Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 11
Why These Presuppositions Must Be Developed
Hegel’s philosophy of right begins with abstract right — with the person who gives itself a determinate being as owner in a thing. Anyone who reads the text as it stands may gain the impression that right is simply posited: here is the person, there is the thing, and now things get underway. This reading is mistaken. In the introduction to the Grundlinien of 1820, Hegel recorded the presuppositions in compressed form (§§ 4–32); in the more mature Encyclopedia of 1830, he develops them explicitly: theoretical spirit → practical spirit → free spirit → objective right. The later architecture is clearer because it spells out the steps that first make abstract right possible.
And Hegel says so himself, in the remark to § 4. There he names the presupposition and points to the place where he developed it:
“The main features of this premise — that spirit is initially intelligence, and that the determinations through which it proceeds in its development are the path from feeling through representation to thought, by which it produces itself as will, which, as practical spirit in general, is the proximate truth of intelligence — I have presented in my Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Heidelberg 1817), §§ 363–399, and I hope to be able to give a fuller elaboration of them at some future time.”
That is the entire psychology of the first edition. Hegel here presupposes it as already known, repeats it in abbreviated form — and explicitly calls it a premise.
The closing remark is noteworthy: the “fuller elaboration” that he still owed in 1820 came in the lectures and in the later editions. Anyone who takes the thirty paragraphs preceding property to be a mere preamble has thus not only misjudged the matter but also overlooked Hegel’s own testimony.
What stands there in compressed form is developed in [[hegel-subjektiver-geist]] (optional).
These steps are not philosophical preludes but load-bearing arguments. Anyone who understands property as the self-actualization of the person must be able to show what a person is, what self-actualization means, and why a thing can serve as the means of this actualization. Anyone who describes contract as mutual recognition must be able to show what recognition is and where the subjects who recognize each other come from. Anyone who diagnoses the teleological inversion — that the means can turn against the end — must be able to show what end and means are, and why the inversion is immanently possible and not merely an external defect.
This section develops these presuppositions — the concept of purpose, free will, and the relation of right to both. It does so in a way that lets the arguments be followed through concrete examples. Readers familiar with Hegelian logic will recognize the material; readers who are not should nonetheless be able to follow along.