3 - Freedom

Summary

I said in Chapter 1 that the German idealists saw the idea of freedom as the central concept of modern philosophy: as symbolic of the problem of rational justification, especially under modern conditions, and, if rightly conceived, as also the solution to this problem. In this chapter, I want to explain how the German idealists were able to use the idea of freedom to reformulate the project of modern philosophy in a new way, in a way that understood the full import of Hume's criticisms of Descartes' and Locke's attempts to establish the authority of our concepts. Hume's insistence on the contingency of all our beliefs suggested to Kant, and then to Hegel, that modern philosophy required a new and different account of authority, one that was centrally connected to the notion of human freedom.

Of course, the idea of freedom was already an important idea in modern moral and political philosophy, especially in the British tradition. By the time of the German idealists, Hobbes and Locke had already insisted on the natural rights of all human beings, and their claims were clearly at work in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. So what more needed to be done? In what sense does freedom pose a philosophical problem, and in what sense does it require a philosophical solution of the sort offered by Kant or Hegel?