ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to shed light on the unity of the theoretical and the practical in G. W. F. Hegel's theory of freedom, in particular, and so perhaps to provide a foundation for future work on the relation between Hegel and his German Idealist predecessors. The truly free will, for Hegel, is thus the unity of theoretical and practical spirit, the unity of intelligence and will—the will that does not just promote its own arbitrariness, but rather wills what it understands freedom to be, namely, something universal. The chapter interprets the free will as the unity of theoretical and practical spirit. At the level of abstract right, the will is theoretically aware that it is free and that the freedom of the person is universal. The moral will, for Hegel, is dominated by the practical mode of thought, even though it includes an explicit theoretical interest in freedom as universal.
