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.
The remark in its own wording, and the editorial situation of the editions, stand in Der freie Geist; what is compressed here is developed there.
And Hegel says so himself, in the Remark to § 4. He names the presupposition — that spirit is “at first intelligence,” and that the way “from feeling through representation to thinking” is the way of “producing itself as will” — and for its elaboration refers to the Encyclopaedia of 1817, §§ 363 to 399. He expressly calls it a premise. Whoever takes the thirty paragraphs before property for a preface has therefore not only mistaken the matter, but also overlooked Hegel’s own statement about it.
This path is developed here as far as the volume needs it; at length it stands in Hegels subjektiver Geist, 23–25. The doubling follows Hegel’s own double presentation — compressed in §§ 4 to 32, explicit in the Encyclopaedia. [KF]
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.