Thomas Hill Green, “On the Different Senses of ‘Freedom’ as Applied to Will and the Progress of Man,” in Works of Thomas Hill Green, ed. R. L. Nettleship, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 308–333.
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I assume you are aware of the debate on freedom (or liberty). If not, this essay will be very difficult, essentially useless. At the very least, check out the first two sections of this lecture transcript of Quentin Skinner’s “A Genealogy of Liberty”, i.e. the sections, The Liberal Concept and The Hegelian Concept. Green’s ideas on freedom is located, along with those of Plato, Kant, Hegel, the Stoics, etc. within what has been rendered, in that transcript, as the Hegelian Concept, and what Isaiah Berlin has popularised as the positive concept of liberty. In arguing for positive liberty, Green is positioning himself against the what Skinner explicitly calls the Liberal Concept, what Berlin calls negative liberty. This liberal tradition is given classical expression by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke (Green cites Locke but not Hobbes) and taken up further by Bentham and Mill and is alive, as Skinner points out, to this day. [Skinner by the way is arguing for a third concept of freedom, which he calls the Neo-Roman concept and which is popularly known as republican freedom.] In addition to familiarity with this debate, some general familiarity with the ideas of Plato, Kant and Hegel along with Stoic and Christian ethics is recommended as Green engages with them.
“[One] way of imposing an undue strain [on the reader],” Brand Blanshard writes in On Philosophical Style (1954: 53) “is to arrange the stepping-stones in groups so that one must skip about at awkward angles in one group before going on to the next.” The example that Blanshard chooses to illustrate this type of difficulty frequently seen in philosophical writing is a 112-word Green sentence which makes a rather pedestrian point that could be made using a lot fewer words. The point is that Green can be frustrating to read. The style (and the vocabulary) will be familiar to anyone who has read any translation of Hegel. Be ready for the challenge.
Also please read the subsection The Theory of the Will in the entry on him at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and get the meanings of and the connections between “willing”, “freedom”, “objects” and “self-satisfaction”. Green’s idea of the will must be grasped in order to make sense of this essay.
Very briefly, I might illustrate them thus. When I make a choice to do or be something from amongst many other options, that activity of choosing might be called “willing”. “By ‘will’,” Green writes, “we mean the effort of a self-conscious subject to satisfy itself.” Whatever it is that I choose to do or be is the “object” of that willing. And of course, it is always me or my mind doing this “willing”. Hence, in this sense, “willing” is always free. (Take note to distinguish this notion of being free, which is a necessary state of the mind/soul, from that familiar, negative, notion of freedom having to do with societal or political relations, which is that of not being interfered with or frustrated by other persons or the state in doing the things that one wants to do.) But my “willing” could also be such that its “objects” frustrate my nature (my reason, the will of God, the law of man’s being, etc. however we define it.) And if my willing is such that it frustrates these, then it will not lead to “self-satisfaction” or “self-realisation”. To the extent that I am so frustrated, I am, for Green, unfree.
We can finally proceed with the summary.
1. “Since in all willing a man is his own object, the will is always free.” That’s to say, everything that one wills is ultimately directed towards himself whether the will is connected to the objects of desire [what he wants to have/do] or being [what he wants to be]. The nature of these objects differ and because the nature of these objects differ, the nature of freedom also differs. These objects might either frustrate self-satisfaction or they might contribute to its realisation. In the former, the act of seeking the object is always free in one sense because it is afterall the agent who wills the object. But if the object frustrates his self-satisfaction, if it does not conform to “the law of his being”, the agent is unfree in another sense. “His will to arrive at self-satisfaction not being adjusted to the law which determines where this self-satisfaction is to be found, he may be considered in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own.”
From this bondage he emerges into real freedom ...by making its [the law of his being] fulfilment the object of his will; by seeking the satisfaction of himself in objects in which he believes it should be found, and seeking it in them because he believes it should be found in them. For the objects so sought ... have the common characteristic that, because they are sought in such a spirit, in them self-satisfaction is to be found; not the satisfaction of this or that desire, or of each particular desire, but that satisfaction, otherwise called peace or blessedness [or freedom], which consists in the whole man having found his object.
To break free from this bondage, the agent would have to, adapting Green, seek satisfaction of himself in objects in which he believes his self-satisfaction should be found. And the agent should seek satisfaction in those objects because he believes his self-satisfaction should be found in those objects. That’s to say, the agent must be aware of what his nature or the law of his being demands and seek those things (or objects) which will lead him to realise that law (or ‘contribute to the realisation of self-satisfaction’). It is only in this latter case that the agent may be necessarily and properly said to be free.
2. The original use of the term freedom denotes a metaphor that expresses a social and political relation between persons. (For the classic statement of this original, or liberal, or negative view of freedom for which Green uses the adjectives “juristic”, “outward” and “primary”, see Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Liberty of Subjects”.) This original use implies some exemption from compulsion by others. Even in this use, the meaning of freedom is altogether uncertain. The extent and conditions of non-coercion or non-interference — “exemption from compulsion” — that might connote freedom will be different in different societies.
When the term freedom comes to be applied to the relation that men have with their, say, inner life of self-consciousness, as opposed to other members of the society, its meaning fluctuates even more. We might, like Plato, establish, for instance, a relation between man and his impulses which frustrate the attainment of his true good and assert that man is free when he is a master of these impulses and unfree when the impulses are master of him. But such impulses are as unlimited as they are varied. To use the metaphor then is quite arbitrary. It might lead one to say only freedom is to be found in a life of absolute detachment from all interests. And indeed this is what happened with the Stoics and to the Christians.
With St. Paul, the relation established is between man and the (divine) law. “With him ‘freedom’ is specially freedom from the law, from ordinances, from the fear which these inspire.” Law as an external command binds man in a double sense by (a) making him obey for fear of punishment, and (b) in forcing him to obey, by obstructing the enjoyment of his desires which might frustrate the law. In a word, law renders man unfree by forcing him to do what he wouldn’t, and forbidding what he would.
[Here’s a classic example of Green’s long-windedness. He expresses the sense conveyed by the last line of the previous paragraph with the following sentence:
Presenting to man a command which yet it does not give him power to obey, it destroys the freedom of the life in which he does what he likes without recognising any reason why he should not (the state of which St. Paul says ‘I was alive without the law once’); it thus puts him in bondage to fear, and at the same time, exciting a wish for obedience to itself which other desires (φρόνημα σαρκὸς {phronema sarkos, from Romans 8:6}) prevent from being accomplished, it makes the man feel the bondage of the flesh.]
From this bondage of the law, man is freed, according to St. Paul, when the spirit expressed by the (divine) law the principle upon which man acts. He comes to identify himself and his acts with the law. He obeys the law willingly. In this movement, man stops being a subject/a servant and becomes a son. “He is conscious of union with God, whose will as an external law he before sought in vain to obey, but whose ‘righteousness is fulfilled’ in him now that he ‘walks after the spirit.’”
3. Of course, this is similar to Kant’s idea of freedom in that the statement “He is free because he conscious of himself as the author of the law which he obeys” can equally apply to both. The difference however is that for Kant, as for Plato and the Stoics, the bondage is not to a divinely ordained law but to impulses of pleasure that inhere in man as a merely natural being. Freedom, or autonomy of the will, for Kant is consciousness of what should be which leads to imperatives for action that are determined/authored by reason. Such consciousness is rare and what we are looking for usually, and what Green thinks Kant’s views amount to, is to “be[] conscious of the possibility of such determination (emphasis added).”
4. Hegel’s quarrel with Kant was of course that the latter’s idea of freedom was essentially unrealisable. Hegel makes freedom more concrete and identifies it with and in the state. Because for him, the state is the perfect expression of reason, the self-determining (or autonomous, to use Kant’s term) principle operating in man. This is a way of thinking about freedom and about the state which is not familiar to Englishmen (Hobbes and Locke, two of the most important philosophers writing in the English language and who propounded the opposite, i.e. negative view of freedom). But it would be familiar to the ancient Greek philosophers (like Plato and Aristotle) who thought of the polis as a society governed by laws and institutions and established customs which secure the common good of the members of the society — enable the citizens to make the best of themselves — and are recognised as doing so. It is in such a state — the modern state, more precisely Prussia, for Hegel and the city-states for the Greek philosophers — that freedom is realised.
5. There is some truth to this view. Both the Greek polis and the modern state contribute to the freedom understood as autonomy of the will in so far as they “actualise in [men] the possibility of [determining] objects conceived as desirable in distinction from objects momentarily desired” so that “man seeks to satisfy himself, not as one who feels this or that desire, but as one who conceives, whose nature demands, a permanent good.”
6. But of course, it is difficult to speak of freedom except in the case of individuals. This talk of freedom as realised in the Greek polis would be unintelligible to the Greek slave who is forced to gratify his master’s lust. Nor would Hegel’s idea of freedom as realised in the modern state be intelligible to “an untaught and under-fed denizen of a London yard with gin-shops on the right hand and on the left.”
What Hegel says of the state in this respect seems as hard to square with facts as what St. Paul says of the Christian whom the manifestation of Christ has transferred from bondage into ‘the glorious liberty of the sons of God.’ In both cases the difference between the ideal and the actual seems to be ignored, and tendencies seem to be spoken of as if they were accomplished facts.
7. In the discussion thus far, freedom has been understood positively. It has meant “a particular kind of self-determination; the state of the man who lives indeed for himself, but for the fulfilment of himself as a ‘giver of law universal’ (Kant); who lives for himself, but only according to the true idea of himself, according to the law of his being, ‘according to nature’ (the Stoics) ; who is so taken up into God, to whom God so gives the spirit, that there is no constraint in his obedience to the divine will (St. Paul) ; whose interests, as a loyal citizen, are those of a well-ordered state in which practical reason expresses itself (Hegel).”
Two issues may be raised against this idea of [what Isaiah Berlin calls positive] freedom. First, is this a good way of thinking about freedom, i.e. as a state of the soul, of having reconciled our wills to the law of our being, as opposed to a civil relation whereby we are not physically or otherwise interfered with by others? Second, what is this law of being that man is supposedly subject to?
[Comment: This paragraph is actually from the end of paragraph 1. But it makes sense to put these questions here for reasons that should be clear if you have reached this far in the summary.]
8. Perhaps, it’s not a good way of thinking of freedom given the problems and confusions (section 6) associated with such a notion of freedom. It is tempting then to confine talk of freedom to the popular sense of the power to do what one wills without being interfered with. But then, we must ask whether we can understand freedom in the popular sense (as acting without interference) without reference to freedom as autonomy of will. That’s to say, how can we understand our freedom to do what we wish to do without understanding from where the direction/preference to do what we wish to do comes from: from us ourselves? or from something else?
John Locke thinks that freedom is merely the power to do or not do a certain act of preference. And to will, for him, is simply to have a preference. As such, to ask if this will is free is to ask an absurd question, like asking whether freedom is free (see paragraph 1). But it can, for Locke, properly be asked if a man is free to will or to act. Liberty in other words has to do with the man and not with his will or act (which are necessarily free).
So far as a man has power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free. Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power; wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary.
Liberty belongs not to the will. If this be so, (as I imagine it is,) I leave it to be considered, whether it may not help to put an end to that long agitated, and, I think, unreasonable, because unintelligible question, viz. Whether man’s will be free or no? For if I mistake not ... the question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man’s will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square.
Volition, it is plain, is an act of the mind knowingly exerting that dominion it takes itself to have over any part of the man, by employing it in, or withholding it from, any particular action. And what is the will, but the faculty to do this?
It is plain then that the will is nothing but one power or ability, and freedom another power or ability so that, to ask, whether the will has freedom, is to ask whether one power has another power, one ability another ability; a question at first sight too grossly absurd to make a dispute, or need an answer.
Liberty belongs not to the will but to the agent, or man. To return, then, to the inquiry about liberty, I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Book II, Chapter 21, paragraphs 8, 14, 15, 16, (20,21).
9. It is alright to ask if a man is free to act. But if we cannot ask if a man’s will is free, can we properly ask if he is free to will? It is difficult to see how anyone would be free or unfree to will because the will is not something that can be acted on like your body might be acted on. If it is indeed acted on, it is no longer your will or preference but the will or preference of whatever is acting on it, whether it be another person. So that the question whether one is free to will is as absurd as the question that asks whether ones will is free.
10. Perhaps this is a mere quibble with words. For the meaning of “power” when we say that a man is has power over his will, i.e. when he is free to will, is different from when we say a man has power over his actions, i.e. when he is free to act. But it has to be accepted that asking the question in the form asked (Is a man free to will as well as to act?) has deeply muddled our thinking about free-will. It has led us to think that the man doing the willing is somehow separate from or subject to the motive or object of the will, in the same way that a natural event might be subject to (or caused by) another. This has led to the further thought that the will, if man is not to be subject to arbitrary or immoral motives/objects, must also be separate from or independent of the objects/motives. However, such distinctions are meaningless. “[A man’s] will is himself. His character necessarily shows itself in his will.” For Locke and others, there is some uncertainty when we ask whether a man has power over determinations of his will, i.e. whether he will act or forbear when given a choice; and if he chooses to act, which one he will choose.
11. But there is no such uncertainty. If we answer that the man has no power, then according to the common scheme, i.e. the negative view, it would presumably be because that action has been determined by his strongest motive(s) and not by his will. We are forced to conclude that the will is determined like any natural phrenomenon: by causes external to it (here, motives).
[But such motives, in the only sense intelligible, are determined by himself. These motives are objects of his own making.]
12. This unsavoury conclusion can be avoided if we say that the man indeed has power over the determinations of his will. But saying this would mean that his will is determined by something else, that “behind and beyond the will as determined by some motive there is a will, itself undetermined by any motive, that determines what the determining motive shall be. …But an unmotived will is a will without an object, which is nothing (emphasis added).”
If those moral interests, which are undoubtedly involved in the recognition of the distinction between man and any natural phenomenon, are to be made dependent on belief in such a power or abstract possibility, the case is hopeless.
13. The only way to get out of this trouble is to realise that the question whether a man is free to will is a question that cannot be answered because the question presupposes that there is some agency beyond the will which determines it such that man could be free or unfree to will. No such agency exists. The will is the self-conscious man. The self-conscious man is determined by objects which are already, and necessarily so, in his consciousness — otherwise they would not be his objects.
To say that [man’s objects] have power over him or his will, and that he or his will has power over them, is ... misleading. Such language is only applicable to the relation between an agent and patient, when the agent and the patient (or at any rate the agent) can exist separately. But self-consciousness and its object, will and its object, form a single individual unity.
14. If a person however persists in asking this question, the answer must be both “yes” and “no”. “Yes” in that nothing external to him has power over him and “no” in that he is nothing other than his will.
15. The discussion thus far has lead to this conclusion: that a man’s will is nothing other than himself and that to ask if he is free to will is to ask an absurd question for given that his will is himself, his will is necessarily free. [Comment: This is the sense in which the will is always free (paragraph 1).] But now, it might be considered what is the character of the objects that are willed. To those inspired by Locke, freedom has been claimed or denied for the will irrespective of the objects willed, on whose nature the goodness or badness of the will depends.
If they decide that a man is ‘free to will,’ they mean that he is so in all cases of willing, whether the object willed be a satisfaction of animal appetite or an act of heroic self-sacrifice; and conversely, if they decide that he is not free to will, they mean that he is not so even in cases when the action is done upon cool calculation or upon a principle of duty, as much as when it is done on impulse or in passion.
16. On the other hand, for the Stoics, St. Paul, Kant, and Hegel, freedom of the will is intimately connected to the nature of the objects willed. Only that will which wills good objects is free but that which wills bad objects, is unfree. Obviously, this requires that we make a distinction between good and bad will but also, and this is important, that an element of identity be found to establish them as wills in the first place. This element of identity is ignored by Plato as well as by St. Paul. But it is present in Kant and Hegel. And this is what has been stressed before: that “[willing] is not a determination from without, like the determination of any natural event or agent, but the realisation of an object which the agent presents to himself or makes his own.”
17. Whether this use of freedom is proper is a secondary matter. If it becomes common enough, the common man would easily understand it just as he easily understands the popular notion of freedom as non-interference by others.
Freedom construed both as expressing the condition of a citizen of a civilised state [as Plato and Hegel do], and as expressing the condition of a man who is inwardly master of himself [as Kant and St. Paul do] share a community of meaning for both leads to “his becoming what he should be, what he has it in him to be, in fulfilment of the law of his being.” This is the fulfilment of the demand for freedom. And this is the same demand of freedom which is expressed by the common juristic conception of freedom.
18. The juristic conception of freedom, it might be said, lies essentially in the feeling of a possibility rather than a reality. To a captive just liberated or to a child in early life, the freedom (to act in whatever way he likes) might seem boundless, but in reality, this freedom does not amount to much. Everywhere we go, our actions are constrained. “Thus to the grown man, bred to civil liberty in a society which has learnt to make nature its instrument, there is no self-enjoyment in the mere consciousness of freedom as exemption from external control.” This makes the quest for freedom, understood as non-interference, important.
In the same way, ‘freedom’ is the natural term by which to characterise the the state in which man shall have become all that he has in him to be after having defeated those wants and impulses that interfere with the fulfilment of his possibilities.
19. Now, we can turn to the “essential question as to the truth of the view … that freedom is in some sense the goal of moral endeavour … such that there is some will in a man with which many or most of his voluntary actions do not accord, a higher self that is not satisfied by the objects which yet he deliberately pursues.”
This notion of the higher self has been put forth in various forms by St. Paul, Kant, and Hegel. Here, it has been put forth as follows: “that a man is subject to a law of his being, in virtue of which he at once seeks self-satisfaction, and is prevented from finding it in the objects which he actually desires, and in which he ordinarily seeks it (emphasis added, see paragraph 1).” That’s to say there is a law of man’s being whose satisfaction is prevented by the objects that we ordinarily desire. We might understand this by differentiating, as Kant did, between the pure autonomous will which concerns itself with the law of his being and the empirical heteronomous will which concerns itself with those objects which he actually desires, and in which he ordinarily seeks satisfaction. But these are separate wills. Can we sensibly, then, ascribe man’s quest for self-satisfaction as directed to certain objects (i.e. that informed by his empirical will) to the same law of his being (i.e. that which is at one with his pure will) which prevents it from finding it there?
20. Well, the pure will, which is a consciously self-realising principle, and the empirical will are not separate but one. The latter is just the former except in that it appears in this or that state of character.
By a consciously self-realising principle is meant a principle that is determined to action by the conception of its own perfection, or by the idea of giving reality to possibilities which are involved in it and of which it is conscious as so involved; or, more precisely, a principle which at each stage of its existence is conscious of a more perfect form of existence as possible for itself, and is moved to action by that consciousness.
21. How do we understand this unity and difference? The unity lies in that it is the same self-realising prinicple that works in both the pure and empirical will. The difference lies in the extent to which they realise the principle. The pure will, whose reality might be ascribed only to God, realises it fully, is fully reconciled with it. But in men, the empirical will at best only tends towards realisation and reconciliation with the form that the pure will takes, which is reason. Put in different words, in men, “the object of [the empirical] will is intrinsically or potentially, and tends to become actually, the same as that of reason.” He is thwarted from realisation by natural impulses: ‘the objects which he actually desires, and in which he ordinarily seeks it’. These impulses are the result of the work of the self-realising principle and not to be extinguished or denied but rather fused or reconciled with those higher interests “which have human perfection in some of its forms for their object.”
22. When this reconciliation or fusion happens, a man may be said to be truly free. He is free in the sense “he is the author of the law which he obeys … from that impulse after self-perfection which is the source of the law or rather constitutes it.” He is also free not only in the sense that he “‘delights in the law after the inward man’ (to use St. Paul’s phrase) while his natural impulses are at once thwarted by it and thwart him in his effort to conform to it, but [because] these very impulses have been drawn into its service, so that he is in bondage neither to it nor to the flesh.”
There is an appearance of equivocation, however, in this way of speaking, because the ‘will’ which is liable not to be autonomous ... is not this self-realising principle in the form in which this principle involves or gives the law. On the contrary, it is the self-realising principle as constituting that effort after self-satisfaction in each of us... The equivocation is pointed out by saying, that the good will is ‘autonomous’ in the sense of conforming to a law which the will itself, as reason, constitutes.
23. In God (or the ideal man), reason and the will are one. But in the historical man, the latter only tends towards the former, i.e. they only tend to unite. “The moral progress of mankind has no reality except as resulting in the formation of more perfect individual characters.”
24. How does/can the reconciliation between reason and will happen?
“A certain action of the self-realising principle … result[s]… in a [conventional morality, a] system of recognised rules (whether in the shape of law or custom) as to what the good of society requires, which no people seem to be wholly without.
The moral progress of the individual, born and bred under such a system of conventional morality, consists (a) in the adjustment (which it is the business of education to effect) of the self-seeking principle in him to the requirement of conventional morality … which is … a determination of the will as in the individual by objects which the universal will has brought into existence.
It consists (b) in a process of reflection, by which this feeling in the individual of what is expected of him becomes a conception of something that universally should be, of something absolutely desirable, of a single end or object of life.”
25. It finally consists in (c) “the growth of a personal interest in the realisation of an idea of what should be, in doing what is believed to contribute to the absolutely desirable, or to human perfection, because it is believed to do so. Just so far as this interest is formed, the reconciliation of the two modes in which the practical reason operates in the individual [i.e. reason and will] is effected.”
There can be no real determination of the will by reason unless both reason and will are operating in one and the same person. A will is not really anything except as the will of a person, and, as we have seen, a will is not really determinable by anything foreign to itself: it is only determinable by an object which the person willing makes his own.
Clueless Political Scientist 