Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel' Compatibilism

Abstract

The problem of freedom in modern philosophy has three basic components: (i) what is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? (ii) Is it possible so to act? (iii) And how important is leading a free life?1 Hegel proposed unprecedented and highly controversial answers to these questions. (i) What we want to be able to explain when we ask ‘what is freedom?’ are the conditions that must be fulfilled such that my various deeds and projects could be, and could be experienced by me as being, my deeds and projects, as happening at all in some way because of me, spontan, sua sponte, etc. If they are ‘mine’, they shouldn’t seem or be alien, as if belonging to or produced by someone or something else or as if fated or coerced or practically unavoidable, and so forth.2 How exactly to say this, how to link such deeds and projects with me such that they count as due to me or count as mine and are thereby instances of freedom is the great problem.3 In answer to this question, and unlike many philosophers influenced by the Christian tradition, Hegel does not defend a voluntarist position on the nature of freedom, but instead, let us say, a ‘state’ theory. He does not understand the possibility of freedom to depend on the possession of a causal power of some kind by an individual, the power to initiate action by an act of will in some way independent of antecedent causal conditions. Contrary to many compatibilists, being free does not involve any sort of causality at all. In his Science of Logic, the ‘application’ of the causal relation to organic and mental life in general is unequivocally said to be simply inappropriate (unstatthaft).4 Instead, freedom is understood by Hegel to involve a certain sort of self-relation and a certain sort of relation to others; it is constituted by being in a certain self-regarding and a certain sort of ‘mutually recognizing’ state.5 This state of self-consciousness and socially mediated self-reflection, defined in a highly elaborate systematic way as a ‘rational’ selfand other-relation, counts as being free.6 This is an active state, a state of doing, a way of being that involves activities and practices that are distinguished as free by all being undertaken in a certain way, not by having a special causal origin. (ii) Hegel defends the possibility of freedom, but in what we would call (initially if a bit misleadingly) a compatibilist, not an incompatibilist form. Since I do not need to be able to think of myself as an uncaused cause in order to qualify as a free subject, I do not need to establish, either metaphysically or as a practical condition,