ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the claim made by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard that, for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, agents are minded insofar as they are capable of normative self-legislation. It also discusses the dialectics of being-for-itself as becoming other in the intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness itself. Practicing the capacity presupposes interpreting the external objects of the world as reasons for one's own and others' actions and beliefs, that is, it presupposes transforming the objects into conceptual contents, making them intelligible. The Hegelian account of Bildung as realization of social freedom will be contrasted with today's widespread culturalist and elitist notions of Bildung. Actually, there are some different parties in the intersubjective relation which constitutes self-consciousness: the lord, the bondsman and the material things in the world. The alienation requires individuals to position themselves deliberatively and reflectively in civil society and to interpret and evaluate the political and the economic structures with which they are confronted.
