The Free Will Which Wills the Free Will : On Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right

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1 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) The Free Will Which Wills the Free Will : On Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right D. C. Schindler The John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America Abstract: This paper aims to present Hegel s conception of freedom as being at home with oneself in an other in simple and straightforward terms. Drawing primarily on the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel outlines the nature of the will, and then the first part of the discussion of Sittlichkeit (ethical substance), in which the will finds its most concrete realization, the paper presents marriage as the paradigm of Hegel s notion of freedom. Hegel s abstract formulation, the free will which wills the free will, is fulfilled in marriage as a communal willing of community. A common complaint regarding Hegel is that he ultimately leaves no place for freedom. The complaint is ironic because one could fairly easily argue that Hegel, at least nominally, accords freedom perhaps more importance in his philosophy than any other thinker before or even after him: not only is it the capstone of his anthropology, 1 the foundation of his political philosophy, 2 and the goal of history as he conceives it, 3 but freedom represents the very essence of spirit, 4 it is the inner principle of his philosophy of nature, 5 and even appears within the structure of logic (!) as he conceives it. 6 In a word, freedom is the heart of philosophy, for Hegel, and it is so because it is the heart of reality simply. 7 If Hegel does indeed state these things clearly, whence arises the common complaint? An attempt to answer this question leads us to yet another irony: it seems to be the case that the very importance Hegel accords freedom transforms it to such an extent that many people find it distorted beyond recognition. In other words, it is not that Hegel has no room for freedom, but that what he means by freedom is not what anyone else does. The Hegel Society of America - ISSN DOI: /owl pp

2 94 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) Admittedly, his general definition of freedom Being at home with oneself in an other 8 does not seem to have any evident correlate in the history of thought. 9 Of course, he himself was aware of this peculiarity, and once remarked that the concept of freedom was, of all the concepts in philosophy, the most frequently misunderstood. 10 It is important to realize, however, that a misunderstanding, for Hegel, is almost invariably a partial understanding that mistakes itself for the whole. Accordingly, Hegel thought that the various conventional ideas about freedom, which indeed contain some indispensable truth, needed to be integrated, they needed to find their proper place within a more comprehensive understanding. Hegel thus aimed not to invent a new meaning of the word, but rather to articulate the genuine whole of which these more familiar ideas are parts or aspects, and in this way to discover their truth. Without a context to give these aspects of freedom purpose and meaning, Hegel felt that they could in fact turn out to be quite dangerous. While we do not have, as Hegel did, the Terror of the French Revolution as a recent memory, the charge that the usual modern notion of freedom is, if not actually destructive, at least seriously impoverished, has become common enough that we ought to find the proposal of a more rich and comprehensive alternative notion worth considering. The purpose of this essay, thus, is to set into relief what appears to be most distinctive about Hegel s notion of freedom, namely, its essentially social or communal character, and to attempt to do so in a brief, straightforward, and nontechnical way. Because of constraints of space, we will not try to defend his particular notion of freedom, and will raise a couple of critical questions only in conclusion. But the effort to give simple expression to Hegel s notion can be judged worthwhile, we hope, for three reasons: first, because one cannot defend or criticize something in any event until one understands what it is; second, because what we will suggest is the most distinctive aspect of Hegel s notion is rarely recognized indeed, it is all but absent from the secondary English-language literature on Hegel; 11 and, third, because this aspect presents what seems to be one of the most genuine alternatives available to the notion we are most familiar with from classical liberal political philosophy without being simply its opposite. We will pursue our aim here by offering an explanation of the notion of will that Hegel elaborates in the introduction to his Philosophy of Right, an explanation that takes its bearings from the context of the Philosophy of Right in Hegel s system. Then, we will present the particular community of persons called marriage and family, which Hegel describes in part three

3 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 95 of his book, as a paradigm of Hegel s account of the will, and so a paradigm of freedom simply. We will end the presentation with a couple of questions for future exploration. Preliminary Observations I. Hegel s Notion of the Will Let us begin with what might seem the most obvious approach to Hegel s political philosophy. In looking over the contents of Hegel s 1820 book, The Philosophy of Right which discusses rights, property, contracts, morality, and the various legal institutions that comprise social life in the modern state one would naturally take this to represent his practical philosophy, as distinct from his theoretical philosophy (i.e. his metaphysics); in other words, this book would seem to deal, not with the essence of reality as grasped by the mind, but rather with the field of action, specifically with the laws, in both the moral and legal sense, governing human social behavior. 12 This impression would seem to be confirmed by the fact that, in the book s introduction, Hegel presents freedom as the essential basis of political order, and goes on to elaborate a conception of the will as a background for the discussion to follow in the body of the text. Thus, one would naturally assume, the will, as the power to choose and execute one s judgments, is the faculty of action, it is that by which individuals enter into contact with one another in the public sphere, and the content of the Philosophy of Right would accordingly represent an articulation of the proper framework for this social interaction. Indeed, Hegel praises Rousseau for having recognized that the will and its freedom is the foundation of political order. 13 But this apparently common sense approach to Hegel s Philosophy of Right stumbles on two points, even before it undertakes a more detailed investigation of the content of the book s introduction. In the first place, Hegel defines the idea of freedom in this introduction as the free will which wills the free will. 14 If we understand the will as the individual s power to choose, this definition would identify freedom with an individual s choosing, not any particular good, but simply a capacity: choosing the power to choose. This, though, would be an utterly empty notion of freedom. Indeed, it would be radically individualistic, entirely closed up within itself, in which case we would be at a loss to explain how a notion of freedom as antisocial as this could form the basis for the political order Hegel describes in the rest

4 96 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) of the book. Moreover, choosing the power to choose bears not the slightest resemblance to Hegel s general definition of freedom as being at home with oneself in an other, and so it cannot be a proper interpretation of what Hegel means by the free will willing the free will. The second obstacle becomes evident only when we step back and view things from a wider angle. It is curious that Hegel elaborates his notion of will, and the freedom that is its essence, not, as one might expect, primarily in the sphere of subjective spirit, which is Hegel s philosophical anthropology, his discussion of the nature of the human being and the various elements that constitute that nature, but rather in the sphere of objective spirit. This sphere is the place wherein Hegel elaborates the social dimensions of the human nature he presented in subjective spirit, or more specifically, the actuality of that nature, realized in the world. If Hegel elaborates the meaning of will in the context of objective spirit, it already suggests that he thinks of the will as an essentially social reality, which belongs to man specifically in his relation to others. Let us examine the transition from subjective to objective spirit in Hegel s system a little more closely. The actual free will appears at the very end of Hegel s treatment of subjective spirit, marking the point at which spirit enters objectivity proper, and it is defined there as the unity of theoretical and practical spirit. 15 It is important to note that Hegel tends to avoid the traditional terms intelligence and will in this context so as not to encourage what he describes as the confusion that takes these to be two separate powers of the soul, which have their essence in themselves and then coordinate with the other only subsequently. As he put it in his lectures on the Philosophy of Right, this confusion supposes that a human being thinks on the one hand and wills on the other, and that he has thought in one pocket and volition in the other. 16 Instead, for Hegel, each of these includes the other; each in fact is the other, or better, each represents the whole spirit under the aspect of one or the other relation to the world. Theoretical spirit is the subject s having elevated the world (the object) through thought to the level of reason: we may say that it represents the internalizing of the world in the spirit. Practical spirit, then, is the externalizing of the spirit, as it were, into the world, or its becoming objective. In this case, the spirit determines the content of the world in terms of reason through praxis. This is why the emergence of practical spirit marks the transition into objective spirit. To speak of actual free will as the unity of these two dimensions is to affirm an adequation of the inside and the outside, the perfect realization

5 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 97 of the spirit in the world. Prior to the elaboration of a sophisticated faculty psychology in scholastic philosophy, Augustine called by some the discoverer of the will conceived it, not as a separate power, but as the whole soul as active, i.e. as turned toward the good. 17 Hegel may rightly be interpreted as recovering this holistic view of will (practical spirit), though in a distinctly modern idiom as productive rather than as appetitive. Now, it is especially important to see that Hegel ascribes will to man specifically as spirit. We will say more about the social nature of spirit, in Hegel s philosophy, in section II below. For now, we note simply that spirit represents man in his actual unity with what lies beyond him. The philosophy of subjective spirit has three main parts: the Anthropology, wherein Hegel discusses the soul as the internal unity, the animating principle, of the human organism; the Phenomenology, wherein he presents self-conscious subjectivity as the ego s growing awareness of both itself and its other; and finally the Psychology, wherein he develops spirit as the unity of the self and other, subject and object. In a way that we will elaborate below, spirit is, as it were, man considered as already in the world, as already in relation to the other, and the will, then, is one of the ways of characterizing this relation. Typically, we think of the will as a faculty that the individual possesses in himself, as part of the make-up of his rational soul, a faculty that is what it is simply in itself, as an instrument that is essentially indifferent to any of the uses that might be made of it. But, for Hegel, this conception would represent a failure to think of will precisely in terms of spirit; instead, it is a conception that reduces the will, we might say, to the level of self-conscious subjectivity, insofar as it absolutizes the separation. He criticizes this view as that belonging to the understanding [Verstand] rather than properly to reason [Vernunft]: The understanding stops at mere being-in-itself and therefore calls freedom in accordance with this being-in-itself a faculty [Vermögen], since it is indeed in this case a mere potentiality [Möglichkeit]. But the understanding regards this determination as absolute and perennial, and takes the relationship [Beziehung] of freedom to what it wills, or in general to its reality, merely as its application to a given material, an application which does not belong to the essence of freedom itself. 18 Hegel s aim, by contrast, is to define the will and its freedom in terms of actuality or completion rather than possibility or potentiality. His goal is thus to make realization the essential moment, which gives his view of the will an unfamiliar note of objectivity from first to last. For example, he describes property in The Philosophy of Right, not as an object one has the right to use as he wishes i.e. a

6 98 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) thing to which he may externally apply his will however he sees fit but as the objectivity of the will, and so in a certain respect as identical to the will itself: Hence everyone has the right to make his will a thing [Sache] or to make the thing his will, or, in other words, to supersede the thing and transform it into his own, for the thing, as externality, has no end in itself, and is not infinite self-reference but something external to itself.... This manifestation [of the supremacy of the will over the thing] occurs through my conferring upon the thing an end other than that which it immediately possessed; I give the living creature, as my property, a soul other than that which it previously had; I give it my soul. 19 If Hegel introduces the notion of free will as the culmination of subjective spirit, it is thus only in an abstract outline which then receives its essential features in the social sphere of objectivity. This general sense of the will allows us, now, to reassess what is going on in the Philosophy of Right. It is not the case that Hegel presents a description of the will as the individual faculty of choice in the introduction and then discusses the application of this faculty to the social order, that is, the exercise of the will in relation to a variety of objects, and ultimately to other human beings. 20 Instead, we ought to see that the book is an unfolding of the objective manifestation of reason or spirit through the progressively complex dimensions of social life: rights, contracts, moral principles, conscience, family, economics, the police, the state, and world history. In other words, in the most proper sense, the will is not merely the protagonist of the book, but equally the plot and perhaps above all the conclusion. We do not know what the will is properly until the end. 21 This allows us, incidentally, to read the book in a much more dramatic light. And it suggests, already, that Hegel s understanding of will is not something essentially empty, as we might have feared, but rather quite full of content. This broader view of the nature of the will in Hegel allows us to interpret properly the specific judgments he makes in his elaboration of the nature of the will in the introduction ( 1 33). We will focus here in a rather schematic way on the three aspects that constitute the body of the introduction, namely, his account of the essential form of the will, his characterization of its proper content, and the unity of the two in the Idea of freedom. 22 The discussion of the will in the introduction may be articulated thus: A. The form of the will ( 5 8) B. The content of the will ( 9 20) C. The Idea of the will as unity of form and content ( 21 28)

7 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 99 The Form of the Will Regarding form, Hegel says that the freedom of the will is best described as self-determination. 23 This definition is no surprise to anyone familiar with modern philosophy, but this familiarity makes it especially important to note that the phrase means something rather unfamiliar as Hegel uses it. While we would normally identify self-determination with the will s power to determine itself, Hegel means primarily the accomplishment of that power, its results, though he does not mean this in a way that excludes the power that brings it about. Self-determination, for him, can be analyzed into three distinct aspects or moments. First is the self that, prior to any particular choice, is indeterminate, and indeed infinitely so: it is capable of almost anything. The self, considered in abstraction from anything to which it might direct its choice, is initially in a state of (relatively) infinite possibility. Hegel calls this moment negative freedom ; it represents the native human ability to detach oneself from any particular reality, whatever it might be. Indeed, Hegel observes that this aspect of freedom is so radical that the self is able to detach itself from its very self: man is the only animal capable of suicide. 24 It is important to note that he both criticizes this common view of freedom as dangerously inadequate in itself and also insists that it is an essential element of freedom more comprehensively understood. 25 While this indeterminacy is intoxicating, it is empty in itself, and so requires some determination. Second, then, is the choice that negates the negation, that is, cancels out the emptiness of sheer indeterminacy. This moment is a resolution, a settling on one option rather than any of the others, and so a specifying or concretizing, of the previously open, but empty, possibility. According to Hegel, this aspect, like the first, belongs to freedom, but does not constitute the whole of freedom. 26 The essential form of the will, finally, lies in the third moment, which is the unity of the two, the self and determination brought together as selfdetermination. What Hegel intends by the phrase in this context is that the self identifies itself with a particular choice, which means that the self embraces the choice as its own, as expressing something essential about itself. Self-determination, far from any power, is thus, we might say, the incarnation of the self, its becoming real, through a choice that gives it definite form. Properly speaking, then, the will is not some thing existing in itself prior to any choice, but comes about in the choice insofar as it is embraced as expressing some truth of the will, and so affirmed as the will s external

8 100 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) existence. Interestingly, Augustine presents a similar insight when, in his Confessions, he describes the state of unfreedom as the will s not being identical with what it chooses (non ideo est, quod imperat). 27 As Hegel himself puts it, the will is not complete and universal until it is determined, and until this determination is superseded and idealized; it does not become will until it is this self-mediating activity and this return to itself. 28 To put it simply, will is not the potency, the power that determines itself to one object or another; instead, while clearly including this point, the will is more adequately defined as the actualized potency of the subject s unity with its object. We may thus articulate the form of the will in the following way: A. Self (indeterminacy: the abstract infinite) B. Determination (particularity of choice: the finite) C. Self-determination (the unity of the two as concrete infinity 29 ) The Content of the Will Now, self-determination is the essential definition of freedom, but it is as yet merely formal; it is only an outline of what freedom is, and not yet the reality of it. (This point is often missed by even some of the best interpreters of Hegel. 30 ) The content of self-determination has yet to be specified. It is not just any choice with which the self is able to identify itself; the nature of the choice matters. As we have said, it ultimately has to be adequate to the nature of what chooses. By insisting on the significance of the content of acts of the will, Hegel may be said to be recovering an ancient view beyond the modern notion of freedom as indifferent power, though, unlike the ancients, he does not judge that content in relation to the good, but ultimately in relation to spirit. 31 Initially, after specifying self-determination, Hegel observes that the self can identify itself with a particular choice precisely by recognizing it as one of its many possibilities, a recognition that allows the self to transcend the particularity of this determination and thus hold onto its infinite indeterminacy even within this particular resolution. 32 But if we stop here, we end up coming to a rest in something like the empty indeterminacy that Hegel had described as negative freedom. It is not enough to say that the self does not lose itself in the particularity of its choices; to be free in a real sense, the self has to find itself, positively, in some particular choice, specifically a choice with which it can identify truly because the thing chosen represents a reality adequate to the self.

9 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 101 Hegel thus turns, after presenting the form of freedom as self-determination, to consider different kinds of content, which he (unsurprisingly) distinguishes into three types according to what makes them desirable, i.e. why they are chosen. The first consists of the things we choose simply because we want them. In other words, they are things that present themselves immediately to us on the basis of our natural drives, impulses, and instincts. The second are things that we choose, not because of a natural inclination, but simply because it is our choice. What Hegel means by the term he uses here, Willkür the English translation, arbitrariness, 33 works only if we understand the word in its etymological sense is not just, as one might initially think, a choice that is totally random or groundless in the sense of having no natural end, but rather also the choice that one makes on the basis of reason, understood here precisely as what transcends nature. He thus mentions Kant s notion of freedom the autonomy of reason as an example of what he means by the term. 34 Interestingly, Hegel claims that Willkür is the most common notion people have of freedom, saying that this is what is meant when people describe freedom as being able to do as one pleases. 35 But for Hegel, neither self-determination as surrender to natural desires nor self-determination as the formal self-activity of reason are adequate. This latter is inadequate because it remains merely formal, identifying reason not with any substantial content but simply with itself in abstraction from all content, i.e. as nothing but internal self-consistency. Note, this criticism would apply equally to the conventional sense of Willkür ( I want to do whatever it is I want to do ) and the Kantian sense of the categorical imperative as the absence of contradiction. Though they may be completely opposed in one respect (absolute licentiousness is clearly at the other end of the spectrum from Kant s rigorous deontologism), the two cases are the same insofar as they take the will s (formal) unity with itself to be the essential point. According to Hegel, such a view will tend to define reason in opposition to nature. The adequate content of will can be neither nature on its own nor reason on its own, but rather the unity of the two. At the end of his philosophy of subjective spirit, Hegel had described this unity as happiness, i.e. complete subjective fulfillment. 36 Here, however, in the context of objective spirit, he identifies this unity making implicit reference to Friedrich Schiller s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man with education. 37 Schiller described education [Bildung] in aesthetic terms as the formation of the whole person, wherein the

10 102 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) life of the body becomes, so to speak, transparent to the soul, and the soul becomes substantialized by expressing itself directly in the body. Thus, the natural drives are not gratified simply in their raw immediacy, but rather in a specifically human or rational way, and reason s ideals are not forcibly imposed on things, but brought about organically, we might say. 38 As educated in this sense, we pursue our ends not merely in reference to ourselves in our material individuality, but at the same time as exhibiting cultural form, and so in an idealized manner. In other words, we not only achieve, we also represent; we give expression in our choices to what it properly means to be human simply. Through education, one no longer lives as a mere particular individual that is in principle, if not in actuality, opposed to all other individuals, but now specifically as man. Education, thus conceived, is the universalization of the human being that is, a turning toward one in a double sense: both uniting his nature and reason within, and uniting the individual and the community without. As an expression of Bildung, the content of the will becomes rational differently from the way it does in Kant, since it is now rational in a truly objective, and so in a more-than-merely-formal sense. The content of the will can thus be articulated in the following way: A. Nature (instincts and immediate desires) B. Reason (formal self-consistency) C. Education (the unity of nature and reason and so concrete universality) The Idea of the Will It may seem at this point that we have reached a kind of adequation of the will to itself, insofar as the will is the objectification of Geist, and education represents an objective content that is now concretely rational. However, if we look back on the discussion so far, we see that we have the form of the will as self-determination, and its content as the universal; but the complete idea of freedom, for Hegel, is the unity of form and content. It is only when self-determination and concrete universality come together that we have a unity of will and reason, which is to say that we have spirit that has become objective. But what does the unity of self-determination and concrete universality mean? It is only here that we come to see what is truly distinctive in Hegel s notion of freedom: the free will is universal self-determination, or, indeed, self-determining universality. 39 This means that free will is not merely an individual willing a supra-individual object, but a supra-individual willing of supra-individuality. In other words, freedom is the transcendence

11 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 103 of particularity not only in the object of the will, but also in the subject that wills. The Idea of freedom, which in Hegel s terminology means the actualized essence as the unity of form and content, is a social reality. Because of this fact, it is not something that can be adequately described without reference to the concrete institutions that constitute the political order. Hegel therefore presents it at the end of his discussion of the nature of the will in an essentially abstract formulation: The abstract concept of the Idea of the will is in general the free will which wills the free will. 40 Expressed thus, and especially given the conventional notion of will, it is quite difficult, as we mentioned at the outset, to avoid misconstruing what he means here as a purely self-enclosed activity of the ego choosing its own choosing. But at the end of the introduction, we do not have a complete understanding of the will in itself, which we will then see applied to the elements of the political order. Instead, we have an abstract description of the end of political order, which will help us to learn what the will is along the path toward that end. In sum, the Idea of the will can be articulated thus: A. Form (self-determination) B. Content (universality) C. Idea (self-determining universality, or the free will which wills the free will) II. Marriage as a Substance Our discussion so far has remained within the introduction of the Philosophy of Right. Having reached at the end of the introduction what we might call an essentially social concept of will, Hegel then turns in the book to present the various dimensions of politics and ethics as relative expressions of this will, which seeks its most adequate form. While we do not have the space here to enter into any details in this progression, it bears remarking that the notion of will he develops in the introduction allows him to interpret these dimensions in specifically social terms, which casts them in a new light with respect to the mainstream classical liberal tradition. Thus, for example, property is not just an individual s possession, but precisely as such is the presence of the individual in the public sphere for which he has responsibility; rights are inherently social realities and thus coincide from the beginning with duties; morality is not simply about conscience or subjective intentions but objective actions in relation to others, and so forth. For our purposes, we are going to leap directly to what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit (sometimes translated as Ethical life ) a word that essentially designates community, the common

12 104 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) existence of individuals because it is only here that Hegel says we have spirit actualized precisely as spirit. 41 To understand why, we must first sketch in a few words what Hegel means in fact by spirit, Geist. The Social Nature of Spirit Hegel s concept of Geist is certainly notorious; some find the notion downright spooky, for it conjures up an image of some disembodied master being, hovering over the world and from this distance hiddenly dictating the movements of history. It has become common, therefore, among Hegel scholars today, to dismiss any metaphysical or transcendent interpretation of Geist and instead to translate his thinking into the apparently more credible categories of (Kantian) critical philosophy. 42 But to do so ultimately sacrifices what is most distinctive in Hegel on the basis of a straw man if the expression is appropriate in this context for the transcendence of spirit is a fairly ordinary and evident part of life, even if this transcendence has not often been recognized by philosophers. Spirit, for Hegel, is not simply, as a well-known scholar puts it, some sort of general consciousness, a single mind common to all men, 43 but has a more concrete aspect. It emerges in the relation between subjects, i.e. in intersubjectivity, but it is more than just an interaction between individual subjects. Indeed, it is this interaction considered as having a certain reality in itself that is distinct not only from the particular individuals that constitute it, but also from their sum as discrete units. It is, so to speak, the we-ness of a coming together of persons, it is what one has in mind when one talks, for example, about doing a particular thing for our relationship, and one does not simply mean doing something for oneself or for the other, or for both people individually. There is nothing particularly strange about this. But what is novel is perhaps the significance Hegel discovers in it, and this discovery is arguably the key to what makes his concept of freedom unique. For Hegel, this we-ness represents a distinctive kind of being, which is analogous to all the other sorts of beings we more readily recognize. In fact, he shows that he intends this analogy quite directly not only by calling this being substance [Substanz] (ousia), that is, using the metaphysical term common to the tradition, but indeed by describing the relation between what he calls an ethical whole and its members as like the relation between a substance and its accidents in natural philosophy. 44 Just as, for Aristotle, a substance represents a whole greater than the sum of its parts an excess expressed in the distinction of

13 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 105 form from matter 45 so too do individuals who come together in a particular way (yet to be described) form something genuinely new, something that can be said to have a reality in itself, precisely because its members can legitimately make the whole an end in their individual activity. Indeed, for Hegel and this is certainly a controversial point we will mention again at the end human community is in fact more perfectly representative of a substance than any natural thing because it possesses an end character (in Hegel s language it has being in and for itself) more completely than any merely material thing can. 46 If people have had difficulty coming to terms with Hegel s notion of community as a substance, it may be because they take a material being as the paradigm of substance, and then of course cannot see how a community can be a being in this particular sense except perhaps metaphorically. But for Hegel, the analogy would properly move in the other direction. The reason human beings are able to constitute an ethical substance is due to the immateriality of spirit. Matter, according to Hegel, is characterized by externality: partes extra partes. 47 No two material things can occupy the same place at the same time; matter displaces itself. But spirit has the character of what we might call non-exclusionary, or self-transcending, interiority. (This is in fact what Hegel means by absolute negativity, which is what he says constitutes the essence of spirit. 48 ) Two spiritual beings can be in quite a literal sense of one mind, because mind does not displace itself (or anything else in fact) in the way that matter does. This means that, insofar as I am spirit, I can be outside of myself in understanding something distinct from myself, in encountering some reality in the world without leaving myself behind, as it were. Hegel explains, accordingly, that the mode of being specific to spirit is manifestation [Manifestation or Offenbarung], communication without loss, or the externalizing of the interior reality of its being without eliminating or even diminishing its interiority. 49 But a spiritual being, obviously, cannot manifest itself precisely qua spirit, to anything other than another spiritual being. Even a particularly receptive pet does not ultimately suffice. 50 If spirit is manifestation, and manifestation requires another spirit, the spirit cannot exist in isolation. In other words, there can be one spirit only insofar as there are (at least) two spiritual subjects, and indeed there can be only one spirit in this case, because spirit cannot be set over against spirit as one (material) thing against another. If two individuals are opposed, they are at best selfconscious subjects, but not yet spirit.

14 106 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) Simply put, spirit is a socially constituted reality. But that does not mean that spirit is not real: as we observed above, it is more real than physical being since it more properly exists in and for itself than any merely physical thing does. Nor does it mean that spirit excludes individuality. Because of the non-exclusionary character of spirit, each subject can call this socially constituted spirit truly mine. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel narrates spirit s progressive coming-to-be, the moment that spirit in its most complete sense arrives on the scene in the developing texture of relations is in the act of confession. 51 In this act, the one self-conscious subject discloses itself to the other, offers to the other, what was initially held back from the other, a holding back that had left the two opposed to each other as one individual against the other. In the confession, they are reconciled, they become one, and so we might say spirit is thus born. In this reconciliation, in this unification of two subjects into a single reality without compromise of their distinction from each other, we have the fulfillment of the memorable definition of spirit that Hegel had formulated earlier in the Phenomenology: the absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: I that is We and We that is I. 52 This formulation allows us to understand what Hegel means by marriage in the Philosophy of Right, why he calls it a substance, and ultimately why it represents the reality of freedom in its most basic form. While the Philosophy of Right is an account of objective spirit, it is interesting to note that spirit as such does not emerge in the discussion in the first two parts of the book concerning abstract right and morality, for here we are looking at human beings as individuals in society 53 or as self-conscious, inter-relating agents, and not yet precisely as members of a more encompassing whole. Spirit proper first emerges at the level of Sittlichkeit, in which individuals understand their individuality only within the context of a community that in some sense precedes them. 54 Interestingly, it is also only here that we have freedom as an actual reality, which is to say, when spirit first becomes in principle adequate to itself. As Hegel says in the opening lines of his treatment of Sittlichkeit, Ethical life is the Idea of freedom as the living good... [and] is accordingly the concept of freedom which has become the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness. 55 We recall the abstract formulation of the Idea of freedom, The free will which wills the free will. What was articulated at the

15 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 107 end of the introduction as an abstraction definition now explicitly becomes in this third and final section of the PR a living good. Marriage It is helpful to look at marriage in this brief account of Hegel s view of freedom, first because marriage illustrates in a simple and vivid way what Hegel means by Sittlichkeit, and, second, because we are proposing that Sittlichkeit is in fact the actual free will that Hegel indicated at the end of the philosophy of subjective spirit, and so represents, so to speak, freedom incarnate. Needless to say, the description of marriage that follows is not at all meant to be a complete account of Hegel s understanding of the institution, but rather focuses only on those aspects immediately relevant to our discussion of freedom. 56 Hegel first mentions marriage early on in part one of The Philosophy of Right in his discussion of contracts, 57 but he does so only in order to insist that it does not belong under this heading: marriage is not for Hegel a contractual relationship, as, for example, Kant took it to be. What disturbs Hegel about Kant s view of marriage is not immediately what disturbs most people namely, that Kant considers marriage essentially a contractual exchange of property rights, the property in question being the spouses genitalia 58 though this no doubt has a connection to the more basic problem. The more basic problem for Hegel is that the contractual view of marriage conceives the relationship, the union, as simply subordinate to the two individuals, it reduces marriage to the coincidence of two separate wills that therefore remain extrinsic to each other even in their apparent intimacy. In this case, the individuals are absolutized in their particularity, which means that the separate individuals are the basis of the relation, the reference point in terms of which it is understood. If individuals as such represent the foundation, the togetherness can only ever be a mere instrument relative to the two separate substances. There is a lot at stake here, since if we do not surpass individualism in marriage, we really cannot expect to surpass it anywhere: a purely contractual view of marriage means atomistic individualism absolutized. In this case, we have no spirit in what Hegel calls its truth. 59 There are always two possible view points, Hegel observes, in the ethical realm: either one starts from substantiality, or one proceeds atomistically and moves upward from the basis of individuality [Einzelheit]. This latter viewpoint excludes

16 108 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) spirit, because it leads only to an aggregation, whereas spirit is not something individual [nichts Einzelnes] but the unity of the individual and the universal. 60 For Hegel, by contrast, while marriage does have its origin in individuals (and indeed in their power to choose) in some respect, since there is no marriage without two separate individuals freely giving their consent to one another, he nevertheless insists that its essential basis is something more. We can understand this something more most clearly in reference to the discussion of the nature of spirit, above. According to Hegel, the precise nature of marriage is to begin from the point of view of contract i.e. that of individual personality as a self-sufficient unity in order to supersede it. That identification of personalities whereby the family is a single person... is the ethical spirit. 61 The marriage, and eventually the family, is a single person in the sense that it represents a basic, in fact, the basic, unit of the social order (ethical substance, we might say, is made up, not of atoms, but of molecules); it is a single whole that represents an irreducible point of reference for the individuals that constitute it, and a distinct agent in the broader social order. Note, there is something truly unique about marriage in this: the act whereby two individuals form this community effects what we would have to call an ontological transformation: from two substances, we get a new substance, of which the two are henceforth members. How is such a thing possible? It can occur only by virtue of the nature of spirit, which, as we have seen, is manifestation, or self-communication. Seen in this light, the exchange of marriage vows can be interpreted as an act of reciprocal self-communication. What distinguishes this act from, say, a simple conversation, is two things: first, it is the communication of a totality of the self, and second, it is in principle definitive. What one communicates in the marriage vow is not some particular idea or experience, some aspect of my self or some possession, but rather myself as a whole person: I give myself to the other in such a way that I henceforward relate to myself always as belonging in a basic way to the other. We saw earlier that Hegel described the acquisition of property as a real-ization of will because, in the possession of property, I give to the thing, which has no soul itself, my soul. What is only intimated here, however, becomes perfectly manifest in the joining of oneself to an other in marriage. 62 Second, this can happen only if it is definitive, a gift of myself rather than merely a loan, even an indefinite one. In one respect, the exchange of vows is a single moment, a single act of self-determination, but in another respect, it

17 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 109 is a moment that includes implicitly within itself all future moments under a particular aspect. 63 Anything short of this would ultimately fail to bring into being a new substance, a true whole, a unity, rather than a simple aggregate of individuals. Moreover, this total communication of the self in the vow has to be reciprocal; it cannot be a communication unless it is properly received, and it can be properly received only in the form of a self-communication in response. A one-sided vow would be something more like a promise one makes to oneself to be devoted to an other, and so not a real communication, a bringing into being of ethical substance. 64 Hegel affirms that marriage is necessarily monogamous, because only thus can it be the total, i.e. undivided, surrender of the person. 65 In this sense, we ought to view the act of confession we referred to earlier as only a partial image of what has a complete form in the relation of marriage. It bears remarking, though we cannot explore it in the present context, that if marriage represents the first instantiation of objective spirit proper in the Philosophy of Right, it is not the last one. Hegel develops the notion of ethical substance beyond marriage and family, which he refers to as its natural existence, through the complex dimensions of civil society, and then, most comprehensively for him, in the state. A full treatment of freedom in Hegel would require a reflection on the essence of these dimensions, and how what we have described in relation to marriage relates to them. 66 Our specific purpose here, however, is not even to sound out Hegel s views of marriage and family per se, but simply to take marriage as a basic example to illuminate what Hegel means by freedom. And it is to this that we now turn. III. Marriage as Freedom For Hegel, marriage, as the fundamental instance of Sittlichkeit, is freedom in its most basic sense. It is only when we grasp the peculiarity of this assertion that we grasp the novel sense of the will that Hegel is proposing. What is being claimed here is not that marriage is one of the best uses of freedom, i.e. one of the best choices one can make, nor that marriage can exist only by virtue of the self-communication that human beings are capable of because they are free, nor even that, within the bonds of marriage and the kind of disciplining of our natural drives that they entail, individuals can become and be free in a profound and rich sense. All of these things are certainly true, and Hegel would of course want to affirm them. But the claim is more basic: these are all true because marriage is freedom, it is the real existence of

18 110 The Owl of Minerva 44:1 2 ( ) freedom in the world; as spirit in a nutshell, so to speak, marriage represents the proper subject of freedom in which individuals share by belonging to it. Human beings can be free in a real sense, for Hegel, only by virtue of marriage or of human communities that bear some analogy to marriage. In other words, speaking more generally, the existence of freedom requires belonging to a whole that is larger than oneself as an autonomous individual, so that autonomy represents at bottom, not the essence of freedom, but a threat to it. Note, this makes sense of his critique of social contract theories of political order: they take as foundational the deliberate exercise of will, and so will in its individual existence, rather than recognizing that the individual exercise, to be fully free, must be rooted in an individual-transcending ethical substance. 67 Let us, in this last part, briefly review the essential elements of Hegel s interpretation of the will that we presented in part one and consider how marriage as the natural form of Sittlichkeit exemplifies these. In the first place, we saw that the formal definition of the will, the essence of which is freedom, is self-determination, meaning not the power to determine oneself, but the actual determination of the self in a particular choice with which the self can identify. Significantly, in his lectures, Hegel gave as an example of such an identification of the self with a particular determination the phenomenon of friendship and love, in which we limit ourselves by binding ourselves to an other, but come to know ourselves in this limitation. 68 In other words, we might say that, instead of being less than we were before the particular choice, we are more; paradoxically, the limitation has expanded us. The choice of marriage, the act of will in which one gives oneself to the other, so that the self and the other are henceforward one, is the very form of self-determination as Hegel had defined it in the introduction. In this respect, we could say, quite in contrast to the normal view of the matter, that one comes to have a will, properly speaking, through and by virtue of the definitive selfcommunication in the act of consent. Prior to membership in a community, one has a potential will, but not a real one though of course we would have to add that there can scarcely be conceived such a thing as a human being without some such membership, and so without will in some form. Second, we explained that that in which one determines oneself realizes freedom only to the extent that it is rational, i.e. adequate to reason in Hegel s sense. This means that it is universal not only in its content as a genuinely educated act would be but also in its form. Meeting this criterion requires

19 Marriage as a Paradigm of Freedom in Hegel s Philosophy of Right 111 more than an individual transcending his particularity in the use he makes of his will; it requires, as we saw, that willing itself transcend particularity. Hegel described the concrete Idea of freedom as self-determining universality, which means it is not an individual s determining his own interest, but is a community determining together what is to be pursued. In other words, will proper is not just a willing of a common good, but a common willing of a common good, i.e. a joint willing in which we have a single act carried out by more than one subject. Here, too, we see how marriage is a paradigm of freedom. Finally, we return to Hegel s abstract, or merely formal, description of the will in its complete Idea, which means in its realized or actualized form, namely, the free will which wills the free will. While it may seem, upon first hearing this description, that Hegel gives expression to the most empty and egotistical existentialist nihilism, as we suggested at the outset, it has become clear by now that this would be the case only if we took for granted a notion of will as an individual s power to choose. But we have seen that, for Hegel, the will belongs most specifically, not to the isolated individual, but to spirit, which is to say that the most proper form of will is a shared will. Moreover, the will is not in the first place a power that can be indifferently applied to one content or another, but a realized actuality; thus conceived, it is full of content, it embraces in principle the whole of the world as the place wherein human community comes to be. Understood in this way, marriage, in which two individuals become one spirit through a reciprocal pledging of themselves, provides a paradigm of free will willing free will, which we can now translate into the terms of the living good of the ethical substance of marriage as two people jointly willing their togetherness and all that it entails. For the very same reason, marriage becomes a basic illustration of what it means for spirit to become objective, and so for freedom to become reality. According to Hegel s general definition, freedom is being at home with oneself in the other ; in the one-flesh union of marriage, we might say, spirit makes a home. The notion of freedom that emerges from this account of Hegel s Philosophy of Right is admittedly an uncommon one. But Hegel insists that his conception is the truth of the common conception, which means it goes beyond the common views in a manner that includes them, i.e. to fulfill what they intend in a more adequate way than they themselves can manage. And, indeed, it would not be very difficult to make this claim plausible. To