Freedom

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from Rousseau's distinction between doing what one wills and doing what pleases us, illustrated by two high-school students woken at six in the morning. From it he draws the idea that "obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom", a formula in which he sees a prefiguration of Kantian autonomy and of Marx's anthropology1. With Clouscard, he sets this freedom against libertarian liberalism, which is permissive in morals and repressive in social matters, and he criticises a formal freedom that ignores the individual's debt to the collective2. In Kant, he shows that the noumenon makes freedom possible and that nature and freedom contend for one and the same territory, like the forest cleared to make a field34. With Hegel, he distinguishes the freedom of the void, which turns into a fury of destruction, from classical character and from individuality. He conceives of freedom as a liberation, the result of praxis and labour, and in his view Hegel makes it the meaning of history56. He also links it to musical tonality and to Waterloo, which opens the world of free enterprise.

1. 1L for Liberty26 Dec 2014
2. 2Michel Clouscard and the betrayal of May 687 Feb 2025
3. 3#1.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015
4. 4Nature vs. freedom?8 Oct 2026
5. 5Hegel on the Beach 4/52 Feb 2016
6. 6#6 Answers to questions30 Nov 2020

Introduction produced automatically from the 10 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.