Abstract Right: Natural Immediacy within the Matrices of Personhood

Chapter ten, therefore, examines the opening section of Hegel’s Rechtphilosophie, “Abstract Right,” in order develop a ‘preliminary sketch’ of the concepts of right and juridical personhood. The chapter historically contextualizes Hegel in relation to the mechanical deterministic conception of the individual (Hobbes) and abstract, though free, conceptions (Rousseau, Kant, Fichte). The chapter then moves to point out Hegel’s uniqueness in this context. Synthesizing Hobbesian and Fichtean standpoints, Hegel argues that the natural dimension of the individual (impulse, drive, and whim) is crucial to the genesis of actual freedom in the social world. Reconstructing Hegel’s analysis, the chapter shows that freedom is not undermined by acting out on one’s desires, impulses etc. but is brought into the world by these very drives. Although these drives are historically and socially conditioned they are, nevertheless, immediate and therefore constitutive of the basal level of juridical personhood. Thereby the chapter argues that a new sense of nature arises within Hegel’s political philosophy. The task, then, is to pursue what nature must mean within the fields constituting the socio-political.

The Nightmare of Reason and Regression into the Night of the World

This chapter critically reads finite subjectivity in terms of its natural, instinctual dimension. The chapter’s objective is to further substantiate the significant problem Hegel’s conception of nature poses to his project of radical freedom. Developing a sense of subjectivity’s potential for “regression”, the chapter seeks to outline how, as in the case of acute psychopathology, subjectivity’s ordering of its instinctual dimension might be undermined. Hegelian regression, therefore, is a haywire inversion where the logical superiority of spirit’s freedom is subordinated to the ontologically prior register of instinct. Extrapolating from this analysis, the chapter contends that the unconscious-instinctual depth of the subject is never entirely abandoned; this abyss (Schacht) of indeterminacy lingers within the matrices of finite spirit and has the perpetual possibility of breaking-loose to the detriment of subjectivity’s free self-actualizing activity. Consequently, a reconstruction of Hegel’s account of mental illness forcefully demonstrates how nature remains a perpetual source of trauma for finite subjectivity and, therefore, the life of spirit.

Introduction: The Problem of a Philosophical Rendering of Nature and Hegel’s Philosophy of the Real

-The monograph begins with an historical introduction to the problem of nature in German idealism. Subsequently, the chapter outlines the holistic quality of Hegel’s thought, and the importance he repeatedly assigns to nature within his own system. It argues that if Hegel’s system is to be taken seriously then it must be reconsidered it in terms of that which contemporary scholarship has excluded, i.e. his conception of nature. The wager is that such a move allows for a critically (re-)reading of Hegel against Hegel, offering an entirely different understanding of his late philosophy. Consequently, the book proposes to (1) generate a careful reconstruction of Hegel’s conception of nature in order to (2) critically explore what such a conception of nature must mean when considered in relation to what he advances concerning the constitution of subjectivity and social freedom. This proposal establishes the coordinates for the remainder of the monograph. The introduction functions as a break with traditional Hegel scholarship that begins with his logic (an onto-logic) and then reads the remainder of his final system in terms of the abstract dictates of ‘the concept.’ This project fundamentally concerns Hegel’s Philosophy of the Real (Realphilosophie), the actuality of nature and culture.

Conclusion: Freedom within Two Natures, or, the Nature–Spirit Dialectic in the Final System

Concluding, the monograph attempts to address the major objections that might be raised against this rereading of Hegel’s final system. Specifically, it responds to the claim that such a reading conflates the inchoate activity of spirit in nature with nature itself and so proceeds by way of conflation. Resisting this criticism, the conclusion returns to crucial passages from Hegel’s writings on nature that explicitly characterize nature as impotent and radically external—two features antithetical to the concept of spirit. Consequently, the conclusion argues that there must be a reticent independence assigned to the domain of nature that is not the result of misreading Hegel’s mature philosophy. Instead, this reticence is the very expression of material nature and it functions as a problem for the project of spirit, a problem which permeates the entirety of Hegel’s final system, specifically his philosophy of the real (Realphilosophie). The conclusion then highlights three symptomatic expressions of nature’s paradoxical and problematic status. Subsequently, the conclusion also shows how spirit’s project of freedom persistently transgresses two distinct senses of nature.

Surplus Repressive Punishment and Spirit’s Regressive (de-)Actualisation

This chapter begins with a provoking claim: the real problem here is not the natural dimension involved in criminality. Instead, it argues that the real threat to freedom’s social actualization is the way in which the state’s disciplinary apparatus reacts to violations of right. It shows that if criminality needs to be framed in terms of nature then so does punishment. If punishment functions to (re-)habituate transgressive persons, then one of its inherent risks is that it might operate as a brute externality, a natural force. In functioning as an external natural force, punishment actively mutilates the freedom constitutive of juridical personhood. Not only does this mutilation undermine the individual it also actively undermines spirit’s social (objective) expression as freedom because such a practice serves to (a) fragment and alienate the person and (b) the totality constituting the body politic. This threat is what the chapter calls “surplus repressive punishment.” This problem as a whole is what the chapter denotes with “spirit’s regressive (de-)actualization.” Consequently, the problem nature poses in Hegel’s system is even more complex when considered in terms of how the polis’ institutions frame, understand, and react to that very same problem.

Assimilation and the Problems of Sex, Violence, and Sickness unto Death

This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?

Treatment as (re-)Habituation: From Psychopathology to (re-)Actualised Subjectivity

Chapter eight outlines how Hegel’s analysis seeks to overcome the problem of nature entailed by his conception of mental illness. It offers, therefore, a reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis of the category of habit. The chapter outlines the duplicitous signification of habit. First, habit expresses spirit’s liberating activity. It binds, unifies, the body’s manifold of instincts and drives as a singular whole. Second, spirit’s reconstructive activity takes the shape of a natural effect. The chapter argues that Hegel’s concept of habit shows itself as crucial to the problem of psychopathology and therefore nature: it combines the multitude of natural drives etc. within the unified simplicity of a subjective totality. Habit, therefore, is the grounding process that allows for the stabilized (re-)emergence of the subject out of its over-immersion in natural determinations. A close reading of habit, however, reveals that there is nothing that guarantees the problem of nature has been permanently ‘sublated.’ To the contrary, the chapter contends that what Hegel’s analysis shows is how closely bound the problem of nature is to his conception of finite subjectivity and freedom. Taking this to be the case allows for this question: how does nature factor in objective spirit, i.e. the political register?

The Problem of Nature’s Spurious Infinite within the Register of Animal Life

Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of Hegelian nature. Concentrating on Hegel’s writings on animal life, the chapter reveals that the organism’s self-referential structure is consistently given over to various forms of external determination that analogically reflect the externality permeating the categories of space and time. This collapse into exteriority proves dangerous to the interiority constituting organic life. By extension, such collapse is dangerous to the animal organism’s status as one of the primary upsurges of freedom within the matrices of material nature. The upshot of Hegel’s account of organic life is revealingly significant: nature’s exteriority and indeterminacy function as crucial preconditions for the emergence of freedom within nature and yet they also serve to perpetually threaten the very reality of that same freedom. This paradoxical tension constitutes a fundamental problem which the remainder of the monograph seeks to systematically explore, both in terms of Hegel’s anthropology and political philosophy.

Crime, the Negation of Right, and the Problem of European Colonial Consciousness

This chapter develops an acute sense of the contingency that necessarily unfolds in the wake of Hegel’s account of personhood, specifically in terms of the structure of contract. In the pursuit of one’s own interests in terms of property, Hegel’s analysis leads to the inevitability of exchange amongst persons (contract). The chapter aims to demonstrate that because contracts are contingent upon persons’ self-interests they are prone to violation: one may just as well respect their contract as violate it. Right, framed in terms of contract, dialectically mutates into wrong and crime. The chapter that the natural dimension of the individual, understood as immediate drive etc., is crucial to criminal violations of right. Subsequently, the chapter develops a sustained critical reading of Hegel on this speculative rendering of the structure of crime. Drawing from key theorists in postcolonial and critical race studies, the chapter accentuates the problematic colonial impulse permeating Hegel’s position, exposes the ways in which it grounds criminality in the ‘natural’, ‘metaphysical’ depth of the juridical subject.

An Introduction to the Problem of Surplus Repressive Punishment

Opening Part III, chapter nine begins historically. It situates Hegel’s political writings in relation to Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and to a lesser degree Fichte. Paying careful attention to the Philosophy of Right’s full title, and its introduction, while also acknowledging both “metaphysical” and “non-metaphysical” readings of Hegel’s political philosophy, the chapter gestures towards Hegel’s account of “Abstract Right”, specifically the category of personhood, as a fertile point of departure for pursuing the problem of nature from within Hegel’s political philosophy.