Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 8

Kai Froeb

External Constitutional Law, World History, Absolute Spirit — Three Concluding Sketches

The Philosophy of Right does not conclude with the determination of the state. Following the state come three fields that Hegel himself developed very differently: external constitutional law (the relationship of states to one another), world history (the movement of forms of life in time), and absolute spirit (religion, art, philosophy as the sphere in which the ultimate ends are articulated that act back into objective spirit). These three themes are interconnected — they concern the conditions under which what has been developed in the Philosophy of Right is realized or fails to be realized — and they are only sketched here, because their full elaboration would each require its own volume. But as far as the sketches reach, they make visible the place of the Philosophy of Right within a larger structure.

Kapitel 29: External Constitutional Law — The Horizontal Dimension

States do not appear only in time (that is world history), but also alongside one another, simultaneously, in a space of shared world. External constitutional law is the sphere of this horizontal dimension: the relationship of states to one another, the form in which they recognize or fight one another, the structures in which a shared world forms out of many states at all.

Hegel treated this sphere rather briefly; for him it is the place where war has its conceptual location — as the test in which states assert their individuality against others — and where international law appears as merely formal law without a superordinate instance. This treatment must be expanded today on several points, without needing to be abandoned.

First, the reality of states today is pervaded by communicative, economic, and ecological interconnections that Hegel did not have before his eyes in this form. The metabolic relationship developed in the Prelude (II.3) today occurs predominantly across borders — through global supply chains, through international financial markets, through migration, through shared ecological conditions. The geographical differences that once isolated forms of life from one another are increasingly bridged by transport and communication (cf. II.3); states no longer live in a world where their inside would be clearly separated from their outside, but in a nexus in which internal reproduction depends on the external and vice versa.

Second, out of this a limited but real practice of supranational structures has developed — from international treaties through international organizations (the United Nations, the WTO, the IMF, regional alliances such as the EU) to transnational standards (in technology, in law, in ecology). These structures do not have the status of a superordinate state — which Hegel rightly held to be impossible — but they are also not what he called merely formal international law. They are their own form of mediation between states, one that simultaneously limits the risk of conflict and generates new levels of conflict.

Third — and this is methodologically the most important point — states are not the only organizing principle by which the horizontal dimension is structured. A second level, running crosswise to individual states, is that of civilizations. It becomes clearer in the following section on absolute spirit; here it need only be noted that the relationship of civilization and state is historically variable. In the Roman world, civilization and state largely coincided in the imperial phase; in classical Greece, many city-states belonged to one civilization; in Chinese history, phases of a unified imperial structure alternate with phases of a multi-state system within the same civilization. Today one can roughly distinguish several major civilizational spheres — the Western (itself further divided into Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox lines, which still mark palpable boundaries within Europe today), the Islamic, the Indian, the Chinese, as well as the regional interconnections of South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. States move within these civilizational spheres and are shaped by them. Language and religion are the two main axes along which civilizations are sorted — with language being not only a means of communication but also a trace of historical expansions (the Romance-language countries, the English-speaking world, the Hispanophone world are traces of colonial expansion).

A detailed analysis of how states and civilizations act upon one another today — conflict and cooperation, competition and integration, the handling of ecological and technological threats, the unequal power relations between civilizational spheres — belongs to a study of its own. The point here is methodological: the horizontal dimension of states is not only the relationship of states as such, but always already their embeddedness in civilizational contexts, which have their place in absolute spirit.

Kapitel 30: World History — The Vertical Dimension

While external constitutional law concerns the simultaneity of different states, world history concerns temporal movement — the development of forms of life, in which new shapes emerge from older ones, new problems arise from old solutions, and new solutions are sought for new problems.

In Hegel, world history is the conclusion of the Philosophy of Right. It is that in which the Idea of coexistence comes to its full actuality by realizing itself in the historical movement of peoples. In this treatment there is a tension that is load-bearing for our conception. On the one hand, world history is the material from which the determinations of the Philosophy of Right are drawn — the materials on which universality becomes visible (cf. I.7, I.8). On the other hand, it is the conclusion — the movement in which these determinations historically realize themselves or against which they must assert themselves. Both belong together and can be unfolded in a world history as its own volume, which is not to be conducted here.

Three determinations of Hegelian world history are to be critically modified, without the architecture being abandoned.

The geographical preconditions. Hegel, as mentioned, referred to Carl Ritter when developing the geographical preconditions in the introduction to world history: mountain peoples with expanded subsistence, river-valley kingdoms with central bureaucracy, port-city cultures with trade and science. This sketch remains fruitful; it has already been taken up in I.7 and V.5. But with the development of transport and communication technology (cf. II.3), the status of these preconditions shifts: they are not abolished, but increasingly workable. World history must therefore think geography not as fate, but as a changing condition.

The question of progress. Hegel’s world history has a tendency to think progress one-dimensionally — as an increasing realization of freedom from the Oriental world through the ancient to the Germanic. This tendency is problematic today for several reasons: because the Eurocentric scheme no longer holds; because the “Germanic” world was not the endpoint; because what appears as progress always also brings losses with it. A dialectical concept of historical progress would be needed, one that thinks achievement and loss simultaneously — what is gained in a later form (formal equality, interiority, differentiation) and what is lost (communal bonds, commons structures, ethical self-evidence). Earlier forms are not merely superseded stages; they can contain elements of reason that are suppressed in the present and can return at a higher stage.

The endpoint. In Hegel, world history seems to end with the modern state — whether as fulfillment or as the form in which the Idea comes to itself. Marx countered this by arguing that capitalist modernity is not the endpoint, but itself a historical form that will pass over into another. A world history today cannot set the endpoint — neither as the modern state nor as some other telos. It can describe the movement in which we participate, without closing it off. The question of what comes after capitalist modernity cannot be answered from theory, but must be worked out in practice — a consequence that Hegel himself, read honestly, does not exclude: what is supposed to be reasonable must first become practical, and becoming practical is the affair of those who act in history.

A world history that took up these three modifications would not be a rejection of Hegel, but a correction of Hegel that at the same time integrates Marx. What Marx criticized in Hegelian world history — the mixing of concept and present-day empirical fact, the tendency toward reconciliation with what exists, the insufficient economic analysis — is compatible with the Hegelian architecture, once the mentioned modifications are made. Much of what figures among Marxist authors as specifically Marxist is in fact already inherent in the Hegelian form — only not worked out, because Hegel did not analyze the economic conditions of his own time with the same depth Marx later brought to them.

Kapitel 31: Absolute Spirit — The Sphere of Ultimate Ends

In Hegel, objective spirit (right, morality, ethical life, world history) is followed by absolute spirit as the sphere in which spirit no longer determines itself through finite ends and their material, but relates to itself. Absolute spirit, in Hegel, is articulated into art, religion, and philosophy. In our conception, the order is to be reversed against Hegel: religion — the immediate interiority in which the finite feels itself as a moment of the infinite; art — the expression in which what is felt takes on sensuous shape; philosophy and science — the reflection in which what is felt and expressed is conceptually penetrated.

The reversal against Hegel has several reasons, which shall be briefly noted here, since their elaboration belongs to a volume of its own on absolute spirit. First, the order is phenomenologically more honest: this is how people actually experience it — first the touch, then the urge toward form, then the question of the connection. Second, it is participatory: every access is independent and equally entitled; in Hegel’s order, religion appears as a historical intermediate stage meant to be sublated into philosophy, whereas in the reversed order it remains an irreplaceable access of its own. Third, it is structurally dialectical: in the order religion–art–philosophy, the first and third stages have more in common with each other than either has with the second — religion and philosophy share the reference to the whole, art stands between them as objectifying mediation. Hegel’s own order, art–religion–philosophy, follows the scheme intuition–representation–thought in an ascending line, without clearly mapping the dialectical triad. Fourth — and this is the strongest argument for the architecture of this work — only in the reversed order do the correct systemic parallels to objective ethical life emerge: family relates to religion as the immediate, feeling-laden beginning; civil society to art as objectifying differentiation; state to philosophy as the conceptual grasping of the whole. Fifth, the historical-empirical evidence is unambiguous: the art of human history draws its content predominantly from religion — the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek images of the gods, the Gothic cathedrals, the Islamic mosques, Bach’s masses, Buddhist mandalas, cave paintings. Religion precedes art genetically, not the reverse. Theology, art history, and philosophy develop comparatively late, as reflection on what is already lived in religion and art. Sixth, Hegel himself, in one passage of the Philosophy of World History, used the order religion–art–philosophy and modified the parallel intuition–representation–thought into the more dialectical order representation–intuition–thought; he saw the better order but did not carry it through systematically.

What is absolute about this sphere is not a metaphysical sublimity, but a specific position in the movement of spirit. Ab-solutus means: not limited by anything else — here too in the sense of the Logic, in which the absolute Idea was determined as the self-cognition of method (cf. Ia.A.3). In family, civil society, and state, spirit relates to finite ends and the material available in each case — a loaf of bread is baked, a machine is constructed, a law is passed. In the sphere of absolute spirit, it is not about finite ends, but about ultimate ends — what we ultimately hold to be good, true, and important, that toward which all finite ends are oriented. Religion grasps these ultimate ends in the mode of immediate feeling; art shapes them in the mode of sensuous expression; philosophy and science grasp them in the mode of conceptual cognition.

An important determination belongs to religion, one that is load-bearing in our conception and that belongs in a volume of its own, but shall be briefly indicated here: the resonance model. “Feeling” is not passive stimulus processing, but resonance — as a string vibrates along when struck by the right tone. Bach’s music does not work because it comes from outside, but because it sets something ringing in us that is already there; the starry sky does not overwhelm because it is foreign, but because something in us recognizes the order it displays. What distinguishes religious resonance from related experiences — from aesthetic rapture, from moral being-struck, from mood — is the reference to the whole: it relates not to an individual object, not to an individual demand, not to a diffuse basic mood, but to the order that is present in everything and points beyond everything. It does not demand, as moral experience does — it carries: it is the experience of being embedded in an order greater than one’s own willing and fearing. This capacity for resonance has its ground in the fact that the human being is itself part of the order — as a thinking, feeling spirit that carries within itself the logic effective in the world. In Hegelian terms: the Idea recognizes itself in us. In more secular terms: the structures the world follows are the same ones our thinking follows — and when we feel them, that is not chance, but the Idea’s familiarity with itself.

Reflection in philosophy cannot conclude in itself, because it does not become external out of itself. What it cognizes must return to the world in order to become actual — and this happens not through philosophy itself, but through the subjects who take up its cognition and put it into practice in their action, in their institutions, in their religious experience, and in their aesthetic expression. From this arise feedback circuits: what philosophy cognizes modifies what subjects believe, feel, and shape; what religion experiences inwardly modifies what it publicly expresses and reflects; what art expresses modifies what subjects want to recognize as truth. The three spheres are not separated from one another, but circulate into one another. Religion without art becomes mute — experience presses toward expression. Religion without philosophy becomes blind — experience demands clarification, distinction between genuine and false, between living and pathological. Art without religion becomes empty — it loses the source from which it is nourished. Philosophy without religion becomes sterile — it no longer has anything on which to grow.

That absolute spirit appears here — and not merely as an appendix — has its ground in an observation load-bearing for the whole conception: the ultimate ends articulated in religion, art, philosophy, and science co-shape objective spirit. The forms of life of a society cannot be explained from economic or legal structure alone; they are also shaped by what people hold to be good, true, sacred. A Confucian civilization, a Christian civilization, an Islamic civilization differ not only economically and politically, but also in the deep structure of what they recognize as ultimate ends. The civilizations mentioned in the section on external constitutional law can be distinguished precisely from this point: they have different religious traditions, different aesthetic idioms, different philosophical backgrounds. This is the deep structure that runs crosswise to individual states and shapes the relationship of civilizations to one another.

The divisions within a civilization, too, mostly go back to differences in absolute spirit. The West is not one civilization, but divided into at least three religious lines — Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy — whose respectively different anchoring of the relationship between subject and community, between interiority and institution, between merit and grace still marks palpable boundaries in the political cultures of Europe today. Similar divisions can be observed in other civilizational spheres. Geography and language are only the second level; the first, deeper level is that of ultimate ends.

But — and this is the counterpoint against a culturalist idealism — forms of life cannot simply be derived from absolute spirit. What a society recognizes as ultimate ends shapes it; but how it realizes these ends depends on the material, on geographical conditions, on the available means, on the economic constellation. Hegel, as mentioned, referred to Ritter; materiality remains the condition through which ultimate ends must pass in order to become actual. Mountain peoples, river-valley kingdoms, port-city cultures develop different forms in which their religious, artistic, and philosophical ultimate ends are also articulated — not because the ultimate ends differ, but because they must be concretized differently.

The point at this juncture of the Philosophy of Right is therefore: the determinations developed here — person, property, contract, family, civil society, state — do not stand in isolation. They stand in a double mediation: on the one hand with the material, with geographical substance, with economic conditions (this is the vertical dimension downward — philosophy of nature, economics); on the other hand with the ultimate ends articulated in religion, art, philosophy (this is the vertical dimension upward — absolute spirit). The Philosophy of Right is the sphere in between — the sphere in which material is shaped by ultimate ends and ultimate ends are concretized by material.

A detailed treatment of absolute spirit — the religions in their diversity with their inner differentiations, the art forms in their history, the philosophies in their contention, the resonance model in its systematic elaboration — belongs to a volume of its own. What had to be noted here is the position: absolute spirit is not beyond the Philosophy of Right, but is the sphere in which the ultimate ends are articulated that act back into objective spirit. Whoever reads the Philosophy of Right without this reference loses what conceptually sustains the whole structure.

A detailed treatment of absolute spirit — the religions in their diversity, the art forms in their history, the philosophies in their contention — belongs to a volume of its own. What had to be noted here is the position: absolute spirit is not beyond the Philosophy of Right, but is the sphere in which the ultimate ends are articulated that act back into objective spirit. Whoever reads the Philosophy of Right without this reference loses what conceptually sustains the whole structure.

Kapitel 32: The Place of the Philosophy of Right in the Whole

With the three sketches — external constitutional law, world history, absolute spirit — the Philosophy of Right is placed within the structure in which it has its function. It is not an end in itself; it is the systematic presentation of the Idea of coexistence, in which the material of human action is shaped by ultimate ends, and it stands between the philosophy of nature and economics on the one side and absolute spirit on the other.

What it itself can accomplish is the exposure of the structural architecture in which historical movement orders itself. No more can be demanded of it, but no less either. It is the conceptual precondition for a world history that does not disintegrate into empirical fact, and it is the conceptual ground for a practice that does not disintegrate into arbitrariness. What it cannot accomplish is historical movement itself — that must be accomplished by other investigations, and in the end by the subjects themselves who act within this movement.

The connection attempted in this conception between Hegelian architecture and Marxian concretion is not a synthesis that would sublate the differences. It is the recognition that both are necessary, each in its own way: the Hegelian architecture, because without it the material disintegrates into empirical fact; the Marxian concretion, because without it the architecture remains empty. What Marxists in the twentieth century often regarded as specifically Marxist — the structural analysis of inversions, the critique of formal equality under substantive asymmetries, the diagnosis of the historical specificity of modern relations — is in fact already inherent in the Hegelian form, insofar as it is carried through consistently. Marx worked out what Hegel could not work out; but he did so methodologically in a form that is Hegelian. This insight is not a reconciliation of opposites, but a proposal for reading that attempts to do justice to both authors and that sustains the architecture developed here.