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According to this determination, the freedom of the will is arbitrariness [Willkür]—in which both of these are contained: the free reflection, abstracting from everything, and the dependence upon a content and material given internally or externally. Because this content, necessary in itself as an end, is at the same time determined as possible in relation to that reflection, arbitrariness is contingency as it exists in the form of the will.

The most common notion of freedom is that of arbitrariness—the midpoint of reflection between the will as determined merely by natural drives and the will which is free in and for itself. When one hears it said that freedom in general consists in being able to do what one wants, such a notion can only be taken as a complete lack of intellectual cultivation, in which there is as yet not the slightest inkling of what the will that is free in and for itself, Right, Ethical Life [Sittlichkeit], etc., actually are. Reflection—the formal universality and unity of self-consciousness—is the will’s abstract certainty of its freedom, but it is not yet the truth of that freedom, because it does not yet have itself as its own content and end; the subjective side is therefore still something different from the objective side; the content of this self-determination remains, for that reason, purely finite. Arbitrariness, instead of being the will in its truth, is rather the will as contradiction. — In the controversy carried on especially at the time of Wolffian metaphysics, as to whether the will is actually free or whether the knowledge of its freedom is only a delusion, it was arbitrariness that was kept in view. Determinism correctly countered the certainty of that abstract self-determination with the content which, as something found at hand [vorgefundener], is not contained within that certainty and therefore comes to it from the outside—even if this ‘outside’ is drive, representation, or a consciousness filled in such a way that the content is not the product of the self-determining activity as such. Since only the formal element of free self-determination is immanent in arbitrariness, while the other element is a given, arbitrariness may indeed be called a delusion if it is supposed to be freedom itself. Freedom in all reflection-philosophy—as in the Kantian and then the Friesian total shallowing [Verseichtigung] of the Kantian—is nothing other than that formal self-activity.

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