Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 12
The Purpose and the Possibility of Inversion
The concept of purpose is not mystical. It designates the simplest form of any directed activity. Whoever bakes a roll has a purpose (the roll), selects means (flour, yeast, oven, time), and conducts the action so that the result comes about. Whoever writes a program, treats a patient, repairs a bicycle — the same structure everywhere: subjective purpose, means, accomplished purpose as result. In the background there usually stands a need that motivates the purpose: hunger, illness, mobility. But the need is not itself the purpose; it drives the setting of a purpose, which alone formulates the purpose and selects the means.
What makes a means a means is, first, its fitness for the purpose. The hammer is a means because it can drive in the nail; flour is a means because it can become a roll; the computer is a means because it can process texts. Fitness is the first thing — it is what makes the means a means at all.
But something follows from fitness that Hegel observed precisely in the logic of the concept. In order for the means to be fit, it must have properties of its own that are not derived from the purpose but from what the means itself is. The hammer has a weight, a hardness, a shape — properties it does not first acquire through the purpose driving in a nail, but brings with it as a physical thing. Flour has a particular chemical composition, a property of swelling, a reaction to yeast — properties that cannot be derived from the purpose baking a roll, but from what flour is. Hegel determines the relation of purpose and means in a twofold way, and both sides belong together in a single move for him. First one side: the object has, against the purpose, the character of being “powerless and of serving it” (TWA 6, 450). Immediately afterward, the other side: “But the means also has a side according to which it still has independence with respect to the purpose” (ibid.). Both belong together — the means serves, and precisely in serving it brings its own right along with it. We will call this second side, in what follows, the autonomous lawfulness of the means. [KF]
Hegel himself draws from this the consequence that bears everything that follows. If the activity of the purpose stopped at determining the immediate objectivity, then “the product would again be only a means, and so on ad infinitum; what would result would only be a purposive means, but not the objectivity of the purpose itself” (TWA 6, 451). External purposiveness, left to itself, never arrives at the purpose: every result becomes the means of the next. For Hegel this is a logical deficiency that teleology overcomes in its progression toward internal purposiveness. A social form can also perpetuate this deficiency instead of overcoming it — this is the figure that Marx describes with money.
From this autonomous lawfulness follows a pragmatic consequence that Hegel describes as the “cunning of reason”: I attain the purpose not by forcing the means but by using its properties. The good craftsman knows his material and works with it; the bad one works against it and fails. Whoever wants to drive in a nail lets the weight of the hammer work for him; whoever wants to generate electricity uses the autonomous lawfulness of water, which flows downward. The cunning consists in winning the properties of the means as allies instead of fighting against them.
But from this also follows an immanent possibility that is central to the whole analysis that follows: precisely because the means has properties that reach beyond the individual purpose, it can turn against the purpose. The autonomous lawfulness that makes the means a fit means is at the same time the place where inversion can break in. The means can become independent, enter into a different purposive context, or override its original purpose.
Three examples that make this concrete.
The tool that shapes the worker. Whoever uses a hammer employs a means; but whoever performs the same movements with the hammer for decades is shaped by the tool — the hand becomes the smith’s hand, the body adapts, perception trains itself on what matters about the hammer. The means moves into the worker; it retroactively determines what he is. This too is not a defect but an immanent possibility. Whoever handles language is shaped by language; whoever handles tools is shaped by them; whoever works in an institution is shaped by its routines.
The institution that forgets its task. A university is founded to cultivate and pass on knowledge. It has its own autonomous lawfulnesses — administration, appointment procedures, acquisition of external funding, rankings. Whoever gets caught up in these autonomous lawfulnesses loses sight of the means-purpose relation: the university operates itself, and knowledge becomes a pretext. The autonomous lawfulness that was necessary for the institution to function has turned against its original task. The same holds for hospitals in which billing logic overlays the mandate to heal; for schools in which examination routines replace learning; and for many other institutions besides.
The product that subjugates the producer. What leaves the hands as the result of labor can turn against its producer. Software that a programmer writes can later force him to organize his working hours according to the conditions of its maintenance. An administrative apparatus that an agency builds up can dominate, through its own logic, the very staff who built it. On a broader level: when human beings produce products and these products become the dominant condition of their way of life — when the produced relations come to govern the producers — this is teleological inversion in its broadest form. This observation will be developed further in the main volume in the analysis of alienated labor; here it is meant only to make the structure visible.
The same structure operates in all these cases: the means has properties that make it fit and that at the same time reach beyond the individual purpose. These properties are not flaws but the condition of fitness. But they are also the place where inversion can break in. The means can become an end in itself; the original purpose can be run over.
This is connected to a distinction that will carry the further analysis: that between external and internal purposiveness. External purposiveness obtains when the purpose comes from outside and a thing is merely a means for something else — a tool for its user, a machine for its task. Internal purposiveness obtains when a system is its own purpose — the organism that preserves itself because its preservation is its meaning; the person whose dignity does not follow from an external purpose of use; an ethical community in which the members do not exist for the sake of something else, but have their purpose in their living together itself. Hegel’s critique of the Enlightenment — that it made everything into means and thereby entangled itself in a contradiction: means for what, if there is no end in itself? — becomes the standard for the entire course of the Philosophy of Right. Wherever persons, relationships, and forms of life are degraded to mere means, internal purposiveness is violated; wherever they are respected as ends in themselves, it is realized.
These insights will recur repeatedly in the parts that follow: in property, which can turn against the realization of personality. In contract, whose formal equality can conceal a substantive inequality. In civil society, in which the system of needs becomes a system of self-sufficient autonomization. In law itself, which can turn from a means of recognition into an apparatus for coding appropriation. To recognize them does not mean rejecting the means — without autonomous lawfulness there is no fit means — but bringing the purpose back into force.
A conceptual clarification belongs here, because it bears the following analysis: the relation between abstract and concrete. When abstract right is discussed below, abstract is to be heard in a double, methodologically important sense. First: abstract initially means setting aside. Abstract right treats persons as persons, setting aside their concrete properties, their social standing, their needs. This abstraction is a good abstraction — the achievement of the Enlightenment against the society of estates, the precondition of civil equality, the ground on which persons can meet one another as subjects of right in the first place. Second: but abstract can also mean that something has lost its concrete conditions and forcibly asserts itself against the concrete. In his early essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” (1807; TWA 2, 574–583), Hegel marked out this second meaning as bad abstraction — abstracting that blinds itself to actual living circumstances in order to assert itself. Both meanings are simultaneously alive in the modern order of property: it is good abstraction insofar as it recognizes all persons as formally equal; it is bad abstraction insofar as it asserts this formal equality against the concrete conditions under which it becomes factual inequality. The parts that follow will find this doubling again in several places: in the question of property, in the question of contract, in the system of needs. Whoever wants to defend the good abstraction against the bad must be able to distinguish between the two.