Christopher Yeomans’ Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency can be read as a sustained attempt to retrieve the problem of free will for Hegel by relocating it within the conceptual architecture of the Science of Logic. The guiding wager is that Hegel’s distinctive treatment of freedom—as an achievement of self-determination that simultaneously appropriates, transforms, and rearticulates forms of external determination—cannot be adequately reconstructed from topical treatments in the Phenomenology or the Philosophy of Right alone. It requires a patient traversal of the Doctrine of Essence and the Doctrine of the Concept, where the dialectic of ground, condition, modality, causation, teleology, and reciprocal interaction provides the intelligible scaffolding for what, in practical philosophy, appears as agency’s felt unity of spontaneity and situatedness. On Yeomans’ account, Hegel’s answer is “weird” in Robert Nozick’s sense—resolutely non-straightforward and, precisely for that reason, proportioned to the depth of the question—because it declines to arbitrate between the internal and the external by fiat and instead reconceives freedom as a mode of expression in which internal determination is articulated by, and through, the very externalities it seems bound to resist.
At the outset, Yeomans frames Hegel’s basic insight with unusual frankness: the best intuitive exemplar of freedom is not the isolated moment of moral choice but the intersubjective experience of love and friendship. The example is not decorative; it dislodges an entrenched picture in which agency is essentially a privacy of decision and substitutes a structure of mutuality where the self’s relation-to-self is mediated by others. Agency is embedded as much as it is sovereign. The price of acknowledging this intuition is conceptual exactitude: one must explain how internal determination can be compatible with, and even articulated by, external determination, without sliding into either heteronomy or vacuous identity. That articulation, Yeomans insists, is not delivered by Hegel’s political theory alone but is prepared in—and, methodologically, demands—the Logic.
The book’s central thesis is that Hegel’s practical philosophy only becomes fully legible against the background of his logical doctrines of reflection, ground, modality, causation, and teleology. The difficulty is classical. If everything actionable is susceptible to explanation—if the Principle of Sufficient Reason in its methodological, modal, and naturalistic guises retains its grip—then it seems that either a regress of grounds awaits every choice, or the necessity indexed by sufficient reasons devours the very openness that free agency appears to require. Yeomans’ Hegel meets this triad of challenges (regress, modality, mechanism) by transforming our understanding of explanation itself: the ground of a fact is not a single antecedent describable apart from the explanandum but a reflexive structure in which form and content, ground and condition, positing and presupposing, interpenetrate in a way that makes the whole explanatorily prior to its parts. In this reconfiguration, “self-explanation” emerges as the basic form of explanation; the agent is a locus where the relevant totality folds back on itself such that what counts as a reason is inseparable from the structured field of conditions it itself organizes.
This is why Yeomans lingers so long on the Doctrine of Essence. Hegel’s progression from absolute ground to determinate ground to condition is not metaphysical ornament but a disciplined attempt to say how internal and external determination can be coordinated without collapse. Absolute ground asserts identity of ground and grounded; determinate ground introduces form to distinguish explanans from explanandum; the turn to condition then inscribes a third term to avoid both uninformative identity and infinite regress. Explanation is, in principle, triadic: explanans, explanandum, and the structured horizon of conditions that make a difference to what counts as explanatory at all. In modern terms, Yeomans shows, this anticipates erotetic conceptions of explanation as an answer to a why-question whose presuppositions (contrast classes, background understanding, acknowledgment of the explanandum’s obtaining) shape the space of relevance; but Hegel’s distinctive move is to insist that this triadicity is not merely pragmatic or linguistic. It belongs to the ontological logic of “the fact itself,” the Sache an sich selbst, which is a totality in which ground and condition are internally related moments rather than external addenda.
Yeomans sharpens the point by showing how Hegel’s holism is meant to be stronger than a merely epistemic reminder about “taking the whole into account.” To specify the sufficient background conditions for a cause without tacit reference to the effect is impossible; the conditions are “posited by the cause itself,” not because we are poor finite inquirers who must smuggle outcomes into premises, but because the very identity of the explanans is inseparable from the pattern of presuppositions that make its efficacy intelligible as this efficacy. Thus the ground–condition relation is not a juxtaposition of antecedent matters of fact; it is the retrospective and prospective unity of a structure whose reflexivity underwrites responsibility. The lesson carries over directly to agency: if my action is to be more than a happenstance concatenation of motives and circumstances, the explanatorily decisive elements cannot be conceived as merely given antecedents. They must be positings that simultaneously presuppose—and in that sense appropriate—the field of conditions within which they become what they are.
The rhetoric of “positing” and “presupposing” can seem opaque until Yeomans cashes it out modally. In the middle of the book he introduces the distinction, crucial for Hegel, between two structurally different senses of alternate possibility. In Willkür (arbitrary choice) the space of alternatives is a looseness of fit—an indeterminacy in how lines of necessity attach to available representations or consequent states. By contrast, in Wille (the free will proper), contingency does not vanish; it is reconceived as a tight fit that, precisely because it is more determinate, opens accessible alternate possibilities along a measured continuum of expressions. The dialectical punch line is that Wille does not confine itself to a given set of desires or character-traits; it makes its drives into its own rational system, reconfiguring them such that speaking of “drives” is misleading—character is the better term for their new form. The locus of responsibility then shifts from what is antecedently given to what is self-constituted in action; immediacy is no longer mere givenness but the immediacy of a self-dependent whole in which creation and interpretation coincide.
This modal transformation also clarifies why Yeomans resists reading Hegel as either a standard compatibilist or a libertarian. The former typically preserves control at the expense of meaningful alternativity; the latter secures alternativity at the expense of intelligible control. On Yeomans’ reading, the real culprit behind the stalemate is a shared picture of action that artificially separates positing from reflection-into-self: an action is posited now, while the motives and character that “explain” it are outsourced to a presupposed past. That separation generates, on the one side, indeterminacy of interpretation (we cannot reliably take off from and return to the same point in reading the deed), and on the other, indeterminacy of prediction (abstracted antecedents yield branching outcomes). Both indeterminacies are artifacts of a picture that refuses to let the explanatory ground internalize the conditions in the very act of expression. Hegel’s proposal is not to deny alternativity but to embed it in a structure where it belongs to the form of expression rather than to a merely aleatory gap between antecedent conditions and subsequent states.
From here the book turns to the naturalistic challenge with admirable clarity. If the modern scientific image privileges mechanism, and if mechanism implies a passivizing conception of effect and a picture of independent parts interacting by externally sufficient forces, then it can seem that free agency is at best a projection and at worst a confusion. Yeomans’ Hegel refuses both defeat and denial. His move is neither to abolish mechanism nor to relegate teleology to a theological aside, but to argue a pair of priority theses: reciprocal interaction is the truth of causation, and teleology is the truth of mechanism. These are not empirical claims about where to apply concepts; they are logical claims about which concept is truer, i.e., which succeeds in internalizing the conditions of intelligibility that the less adequate concept must surreptitiously borrow from elsewhere. In this sense, teleology is not an optional vocabulary for humanistic niches; it is a more adequate rendering of objectivity whenever productivity as expression is at stake.
Mechanism, on Hegel’s account, is defined by the externality of causality: the cause remains immediately external to the effect even as the effect bears the mark of the cause’s self-identity. The interaction of substances is thus a “repelling being,” a restless juxtaposition in which the identity-in-difference that would be needed for genuine expression is forever deferred. For descriptive physics, this is often good enough. For a logic of agency, it is disabling. To recover the form of productivity that belongs to acting, Hegel escalates the concept: first to reciprocal interaction, where the strict asymmetry of activity/passivity is overcome in a dynamic of mutual determination; and then to teleology, where the unity of end and means reorganizes mechanism from within. Yeomans renders this ascent readable by insisting that at each step the problem is expression: can we think a mode of production in which the product is internally related to the producer such that the background conditions are not alien limits but, precisely as conditions, moments posited by the activity they enable?
This is where the earlier work on ground and condition pays dividends. The background is not a merely formal necessity; it is an enabling resource, a diffuse but necessary locus of responsibility on which prioritized grounds depend, and thus an internal moment of the explanatory whole. The Humean picture of constant conjunction is inadequate not because it is empirically false but because it presupposes, against its own grain, that the very events it correlates are thinkable apart from the ground-relations that determine them. Hegel radicalizes the Kantian critique: facts as such are parasitic on determinate ground-relations, and ground-relations are, in their truth, reflexive structures that include their conditions—not as alien inputs but as moments of self-positing. Agency, then, is not a punctual cause inserted into a neutral mechanistic series; it is a teleologically organized reciprocal self-determination whose explanatory unity is the paradigmatic case of the holism of ground.
Yeomans is at his most incisive when he re-reads the Philosophy of Right’s introduction through this logical lens. Hegel’s oft-cited distinction between Willkür and Wille is not merely a moral-psychological taxonomy; it is the practical face of the Logic’s distinction between relative and absolute modality. The charge against Willkür is not that it celebrates alternatives; it is that it misconstrues them as an unintegrated looseness of fit, thereby forfeiting the unity of creation and interpretation. The defense of Wille is not that it abolishes contingency; it is that it converts contingency into the structured openness of an expressive continuum—what Yeomans calls a “measured” range of accessible possibilities—by making the drives into the will’s own rational system. In that conversion, “drive” becomes a misnomer; character names the internalized form of motivation, and responsibility shifts from the given to the self-constituted.
Several common objections are neutralized in passage. First, the worry that Hegel’s holism collapses explanation into description is deflected by the three-term model. The distinction between ground and condition is not decorative; it is precisely what blocks the regress that ensues when every explanans must itself be explained as a further explanandum. The condition is not a ground; its role is to shape the space of difference that makes the ground’s determinate relevance possible without itself being the locus of “because.” In causal idiom: a set of unnecessary but sufficient conditions may surround a cause understood as necessary but insufficient; to select the cause from among the conditions is already to have tacitly invoked the totality within which it is explanatory. Hegel’s more radical claim, as Yeomans emphasizes, is that once the set of conditions is exhaustively described it must include the explanandum—meaning that “nothing prevents the cause from causing the effect” is not a cheat but a structural insight into how explanantia and explananda belong to one and the same reflexive whole.
Second, the suspicion that Hegel’s critique of mechanism entails a flight from productivity misconstrues the dialectic. Hegel rarely grants causation the last word on agency because he thinks too highly of control, not too little. Mechanism, precisely as external, records an impoverished sense in which the agent’s act could belong to her as expression. Teleology, by contrast, is where productivity is most fully itself: end and means are not a hierarchical fiat but a reciprocal transformation in which each mediates the other’s identity. Yeomans tracks a telling passage in which Hegel characterizes “mechanical” action, memory, and habit as lacking the “peculiar pervasion and presence of spirit,” and thus as missing the freedom of individuality. The point is not that the self-activity of spirit is absent—it cannot be—but that it is not manifest as freedom where production is only external. Teleology is the logical correction, not the metaphysical replacement, of mechanism.
Third, the charge that Hegel evades the issue of alternate possibilities is inverted. On Yeomans’ reconstruction, Hegel affirms alternativity in its strongest form precisely where necessity is deepest. The continuity from possibility through actuality to necessity is not a slide from openness to closure; it is a deepening articulation in which contingency increases as we ascend toward absolute necessity because the totality that makes the fact what it is gathers more determinate relations within itself. In action-theoretic terms, this is why Wille does not collapse into predestination: the “tight fit” of expression yields richer pathways of enactment, not fewer, since the unity of creation and interpretation multiplies the forms in which the self can be itself. The modal openness is not a gap before the deed; it is the immanent variability of expressive actualization.
The book’s argumentative rhythm thus yields a picture of freedom as true necessity: not the iron compelled by external law, nor the caprice of an unbounded faculty, but the intelligible necessity of a self that, through its deeds, posits as its own the very conditions that condition it. If this appears paradoxical, it is only because we are accustomed to opposing immediacy to mediation and necessity to possibility. Hegel’s strategy, as Yeomans reads it, is to show that the will’s immediacy is self-dependency, and that necessity is the name for a mode of intelligibility in which because and as coincide: we understand why the action occurred by understanding what it is as expression. This is why “self-explanation” is not rhetorical flourish but the form of explanation suited to agency. It is not the claim that the agent is uncaused; it is the claim that the agent, as a locus of ground that internalizes its conditions, is the proper seat of the “because” when action is understood teleologically.
Yeomans’ alignment of Hegel with contemporary philosophy of action is judicious rather than programmatic. He notes, for instance, how libertarian incompatibilism often relies on a global-state picture of the world (à la van Inwagen) that abstracts from the activity that transforms one state to another and then treats both motives and circumstances as independent antecedents. In that frame, agency can only appear as either an incomprehensible supplément or as a place-holder for what is explained elsewhere. Hegel’s alternative does not deny the attraction of state-descriptions for physics; it denies that such descriptions are apt for the logic of expression in which acting counts as self-determination. The point is not to depreciate physical description but to resist exporting its form of intelligibility into a domain whose explananda are expressions whose identity is inseparable from the unity of positing and presupposing.
The payoff, finally, is interpretive and systematic. Interpretively, Yeomans vindicates Hegel’s scattered claims that freedom is inseparable from necessity and that spirit is not captured by causal categories: these are not dogmatic antinomies but carefully earned theses grounded in the Logic’s account of reflection, ground, and teleology. Systematically, he shows why Hegel never reduces the normative (recognition, retrospective uptake, social articulation) to the natural, even as he refuses a dualism that would render the will unintelligible. The unity of creation and interpretation that constitutes Wille depends on institutions and others, but not as external constraints; they are the internalized conditions under which the will becomes what it is. The social world is not a limit to freedom but the medium of its expression, precisely because, at the logical level, conditions are moments of ground in the whole that is the fact itself.
One sees, in retrospect, why Yeomans places so much emphasis on the notion of expression. It is the thread that binds the book’s four principal claims. First, the explanatory holism of ground and condition entails that the explanandum is not externally added to the explanans; it is internal to a reflexive whole. Second, the modal deepening from relative to absolute necessity entails that alternativity belongs to the expressive continuum of enactment, not to a prerational indecision among antecedents. Third, the critique of mechanism by way of reciprocal interaction and teleology entails that productivity is, in its truth, a form of self-manifestation in which the product is internally the producer’s own. Fourth, the sociality of recognition entails that interpretation is not an afterthought but an aspect of the same expressive structure—creation and uptake belong together because the ground internalizes its conditions. Each claim is conceptually autonomous; their force is cumulative.
If one asks what, beyond exegetical rescue, is achieved by this reconstruction, the answer is twofold. For Hegel scholarship, Yeomans reframes the debate away from the question whether Hegel has anything to say about free will (beyond social freedom) to the question how the Logic’s treatments of essence and concept are the conditions of possibility for any adequate Hegelian theory of agency. For contemporary philosophy, the book proposes a non-deflationary compatibilism of a higher order: not that freedom just is control under determinism, but that determinacy itself must be reconceived such that the intelligibility of action as expression is basic. In that reconception, the old binary between “either the will is undetermined or it is necessitated by antecedents” is displaced by a logic in which the relevant necessity is the intelligible necessity of a self-determining whole, and the relevant alternativity is the structured openness of expressive realization.
None of this is easy. It is to Yeomans’ credit that he does not pretend otherwise. The prose remains disciplined and technical where needed: the reader is asked to track the fate of identity and difference through ground and condition, to accept that explanation can be a three-term relation irreducible to a set of premises and a conclusion, to see why the “because” appropriate to agency must, in the end, be teleological and not merely efficient-causal, and to recognize that this is not a retreat from science but a rectification of categories. The reward is a conception of freedom that neither dissolves into moral psychology nor abstracts into metaphysics but passes through both, returning with a logic of agency in which self-determination is intelligible because the self can be shown to be the unifying form of its own conditions.
In this sense, Freedom and Reflection delivers on the promise of its title. The reflection at stake is not scrupulous introspection but the logical structure by which an essence becomes determinate through its own activity; the freedom at stake is not license but the form of life in which that activity is enacted as a world-facing, world-internal expression. That Hegel’s philosophy of action should require such an abstract itinerary is not a vice but a mark of coherence: only a logic that renders internal and external determination co-articulate can secure the possibility of acting as oneself under conditions that never cease to be other. Yeomans’ argument is demanding because freedom is demanding. It asks for nothing less than a reconception of necessity, a rehabilitation of teleology, and a willingness to see that the explanation proper to agency is the kind in which the agent’s deed—and the world it inhabits—exhibit a unity of positing and presupposing that we, in acting, can only ever express.
If one were to condense the book’s distinctive contribution into a single Hegelian formula, it would be this: freedom is the intelligible necessity of an expressive whole. In that formula, “intelligible necessity” preserves the insight that reasons explain actions without effacing their contingency; “expressive whole” preserves the insight that what explains an action is not a freestanding antecedent but a reflexive unity that has internalized its conditions. Yeomans’ Hegel is thus neither the quietist of recognition alone nor the metaphysician of noumenal choice; he is the logician of agency, who takes the Principle of Sufficient Reason seriously enough to transform it, and the modern scientific image seriously enough to insist that mechanism’s truth lies beyond mechanism—in the teleological reciprocity where free acts are not exceptions to nature but exemplars of a logic according to which doing and being-done belong to one another as the grammar of expression.
Simon Gros 
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