Hegel’s logic of freedom

“Being with oneself in the other” is Hegel’s famous definition of freedom, and, I argue, it is also the key topic of his entire Science of Logic. Hegel’s Logic is an ontological analysis of the underlying relational structure of everything: the structure of thinking as much as the structure of the world. Hegel proposes at the beginning of the Logic that this structure must display the form of “being with oneself in the other”, i.e. consist in a relation of identity and difference between a totality and its elements. After presenting the different forms of “being with oneself in the other” developed in the Logic, I will offer a new interpretation of the Philosophy of Right and the Philosophy of History in the light of my interpretation of the Logic. This serves to show how exactly Philosophy of Right is the exposition of the existence of freedom and how it is grounded in the Logic. While the connection between Hegel’s Logic and social philosophy has often been taken to have authoritarian and anti-individualist implications, I will show that this is not the case and that this connection instead highlights the republican aspects in Hegel’s theory