Outlines for a Phenomenology of Freedom

Abstract

The article deals with the question of phenomenological ethics, comparing Husserl’s and Fink’s ways of understanding the phenomenological reduction and thereby the pedagogical tasks of phenomenology, whose existential meaning lies in the “doctrine of freedom” (“Lehre von der Freiheit”), which is in turn closely linked with the problem of the beginning of philosophizing, since the phenomenological reduction presupposes itself. A comparison between Fink’s and Patocka’s views of freedom as transcendence (expressed by the concepts of hermitry and sacrifice), as well as a phenomenological reading of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values in relation to the educational theme of the Idealbildung, will let us see how Fink’s cosmological philosophy, having its hermeneutic keystone in the phenomenon of play, still has phenomenological features and pedagogical implications, being describable as a phenomenology of freedom, whose idea of freedom as “experiment” or as man’s “self-production” presents interesting analogies with Arendt’s view of action.