Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard BosanquetGreen, Thomas Hill
Philosophy
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet
Green, Thomas Hill
Liberty; Natural law; Political obligation
4. This is an objection which many of Kant's statements of his
doctrine, at any rate, fairly challenge. It was chiefly because he
seemed to make freedom [1] an unrealised and unrealisable state,
that his moral doctrine was found unsatisfactory by Hegel. Hegel
holds that freedom, as the condition in which the will is determined
by an object adequate to itself, or by an object which itself as
reason constitutes, is realised in the state. He thinks of the state
in a way not familiar to Englishmen, a way not unlike that in which
Greek philosophers thought of the πόλις, [2] as a society governed
by laws and institutions and established customs which secure the
common good of the members of the society--enable them to make the
best of themselves--and are recognised as doing so. Such a state
is 'objective freedom'; freedom is realised in it because in it
the reason, the self-determining principle operating in man as his
will, has found a perfect expression for itself (as an artist may
be considered to express himself in a perfect work of art); and the
man who is determined by the objects which the well-ordered state
presents to him is determined by that which is the perfect expression
of his reason, and is thus free.
[1] In the sense of 'autonomy of rational will,' or determination by
an object which reason constitutes, as distinct from determination by
an object which the man makes his own; this latter determination Kant
would have recognised as characteristic of every human act, properly
so called.
[2] [Greek πόλις (polis) = city-state Tr.]
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