Possibility Of Freedom Research Articles

Breaking the mold of servitude: subaltern agency and possibilities of freedom in Elias’ Khwabnama

ABSTRACT The critically acclaimed novel Khwabnama by Akhtaruzzaman Elias is set in the 1940s and offers a “magical realist” portrayal of the lives and struggles of ordinary individuals of a rural community, with the emergence of the state of Pakistan and peasant struggles of the time serving as the backdrops. Towards the end of the novel, we see Tamiz, a landless peasant, deciding to alter the course of his journey to most likely join the rebellious farmers in their struggle for a fair share of the crops. In this paper, I analyze the character of Tamiz and the meaning and significance of his decisions and actions in the contexts of the novel and Elias’ oeuvre in an effort to excavate his ideas about subaltern agency and freedom. Tamiz’s action, along with the dreams and the magical elements of the novel, gestures towards barely visible and unspecified visions of freedom, which may be irreducible to languages of national liberation or class struggle, yet express Elias’ affirmation of the indomitable spirit of the subaltern to reject and resist the mold of servitude in which they find themselves.

Ian Proops: Kant on Transcendental Freedom (The Fiery Test of Critique: Chs. 11–12)

Abstract Kant’s position on the problem of free will can be perplexing and frustrating: all the real questions about human agential capacities or even about issues of moral imputability are empirical questions, which have empirical answers. But there remains a metaphysical or transcendental problem about the possibility of freedom, which is forever insoluble. Ian Proops’ discussion in The Fiery Test of Critique is to be commended for displaying the rare virtue of appreciating this last point and presenting Kant’s position about it accurately. The only questionable part has to do with the standard terminology – ‘determinism’, ‘libertarianism’, ‘compatibilism’, and ‘incompatibilism’. I argue that it would be better to say, as Kant does, and Proops also does most of the time, that practical freedom, hence transcendental freedom, must be presupposed whenever we act or even judge, but how freedom is possible is both unknowable and even incomprehensible to us.

Peter Kropotkin and Social Ecology: Between Biology and Revolution

Research or concepts in the biological field have often been used as a basis to root political projects of different orientations. In the libertarian literature, there have also been attempts to explore the link between the natural world and the possibility of freedom by combining discoveries in biological fields and research in philosophical/political fields. In the first part of our work, we analyse Peter Kropotkin's thought, especially his theory of mutual aid, focusing on his protoecological concepts. This section also focuses on the Social Ecology of Murray Bookchin in the context of the evolution of life in the natural world. The concepts of cooperation, empathy and mutual aid are explored, and also revolution, federalism and egalitarian ethics. In the second part, we review these ideas and concepts, drawing on insights from recent discoveries in the study of ecology and evolutionary biology. We conclude our review by discussing how these natural principles can inform social projects and social organisation, identifying how mismatches between social and biological organisation have contributed to inequality and domination.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Proposition of the New Critique of Reason. Imagination–Creativity–Freedom

Phenomenology is one of the main currents of modern philosophy. Philosophers most often understand it from the perspective of Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) phenomenology as a concept of cognition and a method of viewing and describing what is directly given, i.e. a phenomenon. In addition, phenomenology is the fundamental science – prima philosophia that determines what and how is directly given. Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), a student of E. Husserl, was the first thinker in Poland who practiced philosophy in a phenomenological way. R. Ingarden contributed to the dissemination of Husserl’s phenomenology in Poland and became an outstanding phenomenologist who developed an original phenomenological path proposing a creative reception of his teacher’s thoughts between World Wars II and I. Inagrden’s phenomenological path was different from Husserl’s. While Husserl developed a transcendental-idealistic form of phenomenology, Ingarden did not wholly abandon the transcendental path but went toward realism. The Polish phenomenologist did not want to question his master’s concept of the transcendental Self but only wanted to find a place for this Self in the real world. Polish thinkers who further deepened the creative reception of Husserl’s phenomenology have always gathered around Ingarden. One such person was Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (1923–2014). Their professor-student meeting occurred at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow just after the end of World War II. Husserl’s phenomenology inspired A.-T. Tymieniecka, but this was phenomenology understood by Ingarden, taking into account the realism of the world and the entire sphere of empiricism. We can assume that the scholar’s meeting with Ingarden allowed Tymieniecka to develop her phenomenological concept, which she called the concept of the phenomenology of life and the human creative condition. It is a phenomenology that rejects idealism and chooses the realism of the world and life in the cosmic dimension. The human being here is a living entity whose life is anchored in nature but ultimately evolves and develops in culture through scientific and technological activities. In this cosmological and dynamically changing perspective, the source experience of the subject – a living being – becomes the experience of being alive and living in the unity-of-erything-there-is-alive. Therefore, Tymieniecka rejected the primordial nature of the cognitive-constitutive act of the pure consciousness, which we deal with in classical phenomenology, favouring a creative act founded in man’s creative imagination and only secondarily reflected in the cognitive act. The Polish philosopher believed that only in such a case is there a possibility of freedom in the human world of life and, thus – authentic self-realisation and self-interpretation of man in existence.

Between Abstraction and Materiality: Carlos Villa and the Politics of Asian American Art

Abstract In the 1970s and early 1980s, Filipino American artist Carlos Villa developed a set of experimental methods and idioms—namely, abstraction, abject sensibility, and intense materiality—that would accompany his renewed interest in self-identity and community expression. While these strategies coincided with the broader artistic tendency of the 1960s and ’70s toward unconventional materiality and a deliberately indecorous sensibility, Villa’s far-reaching concern for the racialized condition of Filipinx America compels a reconsideration of his work vis-à-vis the historical and discursive contexts of Filipinx America. This article combines formal analysis with readings from Filipinx/Asian American studies and critical theory to argue that Villa’s experimental methods expose and reroute the multifarious ways in which Filipinx America has been subjected to the violence of the visual regimes of colonialism and modernity. They reorient the predicaments of Filipinx America towards imagining alternative modes of existence and possibilities of freedom, and a rethinking of the politics of Asian American art.

Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis: Anxiety, Creativity and the Everyday

Doubtless, the COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely challenging in all aspects. However, rather than looking at COVID-19 exclusively as a catastrophic event, which has generated insecurity, anxiety, panic and helplessness, I suggest investigating this insecurity and anxiety through the prism of existential philosophy. Drawing, in particular, on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and the literature on the existentialist anxiety of international relations, this study suggested looking at anxiety not in terms of insecurity but as “freedom’s actuality”. In other words, the attention was focused not so much on the many restrictions and bans imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but on the many quotidian and minuscule creative interventions through which people attempted to counterbalance, respond and react to them by creating new possibilities of freedom. Special attention was devoted to the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety. This distinction is especially important, as it connects to two different and opposing subjectivities. While normal anxiety encourages a proactive approach to life—inspiring individuals to change the present through new daily strategies—neurotic anxiety prevents it, as it tends to replicate the ordinary, the known and the familiar.

ОБРАЗ ДОМУ В КОНТЕКСТІ СОЦІАЛЬНО-ГУМАНІТАРНИХ НАУК

The article is devoted to the problems of perception of the image of home during the time of large-scale Russian aggression, mass forced emigration from Ukraine and resettlement within the country, which have both theoretical and practical relevance. The researcher aims to conduct a comparative analysis of ideas about the image of the home in philosophical, sociological and psychological literature, to project these theoretical approaches to Ukrainian realities. The author defines the "image of home" as a multidimensional concept containing meanings, symbols and evaluations related to our biography, time of residence in a certain place, features of primary and secondary socialization, individual and group traumatic experience. It is noted that with the beginning of the war, the idea of home changed not only among those who permanently or temporarily left their home, but also among almost all residents of Ukraine. The article states that the phenomenological concept of the "life world" by E. Husserl and A. Shchyuts has significant heuristic potential for studying the social adaptation of our servicemen who will return home after victory. At the same time, O. Spengler's concept of civilization allows us to explain the barbaric behavior of the Russian invaders on the territory of Ukraine and the essence of the occupation regime established by them. At the same time, the theories of M. Heidegger and M. Buber help to understand the motives of people who, risking the lives of themselves and their loved ones, do not want to evacuate from territories where active hostilities are ongoing. The author comes to the conclusion that each of the considered concepts of home describes different aspects of human spatial existence - from existential to ecological, in its own way characterizes the difficulties and limitations of life situations that Ukrainians find themselves in search of a better destiny. At the same time, the house gradually loses its geographical localization and is associated not so much with a specific address, but with the possibilities of freedom, self-expression and privacy of a person in its space. Key words: home, home image, life world, privacy.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Responsibility experience for your own life through volunteering

Phenomenon of the Volunteering reveals itself through dedicated time for volunteering, duration of volunteering commitment, area where volunteering is implemented and through age group of the volunteers. The object of the study is volunteering experience of young adults. Interpretative Phenomenological Analyses is research methodology. According to the phenomenological approach, research itself is not focusing on any foreseen objectives, oriented to the volunteers’ experience. In this article is presented part of the research, giving deeper view on one of the super-ordinates theme, with the aim: to present responsibility for your own life experience of young adults in long term and fulltime volunteering, while volunteered is held in social help area. In the study participated 6 research participants, 3 young men and 3 young women, 20–30 years old. To collect the data of the research were used semi-structured interviews. Conclusions of the study presented in this article shows 1) that through volunteering experience research participants perceived power and duty of own life’s quality. They got awareness about their own life – they can and they must be responsible of own life. 2) This power of responsibility is hidden in themselves and change of own life depends on the decisions made by them while volunteering. Prior experience of responsibility is opening decision possibilities and freedom possibilities in any change of life.

Enslavement and the Possibility of Freedom: A Rethinking about the Human Condition through Tagore’s Red Oleanders

ABSTRACT The present study takes as its objective the enunciation of the human condition as presented in Rabindranath Tagore’s 1925 play Red Oleanders. The play is set in the fictional backdrop of Yaksha Town, a place where every person is a slave of the system. Through a detailed analysis of the situation of Yaksha Town, the article first brings to light how a totalitarian society deprives every character of liberty and joy and then examines how all the characters are personally accountable for their confinement in the system. As Tagore intends to present the situation of the real world through that of the town, the story of the enslavement of the characters in the play is also that of humanity in general. For Tagore, the malady of the modern world is rooted in its preoccupation with worldly privileges that detaches a person from the ebullience of nature. So, this article also strives to elaborate from the playwright that it is not the propinquity of a materialistic system but that of nature that can liberate humanity from all social and personal confinement. The whole discussion is put forth in light of the theories of Existentialism and Marxism.

Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Ontological Distinction between Ground and Existence in Friedrich Schelling’s System of Freedom

The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) is the most coherent form of Schelling’s attempt to describe the absolute system or the system of freedom. For the first time in the twentieth century, with Heidegger's careful reference to his treatise on freedom and his repeated commentary in 1936 and 1941, the importance of this treatise in the history of Western thought became apparent. Heidegger focuses on Schilling’s thinking, especially with Schilling’s treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, research into the formation of the system, and the question of the possibility of a system of freedom as a question of the essence of being. Schilling bases his research on the system of freedom on a correct ontological basis in order to transcend formal freedom as an independent determinant of mechanical causation and to achieve the true definition of freedom as the ability to do good and evil. And after proposing the inadequacy of formal freedom in the idealist systems before it, it introduces the real and living concept of freedom as the ability to do good and evil. Heidegger demonstrates the independence of the Schelling system in comparison with the Fichte and Hegel systems, and his innovations in response to issues such as evil, freedom, identity, and the relation of being and “is” are most evident in the metaphysical realm of the will; however, remaining within the metaphorical framework also prevents Schilling from approaching the question of the truth of existence. Schilling’s important issue is the elimination of the opposition between freedom and necessity, which, in his view, is the focus of philosophy. For this reason, the discussion of freedom is at the heart of the system in its true sense, and in his opinion, his dissertation is for the first time the design of a system based on the idea of human freedom. The possibility of a system of freedom must be created in accordance with the principle of identity, which does not ignore the meaning of the relation of theology. In Schelling’s Heideggerian interpretation of the principle of identity, the priority of ontological issues in matters of theological nature such as all theism is given more importance and the question of all theism as a question of the system to the question of “is” and how to connect the structure of beings as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Heidegger’s interpretation of the concept of the system of freedom according to Schelling with emphasis on the ontological distinction between ground and existence. This study seeks to answer these two questions: how does the design of the real concept of freedom open the way to explain the ontological foundation of the possibility of evil and the possibility of freedom in the system? Also, how does the distinction between ground and existence lead to Schelling's main goal in resolving the conflict between system and freedom? Moreover, according to Heidegger, to what extent does this distinction arise from Schilling’s metaphysical and subject-centered thinking?

What Could Be, But Never Has Been: Horizons of Human Rights and Racial Justice

The US’s authority as chief enforcer of human rights grows increasingly illusory as civil unrest brings the quotidian nature of racialised human rights violations in the US into a frame shared by authoritarian regimes. This reality animates my analysis of how an organisation I call Doctors for Humanity (DfH) finds its footing in a terrain of human rights enforcement that is shifting from a global to a domestic focus. The US is not an actual space of freedom but often represents the limit of possible freedoms. This horizon evokes something that always could be but never has been and unmasks what I analyse as a constitutive unfreedom at the heart of liberalism in American empire. To attend to human rights violations in the US is to undermine American authority and its right and responsibility to make claims about the actions of other nations. As a future physician and human rights advocate invested in racial justice, I illuminate the paradoxes of ethical action within a context where the possibility of freedom for some depends upon the unfreedom of others. To effectively police human rights from this perspective necessitates the deconstruction of the US as a space of freedom, pointing instead towards a praxis of global human rights which lives up to the concept’s aspirational universality.

The Theological Origins and Underpinning of the Longing for Total Revolution

ABSTRACT The longing for total revolution described in Bernard Yack’s seminal book, which he analyzes as an effort to find a place for human freedom and morality in a world governed by natural necessity, can be traced to Reformation debates between predestinarian Calvinists and free-will theologians. These debates were reflected in Kant’s efforts to establish the very possibility of freedom and in those of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Considered in this light, the longing for total revolution is a yearning not merely to overcome dehumanization but to become something more than human, which must always come up short in the face of human finitude and mortality.

‚Ultimate Responsibility‘ without causa sui: Schelling’s Intelligible Deed of Freedom contra Galen Strawson’s Argument

Abstract. Since the mid-1980s, Galen Strawson has introduced an argument into the analytic debate about the concept and possibility of freedom. He has repeated and defended it in various formulations, which amounts to an “impossibilism” of freedom in the moral sense, i. e., to the impossibility that we can be called ultimately responsible for the moral quality of our actions based on existing freedom in the full sense. In this paper, I want to explain Strawson’s argument, which is supposed to prove this intuitive difficulty as impossible to fulfill, and to show the conditions of its persuasiveness. Furthermore, I will make clear how and by what right philosophers like Kant, Fichte and especially Schelling were able to evade this argument avant la lettre by introducing the concept of an intelligible self-constituting act of freedom.

Wzniosłość i gniew

The article endeavours to characterize key issues raised by Ananda Devi (1957), a francophone writer and poet born in Mauritius who has been living in France for many years. The analysis is based primarily on two novels that were translated into Polish by Krzysztof Jarosz: Le sari vert / Zielone sari and Ève de ses décombres / Ewa ze swych zgliszcz. Already these two novels enable us to perceive the uniqueness of Devi’s writings, whose clear commitment to the discussion about burning social problems equals its commitment to the discussion with literature: its tradition, present status quo, planned future. Devi poses questions about national, linguistic, cultural, and sexual identity; about wasted opportunities of emancipation from the shackles of colonialism; about possibilities of freedom in the environment of systemic subjugation. The micro perspective enables her to show some macro phenomena: continuous production of “dispensable people,” human robots exploited to produce goods for the rich North and the rich West, sacked overnight when using cheap labour force stops bringing profit; systemic racism used by the law-observing state to perform illegal acts. In the world based on the economy of profit, literature, and particularly poetry, becomes a unique weapon, because it serves no purpose. Reading and writing are revolutionary activities, looking for brothers and sisters in poetry is a chance to build a radical International that includes also (or rather, first of all) men and women who have experienced rupture, life in two different dimensions, languages, groups (choosing French by a Mauritian was a declaration, Devi describes the experience of splitting when portraying Sad in Ève de ses décombres). Devi is particularly concerned with the fate of children doomed to failure due to their “bad” descent, skin colour, or sex, children who are guilty from birth. Systemic inequalities and inherited violence in humiliated and ashamed communities mainly afflict women, who are reduced to bodies that may be conquered, beaten, exploited as labour force. Devi succeeds in presenting silent or nameless women not as victims (although she does not underplay their suffering, on the contrary), but as heroes who become reborn after traumas or in next generations, able to take revenge, risking the scraps of stability and false safety to show their presence, to exert influence, to reverberate. The flame of wrath experienced by Devi’s characters, also those burnt alive, as the character in Le sari vert, should (and will) be a seedbed of change, because you cannot burn all women pregnant with silence. Devi accuses (like the author of Les Misérables), she is not afraid of elevation, as panache is necessary for a coup, for changing the status quo, the order based on lawlessness, for social, common awakening.

Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Possibilities of Freedom: The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2019

This article considers why Warner’s writing has been undervalued, in particular taking issue with the argument that her works are too radically disparate to be discussed as an oeuvre. It argues that one path through her writings – a ‘handle to get hold of the bundle’ in William Empson’s phrase – is the idea of ‘the possibilities of freedom’, a topic broad enough to address a good deal in Warner’s writings but specific enough to bring some focus. ‘The possibilities of freedom’ – as against ‘freedom’ alone – points both ways, both to what is possible and conversely to the limits of the possible. The essay follows this theme and some of its variations through the six decades and several genres of Warner’s writing life, discussing in particular ‘The Young Sailor’, Lolly Willowes, Opus 7, ‘To Come So Far’ and ‘Oxenhope’. It concludes that we should see her as in no way a quiet, removed stylist but instead as a figure of vigorous cultural engagements, an intellectual contemporary of writings such as Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918), Sartre’s Les chemins de la liberté (1945–49) and Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘What is Freedom?’ (1961).

The Changes of Cultural Memory in a Liquid Modern World

Based on the insights of modern philosophers, particularly Zygmunt Bauman, the work examines how cultural memory can be affected by globalisation and what kind of challenges arise when collective truths are passed on from generation to generation. The sources selected for the analysis are modern dystopias that design possible versions of cultural response. Other subjects significant to the research include phenomena of modern culture that help to uncover the latest trends and the views on cultural heritage held by people of the 21st century. The article comes to the conclusion that the changes of cultural memory in a fluid modern world can be affected deeply by factors such as the ideology of consumerism and the insularity of a web community, but this is only a possibility. Western authors Aldous Huxley and Michel Houellebecq place a stronger emphasis on determinism, whereas Lithuanian writer Jaroslavas Melnikas highlights the possibility of freedom. Nevertheless, notably, all of these texts are projections that primarily encourage critical thinking and demonstrate the ambivalence of the current situation. Contemporary culture is likely at a turning point, but the results of the transformation are still unclear.

Mentoring from the Margins

ABSTRACT Using a critical and de/colonial focus, in this article, I trace the unfolding of my experiences, as a Desi woman, mentoring two Black women pursuing doctoral degrees in education. Using personal narratives, I explore the intersections of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and colonizing structures of higher education that create and maintain power differences. I map the individual and entangled trauma minoritized people experience in academia, arguing for a radical interconnectivity that creates pathways for understanding resistance and illuminates possibilities for freedom. I argue that Black women’s knowledge needs to be valued, taken seriously, and engaged with thoughtfulness and care for legitimizing and normalizing Black ontoepistemologies. Mentoring in this terrain requires space-making that centers minoritized perspectives, in this case knowledge construction by Black women.

Reconsidering freedom: Survivors of sex trafficking and Paul Ricoeur’s relational notion of freedom

The nature of freedom has been discussed extensively by Paul Ricoeur in his book Freedom and Nature. This article critically engages with this notion of freedom in the context of survivors of sex trafficking and their lack of experience of freedom. We indicate to what extent Ricoeur’s notion of freedom, as the reciprocal relationship between the voluntary and the involuntary, offers a relational and dynamic understanding of freedom which is highly relevant in the context of survivors of sex trafficking. A mere bodily freedom, an escape from captivity, as often found in reductionist definitions of freedom, does not warrant freedom as volition for survivors of sex trafficking. The development of the full possibilities of freedom remains lacking in this context. This compels one to reconsider freedom as “voluntary-involuntary” freedom and to develop a much more complex, holistic and relational notion of freedom. Aspects like imagination, the affective, fear, desires and human dignity, should all be incorporated in the concept of freedom, which remains bodily, but does not exclude volition in the abstract or even idealistic sense. Such a comprehensive understanding of freedom is paramount for survivors of sex trafficking, but also for further philosophical considerations of freedom.

Making a Way Out of No Way: Black Faith in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk

Making a Way Out of No WayBlack Faith in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk Joe Tolbert Jr. (bio) In Barry Jenkins’ 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, we see two Black families’ daily struggle to live despite the unjust systems that permeated 1970s New York City. The film follows childhood friends-turned-lovers, Tish and Fonny, and how a false charge that puts Fonny in jail puts a strain on the news that they were going to have a baby. In the film, the viewers are held in the tension of the quotidian violence that Tish, Fonny, and their families face as they strategize ways to restore Fonny’s freedom with the possibility that is represented in their unborn child. We are held in the tension of the ways this country treats Black people who are trying to live in spite of this violence and the hopeful possibility that their child will not have to live through the injustice and violence that they have had to navigate. Although this film is not explicitly religious, it is this tension between the reality of injustice and the possibilities of freedom through the transformation of this country that this film shows the inner workings of Black faith. Beale Street and Black Faith Early on in the film, we find Tish and her family waiting for Fonny’s family to arrive, so that Tish can share the news about the coming child. Since this scene is the only explicitly religious scene in the film, I describe it in detail here. Once they arrive, it becomes clear that Mrs. Hunt and her daughters are very pious and devout Christians—“Holy Rollers” some would say. As Frank began to ask for updates about the well-being [End Page 302] of his child, the mother shares how she hopes his time in jail would lead him to salvation, and that sometimes she thinks that his being in jail was a part of God’s plan so he could think about his sins and surrender his soul to Jesus. As tension between Fonny’s parents rises, due to his mother’s faith and his dad’s hip 70s cool, Tish interrupts and tells them that their son is going to be a father. At the news, Frank tells Joe that they are about to go out and get drunk in celebration, and he reassures Tish that he is glad about the news. However, Mrs. Hunt, in self-righteous fashion, asks, “Who is going to take care of the baby?” Tish replied that as its parents, they would. Fonny’s father replied that it would definitely not be the holy ghost. Mrs. Hunt tells Tish that she doesn’t call the lust between her and Fonny love and that she knew she would ruin her son’s life. After quoting a scripture that touts purity and righteous living, she pronounces that since the baby was born in sin, the holy spirit was going to make it shrivel in her womb, but that her son would be forgiven (Fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) inIf Beale Street Could Talk, 2018. Annapurna Pictures. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] To know the writing of James Baldwin is to encounter his critique of the church. His critique centered on the church’s inability to deal with the things of this world. In his view, the church was so concerned with controlling the body, keeping it “pure,” it didn’t handle the material evils [End Page 303] that Black people were forced to endure. This practice of religion leaves those material evils untouched. In Jenkins’ film adaptation, we see this in the character of Fonny’s mother Mrs. Hunt. What this scene shows is the ways that religion is weaponized in such a way that we can perpetuate the dominant culture’s ideologies against ourselves. In Mrs. Hunt, we see a woman that is so concerned with biblical notions of purity and sexual morality that she uses the rhetoric often used against unwed parents. Her language makes...