Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 13
Human Action as Metabolism — the Transformation of the World
Before the concept of purpose is developed further into the concept of free will, a more concrete determination needs to be inserted, one that will bear the weight of the entire presentation that follows. What does the teleological structure — purpose, means, realization — concretely mean for the being whose form of life it determines: for the human being?
The concept of purpose is not exclusively human. Animals, too, intervene in the world; they pursue prey, build nests, defend territories. Plants, too, turn toward the light and drive their roots into the ground. In all these activities, teleological structure can be recognized. What distinguishes the human being is not intervention as such, but the conscious positing of the purpose and the systematic working out of the means that serve its realization. Marx captured this difference in a famous passage in Capital: what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bee is that the architect has the structure in her head before she builds it in wax. The half of this that belongs to the philosophy of nature stands in Hegels Naturphilosophie, under the glossary entry Art Impulse. The bee remains wholly within its activity; the architect steps outside herself, plans, corrects, compares, learns.
What unfolds from this Marx grasped as the metabolism between man and nature — a term that captures the matter precisely. The human being does not live in nature as one being among others, but in a standing relation of exchange: he takes materials from nature, transforms them, and returns them altered. Breathing, eating, drinking are its simplest forms; tool use, agriculture, craft, industry are its developed forms. In this metabolism, the human being changes nature — and himself, for the means with which he works on nature shape the form in which he lives. One who works with the plow lives differently from one who works with the hoe; one who mines coal lives differently from one who writes software.
The metabolism has two sides that would be lost in the diction used so far. First, it is not only an engagement with nature but always already an engagement with other human beings. A person grows up in a family, learns from others, acts for others and with others — his metabolism with nature is from the outset socially mediated. Someone else made the plow with which he works the field; the field itself belongs to a community, a family, an association; what he produces enters a cycle of giving and taking. Second, human action brings forth not only products and services but also institutions, habits, rules, roles, culture. When human beings live together, agreements arise about who may do what and who is obligated to do what; from these agreements come habits, from habits rules, from rules institutions. These productions are not mere accessories to actual production; they are themselves a form of metabolism — the one in which human beings give themselves their own forms of life. The later concept of objective spirit will systematically unfold these productions; here it is only necessary to establish the general point that they belong to human action.
The means by which the metabolism is carried out are not simply ready to hand; they are themselves produced. Tools — from the struck stone through the hammer to the computer-controlled machine — are extensions and reinforcements of human organs. The Hegelian Ernst Kapp, in his Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Foundations of a Philosophy of Technology, 1877), developed this thought as “organ projection”: the hammer projects the fist, the lens projects the eye, the telegraph wire projects the nerves. Tools are not something that comes to the human being from outside; they are his own bodily capacity made external in the world. With each generation of tools, what human beings can do with their world also changes — and with it, what they themselves are.
One particular line of technological development deserves separate mention, because it becomes important for the later understanding of relations between societies and states: transport and communication technology. From paths and bridges through Roman roads, medieval waterways, early modern postal systems, the nineteenth-century railway, to the airplane and the shipping container in the twentieth century, transport has expanded dramatically in reach and speed; from mounted messengers through couriers, carrier pigeons, the telegraph, the telephone, to radio and the internet, communication has undergone a similar movement. Both lines bridge the geographical differences that, in the natural metabolism, once separated forms of life from one another. They do not abolish these differences — the Alps remain between Germany and Italy, the Himalayas between India and China, and the fertility of soils and the occurrence of raw materials remain distributed as they are distributed in nature. But the significance of these differences shifts: what was once an insurmountable boundary becomes, over time, a shorter journey; what was unreachable distance becomes communicatively present. The geographical difference that in earlier times largely isolated forms of life from one another increasingly becomes a difference within a communicative context that makes it workable. This shift is not a mere technical fact but a precondition for forms of life in different regions entering into relation with one another — through trade, war, mission, science, migration. It will recur in the philosophy of international law (Part VIII) and in the relation between civilizations.
The significance of these general determinations for what follows is this. When the philosophy of right later speaks of the system of needs — of the mediation of human needs through exchange, market, money — it presupposes everything developed here: that human beings stand in a metabolism with nature and with one another, that they produce tools and techniques, that they build institutions and rules, that they live in a communicatively connected world. The system of needs in its specific modern-bourgeois form is a particular historical shape of the general metabolism, not the general metabolism itself. This clarification allows the analysis of the modern form to proceed more precisely, because the general does not disappear within the modern form.