5 - From the Phenomenology to the Philosophy of Right: Hegel's Concept of the Will and the Possibility of Modern Ethical Life

Summary

The path that we have taken in the previous chapters requires some assessment. Someone interested in Hegel's philosophy of agency – in the questions of what it would mean, on his account, for an agent to have desires or to act for reasons, or for an agent to be free – might object that our reading of the Phenomenology's treatment of these topics has been pursued in a somewhat tangential manner, drawing as it does on a consideration of such issues as the relations among literary genres like tragedy, comedy, and the romantic novel. If it is a theory of agency that is supposed to emerge from an engagement with these literary texts, does such a theory not have conceptual grounds that can be set out on their own, apart from their evocative connections with literary genres? And further, if Hegel's ultimate system could present the elements of agency that we have identified as all deriving from, say, a conception of rational will, what then are we to say of the literary approach that opened up these elements in the first place? Does Hegel, as might seem evident from a quick comparison of the PhG to his later works, simply leave such concerns behind when he moves to his mature system?

The mature Hegel did, of course, present a philosophy of agency in the context of his system's eventual Philosophy of Spirit.