THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

the will define the basic objectives of the Philosophy of Right, and how they determine
the dialectical structure of the book’s main argument.
This chapter presents one of the final steps in this as yet uncompleted argument.
It presents an interpretation of the nature of the dialectic in the Philosophy of Right, and it
examines the basic structure of Hegel’s argument in his criticism of morality and civil
society. These issues, which bear a direct relation to the central themes presented thus far
in the dissertation, arise within the context of a discussion about the relationship between
Hegel’s political philosophy and the values that define the tradition of political
liberalism. This chapter argues that a failure to grasp the overall argumentative strategy
of the Philosophy of Right has lead much recent scholarship to misconstrue Hegel’s
relationship to core values of liberalism. Specifically, this failure has led much
scholarship to overlook Hegel’s relatively severe criticisms of morality and of civil
society. While these discussions of the dialectic and the structure of the Philosophy of
Right do not employ the terminology developed thus far in the dissertation, they raise
issues that are clearly related to those addressed in the preceding chapters. More
importantly, perhaps, it should be relatively clear how the claims made in the previous
specific to the will, while the terms “particular,” “finite,” and “determinate” describe the difference
between the self and the other as instantiated by the will. One of the main distinctions between the will and
various lower level instantiations of the notion consists in the degree of cognitive clarity that the will can
achieve with regards to its telos and the distinction between its self and its other. Moreover, this higher
degree of clarity about itself also leads to the greater role that the will’s self-understanding plays in
determining what it actually is. This is where “indeterminacy” and something like the traditional notion of
freedom come in. As we discussed in the Appendix to Chapter Four, the will (or mind) is the synthesis of
(a) what it is in itself and (b) what it takes itself to be. The second moment here relates to the degree of
clarity achieved in representation or self-awareness. The higher the degree of self-awareness – i.e. of the
awareness of the self in opposition to its other – the less the self is simply what it is. Thus it is the degree
of self-knowledge that determines the high degree of (negative) freedom expressed in the first moment of
the will.
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