This paper attempts to show that an expansive normative vision can be drawn from Hegel's texts, one whose scope significantly exceeds the anthropocentric model presented in the ‘objective spirit’ parts of his system. This expansion of normativity is linked to an expansive vision of relationality underpinning Hegel's model of ‘concrete freedom’. In order to put into sharper relief the links between expansive relationality and normativity, the late thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is mobilized as a heuristic contrasting point. In the ‘subjective (...) spirit’ sections of theEncyclopaediaare found insights that anticipate key features of Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘flesh’. Locating these insights allows us to detect the underlying thread this paper seeks to mine. Hegel's own ‘theory of flesh’ culminates in the notion of ‘constitutive attachments’, the idea that the content of subjectivity is made up of all the bonds linking the human subject to her surrounding worlds and objects. Since freedom for Hegel is ‘being with’, and since normative demands arise from the different ways in which freedom is concretely realized, it would seem that Hegel's relational conception of subjectivity should lead to an equally expansive conception of normativity. Against the objection that Hegel denied any normative status to non-human beings, the paper points to passages in his work, notably his account of aesthetic judgement and natural beauty, which appear to suggest the opposite. (shrink)

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In (...) this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel’s account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the normative or evaluative super-principle of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity. -/- Published online first 27 January 2021. (shrink)