Paths Not Taken

This chapter begins with the Phenomenology ’s brief critique of Kantian moral theory. Hegel credits Kant with reconciling the objective validity of rational criteria with their status as self-authored, while failing to make good on his own insight. Since, on Hegel’s diagnosis, Kant’s conception of the will is a reified abstraction from social ‘actuality’, he assigns it a spurious self-sufficiency, leading to an unsatisfactory picture of the nature of practical reason. The chapter then turns to Hegel’s strategy for undoing this conception, namely by traveling the two paths Kant opened up but did not take. Taking the first path means appreciating that rational criteria cannot have their basis in features of the individual agent considered in isolation; instead, criteria must be those agents can act upon in institutional actuality while still recognising themselves as their authors. Taking the second entails seeing resistance and alienation as productive phenomena, symptoms not of structural deficits of the human will, but of conflicts between what freedom seems to demand at a given socio-historical juncture and what it really does. Taking both paths, therefore, entails a recognition that what counts as respectively internal and external to free subjectivity is subject to both synchronic and diachronic variation.