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Freedom in and through Hegel's Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
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- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , Fall 2000 , pp. 683 - 704
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- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2000
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1 Hegel, G. W. F., Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III, Vol. 10 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden, edited by Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970)Google Scholar, §482A. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Miller, A. V., Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)Google Scholar. Further references will be abbreviated Enc, and will cite paragraph numbers, which are the same in the German and English editions. An “A” following the paragraph number will indicate “Anmerkung,” and a “Z” will indicate “Zusatz.”
2 On the Phenomenology culminating in the standpoint of the speculative philosopher, see G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 3 of Werke, p. 39. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Miller, A. V., Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Further references will appear in the form PhG, 39/22, with the number after the slash representing the English pagination. On the association of freedom with conceptual thinking, see PhG, 156/120.
3 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, Vol. 8 of Werke, §19A. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Geraets, T. F., Suchting, W. A., and Harris, H. S., The Encyclopedia Logic (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)Google Scholar. Further references will be abbreviated Enc, and will cite paragraph numbers, which are the same in the German and English editions. Also see G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, Vol. 5 of Werke, p. 44. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Miller, A. V., Hegel's Science of Logic (New Jersey: Atlantic Highlands Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Further references will appear in the form WLI, 44/50, with the number after the slash representing the English pagination.
4 Enc, §158. Also see G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, Vol. 6 of Werke, pp. 237–40. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Miller, A. V., Hegel's Science of Logic (New Jersey: Atlantic Highlands Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Further references will appear in the form WL II, 237–240/569–571, with the numbers after the slash representing the English pagination.
5 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II, Vol. 9 of Werke, §248. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Miller, A. V., Hegel's Philosophy of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970)Google Scholar. Further references will be abbreviated Enc, and will cite paragraph numbers, which are the same in the German and English editions.
6 Enc, §382.
7 Enc, §381Z. Although this citation is not from the Logic, it expresses the understanding of necessity found there, as will be clear from the citations that follow.
8 Enc, §158Z.
9 On the relation of external and internal, see Enc, §§138–41, and WL, II, 179–81/523–526.
10 Enc, §381Z.
11 Enc, §94Z.
12 Enc, §158Z. According to Wolfgang Marx, in “Die Logik des Freiheitsbegriffs,” Hegel-Studien, 11 (1976): 125–47, this explains why the transition from necessity to freedom arises in the transition from the logic of essence to the logic of the concept—for in the latter a thing and its parts are understood as a self-caused and free whole, whereas in the former a thing's constitution always remains subject to external causation.
13 G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts, Vol. 7 of Werke, §158. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Nisbet, H. B., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Wood, Allen W. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Further references will be abbreviated PR, and will cite paragraph numbers, which are the same in the German and English editions.
14 PR, §161. For Hegel's discussion of marriage, see PR, §161–69. Richard Dien Winfield provides an extended contemporary reconstruction of a Hegelian account of marriage as a structure of freedom in The Just Family (Albany: SUNY, 1998), chaps. 4 and 5Google Scholar. Winfield rightly points out, on pp. 88–90, that as a structure of freedom (rather than a natural relation) marriage cannot be limited to heterosexual couples, as it is in Hegel's traditional understanding.
15 Enc, §28Z.
16 Enc, §94.
17 Enc, §94Z. At Enc, §95, Hegel writes that, “in its passing into another, something only comes together with itself (mit sich selbst); and this relation to itself in the passing and in the other is genuine infinity.” In the remark to this paragraph he therefore concludes that, just as freedom is the truth of necessity, “the truth of the finite is rather its ideality.”
18 PR, §158Z. As Merold Westphal puts it, in Hegel, Freedom, Modernity (Albany: SUNY, 1992), p. 8Google Scholar, freedom requires one to “remain in control of oneself in giving oneself up to the mediating activity of the other.” Westphal argues that this requires the sort of reciprocity developed in the logic of the concept and not in the logic of essence.
19 Enc, §381Z.
20 Enc, §381Z.
21 Enc, §381Z. An adequate understanding (not to mention a defence) of Hegel's claims and conclusions about natural beings would require a careful reading of his philosophy of nature, which is beyond the scope of this article. Such an understanding, however, is not crucial to the question of the freedom of spiritual beings, which is my primary concern here.
22 Enc, §381Z.
23 Enc, §382Z.
24 Enc, §382Z. Also see G. W F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, Vol. 13 of Werke, p. 134. I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Knox, T. M., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), Vol. 1Google Scholar. Further references will appear in the form A I, 134/97, with the number after the slash representing the English pagination.
25 Enc, §382Z. Also see Enc, §379Z, where Hegel writes that “the entire development of spirit is nothing other than its self-elevation to its truth,” truth being understood as the “agreement of the concept with its actuality.”
26 A I, 152–54/112–13. Also see Enc, §384Z and §381Z.
27 At WL, II, 465/757, Hegel writes, “Finite things are finite insofar as they do not have the reality of their concept completely within themselves. … That actual things are not congruent with the idea is the side of their finitude and untruth.”
28 Enc, §381Z and §441Z.
29 Enc, §441Z.
30 Enc, §445.
31 Enc, §387Z.
32 PR, §9, and Enc, §225, §443Z.
33 PR, §11. Also see PR, §10, and EHC, §469+Z.
34 PR, §14, and Enc, §§476–77.
35 On this double obligation of the will, see Enc, §470, and PR, §27.
36 PR, §§21–23, and Enc, §444Z, §482. In order for this to occur, for the willing subject to be able to will itself, it must be able not only to will, but also to think or know what it itself truly is. This latter task is charged to theoretical spirit, and, for this reason, objective spirit is the unification of theoretical and practical spirit. For an excellent discussion of this, see Houlgate, Stephen, “The Unity of Theoretical and Practical Spirit in Hegel's Concept of Freedom,” Review of Metaphysics, 48 (June 1995): 859–81.Google Scholar
37 Enc, §483.
38 Enc, §484. Comparing the language of this paragraph with that encountered above from the Logic, it can be seen that both freedom of the will and logical freedom depend upon becoming bei sich selbst in an other. Also see PR, §28.
39 PR, §4, §§29–30, and Enc, §486.
40 Enc,§513.
41 The account of the finitude of the willing subject in the next several paragraphs represents a highly compressed version of an interpretation I express at greater length in “A Limited Kind of Freedom: Hegel's Logical Analysis of the Finitude of the Will,” The Owl of Minerva, 31, 2 (Spring 2000): 173–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42 See Enc, §385Z, on the defect in the state being that its objectification of the spiritual is “only posited,” rather than grasped as having “immediate being.”
43 Enc, §234+Z, and WL II, 544/820, 547/822.
44 WL, II, 544/820.
45 See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophic der Religion I, Vol. 16 of Werke, p. 237: “the state is only freedom in the world, in the sphere of actuality. Everything depends here essentially on the concept of freedom that a people bears in its self-consciousness. … There is but one concept of freedom in religion and the state. This one conception is humanity's highest possession, and it is realized by humanity. A people that has a bad conception of God also has a bad state, bad government, bad laws.” I have used, with some modifications, the translation of Speirs, E. B. and Sanderson, J. Burdon, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), Vol. 1Google Scholar. Further references will appear in the form R I, 237/247, with the number after the slash representing the English pagination. Andrew Shanks writes, in Hegel's Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 183, that “one might perhaps define the central concern of Hegel's philosophy of religion as being with the pre-political preconditions of freedom.” The same thing could be said about Hegel's philosophies of art and philosophy.
46 On there being a multiplicity of conflicting conceptions of the good, see WL, II, 543–48/819–23. Throughout the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes explicit and implicit remarks to the effect that this makes possible the development of a variety of political states in which people feel at home. See, for example, PR, §150A, §156, §258A+Z, §§336–40, and §§346–52.
47 A I, 129–30/93–94, 134/97ff., 199–202/150–52, and R, I, 12–13/2–3. Zbigniew Pelczynski acknowledges, in “Freedom in Hegel,” in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, edited by Pelczynski, Zbigniew and Gray, John (London: Athlone, 1984), p. 177Google Scholar, that the activities of absolute spirit have an essential role to play in “providing the intellectual basis” of the freedom of the will. But he insists, nonetheless, that “the highest stage in the dialectic of freedom results from the rational necessity of reconciling the objective and subjective will,” thus failing to grant Hegel's point that the most comprehensive sort of reconciliation and freedom is available in the activities of absolute spirit alone.
48 At A I, 21/8, 155/114, Hegel describes art as the first reconciling middle term between thought and existence. McCumber, John argues, in “Hegel's Anarchistic Utopia: The Politics of His Aesthetics”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22, 2 (1984): 203–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, that art frees us from the externalities to which the will always remains subject by reconciling us to them.
49 A, I, 139/101, and P R, §341.
50 On feeling not determining its content out of its own form, see Enc, §400+Z, §472+Z.
51 At Enc, §133Z, Hegel identifies “the distinction between philosophy and the other sciences. The finitude of the latter consists altogether in the fact that thinking, which is a merely formal activity in them, adopts its content as something given from outside, and the content is not known to be determined from within by the underlying thought, so that the form and content do not completely permeate one another.” At PR, §270A, he writes that “religion has the truth as its universal object, but it has it only as a content that is given, not as one that is known, in its grounding determinations, through thought and concept.” At A I, 28/13, he says that it is only through philosophy that art receives its real ratification (echte Bewährung). For more on the relation of art to philosophy, see Desmond, William, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY, 1986), especially chaps. 2 and 3.Google Scholar
52 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Vol. 12 of Werke, p. 69. The translation is by Rauch, Leo, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 52.Google Scholar
53 Enc, §11. Hegel characterizes self-knowledge as the principle of freedom at A, I, 458–59/355, and describes “know thyself” as the law of spirit's being at P R, §343A, and Enc, §377+A. At PR, §352, he writes that spirit is “simply the movement of its own activity in gaining absolute knowledge of itself and thereby freeing its consciousness from the form of natural immediacy and so coming to itself.”
54 Enc, §444Z. On language being the most appropriate manifestation of spirit, also see PR, §78, §164. Cook, Daniel J. writes, in Language in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 105Google Scholar, that, “because language is the least corporeal mode of expression, it is best capable of representing man's inner thoughts and of reproducing his knowledge of the outer world.” McCumber, John, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 56Google Scholar, describes language as the only “exteriorization of spirit which remains within spirit.”
55 PhG, pp. 29/14, 39/22, 156/120.
56 Some of these questions were, in fact, raised by anonymous readers of this article, and I am grateful to them for bringing them to my attention.
57 My response here to the hypothetical critic of Hegel is essentially the same that Allen Wood gives to Isaiah Berlin in Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 52.Google Scholar
58 For recent examples of this phenomenon, see Patten, Alan, Hegel's Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999Google Scholar), and Franco, Paul, Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, both of which equate “freedom” with the kinds of freedom Hegel treats in objective spirit, and ignore his discussion of absolute spirit almost entirely.
59 This is not to say that I think no further interpretation of the Philosophy of Right is needed. Readers interested in my interpretation of some of the details of objective spirit should see “A Case of Bad Judgment: The Logical Failure of the Moral Will,” The Review of Metaphysics, 51 (December 1997): 379–404Google Scholar, and “Freedom and the Need for Protection from Myself,” The Owl of Minerva, 29, 1 (Fall 1997): 39–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
60 On the necessity of contingency, see Houlgate, Stephen, “Necessity and Contingency in Hegel's Science of Logic,” The Owl of Minerva, 27, 1 (Fall 1995): 37–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the contingency of political freedom in particular, see Vos, Lu de, “Die Logik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Eine Vermutung,” Hegel-Studien, 16 (1981): 99–121, especially p. 120Google Scholar; Houlgate, Stephen, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 124–25Google Scholar; and Peperzak, Adriaan, “‘Second Nature’: Place and Significance of the Objective Spirit in Hegel's Encyclopedia,” The Owl of Minerva, 27, 1 (Fall 1995): 51–66, especially pp. 58–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
61 PR, Preface, 26/21.