Abstract In this paper I will first argue, with reference to Hegel's Jena writings, that the notion of recognition, and the constitution of practical self-consciousness, emerge from the process of first nature and presuppose the capacities of a pre-reflexive self. Then I will show that both the notions of habit and second nature, which Hegel in the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Right places at the basis of his understanding of the social and historical world, and his conception of embedded freedom as liberation, are themselves not intelligible except in their dialectical relation to the first nature of which they are reconfigurations. I will then show how the dialectical relation to first nature accounts for processes of social reification, understood as deadening forms of forgetting the living root of sociality, and thus how it can account in a social diagnostic sense for some aspects of the contingency, plurality and fragmentation of contemporary social processes.
In recent years, the ancient concept of second nature has become the focus of a growing volume of Hegel-related work in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of mind, and action theory. And for good reason: second nature allows us to think across, and seeks to bridge, fundamental antagonisms that have haunted modern philosophy since its inception – between the realm of law and the realm of reasons, necessity and freedom, inclination and duty. In social philosophy, in particular, second nature holds the promise of reconciling the painful modern rupture between the individual and her political community, reviving the goods and comforts of what have been called the freedoms of the ancients in the context of a modern Sittlichkeit .
Abstract Explicating a concept that Hegel coins in his early writings, this paper shows how death—which initially appears as an absolute limitation on human freedom—can be understood as its condition. Understood as ‘the power to die’, our mortality becomes the freedom to negate any determination whatsoever, much as to own and value some determinations. The last section juxtaposes this agentive understanding of mortality against Hegel’s ideal of modern Ethical Life, sketching the ways in which modern ‘second nature’ is better grounded in our mortal ‘first nature’.
