Hegel and Searle on the Necessity of Social Reality

Abstract

In this paper, I try to sketch John Searle’s and G.W.F. Hegel’s answers to the question why human beings live in a social world of institutions that provides them with desire-independent practical reasons. Both Hegel’s and Searle’s answers draw on the intimate connection between institutional reality, the practical normativity essential to it, and the fact that the creatures that institute this reality are endowed with a free will. My main claim is that, in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel offers a much stronger explanation of the necessity of an essentially normative social reality than Searle. While Searle believes that free beings could also exist independently of an institutional reality, Hegel’s point is that if there are to be free beings at all, they must live in a social world of institutions that grounds practical normativity. I argue that an important consequence of Hegel’s view is that social reality cannot be understood as something merely constructed or illusionary.