Eric Storey

This thesis aims to defend Hegel’s theory of action as one developed in support of a larger theory of ‘positive’ social freedom, and it aims to do so, specifically, by taking the theory’s logical motivation seriously. That is, it argues that we cannot correctly interpret and evaluate Hegel’s account of properly ‘ethical’ action (which is my focus, as distinguished from its logically prior, incompletely ‘moral’ form) unless, when doing so, we acknowledge the conceptual system that, he maintains, underlies, structures and justifies it. Hegel’s theory of ethical action then, on my reading, is one of the progressive achievement of individual autonomy as necessarily socially and historically situated. As a theory of the practical attribution of ethical responsibility, this is a reasonably familiar project. But it is unfamiliar in deriving from two domains that I argue are inseparably united and reciprocally determining. One is the domain of objectively evaluable practical deliberation that aims to achieve concrete reality in a social context; the other, that of the logic that discerns the fundamental ontology of this reality and therefore the degrees of logical necessity that govern our reasoning about it. My basic claim is that, contrary to most approaches, these twin characteristics of psychological credibility and logical provenance cannot safely be interpretatively decoupled. I focus on the four elements of ethical action that I take Hegel’s theory to be identifying (that is, on his ethically developed conceptions of the will, intention, conscience, and responsibility) and I support my claims about each by critical reference to some recent influential readings. My responses to these make specific allowance for the fact that while the will is, for Hegel, a logical category of being, the three other elements, when fully ethically construed, only arise as concretely practical activities of Spirit in the historically situated ‘realm of the real’, and are therefore both ‘always already’ historicized and governed only by the weaker kinds of necessity that obtain there. I conclude that Hegel’s theory of action is, ultimately, a cogent demonstration of the will’s logically mandated struggle for ‘self-actualization’ and, thereby, a credible account of the good’s concrete realization in the socially conditioned, historical world. It is, in effect, a working-through of Hegel’s prior theories of subjectivity as a form of ‘recognitive’ self-consciousness and of freedom as constructively reconciliatory within the constraints of established practice. I conclude too that, as a theory of the subject’s self-formulation, his theory of action is a persuasive account of Geist’s advance towards self-knowledge in the manifold of historically situated contingency. Keywords: action, logic, actuality, the concept, cognition, speculative identity, will, subjectivity, the good, intention, conscience, responsibility, moral, ethical, practical deliberation, freedom.