Habit as Freedom: The Pre-social Formation of Agency in Hegel

This thesis argues that contrary to the dominant anglophone approach to interpreting Hegel, his social philosophy ought to be understood as breaking with Kant’s conception of freedom. I develop this argument first by showing that Hegel denies the distinction, central to Kant’s moral philosophy, between is and ought. In the second chapter I turn to the work of Robert Pippin, who offers the most wide ranging and systematic defence of the view that Hegel maintains an essentially Kantian theory of freedom. Through my discussion of Pippin, I conclude that his attempt to ground the objectivity of social structures in the reflective endorsement of individual subjects is ultimately unsuccessful. I then turn to the work of Terry Pinkard and Christoph Menke who I see as correctly recognising that there is a tension between Kant’s subjectivist conception of freedom and Hegel’s socially integrated theory. Both theorists do not, however, see this tension as indicating that the Kantian model of freedom is inadequate to providing an account of agency that could be reconciled with a modern social conception of freedom. Instead, they see the tension as a productive one. For Pinkard it indicates the maturity of the consciousness of modern subjects who cannot be fully integrated into social structures. For Menke the tension reveals an alternative form of freedom as liberation from the constraints of rigid and habitual social practices. In the final chapter of this thesis, I argue that in the anthropology Hegel develops an alternative model of freedom as a pre-social self-formation. This alternative model of freedom provides an account of how the subject comes to be the kind of being capable of integrating into social structures by making themselves into a coherent self. The manifestation of this alternative model of freedom is habit. Habit is a form of freedom which, in our overly intellectualised conceptions of agency, we often dismiss.