3 - On giving oneself the law

Summary

I have suggested that Hegel's unusual phrases about spirit – that it is a “product of itself” – can be traced back through Fichte's notion of self-positing and ultimately to Kant's notion of self-legislation, and that by doing so he does not mean to suggest that values like personhood or some specific conception of freedom and its value are mere “posits,” constructed in response to merely contingent circumstances, the way we might propose a new dance or art form or clothing style. What spirit legislates for itself are laws, not cultural preferences and so the binding and non-arbitrary nature of such self-legislating must find a place in any account. On the assumption that Hegel considers spirit itself as an achieved normative status, proceeding in this direction is in effect to see Hegel's core theory as a theory of cognitive and practical normativity, and to claim that he is indebted to Kant's argument about the nature of such normativity: that we are subject to no law or principle of action that we do not “legislate for ourselves.” A great deal depends on how this meta-law is understood and how Hegel appropriated and significantly reformulated it. Although this is not an invitation to the absolutizing of culture or “constructivism,” Hegel is also signaling that he is not adopting a model of natural development, like organic growth and maturation, to account for historical change (spirit is a product of itself).