Hegel´s compatibilist theory of freedom

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Oxford

Jornada; Annual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain; 2019

University of Oxford

Kant claimed that transcendental idealism was the only way to save human freedom in a world ruled by the laws of mechanistic physics. Trans¬cendental idealism appeals to a dualism in the last analysis similar to the dualism of dogmatic metaphysics, which founded the possibility of freedom on the ontological distinction between soul and matter. Nietzsche identified the affinity in this respect between Kant´s approach and what he called "soul atomism" (Seelen-Atomisik) and, more generically, "platonism". For his part, Hegel aims to base freedom on absolute idealism. The novelty of Hegel´s approach is thus the project of keeping both natural necessity and human freedom within the framework of monism. Realist, materialist or physicalist monism has usually defended a reductionist approach to the phenomenon of self-consciousness. That is why in the context of a realist, materialist or physicalist monism there does not seem to be any place for construing choosing as a spontaneous cau¬sation. Hegel´s defense of human freedom relies instead on the claim that the one universal substance is unbounded rationality. In this approach, every de¬terminate content of the activity of thinking is actually its self-singularization and self-determination in that content. According to Hegel literally everything ?the own feelings, urges and inclinations of a singular mind, the other minds and the things of the natural world? are not properly external to that singular mind; thus, they do not exert as such a coercive effect on it. Yet, since natural things are not self-knowing minds they do interact among each other according to the deterministic laws of matter ?and as long as the mind has not reached the stage of self-knowledge in which the immediacy of its being-self-determined is definitely sublated it can also be subject to the spe¬cific causality of ontologized contents and their laws. However, the human mind is in itself (an sich) self-determining self-knowing; thus, although un¬der particular circumstances it may act as if it were a further thing of the na¬tural world it is qua thinking nothing else than the activity of sublating the determinations given to its thought and, for that very reason, a determined as well as a free agent.