Alznauer, Mark. Hegel's Theory of Responsibility.

Wilford, Paul T.

ALZNAUER, Mark. Hegel's Theory of Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. x + 220 pp. Cloth, $95.00--Alznauer begins his study by citing Hegel's striking claim that the capacity for responsibility (Schuld), which Hegel equates with the knowledge of good and evil and knowledge of the will itself as either good or evil, is the "absolute destiny of human beings." As the destiny (Bestimmung) of mankind, responsibility is both "our essential nature" and our vocation--"a social and historical achievement." Alznauer's work unpacks this twofold claim by investigating: (1) the state of being responsible--what it means to be responsible for an action--and (2) the status of responsible agency--who is responsible and why.

Alznauer's philosophically rigorous and exegetically meticulous account of Hegel's theory of responsibility turns on five interconnected theses: (1) an expressive notion of freedom as being-with-oneself; (2) that responsibility depends not on a causal capacity but on a cognitive one, namely, that one have a certain kind of knowledge of one's own activity; (3) that an agent have a specific self-conception as essentially free, the attainment of which depends on (4) one's being "regarded as a responsible agent," which requires (5) that one be a member of an actually existing, particular state.

As Alznauer notes, his study intersects with two themes central to recent scholarly literature on Hegel's practical philosophy--freedom and action. Regarding these themes, Alznauer makes two essential points. First, the kind of freedom action presupposes is a "consciousness of freedom, knowing yourself as rights-bearing person," and, second, action in the strict sense is responsible action. By restoring the intimate connection between Hegel's concept of action and his theory of responsibility, Alznauer is able "to recover the true content of Hegel's claims about the intrinsic sociality of action" and further explore how sociality is a constitutive dimension of the expression of human freedom in the sphere of objective spirit--the domain of law, morality, and ethical life.

Alznauer's commitment to the essential sociality of responsibility governs the structure of his book, which, following Hegel's philosophy of spirit, moves from examining the requisite psychological capacities for responsible action (subjective spirit) to a thorough and sustained examination of the importance of sociality for responsibility (objective spirit), before finally considering world-historical actions which lie at the intersection of objective and absolute spirit.

In chapter one, Alznauer applies Hegel's actualization thesis to the concept of the will. Arguing that the Philosophy of Right advances a developmental account of will, or "how the will becomes free or rational," Alznauer demonstrates that what ultimately distinguishes the rational shape of the will from the preceding natural and arbitrary shapes is "the recognition of objective reasons, reasons that are not contingent on the agent's motivational tendencies or her choices, but which are tied to the conditions of the agent's freedom."

Having established that only the rational will, namely, "the will that has achieved this self-consciousness of being subject to objective reasons," is genuinely responsible for its actions, chapter two investigates the requisite conditions for the attainment of such a self-conception. Approaching this question indirectly by analyzing Hegel's theory of innocence (Unschuld), Alznauer brings three conditions of responsibility into focus: an agent must (1) possess the requisite psychological capacities in order "to experience her actions as expressions of her own reason to act," (2) have been raised in an "environment that allows her to arrive at a self-conception of herself as free," and (3) "be a recognized member of a state." Alznauer convincingly argues that this third condition is an extension of Kant's account of the "exeundum e statu naturali" and that Hegel takes Kant's argument regarding the basis of property rights to be "true of all our rights and duties." Accordingly, for Hegel, prepolitical life is necessarily a "state of innocence (Stand der Unschuld): a condition in which there is nothing to be responsible for and hence no way of being a responsible agent."

Chapter three elaborates a correlated theory of action as "willing which is subject to evaluation according to some concept of right that has achieved actuality in existing customs and laws." Alznauer shows how action so understood can be evaluated in three respects--expressivity, normative justification, and implicit sociality--and from four distinct perspectives--as rightful, moral, ethical, or world-historical. This four-dimensional schema of action provides a means for grasping the increased concreteness of these spheres of right and a rationale for a hierarchy of justification, in which "the earlier spheres are sublated or aufgehoben in the later ones."

Chapters four and five, then, explore potential conflicts between these various spheres of right. In chapter four, Alznauer shows how the tension between abstract right and morality can be resolved if both are "reconceived as two moments of ethical life." Applying Hegel's innerouter identity thesis to action, Alznauer reconstructs Hegel's argument for the speculative identity of morality (inner) and abstract right (outer). But whereas in chapter four, Alznauer demonstrates how, by "recentering the subjective will in an objective social space," the perspectives of morality and right are sublated into that of ethical life, in chapter five Alznauer argues that ethical life cannot be sublated into the higher perspective of world-history.

Alznauer adjudicates the anticipated conflict by distinguishing between the possibly salutary effects of an action (insofar as it promotes human freedom) and the individual actor's responsibility to the claims of his own ethical life. Defending the integrity of Hegel's ethical contextualism from the Kierkegaardian accusation that Hegel's commitment to a rationalist philosophy of history permits an "illegitimate inference from historical significance to ethical justification," Alznauer argues that although world-history is unlimited or absolute, ethical life remains "the highest court of appeal in determining the responsibility of individual agents." In closing, Alznauer underscores his thesis that objective spirit is the domain proper to responsibility, observing that even though a philosopher of history may transcend his given parochiality in thought, determining concrete practical obligations requires attending to "the infinite particularity of actual historical existence." Consequently, "even the philosopher with absolute knowledge must defer to the wisdom of the phronimos. "

This reflection and Alznauer's concluding discussion of the role that Hegel's theory of action plays in his philosophy of spirit prompt the reader to wonder about the relation (or possible tension) between the claims of objective spirit and the human interest in the activities of absolute spirit that transcend it, namely, art, religion, and philosophy. In particular, if there is indeed a prudential form of wisdom that remains categorially distinct from the philosophic perspective, does this render the philosopher's wisdom partial? If so, in what sense has Hegel succeeded in transforming the love of knowing into actual knowing? Or must Hegel too confront a permanent tension between phronesis and sophia?--Paul T. Wilford, Berlin, Germany