Appendix I: Hegel's Theory of the Will

In Lecture II the attempt has been made to elicit and criticize the main principles underlying Hegel's theory of freedom. A somewhat fuller explanation is here subjoined.

Hegel approaches the subject by a somewhat unfortunate analogy. The will is free in the same sense as matter is heavy. Gravity, he thinks, constitutes bodies. This in itself seems to be a mistake, partly of fact, but principally of definition. The expression "body has gravity" is a way of putting the fact that bodies, when otherwise unconstrained, move towards one another with a certain assignable acceleration. This statement by no means exhausts all that is known about bodies. If bodies were not known independently, that is, had no other attributes, we should not say that bodies had weight, but merely that weight exists. Whether all bodies do behave in the way referred to is a sheer question of empirical fact. But in any case gravity is not body, but is an attribute of body or, if it is preferred, a way in which bodies do behave. In the same way, if it is true that the will is free, it is certainly not in the sense that freedom is will or that will is freedom, but that freedom is a characteristic of will or an expression of the way in which will behaves. But will is not only freedom to Hegel, it is also thought. Will and thought are not two special faculties, but will is a specific mode of thought. It is thought as translating itself into existence,1 setting before itself an object with which it is in a manner identified. Ordinary language would recognize these expressions as having a loose metaphorical justification, but to Hegel they are the kernel of philosophy, and his conception of free will in particular will be found to depend upon taking then seriously. It is through his identification of the will with the system or totality of its objects that Hegel is able to speak of the will as determined only by itself, of the will as willing itself, and thus free from any other determination.

The development of this conception follows the ordinary dialectical process of Hegelian philosophy. We start with the conception of a will that is free in the sense of being quite indeterminate, so that it can choose anything and everything. But a will so indeterminate as this in fact chooses nothing and defeats itself. Hegel likens it to the anarchical movements of politics that want everything in general and nothing in particular. To escape from this barrenness we take refuge in particular objects or ends. But if the particular ends are isolated and disconnected they just miss that unity of action which distinguishes will. The truth then must be that, while the will sets a multitude of particular objects before itself, those objects must be united by some underlying principle.

It is in this unity of principle that Hegel finds what he calls freedom. The connection is by no means obvious,2 but the drift of the argument may be gathered from the account of freedom as ordinarily, and in Hegel's view, falsely understood.3 This false conception emerges when the will stands contrasted as a distinct faculty or power of choice with the various impulses which direct it towards particular objects, each of which counts as distinct from and possibly opposed to others. The power of the will to to choose between them is the kind of freedom which Hegel calls caprice (Willkür). And according to him it is at this point that the ordinary controversy as to freewill arises and on this plane that it is conducted. As long as the will is regarded as a bare potentiality, what Hegel calls something formal, standing over against impulses and promptings that proceed from elsewhere, whether within our nature or without it, you can argue with equal force either that it is determined or that it is undetermined. You can argue that it is determined on the ground that a mere potentiality, a bare form, has nothing within it to make it decide one way rather than another, whence you conclude that the propelling force must come from the impulse or from the presented object. You can argue equally that the will is undetermined because you can show that it can take up or drop any one of these objects and that what it can take up it can cancel, no matter what the strength of the impulse may be. In reality, according to Hegel, both arguments fail because both rest on a false conception of the relation of the will as a unity, or what he would call the universal, to its particular acts and impulses. The truth is that these particulars emanate from the universal character of the will itself. The will, therefore, does not stand over against the impulses which solicit it, but is itself the source of each movement in which it accomplishes and fulfils itself. The argument seems to ignore the distinction between impulse and will,44 but again let us suspend criticism and try to follow the drift of the reasoning to the end.

To do this we must think of the will as expressing itself completely in a system of purposes all related to one another.

When it grasps this system as a whole it is said to exist for itself and to be its own object.5 The meaning is that this system completely expresses the nature of the will and therefore for Hegel (here we get back to the ultimate identity of subject and object) is the will. True, there is always a distinction between subjective and objective, inner and outer aspects, Subjectively the will is the rational self-consciousness, objectively it is the rational system of ends. But to get the full "idea" of the will these aspects must be held together. The will therefore in willing its object is said to will itself. Thus for the will to be determined by its objects as a whole is to be determined by itself, and to be determined by itself is freedom. This is the substance of the entire argument, which culminates in the formula that the idea of the will is the free will which wills the free will.

This peculiarly difficult phrase proceeds directly from Hegel's identification of subject and object. Just as in the sphere of knowledge the mind, taken in its full concrete reality, is the system of the objective world which it knows, the knowledge itself being an aspect of the system, so we are to understand that in action the will is the system of accomplished purposes, the purposiveness of it being a part of that system. We are to conceive a system of activity penetrated throughout by a single principle or rather, we should say, engendered in all its variety of detail by a single principle, which requires infinite variety of forms in which to express itself, but a variety which by the interconnection of all its parts makes up an organic whole. This whole Hegel conceives as determined by nothing external to itself; any part of it may be regarded as determined by the will, but is in fact equally a determinant of the will. Its nature is to be a part of that will. So, in a sense, the will wills itself. Wherever you start, pursue the track of determination and you will come back to the point from which you started. This is the circle in which Hegel finds the meaning of infinitude, and that is why infinitude and self-determination are to him in the end the same thing.

In seeking to render the meaning plain to ourselves, we are constantly brought up against the initial difficulty of conceiving a will which wills itself. Surely when we will we are making, creating or bringing about something that does not exist; something, whatever it may be, which is at any rate other than the act of making it. To avoid this fundamental difficulty and to discover, if we can, what substance underlies the Hegelian argument, let us put it, in more modern phrase, that the will and its object are conceived as an organic unity to be understood by the contrast in which it stands to that mechanical relationship which Hegel calls caprice. In this mechanical relationship there are a number of distinct and separate impulses, and a will apart from them all, moving above them and choosing now one and now another. In the organic relationship the different movements of the will, though distinct from one another, are emanations from one and the same principle. They could not exist without that principle, nor yet could the principle exist without them, nor indeed without any one of them, for each is an organic part of the whole.6 Each impulse is, as it were, a bit of the will. Each bit of the will is determined by the will as a whole. Thus will is determined by will, that is by itself. And if, again, the will be considered as a whole which is determined by nothing external, but by its constituent parts, then similarly the will as a whole is self-determined. All its different objects are parts of a whole which hangs together and in which it is always expressing itself. This organic relationship is what Hegel understands by freedom, and so understood we have in this conception a system of action, the object of which is to maintain itself as a free system. This is what is expressed in the phrase "the free will which wills the free will." Putting aside the phraseology, which depends on the impossible identification of subject and object, we have before us the conception of an organic or harmonious system of conduct. What precisely is a harmonious system? It is one in which there are many parts, but so related that they all maintain or support one another. If we think of some occupation or some purpose which we deem desirable as a whole and which interests us in all its successive details, we have the model of a harmony of this kind. We take each step for its own sake because it is inherently attractive, and we also take it as a step in a journey, the end of which is equally attractive; and thus there is at every stage a double motive, the immediate object for its own sake and also as contributory to the wider object which is intrinsically desired. If all life could be like that, it would be a perfect harmony and it would have nothing to do but to maintain itself. It would in fact be a self-maintaining system, such as Hegel contemplates, a system, that is, in which each part in effecting itself helps to give effect to the whole. Now the ideal to which moral purpose strives is a system of this kind, a harmony within the individual, a harmony as between all individuals -- a unity, that is, in which each individual playing his own part, living a life which is desirable to him, is forwarding and consciously forwarding the life that is desirable for all mankind. In such a harmony, moreover, there would be perfect freedom, for the individual would be expressing himself unconstrainedly, and yet in expressing himself and by expressing himself, would be serving the requirements of the whole. But the freedom would be possible only because there is harmony and it would be truer to say that in such a system it is the will to maintain harmony than that it is the will to maintain free will which is the vital principle.

This leads us to inquire further into the relation between freedom and harmony. What is really meant by freedom? Ordinary thought translates freedom as absence of constraint. Hegel takes freedom as self-determination. In a world where nothing stands alone, where every act or event is related to something from which it follows and which is said to determine it, it is clear that of the action of anything whatever that we can regard as a continuous object, that we can identify through successive moments, one of two things is true. Either that action is an action of the object itself, proceeding from the nature of the object, arising out of the state in which the object has been, and consisting in a further state of activity which is just what the object of itself becomes. In that case the object may be said to determine its own action, or, regarding the object as one through successive phases, that is, before the action and in it, we can speak of the object, if we will, as self-determined in its activity. The other alternative is that the object should be determined by something else acting upon it. Then we speak of it as constrained. In the purely physical world, ordinary thought recognizes this contrast between freedom and constraint. A lever may be said to move freely about its fulcrum. The law of gravity expresses the way in which two bodies move freely, the pendulum moves freely about its support, all in contrast to the way in which these objects would behave under the constraint of some external force operating upon them. It may be objected that no one of these bodies really moves of itself. The pendulum, for instance, is part of a system of forces. There is its point of support, the weight attached to the rod, the rod itself and the earth. Nevertheless the swing of the pendulum is the resultant of just this particular system of forces acting without constraint by others, and that absence of constraint is what is meant when it is said that the pendulum swings freely. That particular system of forces determines of itself, and without the impingement of any other forces, just the particular set of motions which we discover. On the other hand, if the pendulum is deflected by a magnet, a push or a catch, a new force intervenes by which it is constrained. The whole system, including this new force, again may be said to act freely if no other intervenes. But in every case freedom from some external constraint will mean determination by the forces that are within the particular object or system of objects, which is the subject of our discourse.

When we come to the action of living things, and in particular to the will, we still mean by freedom primarily this same thing, the determination of the act by the character of the living thing itself, in particular of the will, as against determination by anything other than itself. What I choose to do at this moment, if I choose freely, expresses the character of my will at this moment. True, some external thing may be the stimulus which sets the will in motion, and it is because I see the rose perhaps that I have the impulse to bend down and smell it or pick it. But the rose does not constrain me, rather it suggests an experience, and the fact that I think of that experience as pleasing is a circumstance of my inner nature and precisely the circumstance which expresses itself in my impulse. In so far as any external object does constrain me and in so far as it awakens in me that which I cannot resist, I am deemed, and rightly deemed, not to be free, to be a slave to the external thing. Or again, if this craving is, as rightly regarded it should be regarded, rather inner than outer, then I am a slave to one of my impulses and my will is not free. If, on the other hand, knowing quite well what I am about and what was coming from my act, I perform that act with a view to that result, then that act is an expression of my will. It is unconstrained by anything external, not merely to myself, but to my will, and my will is free.

But there is a further sense in which the will is free which does not apply to material things. Given the pendulum duly attached to its support and raised from the vertical and then set free, that is, released from all external constraint, the result will be uniform and certain. The pendulum will swing to and fro. Each swing is determined accurately by the past swing. The movement of each moment is determined by the configuration of the preceding moment. Thus the mechanical system, though free from external restraints, is never free from its own past.

The question of the freedom of the will morally considered has been whether the will can ever be said to be free from its own past. The answer to this must be in a sense negative and in a sense affirmative. There is no reason to doubt that what my will is now is something which has come out of all that it and that I have been; and there is no ground for assigning at any point a breach of continuity. The difference between the will and the mechanical system is this. The will looks towards that which is coming out of it; it is in a sense determined not by the past but by the future; and yet that future is something which it itself creates. It creates the end by which it is itself determined. The fact that the will creates this end is itself the determining point of its activity. It is in this sense that the will is self-determined in a way in which nothing that is mechanical can be. The pendulum does not swing because it wants exercise or because it wants to get to the other side. It swings as a result of the forces that are working within the system to which it belongs. The will, it may be said, also operates in accordance with the forces working within it, but these forces are such as to create a result which it foresees and it is because they create this result that the will acts as it does. The consequence is that there is no limit to the self-determination of the will. If at any point in the course of its activity something indicating a different result, previously unforeseen, emerges the will is able to adapt itself to this new circumstance. There is no fact bearing upon the issues of its action which the will is constrained by its past to omit. The past has made it what it is, but what it is is something looking to the future, determining its movements by their relation to the future. Self-determination in general then means the operation of an object in accordance with its own character and the self-determination of the will in particular, its operation in accordance with the character of a creative impulse. Unconstraint and self-determination are thus two expressions for the same thing, the one negative and the other positive.

With this definition in mind, we can easily recognize that the harmonious system of conduct, or let us say the harmonious will, is also in its inward relations a free system and a free will. Let us think of such a system as produced in each part by a several and separate act of will. Each act expresses itself, Or rather in each act as it is at the time and in the relations appropriate to the action, the will is expressing itself without let or hindrance from other acts or relations of the will. Not only without let or hindrance from them, but furthered, maintained and supported by them, while also yielding to them furtherance and support. We think of the will in each act as looking not only towards the act itself, but also towards the entire system of willing of which it is a part, as expressing itself in both relations and finding the two relations harmonious. In such a harmony each deliverance of the will is free, that is it is unconstrained by any other deliverance of the will. Now for any single act of will there is just the same freedom if it is performed without any consciousness of relation to the will as a whole, for it is performed without constraint and it is therefore self-determined. But the will as a whole can only have freedom within it its purposes harmonize, otherwise there is constraint of some of its deliverances by others and they cannot all be free. In particular, if the permanent character of the will, its main tendency or its general principle, is in conflict with and overbears its own impulse in some particular case, the result in that case is not freedom but constraint. Here it would seem that Hegel would rejoin, "Yes, but the constraint that you speak of as exercised by the will in one particular relation is a constraint exercised by the will as a whole upon the will at a particular moment, that is, a constraint exercised by the will upon itself. Thus it is still self-determination and therefore it is freedom." But if this argument is advanced, it must be rejoined that self-determination so interpreted is by no means a satisfactory definition of freedom. If there is self-determination without harmony, what results is that the particular act or phase of will may be to any degree constrained, deflected, inhibited in its self-expression by the will as a whole, or, if the phrase be preferred, by the unifying principle of the will. Thus instead of the freedom of each several act of will we may have an absolute constraint exercised by the whole upon the parts. If it be said that this at any rate leaves the general principle of the will free to express itself, it must be replied that all we know of this principle is that it consists in the complete domination of all distinguishable phases or acts of will. The will is not willing itself, but against itself. Thus, in place of the free will that wills the free will, we have the conception of the will that in its freedom wills the total subordination of will; or, in other words, freedom without harmony turns out to be constraint, the subordination of the particular to the universal. On the other hand, the freedom which is found in harmony is the expression of each particular phase of will in its own nature, and it is only if order and harmony are assumed to be convertible terms that it is possible to lay down a priori that a system dependent on a single principle is at once self-maintaining and free. The truth is that the Hegelian conception of freedom really points towards an idea of harmony which Hegel himself does not seem to have appreciated.

Freedom in the sense of absence of internal friction could be realized in a completely harmonious order of conduct but in no other. But free will, as Hegel uses the expression, is simply will which carries through a single principle, that is really a self-disciplined will -- disciplined in accordance with law and custom -- and wherever he uses the term "freedom," the term "self-discipline" should be substituted to make sense of his argument. In place of the will that wills the free will we should speak of the disciplinarian will that wills the subordination of all those partial impulses. In this conception there is, if you like, freedom for the central principle of the will, but for that alone -- a freedom like that of James I's free monarchy, which meant that the monarch was free to do what he wished with every one else. It follows quite clearly from Hegel's view that the bad will is not free, but on this point he must be charged with distinct inconsistency, for when he comes to deal with the responsibility for wrong-doing (§ 139, p. 183) he explicitly maintains, as against the view that evil is necessary, that "the man's decision is his own act, the act of his freedom and his guilt." But it is clear that in his usage of the terms this could only be true if wrong-doing were the universal principle of the will. Hence the man who acts wrongfully is not free; he is expressing caprice (Willkür) and has no freedom. Hegel cannot have it both ways. Either freedom means self-determination expressing itself in the choice between good and bad, and therefore as distinctly in the bad as in the good. In that case man as a moral agent is free, but free to do both ill and well. Or, freedom means subjection to the discipline of the good will. In that case man is free when he does good, but is not free to choose between good and evil.

To sum up, Hegel's conception of freedom depends upon a confusion between two distinct conceptions. On the one hand there is freedom in the sense of self-determination in any act of the will which is carried through without restraint. Freedom in this sense does not depend on any positive relation between one purpose and another, but might be realized in an isolated act without conscious relation to any other. On the other hand, in the will as a system of purposes there is freedom from any internal check or restraint only if all these purposes are in harmony. Hegel's account seems to fuse these conceptions, taking control of the partial purpose by the whole to be self-determination and therefore freedom, without postulating harmony as a condition. Now in the conception of a moral order which is a perfect harmony the freedom of the whole is the gathered fruit of the freedom of each part. In self-determination without harmony there is for the partial manifestations no freedom but subjection, and for the governing will no ideal of freedom but only of order. To speak of the latter conception in terms only applicable to the former is the fallacy that runs through all Hegel's theory of the law and the state.