Hegel’s Justification of Private Property

Abstract

ion from his given wants and desires? The same objection cannot, however, be made against Hegel's conception of free personality. Personality implies a sense of distance between oneself and one's ends and life situation. It involves the ability to evaluate and reflect on one's ends that is central to our everyday idea of individual autonomy. Unlike full Hegelian freedom, it need not imply that we subject our ends or situation to critical examination 'all the way down', nor that there is some set of rational ends to be discovered once we embark on this course of radical reflection. Thirdly, Hegel assumes that personality is a distinctively human capacity (it helps to distinguish human beings from animals), but not one which human beings necessarily have (in this sense, some human beings are merely ani mals).28 Personality involves a set of capacities and self-understandings which are acquired only through Bildung — a process of education and acculturation achieved through one's social experience. In certain types of social worlds the individual is able to develop the capacities and self-understandings that are integral to personality; in other types he cannot.29 The central claim of Hegel's account of property is that it is only in social worlds containing the institution of private property that an agent can become a person; it is only in such a world that he can 'become an actual will'.30