Possibility Of Freedom Research Articles

The Consequence argument and the Mind argument

Van Inwagen, like many other libertarians, is convinced by the argument. But there is a problem: one of the presuppositions of the Consequence argument seems to yield a powerful argument for the incompatibility of freedom and indeterminism, an argument van Inwagen calls the Mind argument.1 It seems, then, that what many have taken to provide the most powerful reason to reject compatibilism also provides reason to embrace scepticism about the very possibility of freedom. Since van Inwagen is a libertarian and would like to reject both compatibilism and scepticism, he recognizes the need to respond to this problem. His solution is to identify and reject a premiss of the Mind argument not shared by the Consequence argument, but he admits that he does not know 'how it could be' that the premiss in question is false.

The Consequence argument and the Mind argument

Van Inwagen, like many other libertarians, is convinced by the argument. But there is a problem: one of the presuppositions of the Consequence argument seems to yield a powerful argument for the incompatibility of freedom and indeterminism, an argument van Inwagen calls the Mind argument.1 It seems, then, that what many have taken to provide the most powerful reason to reject compatibilism also provides reason to embrace scepticism about the very possibility of freedom. Since van Inwagen is a libertarian and would like to reject both compatibilism and scepticism, he recognizes the need to respond to this problem. His solution is to identify and reject a premiss of the Mind argument not shared by the Consequence argument, but he admits that he does not know 'how it could be' that the premiss in question is false.

What is the Question for which Hegel's Theory of Recognition is the Answer?

The claim I propose to defend is that Hegel’s ‘theory of recognition’ is intended as an answer to a specific question in his systematic philosophy. That question is the question of the nature and the very possibility of freedom.1 This will be controversial for several reasons. First I want to treat his mature theory of ethical life or the ethical community (Sittlichkeit) (the theory published as the account of ‘objective spirit’ in the Encyclopedias and most familiarly in the lectures on the Philosophy of Right) as an extension of the original, or Jena-period theory of recognition, not its abandonment.2 A widely accepted view has it that while Hegel was originally interested in accounting for the nature and authority of social institutions by appeal to a basic inter-subjective encounter and the ‘realisation’ of such inter-subjective links, he came later to abandon that view about inter-subjectivity, and believed instead that human social and political existence was best understood and legitimated as a manifestation of a grand metaphysical process, an Absolute Subject’s manifestation of itself, or a Divine Mind’s coming to self-consciousness.3 On this interpretation, what had been a competing modern theory about the nature of human sociality, a rival to Machiavellian and Hobbsean attempts to understand how and why persons forge the links of dependence and authority that they do and must, and so a rival account of an original dependence tied to the problem of recognition, status, esteem and solidarity, not fear, power and security, became instead a conservative, organic theory, with individuals mere accidents of ‘the truly real’ ethical substance manifesting itself in time and with no central role any more to inter-subjective experience. My claim will be that this interpretation is insufficiently attentive to the unusual foundations of the mature theory of ethical life, or to Hegel’s theory of spirit (Geist), and so to the very unusual account of freedom that position justifies. Once the latter is in view, I want to show, it is much easier to see how the ‘ethical life theory’ is an account of successful recognition, or a mutuality based on a kind of rational acknowledgement. Secondly the claim is controversial because defending that proposition will involve the claim that the theory of recognition is not primarily to be understood (as it often is in post-war Hegel scholarship) as a comprehensive transcendental theory about self-awareness, as if about the possibility of any self-relation (as if the contents of any such self-relation are and must be internalisations of ways of being-regarded by others), is not primarily a genetic theory about the formation

Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred

MARIA KARAFILIS Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred Today ... it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the "making of geography" more than the "making of history" that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies Is the system of slavery, as set forth in the American slave code, right! Is it so desirable, that you will directly establish it over broad regions, where, till now, you have solemnly forbidden it to enter? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred By the mid nineteenth century, the persistence of the domestic slave trade, along with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, suggested that the abolition of slavery was not imminent. In fact, the "peculiar institution" was expanding , and threatened to turn recently acquired western territories into slave states. As emancipation seemed increasingly precarious, and the possibility offreedom for slaves in the United States less secure, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her lesser-known but more militant anti-slavery novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). In Dred, Stowe depicts several potential sites where African Americans could participate in democratic communities and notions of racial hierarchy could be challenged. These potential sites include a reformed Southern plantation , a settlement offree and fugitive blacks in Canada, and a maroon community in the Great Dismal Swamp. The first two locales end up replicating the repressive systems ofhierarchy that undergird the racist, dominant order and thus are specious alternatives of democtatic pracArizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 24Maria Karaflis tice, while the latter, the swamp, is the primary arena that holds out the possibility of meaningful sociopolitical transformation. These reconceptualizations of sites of democratic action serve to contrast the poetic and idealized notion of "America" with the geopolitical territory and official state apparatus of the "United States." By suggesting an alternative space—not the American sacred space of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers—Stowe challenges the concept of America as the otdained and divinely favored locus of freedom and equality and theteby tetertitotializes the national imaginaty. The geopolitical territoty of the United States is dissociated from the ideal manifestation of democracy, and the authot locates the latter somewhere else. This "somewhere else" is not in an experimental collectivity or commune in the United States (like Brook Fatm, for example), but in the "un-American" borderland space of the swamp. That location suggests both the degree to which racist ideologies have petmeated the American system, symbolized by the geopolitical territoty, and saturated the "land"—both the territory and its métonymie reference to the people and state—with anti-black sentiment. It also suggests a disturbing , concomitant need to physically remove oneself from U.S. soil in order to develop an alternative consensus and sociopolitical system. Examining Dred in terms of spatialization and the loci of democratic ideals and practices brings to the fore such questions as, "What can be a space offreedom for blacks in America?" and "Where can such marginalized populations achieve the liberty and freedom promised to all men by the Declatation of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?" These questions concerning space and freedom were particularly pressing and politically charged when Stowe was writing Dred in the 1850s, as the nation simultaneously debated extending slavery into the new territories and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which separated the region into two distinct states and allowed for popular sovereignty to determine whether the states would be slave or free territories. Intranational borders, then, and the "line" at which slavery stops were hotly contested, and with profound social, economic, and political consequences. Dred represents an intervention into the debate concerning spaces of "freedom " and spaces of slavery in the United States, and it is an argument against extending slavery into the new territories. Charles Sumner, Stowe's close friend and Congress member, recog- Spaces of Democracy25 nized the value of Stowe's new book in combating the Kansas-Nebraska Act and arresting the spread of slavery. In a letter to her in the early 1850s Sumner wrote, "1 am rejoiced to learn, from your...

Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel' Compatibilism

The problem of freedom in modern philosophy has three basic components: (i) what is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? (ii) Is it possible so to act? (iii) And how important is leading a free life?1 Hegel proposed unprecedented and highly controversial answers to these questions. (i) What we want to be able to explain when we ask ‘what is freedom?’ are the conditions that must be fulfilled such that my various deeds and projects could be, and could be experienced by me as being, my deeds and projects, as happening at all in some way because of me, spontan, sua sponte, etc. If they are ‘mine’, they shouldn’t seem or be alien, as if belonging to or produced by someone or something else or as if fated or coerced or practically unavoidable, and so forth.2 How exactly to say this, how to link such deeds and projects with me such that they count as due to me or count as mine and are thereby instances of freedom is the great problem.3 In answer to this question, and unlike many philosophers influenced by the Christian tradition, Hegel does not defend a voluntarist position on the nature of freedom, but instead, let us say, a ‘state’ theory. He does not understand the possibility of freedom to depend on the possession of a causal power of some kind by an individual, the power to initiate action by an act of will in some way independent of antecedent causal conditions. Contrary to many compatibilists, being free does not involve any sort of causality at all. In his Science of Logic, the ‘application’ of the causal relation to organic and mental life in general is unequivocally said to be simply inappropriate (unstatthaft).4 Instead, freedom is understood by Hegel to involve a certain sort of self-relation and a certain sort of relation to others; it is constituted by being in a certain self-regarding and a certain sort of ‘mutually recognizing’ state.5 This state of self-consciousness and socially mediated self-reflection, defined in a highly elaborate systematic way as a ‘rational’ selfand other-relation, counts as being free.6 This is an active state, a state of doing, a way of being that involves activities and practices that are distinguished as free by all being undertaken in a certain way, not by having a special causal origin. (ii) Hegel defends the possibility of freedom, but in what we would call (initially if a bit misleadingly) a compatibilist, not an incompatibilist form. Since I do not need to be able to think of myself as an uncaused cause in order to qualify as a free subject, I do not need to establish, either metaphysically or as a practical condition,

Human nature, freedom and political community: An interview with Noam Chomsky

For Noam Chomsky ‘human nature’ is a clearly defined concept, biologically endowed and largely independent of social and historical conditions. Because its deepest properties are genetically determined, for Chomsky the study of human nature ought to proceed in much the same way the functions of other bodily organs are examined. His ground‐breaking research into the language faculty, which he claims is one of the more accessible attributes of human nature, revolutionised the study of linguistics and cognitive science generally in the 1950s and 1960s. However, this approach has put him at odds with those, such as behavioural scientists and existentialist philosophers, who have long argued that physical and mental development should be understood as separate processes because of the overwhelming influence of environmental conditions on the latter. It also sets him apart from some recent post‐modern thinkers who deny the existence of an intrinsic human nature, arguing that our moral and political values are socially and historically determined. For his part, Chomsky still finds it odd that what we take for granted in explaining physical growth becomes so ‘controversial’ in a discussion of the psychological aspects of human nature. Noam Chomsky's understanding of human nature underwrites his conception of desirable social and political arrangements. A good society, according to Chomsky, is one ‘that leads to [the] satisfaction of intrinsic human needs, insofar as material conditions allow’ (Peck, 1988, p. 195). It should give expression to an ‘instinct for freedom, the consciousness of which gives us ‘the opportunity to create social conditions and social forms to maximize the possibilities of freedom, diversity, and individual self‐realization (Chomsky, 1973, pp. 395–6). Libertarian socialists and anarchists like Chomsky believe complex industrial societies can be organised within a framework of free institutions and structures leading to, in Rocker's words, a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interests and arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract’ (Peck, 1988, pp. 191–2). An appreciation of Chomsky's understanding of human nature provides some important clues to his political values, specifically his attitudes towards human rights, the nation‐state and alternative form of political community. These topics are explored in the interview below which is divided into two parts: human nature and moral behaviour; and political community and globalisation.

Kierkegaardian Implications of Punishment, Guilt, and Forgiveness for Education

Students have to be punished if they have made a serious transgression. Avoidance of punishment will lead to serious complications. But punishment is inseparably linked with guilt and forgiveness. The inability of individuals to forgive themselves was regarded by Kierkegaard to be an emanation of individual false pride, a kind of vanity. This type of despair, a psychological and spiritual disorder, is a serious and debilitating problem. The inability to escape this despair of forgiveness can lead to a loss of genuine humanness. Unchecked, this despair can lead to unrelatedness of self to itself and fear of the possibility of freedom. Thus the self-knowledge attainable in despair over the forgiveness of an offense would lead to what we would call a successful rehabilitation of the individual and his or her conjunct reintegration into society. Kierkegaard's ideas on punishment are interesting — historically and philosophically speaking — because they represent a softening of a harsh view of punishment by stressing the humanizing aspects of guilt and forgiveness.

Hegel's System of Needs: The Elementary Relations of Economic Justice

The Philosophy of Right is not usually taken to contain a prescriptive ethics. Yet to establish as much regarding the elementary relations of the economy is the task of this essay. The project is cast into three parts. It begins with Hegel's account in the ‘Introduction’ of the free self prior to the exposition of the modes of just conduct or philosophy of right proper. It is an account of freedom not yet realized — without any particular content. Yet, the point is established that the philosophy of justice will be based on a twofold notion of self-determination. Most of the ‘Introduction’ concerns the argument that freedom or valid conduct has to do with pure self-determination, the self determining itself. The claim is also made that philosophy establishes its own legitimacy through its conceptual self-determination. Part two deals with the question of how freedom can be realized in civil society where the individual's governing orientation is particularity. The characteristic features of civil society do not encourage the expectation that freedom can be realized there. One, particularity itself appears to be rooted in a natural necessity which seems to preclude any possibility of freedom. Two, the inherently social character of civil society seems to rule out the exercise of a freedom that is about the self's relation to itself in self-determination. Three, the pursuit of particularity characteristic of civil society seems inherently antisocial and thus not a suitable mode of conduct for ethics. However, the argument will be made that the theory can conceive of the relations of particularity in a way that makes the free self inherently social and particularity both social and free from natural determinations.

The role of Augusto Pérez: A study of Niebla

From the opening pages, the reader immedi ately observes that Niebla is about a form of art or, more specifically, about the novel. The pro logues discuss the subject, but the theme is de veloped, above all, by Augusto, the central protagonist or agonist. The first chapter begins with Augusto's entrance into a reality he avoided prior to the writing of the novel. As Augusto engages in activities he is creating his external reality and the very text of which he is a part. Clearly, Augusto is an artist in his own right, and the novel's sequence of events leads logically to his confrontation with Unamuno as they debate the question of authorship and authoritiy with respect to the work. Although the existential, psychological and lit erary dimensions of the novel are connected, this paper will focus on one central theme: the nature of artistic production. The context in which this activity occurs, the process it initiates, and the problem it occasions are a primary concern of Niebla and the topic of this study. Niebla?mist?by its very title suggests a world of endless flux and a novelist-creator trying to give order to this amorphous substance or shape less mass of reality. The artist is Augusto who enacts this role as he tells his tale or lives his life. Let us recall from the outset that if Unamuno created Augusto and put him into motion, it is Augusto who acts and make decisions which allow him to develop his existence. Augusto him self defines the part he plays: Como yo ahora aqu?*, representando a solas mi comedia, hecho actor y espectador a la vez (XVIII, 619).1 Carlos Blanco Aguinaga and Leon Livingstone emphasize Augusto's function as a self-conscious actor, and in turn, author, whose projection of self-created images establish and preserve the personality.2 And this theory, as Robert Alter points out, has ramifications for it establishes Niebla as an experiment in the possibilities of freedom in fiction writing. Alter compares Un amuno's nimia to D.H. Lawrence's narrative form and writes: . .and Lawrence's new open form, in which protagonists end up talking about their lives as though they were novelists deter mining how to handle the fiction of their own experience, would be one possible realization of Unamuno's program.3 Support for these theories comes directly from the text as Unamuno through V?ctor explains a character's function in the nivola: 'Voy a escribir una novela, pero voy a escribirla como se vive, sin saber lo que vendra . . . Mis personajes se ir?n haciendo seg?n obren y hablen;. . .su car?c ter se ir? formando poco a poco... (XVII, 615). If Augusto's independence makes Niebla a spon taneous or viviparous novel,4 such a classification reveals only a partial truth about the compostion since the work has a carefully articulated plan which relies heavily on August as the author of his own life. Paul Olson makes this observation and concludes: Paradoxically, the idea of living and writing 'sin plan previo' appears to be a basic 'plan previo' for this novel. . .5 With Augusto's status as a creator and consequently, an artist established, Unamuno devises a worthy counter part to exemplify the nivola s intent, as we shall see.

The feasibility of universal grants under democratic capitalism

Today unemployment is a cultural, not an economic problem. By this I mean the following: (1) no economic solution to growing unemployment is in view; (2) if it is not necessary that people perform unpleasant work, they should not be forced to do it; and (3) not working will not be viewed individually and socially as undesirable if certain institutional and cultural changes occur. A central political problem of our times is to transform the deprivation resulting from growing unemployment into a celebration of increasing freedom from unpleasant work ("toil"). The economic preconditions of this transformation are present: this is why we have massive unemployment. Political, cultural, and institutional preconditions are as yet absent: this is why we experience the possibility of freedom as widespread deprivation.

Food and Freedom in The Flounder

I.Ji.\S WE WATCH in terrified fascination the coming of the third and last world war, in our age of universal television that brings starving children and dying soldiers nightly into each living room, we know less than ever how to think about responsibility. Whose fault is it that the world is as it is? Whose fault that I am as I am? Whose job is it to change the world? To change me? For those of us committed to the radical or the liberal left, to human liberation, these questions pose a special dilemma. If we blame oppression on the powerful and privileged who benefit from it, then their victims and we ourselves are likely to seem like helpless objects. Look what they are doing to us! And thereby the possibility of freedom is mystified: how can objects ever become free actors? It may then seem that a magic legislator is required to make the transformation-to import or even impose freedom. In order to realize my powers, don't I have to recognize my complicity in my own victimization? Yet, if to escape this horn of the dilemma, we stress the victims' complicity, insisting that freedom cannot be given but must be taken and that it is a constant potential in us all, even the most oppressed, then we are gored by the other horn. For then we seem to be blaming the victim and denying the legitimate anger of the oppressed. Recognizing that normally suppressed anger and its legitimacy also seems essential to liberation. The political theorists do not seem able to help us here, for these very issues trouble the interpretation of thinkers like Marx and Freud, Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt. What is the right way to understand the relationship between politics and economics, between choice and necessity in history, between ideals and bodily needs and drives, between public and private, or-in the words of Richard Flacks-between 6making history and making life?'

The Theatre of Friedrich Durrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom

The Theatre of Friedrich Durrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom

The Theatre of Friedrich Dürrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom by Kenneth S. Whitton (review)

The Theatre of Friedrich Dürrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom by Kenneth S. Whitton (review)

Book Reviews

Doris V. Falk, Lillian Hellman, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin Katherine Lederer, Lillian Hellman, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin Lois C. Gottlieb, Rachel Crothers, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin Steven H. Bills, Lillian Hellman: An Annotated Bibliography, reviewed by Katherine Lederer Mary Marguerite Riordan, Lillian Hellman, A Bibliography: 1926-1978, reviewed by Katherine Lederer Kenneth S. Whitton, The Theatre of Friedrich Diirrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom, reviewed by Armin Arnold René Bablet, ed., Les Voies de La création théâtrale, reviewed by Laure Riése

The medieval Arab poet and the limits of freedom

am concerned with the poet and adib, since they are the creators of those classical Arabic works which are the forerunner, or the equivalent of, modern Arabic literature -classical Arabic literature in the narrow sense. Moreover, at least until the end of the third century A.H., it was the poet who was the literary creator par excellence, and many poets, especially in pre-Islamic and Umayyad times, did not write down their own compositions. So I have chosen to modify the title of the session to suit the subject of this paper, the possibilities for freedom of expression open to the Arab poet in the early medieval period, though I shall also refer to prose writers where relevant.

A Reading of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants

A reader familiar with Bernard Malamud's works is likely to turn to a new novel by this well-established writer with certain expectations. He will probably count on meeting again Malamud's variant of the Yiddish shlemiel: the fool-victim, who is the butt of fate and men, bungling his way through life, but who somehow manages to endure it all, helped by his foolhardy persistence and his wry grimaces and shrugs. Among other strands that enter into the fabric of a Malamud novel or story there is the all-too-human female character – one hesitates to dub her ‘ heroine ’ – whose gift of love tends to be a dubious blessing. The male protagonist's personality and destiny are often given depth and scope through the motif of the double; this is not exactly the Romantic Doppelgänger, but rather two characters whose destinies are linked in various ways, sometimes in a (spiritual) father-son pattern. The heroic-unheroic action will very likely take place in an atmosphere of isolation and imprisonment, the ghetto being a prototypical setting. The past will most certainly play a small but important role as a means of creating depth and resonance; it may appear as history, legend or myth. Touches of a pastoral world – trees, flowers, birds – will hint at possibilities of freedom, purity and innocence. The shlemiel will never really be attuned to these happier strains; nevertheless there will most probably be a movement in his development toward a qualifies rebirth, a limited redemption, which will have to be bought with suffering and commitment. This might be the commitment of the artist, and the satisfaction of wholehearted dedication will be balanced and often outweighed by anguish and doubts of purpose and ability. Malamud always lightens the sombre picture with humour and wit; this is achieved by colourful ‘ Jewish ’ echoes: self-deprecating jokes and home-made sayings and proverbs which tend to reduce tragedy to something trivial and commonplace.

Man as economic animal and man as praxis an Interpretation of Marx

The conception of man as an economic animal is implied by the view that economic production is the determining “factor” or “sphere” of man or society. Against this conception can be put another, that of man as praxis. This takes account of man as a creative being, capable of realizing his freedom through his own activity. In this article the theory of the determining role of the “economic factor”, and the theory of factors in general have been examined. The economic interpretation of history, a variant of the theory of factors, has been acknowledged as partly true for the self‐alienated man and society, but the theory of factors in any variant has been found inadequate as a general theory of man, or society. The possibility of freedom cannot be reduced to the fact that the determining roles played by “factors”, vary, or to the hope that the economic “factor” can be subordinated to a “better” one. Man's freedom consists in his resolving the conflict of “factors”, and in realizing himself as an integral cre...