Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 29
Looking Back — What Is Taken Over and What Is Passed On
At the outset stood the claim that this volume keeps contact in two directions. Now it can be said at what points.
What is taken over from nature. Two determinations, and both have been redeemed in their place. Inner purpose: in Was die Logik liefert it holds that an organism does not have to know its purpose in order to be inner purpose, and that the knowing is added only in spirit. That is redeemed in impulse, the felt difference between what one is and what one could be. And the planetary life of §§ 392 and 393, which Der geologische Organismus treats as a geological organism lacking self-preservation in the full sense — a finding that protects the passage against the world-soul reading.
To this is added a structural parallel that becomes visible only in retrospect. In nature, illness is the reverse side of sensibility; in spirit, derangement is the reverse side of the same capacity to let oneself be taken in by a particularity. Whoever can receive can be overwhelmed. That is no analogy but the same determination in two places.
What is taken over from logic. The five determinations from Chapter 7a have carried, but not equally far everywhere. The universal-particular-singular structure orders the three parts, and it orders them twice, in the Anthropology once more in miniature (Chapter 11). The bad infinite explains what desire and happiness fail at. The nodal line of measure explains habit. Real possibility carries the transition of the whole Anthropology. And the two ideas of the true and the good give the substantive ground for free spirit, which Peperzak can ground only editorially. How far the parallel of the articulations carries as a whole is tested by Chapter 28 — which finds it limited.
What is passed on. Three pieces, and it is useful to know which. Recognition arises in Chapter 19, and from there the philosophy of right takes its concept of the person: whoever recognizes makes the other neither his end nor his means. The contract presupposes this instead of founding it. The sign arises in Chapter 23, and with it the insight that the universality of a sign does not lie in its nature but has to be shared in order to hold — which is what first makes stipulation, publicity, and registration into what they are. And habit from Chapter 14 is not the opposite of freedom but its condition; where the philosophy of right determines ethical life as second nature, precisely this habit is meant and not mere habituation.
What remains open. Intersubjectivity is not thematic in the printed Psychology but unspoken, as Chapter 26 shows. Whether universal self-consciousness belonged, in substance, immediately before objective spirit is, with Hösle, an open question, and Hegel himself rebuilt the sequence several times. Whoever has read this far should know that at this point he meets an undecided matter and not a result. What follows from that is said by the next chapter.