THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

Therefore he argues we must replace the category of necessity with the category of
freedom. 40 Hegel associates freedom with the categories of purposive action. He argues
and its properties, or between the subject and its predicates, in terms of logical necessity. (Leibniz actually
has two apparent models of substance – one in the Discourse on Metaphysics and one in the Monadology.
Hegel’s conception of the notion closely follows Leibniz’s account of substance in the Monadology. In this
context, I’m speaking of Leibniz’s conception of substance in the Discourse on Metaphysics, where he
takes mathematical concepts as a model for his conception of substance.) Here the terms “substance” and
“subject” present the thing as a unified object, while the terms “properties” and “predicates” present the
manifold plurality contained in the thing. Leibniz and Spinoza grasp the relation between the substance
and its properties, or between the subject and its predicates, in terms of logical necessity. The predicates
are logically deducible from the subject. The properties necessarily follow from the substance. In this
sense, Leibniz and Spinoza explain the relationship between the unity and the plurality of the thing in terms
of logical necessity. In contrast to this position, Hegel argues that we can only grasp the relation between
the plurality and the unity of the thing if we grasp the thing as a teleological process. We must employ
categories normally associated with action, or the subject, in order to grasp this relation.
40 Of course “replace” isn’t really the right word. In Hegelian terms, the relation of necessity must
be sublated (Aufgehoben) in freedom. Or, to employ another important Hegelian slogan, we must grasp
“the unity of freedom and necessity.” It is widely, though I think wrongly, assumed that Hegel accepts a
deterministic conception of the world, and that he thus possesses some compatibilist conception of freedom
that, depending on the school of interpretation, can best be described as a form of modified Spinozism or a
form of modified Kantianism. On the first interpretation, freedom consists in self-knowledge. Through
knowledge of the world and our self we come to accept, and even identify with, the forces that determine
us. It is this acceptance/identification that constitutes freedom. On the second interpretation, freedom
consists in a certain mode of self-description and self-understanding, one that relies upon reasons rather
than causes. This interpretation, popularized by Robert Brandom and Robert Pippin, accepts the Kantian
distinction between theoretical and practical descriptions of the world, while rejecting Kant’s underlying
metaphysical basis for this distinction. Both of these interpretations provide ways of understanding Hegel’s
claim about “the unity of necessity and freedom.” In contrast, to both of these determinations, I would
argue that Hegel uses the term “necessity” to designate (a) some general form of the grounding relation,
and (b) and some very general notion of determination from without. We might represent this general
grounding relation as “B because of A.” In Spinoza’s philosophy, as Hegel sees it, this general meaning of
necessity is further specified in terms of the kind logical deducibility evident in mathematical proofs and in
terms of mechanistic causality. On this view, necessity always has the form “A→B.” If all grounding
relations takes this form, then the world consists in long series of causal chains in the mode of matter
(reflected in long series of deductions in the mode of mind), all with the form …→ N → N+1 → N+2 →…
In a world like this, everything is determined from without, thus everything is necessary in the second sense
presented above. Hegel rejects this conception of necessity, though his final picture retains the core notion
(of conceptual connection as “B because of A”) presented above. Hegel replaces the “A→B” relation with
the “B for the sake of A” relation, the kind of relation we use when explaining our actions. For instance: I
went to the fridge in order to (or: for the sake of) getting a beer.” This introduces freedom into the notion
of necessity in two ways. First, it introduces indeterminacy. “A→B” implies that B must follow A, that
events of type B always follow events of type A. By contrast, “B because of A” allows for contingency. If
A is “getting a beer,” then there are obviously many different events that could fill in the B slot – going to
the fridge, swiping the beer someone else who just got it from the fridge, going to the store, etc. More
importantly, this conception of necessity allows for the possibility of “determination from within.” Thus
when Hegel speaks of the unity of necessity and freedom, he is speaking of (a) a kind of grounding relation
that includes contingency, and (b) and a conception of things as determined both from without and within.
Among other things, I take the following passage as support for my claim that Hegel construes necessity in
the non-standard fashion suggested here. Hegel says: “This leads on to the concept of a series of natural
things [a series running from less developed to more developed specimens], and in particular, of living
things. The desire to understand the necessity of such a development makes us look for a law governing
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