A vida da lei: reconhecimento, liberdade e dominação na Filosofia do Direito de Hegel

Abstract

The present work seeks to show that the Hegelian theory of freedom in Hegel's Philosophy of Right consists in a re-signification of the practical self-reflexivity of the autonomous will that rests on the enlargement of the sphere of autonomy to the political articulated in the Hegelian theory of self-consciousness and spirit. The fundamental question of classical German philosophy about the form of the self-relationships of the self is taken up again with two crucial modifications: the theoretical reformulation of the system of intelligence and will based on the fundamental thesis of the unity of thought and praxis and the reconstruction of the conditions of possibility of the effective free will, understood as the free will that refers only to itself in its self-determination and normative-institutional objectification. This resumption configures a systematic critique of the inadequacies and one-sidedness of the conception of freedom of modern political philosophy and of the Kantian-Fichtean theory of the self and self-consciousness, showing that they are based on an abstract and false structure of the form of the relationship between individual and community and neglect crucial factors linked to the intersubjective experiences that make possible the capacity to act rationally autonomously and the normative validity of law in the first place. The core of the Hegelian theory of freedom thus lies precisely in highlighting the necessary link between adequate individual practical self-relation and the specifically ethical relation to the will of others, so that the decisive issue becomes that the individual actively knows, wants, and claims the specific forms of social relations and institutions that make this kind of self-relation possible. Freedom thus means the very dynamic of liberation of the will, understood as a process constitutively marked by contradiction and struggle; liberation which, however, while it is understood in this way, leads to the paradox that the act of liberation only becomes possible if freedom has already been passively received. This paradox can be mitigated when one considers Hegel's deepening of the intellectualist concept of critique of the Enlightenment, insofar as he relates it not to mere negation, but to the very "negative side" of the spirit present in the affections, language, memory, history, and praxis that as such are the indices for the spirit of the domination of the will, as e.g. in feelings of fear, disrespect, or invisibility, and as such already the first step on the path to its overcoming. Whereas the Philosophy of Right has as its ground the historical factual realization of the freedom that we are, it must be read as the foundation of an immanent critical social ontology. This puts in check the reading according to which Hegel would have reduced the importance of the intersubjective dynamics in the effectiveness of freedom in the definitive system, showing that its elements are presupposed there in all moments to the point that modern institutions cannot abdicate from them without giving up their legitimacy.