(I) The sustainability provision

Mobilizing Hegelian philosophy for thinking about environmental problems might seem counterintuitive at first glance, given its widespread—but ultimately misguided—reputation as a philosophy of subjectivity. Yet, interpreters that ascribe a Promethean position to Hegel ‘surreptitiously presuppose an ideological notion of the “subject”’ (Nancy Reference Nancy2002: 5) and forget his acceptance of ‘the turn to the subject, but not the foundationalist metaphysics of subjectivity’ (Williams Reference Williams1992: 102, 142). Hegel presents no solipsistic subjectivity but a socially interactive paradigm: for him, self-conscious subjects emerge only through their relations with others, through ‘the assumption of a position in a social space’ (Pinkard Reference Pinkard1996: 7). But if the role of the social is acknowledged by many readers of Hegel (e.g., Pippin Reference Pippin1989; Hardimon Reference Hardimon1994; Williams Reference Williams1997), the role of the natural world is more controversial. Nevertheless, as Sedgwick underlines, Hegel criticizes metaphysicians of subjectivity not only because they present reason as limited and our form of knowledge as deficient but also because they portray it as abstract, especially when ‘the science of subjectivity’ overrides ‘the science of nature’ (2012: 94). Hegel holds that the two form a continuum and cannot be fully separated.

For that reason, Hegel’s philosophy is understood by many commentators as having a naturalist basis. To be sure, not all readers of Hegel agree with such a characterization (see Gardner Reference Gardner and Hammer2007; Reference Gardner and Stone2011), and the exact contours of Hegel’s naturalism are highly disputed. While we will not dwell on this debate, we take it that, at the very least, Hegel’s commitments are strong enough to describe his position as ‘broadly naturalistic’—a term that Alison Stone (Reference Stone2013) uses to situate Hegel’s complex views on the continuities and discontinuities between philosophy and science (see also Illetterati Reference Illetterati2020). In presenting our case for a Hegelian approach to sustainability, we equally agree with Renault when he asserts that one reason for Hegel’s contemporary relevance is his way of ‘retaining the primacy of the social without falling in the traps of antinaturalism’ (2012: 248).

The relevance of Hegelian philosophy to the debate on environmental sustainability has recently been underscored by authors such as Alison Stone, Wendell Kisner and Klaus Vieweg. However, none of them gives significant attention to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—the text pivotal to our argument about the concurrent transformation and preservation of nature, and the role of work in this process. Stone argues for the presence of ‘a critical and protoenvironmentalist strain of thought’ within Hegel’s work (Reference Stone2005: 170). Nevertheless, she deems Hegel’s philosophical framework as ultimately internally inconsistent. These inconsistencies arise, according to Stone, where despite his view on nature as having an intrinsic value, he maintains that humans have no duties of respect or preservation towards natural entities—only a positive duty to transform them without restraint (Reference Stone2005: 153).Footnote ⁴ As a response, Stone argues that Hegel’s ‘transformative duties’ must be constrained by ‘preservative duties’. Individuals who ‘persist in irrationally destroying nature’s order’, inevitably fail ‘to act rationally and so renege on their duty, or do wrong, by Hegel’s standards’ (Reference Stone2002: 257).

Wendell Kisner argues that Hegel’s category of life, as presented in the Science of Logic, ‘provides ontological grounds for the recognition of living species along with their various ecosystems as the proper objects of ethical regard for environmental ethics’ (2008: 1). However, like Stone, Kisner maintains that Hegel overlooks the implications of his own thought when, in the Philosophy of Right, he seconds the possibility of humans subsuming external nature under the right of personhood. For Kisner, Hegel ‘should have been ‘more attentive to the ontological development he had himself articulated’ (2008: 54), wherein any form of life treated in a thing-like manner is denied its status as a living being. Kisner concludes that to achieve an ‘environmental Sittlichkeit’ (2008: 16), a true understanding of the life-form is needed.

For Klaus Vieweg, Hegel, despite providing ‘no developed concept of sustainability’, was capable of sketching ‘substantial outlines of this key issue of 21st century life’ (Reference Vieweg2020: 90). In particular, Vieweg identifies two central concepts in Hegel’s practical philosophy: care (Sorge) and forethought (Vorsorge), which culminate in the notion of ‘appropriate appropriation’ (Reference Vieweg2020: 85). The latter establishes a differentiation between natural things based on their position ‘in the natural realm, in the infinite variety of the qualitative nature of objects and the diversity of subjective aims’ (2020: 89). Entities such as ‘air, water, animals [and] ecological systems’ (2020: 86) are deemed preconditions for human life, and consequently, should be treated distinctly in discussions of property.Footnote ⁵ For instance, external goods rationally necessary for life’s continuation should be subject to ‘strict public supervision and control and must largely be withheld from profit-making interests’ (2020: 95).

Distinct from what Stone, Kisner and Vieweg have done, we will defend the Hegelian requirement of sustainability via a reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically his discussion of the life and death struggle and of lordship and bondage. We believe that the seed of a Hegelian environmental ethics can already be found in this text, where a fundamental relation is established between the preservation of life, the role of work and the attainment of freedom.

(II) The vital lesson of the life-and-death struggle and the role of work

One of the purposes of the Phenomenology is to show that both theoretical and practical consciousness can end up trapped in claims of self-sufficiency. But in the same way that self-sufficiency proved unstable for consciousness in its attempt to know the world, it will prove unstable for self-consciousness in its attempt to know itself. As Stern asserts, the ‘practical attitude can also be developed one-sidedly’, especially when it seeks to ‘master the natural world’ (Reference Stern2013: 82). But in which sense would mastering the natural world imply a one-sided development of self-consciousness? And how could this one-sidedness be overcome?

By the end of Hegel’s reflections on self-consciousness, we learn that if theoretical consciousness attributes a putative independence to the object, practical consciousness—that is, self-consciousness as desire—seeks to deny it. Desire is the ‘movement of consciousness which does not respect being but negates it’ (Hyppolite Reference Hyppolite1974: 159). However, by searching for certainty of itself in the destruction of the object’s independence, self-consciousness discovers itself as a structurally dependent desiring logic. As Butler maintains, ‘a destructive agent has no identity without a world to be destroyed; thus, this being who, convinced of his exile from Life, endeavours to destroy all living things, ends up paradoxically dramatizing his essential dependence on the world of the living’ (1999: 38). Indeed, self-consciousness does not present itself as an ‘inert tautology of I=I’ but as ‘engaged in a debate with the world’, a world that is constantly disappearing but whose presence and vanishing become essential for self-consciousness to pose itself (Hyppolite Reference Hyppolite1974: 159). Thus, by asserting its independence from nature, self-consciousness reveals its profound dependence on it—but it is precisely through desire that self-consciousness will bring about, in a practical manner, ‘the unity with the world that consciousness could only effect theoretically and inadvertently’ (Butler Reference Butler1999: 33).

Self-consciousness will eventually notice that its dependence on determinate objects does not satisfy its desire, that the latter cannot be attained through the constant negation of living things. In Hegel’s famous words, ‘self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’ (PS: ¶175). Hence, self-consciousness is, in Hegel, a practical achievement that has itself as its object but that depends on the encounter with living others to actualize itself. In order for me to become a self-determining subject, ‘subject of my desires’ rather than ‘subject to my desires’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2011: 32), I must be faced by another self-consciousness capable of exercising ‘the negation within itself’ (PS: ¶175). As Suther claims (Reference Suther2025), the initial difficulty for self-consciousness is to overcome the alienation of mind from life—an intra-subjective form of alienation that is only later superseded by another intra-subjective form of alienation; that of mind from mind, characteristic of the master-slave relationship.

Importantly, entering the realm of Spirit through the encounter with another self-consciousness does not entail the abandonment of the natural realm. On the contrary, we are constantly reminded of the co-constitution of the natural and spiritual realms (see Bernstein Reference Bernstein2023: Ch.4). As has been recently argued, Hegel can be interpreted as endorsing a constitutive model of rationality, wherein ‘rationality does not just subsume and transform the function of our lower-order animal capacities but is constitutive of those capacities as capacities’ (Suther Reference Suther2025).Footnote ⁶ Similarly, according to Schuringa, Hegel’s well-known assertion in the Encyclopaedia that spirit is the ‘truth’ of nature (Enc: §251) does not merely suggest that spirit is always already natural, but rather that ‘in remedying nature’s deficiencies, spirit does not leave nature behind but realizes that which nature only attempts to be’ (2022: 502). The natural world is not abandoned or merely transformed, but rather actualized in a higher form within the spiritual realm.

The life-and-death-struggle makes this last point even more evident. With it, Hegel ‘introduces into the conditions of the “satisfaction” of any self-relating another self-consciousness, an object that cannot merely be destroyed or negated in the furtherance of life without the original self-consciousness losing its confirming or satisfying moment’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2011: 37). At first, it seems counterintuitive for Hegel to introduce—right after admitting that subjects must ‘recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another’ (PS: ¶184)—the need for a life-and-death struggle. Two negations occur with this confrontation: the negation of my own dependence on life—I must demonstrate that I am not ‘attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that is not attached to life’—as well as the negation of the life of the other—I must seek ‘the other’s death’, for I cannot value the other more than myself (PS: ¶187).

At first sight, with these assertions, Hegel does not appear as a fierce defender of our dependence on the natural world. But it is precisely at this point that his position is of utmost relevance. The passages on risking the other’s and one’s own life do not negate our condition as natural beings, but rather describe the transition from life as an ‘immediate unity’, to life as a ‘reflected unity’ (PS: ¶171). In other words, these passages describe the co-constitution of life and freedom. As Brandom claims, the moment of risking one’s life corresponds to an ‘initial transition from being merely a living organism, belonging to the realm of Nature, to being a denizen of the realm of Spirit’ (Reference Brandom2007: 130). We must commit to our condition as natural beings, but in a self-reflective manner (see also Khurana Reference Khurana and Khurana2013). It is through this life-and-death struggle that we can finally put an end to a conception of ourselves ‘as extremes wanting to be for themselves, or to have an existence on their own’ (PS: ¶188). What the struggle shows is not the truth of life in the absolute detachment from the natural world, but the truth of freedom in the maintenance of life. This becomes clearer when Hegel argues that ‘this trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally’ (PS: ¶188). Wanting to radically separate themselves from one another and from life, subjects paradoxically collapse ‘into a lifeless unity which is split into lifeless, merely immediate, unopposed extremes’, incapable of reciprocally and consciously giving and receiving, left free but ‘only indifferently like things’ (PS: ¶188). The dependent side of human life is not disregarded but made constitutive to the independent side.

Tellingly, and despite death being the greatest determinate negation, Hegel calls the lethal result of the struggle ‘abstract’. He claims that this is ‘an abstract negation, not the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession’ (PS: ¶188). The key here is that self-consciousness is on a quest for its own certainty and that in destroying the conditions of possibility of its own existence, it also destroys the conditions of possibility of its own certainty. As Pippin puts it, the subject realizes that ‘it is not rational to do that which makes it unlikely that [she] can continue as a rational agent’ (Reference Pippin1989: 161). Self-consciousness is thus profoundly dependent: not only on its environment and on the survival of another self-consciousness capable of granting recognition, but most importantly, on the conscious acknowledgment of such dependence. In short, what Hegel claims is that to become self-determining, free subjects rely on the active recognition of, and the practical commitment to, their dependence on life, both human and non-human. Our first glimpse of the Notion of Spirit is meant to teach us much more than we might initially think. As Ikäheimo explains, spirit is merely a ‘title-word for the human life-form’, characterized by both subjective and objective moments forming an integral whole, by a view of recognition as ‘a self-transcendence and inclusion of otherness’, and by a form of freedom that not only cannot abstract from but must reconcile with what determines it (2022: 44).

The first subject to do so is the slave. This subject submits to ‘the fear of death, the absolute Lord’ (PS: ¶194) and shows his essential nature to be not ‘for itself’ but rather ‘for another’ (PS: ¶189). The slave’s attachment to life puts him in a weaker position with respect to the lord, who interposes the slave between the thing and himself. But ultimately, in Hegel’s story, lordship and bondage show their essential natures to be ‘the reverse of what [they] want to be’ (PS: ¶193). The lord turns out to be dependent and the slave independent, and what leads to this difference between them is the concept of work.

Work, our conscious transformation of nature,Footnote ⁷ appears at this moment as that through which ‘the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is’ (PS: ¶195). Through work, the subject shapes things, and in doing so, her individuality finally flourishes, objectivizes itself, and acquires a permanence outside itself. In this particular way, the conscious transformation of nature becomes the starting point of human freedom. However, Hegel immediately acknowledges that this positive moment is accompanied by a negative one. In working, the slave not only acquires a much-needed sense of independence, he also ‘posits himself as a negative in the permanent order of things’ (PS: ¶196). This self-understanding as a negative force is fundamental to become someone ‘for himself, someone existing on his own account’ (PS: ¶196). For that reason, Hegel writes, ‘through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind on his own’ (PS: ¶196).

Our claim, however, is that only a sustainable form of work opens the door to a Hegelian actualization of freedom. Although Hegel emphasizes the role that transforming nature plays in the achievement of freedom, he has already given us sufficient reason not to interpret this as an unqualified right—life must be preserved. But there is more: the negative force that the slave discovers in himself must learn to limit itself. In fact, work is defined by Hegel as ‘desire held in check’ (PS: ¶195). We suggest reading this claim in the following way: by itself, desire is a form of Hegelian bad infinity—one that knows no limits and is never satisfied. However, humans are not doomed to constant dissatisfaction; work, as an activity in which desire becomes self-conscious can liberate it from mere repetition. It does so by inserting a notion of limit: by giving form, direction, permanence, work channels desire into a productive and transformative force rather than an endlessly consuming one. Work counters the logic of bad infinity and produces a practical, socially mediated notion of limit.

Nature cannot be exhausted because life remains a necessary condition for our development as self-conscious beings. Its role is not accessory or secondary but constitutive: without life, without the realization that life must be preserved, there is no road to freedom. We cannot search a total negation of nature—our own and that around us—or base our practices on an inattentiveness to nature’s needs. At the same time, we cannot remain indifferent to life—such is the one-sided position (that Hegel also problematizes) in which the slave ends up when he embraces a Stoic worldview, which enables him to retreat to ‘pure thought’ only at the cost of negating the world. Neither escapism or indifference, nor unlimited domination can enable freedom; for Hegel, only a sustainable, limited and limiting transformation of nature can do so.

(I) Bad infinity at work

We now turn to some key elements in his later, practical philosophy. We argue that the latter also provides a fruitful framework for grasping the environmental problems of modern societies. But first, a word of caution. Hegel could not have anticipated the developments of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism and the magnitude of our current ecological crisis. Although almost all commentators acknowledge that there are internal tensions in his account of ‘ethical life’, there is substantial disagreement about how solvable these tensions are. While some believe he conceptualized a pre-capitalist economy (Herzog Reference Herzog2013: 56), others imply that he gives too much space to individual freedom and thereby cannot reconcile modern subjectivity and objective spirit (Bernstein Reference Bernstein, Moyar, Walsh and Rand2022: esp. 140). Yet others argue that Hegel’s economic system needs to be understood as subsumed under a strong state (McGowan Reference McGowan2021: esp. 245; Baumann Reference Baumann2022). And let us also note that of course many other views presented in the Philosophy of Right—e.g., his views on gender relations, the lack of democratic participation and the unresolved problem of the rabble (Ruda Reference Ruda2011; Zambrana Reference Zambrana2021; McGowan Reference McGowan2021: 243–44)—raise serious questions about the extent to which his account can be understood as presenting a reconciliation with reality (Hardimon Reference Hardimon1994), even on the standards of his own time.Footnote ⁸

Nonetheless, we think that there are conceptual resources in Hegel’s mature thought that are useful for thinking about alternatives to what, we will argue, can be grasped as the ‘bad infinity’ characteristic of the current economic system. In discussing them, we continue the line that we have identified in the Phenomenology, namely to ask how freedom is possible neither by destroying nature, nor by avoiding any interference with it, but by a mediated relationship in which its ineliminable role for human freedom is recognized. The Philosophy of Right expands Hegel’s account, started in the Phenomenology, of how freedom is possible for the finite, bodily, social creatures that human beings are (PR: §142). We will argue that despite not directly addressing the question of a sustainable relation to external nature, Hegel’s conception of habit, and his understanding of work as not directed towards a ‘bad infinity’ of endless growth but towards the achievement of social recognition and of forms of cooperation that guarantee socio-natural reproduction, contain interesting possibilities for thinking about free and sustainable life forms.Footnote ⁹

This strategy may seem surprising at first glance. As Lumsden puts it: ‘The Philosophy of Right cannot locate us in external nature, it can only account for our hold over it’ (Reference Lumsden2021: 107). Nature only plays a role as the ‘external sphere’ into which individual freedom needs to be translated in the form of property, for the person to ‘have being as Idea’ (PR: §41). Hegel does mention the ‘tilling of the soil, the cultivation of plants, and the domestication, feeding, and conservation of animals’ as well as the use of ‘raw materials or the forces of nature’ for the production of goods (PR: §56). He even briefly discusses ‘self-renewing products’ and holds that for such products, the use needs to ‘limit itself with a view to safeguarding that renewal’ (PR: §60), which points to an awareness of the need for sustainability in areas in which such ‘renewal’ plays a role. With regard to agriculture, he speaks of ‘not just indeterminate exploitation, but formation of an objective kind’ (PR: §203), which also refers to a long-term, stable social formation. And of course, his view of property is not a pre-social one, but one in which it is social recognition that ultimately secures property rights. These social structures can also impose limits, for instance, when someone’s life is at stake (PR: §127 H). As Khurana underlines, Hegel seems to be concerned not just with ‘sheer biological existence’ but with all necessary means for a ‘specific civic form of life’ and for ‘sustainable living conditions’ (Reference Khurana, Moyar, Walsh and Rand2022: 160). And yet, Hegel’s tendency seems to be to treat nature as raw material for human work (PR: §196), and property as something that, if limited, is so for the sake of human beings rather than for the sake of preserving nature.

Nevertheless, we argue that Hegel’s mature thought contains other valuable ideas—one of them being the notion of ‘bad infinity’. According to Hegel, a ‘bad infinity’ is an infinity that is understood as ‘the other’ of finitude. This leads to an ‘indeterminate emptiness’ without any qualitative distinctions and any chance of returning to its origins (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 61). What a bad infinity lacks is any rational internalization of limits. This notion seems applicable to the strive for profits that characterizes the mode of production and consumption in the system of needs. Indeed, commentators have understood the capitalist growth imperative—which, on a Marxist understanding, functions not only via consumption or status-seeking, as in Hegel, but via the pressure to generate profits on the side of capital—as an instance of the Hegelian notion of a bad infinity (McNally Reference McNally, Albritton and Simoulidis2003; Arthur Reference Arthur2004; Neuhouser Reference Neuhouser2023). This seems plausible given its nature as an ‘unending process, one that can never arrive at its destination, precisely because this destination is logically impossible—because the infinite posited as the not-finite can never be encountered through the labour of knowing the finite’ (McNally Reference McNally, Albritton and Simoulidis2003: 3).

As Arthur notes, ‘capital is a bottomless sink of value and always demands more’ (Reference Arthur2004: 146). Consequently, it evolves into a process without any natural endpoint, relentlessly pushing back all limits or boundaries it encounters, all while disregarding its own dependence on the natural conditions that it continually destroys. As ecological economists have long criticized, these economic systems (as well as the theories that they are based on, i.e., neoclassical economics) neglect the fact that all social systems depend on bio-geophysical conditions (e.g., Martinez-Alier Reference Martinez-Alier2002: Ch.2). As long as nature stays a mere resource for the growth imperative of capital, the ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström2009) will continue to be violated. And as a part of this relentless strive for higher profits, the exploitation of not just external but also inner nature takes place, in the sense of the physiological and psychological energies of individuals (Fracchia Reference Fracchia2008). For Neuhouser, the notion of bad infinity enables us to identify ‘structural similarities’ between the notion of capital and the life processes themselves (Reference Neuhouser2023: 59). The crucial distinction lies in the fact that, unlike ‘mere reproduction’, capital’s circulation is driven by the pursuit of ‘continual increase’. This renders it more analogous to unhealthy life processes with cancerous-like tendencies, where growth is perceived as a logic of ‘quantitative increase’ rather than ‘the development of new or enhanced capacities’ (Neuhouser Reference Neuhouser2023: 65).

Indeed, current economic systems are built on a strong imperative to grow in terms of GDP, which goes hand in hand with a consumerist culture that also suggests an ‘ever more’ for individuals (Jackson Reference Jackson2009; Hickel Reference Hickel2021). This seems, at first glance, also to be Hegel’s understanding of the ‘system of needs’, in which the appropriation and use of natural materials is combined with ‘subjective need’ (PR: §189). Human needs differ from animal needs in that they are not restricted to natural necessities, because ‘judgment’ and ‘opinion’, as well as ‘representational thought’ co-determine them (PR: §190, §194). This leads to their ‘multiplication’ (PR: §190), in a process of ‘infinite increase in dependence and want’ (PR: §195). As McGowan notes, Hegel here uses the notion of ‘comfort’ (PR: §191 H), which is insatiable (Reference McGowan2021: 238). In fact, Hegel takes over ideas from ‘Smith, Say, and Ricardo’ (PR: §189) in what Feltham (Reference Feltham2021: 69) describes as ‘an undigested import from early political economy’ that stands in no connection to his own Philosophy of Nature.

To that extent, Hegel seems to also take over from the political economists the endorsement of economic growth and the lack of awareness of the embeddedness of the economy in bio-geophysical systems.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, and especially in one remarkable passage, Hegel criticized a kind of ‘consumerism’ avant la lettre, namely when speaking about an individual who works in ‘trade’ but is not a member of a corporation. Such an individual is ‘without the honour of belonging to an estate’ and ‘his isolation reduces him to the selfish aspect of his trade’, while ‘his livelihood and satisfaction lack stability’ (PR: §253). This is why such an individual ‘will try to gain recognition through the external manifestations of success in his trade, and these are without limit’ (PR: §253). Again, what fails here is the emergence of a sense of limit—precisely what, as we have already seen, should be introduced by the activity of work. The members of corporations receive recognition from their fellow members, while individuals without corporate membership try to achieve it through a limitless striving for profits and ever higher levels of consumption, which, again, very much resembles Hegel’s notion of bad infinity (see also Schmidt am Busch Reference Schmidt am Busch2011: Ch.5; Muller Reference Muller2002: 158–59). This notion thus helps describe why, instead of being oriented towards human needs and the preservation of nature, our economic system pushes towards the exhaustion of both human and non-human nature. This analysis also leads to serious questions about the possibility of ‘capitalist production [becoming] sustainable one day’ (Saito Reference Saito2017: 132; see also Buller Reference Buller2022; Christophers Reference Christophers2024).

(II) Transforming unethical habits

The second theoretical resource we focus on, and which will allow a deeper understanding of the ‘bad infinity’ of capitalist growth but also potential ways of overcoming it, is Hegel’s notion of ‘habit’. Together with his notion of work, which similarly contributes to an understanding of a sustainable relationship between humans and nature, ‘habit’ describes his attempt to find a relation to one’s inner nature that enables freedom. In Ethical life, ‘the habit of the ethical appears as a second nature’ (PR: §151), thus making it a matter of concrete social institutions and practices rather than abstract principles. In the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel defines habit as ‘the soul thus mak[ing] itself into abstract universal being, and reduc[ing] the particularity of feelings (of consciousness too) to a determination in it that just is’ (Enc: §410). Through ‘repetition’ and ‘practice’, feelings are turned into ‘possessions’ that the soul is ‘not interested in or occupied with’, thereby opening up opportunities for ‘other activity and occupations’ (Enc: §410, for a discussion see, e.g., Novakovic Reference Novakovic2017: Ch.1). Habits are a ‘second nature’, as Hegel writes with reference to Aristotle (Ferrarin Reference Ferrarin2001), allowing us to hold emotions or spontaneous bodily needs in check and to focus on physical or mental activities. The bodily existence of human beings, as part of the natural world, cannot be denied, but by shaping it into a second nature, it can become an enabling condition for pursuits of the free human will.

And yet, habits also contain an element of unfreedom because they function in a mechanical way. Hegel calls this a ‘formal’ unfreedom, which is compatible with the ‘content’ of the habit—if it is a ‘habit of right in general, of the ethical’—being the content of freedom (Enc: §410R). Commentators disagree about the extent to which this makes Hegel’s notion of habit ‘paradoxical’ (on the latter, see Menke Reference Menke2013; see also Furlotte Reference Furlotte2021: 141 and Zantvoort Reference Zantvoort, Chotaš and Matějčková2020: 39–45). Novakovic seems right, however, when she insists that habit is not ‘blind’ for Hegel, but compatible with ongoing reflections on principles, because this is what makes it possible for habits to be understood as morally good, showing Hegel’s ‘enduring Kantian commitments’ (2017: 25). There is certainly a risk of habits becoming too blind and mechanical (see PR: §268 H; Novakovic Reference Novakovic2017: 16, 64–68), but it is not a necessity. Thus, while Hegel criticizes Kantian morality as one-sided, because it focuses on abstract moral imperatives, he nonetheless retains a reflective Kantian moment in his development of ‘ethical life’, in which the abstract moral principles become the concrete imperatives stemming from social roles and relations.

For Hegel, habits are always part of social forms of life—and the point of ‘ethical life’ is, of course, that individuals are embedded in forms of life that they can rationally endorse, being at home in them and therefore enabling, rather than restricting, their freedom (PR: §151; see also Novakovic Reference Novakovic2017: 38–45). In ethical life, second nature is stabilized in processes of mutual recognition between individuals, and this recognition is in turn made ‘real’ in ‘a second nature that is both subjective and objective’ (Testa Reference Testa2009: 348). Novakovic reads the ‘ethical disposition’ that connects individuals to ethical life as a ‘form of whole-hearted identification’, that leads to an integration of the relevant principles into an agent’s ‘sense of who she is’, becoming not a limitation, but a condition, of her freedom (Novakovic Reference Novakovic2017: 52; italics in the original).

But just as individual habits can become mechanical, forms of life can also become irrational and inert and yet remain stable precisely because they have become sedimented in social habits and institutions (and arguably, also in material infrastructures such as the structure of cities, etc.) (Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi2018: 74). ‘Failed and failing form(s) of life may linger a very long time’, as Bernstein puts it (Reference Bernstein, Moyar, Walsh and Rand2022: 126). Lumsden in fact uses Hegel’s notion of habit and ethical life for exploring why ‘normative change is so difficult’ (Reference Lumsden2018: 31) and why modern societies fail to respond to the challenges of climate change. The ‘naturalistic features’ of habit prevent change and mere appeals to moral reasons cannot do enough to challenge them. In Lumsden’s reading, the Philosophy of Right captures precisely the kind of one-sided relationship to nature that has shaped modernity, namely as something ‘we seize, impose on or mark’ (Reference Lumsden2021: 107). Apparently, the habits of modern life are not sufficiently reflective to respond to the new reasons that environmental science has provided, by changing towards a less resource-intense, sustainable, mode of living and producing.

In fact, one might ask whether the role of privileged citizens, who use up a far greater share of natural resources (in particular through CO2 emissions) than is generalizable, behave in a way that is comparable to the ‘rabble’—not in the sense of poverty, but in the sense of an ‘inward rebellion’ (PR: §244 G) akin to the one the affluent show in Hegel’s analysis, this time against the natural limits of our planet and therefore against the conditions of possibility of society as whole. If Zambrana describes the rabble as representing an ‘interruption of the productivity and reproduction of Sittlichkeit’ (Reference Zambrana2021: 4), it seems plausible to draw a connection to forms of consumption (private jets, etc.) that undermine the long-term viability of peaceful social life in a healthy natural environment. Arguably, our form of life, and in particular certain social groups, are stuck in ‘bad habits’ of overproduction and overconsumption that violate planetary boundaries and thus make a rational reconciliation with one’s physical finitude and one’s social nature impossible.

This analysis helps diagnose the current problems and points towards possible solutions, based on a Hegelian rather than a Kantian approach: what needs to change are not just abstract principles, but the social practices, institutions and habits that constitute our ethical life, as well as the patterns of recognition that go with them. While Hegel himself does not offer a comprehensive and detailed answer (and when he does, it remains unsatisfactory), he points towards interesting directions. Unsurprisingly, one way in which he does so refers to social recognition. We argue, following Neuhouser’s perspective, that for such recognition to occur, a critique of the spurious infinity of the capitalist mode of production is necessary. This infinity, which ultimately ‘eludes the conscious control’ of the individuals involved, calls for scrutiny because economic relations, as ‘social activities of human subjects’, warrant assessment based on ‘standards of freedom appropriate to spiritual phenomena standard of self-conscious agency’ (Neuhouser Reference Neuhouser2023: 66, 69).

At the objective level, Hegel partly solves this problem by suggesting a model in which some degree of conscious coordination takes place, between the corporations and the state, supported by the police as a regulatory force that reins in the free play of markets (PR: §§230–49). At the subjective level, Hegel addresses the potential lack of social recognition by advancing a notion of work—to take place within the corporations—quite different from capitalist notions of work, and which points, instead, to earlier religious traditions in which work was understood as a ‘calling’ (Herzog Reference Herzog2013: 75). This continues the line from the Phenomenology, in which work also played a crucial role in the process of mediating nature and freedom, to the Philosophy of Right, where it arguably plays a similar role.Footnote ¹¹

Hegel closely connects habit, limits and work: ‘Practical education through work consists in the self-perpetuating need and habit of being occupied in one way or another, in the limitation of one’s activity to suit both the nature of the material in question and, in particular, the arbitrary will of others, and in a habit, acquired through this discipline, of objective activity and universally appliable skills’ (PR: §197; see also Zambrana Reference Zambrana2021: 10). At the same time, work also connects individuals to the material world (e.g., Ver Eecke Reference Ver Eecke and Maker1987: 145). And while the opening passages of the system of needs may suggest that work is subjected to a ‘bad infinity’, the passages on the corporations paint a different picture: through them, individuals are precisely freed from the unlimited desire for recognition that those without corporate membership experience. Presumably, what Hegel here describes is the shift from a ‘bad infinity’ to a ‘true infinity’; finally, finitude and infinity are dialectically reconciled rather than absolutely opposed (Zambrana Reference Zambrana2015: 64).

What difference does the membership in a corporation make? For Hegel, individuals need to ‘attain actuality’ by entering into ‘determinate particularity’, limiting themselves ‘exclusively to one of the particular spheres of need’ (PR: §207). They need to choose a social role in the sphere of divided labour. They become a member of an occupational group, in which they have the ‘honour of [their] estate’ and ‘gain recognition in [their] own eyes and in the eyes of others’ (PR: §207). Through occupational membership, which Hegel calls a ‘second family’ (PR: §252), individuals acquire a social identity and a social safety net that assures them that their physical needs will be met. This social identity comes with recognition: ‘the two [i.e., livelihood and capability] are also recognized, so that the member of a corporation has no need to demonstrate his competence and his regular income and means of support—i.e., the fact that he is somebody—by any further external evidence’ (PR: §253). In other words, a member of a corporation does precisely not need to strive for recognition by external proofs of success such as high levels of consumption. The corporations ‘ensure that the economy is not directed at maximizing growth and affording the few the chance to accumulate extreme wealth, but rather that society as a whole enjoys the ‘security of a smoothly continuing profit’ and everyone is guaranteed their ‘livelihood’, as Houlgate puts it (Reference Houlgate, Moyar, Walsh and Rand2022: 285). Instead of individual self-interest, it is the sense of working together, on the basis of a shared understanding of what makes someone a ‘master’ of a trade (PR: §252), that motivates the members of corporations. They share a certain lifestyle, which means that their consumption levels are regulated by the community’s norms, rather than by a competitive rat race in which individuals try to outcompete each other. This argument—that work should happen in social communities in which individuals receive recognition from others, such that pressures towards consumerist behaviour are reduced—is one of the points that can be salvaged from Hegel’s thought. Because ‘work is the human way of adapting to the environment, by adapting the environment to human needs’, (Deranty Reference Deranty2024: 294) the social conditions under which such adaptation takes place are of paramount importance.

The second point to be salvaged from the Hegelian account pertains to the social organization of work, which must be done with the ultimate purpose of reconciling our status as natural beings with our status as free subjects, permitting a free and sustainable reproduction, for both human and non-human nature. Of course, this argument raises as many questions as it answers. Commentators have pointed out that the precise shape of the corporations is unclear, with Hegel sometimes suggesting geographically (rather than professionally) organized communities (Schmidt am Busch Reference Schmidt am Busch2011: 233–34). It is also not obvious how exactly they can coexist with the ‘subjective freedom’ that Hegel describes in the ‘system of needs’ (Herzog Reference Herzog2013; Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Moyar, Walsh and Rand2022). Hegel himself raises the possibility that a corporation can ‘become ossified and set in its ways, and decline into a miserable guild system’ (PR: §255H)—and we might add, can themselves embody unsustainable habits.Footnote ¹²

He recommends ‘the higher supervision of the state’ as an antidote (PR: §255H), but this again leads to further questions about the nature of the state, which we here cannot enter into. Finally, it is debatable how a generalized social recognition could take place, what it would imply in terms of the distribution of labour and on how flexible the latter would be (for a discussion see, e.g., Kandiyali Reference Kandiyali2020). The key question, however, is how such forms of work, which would function as an antidote against the ‘bad infinity’ of endless profit seeking and the search for ever higher levels of consumption, can become part of a broader ‘ethical life’ that reconciles itself to the limits of its external environment. Modern societies have hollowed out or completely destroyed many solidaristic organizations—for example, unions—that could be understood as functional successors of the Hegelian corporations (see, e.g., Heartfield Reference Heartfield2006). In other cases, they have been arguably co-opted into the capitalist drive for profit at the expense of external nature (and of non-organized labour elsewhere in the world). Work of the kind that Hegel imagined in the corporations seems to exist, at best, in pockets of public or civil society institutions that enjoy some degree of protection from competitive pressures, or in alternative communities experimenting with practices of subsistence. Rethinking and reorganizing work, and thereby reining in the ‘bad infinity’ to which most forms of work are currently subjected, would, arguably, require massive shifts in the power relations between workers and employers, and between the economic and the political sphere. At the very least, it would require remembering that Hegel’s critique of markets is ‘a structural one’, rather than one focused solely on ‘the attitudes or behaviour of individuals within the market’ (Baumann Reference Baumann2022: 28).

Nonetheless, we think that Hegel provides an interesting model of relating to one’s work and to external nature, in ways that avoid the logic of bad infinity. It provides inspiration for thinking about ways of organizing societies in which the interdependence and social cooperation behind the modern division of labour is kept up, and yet the growth imperative is superseded. It thus overcomes the charge, sometimes raised against critics of capitalist growth, that they would want to peddle a naïve primitivism in which the achievements of modern life would ultimately have to be given up and humans would end up being less free on all counts (e.g., Terzi Reference Terzi2022: Ch.3). Just as Hegel does not think that humans could or should leave nature untouched, he does not seem to seek an economic system in which there would be no progress in the sense of technological improvements or better ways of organizing the division of labour. What his proposal might allow is to embed such a form of progress into a macro-economically stable system, in the sense that the use of natural resources is limited to the carrying capacity of a healthy ecosystem and climate, as defenders of post-growth have long argued (e.g., Daly Reference Daly2014). As it currently exists, our mode of production is unsustainable and negatively impacts our relationship to work itself. ‘If work is necessary in the sense that it is what helps sustain the lifeworld in its flows and with it the lives of its members’, says Deranty, ‘then work that is organized in such a way that it undermines the natural preconditions of the lifeworld is in direct contradiction with its primary necessity’ (Reference Deranty2024: 334).