Hegel on the Idealism of Practical Life

Hegel on the Idealism of Practical Life By: David Ciavatta, Ryerson University (This paper is forthcoming in Hegel Bulletin) That so-called philosophy which ascribes reality—in the sense of self-sufficiency [Selbständigkeit] and genuine being-for-and-in-itself—to immediate individual things, to the non-personal realm, as well as that philosophy which assures us that spirit cannot recognize truth or know what the thing-in-itself is, is immediately refuted by the attitude [Verhalten] of the free will towards these things. If so-called external things have a semblance of self-sufficiency for consciousness, for intuition and representational thought, the free will, in contrast, is the idealism and truth of such actuality. Hegel 1991: Section 44, Remark. Hereafter all references to the Philosophy of Right will be given as PhR: followed by the section number. In referring to the Remarks and Additions associated with Hegel’s numbered sections, I will give the section number directly followed by ‘R’ or ‘A.’ On Hegel’s account, to perceive is necessarily to take oneself to be in direct contact with a world of independently existing, individual things. For one of Hegel’s more extended accounts of perception and its relation to things [Dinge], see Hegel (1977: paragraphs 111–31 [in German: Hegel 1988: 79-92]). Hereafter all references to the Phenomenology of Spirit will be given as PhS: followed by ‘M’ and the paragraph numbers of Miller’s translation, and then by ‘W/C’ and the page numbers of the Wessels and Clairmont edition. When we open our eyes we immediately perceive such things as chairs, trees, dogs, rocks, rivers, other people, and each of these things appears as self-contained and complete in itself, as separate from and external to everything around it. It seems that it is sight, more than the other senses, that tends to construe the world in terms of self-contained, independent, things, each external to all others. For a discussion of this theme as it pertains to Hegel, see Russon (2004: 184–209). Each individual thing implicitly presents itself as having metaphysical integrity and self-sufficiency in its own right: each simply is what it is, and one need look nowhere other than to the individual thing to develop an account of its reality. Above all, these individual things present themselves as being independent of our perception of them: when we open our eyes, we take ourselves to be gaining access to things that exist as they are whether we are conscious of them or not, and so we implicitly take our contact with them to be utterly inessential and inconsequential with respect to their ultimate nature and existence. As Hegel writes, from the point of view of perception ‘the object, defined as the simple, is the essence regardless of whether it is perceived or not; but the act of perceiving, as a movement, is the unessential moment, the unstable factor which can as well be as not be’ (PhS:: M111, W/C 79). After all, we ourselves are, from this perspective, self-sufficient individuals among others, and so the things we perceive around us are as inessential with respect to our reality as we are with respect to theirs. Insofar as we are perceiving beings, Hegel thinks, this view of reality is natural and immediately evident to us, a kind of default view that the very form of our perceptual consciousness itself tends to foist upon us. Of course, Hegel is concerned to challenge this view of reality. Among other things, he claims to show that genuine, full-fledged individuals must be understood as bearing their relations to others within them, such that what is other is not simply external after all. In the end, for Hegel the most evolved metaphysical view brings reality to focus as a movement of self-realization in and through an ongoing relation to others, and what is ultimately real is not just the individual things that are, as it were, the static products of this relational movement, but the ongoing movement itself, as that through which alone these things are able to be distinct, lasting individuals in the first place. Here is one of Hegel’s more decisive statements concerning the essentially dynamic character of what he calls the ‘idea’ (which for him constitutes the most evolved category in terms of which to think reality): ‘[T]he idea is the process of disrupting itself into individuality and into the latter’s inorganic nature, and of then bringing this inorganic nature again under the controlling power of the subject and back to the first simple universality. The identity of the idea with itself is one with the process; the thought that liberates actuality from the seeming [von dem Scheine] of purposeless mutability and transfigures it into idea must not represent this truth of actuality as dead repose, as a mere picture [Bild], numb, without impulse and movement, as a genius or number, or as an abstract thought; the idea, because of the freedom which the concept has attained in it, also has the most stubborn opposition within it; its repose consists in the assurance and the certainty with which it eternally generates that opposition and eternally overcomes it, and in it rejoins itself’ (Hegel 2010: 674; and in German, Hegel 1968: 177). Hereafter all references to the Science of Logic will be given as SL followed by the English page number, then the relevant volume and page number of the Gesammelte Werke. On this view it turns out, too, that the world is not simply external to us, as our natural consciousness would have it. Rather, Hegel argues not only that we realize ourselves as who we really are only in and through our cognitive and practical interactions with the world, but also that the world fully realizes itself in its truth only in and through its ongoing interactions with our self-consciousness. This focus on the metaphysical primacy of interaction, and in particular on our unique role in enabling this metaphysical truth to come to a fuller realization, constitutes a core pillar of Hegel’s idealism, in distinction to the kind of naïve realism that Hegel associates with perceptual consciousness’ most immediate, native view of the world. I call it a ‘naïve’ realism to capture’s Hegel’s thought that this is not so much a fully-articulated, systematic philosophical view, as it is something that ordinary consciousness tends to adopt naturally. One might even call it ‘common sense’ realism. What I wish to explore in this paper is why it is that Hegel takes our practical attitude to play a distinctive, even privileged, role in his articulation of an idealistic alternative to the naïvely realistic conception of reality outlined above. As the text quoted above from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right suggests, Hegel conceives of our practical attitude as refuting the sort of naïve realism that is native to our everyday perception. As Hegel says, the free will ‘is the idealism and truth’ of what otherwise appears—that is, of what immediately appears to consciousness—to be a world composed of separate, self-sufficient, external things. On Hegel’s account, the practical attitude has the capacity to see through this initial appearance, tapping into and affirming the dynamic, relational movement that underlies it, enabling this movement itself to come to the fore. Interestingly, Hegel implies that this more sophisticated, idealist orientation towards reality is just as natural or immediate to our practical attitude as the naïve realist conception is to perceptual consciousness. This would suggest that the truth purportedly revealed by our practical attitude is not first and foremost a conclusion we arrive at on the basis of any sort of express reflection upon what our practical attitude involves—as though the truth were located only in this reflection, and not in the practical attitude itself. It is not that one would first have to think philosophically about one’s practical attitude, teasing out its specific rational implications in the way that one does with a concept or judgement, before one were privy to the idealist truth that Hegel thinks is harbored in it. Rather, Hegel is suggesting, this truth is immediately inherent in the very movement whereby we interact with the world as a field open to our practical exertions, and in the way in which we, in practice, take this interactive movement and this field to have a kind of legitimacy and standing in their own right. As Hegel says, the practical attitude is immediately a refutation of realism, and the free will is itself the truth and idealism of reality. This attitude and this will are involved in the direct enactment or performance of that truth and of that refutation: the free will is involved in making idealism true, as it were, by the very fact that a practical attitude towards the world is actually adopted in the first place, and by the very fact that a field of interaction is thereby brought to life. That the world presents itself as open to, even as solicitous of, our potential undertakings, seems like a constant and irreducible given of our lived experience. Even the infant’s primitive intentional movements—the reaching out to grasp a toy or a finger, for instance—seem to be premised upon there being, not only objects within reach that present themselves as solicitous of those movements, but also a field that is immediately open to and traversable by its limbs, a practical field in which there is, minimally, a ‘here’ and a ‘there’ and a ‘towards which’ tracing out the limb’s possible trajectories. The infant’s very sense of its own practical capacity to move its own limbs is immediately corroborated, throughout, by an external world that enables, outlines, even beckons, this limb movement. In highlighting the way our relation to our own agency is essentially correlated to the existence of a world articulated as a field of potential actions, I am here drawing from a line of thought brought to the fore by such phenomenological philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See especially Heidegger’s analysis of ‘worldliness’ in Heidegger (1962: 91–107); and Merleau-Ponty (1962: esp. part 1, ch. 3). Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty even our apparently immediate sensations (for instance, those of colour) are essentially correlated to particular sorts of practical bodily attitudes (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 211–5). For a discussion of how developmental psychology factors in how an infant’s perception of things is shaped by the ways in which these things solicit certain practical attitudes, see, for instance, Young (2005). Young draws on the notion that the world is strucutured in terms of ‘affordances’ to action, a notion initially developed by James J. Gibson (Gibson 1986). Thus it seems that adopting a practical attitude is not merely a matter of forming a subjective perspective on the world, a perspective that is ‘in me’ or ‘in my head’ but that has no bearing whatsoever on the way the world ‘out there’ itself is. Rather, there can only be a practical attitude—there can only be realistic potential actions on the horizon, a realistic, embodied sense of an ‘I can’—on the condition that the world correlates with this attitude by presenting itself as something we can roam around in, as a field populated, not so much with independent, practically-neutral, self-contained things, as with pragma, with things calling to be touched, picked up, thrown, eaten, avoided, cared for, worshiped, owned, and so on. That the world is itself such a practical field, and that we, in actually realizing ourselves as concrete agents in it, are at once alive to it specifically as something that affords us the potential to realize ourselves practically, seems to be an essential part of what is at stake in talking about a ‘practical attitude’ in the first place. As I will go on to claim, that the world corroborates our engaged perspective in this way is an essential dimension of the idealist truth that Hegel takes the practical attitude to disclose. The idealism of this attitude, then, is not just something internal to the agent herself, but has to do just as much with the way the world itself conditions and enables agency. For Hegel, our account of free agency and its living relationship to itself must come hand in hand with an account of the nature of the world in which agents inevitably realize themselves, an account that reveals this world to be of a nature that makes agency, not only possible, but motivated, beckoned, fitting. In short, Hegel’s idealism requires that the nature of the world be fit for freedom. This theme is perhaps most apparent in Hegel’s conception of Sittlichkeit, which Hegel at one point characterizes as ‘the concept of freedom which has become the existing world’ (PhR: 142; Hegel’s emphasis). In my view this essentially metaphysical dimension of the philosophy of action, focused in particular on the question of what the nature of reality must be like in order for human agency to be possible, has not been sufficiently attended to in the recent literature on Hegel’s philosophy of agency. Consider, for instance, that none of the fourteen papers included in the recent edited volume entitled Hegel on Action (Laitinen and Sandis, 2010) directly address the relationship between Hegel’s theory of action and his distinctively idealist metaphysical commitments. The book’s lead paper, Charles Taylor’s influential ‘Hegel and the Philosophy of Action,’ does tread upon this terrain, in that it sketches out Hegel’s thesis that action is irreducible to other sorts of events, and so demands a distinctive metaphysical account that runs against the grain of much contemporary (and broadly realist) philosophy of action (Taylor, 2010). But Taylor is here more concerned with situating Hegel in the lineage of Romanticism than with laying out the distinguishing features of Hegel’s idealism in particular. In his paper ‘Idealism and Agency in Kant and Hegel,’ Robert Pippin is concerned to address the relation of agency and idealism head-on, but the conception of Hegelian idealism operative here is decidedly non-metaphysical, and for Pippin has to do with the normative continuity between natural inclinations and rational moral imperatives within the sphere of an agent’s reason-giving (see Pippin 1991). To the extent that metaphysical issues arise at all in this literature, they tend to be oriented around traditional questions concerning the compatibility of human agency with the sorts of external, causal relations that purportedly govern all events in the natural world. See, for instance, Knowles (2010) and Yeomans (2012). Yeomans’ rich studies of the links between Hegel’s logic and his account of agency certainly have metaphysical implications that extend beyond the traditional concerns with causality and that bear on our understanding of Hegel’s metaphysical idealism. However, Yeomans’ overriding goal is to situate Hegel in relation to these traditional concerns, and even to defend a certain causally-oriented interpretation of agency in the face of commentators who seek to deny such a dimension in Hegel. While it is often noted (rightly, in my view) that Hegel himself does not put much stock in those traditional questions, this is sometimes taken as a sign that Hegel’s own account of agency is not fundamentally engaged with metaphysical concerns at all, but is, rather, exclusively focused on epistemological or normative concerns, and with what we might generally call the inner or subjective conditions of practical life. This downplaying of any causal dimension to Hegel’s theory of agency in favour of epistemic and normative concerns has perhaps been made most prominent by Robert Pippin (see, for instance, Pippin 2008), but can also be found, for instance, in Deligiorgi (2010), Quante (2004), and Speight (2001). Thus, for instance, in the literature there has been much focus on what sort of knowledge a subject must have, both about herself and the world, in order to be said to act intentionally and to be held accountable for her actions; and, normatively, there is the question of how agency is linked specifically with the capacity to respond to reasons and to the possibility of conflicting interpretations of what one has done. To the extent that attention has been paid to the “external” conditions of agency—to what the world must be like in order for agency to be possible—this has been largely limited to a focus on Hegel’s developed social theory and his thesis that we can only be agents in the context of other selves and the broader institutions that recognize us as agents. See, for instance, Pippin (2010), where Pippin usefully articulates Hegel’s focus on the external conditions of agency in terms of Hegel’s dialectic of the inner and the outer, but construes these external conditions exclusively in terms of the social sphere. While these internal and social dimensions of agency are certainly essential for Hegel, in my view they cannot ultimately be uncoupled from the more rudimentary and distinctive metaphysical stakes that, for Hegel, are at play in the practical attitude’s very relationship to the external world. Hegel’s general neglect of causal questions in his more explicit accounts of agency springs, not from an attempt to articulate an account of agency that is, as it were, metaphysically neutral, but ultimately from a sense of the inadequacy of that particular metaphysical view that takes external, causal relations between things or events to set the ultimate terms for our understanding of reality Hegel’s internal critique of the metaphysical view that takes causal relations to be ultimate can be found in SL: 492 -500, 11.396-404. For a good discussion of this critique, with attention to some of its implications for our understanding of agency, see Yeomans (2012), ch. 10. —a view that, for Hegel, is challenged to some extent by our practical attitude itself, insofar as it commits us to privileging, against the purported primacy of external relations, the idealist notion of a movement of self-realization that occurs only in and through relations to others. For Hegel, part of the task of a philosophy of action is to get clearer on the distinctive sorts of metaphysical commitments that are internal to the movement of agency itself—commitments that we, as agents interacting with the world, are constitutively implicated in—and this is quite distinct from the task of determining whether agency is compatible with a causal conception of reality that would presumably preclude any irreducible ontological status for human actions and that would trump any distinctively idealist commitments at the outset. In what follows I take up the issue of how to conceive of our practical relationship with the world, and I concentrate, in particular, on the question of whether the world itself can be said to call us to action. I cast this question in terms of the metaphysical question of whether the world would in some sense be deficient or incomplete without our agency, such that our practical exertions can be conceived as addressing and mitigating this privation, and thus be conceived as warranted by the world itself. I suggest that from the naïve realist perspective—a perspective that, on Hegel’s view, leaves out of account the distinctive metaphysical implications of the engaged agent in the midst of realizing its will—the world is to be conceived as wholly independent of and external to us, and so as fundamentally indifferent to whether we do anything at all in it. In contrast, from the idealist perspective that, for Hegel, is internal to the practical attitude’s living relation to the world, the world itself is populated with metaphysical deficiencies that we, as free agents, are specifically equipped to address, and these deficiencies are not exclusively subjective or internal—residing solely within our experience of our own desire as a privative state, for instance—but are just as much to be located in the character of the objective situation itself. After sketching out these root metaphysical concerns, I go on to explore certain dimensions of Hegel’s ‘practical idealism’ by focusing, first, on certain aspects of Hegel’s conception of moral action, and then on Hegel’s conception of property ownership. In both cases, we will see, agency realizes and affirms itself by rendering an otherwise external world into a manifestation of its own will, and it is precisely by realizing, and affirming the legitimacy of, this interaction with the world that it lays claim to refuting the sort of externality that realism takes to be the final word on things. Action as an Intrusion into an Indifferent World From the perspective of the sort of realist stance that Hegel takes to come most naturally to our everyday consciousness, the world is ultimately made up of separate, individual things, each of which simply is what it is, and is external to other things. Compare Hegel’s statement that ‘[f]or our ordinary consciousness (ie. the consciousness at the level of sense-perception and understanding) the objects that it knows count as self-standing and self-founded in their isolation from one another, and when they prove to be related to each other, and conditioned by one another, their mutual dependence upon one another is regarded as something external to the object, and not as belonging to their nature’ (Hegel 1991: 45Addition). As we saw, from this perspective each thing has its own nature and its own material presence, separate from and external to that of other things—and so separate from and external to us, insofar as we are likewise concrete individuals within this world. The world, conceived in this way, must thus be indifferent to whatever particular initiatives or ends that we have a mind to realize in it. Moreover, it does not in any way solicit or demand action from us: it does not present itself as specifically needing our agency to address, rectify, fulfill, preserve, or transform it in any way, for the things we perceive around us are what they are with or without us, and do not in any way call upon us to concern ourselves with them or become involved in their unfolding. Perhaps other living things, and certain animals in particular, on occasion actively solicit responses from us as agents, but it seems they too would have just carried on being what they were had we never entered their environments in the first place. That is, they do not need us to be what they are—the principle that accounts for their individual being is independent of and external to that which accounts for ours—and so no lack or deficiency in their being would result if we as agents were taken out of the ontological equation altogether. Whatever particular solicitations they might make upon our agency thus seem contingent and dispensable relative to their essential natures, and as a result any actions we might undertake in response to these solicitations are likewise contingent and dispensable. Indeed, it is hard not to get the impression that, for the most part, animals would be better able to realize themselves without our interventions into their affairs, and often, when they do solicit specific responses from us, what they demand from us is precisely to be left alone. Though we as agents might at times experience ourselves as answering to a deficiency that is actually there in the world—as for instance when we attempt to protect an injured bird from the aggressive pursuit of a vicious cat, perceiving that the bird is at risk of dying and so needs our help—from the realist perspective we are considering there can in truth be nothing in the objective situation itself that specifically solicits us into motion: all there are are positive, objective things or events, all occurring naturally, as they are bound to occur by the objective laws of nature, and if we do not like what is happening or find it to be deficient, that is perhaps an expression of who we are, or of our subjectively formed perspective on things, but not of how things are in themselves. The objective world itself does not of its own accord create gaps that need us, in particular, to fill them in, does not give rise to tensions that specifically require our decisions, our initiatives, to bring them to resolution. Let us for a moment grant that there are actual deficiencies in the objective world. For instance, in our example we might consider the bird’s being batted around by the cat as an objective state of affairs that is contingent and deficient with respect to the bird’s natural capacity to realize itself. However, it may be that depriving the cat its access to the bird introduces a kind of deficiency for it, and there seems to be no obvious ground, at least as far as nature is concerned, for privileging the bird’s perspective on things. That would suggest that our intervention into nature is, again, not warranted or called for by nature itself. That we ourselves experience such deficiencies personally as calls to action, that such situations implicate and motivate us as practical agents in the first place, that we could possibly find, in such situations, opportunities for our own individual self-realization or self-satisfaction as agents—again, all this seems to be something that reflects something about us, something perhaps about our own natural inclinations or our values and self-conceptions, rather than something as it were brewing in the world itself. That some of the deficiencies immanent in the world happen to be such that we, given our particular powers and limits, are in a position to rectify or resolve them, and that we are such as to feel motivated to respond to them, seems purely accidental from the point of view of the nature of this external world. In that case, we are really answering to ourselves, to our own particular natures or self-conceptions, and not first and foremost to something at play in the world itself. If the world in which we act does not, on its own account, call for action on our part, if all the things we encounter simply are what they are independently of anything we as agents might do in relation to them, then all of our actions seem to take the form of intrusions: like the stranger who barges in uninvited, we as agents barge into a world that would have gotten along just fine without us, introducing into it changes that are external and contingent with respect to what it really is in essence. From the realist point of view, one can give a full and adequate account of the nature of the external world of things without any reference whatsoever to our particular practical powers, to our specific character as free agents. And so the thought that we, taken as particular individuals among others within the objective world, should have some sort of privileged place in it, such that the world itself would need free agents, in particular, to somehow complete or fulfill or settle its character, seems to be wholly out of place. If Hegel takes his philosophy to offer a challenge to this conception of action and to the realist assumptions that underlie it, it seems that Hegel must hold that the objective world in which we act is not simply external to our agency in this way. That is, he needs to hold that there is, after all, a sense in which the world itself does contain gaps or deficiencies that specifically call our agency into action. Also he must hold that we act, not only on behalf of ourselves (on the basis of our needs, desires, or individual self-conceptions) as particular beings in the world, external to all others, but also on behalf of the world itself, taking up into our actions something inherently universal, something that transcends our immediate, natural particularity. For instance, if it were the case that, in responding to the injured bird’s vulnerability in relation to the attacking cat, we were in fact acting on behalf of some genuinely universal concern—imagine some sort of cosmic principle of harmony between all creatures, say, something sought after, not merely by this or that being, but by the very order of nature itself, an order that the cat was threatening to disrupt with its attack—then our action would not need to be conceived as an intrusion into a sphere that is external and indifferent to it. Rather, the action could be understood as participating in a striving that was already prepared for by, already underway in, this sphere itself. Further, we would not have to treat whatever satisfaction we might obtain from engaging in such an action as evidence that we were, in the end, responding exclusively to our own particular natures—some sort of natural sympathy for the vulnerable, for instance. For it could very well be the case that we are the particular kind of being that is most satisfied when we are answering to universal concerns, when we know that our actions are, as it were, called for by reality itself. That we are such as to find satisfaction in such actions does not itself preclude them from having this universal import. Compare Hegel’s critique of those would attempt to deflate the import of noble actions by drawing attention to the self-serving motives that inevitably underlie them; PhR: 124 and R; and PhS: M665, W/C 436–8. Now Hegel does not endorse such a cosmic principle of harmony, at least not in any straightforward sense, Indeed, Hegel sees contradiction, opposition, and incompleteness (or, simply, finitude) as ineliminable aspects of both nature and the spiritual domain, so if there is some sort of force at work in bringing harmony or unity to all reality, it is one that does not ultimately do away with discord and difference. For a basic discussion of how contradiction is at play in the real, see SL: 381–385, 11. 286–90. but he is concerned to show that our actions can be such as to answer to some sort of universal force at play in the real. Since it is most obviously in the sphere of moral life that action claims to manifest, not just an agent’s own particularity, but something of inherently universal import, it is to Hegel’s account of this sphere that I now turn. Moral Action and its Place in Nature It is perhaps in the sphere of moral life most of all that we are prepared to recognize the existence of objective situations that themselves solicit actions from us. To recognize some injustice, for instance, is to experience a sort of deficiency at play in the world. It is to recognize the actual, positive presence of a glaring absence, to recognize an existing situation that is in itself unsettled, and that as such cries out for some sort of active response that will address that absence or unsettledness and bring some closure. Even though it might be a situation that arises wholly independently of us, we can find ourselves as agents personally implicated in it. In that case we are suddenly put in a position in which a failure to offer a response that would somehow eliminate the deficiency and restore justice would be tantamount to permitting this deficiency to persist, and so inaction would constitute negligence on our part. Just as, when someone we know waves at us from across the street, we are suddenly put in a situation in which a response is called for, and in which no response is no longer an option (for not responding is now an active snub, whether we intend it or not); so too are those objective situations we consider moral such as to implicate our agency in ways we cannot control. It is as though such situations have a right to our action, and they themselves would be incomplete or unfulfilled without our active intervention, without our bringing things to their proper resolution. This is essentially what Hegel, in his discussion of morality in the Philosophy of Right, calls the ‘right of objectivity’(PhR: 132 and R). This right concerns the capacity of the objective world in which the agent lives to demand or proscribe an agent’s actions unconditionally, regardless of whether the particular agent recognizes this demand or proscription for herself. Now it seems to be above all in our dealings with other selves that we as agents are solicited into moral action: other selves are those specific external beings that themselves actively place demands and make claims on us, those worldly ‘objects’ that oblige us, in our capacity as free agents, to respond and answer to them. Indeed, according to Hegel’s much-discussed doctrine of interpersonal recognition, a self simply cannot be a self without engaging in relations of recognition with other selves. ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged’ (PhS: M178, W/C 127). For Hegel, then, the other is essentially incomplete without my active recognition, and so the very presence of the other is, as it were, a call to action, a call to engage in ways of being that recognize this other as a free self in its own right. It is this call for recognition that arguably stands as the ultimate source not only of moral obligation, but also of just institutions and law on Hegel’s account. For an extended investigation of this theme, see Williams 2000. And it is the other’s real need for appropriate recognition that constitutes the most basic example of the sort of metaphysical deficiency that specifically mobilizes us into actions that would negate such a deficiency. On this account, then, the naïve realist’s vision of individuals as self-sufficient, self-contained totalities, essentially external and indifferent to all otherness, simply fails to do justice to the essentially relational character of selves. And the domain of interpersonal recognition, then, would seem to be especially well-suited to demonstrating how our practical attitude enacts both a refutation of such naïve realism, as well as a practical affirmation of the idealist’s privileging of a relational ontology. The moral and political philosophy of recognition, then, is arguably idealist through and through. However, if we focus exclusively or even primarily on the intersubjective domain of recognition, we risk overlooking the full significance and scope of Hegel’s claim about the practical attitude as enacting a refutation of realism, and as demonstrating idealism actually at work in the world. Indeed, some accounts that focus on Hegel’s doctrine concerning the social conditions of agency tend to abstract from the metaphysical underpinnings of this doctrine altogether, as though there were nothing particularly metaphysical at stake in Hegel’s famous thesis that “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another” (PhS: M178, W/C 127). Pippin’s broadly “cognitivist” reading of the intersubjective dimensions of agency goes in this direction (see Pippin 2008, ch. 6 and 7), as does Quante’s (Quante 2004) and Williams’s (Williams 2000). In contrast, for an attempt to identify some of the basic ways in which Hegel’s idealistic metaphysical commitments inform his conception of the social and political realms, see Westphal (1992: 7–54). It may well be that other selves, taken as a particular class of external beings among others, indeed call us to action in the ways I have described. But Hegel’s claim about the practical attitude’s distinctive capacity to reveal the inadequacy of realism’s privileging of the metaphysical integrity and substantiality of materially separated individuals, concerns our relations to all things—that is, to anything that our immediate, perceptual consciousness presents to us as a self-standing individual, external to us and to other things—not just to those particular ‘things’ we call other selves. Focusing primarily on our social relations, then, can serve to obscure the fact that, for Hegel, it is even in our practical relations with the natural world at large that we are engaged in a kind of practical refutation of naïve realism—that, for Hegel, even the natural world proves to be open to and in certain ways solicitous of our agency. In fact, if we look to Hegel’s detailed discussion of Morality in Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we find that the key issue at stake there concerns, not primarily the individual agent specifically in its relation to other agents, but rather the question of how to understand the relationship between the moral agent’s actions and the natural world in which it acts. More precisely, the question is whether the practical attitude specific to the moral agent is such as to commit this agent to treating the natural world as fundamentally external and indifferent to its most genuine, freely determined purposes (as in the realist’s ‘intrusion’ picture), or whether, on the contrary, it must implicitly posit nature as being fundamentally in harmony with it, as expressly accommodating, even requiring, its action. That is, for Hegel what is centrally at issue in our attempt to act morally is, at bottom, the metaphysics not only of moral agency itself, but of the natural world in which alone moral agency realizes itself: to be a moral agent is necessarily to become embroiled in the metaphysical question of whether the natural world is complete on its own account and thus wholly independent of our strivings (whether it is ‘free,’ as Hegel says), or whether we must conceive of nature as in some way deficient or indeterminate, and thus as itself calling upon our free agency to bring it to its fuller truth and resolution. As Hegel puts it, the moral agent’s relation to nature is based, ‘on the one hand, on the complete indifference and independence of nature and moral purposes and activity with respect to one another, and, on the other, on the consciousness of duty alone as the essential fact, and of nature as completely devoid of independence and essential being’. PhS: M600, W/C 396; Hegel’s emphases; translation modified. So, for instance, Hegel sees the moral agent as struggling with the question of whether the given world of nature is itself constituted such that agents giving themselves over to universal, moral ends can count on being happy in this life, where happiness is construed expressly as ‘a consciousness of the unity of its [the agent’s] actuality with that of nature’ (PhS: M601, W/C 396–7; trans. modified ). Similarly, he sees the moral agent struggling with the issue of whether its naturally given, sensuous inclinations, conceived as the real impetuses of all concrete action, are inherently at odds with its moral strivings, or whether they must be such as to play a mediating role in bringing its moral intentions to actual fruition (PhS: M622, W/C 408-9). Finally, given that the agent, as particular, is inevitably situated in the natural world alongside other particular beings, and given that its relation to this empirical manifold will be such that, in taking up one side of it, other sides will be left out of account, the question arises as to whether the concrete world is itself such as to lend itself to the sort of single, unified, all-trumping imperative that moral action demands, or whether such action inevitably becomes bogged down in the multiplicity and complexity of the concrete (PhS: M605, W/C 400). In each case, the issue concerns moral agency’s way of taking up what nature is, and it is precisely this issue that structures Hegel’s immanent critique of moral life. In this context, Hegel regularly draws attention to the fact that it is the moral agent’s practical attitude that itself enacts or demonstrates—in deeds rather than in thoughts or words—a response to this metaphysical question concerning the ultimate status of the natural world. For instance, Hegel argues at one point that, despite the moral agent’s express commitment to conceiving of the given world of nature as fundamentally indifferent to and independent of its moral ends (in that respect implicitly endorsing the realist’s treatment of the world as wholly external to our free agency), moral action itself embodies a rather different, we might say idealist orientation, according to which the natural world is not wholly other, but is rather introduced, through the movement of free action itself, into a higher, more complete, and self-consciously justified way of being. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel argues that, because the moral agent must perceive nature, in its present form, as being external to it and thus as inharmonious with its moral purposes, it must postulate such a harmony as merely ideal or as possible only in principle. On the other hand, however, ‘consciousness … proclaims through its deed that it is not in earnest in making its postulate, because the meaning of the action is really this, to make into a present reality what was not supposed to exist in the present [namely, the harmony itself]’(PhS: M618, W/C 618; emphasis added). The practically engaged self-consciousness that is peculiar to the movement of moral action itself is such that it cannot fail to posit the actual world as fundamentally amenable to its moral strivings: in actually acting, it demonstrates its certainty that it is embodying a claim that is vindicated in the face of all potential challenges, and so it acts as though all reality were in itself receptive of its action’s coming to be, as though it were doing the concrete work of a universal striving or will (the will that bears on everything, the will of reality itself, as it were) not just its own particular will (a will that would be external to, and thus potentially intrusive upon, the claims that other particular realities might make on it). Further, given that all moral actions, as concrete events taking place in the natural world, will directly draw upon and incorporate natural forces within them (including the agent’s naturally-given impulses), Hegel argues that, in practice, it cannot be that nature is wholly external to, independent of, and thus ultimately recalcitrant with respect to, the realization of moral action. On the contrary, the natural world must be fundamentally open to being thus incorporated; the given situation, including the given state of the agent’s natural impulses and needs, must be fundamentally receptive to the actualization of moral purpose, if moral action and the concrete practical attitude of the moral agent are possible in the first place. I take it that this is part of what lies behind Hegel’s argument that moral action is itself the demonstration of an existing harmony between impulse and moral purpose (see PhS: M622, W/C 408–9). Thus, for Hegel, moral agency—in its very claim to be acting morally, in its very performance of moral action—itself is involved in bringing to light a nature that is in harmony with moral freedom, a world that would be deficient without it. I agree with Pippin’s argument that Hegel’s idealism posits a continuity between nature and our self-consciously held moral or rational commitments (see Pippin 1991), but on my reading Hegel takes action itself to demonstrate that there is in fact a metaphysical continuity between nature and morality, not merely that we as agents are bound to think in terms of such a continuity. Part of the implication of Hegel’s claim, I take it, is that moral action reveals something about the nature of objective nature itself—namely, that it is not wholly devoid of, or recalcitrant to, the sorts of normative tensions that mobilize us as agents. Or, we can also say, it demonstrates the objective existence of moral deficiencies or gaps at play in the given world itself, precisely by acting morally, and by thereby introducing into the fabric of this world something (the action itself) whose concrete reality can only be understood as a negation or redressing of such deficiency. That the moral stance continues to be structured in terms of the ultimate opposition and externality between moral agency and nature, and insists on this opposition despite the fact that the concrete movement of moral action itself belies this opposition, constitutes a significant part of Hegel’s dialectical critique of the moral world view. For Hegel, then, we might say that part of morality’s problem is that it does not adequately heed the distinctive perspective on reality that moral action itself brings to the table, a perspective from the point of view of which the given world is not ultimately external to its own self-realization. Though I cannot fully explore the claim here, I take it that Hegel’s argument for the priority of what, in contrast to morality, he calls the ‘ethical’ domain, hinges in part on ethical life’s having incorporated into itself this perspective on reality, this ‘practical idealism’ of the will. Thus, for instance, Hegel describes the practical sphere of the ethical as ‘spirit living and present as a world’ (PhR: 151), highlighting the notion that here the exigencies that press upon the agent are not merely subjective and internal to the agent (and thus external to the world the agent confronts), but are already at play in structuring the immediately given, concrete situations ethical agents face when they set out to act. Here, then, agency is a matter of responding to what this concrete world itself calls for—that is, the world is itself such as to demand being addressed by action—rather than a matter of trying to impose something ‘pure’ and abstractly ideal into a nature conceived as something wholly alien or indifferent to it. See PhS: M439, W/C 289 for an especially clear characterization of ethical life as involving the overcoming of the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. Hegel here writes that, in the domain of the ethical, the actual world has ‘completely lost the meaning for the self of something alien to it, just as the self has completely lost the meaning of a being-for-self separated from the world’. See also PhR: 142, where Hegel characterizes ethical life as ‘the concept of freedom which has become the existing world’ (Hegel’s emphases). From the point of view of ethical agency, then, the world of objective nature must be conceived, not merely as a set of self-contained, practically-neutral things, but rather in terms of the actual and potential practical situations to which they give rise. To explore further Hegel’s conception of the relationship between the practical attitude and the natural world, I turn now to Hegel’s discussion of the right to property ownership. The most basic issue at stake here, we shall see, has to do with the agent’s capacity to realize itself in and through a natural world that is otherwise external to it, and in the course of his analysis Hegel sheds light on a particular way in which nature opens itself to being incorporated into the will’s self-realization. The Practical Attitude and the Ownership of Inanimate Things The extended passage quoted at the outset of this paper, in which the basic link between the practical attitude and idealism is identified, is taken from Hegel’s discussion of the right to own property. Here Hegel’s focus is exclusively on the will’s relationship to non-personal things, to non-selves. Though it is nominally possible to own another person, Hegel argues that it is against right to do so, and his argument hinges specifically on metaphysical concerns—on what we might call the metaphysics of ownership itself in relation to the metaphysics of selfhood. As I will discuss further below, to come to own something, on Hegel’s account, is quite literally to become the substantial ground of its reality. That is, from an ontological perspective the owner and her various items of rightful property together constitute one being, a single, self-standing, concrete actuality. And because other selves are (at least implicitly) free and autonomous, and because as such they actively actualize themselves, and so are their own ground, it is in the end not metaphysically possible for one self to own another. For Hegel’s discussion of ownership of other selves, see PhR: 57R. Hegel’s account of the master/slave relation in the Phenomenology claims to show that, though the slave is treated as an owned thing in the context of this relation, the slave could only maintain this relation and behave as the master’s thing if he takes himself to be such a thing. It is precisely this active self-relation, this ‘pure being-for-self’, that ultimately precludes him from really being a thing, and so that ultimately undermines the initial terms of the master/slave relation; see PhS: M190–196, W/C 132–6). If the self is going to play a role in completing and corroborating the reality of the other self, this relation cannot take the form of ownership, but rather of recognition, an act that expressly frees the other to be itself. Hegel thus identifies the world that the proprietary will confronts specifically as a world of things (Sachen), and stipulates that things are precisely the sorts of beings that lack any substantial capacity to realize themselves as autonomous centres in their own right, that lack the capacity to maintain their identities in the face of external forces that would determine them. As Hegel writes, the thing is the opposite of the substantial: it is that which, by definition, is purely external. What is external for the free spirit (which must be clearly distinguished from mere consciousness) is external in and for itself (PhR: 42; Hegel’s emphasis). Though Hegel means to include animals and other living beings under the category of things, I will be focusing primarily on inanimate, naturally given objects, as I think these are the clearest example of such purely external things. Hegel does say in PhR: 44A that animals are ‘external to themselves’, and that the reason for this is that they are not ends unto themselves, and are not characterized by ‘infinite self-reference’, a trait usually associated with subjectivity and self-consciousness. However, it is quite clear from his account of organic being in the Philosophy of Nature that he takes some of the distinguishing ontological characteristics of life to be internal teleology (having itself as its end) and (at least in the case of animals) infinite self-reference (Hegel 1970). (Hereafter all references to the Philosohy of Nature will be given as PhN followed by the section number, and R [for Remark] and A [for Addition] where appropriate.) See, for instance, PhN: 337A, where Hegel expressly describes life in terms of the notion of Selbstzweck, and PhN: 359R, where he appeals to the notion of infinite self-reference in his account of the animal’s practical relation to the world. For Hegel, we will see, such inanimate things are inherently incomplete and indeterminate when conceived in abstraction from the fuller interactional contexts in which they actually exist, and it is in particular our practical interactions with them that can bring them to a kind of stability and incorporate them into a higher, more stable, and more complete ontological whole—that of the rational agent’s self-standing and self-affirming practical life—than they are capable of attaining on their own. It is thus the inherent, ontological deficiency of such things, as well as their inherent openness to being thus incorporated, that can be said to constitute a kind of solicitation of our free agency. In the Hotho addition to paragraph 44 of the Philosophy of Right, we find Hegel saying: ‘to appropriate something means basically only to manifest the supremacy of my will in relation to the thing and to demonstrate that the latter does not have being in and for itself and is not an end in itself. This manifestation occurs through my conferring upon the thing an end other than that which it immediately possessed.’ It is clear from this passage that Hegel is conceiving of this supremacy in ontological terms. In relation to them we can see how our agency is not, as in the realist account, an intrusion into a world that is wholly external to it, but rather has room opened up for it by the nature of the world itself. A rock, unlike an organism or another person, does not care whether we crush it up into dust, or shape its material mass into some other form useful for our purposes. The rock is, in effect, indifferent to its own material integrity and individual presence, as it is to its various other determinacies, such as its shape and size. As Hegel would put it, it is fundamentally external to itself in these respects, or it is ‘indifferent to its determinateness’: its various determinations, the features that would seem to make it the specific object that it is and that distinguish it from others, are not held together by a substantial unity that maintains itself as thus determinate. On Hegel’s account, living beings are characterized by a more sophisticated way of being, a more sophisticated ontological structure, than that of inanimate beings; in particular, living beings actively reproduce and maintain themselves in the face of otherness, and so are self-reflected. I follow Hegel here in identifying the character of the inanimate world in terms that presume both the existence of life and the irreducibility of its being to inanimate (mechanical and chemical) processes. However, I should say that Hegel’s own account of such inanimate things as rocks and water is more complicated than I am presenting it here, for in the end he goes so far as to conceive of such earthly things as though they were, in themselves, moments of a biosphere. That is, in the face of the fact that such things are, as individuals, external and indifferent to the living things that exist around them, he interprets their being from the point of view of their more global role in housing and providing the matter or potentiality for living beings (see PhN: 338–342). In contrast to this account, and in keeping with the basic commitments of the naïve realist account I outlined above, I am treating such things on the model of basic physical bodies, spatially self-contained and external to one another, and fundamentally engaged in mechanical relations, or relations involving the external determination of one thing by another. These are bodies of the sort Hegel discusses, for instance, in his account of mechanical objects; see, for instance, PhN: 262–71, and SL: 631–44, 12.133–47. There is no substantial ‘it’ that is destroyed when the particular rock is pulverized into dust that now floats through the air, and no unified individual ‘self’ or substrate—one that would warrant such expressions as the ‘rock in itself’—that affirms itself as a unified, self-same, concrete presence through ‘its’ various material changes. What such individual things lack is precisely some sort of inner identity or stable, substantial standard in relation to which we could identify what is proper to them as individuals, and what is merely accidental. Whereas the specific realist position we considered held there to be a kind of substantial integrity to the concrete individuals we find around us in the perceptible world, in the case of rocks—and arguably of all other naturally occurring inorganic things—we are faced with individuals that seem indifferent to their very individuality and material integrity in basic ways. That such things are inherently indifferent to the individual forms they take on, and that their individual form is inevitably determined by what is external to them—that this determinability by others is inherent in their very being, such that they are inherently external to themselves—makes it the case that, in taking such things up into our practical projects, we are not thereby infringing upon some internal integrity, some way that individual things ‘naturally are’ on their own account. On the contrary, our transformation of such things into a form that manifests our purposes is in a way licensed by the very character of such things, by this very self-indifference. In this respect, it may seem that our practical transformations of inanimate objects are not essentially different from the transformations that these things undergo at the hands of other inanimate objects: the sculptor’s chisel’s forming of the stone, it seems, is of essentially the same nature as the river’s much more gradual, but purposeless, formation of it, in that both involve external, mechanical processes, and both are grounded in the stone’s self-indifference and its fundamental openness to external determination. However, Hegel would argue that the mechanical processes at play in the sculptor’s case are really abstract moments in the concrete realization of a different, higher kind of reality than is possible in a merely mechanical, inanimate world. To anticipate: for Hegel the living body of the agent engaging itself with the rock, along with the chisel and the rock itself, together constitute the single, unified actuality of the self-determining, self-realizing movement of the agent’s own will, a movement that is realized precisely in and through the interaction of concrete, worldly things, but that is itself not reducible to these things taken in abstraction from this interaction. The river’s external relation to the stone is, in turn, external and indifferent to the river itself. For its being formed as this individual river with this causal power in relation to the stone—as opposed, say, to its having the form of groundwater out of contact with the stone altogether—is likewise a matter of indifference to it, and is, in turn, just a product of further external forces acting on it. ‘Since the object is thus determinate yet indifferent to its determinateness, through itself it points for its determinateness outside and beyond itself, constantly to objects for which it is however likewise a matter of indifference that they do the determining. Consequently, nowhere is a principle of self-determination to be found’ (SL: 633, 12.135; Hegel’s emphases). Indeed, in a purely mechanical world comprised of individuals that are fundamentally indifferent to themselves in this way, there really are no independent, individual centers that can be singled out as causes or ultimate starting points of change, for the apparent capacity of each thing to originate change is itself purely a function of the external forces that are at work in shaping it, forces which are in turn a function of the mechanical forces that are shaping them, and so on. A genuine starting point that could sufficiently account for any actual change in the world is always deferred. Faced with this infinite deferral, we might appeal to the idea that each particular change is really just a function of the total system of all interacting objects, and though we might single out individual phases or moments, our selection will always be merely contingent abstractions from the point of view of this essentially continuous, ultimately indivisible totality. Hegel explores a comparable line of thought in his account of the mechanical world: ‘the object has the determinateness of its totality outside it, in other objects, and these again outside them, and so forth to infinity. The immanent turning back of this progression in infinitum must indeed be likewise assumed, and it must be represented as a totality, as a world, but one which is nothing but a universality brought to closure through a singularity that remains indeterminate, a universe’ (SL: 633, 12.135; Hegel’s emphases). For a more elaborate discussion of just why an exclusively mechanical account of reality is inherently inadequate on Hegel’s account, see Kreines (2004). Either way, we find that the immediately apparent individuality and independence of such inanimate things—an individuality that, from the naïve realist’s point of view, was to be conceived of as the ultimate starting point and building block of our account of reality—proves insufficient to stand on its own. Such individuals cannot account for their own reality, but on the contrary reveal themselves to be inherently incomplete moments of something that transcends them. A worry sometimes expressed about Hegelian idealism is that it adopts a kind of holism that threatens the ontological status of individuals. For a good discussion of the issues at stake in this criticism, and for some potential responses, see Stern (2009: ch. 1). On my reading, there are degrees of individuation on Hegel’s view, with animals and human agents possessing the most developed individuality, and with inanimate objects characterized by an impoverished form of individuation (with the result that the latter are susceptible of being subsumed into greater wholes). For Hegel, this inadequacy is inherent in the very being of such apparently self-sufficient things: it is thus that they themselves, in their constitutive deficiency, implicitly call for a higher kind of being, one that can, as it were, answer for its own reality. In the end, it is the self-affirming, self-realizing individual agent that answers this call: the immanent deficiency of the inanimate world makes room for a being that exists as its own centre, a being that is not wholly in the thrall of external determination, but that takes up otherwise external, inanimate forces and transforms them into manifestations of its own self-grounding, self-affirmed reality. In the Science of Logic, the progress from mechanism’s inherent insufficiency, to a form of being that is conceived of as self-affirming and self-determining, involves a more detailed movement through chemism, teleology, life, and then finally self-knowing agency. While I cannot trace out this movement here, I do wish to suggest that the metaphysical insufficiency of mechanism is itself what calls for a more self-determining way of being, and that this is relevant for Hegel’s own account of how free agency, in its relation with the inanimate world, takes itself to be responding to a genuine deficiency at play in that world. It is precisely this movement that stands at the heart of Hegel’s account of the right to property: in becoming the owner of property, the free will comes to affirm itself, and make itself actual and objective—gives itself concrete, worldly efficacy, as it were—precisely by appropriating what otherwise has the appearance of being independent of it. As Hegel says, ‘I, as free will, am an object to myself in what I possess and only become an actual will by this means’ (PhR 45). Without something in the world it could call its own—minimally, the agent’s living body, along with this body’s natural capacity to turn the things in its immediate surroundings to the purpose of realizing itself For a discussion of the privileged role of the self’s own body in Hegel’s account of property, see Ciavatta (2005).—the will could never make an actual difference in the first place, could never become a concrete will. The will’s very efficacy, the very power by which it can realize itself in the world, requires that there be things whose objective presence is such as to carry or embody the will, things whose actuality is the actuality of the will itself—in short, things the will can claim as its very own. On Hegel’s account, the appropriated thing, though initially external, comes to have ‘my will as its substantial end,… its determination, and its soul’ (PhR 44). When a thing is owned, it no longer has a self-sufficient reality or integrity of its own, but becomes most essentially an actual manifestation of the individual will’s affirmation of itself. Or rather, the appropriating will demonstrates, by its very act of assimilating the thing into its own actuality, that the thing never had a self-sufficient reality of its own, but was always incomplete in itself and essentially vulnerable to other-determination, inherently incapable of maintaining its individual integrity in the face of external forces. See the addition to paragraph 44 of the Philosophy of Right (the relevant passage is quoted above in note 27), where Hegel suggests that it is precisely in the movement whereby the will appropriates the thing to itself, that the thing’s externality to itself is demonstrated and comes to its truth. See also PhR: 61, where Hegel speaks of a ‘realized externality’, suggesting the proprietary will is itself participant in bringing this externality about. The person’s individual will, in contrast, is precisely a power of affirming and maintaining the person’s individual identity and freedom in the face of otherness, and it does so, in part, by incorporating other things, other ‘quasi-individuals,’ into its own actuality—making them, in effect, extensions of its living body. It is this capacity of the individual will to, as Locke said, ‘mix itself’ into things, that grounds the obligation we feel in certain circumstances to ask the owner of an item of property whether we can handle the item or not, for this item is ‘possessed’ by the owner’s will, this will is quite literally present in it, and to handle it without permission would be a violation. This complex metaphysical notion—namely, that a self-realizing individual realizes itself essentially in and through a negation of what is other to it, and that this negation itself demonstrates the metaphysical deficiency of the (otherwise apparently self-sufficient) other relative to the self-affirming individual that incorporates it—is basic to Hegel’s essentially dynamic, relational idealism. We see this notion play a central role particularly in Hegel’s conception of the distinctive being of living organisms, for instance. Indeed, Hegel regularly construes the animal’s basic act of eating as a kind of idealism in practice, and thus as displaying a practical refutation of naïve realism; for this act, like the will’s act of appropriating something as its own, involves a process of self-realization in and through a negation of what is other, and as such this act is also construed as demonstrating that the apparent independence and substantiality of the incorporated external thing (ie. the food) is really a mere appearance (See PhR: 44A; PhS: M109, W/C77; and PhN: 246A). More broadly, the animal is, on Hegel’s account, not merely a discrete body, separable from its external environment, but is essentially a breathing, eating, seeing, chasing body, and as such its very reality qua living inevitably takes the form of an ongoing interaction with the world (PhN: 362 and A). It is not that, in the absence of such interactions, the living being would die (though that is of course true). Rather, it simply is this ongoing interaction, and so in the absence of this interaction it simply would not be what it is, it would not have the form of a living being in the first place. But this suggests that the things it interacts with are not straightforwardly external to its body. Indeed, as incorporated into the animal’s constitutive life-processes they are just as much part of its living actuality as its own bodily organs, and so animal life realizes a situation in which the apparent externality and separate material integrity of these things—those features that the naïve realist ontology takes as absolute—is overcome, at least while the animal continues to be alive. Compare Hegel’s remark that the animal’s self-reproductive involvement with the world (e.g., in eating things) ‘constitutes, properly speaking, the object and the negative over against the subjectivity of the organism, which the latter has to overcome and digest’ (PhN: 365). The same living movement that gives rise to the animal at once gives rise to the objects with which the animal involves itself. Hegel’s conception of the idealism at play in the human practical attitude is clearly rooted in a very similar notion of the metaphysical status of the world with which we interact as we realize our agency. Indeed, it would seem that this notion ought to play a role, not merely in our understanding of property ownership, but also in our understanding of human action generally. For every action, conceived as an actual, concrete event of the will’s self-realization, will take the form of a movement of negating the immediate presence of things so as to realize in and through them a sense or an end that they do not straightforwardly contain in themselves. For example, an agent engages in an actual process of cutting a tree with a stone axe she has made, and a new kind of reality comes to be thereby—namely, the process of tree-felling, a dynamically-unfolding, futurally-oriented reality that is just as objectively there as the untouched stone. However, this new reality realizes itself only as a negation of the given, material presence of the untouched stone, and it itself is a being within which the stone does not stand alone as a positive, independent, self-contained totality, but functions essentially as a moment among others within a dynamic, relational whole: the actual, concrete movement of tree-felling is what it is only as a gathering together of the stone’s durability and shape, along with the power of the living human body that wields it, along with the tree’s specific perviousness and resistance to the axe, and so on, and through this dynamic synthesis a new being takes place (the felling) that has a distinctive presence of its own. I am drawing here on Hegel’s likening of the end of an action to a living soul that gathers otherwise external parts into a coherent whole that has an identity of its own, an identity that enables us to determine what is internal or essential to the action, and what is merely external; see PhR: 118. Compare also Hegel’s discussion in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, of how we in our productive work use nature against itself, setting it to purposes that negate or limit what would otherwise happen naturally, thereby realizing something of a different order precisely through this negation (Hegel 1956: 27). In the end, its presence is really that of the agent undertaking it, the presence of her will as she realizes herself, as an agent, precisely in and through these ‘negated’ things, precisely as the real ‘soul’ of these things. The stone-as-axe is what it is precisely in the context of this dynamic, relational whole in which the axe is actually at work in the process of cutting down the tree, or, we can also say, in the process of realizing the agent’s will and purpose. We often think of Heidegger as being the first thinker to draw our attention to the dynamic, relational ontology peculiar to our practical involvements with the world, but I am here suggesting that the seed of a comparable insight can be found in Hegel’s account of how the will realizes itself in and through an otherwise external world. Compare Heidegger’s account of equipment in Heidegger (1962: div. 1, part III). It is this whole working context of self-realization through otherness that provides the ultimate terms for understanding the stone’s reality as axe, and not merely those aspects of the stone’s reality that are present independently of its actual interaction with hand and tree. Agency as Condition of Individuation In a passage in which Hegel argues that it is not possible to own generic natural elements, but only concrete individuals, he indirectly draws our attention to the possibility that it is the will’s concrete presence as a living, bodily individual that first provides the context in which such inanimate objects come to have the form of individual things in the first place. The breathe of air or the mouthful of water can be possessed, not air or water as such, Hegel argues, drawing attention to how our individuality as agents is essentially correlated to the individuality of such inanimate elements (PhR: 52R). In these cases, it is easy to see that we as individual living beings are the ground of the individuality of the inanimate thing, or at least that our respective individuality is constituted in tandem through a movement of interaction. For water or air would not take the form of individual breathes or mouthfuls without lungs and mouths, and, indeed, we can likewise say that we would not exist in the particular, individual form we actual do, if there did not exist air and water that are actually individuated into breathable units and mouthfuls, and if there did not exist the generic elements that offered no fundamental resistance to becoming thus individuated. Likewise, when we consider that such things as ‘this river’ or ‘this mountain’ are also singled out by us—by our perceptions, but also by our practical projects (say, swimming or climbing) in relation to them—from what would otherwise be an indifferent continuity of water or earth, we are brought to wonder whether these things too, which on the surface seem to have a kind of integrity and undeniable sensible presence of their own as individuals, are likewise the correlates of our own (and other comparable animals’) concrete relations to them. This point relies on the notion that individuation is, from the point of view of the inanimate world itself, at bottom arbitrary or externally determined. But note that our own self-individuation and that of other animals is not arbitrary, at least as far as we and they are concerned. And if this living, self-individuating movement is inherently correlated with the individuation of things in our environments, then at the very least the latter is posited, from the perspective of the living, as being as essential as that of the living individuality. That is, in these cases it seems that the individuality of the things encountered is essentially correlated to our (and other comparable animals’) actual and potential interactions, and has no standing independently of this interactional context. If that is so, then the same practical movement in virtue of which we affirm and realize ourselves as individual agents in the world, is at once the movement that affirms and realizes the individuality of the things we as particular agents encounter—even if, in the end, our particular practical relation with the things at issue amounts to nothing other than a consumption of them (as in the drinking and breathing cases). It may appear that such things as individual rocks are different, in that they seem to stand as separate individuals, discontinuous with and external to their surroundings, whether or not we encounter them. But our discussion of the inherent indifference of such things to their own individuality and determinacy seems to imply that, even in cases such as this, there is something inherently contingent and relative about the fact that the individual object happens to take the form that it does at any given moment. Though we ourselves may not have literally shaped the rock into its current form, there is a sense in which its being relative to our perspective, and other perspectives like ours, is more important, with respect to the rock’s being constituted as an immediate, separate individual, than the natural, inanimate forces that shaped it into its current form. For, as I suggested, the rock’s individuality is a matter of utter indifference and contingency relative to the other inanimate things that were involved in shaping it, things that are both external to it, and external to the particular forms they happened to possess while engaged in that shaping; whereas we, as beings who actively comport ourselves in relation to such things, and who see them as the potential sites of our own practical self-realization as agents, are precisely the sorts of beings for whom their current individual shape does matter. We might look at the point this way. We as individuals engaged in a practical attitude bring to the world the relatively short-term, finite temporality of our lives and of our projects—we bring the world into the ‘now’ of our practical experience—and from the point of view of the time-scale of our actual and potential interactions with the rock, the rock as it is right now appears to stand on its own, immediately discontinuous with the rest of the world. However, considered not from the point of view of our finite, embodied perspective, but in terms of the wholly objective (that is, subjectless or perspectiveless), long-term process of its geological formation and deterioration, it is best understood as an insubstantial, utterly contingent temporal phase of what is otherwise essentially a continuum. Thus it seems that our practical attitude is itself involved in generating the temporal field in which the rock first stands out as a separate, individual thing in the first place; our practical attitude is, as it were, what lets the individual rock occur and make a difference as an individual, rather than as a merely passing phase in a continuum. As with the river or the mountain, the individual boundaries we identify as mattering are correlated to our own concrete, practical potentials as individual agents. In that case, our very encounter with such things, our immediate perception of them as external things that are separate from us, is already a kind of incipient ‘formative activity’ on our part—not in the sense that we materially shape the things with our bodies, but rather in the sense we, in our practical attitude, are involved in giving rise to a world of individuals that can be thus shaped in the first place. The rock stands out, in its individuality, precisely as something that can, in principle, enter into relation, as something having the potential to be gathered, with other things and with my body, into a unified manifestation of our will. Its very individuality, its very separateness and immediate givenness, as something mediated by the practical attitude, is thus essentially a beckoning of the will. It is thus that the practical attitude enacts a refutation of the realist construal of action as an intrusion into a being that has an ontological integrity of its own. If even the rock’s immediate presence is owed to the practical, relational context that we, as agents, set in motion in the world, this amounts to saying that what grants it standing in its immediacy is precisely what undermines this standing, precisely what reveals it to be a contingent appearance. This dynamic, involving the presupposition of an immediate given that is external to us, and the subsequent realization that even this givenness is in fact a necessary correlate of our own activity, is basic to the structure of reflection as Hegel conceives it; see especially Hegel’s discussion of the transition from ‘external reflection’ to ‘determining reflection’ (SL: 348–53, 11.252–7). As Christopher Yeomans has demonstrated, this basic dynamic can be found, in different forms, in various parts of the Logic, and in the end constitutes an essential dimension of Hegel’s overall conception of human agency (Yeomans 2012). That we access the rock in a given moment, and treat its current state as a presentation of a complete, self-sufficient being, is to fail to appreciate its fundamental self-indifference and self-externality. This is, again, how our immediate, realist-oriented consciousness operates. As Hegel argues, however, our practical attitude does not accept such immediacy as absolute, but rather introduces the rock into a context of actual and potential action in which the rock’s very actuality is fundamentally mediated by otherness—at the very least, by the agent’s own body, which has the power to turn it towards a substantial purpose, most basically that of affirming the will in its character as self-affirming. Concluding Remarks: Agency’s Relation to Animal Life I have focused the discussion on the practical attitude’s relationship to the inanimate world, but the issue of the will’s overall relationship to nature becomes significantly more complicated if we take into consideration the agent’s relation to living beings, and particularly to animals. As I suggested earlier, individual animals likewise enact a sort of practical demonstration of idealism, on Hegel’s view, in that they too have a stake in constituting the external world as something naturally amenable to their own self-realization. They are hardly the passive, externally-determined, self-indifferent individuals characteristic of the inanimate world. Rather, they exist as forging a determinate environment for their own lives, and, as is the case with human agency, their realization of themselves as individuals seems essentially bound up with a process of negating what is external. Thus despite Hegel’s claim that animals, too, are external to themselves, and that they are therefore as much susceptible to being owned as inanimate things (see PhR: 44A), the nature of the relationship between the will and animal life in particular would seem to be much more complex than the will’s relation to the inanimate world. Indeed, the fact that we, as embodied agents, are essentially alive, and that our every practical contact with the world is mediated by our own living bodies, would, it seems, need to play a significant role in our account of how the will realizes its freedom in and through a concrete engagement with external things. For the will’s exemplary capacity to demonstrate the truth of idealism by overcoming the apparent externality of the things must, it seems, be rooted at least in part in the way the organic body of the agent realizes itself as living in and through its ongoing interaction with the world. Indeed, it seems that Hegel’s metaphysics of agency depends essentially on his metaphysics of life, even if, on the whole, Hegel is more concerned to highlight how the free will transcends our animality than he is to explore our continuity with it. Bibliography Ciavatta, David (2005), ‘Hegel on Owning One’s Own Body,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 43:1:1–23. 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