John F. Hoffmeyer

Hegel saw himself as a philosopher of freedom. Critics have depicted him as a defender of domination and the status quo. After all, is it not Hegel's position that "what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational?" That position seems to nullify freedom by absolutizing what already is. For without the capacity to call into question and transcend what is already given, there is no freedom. ;Refuting the charge that Hegel's philosophy is fundamentally a glorification of the status quo requires a demonstration that Hegel's concept of actuality is not equivalent to "what is already given." It requires showing that Hegel's thought accounts for future possibilities relativizing present actualities. It requires examining Hegel's understanding of both time and the relation of actuality to possibility. ;I argue that those are not two disjunct areas of investigation. This runs contrary to Hegel's self-understanding. He examines the relation of actuality and possibility in the Science of Logic, but insists that time has no place in logic. My thesis is that time and the relation of actuality to possibility are related to each other in the concept of freedom which Hegel develops in the Logic. Despite Hegel's explicit claims, he understands freedom in such a way that time is constitutive of freedom. The Logic contains an implicit concept of temporality. ;My investigation begins with a general consideration of Hegel's explicit understanding of time, as presented in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Phenomenology of Spirit. This leads in chapter 2 to an examination of Hegel's logic of reflection. It is the logic of reflection which structures the relation of actuality and possibility. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 take up in detail the three subsections of the Logic's chapter on actuality and its relation to possibility. In chapter 6 I make explicit Hegel's implicit understanding of temporality. I also seek to show how that understanding of temporality meets with Hegel's conception of actuality and possibility in his concept of freedom