근대 시민사회의 근원으로서의 자유와 자연의 필연성 -헤겔의 역사철학을 중심으로-

Abstract

considers the origin of the question of the ground of modern civil society and attempts to show how this question arose for Hegel. Although the question of the ground was already central to ancient philosophy, the consideration of the ground of history only begins with Rousseau and arises in his Second Discourse in response to the question of the relationship of the political and the natural. Human is characterized by its ability to free itself from and oppose itself to nature in and through the political. History for modernity, as it appears in Rousseau, is the account of the progress of man to self-consciousness and freedom. The relationship of self-consciousness and freedom to nature and its laws, however, it not considered by Rousseau, and it is consequently difficult to discern the ground of their interaction. It is precisely this question, however, that Kant addresses in the Third Antinomy of pure Reason. According to Kant, both universal natural necessity and freedom are necessary and also antinomies, since every event must have a prior cause, and yet, unless there is a first and hence free cause, the series will always be incomplete and the law of nature thus never sufficiently grounded. Kant solves this antinomy by showing that the contradiction is not in the world but in consciousness, posting two distinct and independent realms, the phenomenal realm of nature and the noumenal realm of freedom. Hegel`s conception of history is a direct respond to the Third Antinomy and Kant`s problematic solution to it. This problem for Hegel, however, is not merely theoretical but also practical. In fact, the antinomy of freedom and natural necessity as it appears in the French Revolution and English bourgeois society was apparently the immediate impetus for his thought. In Hegel`s view Kant solved the antinomy only by making consciousness itself contradictory and therefore unintelligible. Hegel, however, accepts this contradiction and makes it the basic of his system. Antinomy becomes dialectic.