Gian Marco Galasso

Research Project

Drives: The Rational Determination of the Will in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

The aim of my research is to answer the following question: how to justify Hegel’s assertion in the Philosophy of Right that drives (Triebe) are to be understood as “the rational system of determination of the will’s determination” and that, when grasped them in “terms of the concept”, they constitute the “content of the science of right”?
The perspective I adopt to answer is that of political ontology. With this expression, I intend firstly to emphasise the Hegelian awareness of the inseparable link between categories of being and categories of politics, and secondly to provide a specific key to the philosophy of right that studies, on the one hand, the link between logic and objective spirit ; on the other, the relationship between the filling of the will, the doctrine of the concept and the Psychology, which is decisive for the determination of the Hegelian anthropology of work as a genealogy of the modern subject and ethical life.
The focus on the drive genealogy of the contents of the will allows to address how Hegel overcomes Kantian-Fichtian ought-to-be, both in logic as well as in philosophy of right, where such a genealogy leads to decisive paragraphs dedicated to the Bildung; to the good, to the duty and the Kantian formalism of duty for the sake of duty; to the ethical theory of duties and to the ethical as a doctrine of virtues.
To study the problem of the relationship between drives and science of law in the three different meanings (logical-political, anthropological-political, legal-political) in which Hegel declines it, I divide my research into three parts: 1. Political Ontology and the Question of the Negative; 2. Second Nature; 3. Verfassung as ‘Material Constitution’.