CartHegel and the Dialectic of Freedom and Necessity Instructor: Borna RadnikProgram: Critical Philosophy, Sociopolitical ThoughtCredit(s): 1Date: May 23, 30, June 6, June 13Time: 14:00 -16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: Are we the authors of our own actions and decisions? Or are we always already determined, conditioned, and influenced by our social, historical, cultural, and economic environs such that our agency is merely a reflection of these processes? This Seminar tackles these questions head-on by engaging with G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was a radical and incisive thinker whose ideas have shaped the face of political philosophy and critical theory. With questions of political agency and free will as urgent as ever, this Seminar examines Hegel’s ideas of freedom and the weight they carry in the political, economic, and social contexts of the 21st century by engaging with my book Freedom, in Context: Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Examining the concept of freedom from a Hegelian Marxist perspective, I demonstrate that the essential relation between self-determination and causal necessity in Hegel’s thought is a multifaceted process to be viewed through historical, temporal, logical, and ontological lenses. Using examples from the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental justice, economic inequality, and democratic uprisings in Iran, the value of Hegel’s philosophy is emphasised in contexts beyond the colonial, Eurocentric tendencies of his worldview. Emphasizing the central role of temporality and history in the conception of free will gives this new reading of Hegel real practical import for the pressing political issues of our time.
Session 1: Introduction(s) and the Problem of Freedom in Modern European Thought / An introduction to the Seminar by a general presentation of the core philosophical context: concepts, themes, questions, and problems associated with self-determining freedom and the logic of necessary causation in European modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant). We see how Hegel’s intervention into these debates not only develops the philosophical significance of freedom, but more importantly how his dialectical approach provides helpful conceptual tools to diagnose and critically think through contemporary social and political movements of self-determinacy.
Readings: Malabou, “Contextualizing Freedom,” in Freedom, in Context (2024), pgs. x–xvi; Radnik, “Introduction,” Freedom, in Context, pgs. 1–12.
Session 2: Freedom, Necessity, Self-Reflexive Historicity / This session examines the essential relation between the concepts of self-determining freedom and causal necessity in Hegel’s early Jena writings (up to and including the Phenomenology of Spirit). We explore how temporal and logical movement is constitutive of this relationship in Hegel’s thought.
Readings: Radnik, “Chapter 1: Freedom, Necessity, Self-Reflexive Historicity,” Freedom, in Context, pgs. 13–54.
Session 3: Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom /
Through an examination of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, we see that his account of Christianity demonstrates how being-with-oneself-in-one’s-other, in addition to expressing human freedom, is simultaneously a temporal formula to the extent that it reveals how human freedom sublates the external causal factors that serve as its necessary ground. Since the causal factors temporally precede and condition human freedom, they constitute a historical necessity.
Readings: Radnik, “Chapter 3: Christianity and the Temporality of Freedom,” Freedom, in Context, pgs. 127–157.
Session 4: Hegel’s Political Theory and Freedom /
We finally turn to Hegel’s political thought. By examining Hegel’s concepts of “free will,” “right,” “ethical life,” “the state,” and “world history,” we explore that insofar as they are external and particular shapes of the universal and eternal absolute idea, these concepts express their historicity since they are shapes of the idea of freedom in its historical process of actualization.
Readings: Radnik, “Chapter 4: Political-Social Freedom and Philosophy’s Historicity,” Freedom, in Context, pgs. 159–189.
IMAGE: Paul Delaroche, The victors of the Bastille in front of the City Hall, July 14, 1789, 1830-39
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