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 of 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 no less central in Yeomans’s reading than the possibility of doing otherwise.

Third, Hegel is not 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 a mechanistic causal universe, which is hostile to free agency in making us mere passive cogs.

Fifth, Hegel’s Logic contains materials with which 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 of dissolving the challenges. The aim is to provide the 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 that this principle raises is that of 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 Fichte, who in his The Vocation of Man is filled with horror at 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 essences 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 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 of 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 Yeomans’s but which I think 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 that is the ground whereas the availability of the individual is just an aspect of the background conditions for the research taking place.

Seventh, while freedom includes the possibility of doing otherwise, Hegel holds nonetheless that freedom is compatible with a certain kind of—ethical, rational—necessity. Yeomans’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 to 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 that 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. Yeomans’s 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 of 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 to 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 I have said, each part of Yeomans’s book is nicely connected to more recent discussions as well as to 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 (which 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 as it does for many other philosophers:

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 contains 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 is 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.