Kind Of Freedom Research Articles

A Certain Kind of Freedom

Άφρικα: A Certain Kind of Freedom is pivoting on artistic exploration and re-interpretation of a 'difficult' recent past. In part soundwalk, in part performance art, in part punk archaeology, in part getting lost in the dark; the work is a nocturnal rumination bringing together historical bewilderedness with first-person embodied experience of a place. The artist leads a night walk towards and inwards Agios Achillios island in Small Prespa Lake in Greece – near the borders of Albania, and North Macedonia – and back. En route, the walking audience is exposed to wildlife sounds and animal vocalisations, to orchestrated drama, and to historical records directly or indirectly concerning the broader geographical area and its significance during the Greek civil war.

Философское мышление на пути к свободе

The article considers one of the ways to achieve philosophical truth – the inner freedom of the subject. The doctrines of evolutionary epistemology and radical constructivism equate thinking with a means of adaptation. The best thinking is the one, thanks to which the organism survives and leaves maximum offspring. Freedom of thinking in such doctrines is absent, it is determined by the brain and its adaptive tasks. However, at a higher level of analyzing the human personality, one can speak of freedom. Heidegger establishes an inseparable connection be­tween freedom and truth: freedom is “letting beings be”. Only by letting this the cognizing subject can adequately cognize. This requires the renunciation of power, of mastery over the world, of its use as an instrument. Marion argues similarly in the doctrine of the saturated phenomenon. However, this kind of freedom can be called external. The notion of inner freedom is introduced. It is also inseparable from truth, and is now the truth of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge requires non-trivial approaches, as psychoanalysis has shown. The ar­ticle discusses the teaching of D. Winnicott on the true and false self and the theory of E. Ghent of “surrender”. The greatest obstacle to self-knowledge, according to Ghent and other theorists, are psychological defense barriers. They allow us to displace thoughts about ourselves that are unpleasant to us and undermine our self-confidence. In doing so, we alienate ourselves from our true Self. Ghent’s theory of “surrender” describes the breaking down of defense barriers and the in­ner liberation of the Self. Outwardly and inwardly free philosophical thinking is not the proof of a pre-known truth, but wandering (Heidegger). Genuine philo­sophical questioning does not know in advance where it will arrive, but on the way of wandering in a contemplative state it analyzes what is revealed to it

Konsep Kebebasan Menurut Will Kymlicka

This article talks about Will Kymlicka's concept of freedom. It should be noted that the emergence of Kymlicka's idea of freedom is inseparable from his big theme of "Multiculturalism". Kymlicka defines multiculturalism so that everyone must be treated properly by looking at their rights, because everyone has freedom both individually and in groups that are reflected in culture. For this reason, the most basic thing emphasized by Kymlicka is freedom. What kind of freedom does she offer? Kymlicka divides freedom into liberalism and individual freedom. As well as freedom in the context of culture. Therefore, I see that in reality everyone, be it from ethnicity, race, and so on, has the same rights. Free to express their opinions without any pressure from any party or group. The emergence of this concept was caused by the injustice experienced by Canadian society at that time. The issue raised is how Kymlicka strives for equality in everyone individually, as well as in groups. This means that everyone must receive the same treatment without discriminating between one group and another. Freedom means that there is an attitude of acceptance within each individual. The author will discuss why Will Kymlicka sees freedom as one of the most concerned ideas, in impacting the cultures of each ethnic group, race and so on.

New Materialist Freedom in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland

In Chloé Zhao's 2020 film Nomadland, Fern's commitment to eschewing a geolocalizable “home” uproots her from conventional patterns of domesticity and transforms her into an inhabitant of planet earth as a whole, enabling a new way of thinking about identity, environment, and the nature of human freedom. The kind of freedom that Fern's narrative evokes stands in deliberate contrast to the masculinized, heroic style of freedom that American films have done so much to promulgate. In contrast to this conventional representation of freedom, new materialist criticism has examined the many ways that human agency emerges from within a dense web of interconnections that bind together human beings with one another, with other life forms, with inanimate matter, and with the cosmic expanses of time and space. Nomadland can be understood as a film that picks up the iconography of conventional American cinematic freedom in order to redirect this iconography into a new materialist worldview.

Blue Dreams, Black Sleep

Dionne Brand’s meditative and narrative rule-breaking book, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, reveals the ways in which the incredible effortfulness of living, dreaming and sleeping is not only proof of a shared condition of Blackness but also of an antiblack world. Sleep (or a lack thereof) indexes scales of and relations to antiblackness. In this paper, I consider the mirrored boundaries between wakefulness/sleep and life/death, probing their psycho-existential and ontological infrastructures. I argue that these states of being are tethered, however tenuously, to each other and in doing so, clarify the stakes of the ostensibly quotidian and mundane. By analyzing insomnia, slumber, fever dreams and nightmares, the text reveals the literal and metaphorical coordinates that locate the bounds of Black consciousness and freedom. Black sleep becomes a kind of freedom, insofar as it offers reprieve that is only possible when the dreamwork is forgotten or psychically registered as nothing at all.

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

‘Openness in Action’ Early Steps in Cosmic Phenomenology

‘Openness in Action’ Early Steps in Cosmic Phenomenology

THE DEATHCAMP REALISM AS A SOURCE OF PUTINISM. ON THE PLATONIC HIERARCHY OF HUMAN FACULTIES IN VARLAM SHALAMOV’S GULAG STORIES.

In this study, I expedite Varlam Shalamov’s testimony from GULAG to illuminate the Platonic hierarchy of human faculties (appetite, will, intellect) with the help of the key “characters” of Stalin’s death camps: blatar, silovik, politik. I hypothesise that at the heart of Putin’s regime lies a “friendship” between crime syndicates (blatari) and secret police (siloviki) against the intelligentsia (politiki); an alliance of “law-breakers” and “law-enforcers” against “law-makers”. The contrast between blatari and politiki is that between two kinds of freedom: between freedom of choice and political freedom. It is the political freedom that allows us to recognize social life for what it is –– a game that is arbitrary because its rules were “spoken into being” and therefore can be renegotiated for the benefit of all “players”. In absence of this freedom to see the extant game as transient we run the danger of confusing it with an eternal state of affairs and thus turning it into a war to be won by all means necessary. I argue that the ultimate zero-sum-game of the death camp gave birth to the cynical ideology of Putin’s regime. However, Shalamov shows us how participation in the infinite-sum language game –– poetry –– allowed him and some of his fellow inmates to remember an alternative form of life and thus to imagine their way out of the scarcity mindset of the death camp.

HUMAN BEING IN THE SPACE OF ANTINOMIES

The idea of antithetical human nature and the concept of man as a bivalent creature are heuristic to reveal the problem of human being.The traditional antinomic splitting of anthropological features into one’s own – another’s, immanent – transcendent, freedom – necessity, good – evil, happiness –misfortune, etc. acquires a specific coloring in the Ukrainian realities. Purpose is to reveal the ambivalence of the image of a person, which acquires special features in the Ukrainian realities. Methodological basis are the principles of the phenomenological description of subjective experience, the means of historical and philosophical analysis, hermeneutical methods of understanding and interpretation.Discussion. These or those anthropological modes constitute the variability of the human (O.Bollnov, C.Jung, K.Jaspers, J.-P.Sartre, E.Fromm). The reasons for the mosaic nature of the human image are rooted in the existential inexhaustibility of the anthropological palette. The existence of man in the overtones of antinomies is evident in the studies of both domestic classics (V.Lypynsky, I.Franko) and modern Ukrainian philosophers (V.Malakhov, D.Sepety), and Western thinkers (V.Frankl, V.Tatarkevych, G.Hofstede). Conclusion. Controversial nature of the classical opposition of freedom – necessity turns in the Ukrainian realities into the opposition of “will” as an expressive meaningful constant and depressingly deathly “bondage”, and acquires tension of the binarism “freedom – death”. “Will” as the only state acceptable to a person, the authentically own, native way of being turns to a spectrum of modulations of the anthropological attribute of “oneself” as a native oecumene, a truly familiar and close space, opposed to the “alien” – land, people, language, custom, etc.The idea of parity of both – male and female – cores is quite adequate, since in Ukraine the Cossacks was an embodiment of perfect masculinity, “chivalrous nature”, similar to Western chivalry – with similar to chivalrous cult foundations (for example, the cult of the Mother of God and the cult of the Virgin Mary). After all, the ideology of the Cossacks demanded the convergence of the concepts of “nobleman” and “Cossack” as one who was “granted the liberties of a knightly people”.Controversial nature of the modes of life meaning, happiness disappears, losing expressive signs of confrontation and turning into a tense uniqueness of the constants of meaning of life, fate, finiteness of a person as a whole.The concept of happiness, extrapolating into the opposition of happiness /fate – disaster /sorrow (deprivation, misfortune), powerful for Ukrainian culture, is connotative with “will” (after all, “what kind of freedom is such a fate...”), on the one hand, and “underweight” – an evil fate, on the other hand. However, on the existential plane, the life-meaning ethical component of happiness loses its dramatic controversial vector: happiness with its internal semantic and moral modulations is a selfsufficient value.

(Digital) anthologies and genre: Writing sexual pleasure and poetic freedom

“Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellion against that repressed form of self-alienation and her striving toward poetic sexual freedom resulted in her commissioning and editing two anthologies, Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. Investment in correcting the silence around sex(ual) pleasure is echoed and amplified in a growing number of anthologies, mostly digital. What is the conceptual repertoire the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom? Are there discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? What kind of freedom is possible in writing and publishing erotic and/or pornographic texts in a digital space? Drawing on the collections’ editorial notes, secondary materials on the founders of the collectives and hubs, Phyllis Taoua’s reflections on freedom, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story “The Oink in Doinker,” I argue that this genre and its current success is all about freedom in its instrumental and substantive guises. Specifically, I show how in combating sexual moralists through the distribution of their literary output via the Internet, these writers engage online platforms as instrumental freedoms. Using those instrumental freedoms, they practice and aspire to substantive freedoms by presenting a radical vision of sexual permissiveness, and thus remedying a stale literary scene through experimentation with content and style, which equally affords their readers a certain degree of substantive freedom. In their practices and aspiration exists the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between the two kinds of freedom.

Философская теология Хр.А. Крузия

The theoretical natural theology of Chr.A. Crusius is presented in his major metaphysical treatise “The Outline of Necessary Truths of Reason, in so far as they are Opposed to Contingent Truths”. In this treatise the philosopher and theologian from Leipzig consistently sets forth proofs of Godʼs existence, Godʼs properties, and actions. Proving the existence and describing the properties of God, Crusius applies his a priori analytic method, while characterizing Godʼs actions and influences, he appeals to the synthetic method. The most extensive and original section is the section on the essence and properties of God, in which Crusius groups all the divine properties into two large classes: the inactive properties and the active, or energetic, properties. The key issue, which is related to the property of Godʼs perfection, is freedom. Freedom is divided into freedom of contradiction (libertas contradictionis) and freedom of opposition (libertas contrarietatis). Crusius asserts the infinity of both kinds of freedoms with respect to possibility, and their certain limitations with respect to actuality. The freedom of contradiction consists in the possibility to carry out an action or to refuse to carry it out. The freedom of opposition consists in the possibility, under the same circumstances, to make one or the other choice. In a polemic with G.W. Leibniz and Chr. Wolff, Crusius justifies both the freedom of contradiction and the freedom of opposition of God in the act of creation. Further, the justification has had direct cosmological consequences. Crusius denies the existence of the best world among the possible worlds and asserts the existence of some number of equally good worlds. This lets him demonstrate in the creation of the world the preservation of both the freedom of contradiction of God (the opportunity to create and not to create) and the freedom of opposition (arbitrary choice of one possible world among equally good worlds). Substantiating two kinds of Godʼs freedom in the act of creation, Crusius also argues for human freedom, religion, and morality, which would be impossible without the preservation of divine freedom. Further specification of the doctrine of equally good worlds and their properties has been specified by Crusiusʼ supporters A.F. Reinhard and D. Weymann. All these have triggered, in their turn, a polemic about optimism.

Social freedom and dignity of the human person according to Nikolai Berdyaev

Contemporary European democracies, and liberalism in particular, are established upon the foundations of humanism. Humanism, as its name entails, denotes the elevation of the human being and setting up of the person to the centre of the universe. Humanism was a reaction against the mediaeval view of the omnipotent and omniscient God, and seeks an understanding of the human being that would fulfil his/her intuitive desire for genuine human dignity. What kind of freedom would be sufficient and adequate for true human dignity? Faced with this radical understanding of freedom, which originates from, and is dictated by, the deepest realms of the human being, most humanist thinkers chose to reject both God and the idea of the divine icon. Humanism denied man?s divine sonship and proclaimed that man is the son of nature. Hence, Humanism not only declared man?s self-confidence, but it also debased him, by defining him as a product of natural necessity. Liberalism, argues the Russian philosopher Berdyaev, has created a ?single-plane? being, it has separated the citizen from the integral personality, by refusing to admit the spiritual dimension of the human being. Berdyaev stresses that true freedom cannot be simply a formal self-defence, but that it must rather lead to creative activity. This is why the transition is inevitable from formal liberty, which protects us and defends us, to true freedom capable not only of creatively transforming the human society but also of creating a new world.

Passive Tolerance versus Political Engagement. Antistius Constans, Koerbagh, Van den Enden, and Spinoza

This article investigates the contribution of Spinoza and authors of his circle (Antistius Constans, Van den Enden and Koerbagh) on the modern conception of tolerance. In his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza launches the libertas philosophandi-question integrating two kinds of freedom between which there is a tension: freedom of thought and speech and freedom of religious conscience. As freedom means living and acting in society in light of one’s own interests, tolerance becomes a political issue that depends from political perspectives and priorities. This insight leads Spinoza to bringing together the control of political authority on religious affairs and a political regime of religious plurality and toleration. These ideas seem to be reminiscent of texts published in his immediate circle: the anonymus De jure ecclesiasticorum (1665); the political pamphlets Kort verhael (1662) and Vrye Politijke Stellingen (1665) of his teacher Van den Enden; the subversive dictionary Een Bloemhof (1668) and the systematic philosophical Een Ligt (1668) of Koerbagh. In these texts the question of religion and religious authority shifts to the question of the nature and origin of political authority. The authors all criticize the abuse of power in light of the idea that there is no freedom without equality and no equality without freedom. Together with Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus (1677), they thereby form an anomaly within the anomaly of the Calvinist Low Countries that regards specifically this radical democratic view. They are not so much talking about tolerance but about everyone’s active participation in political life which is necessary for the rescue of the republic.

“It’s a kind of freedom”: adolescents and parents speak about motivations for active travel and COVID-19

ABSTRACT Purpose Active travel (AT) incorporates physical activity into daily living, critical for healthy adolescent development. We explore adolescent and parent attitudes and behaviours related to motivations for adolescent AT and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We conducted semi-structured Zoom interviews with 25 adolescent-parent dyads in communities across Israel during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thematic content analysis was used to develop categories and themes. Results We identified key themes related to adolescent AT: Fostering independence enables adolescent AT; Pampering and safety concerns inhibit adolescent AT; Family and community norms influence adolescent travel modes; Personal enjoyment and positive attitudes facilitate AT; Peers and social networks promote adolescent AT and PA; Built environment and transport options influence AT choices. Interestingly, adolescents indicate AT is an opportunity for peer-to-peer communication without screen distraction, yet they use social media to promote AT and PA. Conclusions The findings point to the influence of positive parent perceptions, active and supportive family and community norms on adolescent AT. Peer norms and social networks as well as features of the built environment also have the potential to influence AT. The COVID-19 pandemic encouraged use of AT and provided a setting for positive AT experiences.

Uber mobilities, algorithms, and consumption: Politicizing ethical reflection

Based on an ethnography of Uber’s arrival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this article uses a political economy approach to think politically about ethical reflections concerned with what good mobilities are, how they should be governed and what kinds of relations they entail. I found that particular understandings of what algorithms were and did, and how, however spurious, superficial or derivative, triangulated the differential salience and (re)production of juridical technicalities, political philosophy, naturalized mobilities and ideas of moral and political freedoms to modulate an ethical orientation to mobility in the grammar of facts, realpolitik, a kind of freedom and an attunement to ‘the bottom line’. Ultimately, my goal is to understand through this particular kind of mobility how certain problems become ethical in certain forms to certain people, and how particular dispositions prevail over others.

Kebebasan Beragama di Indonesia dalam Terang Pemikiran Barcuh de Spinoza

This paper pays attention to the issue of religious freedom in Indonesia. Freedom of religion is one of the individual rights of every person. People are free to choose religion according to their minds. By reason, it means that humans recognize the values that are sparked in a religion. The duty of the state is to guarantee religious freedom. In the Indonesian context, freedom of religion is guaranteed in the legal basis contained in the 1945 Constitution. However, it is inevitable that this kind of freedom is also subject to discriminatory treatment. To underline this, Spinoza, a philosopher who greatly respected reason, explained the importance of religious freedom as an individual choice. Freedom of religion according to him should not be restrained by any authority. This paper was written using the literature method which tries to confront Spinoza's thoughts on religious freedom with the issue of religious freedom in Indonesia.

Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins

Reviewed by: Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins Peter Howarth Hollis Robbins. Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2020. 264 pp. $32.95. In 2018, Hollis Robbins went to hear poet Natasha Trethewey give a prestigious lecture. Trethewey spoke about her mixed-race family, the "racial determinism" of her Southern upbringing, and her fondness for the sonnet, a "received European form" (2). Preempting the inevitable criticism that such forms are endemically white, privileged and male, Trethewey quoted Audre Lorde's warning that the master's tools could be never used to dismantle the master's house, but then added that in her own writing life, "I have turned to such forms to contain the subject-matter necessary to challenge the master narrative." After the applause, Robbins asked a question: "How many sonnets have to be written before someone says she received the form from a Black poet?" (2). Trethewey was silent, and then acknowledged that for her, the sonnet had indeed come from Gwendolyn Brooks, not from Europe. Forms of Contention argues that this has been true for a good while. The sonnet is no longer a form borrowed from Europe or white America but is instead one Black writers now own themselves, given the superb sonnets and sequences written by Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Nelson and Trethewey herself. It also maintains that a distinct Black sonnet-writing tradition has been there all along but has been lost by the nineteenth-century newspaper, the anthologies of the twentieth century, and the late modernism of the Black Arts movement. The result is that a sonnet like Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is never considered "representative" of influential Black poetry the way Langston Hughes is, and the great number of Black sonnets in newspapers and anthologies are overlooked as inauthentic and genteel. "Too many ancestors have been forgotten," Robbins writes, "too much nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry was banished from the Black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too 'traditional'" (2). Forms of Contention aims to correct this act of selective memory on both counts. It wants to recover the Black sonneteers from the eighteenth-century onward, and to show that their work forms an authentic tradition of influences, inheritances and rewritings, a multigenerational chain of sonnets. It succeeds admirably at the first task, but to find a "distinct genre" (118) of the African American sonnet is harder work, historically. This is not because Black poets have not brilliantly wrested the form into shapes that express distinctly African American situations and struggles. Robert Hayden's boundary-bursting sonnet "To Frederick Douglass" or Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps" sequence about the US Navy officers penned below decks and their fiancées hemmed in at home are among the best sonnets ever written, without doubt. But the act of adapting the sonnet's pleading to new causes is also part of its tradition. Petrarch made the sonnet famous with his addresses of sexual desire and thwarted ambition, but those appeals were soon transformed into wrestlings with God, or demands for political honor to be restored, or from Milton onward, for both. Wordsworth and Southey took over Milton's enjambed lines and used them to thunder against slavery itself. In that sense, African American poets have been fully traditional from the start, Phillis Wheatley's 1768 appeal to King George: Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,And from his head let every evil fly!And may each clime with equal gladness seeA monarch's smile can set his subjects free! [End Page 242] Scholars debate the degree to which her blessing of the King for repealing the hugely unpopular Stamp Act (a tax paying for British troops in the colonies) contains a plea for other kinds of freedom. But given Wheatley's captive status, to write a sonnet to God and the sovereign at all gave the genre new vigor by giving it a new range of causes to plead. The trickier task that Forms of Contention has set itself, though, is to find a self-aware...

KINDS OF FRIENDSHIP IN JAMES DASHNER’S NOVEL THE DEATH CURE

The aim of this study is to analyze the kinds of friendship in James Dashner’s novel The Death Cure. Most importantly, true friendship stands for a relationship free of any judgments. In a true friendship, a person can be themselves completely without the fear of being judged. It makes you feel loved and accepted. This kind of freedom is what every human strives to have in their lives. The data are taken from the novel by using descriptive analysis. The method used is descriptive qualitative method. The results show that there are three kinds of friendship found in the novel. They are friendship of utility, friendship of pleasure and friendship of virtue. Friendship of utility gives the protagonist an advantage in finding the cure. Friendship of pleasure brings the protagonist happiness in life. Meanwhile, friendship of virtue gives the protagonist a convenient life. A good friendship should give a comfortable feeling and form better human beings.

Struggling for Freedom from Caste in Colonial India: The Story of Rettaimalai Srinivasan

Rettaimalai Srinivasan (1860–1945), a Dalit leader in colonial India, argued that there were two kinds of freedom struggles being waged in the region–one against the British and the other against caste. His autobiography, published in Tamil in 1938, is likely the first Dalit autobiography, and along with his other papers, pamphlets, and speeches comprises a potent anti-caste archive that is yet to be studied. In these texts, Srinivasan defined untouchability as a complex of social and economic practices and emphasized the role of Dalit leadership in undoing these practices. As his work indicates, the freedom struggle against caste required a re-signification of caste names and untouchability itself and an increased representation of Dalit groups within governance. By seeking to turn the name of the Pariah caste into one that could be used with pride, he continuously grappled with the question of self-representation and an appropriate vocabulary to do so. His definition of untouchability as intimately linked with agrarian labour lies at the heart of his emphasis on the importance of Dalit representatives governing and leading people from these communities towards freedom.

Why Does God Need Freedom?


 
 
 God is often portrayed as being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Many worry that these traits make it so that God cannot possess free will. However, very little is said about why a God without freedom would be an issue. I argue that God does not need the kind of freedom we usually care about. I make a case that free will is important to us because it allows us to assign blame and praise to others. From here, I argue that being able to blame God is unimportant, and that God can still be praised even without free will.