Freedom as a concept and as a property of the subject

Abstract

The other side of the alternative of “objectivism or subjectivism (anti-substantialism”), can appropriately resolve the problem of the essence of freedom. Hegel wrote: “No idea can be said with such full right that it is indefinite, ambiguous, accessible to the greatest misunderstandings and therefore is actually subject to them, as about the idea of freedom, and none of them is usually spoken of with such a small degree of understanding of it. Since the free spirit is a real spirit, to the extent that the misunderstandings associated with it have enormous practical consequences...” (Hegel, 1977: 471) Thus, even the idealist Hegel admits that the problem of freedom has theoretical and particular practical significance. One can agree with I. Kant, G. Hegel, and N. Berdyaev, and many other philosophers that freedom exists only in the world of human reality, that is, in culture and society. In nature, both living and nonliving, it is not freedom that occurs but a necessity dialectically associated with chance and possibility. As Hegel rightly pointed out, “Nature ... manifests in its present being not freedom, but necessity and chance” (Hegel, 1975: 695). This statement certainly needs to be concretized. Freedom cannot coincide with necessity, but it cannot entirely resist it. Freedom that is not based on any form of necessity, as Hegel also showed, is not freedom. It is arbitrariness. Naked arbitrariness, according to him, is will in the form of chance (Hegel, 1974). One should bear in mind that the differences between inanimate (physical and chemical reality) and living (biological reality) nature, and in the latter – between the levels of its organization – are qualitative and even essential.