Simon Gros

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Christopher Yeomans’s Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency asks how self-determination can be compatible with, and articulated by, external determination, and where in Hegel a determinate account of that compatibility is to be found. Its governing ambition is to show that the account lies in the Science of Logic — in the doctrines of reflection, ground, modality, causation, mechanism, and teleology — and that Hegel’s practical philosophy presupposes doctrines it does not itself supply. The book rewards study because it makes a canonical problem in the philosophy of action into a test of the Logic’s categories, and because it orders three versions of the principle of sufficient reason into a sequence of challenges, each met by a reconstruction of the very concept that generates it.

The work opens under two epigraphs whose sense is fully retrieved only in the middle of the argument. The first is the story, told to Franz Biberkopf near the close of the first book of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, of a celluloid ball weighted with lead shot: the very weight that was supposed to make the ball obey the thrower’s intention is what carries it a little farther and a little sideways. The second is Hegel’s endorsement of the proverb that the stone belongs to the devil once it leaves the hand that threw it, together with the claim that in acting one exposes oneself to a misfortune that acquires a right over one. Both say the same thing in advance: whatever makes expression possible is also what makes it escape its author. The reader who returns to the Döblin passage where it reappears in the discussion of ground will find that it has been converted from an image into a thesis, namely that the internal determination of an explanatory ground is necessarily infected with the externality of its conditions, and that this infection follows from the operation of grounding itself. This is the first and clearest instance of a compositional habit that governs the whole: material introduced as illustration is later made to bear argumentative weight, and material introduced as argument is later shown to have been an illustration of something more general.

The prefatory apparatus establishes further constraints on how the claims are to be read. The abbreviations page announces that quotations from the Science of Logic follow Miller’s translation with frequent, unannounced modification. This is a paratextual protocol with substantive consequences: it licenses the local philological interventions on which several of the book’s turning points depend, and it makes the reader’s access to the evidentiary base partly dependent on the author’s ear. At one juncture the protocol is exercised openly, when Miller’s rendering of the reflection that appears within itself is judged to have dropped precisely the awkwardness of seeming as a form of self-relation — an awkwardness the argument requires, since the whole point of that passage, on this reading, is that the fact must interpret itself against a background it does not control. The acknowledgments function similarly as a methodological index. They record that the project began as a dissertation on the relevance of Hegel’s basic conceptual theory to the problem of free will, that the author’s sense for the bearing of issues in explanation upon agency was developed under Larry Wright, and that he participated in workshops on agency conducted by Gary Watson and John Martin Fischer. Wright’s erotetic theory of explanation later becomes one of the book’s principal contemporary interlocutors, and the analytic literature on control, alternate possibilities, and moral luck is treated throughout as a live conversation. A closing note records that a piece titled “Hegel and Analytic Philosophy of Action” appeared separately in The Owl of Minerva, marking the engagement with analytic action theory as a partly detachable unit within an otherwise tightly integrated construction.

The architecture is declared with unusual explicitness in the final section of the second chapter, itself introduced by a Beckett epigraph about matching each tumour with a scalpel and a compress. Each of the three main parts, we are told, has the same three-element rhythm: a first chapter that sets out one specific threat arising from a distinctive commitment to the explicability of the world, following that threat through historical and contemporary sources; a second and much longer chapter that reconstructs Hegel’s arguments in the Logic for a specific conception of the concept that appeared to generate the threat; and a third chapter that returns the logical result to agency and combines it with elements of Hegel’s practical philosophy. The three threats are named in a single sequence: that my action is external to the sufficient reason that explains it, that it is necessitated by that reason, and that it is fixed and passive in relation to it. These three, the text says, constitute the intuitive heart of the problem of free will. The organization is therefore neither chronological nor exegetical but diagnostic, and its symmetry is the book’s most conspicuous formal commitment.

A residue of an earlier organization survives inside the first chapter, and it is worth registering as evidence about the work’s compositional history. In the passage announcing what the author calls the threefold equation of the problems of expression, of internality versus externality, and of causal exemption, the numbering slips: the chapter said to argue that the problem of expression is the problem of reflection is called the third, though that argument is delivered in the second; the part said to treat modality is called the second, though modality is treated in the third; and the part said to treat teleology is called the third, though teleology is treated in the fourth. The corrected sequence appears a few dozen pages later in the section that lays out the shape of the project. The most economical explanation, and I mark this as an inference from the text’s own inconsistency rather than as a claim the text makes, is that an earlier three-part manuscript was renumbered when the introductory material was promoted to a Part I of its own, and that one passage escaped the revision. The inference matters for reading, because it suggests that the introduction was originally more nearly a preface and has since acquired the status of a first movement — which is how it in fact functions, since the concept of reflection, the fourfold analytic grid, and the doctrine that what is posited becomes an independent form of reflection are all installed there and are presupposed by everything after.

The argument begins from a negative fact about the reception. On the reigning view, articulated most sharply by Pippin, Hegel takes little interest in the problem of the freedom of the will, does not worry about establishing a unique causal capacity, and does not much discuss the traditional Kantian issues. Yeomans concedes that this is correct as a description of Hegel’s explicitly practical philosophy, and then makes the concession do work of the opposite kind. Hegel declines to argue for the compatibility of freedom with causal determinism, or with a Leibnizian or Spinozistic metaphysics, because he takes all three doctrines to be false; and the arguments by which he shows them to be false are themselves the development of positive views about the forms of determination that obtain in experience, which forms are the resources out of which the particular self-determination we call free will is constructed. The impression of disinterest, on this reading, results from mistaking the uniqueness and textual dispersion of the answer for the absence of a question. The claim is immediately marked as one that can be substantiated only by the book as a whole. That is a methodological wager of some consequence: it removes the burden from any local piece of exegesis and places it on the coherence of the entire reconstruction, so that every intermediate result is provisional until the last part has been read, and so that the sense of early claims is retroactively determined by what the later chapters can be shown to deliver.

The logical space is then re-partitioned. Libertarianism, skepticism, and compatibilism do not exhaust it. Compatibilism revises the concept of free will in order to make it consistent with determinism; its revisionist sibling is a project that revises the concept of determinism in order to make it consistent with free will. Hegel is placed in that fourth position, and the placement is defended by a pair of commitments that ordinarily belong to opposed camps. Like the compatibilist, he accepts that our actions are necessary, and he goes further than the compatibilist in holding that their necessity is integral to their freedom, where the compatibilist may remain agnostic about necessity altogether. Like the libertarian, he holds that we have an open future with alternate possibilities, and he is credited with sharing Kant’s demand for real alternativity — a point on which the reading explicitly departs from Wallace’s more compatibilist Hegel, and one that puts correspondingly more pressure on the single framework that must reconcile the demands of theoretical and practical reason. The book’s controlling antinomy is thus fixed at the outset: necessity is to be constitutive of freedom, and alternativity is to survive undiminished. Everything that follows is an attempt to make that pair stable, and the most illuminating way to read the work is to ask, at each stage, what the pair has been made to cost.

Two rival strategies for defending Hegel are then examined and set aside, and the manner of their rejection tells us what the positive account will have to supply. The first is metaphysical, drawing the response to Kant from the dialectic of the finite and the infinite in the Doctrine of Being. The objection is that nothing in that dialectic rules out self-transcendence proceeding in accordance with necessary causal laws, so Kant’s worry is left untouched; that plants are said to exhibit the same infinity, so the distinction between agents and non-agents fails to coincide with the distinction between finite and infinite; and that Kant’s own reasoning runs in the reverse direction, since for him nature is finite because that is the condition under which it is intelligible. The second strategy is dialectical and historical, treating freedom as an achievement made visible by a story about the practical contradictions that preceded our recognition of it. The objection here is that no immanent criterion is available to support the required revolution in self-image: a factual story about the decline of naturalism would be descriptively inadequate, since naturalism is if anything more robust now than in the early modern period, while a dialectically enriched story lacks the historical trend that would make it more than tendentious. In each case the same deficiency is identified: neither strategy gives the naturalist a non-question-begging reason, and neither addresses the level at which the problem is actually generated.

That level is specified by an argument I take to be the load-bearing one of the first chapter. Taking an example from Patten in which submission to authority is likened to action on unexamined desires, Yeomans observes that the real work in generating the problem of freedom is done by the lower-level oppositions in terms of which the higher-level notions are understood: internality and externality, passivity and activity, possibility and necessity. All of these lead directly back to the traditional problem, and the naturalistic and the social variants therefore have the same conceptual form. The consequence is that no account of Hegel’s concept of freedom can answer the objection that he has changed the subject without giving his account of those basic notions as they bear on practical reason. This is where the necessity of the detour through the Logic is established, and it is established by an argument about the conditions of adjudication rather than by an appeal to Hegel’s own systematic pronouncements.

A second argument, of equal structural importance, is directed at the interpretive tradition that emphasizes mutual recognition and the retrospective determination of an action’s meaning by public evaluation. The emphasis is endorsed without reservation as capturing what is unique in Hegel’s view, and is then declared to be half a story. Self-determination requires that reflection on past action play a role in future action; without a productive or causal aspect we have only half of the feedback loop that connects the two, and endorsement alone is insufficient, since I can endorse the actions of others or the growth of my fingernails without those becoming instances of my agency. The pressure is then increased: if the productive story is radically distinguished from the expressive one, it becomes obscure how the action counts as an expression of my will at all, since not every story about the production of my action is consistent with rational identification with it. And if productive considerations may enter the social process of arriving at mutual recognition, as seems plausible, then the natural and causal elements the expressivist wished to keep at a distance return by that route. The dilemma is then stated at its most general: either the concepts of objectivity we have collectively developed apply to that development itself, including the individual actions that compose it, or they do not. If they do not, we can give no positive account of the productivity of agency and are left with interpretation alone, which is the Kantian horn. If they do, everything depends on the specific structure of those concepts, and the fact that they are socially produced becomes irrelevant to the question of free will. This dilemma is the reason the last of the three main parts must deliver a theory of productivity, and it is the standard against which that theory is later measured.

The threefold equation follows: for Hegel, reflection and expression, self- and other-relation, and causal exemption are fundamentally the same conceptual problem. This is presented as the most distinctive feature of his account and as the form in which his reformulation preserves the core of the earlier, misleading versions of the problem. Two textual warrants are offered — that the inappropriateness of ordinary causal relations to spirit appears in the Logic as the concluding moral of the Doctrine of Essence’s treatment of the forms of self-and-other-relation, and that Hegel’s own introduction of the concept of spirit in the Encyclopaedia draws on the reflective conception of freedom as self-directedness under external influence. It is worth noticing how much the equation is asked to carry. It converts a problem about the metaphysics of causation into a problem about the logic of expression, and it thereby determines in advance that the treatment of mechanism in the last part will have to be an argument about expression as well.

The exposition of Hegel’s own theory of the will, restricted by design to what is needed for the logical argument, isolates the dialectical paradox in the central sections of the introduction to the Philosophy of Right: the will requires both an ability to dissolve every motivation and an ability to express itself through determinate motivations with which it identifies, and self-determination is the ability to do both at once. Yeomans stresses two features of the first ability that constrain all subsequent interpretation. Hegel employs no metaphor of distance or height: the motivations are dissolved in the medium of the agent, which makes the conception more radically libertarian than standing back or standing over. And the ability is introduced without any distinction between higher and lower faculties, between reason and passion, or between reason and nature; every content, irrespective of provenance, can be abandoned or transformed. The consequence drawn is that the problem of free will is more fundamental than the distinctions in terms of which it is usually moralized, and that rationalist compatibilist readings of Hegel face a difficulty in this very section. Suicide is treated as the exhibition of the extent of this independence and as the demonstration of its insufficiency, since the price of expressing independence from all motivation is the destruction of agency; the French Revolution is invoked as the political counterpart, where freedom seen only in the destruction of institutions is driven to destroy the revolutionary institutions themselves.

The second ability is positing, and its introduction allows the whole dialectic of the introduction to be reconstructed as a phenomenological progression. Arbitrary choice — I gloss the German term Willkür here and thereafter render it as freedom of choice — is presented as the interpretation of the tension between abstraction and determination in terms of two further oppositions borrowed from consciousness: subjectivity against objectivity, and the universal form of a choosing faculty against the particular content of a given motivation. A consequence is drawn that recurs in every later part: the naturalness of a motivation is associated by Hegel with its form and not with its origin or content. What makes a motivation feel foreign is the contrast between its manifold specificity and the simplicity of the choosing capacity with which the self has identified, and not its provenance in the body or in causal history. Hence the striking conclusion, stated as a plain reading of the text, that the immediacy, particularity, and externality of motivation are produced by reflection under freedom of choice as a template for the interpretation of agency; hence too the equally striking practical corollary that the project of overcoming desire is a project of modifying our own understanding of agency, a practice as much as a theory, and one for which the proper institutional arrangements are needed because the practice is difficult. The sequence continues through the emergence of happiness as a second, reflective universality, which is the first stage at which the agent’s experience becomes a project measured against a criterion, and whose resources for constructing that criterion are supplied only by the particular motivations themselves. The positive model is self-determining universality, in which the agent acts on herself as on something objective and universality is understood as the development of a disposition; and at that point, we are told, it becomes misleading to continue speaking of drives, since although their content has never left, their form and their relation to the agent have changed so substantially that the proper word is character. This substitution of character for drive is one of the book’s recurring landmarks, and its warrant migrates: introduced here as a piece of Hegelian moral psychology, it is later re-derived from the modal argument and finally from the teleological one.

The chapter closes by refusing to settle the most serious objection it has raised. If the free will is infinite because its object is itself and every relation of dependence on an other is eliminated, then the suspicion arises that only the state or God can be free, since determination by external forces is a fact of life for finite agents. The question is declared to require an analysis of objective and absolute spirit that lies outside the book’s scope, and the reader is directed to the doctrine of reflection for mitigation rather than for resolution. This is the first of several deliberate suspensions, and their accumulation eventually becomes a feature of the work’s form: the argument repeatedly earns the right to a question that it then declines to answer, and the declining is presented as a consequence of the division of labour between logical and concrete investigation.

Reflection is introduced through a compressed reconstruction of the Doctrine of Being as a regress on the conditions for the determinateness of any object of thought. Two families of argument are distinguished: one showing that thought requires contrast, relationality, and external determination; the other showing that it requires indifference, independence from relation, and internal determination. Determinate being, taken as the model on which a thing’s character is exhaustively fixed by its differences from others, is named pure external determination and shown to generate the bad infinity, since the second quality requires a third and so on without end. Being-for-self is introduced as the positive rendering of that regress, and here the exposition installs the term that will do more work than any other in the book: a locus of responsibility. The phrase is defined with care and at a deliberately low level of commitment. It names whatever is determinate through change or relation in virtue of being independent of that change or relation, and thus whatever can be isolated non-arbitrarily as a factor with sufficient stability to anchor an explanatory scheme. The sense of responsibility at issue is explicitly said to be far more abstract than moral or even causal responsibility, and the failure to identify such a locus is glossed as the failure to pick out non-arbitrarily a sufficient reason that actually answers a request for explanation.

The invention is the pivot on which the entire transfer between logical and practical registers turns, and it deserves to be examined as such. Because the notion is abstract enough to apply to a quality, a fact, an essence, a substance, a mechanical system, and an agent, it permits a single vocabulary to run from the opening of the Logic to the theory of the will; and because it is defined by a functional role in explanation rather than by any ontological category, it permits the claim that explanatory and expressive relations have the same structure. The corresponding exposure is that the transfer may be secured by the abstraction rather than by any argument, so that what is shown about loci of responsibility in general need not be shown about agents in particular. The text is aware of the exposure and answers it in two ways. It repeatedly denies that the abstract sense of responsibility is the moral one, and it insists that the concrete application is a matter for a further, more comprehensive work. Whether those two answers are compatible with the book’s own practice is one of the productive tensions to which I shall return, since the examples that carry the argument at its most difficult moments are consistently drawn from agency.

The Doctrine of Being is then shown to exhaust itself: determinateness and independence are made irreconcilable, independence degenerates into an indifferent unit, quantity is revealed to be parasitic on distinctions between quantities, and the terminal category of absolute indifference is one in which nothing can make a difference. The reinterpretation that opens the Doctrine of Essence hinges on the precise character of that failure. The distinctions were unable to make a difference; that inability is now to be understood as something the distinctions themselves do, as their own determination to supersede themselves. Yeomans pauses here on a methodological remark that governs the whole reading. The Logic is subjective in the sense that it concerns thought, without being contrastively subjective: its argument turns neither on the conditions of knowledge of any particular subject nor on how the world must appear to us, but on the internal consistency of an account of the world in terms of its content. This constraint is invoked repeatedly and with real discipline, most consequentially when an otherwise attractive argument — that one cannot specify the background conditions sufficient for a cause without covertly referring to the effect — is judged proper to the philosophy of science and unavailable within the Logic, since it appeals to the limitations of finite subjects engaged in the practice of explanation. The book is unusually scrupulous about the difference between an argument Hegel could accept and an argument that merely supports the conclusion, and this scrupulousness is one of the strongest reasons to read it as a work of reconstruction rather than of advocacy.

Reflection proper is then given its structure. The Doctrine of Essence is said to answer a single question: how can there be a relation to self that involves a relation to another? Two unities of internal and external determination are distinguished, positing and reflection-into-self, and glossed in the vocabulary of expression as creation and interpretation. In positing we move from a unity to the distinctions that express it; in reflection-into-self we move from the distinctions to the unity they constitute, and in doing so we presuppose that unity as our orientation. Expression is defined as the coordination of difference and identity such that the transformation remains within what is to be expressed, and the definition is immediately given its practical edge: expression is hard work, since we are trying to remain faithful to a relatively indeterminate idea in the very process of realizing and thereby transforming it, and our only grip on that idea is through its expressions and their relations to one another. Two examples carry the exposition, one Kantian and one biological. Cinnabar’s potential to change colour under oxidation is used to show that the semblances are already differences, so that the relation traced by interpretation is a difference between differences. The cuttlefish’s camouflage is used to distinguish what makes a difference to one kind of thing from what makes a difference to another, and to introduce a warning that recurs: the essence to which we appeal is not to be assimilated to a natural-kind ontology, since our reflective grip on it comes from its functional role in explanation, and some changes in the cuttlefish’s states are best explained by the essence of the shark that ate it or by the pattern of the background against which it hides.

The technical core of the chapter is a fourfold analysis of each direction of reflection into an input, a main process, a perspective under which the input is submitted to that process, and an output. It is applied twice. In positing, an immediate internal determination is internally determined, through the process of negation, into external determination. In reflection-into-self, an external determination is externally determined, from an internal perspective, into internal determination. The grid then permits a series of precise claims that would otherwise be inexpressible: that positing and reflection-into-self are not mirror images, since both give the perspective to internal determination while the processes differ; that the dominant self-determination is only the self-determination of the input; that half of reflection is guided by a principle proper to other-determination, since the differences among the guises in their dependence must be our guide in transforming them into a locus of self-determination; and that reflection is recursive rather than circular, since one half continually produces states with the status required to serve as inputs to the other. From this the conclusion is drawn that far from delivering the atemporal self-grounding of the absolute, reflection gives absoluteness to the exigency of self-development in a way that positively invites contingency and failure.

The grid is the book’s most conspicuous conceptual invention after the locus of responsibility, and it deserves the same scrutiny. It is derived from a single, deliberately literal rendering of one sentence about self-relating negativity, and it is then applied to passages that do not exhibit the same grammatical structure. Its yield is considerable: it converts a set of famously opaque formulations into a machine with determinate parts, it makes the later transitions describable as displacements of externality from one part of the machine to another, and it supplies the criterion by which the modal argument’s decisive move can be stated at all. Its cost is that the assignment of the perspective to one term rather than another is at several points underdetermined by the text, and the reader must accept a good deal on the strength of the results it produces downstream. That the author himself concedes at one point that the conceptual structure is so intricately turned in on itself that formalization is futile, and yet continues to use the schema, is an honest registration of the difficulty. I record it as a wager rather than as an error: the grid is offered as a translation, and translations are judged by what they let one say.

Two consequences are drawn immediately, and both prove to be permanent acquisitions. The first is a diagnosis of Kantian moral psychology as external reflection, a form of reflection that lacks awareness of its own constituting function and therefore takes its presuppositions as given data, restricting its interpretive work to judging those data as acceptable or not. Applied to the will, this yields the claim that the natural and immediate character of desires is imposed on that content by the external reflection of the rational will itself, and it yields a logical explanation of Kant’s wish to be rid of desires altogether: the rational will misunderstands its own power. The second consequence, taken from Henrich, is that what is posited in reflection is itself identified as reflection, so that the posited acquires a self-sufficiency and stability in relation to what posits it. The practical translation is arresting and is presented as Hegel’s own insight: precisely because motivations are so deeply created by the will, they resist immediate redirection or elimination in the same way that self-determination in general resists external pressure. The metaphor of the small manoeuvrable boat and the large stable one is used to make the point that the agent with a strong character that resists outside influence is thereby resistant to her own capacity to change; habit is a second self that gives long-term orientation, and bad habits have solidity too. A Kantian argument from the A-Deduction is then enlisted: if cinnabar were now red and now black, empirical imagination would never get the opportunity to associate, and similarly, if an agent were brave one minute and cowardly the next in the same circumstances, self-reflection on character would be impossible. The moral drawn is that even the most logically radical transformation presupposes stability and therefore resistance in what is to be transformed, and that one cannot mould the self without a material that will hold its shape.

Here the first of the work’s internal frictions becomes visible, and the exposition does not conceal it. The doctrine that secures the will’s authorship of its own motives is the same doctrine that secures those motives’ independence from the will. The text acknowledges that this multiplies agents, since each motivation, as a mode of selfhood, must have a kind of autonomy even with respect to the others, and it immediately warns against reading this atomistically as a Nietzschean bundle of internal agents. It also concedes that it is natural to doubt whether motivations can play their usual explanatory role with respect to action if they are identical with the will they are supposed to move, and that a conception of the autonomous agent as composed of multiple centres of autonomy requires an entirely new explanatory scheme. That admission is what motivates the transition to the second part, and it is a good example of how the book’s transitions are engineered: a doctrine is pressed until it generates a demand that only the next conceptual level can satisfy.

The second part opens with the challenge in its historical dress. Fichte’s Vocation of Man is quoted at length for the horror at finding the ground of one’s being outside oneself, and for the correlative wish for an inner power that expresses itself for no other reason than that it expresses itself in that way. Externality of grounds is thus identified as the threat, and internality of grounds as what free will is supposed to be; the same idea is traced back to Aristotle’s internality of the moving principle of voluntary action. The philosophical difficulty is then stated with disarming plainness: the correlative notion of self-explanation is initially unpromising, since the value of an explanation appears to lie in adding to our understanding, and answering “why A” with “because A” is either a joke or an oblique way of saying that there is nothing further to know. The constraint on any Hegelian answer is stated with equal plainness: the conception of self-explanation must avoid absurdity, and it must remain continuous enough with ordinary explanation that we can understand ourselves as members of the explicable world, since otherwise the objectionable Kantian division is merely reproduced.

The contemporary form of the threat is Galen Strawson’s regress, reproduced in eight numbered steps and analysed by isolating its second premise, that rational action is a function of how one is mentally speaking, where that is understood in terms of prior mental states. The value assigned to Strawson’s argument is that it depends on no particular account of the relation between reason-states and action, but only on the constraints of explicability as such; his fully determinative relation is just whatever relation makes the relevant explanations true and full, so that he has a criterion for any possible model of explanation rather than a model. This is what makes him a suitable opponent: Hegel’s search for the absolute category gives him the same criterion, so the confrontation can take place on common ground defined by commitment to the principle of sufficient reason. The historical depth of the regress is registered through Hobbes, in whom a conceptual point about desires being the will is entangled with a temporal point about an infinite series of alternating desires and fears. And the response is characterised in advance in a way that is telling about the book’s ambitions: it will clear the ground of a particular skeptical problem, allowing divergent paths toward specific theories of the will rather than binding us to Hegel’s own concrete account.

The reconstruction of ground proceeds in three named phases, and the tension that drives it is stated as a pair of exigencies. Explanation demands external conditioning, since the explanans must supply new information that repairs our understanding of the explanandum; and it demands internal conditioning, since the explanans must stand on its own as sufficient. The latter is a demand for a locus of responsibility, the former a demand that such a locus have determinate and informative character. Taken separately they are complementary; taken as universally applicable to all contents of thought they conflict, since the explanans becomes subject to the demand for external conditioning and the explanandum to that of internal conditioning. The whole subsequent development is the attempt to show how their contrary demands could be reconciled, and the reader who keeps this pair in view will find that it reappears, transposed, in every later chapter — as the pair of demands on modality, as the pair of demands on causation, and finally as the pair of demands on teleology.

Absolute ground poses the problem as the reciprocal presupposition of form and content, and it is elucidated by an argument that connects identity to explanation: the essence just is those similarities and differences that are explanatorily relevant, so that knowing what a thing is turns out to involve knowing why it is as it is. Water is used to make the point twice over, since the chemical composition explains the freezing point while the dissolved salts explain the conductivity, and which is taken as the ground depends on the needs of explanation, though clearly not just any content can serve. Determinate ground is then divided. Formal ground is the model on which the identity belongs to the content and the differentiation to the form; it is illustrated by Hegel’s mockery of explaining a person’s journey to town by an attractive force in the town, and it is diagnosed as failing to distinguish creative positing from interpretive reflection-into-self, since in such explanations the phenomenon is often our reason for believing in the explanans, so that the grounded is the ground for the ground. Real ground adds distinct content, and Hegel’s option is noted with precision: adding to the explanans would leave complete self-explanation as far as the explanandum is concerned, so the addition is made to the explanandum, and one part of it explains the whole. The lightning strike and the weathervane give the hierarchical combination of a fundamental ground with a secondary condition; the choice of the freeway over the coast highway gives its agential counterpart, where the goal explains what I do and often how I do it, while the fact that the freeway is quicker is neither under my control nor explained by my goal.

Real ground then fails in a way that is essential to the book’s later arguments. If any of the varied aspects of the explanandum may be taken as essential — the example is the official whose aptitude, acquaintances, character, and circumstances may each be regarded as the ground of his holding office — then the ground-relation itself does not determine which is the ground, and the contingency of the additional content infects the ground so thoroughly that it can only return into itself as presupposed, without registering the changes brought about by its embedding. The two forms of determinate ground are then read as the failures of theories attending to one pole of the explanatory exigency each: formal ground fails through the excessive role of the internal determination of content, real ground through the excessive role of the external determination of circumstance. A striking application follows, in which belief-desire models of action are diagnosed as inadequate recuperations of the essence, since the contingent features of the action are assigned to circumstances registered in a belief while the desire remains pure of them; and it is precisely this abstractness of the ground-desire that makes it possible for real agents to fail to see it as an expression of who they are. Kantian and empiricist accounts are thereby brought under a single diagnosis, since both posit basic ground-principles standing in an external and arbitrary relation to the concrete circumstances of action. And a further consequence is drawn about the libertarian: from this vantage, positing a capacity for arbitrary choice is the more intellectually honest response, since it frankly acknowledges the indeterminacy inherent in this form of connection between principle and circumstance, adding nothing new to the picture of agency so much as registering the gap and naming what mediates it.

The third term is introduced as a virtue made of necessity. Complete ground grounds the prioritised ground-relation in an absolute relation between the same contents outside that relation, and the inference is spelled out: that A grounds A and B together is itself grounded in the implicit connection of A and B elsewhere. The resulting structure is then identified with a familiar position, the Humean constant conjunction coupled with the isomorphism of explanation and prediction — and rejected, because the Doctrine of Being has already dismissed the atomistic contents that the Humean view presupposes, so that if facts as such are parasitic on determinate ground-relations, then the simple conjunction must conceptually presuppose the very ground-relation it was supposed to ground. Avoiding this circularity is what forces the development of an adequate model of expression, and here the sequence of the argument is worth marking: the concept of condition is introduced under duress, as the only remaining way to describe a content that belongs to the explanatory whole while failing to be a ground.

The doctrine of the condition is the summit of the second part and the source of much of what follows. The condition is the content of the ground-relation taken as given material on which the activity of grounding works; because any material can be worked in different ways, the element of alternate possibility is thereby internalised within the ground-relation itself — an anticipation, marked as such, of the modal argument two parts later. The condition is emphatically denied the status of a ground: something is not through its condition. Its role is illustrated by oxygen, which is a standing condition of terrestrial house fires and becomes explanatory at a lunar housing development, and which even in the ordinary case mediates between the tipped candle and the actual fire by making the connection possible and by determining features of the fire that the candle does not. From this, a general claim is drawn that the conditions include determinative elements as well as background factors. The Hegelian twist is then given through a reversal of the Humean appeal to regularity: it is precisely the non-explanatory status of a content in another context that licenses its explanatory status in the present one, so that the same regularities of experience are as important as for Hume while their import is of a different sort. The example is a child’s birthday drawing, in which the spouse’s standing intention to please the same person, non-explanatory in his case, functions as the condition licensing the explanation of the child’s action by that intention; and where the child’s action, by taking up the intention as a resource, gives the spouse’s earlier actions a determinate meaning as the circumstances in which the child learned that altruistic intentions were available.

Two moves are then made explicit, following Henrich. The object of reflection is to be understood as a form of immediacy, given and unconditioned by anything outside it, while being an object formulated with just that character in mind; and precisely insofar as the object is presupposed by reflection, it is constituted by it. The formula that results is that the ground produces itself in its own conditions. The book does not pretend that this is intuitive, describing it as going beyond the counterintuitive to the precipice of unintelligibility, and it supplies two supports. One is Hegel’s insistence that great expression requires self-limitation, since one must mark out a domain in which others will take the lead in order to create something meaningful within one’s own. The other is the observation that grounding requires more than presence: it requires the identification of a locus of responsibility such that certain background conditions become relevant, and it makes a human difference whether the spouse’s or the child’s intention is the ground of the drawing, since both explanations are consistent with the child having had the intention.

At this point the strong claim appears that the exhaustively described set of conditions must include the explanandum, and the treatment of that claim is a model of the book’s methodological care. In causal idiom the support would be that one cannot specify the sufficient background conditions for a cause without a clause to the effect that nothing prevents the cause from producing the effect, a part of the explanans justified only by the obtaining of the explanandum; and this would mean that the relevant conditions are posited by the cause itself in having produced the effect. That argument is then set aside as unavailable, since it appeals to the subjective limitations of finite subjects and is therefore proper to the philosophy of science. The official argument is that the condition is only relatively immediate, posited as immediate in relation to the ground, which makes the whole ground-relation absolutely unconditioned because what seemed to be an externality has been internalised. The distinction between the two arguments is not incidental. It shows the reconstruction refusing a support it could easily have taken, and it constrains what the resulting holism can mean: the totality at issue must be a feature of the fact and not a feature of our epistemic situation.

The price is then paid openly, and this is where the Döblin ball returns. Once the necessity of conditions is accepted, the activity of the ground is described by Hegel with the term reserved for the mode of transformation in the Doctrine of Being — becoming — and Yeomans presses the significance of that lexical choice. In becoming, the input enters the process that will change it and is changed beyond its control into something fundamentally other. The consequence is that the possibility of interpretation as a simple return to self is gone for good, reduced to uninformative tautology; interpretation now leads beyond the original input instead of back to it. Lakebrink’s portrait of ground as a circular return in which beginning and end coincide is rejected on this basis, and the contingency of seeming is said to come to define the internal relation of the point of expression — a term I gloss once as Hegel’s Sache, the matter or point at issue, and thereafter render as the point of expression. Marcuse is enlisted for the formulation that essence takes negativity into itself only to let go of it and to let it happen, and the image offered is of a parent who enters the chaotic play of her children to orient it, at the price of tousled hair and waning focus. The general result is stated without softening: the self is infected by the externality it internalises, and this becomes an internal cost attached to every form of self-expression. Self-determination is described as work at its logical core, a talent at which one can be better or worse rather than a status achieved — a formulation that returns, almost verbatim, in the book’s final pages, where it is used to position the account between Pippin’s historical achievement and a merely given capacity.

The comparison with erotetic theories of explanation that closes the chapter is calibrated with unusual honesty. Four points of contact are established with van Fraassen, Wright, and Gadamer: that the difference between an explanatory cause and a mere condition does not lie in the fact itself; that the relevance relation cannot be understood on a single model, with Hegel’s category of ground supplying the minimal structure of the genus while the rest of the Logic canvasses the species; that explanation involves one difference making a difference to another, which is aligned with the Hegelian view that one part of the explanandum explains the whole by more fully characterising the contrast; and that the vast majority of relevant information must be presupposed, so that the explanans plugs a small gap in an otherwise sufficient understanding. Gadamer is used at each point as an intermediate case, and the difference in project is registered: Hegel’s Logic seeks a category adequate to unconditional truth, ultimately the structure of the form of life within which local explanations have their significance. The chapter then concedes the decisive limitation. Hegel agrees with Hempel and Oppenheim that a general yet sufficient criterion distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate self-explanation is unavailable, though necessary conditions can be specified; and since the discussion of ground does not compensate with the contextual resources of the erotetic analysts, the category might seem of little philosophical import. The defence offered is exactly proportioned to the concession: the constraints Hegel does provide rule out some initially plausible models of explanation. This is the first appearance of what I take to be the book’s characteristic form of result — a set of prohibitions, offered in place of a criterion, and defended as sufficient for the purpose at hand.

The application to the regress follows. Strawson’s picture is analysed as a particular attempt to combine internal sufficiency with external conditioning: conditioning by general principles, independence secured by the conscious presence of those principles to the agent. Anscombe is set beside him, since her argument against any extra feature accompanying an intentional action has the same regressive shape, and the juxtaposition yields two observations. The first is that a problem about self-determination in the concrete sense derives from more abstract problems about the nature of explanation than from anything specific to agency. The second is that one aspect of the abstract problem is the potential contingency between the explanans and the rest of the explanandum — which is exactly the difficulty diagnosed under real ground, with the pre-intentional content and the circumstances in the position of the ungrounded additional content. Three possible responses are distinguished, and Hegel is assigned the third. He is denied the first because he is no skeptic about free will. He is denied the second — the rejection of causal accounts in favour of teleological ones in Anscombe’s manner — for two reasons, one of which is deferred to the last part and the other of which is that introspection is a poor mode of self-understanding compared with public interpretation, so that only the mutual interpretation of actions by agents together can determine what was done intentionally. The third response is self-subsumption, and it is elaborated through Nozick.

The elaboration is careful and has a specific yield. Nozick’s distinction between an ultimate self-subsuming principle, which retains a residue of arbitrariness, and a non-ultimate one, for which there is an explanation of why this self-subsuming principle holds rather than another, is aligned with Hegel’s distinction between finite explanantia and those that are themselves infinite. The result is a conception of agents as relative originators: we can be self-subsuming and therefore originators of our actions even if higher-order principles explain how we come to be such originators. The Hegelian instance offered is that one purpose of civil society is to allow free rein to individual particularity in a way that can be guided to recognition of its universality, which explains why we moderns are the relative originators of our own choices of vocation, without explaining why we choose one vocation rather than another. The self-subsumptive character of decision is then tied to the thesis, shared with Nozick, that reasons arrive without weights of their own and receive them from the agent in the course of deciding, and the residual arbitrariness is defended by the observation that many aspects of circumstance remain available to repair our understanding of the decision if it puzzles us. The chapter closes by locating the position between two objections, since one may attack the internality, as Clarke does in finding it incredible that an event should be explained by citing an intrinsic feature of that very event, or attack the externality, as Anscombe’s regress does and as Strawson’s demand for conscious and explicit choice does. Both are diagnosed as forms of allergy, an overreaction to the presence of something unexpected, and the reply is that the concepts of self-expression and explanation are lost to us unless both elements are accepted. It is worth noting that this reply is a statement of the book’s own commitments rather than an argument against either objection, and that the argumentative burden is thereby transferred forward to the modal and teleological parts, which must show that the two elements can be held together in a determinate structure.

The third part re-poses the problem in modal terms, and it does so by first exhibiting a textual antinomy within Hegel himself: the claim that freedom and necessity are absurdly regarded as mutually exclusive, and that the highest independence of a human being is to know oneself as wholly determined by the absolute idea; the claim that the will knows its action as a mere possibility by which it is unrestricted and in which it finds itself only because it posits itself there, together with the etymological remark that the will’s indeterminacy contains its determinations and ends within itself and merely brings them forth; and the flat statement that what is necessary cannot be otherwise while what is merely possible can. The three are set side by side without softening, and the demand is stated: Hegel’s different conceptions of modality must be sorted out. The historical staging is unusually rich here, with Kant’s identification of necessity with the conditions of possible experience, his mockery of compatibilism as the freedom of a turnspit, Leibniz’s distinction between hypothetically and absolutely necessary truths as a way of making oneself at home in an infinite regress, Fichte’s review of Creuzer, and Schelling’s reframing of the question of human freedom around the distinction between necessity and freedom rather than nature and spirit. The four available positions are then enumerated and Hegel is assigned the fourth: to reinterpret necessity so that it is compatible with freedom. The political consequence is registered at once, since the Philosophy of Right is described as a project for understanding the conditions under which action is both necessary and free, so that the entire enterprise of understanding modern institutions as actualisations of freedom depends on a conception of necessity that does not reduce the unity of freedom and necessity to absurdity — or, as the text pointedly adds, to totalitarianism.

The reconstruction of modality begins by establishing what actuality minimally involves, and here the connection with the earlier parts is made explicit in a way that repays attention. Actuality names the object of thought understood as in a process of self-manifestation, and it arises out of the difficulty of relating the Spinozistic absolute to its modes. The contrast that organises the discussion is between the mode as a mere mannerism, an arbitrarily attached detail with no inherent connection to what it is attached to, and the absolute’s proper manifestation of itself, which requires both that input and output of manifestation be identical and that the process be grounded in a perspective proper to what is to be manifested. Actuality is then distinguished from being and from existence: being is not explicitly tied to transformation at all and so has no control over it; existence has arisen from ground and conditions and is therefore in itself what actuality is, without yet being the posited unity of reflection and immediacy. The gloss offered is that both being and existence are alienated in an abstract but recognisably Marxian sense, as forms of thought that fail to recognise their own self-production. The relation to the previous part is then stated with precision: the concept of ground leaves the problem of reflected immediacy unsolved while first formulating it as a problem capable in principle of solution, since the rejection of the regress arguments shows that there is an open conceptual space between pure internal and pure external determination that an account of self-manifestation might fill.

The decisive technical move of the whole book is announced here, and it is announced as a reconstruction rather than as an exegetical finding. In order to achieve the internality required for freedom, the self that is to be self-manifesting must take on a different form, one for which the contingency of development reveals rather than obscures its nature; and in the terms of the fourfold grid, the externality must be transferred from the perspective of reflective transformation to the input of that transformation. Every subsequent result in the part is a specification of this transfer. The formal modalities restate the problem in new language, with possibility characterised by absence of self-contradiction and immediately shown to carry a contrastive sense of incompleteness, since the actuality of an event is such definitive proof of its possibility that calling it possible after the fact calls for special context. Formal possibility is then shown to entail alternate possibilities, since if something is logically possible its opposite is logically possible too; and this is connected with the theoretical task of articulating self-manifestation, since the possible must have some lack whose supplementation defines the work of manifestation as a substantial change. Contingency is constructed as the unity of possibility and actuality, and the two ordinary senses of the contingent — the merely possible and that which is contingent on something else — are linked, so that the externality travels over the identity of the possible and the actual like a bridge and infects the possible itself. The formulation offered is that Hegel is, in his own unique sense, an extreme modal realist: the possibility of something is constituted by independent states of affairs existent in their own right, a first-order fact about me in the actual world rather than a second-order fact about a proposition or a fact about other worlds.

The image chosen to make the transfer of externality intelligible is worth dwelling on, since it does more work than its casualness suggests. A guitarist interposes a distortion pedal between instrument and amplifier to express a musical idea that is itself partially chaotic; a low-fidelity effect reproduces the noise characteristic of earlier equipment, noise that has become part of the musical ideas themselves. The point is that if the signal is already conditioned by external features, then the noise to which it is subject in manifestation does manifest its nature, which was less than pure to begin with. The practical corollary is stated without embarrassment: if one is shocked by the extent to which anarchic externality infects self-expression, the prescription is to stop supposing our intentions, purposes, and character to be pure. And a further consequence is drawn that guards against a familiar misreading: to explain this externality by cultural hegemony or overwhelming social pressure is to miss how deeply the point cuts, since any object of thought considered in its concrete richness is subject to such disorder, and the ground-relation as such cannot ground human character regardless of what is substituted for the grounding term.

Real modality then introduces what the book calls the modal metric, and this is the instrument by which the whole part is calibrated. Judgments of possibility can be made at any point along a continuum running from considering no background conditions to considering all of them, and their significance varies directly with the extent of the conditions considered. The four-minute mile carries the illustration: logically possible, perhaps still possible given only that I am a human being with lungs and legs, impossible given my lack of training and rickety knees, and impossible even for a trained runner who is ill on the day. The conclusion drawn is that real modality points less to a discrete kind of modality than to the contextualisation of modal facts at different levels of detail; and the agential application is immediate, since judgments about whether we are the relevant locus of responsibility may vary with the circumstances considered, so that a judgment of causal responsibility may abstract from social and political influences where a judgment of moral responsibility may not.

The inversion that follows is the book’s most surprising claim and the one on which its resolution of the controlling antinomy depends. As we move along the continuum toward absolute modality, the external determinations necessary to bring the possible to actuality are increasingly grounded in the possible itself, so that the more background conditions we include, the less they seem to belong to the background at all. The example of the low-pressure system and the strong winds is used to make the transition palpable, since it is easy to think of the winds as part of the system. And then the general thesis is stated in two coordinated ways: the illusion of modal determinism comes undone through the identification of background conditions with the content of the actuality produced, so that the process is less production by prior factors beyond one’s control and more self-manifestation; and through the recognition that the size of the set of possible expressions increases as conditions are further specified. The two are said to be the same, because the progress toward a complete state of the world is additive rather than explanatory, since the process of including more conditions does not look into prior grounds for them, so that the contingency of the conditions is magnified in direct proportion to their internalisation. The formulation offered is that this is a stunning inversion of the modern tradition, which generally assumes that the influence of conditions and self-determination are inversely proportional; and the specifically modal statement of the result is that indeterminism changes character, from a looseness of fit between conditions and consequent in real modality to a tightness of fit in absolute modality that points to the availability of other tight fits.

The distinction between representation and expression carries much of this weight, and it is introduced through examples that are aesthetic before they are agential. The simple idea of conflict between the sexes is represented in many plays and films, but it is too simple to receive detailed interpretation through any one of them, so that interpretation would become taxonomy and would tell us more about the author or the period than about the idea. If instead a work is taken to express an idea of gender conflict already structured by historicity and institutional context, the contingent circumstances are already part of the idea, and interpretation can compare productions in terms of what they reveal. The detail built into the idea widens the scope of possible expressions even where the scope of possible representations is unchanged. Mamet’s Oleanna is the recurring instance, and it returns three times across the book with an altered valence each time: first as an illustration of expressive richness, then as an illustration of the way rejected alternatives are constitutive of what a work is, and finally, in the last part, as an illustration of the mutual constitution of condition, point, and activity, where the political context is identified within the play’s own dialogue rather than brought to it by an interpreter. The recurrence is characteristic. The book seldom introduces an example only once, and the second and third appearances are consistently used to show that a distinction drawn earlier was a partial view of something later revealed to be more integrated.

The central agential example of the part is the person with a temper who is insulted, and it is developed with a granularity that makes the modal doctrine concrete. In relative modality, insult and temper are treated as general starting points and a range of angry responses is necessitated, with feeling the urge to hit and actually hitting both counting as instances. The insight of absolute modality is that with respect to hitting, feeling the urge counts as a condition of possibility, so that the alternate possibilities built into the necessary connection can be distinguished as possibility and actuality; and the way we describe the feeling in terms of the prospective action itself points to a limitation in the feeling. Then the conditions themselves are internalised, since an insult is not a naturally occurring event and must be taken as an insult by its target, while a quick temper is partly defined by readiness to see many statements as insults. Temper is therefore a kind of reflection that forms its own object, and forms it with an independence that stands viscerally against that reflection. The identity is then run in the reverse direction with equal emphasis: one’s readiness to find insults is in all likelihood proportional to the frequency and severity of provocations, a contingent fact over which the agent has little though not no control, so that the externality of contingency in the significance of the condition is overcome only at the cost of inviting that contingency into necessity, and character is maintained as a locus of responsibility only because it is itself exposed to contingency. This last sentence is, I think, the most compact statement of the book’s entire position, and it is stated in the middle of a chapter about the Logic, about an example from ordinary life, without announcement.

The continuum of accessible possibilities follows: the insult could have been perceived as more or less severe, the response could have fallen anywhere from minor annoyance to physical aggression, and the character could accordingly have manifested itself anywhere from inappropriately self-deprecating to having a chip on one’s shoulder. Anywhere along the continuum there would be an intelligible necessary relation between condition and actuality, and that intelligibility is inherently connected with recognition of the other possibilities. The vocabulary of the Doctrine of Being is then reactivated with altered valence: in place of the chaos of qualitative change and the monotony of quantitative variation, we have taken the measure of the agent’s character, a structured continuum with important divisions in a recognisable progression that is presented by the action itself as intrinsic to its significance. The point is pressed into a claim about understanding: someone who thought he could grasp the significance of merely feeling the urge to hit without grasping that feeling it was a way of restraining oneself would fail to see why we call the agent peaceful; and someone who did not understand that Oleanna was a rejection of other ways of treating gender relations would not understand the play at all. Alternate possibilities are therefore realised rather than merely referred to, since the rejected alternatives are constitutive of what is realised.

The chapter’s engagement with Kant on modality is finely calibrated, and it is here that the book’s dialectical position within the secondary literature becomes clearest. Real modality is aligned with Kant’s relative necessity, and the divergence is located precisely at absolute modality, where Kant’s account makes modal claims second-order claims about the relation between perceptions and our faculties, while Hegel’s internalises the determinate character of real necessity within absolute necessity and makes contingency the very thing that makes necessity determinate. An unusually long footnote conducts the dispute with Longuenesse, granting her formulation that the modal categories express the degree of unity between existence and a unified system of thought-determinations, and objecting that her Kantian orientation leads her to underestimate the penetration in the opposite direction, so that the concept’s digestion of otherness is treated as digestion without indigestion. The counter-image offered is deliberately unlovely: the digestion of otherness is like the digestion of a tapeworm, something that can hold its own within the digestive system. The same note distances the reading from Stekeler-Weithofer’s denial of the convergence of the modalities, identifies Angehrn as a fellow traveller, and situates the position between Longuenesse’s partial constructivism and Pippin’s meta-logical restraint. The disposition of this material is itself significant, and I record the observation as an inference from the shape of the apparatus rather than from any statement in it: the book systematically displaces its quarrels with the literature into the notes so that the main text can sustain the appearance of an immanent reconstruction, with the consequence that a reader who attends only to the body will underestimate how contested nearly every step is.

The application to the will is then made with a caution that is easy to overlook. The distinction between relative and absolute modality is said to correspond to the distinction between freedom of choice and the will proper, while it is immediately conceded that neither the modal concepts alone nor those concepts combined with the underdetermination of motives exhaust the agency notions, and that there are many differences between the two conceptions of the will, of which only one is modal. This is a characteristic hedging, and it protects the argument from the charge of reducing a rich moral psychology to a logical distinction while leaving the reader to judge how much of the psychology has actually been recovered. Freedom of choice is then reconstructed as the modal perspective from which motives are taken as independent antecedent events and the action itself is left out of consideration; van Inwagen’s construction of the state of the entire physical world at an instant, from which nothing follows about its state at any other instant, is identified as the representative contemporary instance, and the condition on that construction is glossed as precisely the requirement of abstracting from the activity that transforms one state into another. The result is that the agent has exactly the alternate possibilities the libertarian posits, and is formally free.

The diagnosis of the contradiction in freedom of choice is the sharpest piece of analysis in the part. Following Hegel’s own charge that Kant and Fichte separate the will’s positing from its reflection-into-self, the failure is shown to be twofold and to generate two distinct indeterminacies. On one distribution, positing is attributed to the will as the activity of creating something new while the conditions are inert, and reflection-into-self is attributed to the conditions as the content presupposed when we interpret the action, since we say the action expressed anger or cowardice rather than that it expressed agency. On the other distribution, the conditions take on the role of positing because they have the content, while agency takes on the role of reflection-into-self as the abstract self-conception that endures through different actions. The first yields an indeterminacy of interpretation, since abstraction from the form of transformation leaves us uncertain which conditions to isolate as expressed. The second yields an indeterminacy of prediction, since abstract conditions may lead to different results. In either case the agent’s activity is a placeholder marking what has been abstracted from, and the tipping-over that defines the contradiction follows from the impossibility of taking off from and returning to the same point in interpretation. The consequence drawn is that indeterminism as such is innocent, since interpretation under absolute modality also involves alternate possibilities, and that the real culprit is the separation of positing from reflection-into-self. Since that separation belongs to a picture of action shared by libertarians and compatibilists alike — the picture on which character and motivation are products of the agent’s prior history as contrasted with the action in the present tense — the deficiencies each party finds in the other are traced to a common root. This is the point at which the book’s claim to advance the contemporary debate is at its strongest, since it offers a single diagnosis of a standing impasse rather than a new position within it.

The will proper is then characterised as the perspective from which the presupposing of conditions is just as much a positing, and the reflection-into-self of the character trait is just as much a positing, since the trait receives determinate expression in the response that appears as the product of the process. The textual warrants are assembled with care: the identification of the constitutive defect of freedom of choice with the separation of the will’s first two moments; the characterisation of the free will as having itself for its object; the rejection of any theory that would simply identify the will with the limited actuality of a desire; and the tying of the externality of drives to the perspective that views them as already present in their immediacy in the will, that is, as presupposed without being posited. To this is added the demand that the drives become the rational system of the will’s determination, read emphatically as a demand that the will make its drives into its own rational system rather than as a merely theoretical requirement that we come to see them so. The substitution of character for drive is then re-derived: when the will sees its drives as conditions it has itself constituted, their form and relation to the agent have changed so substantially that character is the appropriate word. And the modal reading is confirmed by a small but telling piece of evidence, that Hegel likens the particularity emphasised by freedom of choice to the presence of mere mannerism in lesser artists — the same term used in the modal chapter for the arbitrarily attached detail.

The positive account that follows is compressed and, within its limits, illuminating. Action sets up the realm of possibility by placing the act on one continuum rather than another; the religious celibate takes her sexual desire and expresses it as a point on the continuum of ways of loving God rather than on the continuum of sexual gratification, and in doing so establishes which alternate possibilities are relevant. The necessary makes itself into something that could be otherwise in certain ways while remaining unable to be otherwise in others, and this is how alternate possibilities are realised rather than merely referred to. Identification is then given a modal analysis: since the proper role of motivations is to express the self, the choice to identify with a motivation is the choice to identify with a potential self, and since each self is a locus of possibilities, that choice is a choice to identify with a range of possible futures. Wholeheartedness is accordingly redefined as free action that makes valued future expressions more likely and devalued ones less likely, so that even when an agent is doing what she must do, her actual nature is specifiable only as a locus of future possibilities. The image offered is that the garden of forking paths in front of the agent is constitutive of who the agent is, since it is realised in her activity even when she takes only one path.

An objection is then anticipated and answered in a way that reveals how much of the account depends on temporal texture. The worry that action’s concretisation of motives requires backward causation is met by observing that the desire does not end when the action begins: the meal is the process of eliminating the wanting to eat while making it more determinate by orienting it toward certain foods in a certain order and quantity. Motivations are transformed during the action because they are themselves a record of interactions with the world, and it is in this continuation that the final determinate motivation shows itself as a result of the agent’s activity. The argument is modest and effective, and it also shows how much of the modal doctrine can be restated in the ordinary language of doing something over time — which is a point in the reconstruction’s favour, since the demand set in the first chapter was that the account remain continuous with our understanding of ourselves as agents in the world.

The part ends with two protective qualifications that determine the form of the whole book’s result. The first is an argument by cases: whichever perspective one takes, relative or absolute, there is no problem with the notion of necessary free action so long as one holds to it; the trouble arises from a syncretism that takes the determinacy of motives from the model of absolute necessity, without acknowledging its dependence on the agent’s activity, and combines it with the independent antecedent status of motives from the model of relative necessity, without acknowledging the indeterminacy that comes with such independence. Stated as a dilemma about finite objects: if one chooses the determinacy of motives one gets a model that prioritises the agent’s activity in determining them, and if one chooses their independence one is left with their indeterminacy, which generates alternate possibilities and a different, less complete freedom. The second qualification distinguishes this position from Kant’s. It is conceded that the result looks like a compatibilism of compatibilism and incompatibilism, and three differences are urged: relative necessity is not restricted to theoretical reason nor absolute necessity to practical reason, so it is no two-standpoint view; the objects in question do not belong to different realms, so it is no two-worlds view; and there is therefore no apparent contradiction requiring removal, and no timeless account of agency at odds with our self-understanding. The priority of absolute necessity is affirmed, and with it the claim that there is a way of understanding action in which both agent and observer are free — a claim that quietly reactivates the thought, from the first chapter, that understanding the world as necessary is itself crucial to our free agency as thinkers.

The fourth part takes up the naturalistic form of the challenge, and its opening chapter performs a service that is easy to underrate: it collects the contemporary intuition that the passivity of the elements of causal mechanisms is a danger to free will and shows that it is widespread and structurally uniform. Bok supplies the framing, with two ordinary abilities — reflecting on our actions and representing their significance, and spontaneously choosing among real possibilities — and the diagnosis that mechanism eliminates the second and forces a reinterpretation of the first, collapsing the distinction between self and character by reducing the self to a passive element responding dispositionally. Goetz supplies the general principle that an efficiently caused event is one with respect to which its subject is essentially passive; Hursthouse supplies the assumption that beliefs and desires are causally inert and require a triggering event; Davidson and Roth supply the countervailing insistence that only a causal relation can secure the explanatory force of the word because, and that teleological considerations explain general facts while causation is a singular relation between specific events. Two Kantian escapes are then closed off: the dual-standpoint response is rejected because the book has already shown that Hegel rejects any such view, and the analytic compatibilist response is rejected because Hegel accepts that a mechanistic worldview is incompatible with the ascription of free will. What remains is the project of looking more closely at mechanism and reinterpreting the success of mechanistic investigation as parasitic on a dominantly teleological structure of reality.

The chapter also performs a second service that determines how the rest of the part is to be read. It insists that the interest in agency demands a positive account of the relation between the two forms of productivity, and it warns that although the concept of causation fails to play an important role in Hegel’s concrete conception of agency, this is because he finds it insufficient as a model of the relevant control rather than because he is uninterested in control. The emphasis on a broadly productive conception of agency, we are told, is built into the conception of teleology in terms of which agency is understood. The passage in which Hegel describes mechanical thinking, mechanical memory, and habit as lacking the peculiar pervasion and presence of spirit is quoted for its careful formulation, since it grants that such mechanism cannot take place without self-activity while denying that the freedom of individuality is manifest in it. The distinction between presence and manifestness is doing real work here, and it is the same distinction that will be used at the end of the part to explain why laws are instantiated while ends are realised.

The interpretive key for the whole part is drawn from a single section of the Encyclopaedia Logic in which condition, point of expression, and activity are treated together, and the decision to use it as a key is one of the book’s most consequential organisational choices. Each of the three is analysed as a different unity of positing and reflection-into-self. The condition is posited in such a way that its independent existence is presupposed, which makes it the passive resource for self-expression and marks the danger that this internalisation of the external shifts the higher-order balance of determination outward. The point of expression is posited as something inner and possible by reference to external existence, with the presupposition that it has a proper content expressed through the resources the conditions present. The activity is what translates conditions into the point and the point into the conditions, and Hegel is noted to identify the character of a human being precisely with this activity rather than with the point — from which the elegant gloss follows that our character is a way in which we make the point at issue in action, so that agency is not essentially vain. The three are then aligned with the earlier results: the condition corresponds to the perspective of real ground, the point of expression to real modality, and the activity to absolute modality. This alignment is the mechanism by which the last part is made to be a continuation rather than a new beginning, and it is also the place where the reader may reasonably ask how much is being carried by an alignment that the text asserts rather than derives. I record this as one of the work’s methodological wagers: the productive triad is treated as the objective counterpart of the reflective grid, and the treatment is defended by its yield rather than by an independent argument.

The insult example is then re-analysed through the triad, and the re-analysis is among the book’s finest passages of concrete philosophical description. The condition is the insult, given significance by the activity of responding, which activity is the character we call having a temper; the point of the action is something else again, and it varies with the response. If the agent hits, the condition is constituted as a serious insult carrying immediate danger to standing, and the point may be the vindication of one’s standing in the community — an operation compared to Hegel’s treatment of crime as the occasion for law to express itself as the controlling principle of social interaction. If the agent gets hot and delivers an icily calm remark, the insult is constituted as serious in a moral rather than a physical or social sense, and the point becomes the agent’s self-control. If the agent laughs, the insult is constituted as pathetic and the point becomes the insulter’s misunderstanding of the context. The conclusion drawn is that the freedom being described is more radical than a question of the degree of response: it is the ability to characterise the terms in which both the conditions and one’s own activity have the significance they do. And this is said to follow from the productive structure of the world rather than from any insufficiency in it — a formulation that marks how far the argument has travelled from the initial worry that externality is a threat.

Substance-causation is then examined and rejected, and the rejection has a shape that recurs. Hegel’s treatment of substantiality is presented as a way of understanding the identification of a locus of responsibility through the depth of its entanglement in external influences, since it is in calling a state accidental that we understand it as so completely posited that any explanatory story about it must be referred to the substance it expresses. The correspondence with contemporary agent-causal libertarianism is drawn point by point: the derivativeness of the effect on the cause corresponds to the way attributes point beyond themselves to the substance’s causal power; the internality of the fundamental effect as a state of intention corresponds to substance operating in its own medium; and the agent-causal thesis that circumstances provide opportunities for the exercise of causal powers rather than necessitating effects corresponds to the resistancelessness of the medium. The appeal of such views is granted at length, and the grant is important for the book’s self-understanding: agent-causation articulates the intuition that we are originators, in terms close to the root meaning of causation, and it grounds moral responsibility in causal responsibility in a way that accords with the intuition that we are responsible only for what is within our power. It is then observed that self-authorship is grounded in the same causal responsibility, and that the very feature of Hegel’s theory commonly thought to sever the connection between causation and responsible agency — the conception of action as self-expression — in fact confirms that connection by articulating self-expression in a broadly productive vocabulary. The diagnosis of the failure is correspondingly precise: the problem is that the substance is too substantial, since it cannot be transformed by the exercise of its own power, so that it has control over the conditions that explain the manifold forms of its accidents while lacking control over its own nature as the point to be expressed. The formulation that results is one of the book’s most quotable results, and it inverts the expectation with which the discussion began: complete control over externality undermines self-control, and the mastery of externality turns out to be a kind of emptying of the self. Domination of external circumstances is alienation rather than agency.

Determinate causation fares no better, and the analysis of why is the hinge of the part. Hegel’s example of rain causing wetness is read with attention to its logical structure: the water’s determination as rain and as cause is posited in it by an other, since some further force lifted it and gathered it, so that its causality consists in removing the alien determination and restoring its identity, and therefore in superseding its own causality. A cause that is indifferent to being a cause and must be provoked to its causality is not active in the way the intuitive idea of causation had led us to expect; its causality is derivative on the external force. The contemporary parallel is supplied by Hursthouse’s dilemma about triggering events and by Davidson’s acceptance that reasons are not such that having them entails acting on them, together with his appeal to the onslaught of a reason or the noticing of something in the world. The Hegelian formulation of the defect is that the cause treats itself as a condition, since it achieves the identity of content that makes the process expressive only by ceasing to be a cause: the falling rain becomes static moisture. The Aristotelian analogy is then offered with an explicit statement of where it is imperfect: determinate causation resembles production rather than action, since it aims at a goal necessarily outside itself, though there is no sense in craft production that the activity destroys what it expresses until it ceases. The general defect is that the creative force is directed outward without being directed inward, and the consequence for ethics is registered in passing — such a model will not support a conception centred on the role of actions in shaping character.

The turn to reciprocity is executed through Newton’s third law, and the book is right to describe its own finding as almost shocking: freedom is introduced as a basic conceptual structure in the Logic precisely through the interpretation of the equality of action and reaction. The reasoning is reconstructed in two steps. First, the passive substance receives through the action of another only its own due, since what it loses is an immediacy and substantiality alien to it — an isolation that was always a projection by an external reflection positing it as a condition to be superseded. Second, because the cause is a cause only to the extent that it has an effect, and the effect is returned to it as reaction, the infinite regress of causes is bent round into an infinite reciprocal action. The billiard example is used to make the symmetry vivid, since the cue ball just as much causes itself to stop as it causes the eight ball to move, and which we call the cause depends on further factors supplied by the rules of the game. The philosophical result is then stated in a sentence that could serve as the book’s motto: the logical self finds its relation to itself only in becoming open to external influence, when its own activity is the origin of its passivity. And the reach of the claim is immediately widened, with the warning that this is no moral psychology that could be laid over any conception of free will, since it is true of whatever can be a locus of responsibility, a subject of expression, or a sufficient reason. The normative corollary drawn from this is one of the few places where the book allows itself to indicate what a criterion of non-alienation might look like: rational consent to one’s circumstances can only mean that the agent finds herself able to express herself in the form of her own activity of expression as well as in its products, and finds in those conditions the resources for non-alienated self-transformation. The example given is a person’s relation to a creed, where the older person has experienced the creed as allowing subtle but important changes in personal decision and religious practice, and where the flexibility is what makes identity within the influence possible.

Reciprocity, however, is granted only a provisional victory, and the honesty of that grant is instructive. Hegel himself is quoted as calling reciprocity an empty mannerism, since if each element is alike active and passive then the distinction between them is a transparent semblance; and the consequence is drawn in its strongest form, that at the merely objective causal level it is arbitrary to isolate the two as distinct substances at all rather than as forms of the appearance of a single system. Interpretation therefore threatens to relapse into taxonomy or external projection. What survives is a positive residue: each substance in its activity is as much the totality of the interaction as one of its subordinate elements, and it is precisely in being a mere semblance that it can be considered the totality. This is the thought that carries the argument into teleology, since what is now wanted is a form of activity powerful enough to shape both elements and thereby to give the point a determinate form in its expression as well as the condition.

The argument that teleology is the truth of mechanism is stated in a deliberately restricted form at the outset, and the restriction should be kept in view, since much of the chapter’s persuasiveness depends on it. The claim is that mechanistic explanations always presuppose some teleological characterisation of their terms, so that the identity of the objects even of mechanical systems is specified teleologically. It is not a claim about the empirical adequacy or applicability of concepts, and the mechanistic conception of nature is credited as a real advance over the theistic teleology that explains events by the external purpose of a divine will. The framing question is which of two opposed conceptions has the better credentials to count as the more fundamental characterisation of objectivity, and Hegel’s own formulation of the higher question — whether their truth is a third concept or whether one is the truth of the other — is given its due.

The reconstruction proceeds by pressing the mechanist toward the concept of law and then showing what the concession costs. Repulsion, as the systematic form of the asymmetry and passivity of efficient causation, is examined as a candidate account of the individuality of mechanical systems, since every object transmits force to some degree while the degree transmitted reflects its particular nature, and these combine in states of equilibrium and in degrees of active resistance. The advance over the Leibnizian monad is registered, since where the monad was criticised for rigidity, the mechanical object’s mode of repelling others is described as the elasticity of its self-subsistence. Elasticity thereafter replaces rigidity as the book’s model of independence, and this substitution is one of the clearest instances of a term acquiring new determinations across the work: it began as a property of mechanical resistance, becomes the name for a managed openness to influence, and ends as the name for the shape of self-determination itself. The insufficiency of mere activity and rest is then shown, since these are extrinsic states determined by the environment, and the mechanical object is what it is only as a product, so that what it is supposed to be in and for itself is something contingent with respect to its first determinate being. The mechanist is therefore driven to law as an intrinsic norm of functioning that would supply identity conditions by specifying an ideal state toward which a system tends, and the chemical example of a body that alters part of its own mass in order to become receptive to combination is offered as a case in which a change induced from outside is prepared and made possible by a change in the body itself — which is compared, with characteristic economy, to the way a temper makes a remark into an insult.

Two objections then close the argument. The first is that the law has no actual existence within the mechanism: its difference is confined to its ideality, the objects are not themselves differentiated into that ideal difference, and a mechanism need never actually reach its equilibrium for us to individuate it by the tendency toward it. The principle of individuality thus has no actuality in what it individuates, and the criticism is aligned with Hegel’s treatment of laws in the Phenomenology, where the tension between the range of phenomena a law covers and the completeness with which it explains any one of them generates the inverted world. The conclusion drawn is arresting in its polemical economy: a mechanistic metaphysics is insufficiently naturalistic, since it leaves out principles that a teleological metaphysics can locate in real individuals, and the very attitude that made mechanism an advance over external teleology, the demand for immanent determinateness, tells against mechanism at this point. Compared with an immanently teleological view, mechanistic naturalism is just another idealist metaphysics — and our peculiarly modern doubts about free will are diagnosed as a symptom of failing to carry the modern scientific search for immanent controlling principles through to the end. The second objection is presented as a comment rather than an objection: the mechanist has saved the theory only by invoking a striving toward equilibrium, and this understates how central purposiveness already is, since not every collection of objects is a system and a law of functioning therefore constrains the individuation and constitution of mechanical systems. The result is that there is no mechanism without some form of self-determination, and that the way we think about self-determination even with respect to mechanistic principles is necessarily teleological.

The positive characterisation follows. A teleologically organised system has an end that governs the process of its own production, so that the end makes itself actual and teleology is an account of the whole activity of the actualisation of conceptual form. Individual objects become the means by which this creation takes place, and we are encouraged to look at individuality in process, at the object as the process of its own realisation. The end replaces the law as the way objects selectively open themselves to and manage external influence; and because ends change through that influence in a way laws do not, they are actualised in a way laws are not. The sentence in which this is condensed — laws are instantiated while ends are realised — is the culminating formula of the part, and it is worth noticing how much earlier machinery it presupposes. It presupposes the doctrine that a locus of responsibility must be a form of reflection whose products are themselves forms of reflection; it presupposes the modal doctrine that the possible must be actual; and it presupposes the reciprocity result that a thing finds its self-relation in becoming the origin of its own passivity. The final step forecloses the reduction of ends to a further species of cause: teleology remedies the defects of mechanism only by supplying an account of the self-determination of mechanical systems, and since the means takes place for the sake of the end, the means is parasitic on the end; grasping an object as changeable by an external end is already to understand it with reference to an internal end. The distinguishing mark from essentialism is stated at once, and it is the mark that will organise the final chapter: the intrinsic norm is transformed repeatedly through the process of its own manifestation, a process that employs the techniques of mechanical interaction to work on the idea so as to express it.

The last substantive chapter converts this into a philosophy of action, and it does so through two theses whose joint effect is to give the earlier abstractions a determinate shape. The first is the significance of the means. Hegel’s claim that the means is the more honourable thing, that the plough outlasts the enjoyments it procures and that in his tools a human being possesses power over external nature even while remaining subject to it in respect of his ends, is taken as the model of self-determination as elasticity. The illustration offered is a baseball glove broken in over a season, which comes to have the player’s own hand shape and style of fielding as its immanent principle, and which comes to represent his fielding more completely than any single play could. The generalisation is that in using a means, especially repeatedly, we change it so that it comes to represent the end more completely, and that through successful use an initially external purpose can be made internal. To this is joined Hegel’s account of the cunning of reason, read in a specific register: the end interposes an object, allows it to wear itself out in its stead, exposes it to attrition, and shields itself behind it from mechanical violence. The gloss given is that it is through the means that self-determination is protected from the alienation of the mechanical relation, so that the libertarian’s worry about the violent passivity of objects within the mechanistic realm receives a structural answer rather than a denial. The means, the text says memorably, is Hegel’s way of talking about trying as something objective and substantial.

The second thesis is the necessary transformation of the end in the process of its realisation. It is derived as a corollary of the claim that the teleological aspect of behaviour cannot be represented by a prior end mechanically related to the means, and it is supported by the observation that the end confronts mechanical and chemical systems lying about in the context of expression, forming and sorting them according to itself, while the forming and sorting takes place as presupposition and is therefore largely invisible from the end’s own perspective. The example is the person with a chip on his shoulder, who is looking to constitute external events as insults to which he can respond while remaining unaware of it, though the fact is clear to others who avoid saying anything that could be construed as a slight. This is described as a classic case in which the non-intentional background of intentional behaviour lies behind one’s back, revealed only by breakdowns such as alienating contexts where the dominance of one agent’s goals in constituting the context produces a failure of agency in others. The Hegelian demand is that the true teleological relation make the forming and sorting explicit, converting it from presupposition into positing; and the general moral is drawn in a formulation that recurs throughout the book: a theoretical problem for the notion of expression is made into a practical problem for individual expressers, so that what began as a form of skepticism to be refuted becomes a potentially alienating element to be managed. The libertarian model is criticised on exactly this basis, since an agent guided by it will tend to think of herself and her ends in abstraction from her environment and will therefore be surprised by the consequences of her actions, while the fully free agent finds her ends already present in the world as conditions of possibility for action — to see fruit growing on a tree is to see the world as in the process of satisfying one’s hunger.

These two theses are then made to do work against three contemporary positions, and the pattern of the engagements confirms the book’s method. Against Roth’s claim that teleological considerations explain only general facts, the reply is that the intensive interaction between goal and causal context makes explanatory purposes evolve into specific relations to the action they explain, so that the problem of explaining particular actions arises only if purposes are treated as abstract universals — a conception more appropriate, the reply adds, to covering laws than to internal purposiveness. Against Roth’s claim that only causation supports singular counterfactuals, two objections are made: that appealing to a causal relation leaves the counterfactual no less bare, since counterfactuals are more likely to inform our understanding of the causal relation than the reverse; and that overdetermination cases are unavoidable counterexamples to treating a cause as a necessary condition, with the corresponding agential case of a second desire that would have produced the action in the absence of the first. In place of the rejected counterfactual, a different one is offered, and it is a genuine contribution: what distinguishes the assassin who kills by a direct shot from the one who startles a herd is that we believe the latter would have compensated for whatever error or circumstance caused her to miss, had she been made aware of it beforehand. This is described as a counterfactual that ties the agent to her context in virtue of her competence, a way of talking about her skills as means; its logical simplicity is conceded to be inferior, and the Hegelian judgment is that it is none the worse for that.

Against Stout’s teleological theory, the objection is that including a condition of non-interference within the essential properties of a process is implausible, because interference or resistance is necessary in some form and because it rules out the plasticity and persistence central to any teleological process. Two counterintuitive results are traced to the rigidity of independence in that account: the fragility of processes in the face of interference, which forces a distinction between the sun warming the stone and the sun preventing it from cooling; and the over-extension of the concept of mechanism, which attributes to the spring as well as to the watch the capacity to tell time. Hegel’s alternative is stated for each. Plasticity and persistence belong to the nature of a teleological process, so a process ends only where interference overwhelms the capacity to maintain goal-orientation; and the watch as a whole rather than the spring is the mechanism for telling time, because the watch includes means to adjust its functioning in the face of variable circumstances, or else because it affords the wearer the opportunity to make such adjustments, so that in the first case the watch tells the time and in the second we tell the time by means of it. The criterion for deviant causal chains follows from the same resources, and it is developed through George Wilson’s example of the waiter who startles his employer by becoming nervous at the thought of doing so. In the original case the chain is deviant twice over, since it contrasts with the preponderance of the agent’s orientation and since the nervousness is a by-product of contrary desires; in a modified case where the waiter recognises the nervousness as a technique and refrains from controlling it, we would say he startled his employer intentionally, even though the chain is non-standard. What accounts for the difference is the plasticity with which the intention is pursued and the recognition of new means when they present themselves — which is precisely what the cunning of reason names. The criterion is thus the systematic orientation of the agent’s intentional stance, including causal chains that are not directly productive of the action; and the diachronic version, in which the agent either mobilises resources against the nervousness or further develops it, is offered as a check.

The book closes by clarifying what has and has not been achieved, and the clarification is unusually candid. The metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings are canvassed through Hartmann’s distinction between an ontology that provides a category theory without existence claims and a metaphysics that makes priority claims about what there is; the distinction’s tenability is doubted, and its adequacy as an interpretation of the Logic is doubted too, since the claim that finite things depend on the infinite looks like a priority claim. For the purposes of defending the intelligibility of free will, however, no specific existence claim is needed, so that the argument retains its force even under the non-metaphysical reading — from which an indirect argument for that reading is drawn, since the arguments of the Logic can still do meaningful philosophical work under it. At the same time three positions are rejected: Hartmann’s view that Hegel’s position is innocuous with respect to particular forms of knowing, Stekeler-Weithofer’s view that no object-level claims are made, and Pippin’s view that the significance of such claims is always meta-logical. The constraints developed in the Logic are said to be very general and free of existence claims while nonetheless eliminating problematic patterns of thought about one concrete context in particular, that of agency. The result is then described in its own terms as primarily negative: what has been shown is why the problem of free will does not arise for Hegel’s practical philosophy in the way it does for most other modern philosophers.

Two further positionings complete the account. Against Pippin’s proposal that free agency is a historical achievement rather than a discovered capacity, the reading splits the difference by describing free will as a talent that exploits the basic structure of productivity, standing to agents as the physical and mental systems of a violinist stand to her talent for making music: responsive to development both generationally and individually, so that a developed talent is rightly called a historical achievement, while constituting a materiality that enables and constrains, so that the view is less radically bootstrapping than the achievement thesis suggests. The textual anchor offered is that the most structurally articulated picture of individual agency in the Phenomenology appears in the description of the relation among talents, interests, physical conditions, and the matter at issue. And against the sufficiency of the autonomy of the normative, a dilemma is run: pushed too far it becomes a social version of arbitrary choice and severs the internal connection between reason and freedom; reined in, it requires constraints on our understanding of agency and the world, and each way of specifying those constraints reproduces a familiar difficulty — necessitating causation revives determinism, necessitating causation exempting human action revives the problem of the relation between agency and bodily events with the normative order secured at the price of impotence, and the absence of necessitating causation altogether costs us our grip on the principle of sufficient reason and requires an alternative system of categories. The book’s own answer is then named as exactly that: an alternative system of categories focused on the productivity of expression. The final formulation of what the problem of expression is takes care to keep it out of the technical register in which it has been pursued. It is a substantive problem about the work by which agents disclose what they are, work that necessarily changes what they are and is nonetheless bound by a constraint of fidelity; interpretation is involved and is paradigmatically social, while always presupposing a creative act that partly sets the terms of its own interpretation, since the creative act produces a sketch of the framework of significance within which its meaning is determined.

What form of unity, then, does the work attain? It is worth answering this in terms of the book’s own categories, since the answer is largely determined by decisions the book makes about what it will and will not undertake. The unity is stratified rather than reconciled. At the level of architecture it is close to perfect: three parts, three chapters each, three threats, three concepts reconstructed, three returns to agency, with an introductory part that installs the machinery and a conclusion that measures the result. At the level of doctrine it is cumulative in a specific sense that the exposition itself thematises, since later categories are said to stabilise earlier ones by providing contexts for their use — a claim made about ground’s stabilisation of quality and quantity, and enacted by the whole book, since condition acquires its full sense only under modality, immediacy is respecified three times, necessity migrates from the name of a relation to the name of the whole of self-manifestation, contingency migrates from defect to constitutive determinacy, possibility migrates from potential to actual, passivity migrates from a feature of effects to something posited by one’s own activity, and independence migrates from rigidity to elasticity. At the level of result, however, the unity is deliberately incomplete, and the incompleteness is principled in three distinct ways.

The first incompleteness is the withheld criterion. No sufficient criterion for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate self-explanation is offered, and this is presented as agreement with Hempel and Oppenheim rather than as a lacuna; no criterion is offered for distinguishing authentic from alienated self-expression, and the reconstruction of Hegel’s criteria for recognising actual free will is deferred to further work; no reconstruction of the Philosophy of Right on the basis of the logical theory is attempted, and the moral psychology and philosophical anthropology are declared out of scope in the opening pages and remain so. The second incompleteness is the withheld existence claim. The argument is presented as showing that a conceptual space is open and that certain patterns of thought about agency are inconsistent, without showing that anything occupies the space; the form of productivity traced is explicitly denied to be a sufficient condition for the existence of free agents. The third incompleteness is the suspended objection, and it is the most consequential. The worry that Hegel’s characterisation of the infinite will implies that only the state or God can be free is raised in the first chapter, is said to require analysis of objective and absolute spirit, and is never resolved; what it receives instead is mitigation from the doctrine of reflection, on the ground that internal and external determination have been shown to be co-articulable. Whether mitigation of that kind can settle a question of that kind is left to the reader.

The residual frictions are correspondingly of three kinds, and the exposition foregrounds two of them while leaving the third to be noticed. The first is the equivocation latent in the notion of a locus of responsibility. The term is defined at a level of abstraction that carries it across quality, essence, substance, mechanism, and agent, and its portability is what makes the transfer between logical and practical registers possible; yet the arguments that most persuade are those in which the term is filled with agential content — temper and insult, character and habit, the child’s drawing, the waiter’s nervousness, the broken-in glove. One may read this as vindication, since the abstract structure proves its adequacy by its concrete illumination, or as a sign that the examples are carrying the inferential weight that the categories were supposed to carry. The text’s own position is the first, and its warrant is the methodological claim that the Logic’s categories acquire significance from their employment in our reflective lives. The second friction is the status of the fourfold grid, whose assignments of perspective are underdetermined at several points while being indispensable at the decisive one, since the transfer of externality from the perspective of transformation to its input is stated only in the grid’s terms. The third, less often surfaced, concerns the relation between the two halves of the book’s negative achievement. The regress argument is defeated by making explanation holistic and three-termed, at the cost of conceding that the ground is infected by its conditions; the modal argument is won by internalising contingency at the heart of necessity; the mechanistic argument is won by showing that identity conditions must be teleological. Each victory is purchased by admitting more externality into the self than the previous stage had allowed, and the cumulative effect is a conception of self-determination that is thoroughly exposed. The book embraces this consequence and names it — self-determination is work, a talent at which one can be better or worse — but the embrace transforms the original question. What began as the question whether free will is possible given the explicability of the world ends as the question how the ineliminable disorder at the heart of expression is to be managed. That transformation is presented as a discovery rather than as a change of subject, on the ground that the theoretical problem was always a practical problem misdescribed.

The unity attained is therefore best characterised as controlled antinomy stabilised by stratification. The two commitments announced at the outset — that the necessity of action is integral to its freedom, and that alternate possibilities are real — are held together by a single device applied at three levels: making what appears to be an external limit into a moment posited by the activity it enables. At the level of explanation, the condition is internalised into the fact itself; at the level of modality, contingency is internalised into necessity, so that alternativity becomes the structure of significance rather than a gap before the deed; at the level of production, passivity is internalised into activity, so that a thing’s openness to influence originates in its own operation. The device is the same each time, and the recurrence with altered valence is what gives the book its systematic character. It also marks the limit of what has been shown, since the device establishes that the two commitments are co-articulable without establishing that any actual agent articulates them well. The final position is thus a defensible one rather than a triumphant one, and the work’s restraint in saying so is the most reliable indication of its seriousness. Its central interpretive thesis, stated in the last paragraph, claims no more than this: that Hegel has a constructive response to the traditional problem of free will, and that certain otherwise opaque features of his moral psychology and philosophy of action become clear once the nature of that response is understood.

Two closing observations about the work as an object of study. The first concerns its double address. It is written so that a reader interested in the Logic may take it as a sustained reading of the Doctrine of Essence and the opening of the Doctrine of the Concept, in which ground, condition, modality, causation, mechanism, and teleology are shown to compose a single argument about expression; and so that a reader interested in the philosophy of action may take it as an intervention that diagnoses a standing impasse by locating the shared picture that generates it. The two addresses are held together by the thesis that explanation and expression have the same structure, and this thesis is what allows the same sentences to be read in either register. Whether the identification is earned is the largest question the book raises about itself, and it is one the book leaves open, since it is asserted early as an equation, defended by its yield, and never argued independently. The second observation concerns the disposition of the apparatus. The notes carry an argumentative load out of proportion to their typographical status: it is there that the reading is differentiated from Longuenesse, Stekeler-Weithofer, Lakebrink, Kreines, de Vries, Angehrn, Wallace, Butler, Carlson, and Pippin; there that the transcendental arguments against determinism are canvassed and set aside; there that the concessions to rival readings are made. A reader who follows only the body will receive an immanent reconstruction of remarkable continuity; a reader who follows the notes will find that continuity is a construction maintained against pressure from every side. Reading both together is the only way to see what the book is: a work whose surface is the tracing of a single movement of thought, and whose substructure is a continuous negotiation about whether that movement is Hegel’s or its author’s.

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