• Ravi
    1
    I'm reading Hegel's Philosophy of Rights, and I'm sort of confused about the following passage:

    For the good as the substantial universal of freedom, but
    as something still abstract, there are therefore required determinate
    characteristics of some sort and the principle for determining them,
    though a principle identical with the good itself. For conscience
    similarly, as the purely abstract principle of determination, it is
    required that its decisions shall be universal and objective. If good
    and conscience are each kept abstract and thereby elevated to in-
    dependent totalities, then both become the indeterminate which
    ought to be determined. — But the integration of these two relative
    totalities into an absolute identity has already been implicitly
    achieved in that this very subjectivity of pure self-certainty, aware
    in its vacuity of its gradual evaporation, is identical with the abstract
    universality of the good. The identity of the good with the sub-
    jective will, an identity which therefore is concrete and the truth cf
    them both, is Ethical Life.

    2 things are confusing to me:
    1) What does he mean by "substantial universal?" Does he mean 'most important universal attribute?'
    2) When he says "identity," is he just talking about like the explicit intrinsic characteristics--i.e. a more clear description of what the good is, rather than an abstract one?
  • tim wood
    8.7k
    I'll try (but I'm just trying to make sense of English words). I find "substantial universal" as meaning the best and highest expression of freedom. For Kant, freedom means the the freedom to do one's duty, as found in reason. Apparently for Hegel, here, freedom is just the freedom to do good.

    Conscience, similarly, the guide of the will (determination).

    Both are abstract, vacuously and evaporatively so. I.e., both ought to be made somehow concrete/determinate.

    And both are, in pure abstract individual subjectivity, which, due to its pure subjectivity, is the same as pure abstraction.

    When, however, the good is applied to the subjective will, the result is an ethical life.

    In my opinion, he could have omitted everything but the last sentence.
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