Hegel vs. Kant and Schelling on Freedom - From an Essay on German Idealism by Todd McGowan
Part two of Limiting Us to Freedom by Todd McGowan, originally published in Underground Theory by Theory Underground Publishing
“I was delighted to have something published in Underground Theory. My goal is always to see the most complex philosophy—such as that of German Idealism—as it manifests itself in the banality of everyday life. Underground Theory as a volume operates with this same imperative that prioritizes accessibility to all. It is the fundamental project of theory, as I see it, and being a part of it was an absolute privilege for me. Hegel once said that if we can change the world in theory, practice can’t hold out for very long. Underground Theory attempts to realize this idea.”
- Todd McGowan
Conceptualizing Freedom
Like his one-time friend Schelling, Hegel takes Kantian duty as the starting point for his conception of freedom.[i] But in contrast to Schelling, who sees freedom in the capacity for evil, Hegel locates freedom in the form that the concept (der Begriff) takes. While Kant isolates freedom in the practical imperative of duty and Schelling locates it in our capacity for unmotivated evil, Hegel sees the self-limiting act of freedom at work in our thinking and how our thinking manifests itself. He refuses to separate thinking from acting and views thought as a way of acting in the world.
Thought operates through the concept, which Hegel identifies with subjectivity itself. The concept is the basis through which the subject identifies itself with what is other to it. Thought reaches out of the subject and links subjectivity to what it is not. This act of conceptual thinking is an act of self-limitation—an identification with an other that serves as the subject’s limit. In every act of thinking, I limit myself. The otherness that the concept calls up defines subjectivity through the limitation that it provides. I am the series of limitations that I erect for myself through the concept.
If we understand it correctly, Hegel claims, the concept functions through self-limitation, although he is the first to see it this way. He makes his most sustained argument for the decisive role that the concept plays in constituting our freedom in the opening pages of the third major section of the Science of Logic, the “Doctrine of the Concept,” which is where he begins to theorize subjectivity. In this section, Hegel directly links the concept to freedom. He states, “In the concept, … the kingdom of freedom is disclosed. The concept is free because the identity that exists in and for itself and constitutes the necessity of substance exists at the same time as sublated or as positedness, and this positedness, as self-referring, is that very identity.”[ii] Although this passage is dense and filled with Hegel’s own terminology, what he means is that the concept’s freedom lies in its capacity for laying out what is necessary for it, which is its limitation. The concept is the act whereby the subject gives itself a determinate existence through limiting itself.
The concept brings together subjectivity with what it isn’t. We think about what is not ourselves. Through this act of thinking, we limit ourselves to what we are thinking about. This limitation is how we determine our own subjectivity. Through what we think about, we determine what we are. Each act of thinking gives our thought a content that provides the determination of the thought. This determination is a limitation that the subject gives to itself.[iii]
If I conceptualize the color hot pink, for instance, I create a determination in the world. Hot pink is a possible color for things, a way that I have to relate to things. The concept of hot pink opens up possibilities for seeing. But at the same time—and this is the crucial point—it also functions as a limit on my possibilities. Once I have the concept of hot pink, I will see things in terms of this concept rather than simply sitting amazed before the site of what is this color. Hot pink narrows the possibilities of my perception. It limits what I can see. But this limitation is freedom because it what enables me not to be overwhelmed by the variety of the world that confronts me.
The act of self-limitation—when we grasp it as such—changes how the subject relates to otherness. One doesn’t relate to otherness as foreign terrain but as the ground of subjectivity itself. Freedom comes from the recognition of one’s alienation in otherness, one’s going out into otherness, as the basis of one’s subjectivity. Alienation, for Hegel, is not a negative process as it is for Marx but the origin of our subjectivity. We are nothing but this alienation, which is what makes us into what we are. It is a process that distances us from the givens of our existence in the way that the Kantian moral law does.
Alienation into otherness is constitutive for subjectivity and generates the subject’s freedom. This conception of the liberatory effect of alienation is what leads Hegel to his most well-known formulation of freedom in the Encyclopedic Logic. He states, “freedom is precisely this: to be at home with oneself in one’s other, to be dependent on oneself, to be the determining factor for oneself.”[iv] By limiting itself, the subject gives itself its own determination through what is other to it. This is Hegel’s conception of freedom as self-limitation that builds on Kant’s moral edifice.[v]
The free subject finds satisfaction in the limit that this subject posits for itself and not in transgressing all limits. This is where the difference between Hegel’s conception of freedom and the liberal capitalist conception becomes clear. For the liberal, I assert my freedom in obtaining what I desire and respecting the limits imposed by the desire of others. My satisfaction consists in the moments of realizing my desire. Hegel sees it otherwise. For him, freedom creates satisfaction in the limit that the subject poses for itself. One enjoys through the limit, not through attaining the satisfying object but constantly failing to attain it.[vi]
Let us look at an everyday example of Hegel’s version of freedom. Veronica drives an old, dilapidated car that gets her where she wants to go but that no one envies. The paint is chipped in various spots, it often makes unappealing noises, and no section of the body is free from dents or rust. The condition of the car functions as a limit for Veronica: she can’t drive as fast as other drivers, nor can she attract a potential romantic partner with her vehicle. It perhaps even drives away some viable paramours (because she can’t drive away with them in it). Veronica also cannot take pleasure in the latest technological gadgets that new cars come equipped with. And yet, this car represents an expression of Veronica’s freedom through the self-limitation that exemplifies. Veronica views the limit that the condition of the car represents as the expression of her freedom, not as a barrier that she desires to overcome (with, say, the purchase of a new car).
When she gets into an accident, the freedom that the car represents becomes apparent. For liberal freedom, an accident represents the point at which my freedom encounters its limit in that of another. The capitalist views the car crash as the point where my freedom runs into someone else’s. But for the Hegelian Veronica, the accident allows her to recognize the satisfaction that the limit that the junky dilapidated car provides for her. For someone driving a new car, even a minor accident functions as a severe external limitation. One must obtain the insurance information from the other driver, contact one’s own insurance company, bring the car for an estimate, and finally take it to the repair shop to be fixed. Despite all this activity to return the car to pristine condition, the car is never as good as new. The accident damages the object irreparably, stealing from it part of its enjoyability. Purchasing a new car expresses one’s liberal freedom, but crashing it reminds one of all the external limitations that accompany this version of freedom and that reveal it as a fundamental unfreedom.
When one drives a car like Veronica’s, the self-limitation that the car embodies spares one all these external limitations on one’s freedom. After the crash (supposing it is a minor accident), one can give one’s insurance information to the other driver and drive away. A car filled with dents acquires another dent. No dealings with insurance companies or repair shops. The self-limitation expressed in the condition of Veronica’s car is itself the source of her enjoyment of the car. The damaged condition is the site for her freedom.
Veronica does not relate to her car like a commodity even though it surely is one. No matter what the condition of one’s car, it remains a commodity that once promised a surplus enjoyment to its producer and purchaser. But by refusing to relate to her car as a commodity and instead relating to it as a self-limitation, Veronica immunizes herself to the advertisements that lure people into purchasing new cars. The damaged condition of her car—its lessened status as a commodity—is the key to its value for her. It harbors not the promise of more but constitutes an enjoyment of less. Through the act of self-limitation, Veronica establishes a form of value that thwarts the effectiveness of the commodity form. Taking Hegel’s conception of freedom as her point of departure, Veronica breaks from the trap of liberalism and its investment in the promise of the commodity.
Unfortunately, Hegel did not have dilapidated cars to refer to while writing the Science of Logic, so he settled for the freedom of prisoners, which has a similar structure. His ultimate example of the conception of freedom as self-limitation is the criminal stuck in prison. He insists that criminals in this situation must regard themselves as imprisoned as a result of their own free acts. Given this position, it is not surprising that certain liberals, such as Karl Popper, see Hegel as a forerunner of 20th century totalitarian rule.[vii] The liberal views imprisonment as the antithesis of freedom, which is why capitalist society utilizes the prison as its primary form of punishment. It is not surprising that the nation on earth most committed to liberal freedom has the highest percentage of its population in prison.[viii] Liberal freedom always includes an external barrier to this form of freedom in order to prevent a war of all against all breaking out. Taking away freedom to do whatever one wants implies an end to freedom for the liberal. But the problem with this conception of freedom is that it views the subject as utterly separated from the society in which it exists.
If the criminal has broken the law, the limitation that confronts the criminal in prison is the result of the criminal’s self-limitation. In the act of breaking the law, the criminal violates a law that the crime itself posits as valid. The crime affirms the propriety of the law insofar as the criminals themselves treat the crime as a transgression. They perform the crime in the cover of night or in a way that will not attract the notice of law enforcement. This is the tacit acknowledgment that the law operates as the criminal’s self-limitation insofar as the criminal is a member of the society. In the Encyclopedic Logic, Hegel uses criminality to contrast his own theory of freedom with the liberal theory. He states, “A criminal who is being punished may regard the punishment meted out to him as a limitation of his freedom. Nevertheless, the punishment is in fact not an alien force to which he is subjected but only the manifestation of his own action and insofar as he recognizes this, he behaves as someone who is free.”[ix] The theorists of liberal freedom regard the law in the same manner that criminals do—as an external constraint. In contrast, recognizing prison time as the expression of one’s freedom requires that one grasp the limit as what enables possibility as it also restricts it. This is what those invested in the liberal conception of freedom are unable to see.
The law that the criminal violates leads to the criminal’s imprisonment. But at the same time, it—along with all the other laws—creates the terrain on which the criminal can act. The law is not just restrictive but is also constitutive. Without this limit that the law creates, no significant act would be possible. One would find oneself lost in a sea of meaningless activities that never acquired any significance because they would take place outside the frame of any legal apparatus that gives them their significance.
Seeing the imprisoned criminal as a free being seems to stretch the idea of freedom to the Orwellian point at which it becomes its opposite. Jail is freedom, and peace is war. While Hegel would actually find something true about such dialectical reversals, this is not his point with the criminal. Freedom is not blind obedience to the dictates of the social order for Hegel. As an unflinching proponent of both the French and Haitian Revolutions, he would not look askance at the political disobedience of Henry David Thoreau, B. R. Ambedkar, or Martin Luther King Jr. These thinkers counsel disobedience to change the law, not because they see the law as an external restriction. Such radical action reveals an investment in the law that Hegel shares.
Even though Thoreau, Ambedkar, and King actively defy the law, they are not criminals because they break the law for the sake of the law itself. Ambedkar criticizes the caste system for the unfreedom that it imposes on the Indian people. It has an illegitimate power that he calls for law specifically to counter. In the Annihilation of Caste, he points out the fundamental unfreedom of the caste system. He writes, “A caste is ever ready to take advantage of the helplessness of a man, and to insist upon complete conformity to its code in letter and in spirit.”[x] Ambedkar’s disobedience attempts to open up the freedom of law that caste closes down.
Hegel looks to the criminal’s punishment as an example for his conception of freedom because he seeks an example that turns liberal freedom on its head. The liberal conception of freedom misleads us because it leaves us in a situation surrounded by limits that we have no control over. By seeing self-limiting freedom at work in the concept itself, Hegel pushes Kant’s revolution of the concept of freedom to its end point.
German Idealism’s great discovery is a conception of freedom for modernity that acts as an alternative to capitalism’s liberal version. The real opposition is not between positive freedom and negative freedom, between freedom to and freedom from, but between freedom as inherently unlimited and freedom as self-limitation. The freedom to do what one wants is what we should properly call unfreedom. It is only the freedom of self-limitation, the freedom of sublimation, that really merits the name.
But because none of the four major German Idealist thinkers were able to translate this conception of freedom into a political project, it turned into an unactualized philosophical flight of fancy. It represents one of the great missed opportunities in human history. The aftermath of German Idealism turns from philosophy to politics, but in doing so, it abandons the revolution in the understanding of freedom that Kant begins.
This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Limiting Us to Freedom by Todd McGowan will be published over the next two months before Todd’s course at Theory Underground begins in July, 2024 (more info on the course below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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References:
[i] It would be nice if the split between Schelling and Hegel occurred over competing conceptions of freedom. But that is not the case. Most historians of philosophy chalk their breakup to Schelling’s interpretation of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which Schelling supposedly took as a jibe directed at him. But because amicable letters followed Schelling’s reading of the preface and even an extended visit to Hegel years later, this surely cannot be the case. It seems much more likely that Schelling was not altogether pleased that Hegel’s star rose in the firmament of German philosophy as his own descended.
[ii] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 513.
[iii] The point of Hegel’s philosophy is not the overcoming of all limits but the recognition of the necessity of self-limitation through self-sacrifice. In this sense, it represents a direct response to the reign of the commodity form. Rebecca Comay makes this opposition clear in Mourning Sickness, where she specifically contrasts the movement of Hegel’s philosophy to the accumulation of additional surplus value. She states, “Rather than trying to plug the gap through the accumulation of conceptual surplus value, Hegel sets out to demystify the phantasms we find to fill it; the dialectic is in this sense best understood as a relentless counterfetishistic practice. Among the more subtle fantasies Hegel punctures is the melancholic reification of the lost object as an unattainable positivity: he demonstrates again and again that even loss can be a furtive source of consolation. The ultimate sacrifice is without payback in that it suspends every symbolic context in which it could be even recognized as a sacrifice; it voids every available standard of evaluation. Exposing the subject to its collective emptiness, it clears the slate for a new beginning. While appearing to eclipse all previous losses, this sacrifice makes no claim to redeem the lives squandered on the slaughter bench of history.” Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2011), 125.
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