Analysis of §15 of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Submitted for PH356 (Post-Kantian Social and Political Philosophy: Hegel and Marx) 500 word exercise, explaining in your own words a paragraph (§) from Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy Right.
In §15, Hegel criticises a common conception of what it means to have free will, namely that to be free is simply to be able to choose among options – “to do as one pleases”. He calls this kind of freedom “arbitrariness”, and argues it contains two components.
The first is the capacity to step back from any determinate impulse and to regard oneself independently. In this reflective stance, no specific desire or end has binding authority over one; it can always be set aside, and one can choose whether or not to identify it. The second is “dependence on an inwardly or externally given content and material”. Even if one can abstract from every specific inclination, to will is always to will something determinate. Yet this material – drives, preferences, social norms – is not generated by the will’s own rational activity; it is encountered rather than self-produced.
Hegel notes that these two factors stand opposed. Because reflection can withdraw from any given content, each candidate end appears as merely possible, just one option the agent could equally have rejected; yet because the will requires determinacy, some content must be taken up. This double status leads Hegel to conclude that “arbitrariness is contingency in the shape of will” – the selection cannot be grounded in the will’s universal form, but is instead settled by whichever given motives happen to move the agent.
The connection between the choosing agent and what it chooses is therefore accidental rather than rationally grounded. Arbitrariness is accordingly not yet genuine freedom: reflection provides1 the will’s “abstract certainty” of freedom, the felt assurance that one is not compelled, since one could always choose otherwise. But it is “not yet the truth” of freedom, since the will remains dependent on content it has not itself determined.
This mismatch between the indeterminacy of the subjective side (the choosing “I”) and the determinacy of the objective side explains why Hegel calls arbitrariness a contradiction. It promises self-rule, the ability to determine oneself, but delivers dependence – one is steered by whatever content happens to grip me2. It may contain a moment of independence, formally infinite in its capacity to negate any given content, but its actual direction remains governed by finite material.
Hegel therefore holds that determinism has a genuine point against the advocate of arbitrariness: if only the formal moment of choosing originates within the self, while the content that actually directs it is merely encountered, then the will is not self-determining in any robust sense. This is why it is a “delusion” to identify arbitrariness with freedom. The Wolff-era controversy about whether the will is free largely presupposed this defective model, and Hegel thinks that much post-Kantian “reflective philosophy” repeats the same error by reducing freedom to formal self activity – an empty power of selection that leaves the end heteronomous3.
The upshot is that unrestrained choice must not be identified with freedom. Arbitrariness captures only a negative moment – the capacity to abstract from any given content – without providing the positive condition of freedom’s truth. Genuine self-determination would require the will’s content to derive from its own rational nature: the will must have its own rational form as its content, object, and end – as in art, where the best work is not arbitrary but “had to be so” – rather than a contingent given.
Result
Mark: 78% (Lower Mid 1st)
Feedback:
This is an excellent analysis of the chosen paragraph. You not only identify the key claims and explain them, but also establish adequate distant between your mode of expression and Hegel’s, thereby avoiding the danger of mere paraphrasing. There are some comments to the analysis itself, but they concern only finer details and interpretative issues [added here as footnotes].
Marker: presupposes?
Marker: Wouldn’t this eliminate freedom altogether? Perhaps, then, the key problem is that there are, as it stands, no rational grounds for choosing x instead of y, z etc.. even if the will is not determined by mere impulse, say, to choose x.
Marker: Yes, the end rather than the act of willing as such.