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product is not an expression of the ‘real (universal) me’.

On the other hand,

I can take mysel f to be nothing but a set of particular projects and concerns,

and so identify myself fully with what makes me not just a pure ‘I’, but the

particular person I am, and the activities of the will that stem from that (I did

this because I am a father, a husb and, a teacher, etc.). However, because I can

also go back to the universal standpoint of the ‘I’, it may always come to

seem to me that these particular concerns and projects are merely arbitrary

and ‘given’, and so not worthy expressions of what my will should be as

something more universal (why did I do this to help my children, rather than

children more generally?). I take it that Hegel is saying in x7 that this

oscillation can be brought to a satisfactory end when we see our will as

equally expressing both universality and particularity, such that although my

will is expressive of my particular concerns and projects, these are not merely

mine, but can be recognized as valid from a more universal perspective that

is not just mine, although not one that is so universal, that it regards any

particular action by an individual as compromising to that individual (in

caring for my children, I am not just following my private interests and

desires, but fulﬁlling a role that ﬁts into a wider framework, whereby a more

universal good can also be realized, and which could not be realized without

the particular concerns of individuals for their own children).

In my view it is essentially this picture of the will that takes Hegel towards

his social holism: for, as the Philosophy of Right argues, it is ultimately only

within the state that the will can be properly realized in this form, for it is

only within the state that there is the right connection between the general

and individual interest , in a way that will enable us to balance the pull of

universality on the one hand and particularity on the other, into a stable

picture of the individual will. Thus, in Hegel’s state, individuals are part of

an interconnected system of mutual dependence regulated for the general

good, so that in acting as a particular will (father, teacher, etc.) my will feeds

into a system that also realizes the good of society as a whole, which raises

my actions beyond ‘mere’ particularity and adds to them an element of

universality, while this universality is not ‘abstract’ because it can only be

realized through each of us taking on a series of determinate projects,

thereby harmonizing both ‘moments’ of the will in the way Hegel thinks

is required, in a way that is characteristic of the concrete universal.

So,

I have argued elsewhere that this issue is at the heart of Hegel’s diagnosis of the way in which

the French Revolution became the Terror: see Robert Stern, Hegel and the ‘Phenomenology of

Spirit’ (London: Routledge, 2002) 157–68.

Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, x24, pp. 54–5, where Hegel refers to his account of universality

in the Encyclopaedia Logic as part of his discussion of the will, where he says that the free will

‘permeates its determination and is identical with itself in this determination’ (‘durch seine

Bestimmung hindurchgehende Allgemeine, das in ihr mit sich identisch ist’, Werke, Vol. VII,

p. 75) – that is, a will that has a particular content or determination, but for which that

determination is not a limitation on itself, but an expression of its nature (just as Caius is not a

‘limitation’ on the universal man, but a proper realization of it).

138 ROBERT STERN

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