Hegel’s Compatibilism on Free Will

Abstract

According to the standard conception of free will, the decision to choose one among many possible goals can be construed as a free act if and only if the subject has not been moved -or caused- to choose that goal. In this approach, free will seems to be possible solely under the condition of ontological dualism: since the connection of any action with the rest of the things and actions in the natural world is ruled by the law of causality, the act of the subject by means of which she chooses one particular course of action has to be ontologically independent from the chosen action. Such dualist conception of the act of decision is for ontological monism, however, implausible; monist ontologies tend thus to a reductionist conception of the causality of human actions and, along this line, to reject the possibility of free will. Against the reductionist claim of materialism, Hegel offers an unusual theory of free will: he defends a robust conception of free will in the framework of ontological monism, his monism, however, is not a physicalist monism, but an idealist one. The objective of my paper is to reconstruct the reasoning behind Hegel´s idiosyncratic conception of free will.