THE IDEA OF THE GOOD AND ETHICAL LIFE IN HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY

At first glance, it may seem as if the focus was on ethical and moral questions exclusively. However, Hegel's philosophy is speculative in a sense that links these questions to a broader concern with both the human essence—namely, freedom—and the site of its realization—the state and civil society. Hegel's philosophical method is predicated on a view of the state as based on the principle of subjectivity and as guaranteeing the existence of corresponding institutions to the extent that these ensure the exercise of free self-consciousness.

The self-realization of the subject consists in mediating the universal with the particular and thereby overcoming the separation of subject and object. The form of this realization is the idea of the good, that is, the fully realized, consummated concept. The idea of the good is conceived as negating the one-sided determinations revealed in objective reality, and as elevating the spheres of abstract right and morality to the level of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the phenomenology of the consciousness of freedom. Ethical life is the idea of realized freedom, of the good. The idea of the good is actualized in the reflected will and in the objective world. The substance of freedom thus presents itself as a subjective will that manifests itself in the form of reality and necessity.

In Hegel's philosophy the systematic place of objective spirit, the sphere of right, is unintelligible outside its connection with the concept of Ethical Life. In §142 of The Philosophy of Right we read: "Ethical life is the idea of freedom". In Hegel's conception, The Philosophy of Right as a whole culminates in Ethical Life. Ethical Life not only contains the preceding stages abstract right and morality according to the principle of permutation; it is also the basis and precondition of their fully realized value. This is where Hegel's speculative dialectic differs from other dialectical systems. It does not discard the previous steps and contradictions as if they had simply become obsolete and thus useless, but rather shows how their unity creates the productivity of action and thought, that is, authenticity.

The idea of the good determines the reality of right and its nature as an expression of spirit or, as Hegel himself says, it determines the reality of the state. The thematization of the idea of the good thus shows that the philosophy of right, like all the other parts of Hegel's system, is systematically determined by Hegel's speculative logic even as it shapes that very logic as one of its constitutive factors.

The central topic of the conference is therefore to be understood in a sense that encompasses the whole of Hegel’s philosophy and its contemporary relevance. Next to contributions that take up the topics of the parallel sections directly in the context of the Philosophy of Right, we also welcome those which draw fruitful connections to relevant aspects of Hegel’s Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit, his philosophy of religion and history and the so-called Realphilosophie more generally.