Chapter 4 Social Reality as Existence of Freedom—Hegelian versus Kantian Idealism on Actualizing Validity

1 What Makes Up Actualizing Freedom?

Tracing the concept of sociality in Kantian transcendental philosophy and in Hegel’s speculative idealism, leads to intricate problems. These result from the fact that, seen from the perspective of a history of the problems of philosophy, the concept of the social is colored ‘practically’. It was not before the emergence of the social sciences in the course of the nineteenth century that a scientific urge arose to clarify the particular objectivity of the social. This clarification led to differentiating the social as a genuine, specific realm of meaning, hence, detaching the social from its traditional place: the ‘practical’. Against this back- ground, we have seen in chapter three that the beginning of social philosophy can be located in the philosophical direction that dominated the last third of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth: neo-Kantianism. It was particularly the South-West school of neo-Kantianism that developed a conception of the social that, from a systematic point of view, turned out to play a decisive role in conceptions of sociality in contemporary transcendental philosophy. Although Rickert identifies the social with the practical, he also surpasses this identification: he finally reaches a broader and more compre- hensive meaning of the social. There turns out to be a dimension of all values having a social determinacy: the dimension of realizing values (that is, of shap- ing reality according to values). This production of culture is a result of a real subject that realizes values. A subject realizing validity and by doing so produc- ing cultural goods is a person in the broad sense of the word. The social, then, is shown to be a condition of realization of validity, of producing culture, regard- less of whether the values involved are ‘social’ or ‘asocial’ values. Sociality, as the relation between persons, is a condition of realization of values. This determination of the social reflects a constellation that is most fun- damental to Rickert’s system of philosophy: the fundamental axiotic relation. The South-West school of neo-Kantianism in particular emphasized that nor- mative constraints constitute the foundation of the whole human world: the various realms of culture—science, morals, right, art, religion, etcetera—all are specifications of the fundamental axiotic relation. All are characterized by a(n) (objective) normative constraint that leads human endeavors. The

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004302914_006 96 Chapter 4 fundamental axiotic relation is a relation between value, valuing subject, and cultural good. This value-oriented self-formation of the subject eventually con- cerns values that intrinsically or immanently belong to its own subjectivity, and hence, to its freedom: autonomous, intrinsic values. Therefore, the con- cept of self-formation concerns the value determinacy as such of the subject. As a realizing condition of values, the subject is itself a real subject, and a real subject is a subject among other subjects, part of a plurality of subjects. If the social is essentially the realm of realizing values or validity, then—to speak in terms of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit—reason, and hence freedom, becomes actual or comes into existence (Dasein).1 Hegel’s realm of right is exactly this realm of the existence of freedom.2 This entails a broad concept of right, a concept of right in which the will is conceived of as ἐνέργεια (actual- ity), or, to put it in another way, as the being-at-work of freedom or as coming into being of spirit by its self-determination according to reason. In confor- mity with this broad concept of right, the concept of right as the existence of the free will, that is, the will that has made freedom its “inner determina- tion and purpose,” has to be actualized in an “externally found objectivity” and, consequently, the concept of freedom to be realized in the “external objective side,” bringing itself to fulfilment as the “idea.”3 This development starts with “abstract right”4 as the existence of freedom of the actual free will in individual persons who put their will in objects that are external to them.5 At the begin- ning of Hegel’s elaborations on abstract right, we are dealing with the case of free spirit that is maximally external to itself (to put it differently, the spirit, which was the final figure of the philosophy of subjective spirit). A process of conceptual development begins. It starts with the free will in its ‘immediate’ figure (abstract right); then it enters into a figure ‘reflected in itself’ (morality), and subsequently, in the realm of object spirit—that is regarding the volitional aspect of free spirit—it ends in a “substantial” will, in which subjectivity and objectivity are reconciled (Sittlichkeit).6 Although both Hegel and Kantian transcendental philosophy hold the social to be a condition of actualizing freedom, they develop significantly different concepts of that condition. Which of them offers a more adequate concept of the social, and hence, comprehends better what the existence of

1 E § 482. 2 Ibid., §§ 483 ff. 3 Ibid., §§ 483 f. 4 Ibid., § 487. 5 Ibid., §§ 488 ff. 6 Ibid., § 487.