Jena Lectures 1805/1806

Abstract

In the preceding chapter, which examined the 1803/1804 “Philosophy of Spirit” lectures, I argued that Hegel’s philosophical goal in those lectures was the same as his goal in the System of Ethical Life, which he had written the previous year: envisioning an intrinsically ethical society. Transition to the framework of “consciousness,” we saw, brought with it a different, and more adequate, conceptualization of the stages in the development of that ethical society. Hegel seems to believe that adopting the philosophical terminology of the German Idealist thinkers of his day (Fichte, Holderlin, Schelling) renders his argument, or, rather, its presentation, more compelling. As we saw, Hegel invokes consciousness only as a tool for explicating the notion of absolute ethical life; it is not the substantive problem he is addressing. That is, consciousness, as a concept that denotes the cognizing subject, is not an independent focus of Hegel’s research. Keeping this in mind, we can say that the works explored thus far — the System of Ethical Life, Essay on Natural Law, and First Philosophy of Spirit — constitute a single thematic unit, and the differences between them reflect changes in the means Hegel uses to describe the actualization of absolute ethical life as a concrete socio-political arrangement.