Towards a Hegelian Account of Self-Constitution

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My project concerns Hegel's philosophy of agency and consists of a twofold endeavour. Exegetically, my aim is to extract from Hegel's texts a comprehensive account of the constitution of agency. Systematically, my aim is to develop the central insights of such account into a theory of agential constitution as an available theoretical option in contemporary debates on agency.Hegel's theory of action has been seen by many as providing an alternative to standard 'causal' accounts whereby phenomena are deemed actions insofar as they are the causal product of appropriate mental states. Hegel, by contrast, is read as providing a 'qualitative' account whereby phenomena are deemed actions insofar as they adequately 'express' appropriate mental states. This is linked to a non-standard approach to the intention/action relationship whereby normative constraints are introduced such that even appropriately causally guided movements can fail to be actions if their relations with one's inner states are expressively defective. This is in turn linked to complex dynamics of interaction between agents and their socio-political context. Hegel's attention to the ways in which autonomous agency is affected by embeddedness in intersubjective structures has been emphasised as offering key resources for the elaboration of a 'social' account of practical rationality.Profitably intervening in the exegetical debate will require delivering a far-reaching interpretation of Hegel's thought. This is due both to the systematic nature of Hegel's philosophy and to the mediating role he regards action as performing at the interface between the subjective domain of individual self-consciousness and the objective domain of intersubjective structures. The line of investigation I aim to pursue emphasises such interface as the key locus of the constitution of subjects' practical identities. My guiding thread will be an emphasis on the primacy I regard Hegel as according to individual selfhood, even as he anchors the subjective dimension to irreducibly intersubjective factors. The most explicit sources of relevance to Hegel's theory of agency are the 'Reason' chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the 'Morality' section in the Encyclopedia, and the introduction and 'Morality' section in the Philosophy of Right. Since it is the latter text which provides the most extended treatment of the matter, the tendency among scholars has been to focus on it. This, however, has prevented from addressing the Encyclopedia treatment in its own right, and has precluded a systematic attempt at tracing the relationship between Hegel's early and mature treatments of the matter. In my research I wish to cover this overlooked ground.On the other hand, the systematic aim of my project is to elaborate a historically-informed 'Hegelian' account of the nature of agency, based on the analysis carried out in the first part of the project. I then aim to address such account on its own philosophical merits, as a candidate theory within the framework of contemporary debates on agency. Developing a Hegel-inspired theory of agency will imply identifying the core claims and commitments of Hegel's own account, to judge what must be preserved and what may be discarded with a view to providing a theory at once theoretically compelling given contemporary standards and nevertheless 'Hegelian' in some meaningful sense. Since it has been argued that Hegel's account of agency cannot be detached from the underlying framework of his metaphysics, a critical task will be probing the standing of such claims over and above their embeddedness within the whole of Hegel's philosophical system. Insofar as such a detachment is desirable, a crucial challenge will thus be gauging whether this is in fact the case...