1 Spirit’s Embeddedness in Nature: Hegel’s Decentering of Self-legislation Heikki Ikäheimo h.ikaheimo@unsw.edu.au 2020.10.07. Forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin Contents I Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................... 1 II Levels of natural normativity ........................................................................................................................................ 4 III From nature to spirit .................................................................................................................................................. 10 IV Self-government by norms in context ..................................................................................................................... 12 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Abstract A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel’s account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the normative or evaluative super-principle of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity. I Introduction The view according to which Geist or ‘spirit’ in Hegel stands for some metaphysically suspicious spooky entity, transcendent principle behind the appearing world, or a neo-Platonic One whose emanation the world is, has been out of favor for quite some time now. The recently widely accepted view, one that has demarcated itself against the first mentioned one, is that ‘spirit’ in fact stands for the Sellarsian “space of reasons”, or as it is often put the ‘space or realm of norms’ or the ‘normative realm’. The nature-spirit distinction in Hegel has thus become understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative, or does not involve reasons or norms,