NOTES

1. In thinking, according to Hegel, I turn an object into a thought, stripping the sensible element from it and making it essentially and immediately mine. Thought penetrates the object, which no longer stands opposed to me because I have taken from it what was peculiar to it, which it had over against me. Similarly, in willing there appears at first an opposition between myself and my object, and in making a choice I make a distinction between a determinate end and my abstract potentialities. But this distinction is after all my own, and the object, as I achieve it, belongs to me. It is mine when accomplished. The object is what I have done. There is a trace of my spirit in it.

2. The argument is that since all the objects of the will fall under the same principle or have, as we might say, a function in one and the same system, they do not really limit the will as they seem to do, but express it in different forms. In seeing to limit itself, the will is expressing itself. This, according to Hegel, constitutes the freedom of the will, which is its substantive reality, as gravity is the substantive reality of body.

3. It may be well to note the dialectical phases by which the conception of spurious freedom is reached. First, in 8 we have what Hegel calls the formal opposition of the subjective to the objective. The will is something within me, contrasted with the outer world in which it seeks to realize its end. These particular ends form the content of the will, but, in adopting such ends (§10), the will does not fully attain its freedom. Its freedom is implicit. It is in the will itself but it does not exist for the will. That it should exist in this fuller sense, the will must realize itself as an object. There is a will operating whenever I adopt some definite end, and since there is a will operating there is freedom, but not, it would seem, the consciousness of freedom, not that organic connection between a particular end and a permanent underlying principle which constitutes self-determination. This is the stage which Hegel calls the immediate or natural will with its separate impulses and desires. The will stands above all these particular objects and can freely compare and choose between them. This brings us to the position examined in the text.

4. Impulses antagonize one another, and one may calculate which impulse would bring the greatest satisfaction, but such calculation again is mere caprice. According to Hegel, any identification of myself with some one impulse is a distinct limitation of the universality of the self, which is described in this section as the system of all impulses. This conception gives rise to another dialectical stage. The different impulses which issue immediately from the will are held to be good. On the other hand, as natural impulses, they are opposed to the conception of the spirit and have to be eradicated as bad. The truth is that they must be purified by being changed from their immediate or natural character and restored to what he calls their substantive essence, that is to the form in which they can play a part in the rational system which is the will. The conception of happiness, involving some correlation of the different impulses, is a stage towards a rational life, but only a stage, because happiness lies in the individual human being, that is in his subjective feeling, so that what was to be universal turns out to be particular, something realized in particular people that is not an organic unity of all consciousness. The underlying truth (§21) is the self-determining universal, and this is will and freedom.

5. And therefore infinite, for it turns back into itself like a circle, which, for Hegel, is the true representative of infinitude.

6. The only determinant of the will which Hegel contemplates is the object. If then he can show that the object emanates from the will, he proves on his presupposition that the will determines itself. It is to this that his demonstration is addressed. He does not consider the determinist point that the will with all its purposes (to admit that these emanate from within) arises out of antecedent conditions. But he is not really thinking of the will of an individual, but rather of the world spirit.