THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

chapters could enrich and further substantiate some of the central assertions of this
chapter. 282
2) Introduction
While past generations of scholars, including Karl Popper, F.H. Bradley, Isaiah
Berlin, and Georg Lukács, have emphasized the anti-individualist and proto-Marxist
features of Hegel’s political philosophy, more recent Anglophone scholarship has tended
to downplay these features. 283 In the past fifteen years, for instance, philosophers such as
282 Here I will offer one example. Hegel’s discussion of morality develops a particular conception
of the self as subject, a conception that develops the second moment of the will. This conception of the
subject (a) draws a rigid distinction between the subject and the object, (b) identifies the self merely with
the subject, and (c) determines the nature of an action solely in terms of its relation to the subjective
intention that causes it. This distinction between subject and object presents the self/other distinction that
appears in light of the telos. It presents the moment of difference, as discussed in Chapter Four. However,
as we argued in Chapter Four, the self is inextricably entwined with its other. Among other things, the
intimate relation between the self and its other stems from the fact that the self/other distinction is not fixed.
This distinction arises in light of the largely implicit telos. It is only in attempting to overcome the
distinction between the self and the other that we come to a clearer conception of the telos. This clearer
conception of the telos then transforms our conception of the self/other distinction. Morality holds that the
subject, as fully independent from and opposed to the object, determines the nature of the action. By
contrast, Hegel’s account of the notion implies that action first determines the nature of the self, since it is
only through action that the telos becomes clear, and it is only in light of an explicit or clarified telos that
the distinction between the self (or subject) and the other (or object) becomes clear. (We might be tempted
here to say that action simply reveals the subject to itself. However, the subject or self is both what it is
and what it takes itself to be. Thus in revealing the true nature of the self/other distinction to the self, action
transforms the self.) Here we can see how Hegel’s basic account of the notion illuminates his fundamental
criticism of morality. We can also see how morality provides a partial truth. “Abstract Right,” the first
section of the book, focuses on the self as person, as a fully indeterminate being capable of setting goals. It
focuses on the moment of unity, on the goal (or the capacity to determine goals) in isolation from the way
that the goal first constitutes the empirical self in terms of the self/other distinction. Morality brings this
second moment into the equation, though it commits an error in absolutizing the self or subject in its
opposition to the object. It fails to see how the self must constantly reformulate and reevaluate the
distinction that determines it in relation to the object.
283 See Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty; F. H. Bradley’s “My Station and Its
Duties,” in Ethical Studies; Georg Lukács’ Der Junge Hegel; and Chapters Eleven and Twelve of Karl
Popper’s The Open Society and It’s Enemies. While Berlin and Popper criticize Hegel as a precursor of
Twentieth Century totalitarianism in both its Marxist and non-Marxist forms, Bradley and Lukács present
more positive portrayals of Hegel’s anti-liberalism. Bradley draws on Hegel as a resource in developing
his own communitarian, quietist, and in some sense conservative political philosophy. By contrast, Lukács
presents a Marxist interpretation of Hegel’s intellectual development in light of the economic and class
conditions of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century Germany. He focuses specifically on the proto-
Marxist insights contained in Hegel’s early accounts of alienation and the dialectic.
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