10 - Concluding remarks

Summary

A synthetic, conciliatory, or dialectical position like Hegel's, one that treats what had been considered antinomial alternatives as partial views of some more comprehensive true position, inspires an understandable skepticism. It is the “Have Your Cake and Eat It Too” skepticism we have noted several times. The particular issue in the preceding chapters was Hegel's theory of freedom. The interpretation defended was that Hegel has a rational agency theory of freedom. This means that he joins with Kant and Fichte in arguing (a) that a condition for both the inherent worth, the inherent dignity of a human life and the actual substance of a satisfying or fully realized human life is that it be a self-ruled or autonomous life, such that a subject can truly be said to be leading such a life and (b) that this condition can be fulfilled only if such a “leading” or self-rule can be understood as a self-constraint and self-direction by norms, only in so far as a subject is a rational agent. This is in effect the “Have Your Cake” part. The “Eat It Too” part emerges when we understand what Hegel considers to be the nature of such a rational agency, or how he understands the self- and other-relation constitutive of such agency. One could say that he conceives of such practical rationality as a “social practice,” or that he conceives of it “pragmatically,” or that he has a “historicized” or “dialogical” view of what counts as the appeal to reasons.