Conclusion: Freedom within Two Natures, or, the Nature–Spirit Dialectic in the Final System

Abstract

Concluding, the monograph attempts to address the major objections that might be raised against this rereading of Hegel’s final system. Specifically, it responds to the claim that such a reading conflates the inchoate activity of spirit in nature with nature itself and so proceeds by way of conflation. Resisting this criticism, the conclusion returns to crucial passages from Hegel’s writings on nature that explicitly characterize nature as impotent and radically external—two features antithetical to the concept of spirit. Consequently, the conclusion argues that there must be a reticent independence assigned to the domain of nature that is not the result of misreading Hegel’s mature philosophy. Instead, this reticence is the very expression of material nature and it functions as a problem for the project of spirit, a problem which permeates the entirety of Hegel’s final system, specifically his philosophy of the real (Realphilosophie). The conclusion then highlights three symptomatic expressions of nature’s paradoxical and problematic status. Subsequently, the conclusion also shows how spirit’s project of freedom persistently transgresses two distinct senses of nature.