It is widely acknowledged that Hegel's ethical thought moves in a naturalistic direction away from the pure practical reason of Kant's moral philosophy. But the exact character of that naturalistic turn has proven elusive, in part because Hegel so insistently foregrounds the theme of freedom. He often opposes self-determination through freedom to being determined merely by nature, and while Hegel's incorporation of the natural into his theory of freedom has been emphasised by many recent commentators, there remains a fundamental lack of consensus about how nature and freedom intersect in Hegel's ethics. My goal is to shed light on this issue by examining Hegel's distinction between Subjective Spirit and Objective Spirit. This distinction between two domains of inquiry and two perspectives on human action is fundamental for understanding his views about the natural and the normative in ethics. My central claim is that by advocating a division of labor between these domains, and by showing how they are integrated, Hegel is able to capture the best elements of naturalistic inquiry into human psychology and to preserve the distinctive character of the ethical domain.

This paper aims to open an avenue for future research into Hegel's naturalism and to demonstrate Hegel's relevance for contemporary debates. In focusing on the difference between Subjective Spirit and Objective Spirit, I am already taking on a large topic for a single essay, and there are many related issues in Hegel that will necessarily go untouched. Some of these are worth mentioning up front. First, one would expect a paper about Hegel's naturalism to explore Hegel's view on nature in general, namely, the content of the Philosophy of Nature which forms the middle part of the Encyclopaedia. Without an account of how Hegel conceives of nature, it seems that we have to assume a conception of nature foreign to his system, and using that to measure his views would seem to violate a number of hermeneutical strictures. While I admit that this is a problem, it is simply beyond the scope of this paper, and I hope that using an intuitive account of the natural, and Hegel's claims about human nature, is enough at least to get this project going. The project itself can then provide a further spur to examining Hegel's views on non-human nature.

One of the more surreal moments in Kierkegaard's journals involves a scene from the Underworld. Hegel has been reading Trendelenburg's Logical Investigations, and goes over to Socrates to complain. Alas, the conversation has trouble getting off the ground:

Socr.: Should we begin by being altogether in disagreement, or should we agree on something we could call a presupposition?…. What do you presuppose as your starting-point?

H.: Nothing at all.

Socr: That's quite something! So perhaps you don't start at all?

H.: I not start, I who have written 21 volumes?

Socr: Ye gods, what a hecatomb you have offered!

H.: But I start from nothing.

Socr.: Is that not something?

H.: No – on the contrary. That first makes its appearance in the conclusion of the whole, in the course of which I discuss science, world history etc.

Socr.: How might I be able to master this difficult task for many remarkable things may well be included which would show up my stupidity… You know that I did not even allow Polos to talk more than 5 minutes at a time, and you want to talk XXI volumes.

In his 2003 book Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Jon Stewart challenges the classical interpretation of Kierkegaard's response to Hegelian philosophy. Stewart convincingly argues that Kierkegaard's work addresses Danish Hegelians rather than Hegel himself. However, in my view the conclusion Stewart draws from this — that Kierkegaard's thought on the whole has much less to do with Hegel than earlier commentators have presumed — goes too far in undermining the philosophical and historical significance of Kierkegaard's work, and, perhaps more importantly, closes down too quickly the question of his relation to Hegelian philosophy. The following passage exemplifies Stewart's position:

Hegel's works on logic played an important role in the reception of his philosophy in Denmark, where the Science of Logic found a handful of Danish imitators in the 1830s and 1840s. Beginning in 1831, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860) gave lectures on Hegel's speculative logic and published, as a help to his students, his Outline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic, as a kind of handbook. Despite some significant deviations from the original, this work can be fairly characterised as a copy of Hegel's Science of Logic, at times bordering on paraphrase. In response to criticisms of Hegel's account of the beginning of philosophy, Heiberg also presented some of this material again in the form of an article entitled ‘The System of Logic’. This piece, which he published in his Hegelian journal Perseus (Heiberg 1838: 1-45), treats the initial categories of Hegel's logic and tries to defend the notion of philosophy beginning with the categories of being and nothing. There are also extensive critical treatments of different aspects of Hegel's logic in Frederik Christian Sibbern's (1785-1872) Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel's Philosophy, with Regard to our Age, published in the same year. Another overt attempt to imitate Hegel's logic can be found in Adolph Peter Adler's (1812-69) Popular Lectures on Hegel's Objective Logic, which was published in 1842. This work, which also started as university lectures, treats in highly didactical fashion about the first two-thirds of Hegel's Science of Logic.

Ethical motivation represents an important aspect of Kant's practical philosophy, one without which much of Kant's distinctive position would be lost. Not surprisingly, it is also one of those aspects of Kantianism to which Hegelian criticism directs its focus with predilection. Central to Kant's account of moral motivation is the distinction between acting merely in accordance with duty and acting from duty. When he introduces this distinction, in the Groundwork, Kant also points to the epistemic difficulties of properly drawing the distinction. A key concept here is, without any doubt, that of duty, and Kant begins with a preliminary definition: the notion of duty is a notion ‘which contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances’ (G: 4: 397).

What this definition tells us is that, although beings which are only governed by practical reason without any admixture of inclinations and sensuous drives, that is, purely rational beings, will also have a good will, such beings do not have duties precisely because they lack the ‘subjective limitations and hindrances’ of sensuous motivating forces, such as desires, passions, habitual responses. If a person spontaneously and necessarily acts as duty requires, then it does not make sense to talk about an obligation for this person to act as duty requires. Such a person must be a purely rational person, since only she can always and necessarily act as (practical) reason requires. By contrast, beings with limitations and hindrances, like us, act spontaneously and necessarily as natural laws require and, hence, it does not make sense to talk about our obligation or duty to observe the laws of nature.

The Science of Logic is perhaps Hegel's most notoriously impenetrable work. Despite well over a century of commentaries as well as the recent proliferation of scholarship, there exists little agreement concerning the text, whether with regard to particular details or the project of speculative logic in general. Nonetheless, the Logic has often been regarded as exemplifying totalizing metaphysics at its worst. Contemporary philosophers concerned with overcoming metaphysics have thus sought to show not only the incoherence of speculative logic but also the perils of Hegel's supposedly totalizing philosophy.

In contrast, showing the continuity between Kant and Hegel has been the strategy for establishing a ‘non-metaphysical’ view of Hegel's speculative logic. Against readings of Hegel as a metaphysical monist who defends the reality of the Absolute Idea developing in nature and spirit, speculative logic is presented as the absolute-idealist successor to Kantian transcendental logic. Hegel's speculative logic is an ‘idealist logic’, since it aims at expounding the conditions necessary for the determinacy of any possible object of thought. Speculative logic thus clarities that experience is dependent on non-empirical concepts and, ultimately, on selfconsciousness. Along this interpretative line, Hegel's Science of Logic offers an account of thinking as a norm-based activity, and of concepts as rules for fixing determinacy. The great insight of Hegel's Logic is, on this view, twofold. First, Hegel's notion of the concept [der Begriff] is understood as a holistic-inferential system of logical concepts, since it provides an account of conceptual content as determined by every other possible content. Second, Hegel's analysis of the actualization of the concept — of the concept that has ‘made itself the foundation’, in Hegel's obscure phrasing — provides an account of the fundamental role of authority involved in the process of fixing determinacy. To be bound to a rule is to acknowledge it as having authority over us and at the same time to institute it as authoritative over the states of affairs that we seek to determine. That Hegel spoke of the freedom of the concept is, therefore, crucial. It suggests that determinacy is ultimately a matter of the authorization of reason, of establishing one way of fixing intelligibility over against others.