Torn Between What You Want and What You Must Do: Hegel on Duty and Freedom

There is a very common way of experiencing one's own life, in which life is lived as a permanent tension between what I want and what I must do. On one side are my desires, my plans, the things I would do if nothing tied me down. On the other, the endless list of obligations such as work, the children, ageing parents, the bills, the commitments I took on almost without noticing. Under that logic, freedom is always somewhere else, always later, always once I have finally freed myself from all of it.

Many people arrive in consultation with that feeling, and often with the guilt that comes with it, the guilt of wanting to escape one's own life and feeling bad for wanting to. There is a philosophical tradition that offers a different way out of that dead end, and it does not involve resigning yourself or abandoning everything. Its most powerful formulation is in Hegel, and its central idea is disconcerting at first, because it holds that duty is not the opposite of freedom, but the way in which freedom becomes real.

The two freedoms we tend to confuse

To understand the proposal, we need to distinguish two ideas of freedom that we take for granted without thinking about them too closely.

G.W.F. Hegel, 1831

The first is negative freedom, which consists in nobody preventing me from doing as I please. It is a historical achievement we cannot give up, and it expresses each person's right to act as they wish without interference, so long as they do not harm that same right in others. But as a definition of a life well lived it falls short, because it says nothing about what one actually wants. Someone can have every door open and still not know which one to walk through, because they do not know what they want.

The second is reflexive freedom, which consists in determining myself, in acting according to ends I have given myself or desires I recognise as authentically my own. This is where the whole contemporary culture of authenticity and self-realisation belongs. It is a clear advance on the first, because freedom is no longer merely the absence of obstacles but a relationship with myself.

Hegel's objection to this second idea is the one that interests us, and Axel Honneth puts it precisely. The problem is that this freedom, already extended inwards, fails to extend into the sphere of objective reality as well. I can be perfectly clear about what I want and then discover that in the world I live in there is no possibility of bringing it about.

Social freedom, being free in what I do with others

From here comes the third idea, social freedom. I am free not when nobody gets in my way, nor only when I know what I want, but when I act in a shared world whose practices and institutions allow me to realise my ends, and where the ends of others are not a limit on mine but the condition of mine being possible at all.

The clearest example lies in the relationships you already have. In a real friendship, attending to the other is not a sacrifice that eats into my freedom, but precisely what being a friend consists in, and without it there would be no friendship to enjoy. The same holds in love, in raising children, in work that matters. In these bonds, what I must do and what I want coincide, not because I have given up my will, but because I have recognised that my own flourishing runs through them. Hegel calls this domain Sittlichkeit or ethical life, the ground where freedom stops being an abstract principle and becomes a concrete form of living.

Seen this way, duty changes character. It stops being an external imposition that robs me of my life and becomes the way my freedom is realised in something. It is not that duty limits my freedom. It is that without something to respond to, my freedom would have nowhere to be exercised.

Why authenticity alone is not enough

A word of caution is needed here, because this line of thought runs up against a very widespread idea, the idea that a life of one's own is won by shaking off the demands that come from outside. Charles Taylor showed why that idea defeats itself.

His argument is that things take on importance against a background of intelligibility he calls a horizon of significance. Choosing only carries weight if some matters count more than others, and that is not something I decide, because if I did, no matter would be significant at all. Nobody would say they had created themselves by choosing what to have for lunch. Choice matters because there are things that matter prior to my choosing.

I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self, but rather presupposes them.

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity

This is why the most self-absorbed forms of self-realisation turn out to be shallow, not because they belong to the culture of authenticity, but because they contradict its own conditions. Closing the door on whatever makes a claim on us (history, nature, the needs of others, the duties of citizenship) means suppressing the very thing that could have given weight to one's own life. Shutting yourself away destroys the very condition of what you were looking for.

We define ourselves in dialogue, not in solitude

Taylor adds something that speaks directly to what happens in counselling, and it is worth pausing on. Identity is not generated monologically. Discovering who I am does not mean working it out in isolation, but negotiating it through dialogue, partly out in the open and partly internalised, with others. We always form it in conversation, and sometimes in struggle, with the identities that the people who matter to us want to recognise in us.

There is a detail in his account that tends to strike people the first time they hear it, and it is that even when we leave some of those figures behind, our own parents for instance, and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live. This is not some influence from the past that has been fixed once and for all, but an internal interlocutor who is still active, one we go on arguing with, go on trying to explain ourselves to, or go on hoping for an approval from that perhaps never came.

Taylor also warns against a watered down version of this idea, the assumption that dialogue matters only at the beginning, in the genesis, and that afterwards we can manage on our own. Our culture expects us to form our opinions and positions through solitary reflection, but that is not how the important questions work, and least of all the question of who we are. It forgets, he says, how far our understanding of the good things in life is transformed by enjoying them alongside the people we love, and how some goods only become accessible to us through that shared enjoyment.

This is where the importance of recognition comes from. When identity was given by social position, recognition was not a problem, since it was built in beforehand through categories everyone took for granted. A personal identity of one's own, by contrast, enjoys no such recognition in advance. It has to be won in the exchange, and it can fail. What is new about the modern age is not the need to be recognised, but the conditions under which that need can go unmet.

This explains why so many people arrive in consultation with the sense of not knowing who they are, and why that work is so hard to do alone. Not because introspection is lacking, but because introspection on its own is not enough, since what is needed is someone you can speak yourself out to, and from whom you can receive a recognition that does not require you to distort yourself in order to get it. That, incidentally, is one of the things good counselling offers.

What to do with this when obligations weigh on you

All of this might sound as though the answer is to put up with anything, and it is not. The claim is not that every duty expresses freedom, but that some duties do and others do not, and that telling them apart is a concrete and liberating task.

A duty expresses your freedom when it answers to something you genuinely value, when you can recognise your own will in it even when it costs you, and when the bond it serves also sustains you. It does not when it merely obeys someone else's expectation that you never examined, when the bond runs one way and only takes, or when you accepted the obligation out of fear or guilt rather than conviction.

The difference rarely lies in the obligation itself and almost always in the relationship you have with it. Caring for an ill parent can be one of the most meaningful things in a life or a silent sentence, and what decides between the two is not the task but whether you have been able to make it your own.

Try this. Make a list of your current obligations and ask yourself, for each one, whether you could say “I want this, even though it costs me”. Where the answer is yes, you are probably looking at a duty that expresses your freedom, and perhaps all you need is to recognise it as yours rather than live it as an imposition. Where the answer is no, it is worth looking at why it is still there, what expectation, what fear or what guilt is holding it in place.

Try this as well. Think of something you do for another person that you do not experience as a sacrifice. That experience, which nearly all of us have in some corner of our lives, is the concrete proof that wanting and owing can coincide. The useful question is not how to get out of your obligations, but how to bring more areas of your life to have that quality.

Frankl and the meaning that lies outside, not within

Everything above converges, from another tradition and in another language, with one of Viktor Frankl's central claims, which is self-transcendence. Frankl held that a human being is not fulfilled by withdrawing into themselves, but by going out of themselves. That is to say, meaning is not invented from within but discovered outside, in a task that calls to be done or in another person to love. Self-realisation, he said, cannot be pursued directly, because it is an effect that appears once you have given yourself to something other than yourself.

Set side by side, the three ideas say something very similar from different angles. Hegel shows that a will with nowhere to realise itself remains a private intention. Taylor shows that a choice without horizons of significance becomes trivial, and that identity is not generated in solitude. And Frankl shows that a life aimed exclusively at one's own fulfilment ends up empty, because meaning lives in the relationship with what lies beyond oneself.

At bottom, all three call into question the same picture, that of the individual who would be freer and more fulfilled the less tied down they were. And all three propose the opposite, each in their own way, which is that what makes a claim on us is not what takes away our freedom and meaning, but the very thing in which both become possible.

The other as a source of meaning

There is a point where this convergence becomes especially concrete, and it is the place of the other. For Frankl, love is one of the principal routes of access to meaning, and it has a feature that greatly interested him. For him, to love is to grasp the other in their uniqueness, to see what only they are and what nobody could replace. Loving someone is, in that sense, an act of knowledge, and moreover an act that reveals possibilities in the other that are not yet realised.

This connects directly with what we saw in Taylor. The other is not merely the recipient of my meaning, but also the one who recognises me and before whom I come to be who I am. And it connects with Hegel, because in those bonds where wanting and owing coincide, the good of the other does not compete with my own but forms part of it.

This is why, when someone is going through an emptiness of meaning, the most useful question is rarely “what do I want?”, and almost always one of these others. Where am I needed? What is this situation asking of me? Who is waiting for me? Meaning, in this tradition, is not manufactured by looking inwards. It is found by responding.

Freedom, meaning and a life with inner approval

This way of thinking about freedom comes very close to what Existential Analysis observes in practice. When someone finds meaning, it is rarely because they looked inwards and found a grand purpose. More often it is because they discovered something outside themselves that called for their response, and gave themselves to it. Freedom is not lost in that giving. It is realised in it.

Conversely, many of the forms of distress we see today (exhaustion, resentment towards one's own commitments, the sense of living someone else's life, existential crises) are not resolved by getting rid of obligations, but by examining which of them can be recognised as your own and which need renegotiating or letting go. That examination is hard to do well alone, precisely because we define ourselves in dialogue.

Perhaps you recognise the tiredness of holding up a life you do not remember choosing, the guilt of wanting to escape your own obligations, or the difficulty of telling what you really want from what is expected of you. If any of this resonated with you, I want you to know that you do not have to walk that path alone. In my practice I accompany these processes through existentially oriented counselling and therapy and through philosophical consultation, two complementary ways of exploring, calmly and without rushing, the questions that truly matter. I work both in person and through online sessions, so that distance need not be an obstacle. If you would like to take a first step, I would be glad to welcome you.

I publish weekly articles on Philosophy and Psychology. To get notifications subscribe here.

If these questions resonate with you, my work in philosophical counseling and existential analysis offers a space for dialogue to think through how you are living and what life you want to build. If you would like to take that step, I invite you to get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

What is social freedom according to Hegel? It is the idea that we are free not when nobody gets in our way, nor only when we know what we want, but when we act in a shared world whose practices and institutions allow us to realise our ends, and where the ends of others are what make our own possible rather than a limit on them.

Why does Hegel say that duty is an expression of freedom? Because a will with nowhere to realise itself remains a private intention. Duty, when it answers to something we genuinely value and can recognise as our own, is the concrete way that will becomes real in the world.

Does this mean we have to accept any obligation? No. The claim is that some duties express our freedom and others do not. A duty does when it answers to something we value and the bond it serves also sustains us. It does not when it merely obeys other people's expectations that were never examined, or when it was accepted out of fear or guilt.

Why is being authentic not enough on its own? According to Charles Taylor, a choice only carries weight if some matters count more than others, and that importance is not something we decide. Authenticity therefore presupposes demands that come from beyond the self. Suppressing them removes the very thing that could have given significance to one's own life.

What is self-transcendence according to Frankl? It is the idea that a human being is fulfilled by going out of themselves rather than withdrawing into themselves. Meaning is not invented from within, it is discovered outside, in a task that calls to be done or in another person to love. Self-realisation appears as an effect of that giving, not as a goal pursued directly.

Why is the other a source of meaning? Because loving someone is grasping them in their uniqueness, in what only they are and what nobody could replace, and because it is also before others that we come to be who we are. Faced with an emptiness of meaning, the questions “where am I needed?” or “what is this situation asking of me?” tend to be more useful than “what do I want?”.

References

This article draws on Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1991 (originally published in Canada as The Malaise of Modernity), and on Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Freedom's Right), Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. Both develop, from different perspectives, the Hegelian idea of freedom set out in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Elements of the Philosophy of Right), 1821.