Freedom as a Dialectical Expression of Rationality

Abstract

The concept of what we may noncommittally call forward movement has an all-pervasive significance in Hegel's philosophy. Hegelian forward movement is of a particular kind; it is dialectical. Whether our realm of discourse is the individual, the community, the State, or World Spirit, change must be perceived as a dialectical forward-moving, and the subject of discourse at any particular time must be considered in its relationship to the whole, with regard to its position and significance within that whole. Dialectical change, newness as a manifestation of freedom, and in particular the freedom of the natural individual to initiate developmental changes in his own life, is that with which I will be concerned. In Mental Events, Donald Davidson describes tv/o related distinctions which appear at first to be contradictions; (1) that between autonomy or freedom and causal determinism and, (2) that between the anomaly of mental events and the determinate nature of physical laws. In the first part of this paper I will draw on Davidson's formulation of the former issue as derivative of his resolution of the latter in order to illustrate how Hegel's notions of freedom and rationality as dialectical, as historically evolving, enable him to exhibit these distinctions in an entirely different light. In Freedom and Constraint by Norms, Robert Brandom develops and extends [1] the Hegelian notion of freedom in such a way as to stress the element of novelty, as which freedom is freedom to do and express new things. In the second part of this paper, I will further analyze Hegel's notion of freedom as dialectical, based on some of Brandom's insights, in order to