Terry Pinkard

Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington DC, talks to AmirAli Maleki about how Hegel can help us make sense of modern social, cultural and political hot topics.

- AmirAli Maleki

What is Hegel’s view of freedom?

His ideas about freedom have to do with four different questions. First, what is freedom? Second, what is its role in history? Third, how important is it? Fourth, what does it take to actually be free?

To take up the first issue: Freedom has three components. To be free is to be at one with oneself – what Hegel calls in German Beisichsein. One is at one with oneself when self-consciously acting out of a law that’s part of one’s own nature – acting according to ideas and principles of one’s own, not principles arbitrarily imposed from without.

This aspect of freedom involves being independent, but independence is often mistakenly identified with freedom itself, instead of being recognized as merely a component of freedom. Genuine freedom for Hegel involves not only independence, but also a kind of structured dependence on others. All three of these components – being at one with oneself, independence, and structured dependence – have to be in play for there to be full freedom instead of partial or even self-undermining freedom.

Hegel thought this was easy enough to understand in practice, although difficult to grasp in theory. In particular, saying that freedom involves both dependence and independence might itself look like a self-undermining contradiction. However, the