Hegel on modalities and monadology

Martin Kusch

Juha Manninen

pp. 109-177

in: Simo Knuuttila (ed), Modern modalities, Berlin, Springer, 1988

Abstract

"Reasonable and practical men refuse to be imposed upon by the possible, for the simple ground that it is possible only. They stick to the actual (not meaning by that word merely whatever immediately is here and now)."¹ This remark by Hegel in his Encyclopaedia is very revealing regarding the motives of his own modal theory. Actuality and reason are interconnected, but the full concept of actuality is not to be mistaken for the immediately existing, e.g. the Prussian state. An especially interesting statement by Hegel on this point was recently found in formerly unpublished lecture-notes taken in a lecture on the philosophy of right, held just one year before the publication of Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts in 1821². In these lecture-notes Hegel is reported as having said: "That which is reasonable becomes actual, and the actual becomes reasonable."³

Cited authors

Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich