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Freedom

liberté

Worked through in 83 videos · 148 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani regards Rousseau as the founder of the modern concept of freedom. Freedom grounds the human order as gravitation grounds nature in Newton, but it runs in the opposite direction to the fall1. For him, being free is not doing what pleases one: it is obeying the law one has prescribed for oneself and not depending on the labour of others23. With Kant, freedom is a postulate of practical reason: philosophy presupposes it, without this proving that it exists4. It replaces the Platonic idea of the good and includes the possibility of doing evil. Following Spinoza and Hegel, he defines it as the understanding of necessity: it exists only as liberation. He distinguishes it from the "freedom of the void", which turns into a fury of destruction in action, and from the freedom of the victorious Frank, who enslaves the vanquished. With Hegel, he makes it the non-totalitarian meaning of history: one is free, then some, then all5. This freedom presupposes equality and material means.

  1. 1#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 35:36
  2. 2L for Liberty26 Dec 2014 · 3:18
  3. 3#1.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015 · 1:23:25
  4. 4The eternal return… of the death camps?13 Oct 2024 · 19:16
  5. 5Worldliness in Clouscard, or privileges for all18 May 2023 · 20:10

Summary produced automatically from 148 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 15 · 8 Oct 2026Nature vs. freedom?
  1. 51:35Freedom is not obeying nothing: it is obeying the law one has prescribed to oneself, that is, obeying oneself by obeying the law one has voted for.
  2. 1:02:31The domain of freedom must make real in the sensible world the end imposed by its laws; otherwise it is the freedom of the void.
Cycle 9.1 · 30 Nov 2020#6 Answers to questions
  1. 10:48Freedom is not a red herring: it is the result of the whole of human action since prehistory, the only non-totalitarian meaning of human action.
  2. 12:54It is made real by the material advances of a man who, fleeing finitude, produces a new world.
Talks · 2 Jul 2018The Phenomenology of Spirit
  1. 19:59Free will has objective conditions which form a system and which history progressively realizes.
  2. 44:07All of Hegel's philosophy is a philosophy of freedom; the Phenomenology describes the liberation of human existence.
  3. 1:27:23Freedom is a power that passes into existence through the mediation of equality and produces fraternity.
Talks · 31 Mar 2018Tonight, we repoliticise (part 2)
  1. 23:30History had a meaning as long as it sought the conditions of freedom, which form an ordered system.
  2. 54:10In Hegel, freedom gives history its only non-totalitarian meaning and remains inseparable from the assumption of death.
  3. 1:27:27Freedom is necessity understood; if it is not primary, it cannot be final; it exists only as liberation.
Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus
  1. 24:36To be modern, the idea of the good embodied by the sun must be replaced by the idea of freedom.
  2. 35:36Freedom moves in the opposite direction to gravitation: Rousseau is as powerful in liberation as Newton is in subjection.
  3. 1:41:04Freedom is the meaning of history, the opposite of the totalitarian: to bring about the greatest number of free individuals.
Talks · 9 Mar 2017Is history a subject?
  1. 1:13:13History has a meaning, freedom; there is progress when one moves from a less free situation to a freer one.
  2. 1:22:44This meaning is not totalitarian: it tends toward as many free individuals as possible.
  3. 1:27:31Freedom requires material means, such as the bow or the horse collar, and not ideas alone.
Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 4/5
  1. 26:28Freedom is not something already given, nor a quality: it is the path from determination to freedom, which is called liberation.
  2. 27:49Freedom is the substance, the gravity of the will, just as gravity is that of bodies.
  3. 2:33:49Making freedom the meaning of history gives a non-linear meaning, one that can fail: this failure is called barbarism.
Series · 1 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 2/5
  1. 17:57Human self-determination: knowing one's determinations gives more chance of emancipating oneself from them; freedom as intellection of necessity.
  2. 33:28Negative freedom, or freedom of the understanding, is the freedom of the void, that of the self fleeing all determination.
Talks · 23 Jun 2015L'île du Peuple: the debate
  1. 19:41Rousseau: natural liberty has for its bound only the strength of the individual; civil liberty goes much further, through education and the heritage of cultures.
  2. 27:45The fall goes downward, liberty upward: the natural order does not go in the same direction as the human order.
  3. 37:56Natural necessity admits no exception; one believes oneself freer in nature because one is fleeing a society of servitude and domination.
Series · 26 Dec 2014L for Liberty
  1. 3:18According to Rousseau, to be free is less to do what one wants than not to depend on another's labor; it is not to be confused with a relation of force.
  2. 5:33Obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself, and not to the law prescribed by men or by nature, is freedom.
Series · 20 Sept 2014#2 Rousseau, a world that begins
  1. 11:25To be free is less to do what one wants than not to depend on the labor of another.
  2. 26:55With Rousseau, freedom is the foundation of man, not a goal: a margin of maneuver with respect to natural determinism.
  3. 32:57Between the natural order and the human order, an unbridgeable gulf, which is freedom.

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