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Christopher Yeomans, Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012. ISBN 9780199794522. Pp. 275. $74.00 (hbk).
Arto Laitinen
arto.laitinen@uta.fi
University of Tampere
In his book Freedom and Reflection, Christopher Yeomans makes a number of significant claims:
First, Hegel’s views on free will and agency can be best understood against the background of
Hegel’s general views about expression and reflection, positing and reflection-into-self, as
developed in his Science of Logic. The book patiently works through the Hegelian vision on which
self-determination is compatible with, and even requires, certain forms of supportive external
influence.
Second, Hegel’s view on freedom and determinism preserves the libertarian insight that alternate
possibilities and genuine control are needed for freedom. Yet it is not enough that one is
recognized as free agent, or has a self-relation as free agent; there are also metaphysical aspects
of freedom that need to be taken into account. In addition, in the process of acting, and pursuing
means, the agent’s ends are specified and reformulated, so that she can retrospectively take
external deeds to express her will. This aspect of identification-with is not any less central in
Yeomans’s reading than the possibility to do otherwise.
Third, Hegel is neither a traditional hard determinist, compatibilist or incompatibilist, as he thinks
that determinism is false. “Hegel is not interested in establishing the compatibility of free will with
causal determinism or with Leibnizian or Spinozistic metaphysics, since he thinks that all three of
these doctrines are false.”(6). This is a point surprisingly seldom discussed.
Fourth, the traditional philosophical challenges to free will come in three forms which Yeomans
discusses separately. The most general is put in terms of determining grounds and explanations of
actions: if the ground or explanans is external, freedom seems to be compromised – freedom is
rather a matter of self-grounding, self-explanation of self-explanation. The modal version of the
challenge is put in terms of necessity and lack of alternate possibilities – can one be free without a
genuine possibility to do otherwise? The final one is put in terms of mechanistic causal universe,
which is hostile to free agency in making us mere passive cogs.
Fifth, Hegel’s Logic contains materials to reconceive all these three challenges by critically
scrutinizing the conceptual presuppositions of the challenges to free will. The bulk of Yeomans’s
book goes carefully through the three challenges, and examines Hegel’s means to dissolve the
challenges. The aim is to do logical groundwork for a defence of free will, while leaving the detailed
defence itself to another book.
Sixth, Yeomans’s book discusses different versions of the principle of sufficient reason – that
everything has an explanation or a ground. One worry this principle raises is an infinite regress of
grounds or explanations. To block that infinite regress without stopping at some arbitrary point
means that one way or another self-grounding must take place. Thus the category of self-
grounding or self-explanation is relevant in answering the most general of the three challenges to
free will. Yeomans introduces this challenge by quoting how Fichte in his The Vocation of Man is
filled with horror with the idea that he could be determined to be virtuous or vicious without being
able to change it. “That ground of my being and the determination of my being outside myself, the
expression of which was further determined by grounds outside it – that was what repelled me so
vehemently” (69). Fichte continues: “I want to have an inner peculiar power to express myself in an
infinitely varied manner, just like those forces of nature, a power that expresses itself just as it
expresses itself for no other reason than simply that it expresses itself in that way.”(69). Whereas
external determining grounds lay the responsibility for our actions outside the agent, internal
grounds make the action self-explanatory. Thus the need for something like self-explanation is
clear. Yeomans nicely describes the puzzle with self-explanations: the explanans is supposed to
add to our understanding concerning the explanandum, and explaining something with itself (Why
A? Because A!) hardly can do that. He argues that self-explanation not only makes sense, but that
it is at stake in all substances, which manifest their powers or express their essence in various
appearances and different guises. For Hegel, such expressivity combines internal and external
determination. Explaining for example “the way a cuttlefish will transform its camouflage upon
being introduced to a new environment”(50) will involve referring to both its self-regulation and its
responsiveness to surroundings.
When a lightning strikes a house, the event is largely explained by properties and laws concerning
electricity. That the lightning hit one particular house can be explained by the fact that that house
had an iron weathervane. There is a hierarchy of grounds: the nature of electricity being the
primary and the weathervane the secondary explanation (90). When the explanans is realized in
the explanandum, it is connected with further characteristics and thus made more determinate
(90). The substrate does not exist in a pure form but always with further characteristics, and
nonetheless the essence of electricity could be manifested in many different ways. This clarifies
the nature of expression: “the locus of activity is an essence that expresses itself in external
relations that are not grounded in it itself, and yet serve as resources for expression” (91). The
expression of an idea brings it into contact with other ideas and linguistic means: “That which will
express itself is necessarily exposed to failure and chance”(91). This loss of control is at the heart
of every ground. Yeomans quotes the saying, noted by Hegel, that “the stone belongs to the devil
when it leaves the hand that threw it”(91) and applies this idea to any expression of any essence,
that is, not merely to the role of moral luck considered in philosophy of action.
In a characteristically Hegelian twist that Yeomans nicely explains it ultimately turns out that the
roles of the background condition and the ground can be reversed: typically the presence of
oxygen is a background condition and striking a match is a cause for a fire, but in cases where the
presence of oxygen cannot be taken for granted the role of condition and ground can be reversed.
Similar examples can be found from the realm of human action. Let me add an example that is not
Yeoman’s I think it illustrates his and Hegel’s point: typically an individual is the locus of
responsibility and the ground of action, say in conducting research, while the research tradition is
the background. But we can frame the situation so that it is the living tradition is the ground
whereas the availability of the individual is just an aspect of the background condition for the
research taking place.
Seventh, while freedom includes the possibility to do otherwise, Hegel holds nonetheless that
freedom is compatible with a certain kind of (ethical, rational) necessity. Yeoman’s Hegel
combines freedom with a re-interpreted notion of necessity, and holds that “the ethical person is
conscious of the content of his action as something necessary. . . . Generally speaking, the highest
independence of man is to know himself as totally determined by the absolute idea” (EL §158Z).
(131-2). Reconceiving modal terms is central in answering the modal version of the challenge to
free will.
Eighth, Yeomans cashes the causal aspect of freedom in terms of substance causation (instead of
event causation), teleological productivity (rather than mechanical) and the notion of interaction
(rather than asymmetrical causal relations). These moves are central in answering the mechanistic
challenge to free will.
Ninth, in Hegel’s “elastic” theory of action the end to be realized is continually constitutively
specified and reshaped in the process of actualization, and the means have constitutive relevance.
This is just a selection of the points the book makes. The book starts with an introductory part on
Hegel and free will and on the central orienting idea of the book – the idea of expression as
reflection. Then the bulk of the book is focused on the three traditional worries about free will and
Hegel’s responses to them. In each case, one short chapter formulates the challenge invoking
authors to whom Hegel responded and contemporary formulations of the challenge. The next,
longer chapter goes through Hegel’s texts to articulate his view on the question, and the third
chapter of each part then discusses how Hegel’s texts have resources to address the
contemporary challenges to free will.
Yeomans’s conviction is that examining Hegel’s logical thought can enlighten and transform
contemporary philosophy of action. Throughout, he stresses the conceptual structure of reflection
and expression as described in the Doctrine of Essence of Hegel’s Science of Logic. The general
problem of expression is that there must be a difference between what is expressed and its
expression; expression involves a transformation of the initial content or idea, it is typically hard
work; and nonetheless there must be some sort of identity between what is expressed and
expression. The expressions aim at being true to some original idea, which is nonetheless
transformed in the medium of expression. His aim is to give an interpretation of Hegel according to
which his philosophy gives both internal and external determination their due.
According to Yeomans, Hegel argues that there are really two unities of external and internal
determination at work: “positing” and “reflection-into-self”(45). The two poles are the
determinateness and unity of essence on the one hand and a plurality of guises or appearances on
the other hand. Positing is creation – the movement from the unity to the plurality of appearances,
and reflection-into-self is interpretation – the movement from the plurality of guises to the one unity.
In interpreting a presentation in terms of an original idea, we presuppose that idea in approaching
the presentation, we interpret it in its light. Both positing and reflection-into-self combine internal
and external determinations; and the unity of reflection is the relation between positing and
reflection-into-self (49).
Yeomans distinguishes four elements to reflection as a process of determination: an initial object or
input of the process; the process; a perspective from which the object is submitted to the process;
a result or output of the process (52). I must admit not grasping the full significance of these four
elements, but one key insight is that the output of positing is input for reflection-into-self and vice
versa; another is that internal and external determination are equally important. Yeomans does not
hide the “incredibly baroque quality”(55) of Hegel’s text here, but manages to illustrate the
conceptual distinctions with nice examples.
In Hegel’s moral psychology one important thing is the relative independence of established
willings and commitments – once habits and commitments are willed into existence they are not
easily changeable. Unlike a small boat, which is easy to navigate but is weak in storms, a bigger
boat – and a strong will – can resist storms but is not easy to reorient. It is possible to change bad
habits, but good habits and character are achievements that are hard to change. Motivations
flowing from such ‘willed’ formations are in some sense internal and in some sense external:
As one cannot sculpt with water without first turning it into ice, one cannot mold the
self without having a material to work with that will retain its shape. But if it retains its
shape in the face of external influences it will be resistant to internal changes as well:
self-determination is real work.(63).
As said, each part of Yeomans’s book is nicely connected to more recent discussions as well as
Hegel’s predecessors’ formulations, and there is a wealth of fitting examples to illustrate the
Hegelian categories. The Hegel-readings are pretty convincing throughout and, most importantly, it
is a welcome addition to the literature on the points mentioned in the beginning. Nonetheless, what
exactly the Hegelian categorizations amount to is left a bit open-ended, to be worked through in a
later book (that has in fact been published by now: The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel's Pluralistic
Philosophy of Action). The earlier book merely aims to show why the problem of free will doesn’t
arise for Hegel’s practical philosophy like it does for many other philosophers:
Hegel’s commitments to specific forms of intelligibility are such that the concepts that
have cast the most doubt on the passivity of free will no longer do so, and in fact
potentially illuminate certain features of free agency given additional phenomenal
evidence or theoretical commitments.(259).
Yeomans does a fine job in working through the Hegelian theses, but with regard to one concept I
would have recommended sticking to contemporary usage - it would have been better to use the
concept of “identity” in a more principled manner. The book has formulations such as this: “A thing
or fact is explained by its own essence with which it is identical” (75). What the essence explains is
some change or event, some guise or appearance, and it is unhelpful to say that the relation
between the essence and the appearances if that of “identity” – indeed the various concepts such
as “being a ground” are attempts to specify that relation.
The book is not altogether an easy one to read. Yet it is on the whole very rewarding and puts
forward a well thought out position. I warmly recommend this one to anyone interested in Hegelian
practical philosophy or metaphysics.
