The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2001) Vol. XXXIX "Organic Unity": Its Loose and Analogical and Its Strict and Systematic Sense in Hegel's Philosophy Michael Quante University of Munster 1. It is nearly impossible not to be in agreement with Sedgwick's fundamental thesis that the Kantian notion of "organic unity" is of utmost importance for Hegel's philosophy in general and for his practical philosophy especially. In her paper, she combines questions concerning the basis of Hegel's philosophical system with questions concerning more specific problems in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. In Sedgwick's view, we can understand the new metaphysical basis of Hegel's practical philosophy if we look at the way Hegel criticizes Kant's notion of organic unity, on the one hand, and integrates some features of it in his own philosophical system, on the other. 1 To be sure, Hegel used the notion of an organism from the beginning to develop a model of freedom in which the relation between the state and the individual could be determined satisfactorily. In doing this, Hegel's basic idea is that in the notion of an organism we have a notion in which the unity of the whole and the independence of its parts are integrated. The parts are constituted by the whole and are able to represent the whole in adequately realizing their specific purposes." The whole is ontologically and epistemically prior to the parts-to be a part of an organism is possible only if the organism is already there (to put it in the ontological mode). But, on the other hand, the whole exists only in the proper functioning of its parts. In the philosophy of nature, the loss of such proper functioning is the core of the notion of organic illness; in the philosophy of subjective spirit, the loss represents the beginning of mental illness; and in the philosophy of objective spirit, it is the beginning of the end of the state, of freedom, of ethical Iife." Beyond reasonable doubt the notion of organic unity is in the background of all of this, but it takes different forms which should be distinguished in order to understand adequately the complexity of Hegel's position. Since I am in agreement with Sedgwick's main thesis, in what follows I will try to fill in some details and to make some distinctions. And since I am not interested in questions of the 189