Comments on: 106

By: Hegel (Simple)

Hegel (Simple) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:51:55 +0000

§ 106: A new ground for freedom

Freedom now has a new, higher ground. This ground is the inner life of the human being, his own will.

Why is this progress?

In right, freedom was outside, in things and contracts. Now it is in me. It can become actual only in a will that knows itself.

No one can break in here:

No one can take my conviction from me. Others can lock me up. They can take things from me. But what I inwardly hold to be right remains mine. Now we measure a person’s worth by his inner life.

And the task?

For now, this inner life is only my own. It is not yet one with what holds for everyone. The whole second part shows how the will closes this gap. It should learn to will what is right from within.

Summary: Freedom is now at home in the inner life of the human being. There it can become actual. The task is to join the inner life with the universal.

By: Eduard Gans (Additions)

Eduard Gans (Additions) — Wed, 29 May 1833 13:26:05 +0000

In strict right, it did not matter what my principle or my intention was. This question of the will's self-determination and motive force, as well as of its purpose, now enters here with the moral. Since a human being wants to be judged according to his self-determination, he is free in this respect, however the external determinations may stand. One cannot break into this inner conviction of the human being; no violence can be done to it, and the moral will is therefore inaccessible. A person's worth is assessed according to his inner action, and thus the moral standpoint is freedom being-for-itself.

By: Hegel (Encyclopedia 1817)

Hegel (Encyclopedia 1817) — Wed, 30 Apr 1817 23:06:32 +0000

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), § 417:

§ 417. The moral standpoint is thereby the judgment of reflection of freedom, or the relation in which personal subjectivity posits itself as absolutely self-subsistent, and therefore repels the moments of the will into self-subsistent extremes – the universal rational will, and an external self-subsistent world. Subjectivity is the middle term of these, and is just as immediately identical with them as it, because they are self-subsistent, places itself and them, and them with one another, into a merely relative relation.