Abstract

In this dissertation I argue that Hegel‘s analysis of freedom based on the concept of self-determination provides us with an opportunity to radically rethink personal freedom and restore it to its necessary domain: the political. I reconstruct Hegel‘s exposition of the dynamic of self-determination in the Logic by focusing on a central premise: that the exposure and overcoming of the conceptual indifference [Gleichgültigkeit] between categories – between, for example, something and other, identity and difference, or universality and particularity – is the driving force of the argument leading to the Concept, i.e., the concept of self-determination. I show that Hegel‘s critiques of abstract universal free will as well as of particular arbitrary freedom use the same strategy, that of exposing the claims of indifference that sustain the legitimacy of these conceptions of freedom. I argue that the critique of indifference, explicit in the analysis and exposition of self-determination in the Logic and implicit in Hegel‘s discussion of the free will in the Philosophy of Right, offers a new perspective for thinking personal freedom.