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ABSTRACT
Hegel calls social life “the living good,” but what this means is unclear. The idea expresses an ontological claim about the kind of being that human societies possess, but it is also normatively significant, clarifying why the category of social pathology is an appropriate tool of social critique. Social life consists in processes of life infused with ethical content. Societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good similarly to how organisms achieve their vital ends: via specialized, coordinated functions. In distinction to living organisms, the living good realizes itself through the consciousness and will of individual social members.
Notes
1 “The so-called parts of an animal organism are not parts but members or organic moments whose isolation and separate existence constitute disease” (Hegel Ph.R. §278). “In an organic relationship, the units in question are not parts but members, and each maintains the others while fulfilling its own function” (Hegel Ph.R. §278). Parts, for Hegel, exist only in a mechanical relationship, while members exist in an organic relationship. I am indebted to Shterna Friedman for impressing this point on me.
2 Recall Fichte’s claim that a subject has no being beyond its own self-positing activity (Neuhouser Citation1990, 102-16).
3 One basic feature of organisms is the capacity to distinguish inner from outer (Hegel Ph.N. §§357, 359; Pinkard Citation2012, 24).
4 For more on the relation between self-consciousness and life, see Ng Citation2020, 101-12 and passim; and Ng Citation2015, 393-404. Alznauer Citation2016, 196-211 examines the normativity appropriate to spiritual phenomena and compares it to that of living beings.
5 I attempt this in Neuhouser Citation2003, chs. 3, 4, 5, and 7.
6 This makes the living good self-sufficient, a good that continually produces and maintains itself.
7 That habituation is compatible with—indeed, necessary for—free social life is argued for in Novakovic Citation2017, 20-68. The literature on habit and second nature in Hegel is vast; see Khurana Citation2017, §§82-89, 99-101; Testa Citation2008, 286-307 and Citation2020; Haase Citation2017; and Menke Citation2018, 119-48.
8 For the relation between habit and living spirit, see Heisenberg Citation2019, 37, 43-44, 144-53, and 161-62.
9 Although this is the name it is usually given, Hegel’s terms are “lord” (Herr) and “bondsman” (Knecht) (Hegel Ph.S. ¶¶189-96).
10 “Illness occurs in psychic life (Seelenleben) when the organism’s merely psychic elements (das bloß Seelenhafte) become independent of the power of spiritual consciousness and presume to arrogate its function, with the result that spirit loses its rule over the psychic elements that belong to it and, with that, power over itself” (Hegel Ph.M. §406A).
11 A different attempt to glean resources for an account of social pathology from the bondsman-lord relation is found in Särkelä Citation2018, 328-59.