Abstract

Hegel's "Idea"--the coincidence of reality with "the concept"--links seemingly contrary directions: ethical realization of the concept in nature and supersession of nature in the concept, or "objective Spirit" and "absolute Spirit". While the first is the Idea, the second knows or manifests itself as such. I examine major categories of objective Spirit--the state, civil society, ethical life, morality, and personality--as ramifications of the Idea, components of an ethical process of knowledge that posits the objectivity of experience, exhibiting the Idea as "substance", by "externalizing" the concept in the reciprocal relations of individuals. Hegel's Logiks, Phanomenologie des Geistes, and Rechtsphilosophie overcome the limitations of "practical idealism" and simultaneously complete it by regarding the material, sense element of knowing, with which Kant restricted knowing to phenomena and denied reason constitutive value, as a subjective phase surmounted in a purposive process integrating individual into ethical experience in the course of its self-transformation. Harmonious integration demands acknowledgement of individuals as rationally autonomous, as "subjects", permitting their free development, differentiation, and reciprocity. Further, because the dynamic unity of ethical consciousness appears within nature in the interconnected activity of individuals and replaces substance or the real as given as the objective ground to truth, sensibility retains a positive role as an instrument of its manifestation as Idea. As the ethically "realized concept", objectivity calls for a pragmatically rich "deduction" of categories--as forms of teleological activity of consciousness organizing experience according to its identity, forms disclosed in being yet produced by self-differentiating consciousness progressively becoming object to itself. The modern state completes objectivity as the concept since it realizes the priority of knowing to the given in structures of mutual recognition. However, this way of vindicating the Idea in art and religion as constitutive of experience rather than merely regulative simultaneously supplants such historically conditioned forms with philosophy or logic as its true manifestation, in effect confirming the Idea to the finite realm while formally transcending it, and replaces non-logical manifestations of the Idea, as inadequate to the unity of experience despite their constitutive value, with the rational state.