelsatz has been conducted, and will then (in §§2–3) contrast this with the neutral reading I propose; finally (in §4) I will defend that reading against possible objections.

I

The conservative reading to which contemporary critical or progressive readings of the Doppelsatz are opposed is exemplified by Karl Popper in his Open Society and Its Enemies, where he claims that according to Hegel “what is, is good,”⁵ and where he takes the Doppelsatz as a summary of that Hegelian view:

Hegel [maintains] that everything that is reasonable must be real, and everything that is real must be reasonable, and that the development of reality is the same as that of reason. And since there can be no higher standard in existence than the latest development of Reason and of the Idea, everything that is now real or actual exists by necessity, and must be reasonable as well as good. (Particularly good, as we shall see, is the actually existing Prussian state.)⁶

Thus, on Popper’s reading, Hegel’s Doppelsatz is taken to be conservative, in the sense that it claims that whatever exists (such as the Prussian state of Hegel’s time) is rational and therefore good, and to be quietistic, in the sense that it claims that everything that is rational and good already exists: the Doppelsatz therefore rules out the possibility of normative criticism of current social arrangements (and hence is conservative), and the need to do anything to make them better since the good is already realized (and hence is quietistic). Conservative readings of this sort then characteristically link the Doppelsatz to Hegel’s wider philosophical position (so, in Popper’s case, he ties it to Hegel’s supposed historicism, where Hegel is said to hold that “there can be no higher standard in existence than the latest development of Reason and of the Idea”), and to the historical background to the Philosophy of Right (where Hegel is seen as a spokesman for the Prussian restoration) .

In response to this conservative reading of the Doppelsatz, defenders of Hegel have argued that it is based on a fundamental misconception of what he is saying.⁷ In particular, it is emphasised that in the Doppelsatz, Hegel uses the term ‘actuality’ (Wirklichkeit), and this is seen as having a technical sense for Hegel: to be “actual,” something must not just exist, but must conform to its essential nature.⁸ It is argued, therefore, that Hegel is not simply claiming here that “what is, is good,” if that is taken to mean “whatever happens to be, is good.” For, it is only what is actual (in Hegel’s sense) that is good, which will exclude many existing states—states which exist but which do not properly exemplify what an actual state should be. Given this distinction, therefore, it is argued that Hegel’s Doppelsatz is neither conservative nor quietistic. It is not conservative, because Hegel’s notion of “actuality” leaves room for a critical gap between a thing as it is (as it exists) and its essence (as it should be), in those cases where states are not actual, and therefore not rational. And the Doppelsatz is not quietistic, because we may intelligibly act to make an existing state more wirklich, by using Hegel’s essentialist conception of “actuality” to make sense of the idea of working to draw the existence of things closer to their essence, for example through social reform.⁹ Progressive readings of this sort will then characteristically go on to question conservative readings of Hegel’s wider philosophical position and the conservative account of Hegel’s political allegiances at the time when the Preface to the Philosophy of Right came to be written.

I think that most would now agree that the proponents of the progressive reading of the Doppelsatz are right to claim that as it stands the conservative reading is misguided, and that it is a mistake to interpret it as saying that “what is, is good.” It is then natural to think, if the conservative reading is false in this way, then this in itself establishes the truth of the progressive reading, so that precisely in drawing on the Existenz/Wirkslichkeit distinction here, Hegel’s aim was in fact to signal the critical implications of the Doppelsatz, in the way that the progressive reading suggests. However, I want to argue that if we look closely at the context of the Doppelsatz within the Preface of the Philosophy of Right, this is not so clear. That is, I will argue in the next two sections that while the proponents of the progressive reading are right to claim that the Doppelsatz is not saying that “what is, is good,” they are wrong to suggest that instead it is saying “only what is actual, is good, and much that merely exists is bad.” I will argue, rather, that the Doppelsatz is neutral on such normative questions, so neither the conservative nor the progressive reading is correct.

2

One assumption concerning the Doppelsatz that both the conservative and the progressive readings of it share is that in using the term vernünftig here, Hegel is (in part at least) expressing a positive normative assessment of it. As Michael Hardimon puts it: “‘Rational,’ as Hegel uses the term, has both an epistemic and a normative aspect; roughly speaking, it means both rationally intelligible and reasonable or good.”¹⁰ This assumption concerning Hegel’s use of the term ‘rational’ in the Doppelsatzis of course what gets the whole dispute between conservative and progressive readings going in the first place: Hegel is assumed to be endorsing something as right or good, so the question is, is he endorsing things as they happen to be (as on the conservative reading), or things as they would be if fully “actual” (as on the progressive reading)?

Now, the question of Hegel’s understanding of the term ‘rational’ is of course a complex one, as it too is a technical term for Hegel, and to explain it fully would involve a detailed account of his whole philosophical position. However, the narrower suggestion I want to make here is that when Hegel comes to use the term ‘rational’ in the Doppelsatz in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, it may be wrong to assume he is using it normatively; rather, he may be using the term purely methodologically. On this account, that is, in stating that the actual is rational and the rational is actual, Hegel is telling us that what is actual can be investigated by reason and what reason investigates is the actual, rather than that some state of affairs is right or good. In other words, the Doppelsatz is simply part of his argument for having “faith in reason” as the central method of philosophical inquiry, rather than an assessment of the normative status of ‘the actual,’ however that term is understood.¹¹

To see that this is so, it is necessary to look in more detail than is usually done at the context of the Doppelsatz in the Preface.¹² I will begin by first exploring the kind of thing Hegel characteristically tries to achieve in the introductory remarks to his works, and then in the next section will use this to help me offer a detailed reading of the Preface itself along the lines I have suggested.

As is well-known, Hegel had a rather contemptuous view of the place of prefaces and introductions in philosophical works, holding that they were too often used by lazy readers to avoid getting to grips with the works themselves,¹³ while if a philosophical system could be summed up in a preface, it was surely of little value. He therefore does not use the introductory sections of his writings to attempt any real exposition of the book as a whole, or any defense of its conclusions; instead, he mainly uses them to deal with meta-level issues, concerning the nature of the work as a work of philosophy, and therefore with the question of what philosophy (in Hegel’s view) is.

In Hegel’s discussions of the nature of philosophy, he characteristically presents it as a discipline in crisis, held in deserved disrepute in many quarters, given the failure of contemporary philosophers to find a proper way of doing the subject. He then warns against the dangers of this disrespect for philosophy, as tantamount to a disrespect for reason and thought itself, and offers his own philosophical approach as a way of reviving the philosophical tradition, and thus as enabling us to return to a kind of rationalism that is in grave danger of being lost. So, for example, in the Preface to the first edition of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel comments on the contemporary “indifference” to and “contempt” for philosophy “as a science [Wissenschaft],” such that philosophy has become shallow and empty, and thereby deserves to have fallen from its cultural preeminence. Nonetheless, he suggests that it is impossible for us to lose respect for “the higher cognition” of philosophy proper, since “the inner drive of rational insight” is what “alone gives man his dignity.” Once philosophy returns to this “higher cognition”—which with his own work he clearly thinks it will—philosophy will then naturally regain its place as the pinnacle of human culture, while at the same time putting that culture on the right path.¹⁴ Then, in the Preface to the second edition, Hegel focuses more on those who see philosophy as a threat to other ways of thinking, particularly religion and morality, where again he is concerned to stress the need these ways of thinking have of philosophy, if they are to retain their rational core and proper justification. Likewise, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel considers his philosophical treatment of nature in relation to the empirical sciences, and attempts to show that there is a distinctive place for the former as a particular sort of inquiry, different from but related to the la...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• G.W.F. Hegel
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER OF HEGEL’S APPROACH TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• PART II HEGEL ON WILL AND ABSTRACT RIGHT
• PART III HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION AND CRITICISM OF KANT
• PART IV ETHICAL LIFE: FAMILY, CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE STATE
• Name Index