Hegel and Freedom

In this essay I will give an account of Hegel’s conception of freedom, how it relates to his understanding of history, and how it contrasts with the traditional liberal view of freedom. Finally, I will offer some criticism of the idea of organic freedom and the particular conception of freedom that underpins it.


The Dialectic of History:
“The history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom” [Hegel PR]
Central to Hegel’s philosophy is his view of the dialectic of history, and the evolution of the concept of freedom within it. Hegel believed there was a pattern and a direction to history. This movement was a dialectical one and he identified three moments within it: Firstly, the ancient world of the Orient in which citizens are entirely subordinate to the ruler. This gives way to the Greek world, which sees the birth of the individual as a concept. As slavery is still practised however, freedom is still not available to all. Furthermore, Greek citizens identified their best interests with the interests of the city-state. Finally, with the advent of the Reformation, a reformed Christianity empowers the freedom of the individual conscience to make law, morality and institutions conform to the principles of reason. Hegel concludes that when institutions are truly rational, and the state ceases to be an arbitrary imposition of power, people will finally be free, reconciled with the society in which they live.

“The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom consists in this, that… they know and will the universal… their activity is consciously aimed at none but the universal end” [Hegel, PR 260]


At which point history will have reached its telos or endpoint. Hegel does not explicitly identify this end with the then existing Prussian state, although his detractors have often claimed otherwise. But it’s fair to say that Hegel’s vision (despite some important differences) resembled Prussia more closely then any other state in existence at that time.


Two Concepts of freedom:
In his Philosophy of Right Hegel distinguishes between two forms of freedom. Firstly individual freedom; the freedom to do as we please. It rests on our ability to act on our arbitrary choices without constraint, and is roughly consistent with the default view of freedom as taken by liberal political philosophers from Locke to Rawls and modern economists like Friedman and Hayek. Hegel rejected this as ‘mere’ abstract freedom. His concern was that our arbitrary wants may not be our own as we may be subtly coerced into wanting what we don’t really need. This suggests that freedom may be something other then the feeling of being unconstrained, and poses us the challenge of divining our authentic from our imagined needs.
In contradistinction, a second strand of thought can be traced back to Plato, which emphasises duty, communal bonds and social harmony. Plato says we are free when we embrace our role within society. Though not commonly associated with this school of thought, Kant believed we are only free when attending to our duties as rationally conceived. Rampant individualism and acting out of base and selfish motives are seen as destructive. Seeing the tension between communal and individual freedom Hegel aims to reconcile the two. The resulting system of thought has been bitterly criticised for its supposed illiberalism by those who felt the result was skewed dramatically towards the power of the state and away from the individual, not least by Bertrand Russell who said: “Freedom for [Hegel] means little more then the right to obey the law”. But this is a narrow and perhaps wrongheaded misreading. Hegel was not simply out to legitimise state power, but to find the most harmonious balance between the needs of the one and the many:

“The lack of subjectivity is really the defect of the Greek idea.. Plato has not recognised knowledge, wishes and resolutions of the individual… The opposite to Plato’s principle is the principle of the conscious free will of individuals which in later times was more especially by Rousseau raised to prominence: the necessity of the arbitrary choice of the individual.” [Hegel, LHPh, II, 114, 115]


Hegel’s solution is to propose what may be termed objective or concrete freedom.
Where Kant’s conception of freedom proposed that duty lay in opposition to human inclination, Hegel saw that this alienated man from himself. The solution was to show that duty did not impede individual freedom but could be an expression of rational will.

“We are free only when we overcome ‘particularity’ and ‘universally’ or ‘objectively’, according to the concept of the will” [Hegel, PR 23]

That is to say, the requirements of the rational state will not contradict the needs of the rational individual.

Of course, it’s easy to blandly assert that rational institutions will not clash with rational individuals, but it is quite another to imagine how any of this could be made flesh in the world. For one, we are faced with the epistemic problem of how we know that our choices are rational. Some of history’s greatest crimes have been perpetrated by people convinced they were acting rationally. In reality these rational institutions will always be administered by fallible human beings. Second, there seems to be a wishful thinking involved; the idea that my rational requirements will ‘magically’ align with those of others, that what the state requires will always match with what I’m ready to contribute. One hears echoes of Marx’s maxim: “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”, as if there was a guarantee that the sum total of my needs would always be matched by the collected abilities of society.
To counter these objections we must consider the provenance of Hegel’s conception of reason; as universal and innate.

Rationality:
According to Kant, all men have the faculty of reason. This reason is universal, everyone has it, and to the same degree; it defines our humanity and separates us from nature. It is that which enables us to tell right from wrong. It would appear that Hegel adopted this position, as much of his ethical thought relies implicitly on it. He frequently identifies the state with the rational. It is precisely the presumed universality of reason that makes it possible for individual needs to be in harmony with communal ones. However this relies on a disputed analysis of rationality which sits uneasily with both empirical research and our everyday experiences.
Even before Hegel, David Hume wrote that “reason is the slave of the passions” [Hume, Treatise on human nature]. Later, Freud and Jung’s work stressed the influence of our unconscious desires on reason. Twentieth century neurobiology revealed the limits of our cognitive abilities and the often counterintuitive nature of our decision making.
Hegel employs a Cartesian conception of the faculty of rationality, as if it was an unproblematic aspect of ourselves that could be divorced from other aspects of our consciousness. This view of Rational Man starts to resemble that of the “unencumbered self”, free of influence from the world, floating above our contingent, fallible physiology and society as a purely theoretical construct, or rather, a myth.

Of course it may seem unreasonable to criticise Hegel for not taking on board a view of the mind that would not become accepted known for another century. But just as Hegel was embedded in his time, so are we. It would be disingenuous to imagine that we can step outside of the flow of time to view his philosophy (or anything else) in the absence of our historical context, a move which Hegel himself would surely have disapproved.

Ultimately, the reliance on universal reason brings with it grave risk of misuse:

“Hegel [emphasises] rationality as the essential element in freedom… for who is to decide what is rational? Armed with the doctrine that only rational choices are free, any ruler can justify the suppression of all opposed to his rational plans..” [Singer, Hegel, p.41]

Mere negative freedom on its own may lead to an inauthentic and shallow existence, but the idea of the free individual will always stand as a necessary corrective to the abuse of state power in the name of the rational or the good. As GB Shaw said, “Progress depends on the unreasonable man” [Shaw, Man and Superman].

It must be said however that Hegel’s reliance on pure reason is not absolute, he does not advocate wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch. The French revolution and its aftermath had shown that such hubris would end in self defeat, a lesson that would be repeated again in history (Mao, Pol Pot). Instead, Hegel urges us to see the rational in what is already extant and to build on it. Nevertheless we are back where we started, how do we separate the rational from the non-rational in the already existing environment?



Conclusion:
Hegel remains a notoriously difficult philosopher to read and to interpret. But it is essential to do so as the question he asks is a hugely important one, surely more so now then in his own lifetime. The supposed atomisation of liberal capitalist society is a defining issue of our age. The paradox of negative freedom has become unavoidable, we may be free to do as we please (or perhaps what we can get away with), but others are equally free to do to us what they can get away with. The socially conservative religious critique of rampant individualism is an obvious reaction to this, but the criticism is by no means confined to the political right. The anti globalisation movement, or even the Green movement are arguable communitarian responses to neo-liberalism. More generally, disillusionment with shallow consumerism, a fixation with branding coupled with a desire not to be seen as a target market are part of the zeitgeist. The urge for authenticity in how we live illustrates the deep malaise in modern life wherever people fear manipulation and alienation.

So Hegel was asking a pertinent question, but this does not guarantee the validity of his answer. Hegel saw humans as embedded in their time but failed to see that we are equally embedded in our weak bodies and fallible minds. Faced with a choice between inauthentic individualism and a higher form of freedom, with all its attendant rational duties I fear that many people would choose the illusory feeling of freedom over actually being free.

Hegel worries that in a state of individual freedom our desires can be manipulated, but unless we can rely on our access to perfect reasoning it seems that organic freedom would be subject to the same threat. Unless our access to reason really is absolute and infallible, any attempt to create the Hegelian utopia risks subversion in a fundamental way. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes “out of timber so crooked as that which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built”. Including, it may be added, a society built entirely on human reason.