Bojana Jovićević

The topic of this issue is Hegel’s account of action. To act typically means to realise one’s goals through the exercise of one’s intention – that is, one acts upon reasons that justify one’s action as true and good. If one fails to act, one’s reasons are obstructed – either by external circumstances, such as unfavourable conditions, or byone’s inertia of intelligence, the additional judgement required from the agent to translate one’s intention into concrete action. On this view, action is understood as a predicate of ability: the power to act is conceived independently of its actual conditions. In this light, whether an action is realised becomes irrelevant, since its validity is not empirically verifiable. In other words, if action is understood as mere potentiality – prior to entering into relations with the empirical world – its effects on others, or how they judge it, become entirely irrelevant. The agent, in this sense, retains the authority to insist that, regardless of what one actually does, one’s intention remains perfectly valid. Hegel criticises this model. It may turn out that, in acting from intention, the agent is mistaken. Or even if one’s reasons are sound, the outcome could still be wrong. For instance, helping others may be a valid principle, but the way it is employed could be flawed if those one intends to help are, in fact, hindered or harmed by one’s actions. In other words, knowing that an action conforms to an ability (potentia) is never enough to rule out the possibility that something about it is wrong in the particular situation. That possibility could only be excluded if the content of the action were realised in its concrete exercise – a notion that undermines the very idea of ability as such. Therefore, Hegel insists that action cannot be separated from one’s concrete doing. On Hegel’s terms: the actuality of purpose is the purpose of acting. Because the consequences of action partake within the causality of the action itself, as a result every action is, by its very concept, incongruent with the agent’s prior intention. Hegel’s prominent critique of moral action – as an action that focuses solely on intentions and, insofar as it takes place in the actual form of social and political life, comes into conflict with its consequences – is evidently connected with this structure. If no action can be separated from its actual consequences, then what distinguishes a successful action from a failed one? And if action is mediated by the incongruence between intention and outcome, what does this imply for the “truth” of the entire process of the action? What is – from this perspective – a “wrong” action, what is a “true” action, and how do they relate to each other in understanding the entire process of action? Moreover, if action cannot be free from intention or validated by its outcome, but both of them can be explained only through the whole of its process, how then should we interpret the ethics of Hegel’s philosophy of action (as both a deontological and a utilitarian or pragmatist interpretation would be misleading)? The present issue aims to explore these questions and the nexus of related topics (e.g., virtuous action, political action, historical action) from varied perspectives, all of which stem from the following conceptual tension: for Hegel, action resides in one’s concrete doing – there is no action outside of what one actually does, and in this sense, action cannot be validated by one’s intention in its entirety. Yet this does not mean that its validity depends on its consequences; rather, both intention and outcome are explained in light of knowledge discerned through action. While Hegel’s understanding of action has gained growing interest in recent scholarship, this aspect remains largely overlooked and underdeveloped. Beginning with the Phenomenology of Spirit, traversing through the Science of Logic, and culminating in the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of History, this question remains highly relevant for Hegel’s entire practical philosophy. Specifically, this issue aims to explore, among others, the following set of problems as articulated in Hegel’s practical philosophy: - How is practical knowledge related to action, and what grounds this relation? - In what ways do intention and outcome figure within the causality of action, and across different kinds of action (virtuous, political, historical, etc.)? - What is the relation between failed and successful action? Are these distinct or simply different aspects of one and the same concept of action? - How can we distinguish action from the notions of ability, power, or disposition? - Is action independent of, or dependent upon, other competent subjects, and does this imply that it is intersubjective and social in its origin? - What does it mean to concretely exercise action within specific forms of social and political life? Keywords: G.W.F. Hegel, philosophy of action, practical philosophy

This chapter attempts to think Hegel’s term “free release” as a concept and to delineate its meaning with reference to the paradox between the idea and nature in Hegel’s philosophical system. The idea, according to Hegel, is only the idea in the proper sense: if it realizes itself as something concrete in the world of empirical objects, nature. However, since all there is is the idea, the only externality that the idea attains is-itself. So, in the end, the externality of the idea amounts to the idea realizing its own logical determinations in nature. On the one hand, the idea and nature are in a relation of genuine incongruence. On the other hand, nature itself is the result of the self-determining process of the idea-and thus entirely dependent on it. To resolve this paradox, I will introduce Hegel’s concept of “free release.”