Necessity as Self-Conditionality: A Response to Habermas’s Claim that Hegel Renews the Tradition of Ancient Necessitarianism

Abstract In his Also a History of Philosophy , Jürgen Habermas asserts that Hegel renews the doctrine of ancient necessitarianism. Focused on an ‘insight into necessity’ that seeks to discern and explicate the rationality of existing reality, this doctrine prioritizes theory over practice and expects that individuals subordinate themselves to the rationality of existing practices and institutions. In Hegel’s renewed version, fashioned via reliance on a philosophy of the subject, this doctrine depicts the autonomized self-movement of an absolute spirit, entails an account of history that operates behind the backs of human beings, and presents a view of politics that subsumes citizens to the power and authority of a monarchical state. While acknowledging the centrality of the concept of necessity to Hegel’s theoretical and practical thought, this essay questions Habermas’s reading. Through attention to Hegel’s revisionary identification of necessity with freedom qua self-conditionality, his conception is shown to (i) empower a normative Realphilosophie that challenges the rationality of existing reality, (ii) entail a view of historical progress rooted in the agency of human beings, and (iii) explicate an account of the political whose legitimacy and reality rests on the knowledge and will of member individuals.