Libertà e risonanza

Revus Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law, 2020

​ We live in an extremely individual age called neoliberalism. The pluralistic Democratic Constitutional State demands from society a certain moral action that is inclusive, free of coercion, and which guarantees relations of reciprocity and intersubjective communication, capable of stimulating the subjects' self-determination in their institutionalized social practices, to this freedom of the kind social, we shall call the name democratic freedom. Freedom must be an instrument of solidarity to stimulate the democratic potentialities of alterity and inclusion of the invisible. To form subjects free of pathologies, the liberal overcoming of the value of freedom as an absolute individualization is made necessary, bringing out in each individual and in society the responsibility of communicative interaction in the formation of social free will through the development of a social freedom, since the degree of freedom (autonomy) of the subjects depends on how their relate, how our pretensions​ ​ are​ ​ corresponded​ ​ and​ ​ how​ ​ their​ ​ behave​ ​ in​ ​ our​ ​ social​ ​ roles​ ​ with​ ​ the​ ​ other​ ​ subjects.

Crisis & Critique, Hegel and the Philosophy of Right After 200 Years, 2021

In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Hegel argues that neither abstract (negative) freedom nor Kantian moral law (positive freedom) succeed in responding to the demands of their own truth. Instead, he argues that the moment we say anything about our freedom we are already articulating it in terms of right, and the demands of right are never only singular but always already inherently universal. The very essence of right for Hegel is freedom, with right being “the existence [Dasein] of the free will”. This essay argues that Hegel’s philosophy of Bildung is essential for mapping a philosophical account of the process of right’s objective realization in the world, wherein individuals freely participate in an objectively rational social order. The drawing out of the contradictions and failures in positive and negative freedom, as well as (necessarily) in Hegel’s own philosophy of freedom, directly challenges commonly reproduced conceptions of freedom and right. Hegel’s philosophy of Bildung explicates a process of self-cultivation toward universality where the individual actively participates in the development of world history through their own self-development, anticipating and forming the substance of right, and in the process reframing the apparent contradiction between freedom and restriction in the actuality of right.

Libertas and Res Publica in the Roman Republic: Ideas of Freedom and Roman Politics, 2020

The article considers the category of freedom in its ontological sense. Due to the plural character of contemporary situation, within which person finds him-or herself lost without any reliable ground, it is necessary to investigate the question of freedom of the human "I", although many philosophers of the past had already investigated this problem in diverse ways. We conceive the question of freedom as deep and, at the same time, multiple one. Methodologically, the current article poses this question in different ways, taking into consideration the individual level of being. This phenomenological approach (in its wide sense) allows to understand ontological ground of freedom due to varying the way to pose a question while considering the ultimate experiencing of being through such "existentials", as human finitude, responsibility for the "Other", happiness and destiny. We also rethink the ontological situation of searching for the sense of freedom, trying to trace a kind of a "dialog" between contemporary philosophers and such thinkers of the past, as Plato, B. Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, I. Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, M.M. Bakhtin, M. Heidegger. This discussion is organized not in "retrospective" fashion, but in a "problematical" one.

European Journal of Political Theory, 2009

Freedom occupies centre stage among the fields that went through various realignments due to 'the critique of the subject' and the keener perception of contingency in 20 th century thought. In this refiguring of freedom, attention has tended so far to focus on the work of individual thinkers such as the later Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. But there is little awareness that a whole new scheme of thought has taken shape over time, cohering around a shared nexus of premises and responses to particular stakes.

1995

This work consists of a study of the historical, philosophical and political elements determining the essence of freedom and subjectivity in contemporary society. It identifies the origin of subjectivity in Renaissance Humanism, and demonstrates that Humanism's definition of individual freedom and subjectivity became a base upon which the Anglo-Germanic Romantics grounded their intellectual and political framework. The philosophical parallel between Humanism and Romanticism, the projects of which express subjectivity and freedom in terms of 'creation' and 'individualism', establishes a basis from which a study of postmodernism (French post-structuralism) shows that postmodernists, in spite of their critique of modernity, continue to define freedom and subjectivity along the same lines. It contends that the postmodernist critique of society espouses a severely limited notion of subjectivity, i.e. one which is basically negative and antisocial , and whose effect on the way individuals view themselves as socio-political agents is detrimental. This study is not one which aims to discount the importance of the postmodernist critique altogether. Rather, it shows that there are many elements which enter into the definition of freedom and subjectivity as a 'lived' experience in the world, such as those present in Hegelian philosophy, which are often concealed, or negated by postmodernism's rejection of dialectics in history. The study takes as central the Hegelian definition of the elements constituting the process of actualisation of subjectivity and freedom in society, and argues that all three identified intellectual movements, Humanism, Romanticism and Postmodernism, fail to recognise that the other, the means, is not a thingness, a whatness, nor is it other individuals, but is itself an activity the base of which is social, and whose telos is present in the objective order. The work argues that although postmodernism defends individual rights against a visibly declining social, political and ethical order, it does not present individuals with alternatives that are feasible and desirable in today's social and political context. Preface The primary objective of the present work is to demonstrate that contemporary social and political thought bases its definition of freedom and subjectivity on Humanist conceptions, themselves the product of Medieval Christian thought. At first glance, such a contention may appear implausible due to the stark contrast which exists between the power structures of these societies. According to the Medieval tradition, God is all powerful, and the Church is God's instrument, the only institution capable of assuring individuals of the possibility of reaching heaven, i.e. freedom, in the hereafter. All individuals, including Kings, were at the mercy of the Church. By contrast, contemporary society has long separated the realm of political power from religious power, to the extent that the latter was made to stand outside the power structure altogether. However, this superficial distinction fails to recognise that the very separation between Church and state allowed the presence of Medieval Christian concepts of freedom and subjectivity to go unchecked. Given the analysis that will be provided of the nature of the Humanist project for liberty, one may conclude that in contrast to the classical Greek notion of 'reason', the type of reason which developed during the Renaissance was not teleological. Reason was used to obtain knowledge of the end, but did not constitute the end as such. In this respect, Renaissance reason, and indeed Enlightenment reason, whilst able to transcend 'religious' control of reality in what was immediate and palpable, were unable to do so in terms of finality. It is difficult to state whether it was the nature of reason itself, or one acquired through practice, that was responsible for the failure of the philosophers of the past to break away from the dependency of reason on divinity. Nevertheless, the application of reason in the modern age, once the state became separate from the Church and value from morality, appeared purposeless, leaving many philosophers in this century to condemn it as the very instrument of oppression and self-delusion.1 This study makes clear that reason as such is not a concept that can be taken in isolation from the social, political and ideological aspects which combine to define its nature and purpose. Hegel demonstrates this fact clearly in his definition of a type of liberty that he believed was both possible and desirable. Hegel's definition of freedom as action which begins, in the first instance, in thought does not differ entirely from the postmodernist definition of freedom, but nevertheless goes beyond it in its adherence to the idea that only in action is freedom to be actualised. For Hegel, the idea of v freedom was necessarily one which combined the attributes of the past with the means of the present. Hegel sought to impart to us the benefit of knowledge of the past with a heightened understanding of the present, and of the self in the present. For Hegel, individuals, once aware of their dissociation from the earlier tyranny of the Church (which he took to be exemplified in the French Revolution's success in separating Church from State), will abandon the belief in freedom as realisable only and conditionally in the hereafter, and will seek their freedom in the here-and-now. Hegel believed in the idea that freedom is a product of this lifetime and can be enjoyed by the individual who is able to recognise that freedom is not necessarily 'absence of restraint', but in fact a product of 'necessary' choice and hence self-limitation. Thomas Mann defines freedom in a manner that is reminiscent of Hegel: "freedom always inclines to dialectical reversals. She realises herself very soon in constraint, fulfils herself in the subordination to law, rule, coercion, systembut to fulfil herself therein does not mean she therefore ceases to be freedom."2 Of course, it is in and through dialectics that Hegel is able to conceive of the possibility of making of freedom an experience to be enjoyed in the present. As is noted in chapter I of Part III, Hegel acquired his understanding of dialectics from earlier philosophical teachings, most of which were pagan.3 By identifying each attribute with its negation, Hegel was able to introduce a theory of liberty that endowed its definition with the need for both absence of restraint, and restraint. However, unlike the earlier Humanists, freedom as absence from restraint constitutes for Hegel the freedom of thought and that of the will, and freedom as restraint is necessary in terms of the social and political system which establishes the laws of the state. Hegel maintains that freedom as self-determination depends on both elements for its actualisation. Free thought conceives of, and indeed empowers, the will, but only restrictions, i.e. choice, make self-determination possible. This conception is also not peculiarly Hegelian. Machiavelli in the Discourses made clear that the ordini, the laws and ordinances, were the necessary tools for the securing of liberty; individuals need to be coerced in order to act virtuosi, according to virtue, and hence maintain their liberty, which they would have abandoned without such constraint.4 Machiavelli did not believe in the natural inclination of individuals to virtue, and therefore maintained that freedom for self-determination would only be available at a cost, that of coercion of the law without which individuals would always find a way to act in a cowardly way, and hence give up their liberty. However, unlike Machiavelli, Hegel did not believe in the power offortuna, but rather in the power of reason and self-knowledge which he deemed capable of guiding individuals toward vi Cf. Q. Skinner, "Two Views on the Maintenance of Liberty," Contemporary Political Theorv, Philip Pettit (ed.), (New York: Macmillan Pub., 1991), p. 36. 3Cf. Julia Kristeva, L'Etranger en nous, (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); in this book FCristeva argues that the 'other1, the stranger, signifies in fact the negative' side of the self, and that all xenophobic behaviour, ostracism and rejection is itself an act of fear of the 'unknown' that we conceal within us. IX 'Examples of this can be found in A. Maclntyrc's After Virtue (Duckworth. 1985), also in main stream postmodernist literature, el. Part III of this dissertation.-Here I have in mind the work of phenomenologists, such as E. Husserl and M. Heidegger, but equally the work of members of the Frankfurt School, that of Existentialists, and at least some postmodernists among others in the fields of sociology, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Christopher Laseh, The Culture of Narcissism, (London: ABACUS. 1980), pp. xv-xvi. "'.lean Baudrillard. lj> Transparence tin mat, essai stir les phenomenes extremes, (Paris: Galilee. 1990), p. 65. It is not the author's intention to portray the authors mentioned in this exposition of the 'state in contemporary society', i.e. Lasch, Bauman and Baudriilard. as representatives of the postmodern tradition. Rather, their work is taken here as a criLique of contemporary society. Postmodernism, as a tradition, is dealt with in the discussion on Foueault, Lyotard and Dcrnda. in Part III, Chapter II of this work. Moreover, it is necessary to point out that Bauman and Baudnllard, although quite opposed to being qualified as a postmodernists, are often referred io as such. However, what is certainly clear, is that they are both critical of modernism and postmodernism, and hence can readily be cited as critics in reference to both traditions. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, "The Sweet Scent of Decomposition," Former Baudrillard. Chris Rojck & Bryan S. Turner (cds.), (London: Routledgc, 1993), pp. 22-46. 6Ibid" pp. 38-39. 7Ibid.. p. 43. Ibid.. pp. 43-44. 9Ibid. p. 43. '°Ibid., p. 32. ' 'Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic...

Ratio Juris, 2008

The individual freedom has been an imperative, for the achievement of all the aims that the human life involves. In the same way, it is the autonomy, essential piece for the correct construction of the personality of every man. Consequently, the existen ce of the man has revolved through history around the satisfaction of these values. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze in which moment these elements of so much worth were overshadowed by illusory promises that the modernism brings and how, without being aware, we beco me part of a collective mind that found in the comfort the chains that tie it to the Slavism of not thinking by itself.

Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life, 2018

Recently anthropology has taken an interest in the ethical. But the question of the ethical is no innocent question and this turn in anthropology toward the ethical is no innocent turn. With the emphasis on such a conceptual prism as the ethical in the investigation of human social life, the basic drives that gather and bind us together in communities and prompt social action, modify and appear in a new modality. Leaving behind the more traditional sociological approach that takes the question of the imperative quality in practical matters to be fundamentally reducible to the normativity inherent in a given social reality and the more or less mechanistic reproduction of this social normativity by way of enculturation and habitus, the basic drives in communitary life and their inherent imperative quality, are now, with this turn to the ethical, to be understood in connection with such concepts as the care of the self, practical wisdom, the good, judgment, responsibility, freedom. In terms of ontology, this shift in analytical focus seems to imply a drastic reconfiguration in the modal hierarchy according to which social practice as analytical unit is construed. At least, this would be one consequence when James Laidlaw famously—and rightly, I believe—proclaimed that “… an anthropology of ethics will only be possible—will only be prevented from constantly collapsing into general questions of social regularity and social control—if we take seriously, as something requiring ethnographic description, the possibilities of human freedom.” (2002: 315, emphasis added) That is to say, the tenability of the ethical turn in anthropology requires that ontological priority is shifted from the modal category of reality—from the “moral facts” to put it in the positivist terminology of the often criticized Durkheimian sociology—to the category of possibility in order to clear a conceptual space for undetermined deliberation (Lambek 2010a, 2010b), moral experimentation (Mattingly 2013, 2014), cultural change (Robbins 2007) and a reflective stance (Laidlaw 2002, 2014, Zigon 2007). If this is so—and this to be sure is still an open and largely unthematized question in the current theoretical debates—the possibility of an anthropology of ethics would seem to hinge not only on the ability to address in adequate methodological terms “the possibilities of human freedom”; a corresponding fundamental shift toward an ontological prioritization of the modal category of possibility in the understanding of the existential conditions of human practice, of the human condition as such, would equally be a necessary requirement if the anthropological study of the ethical is to be properly different from the study of the reproduction of social normativity. That the notion of ethics urges us to recognize that the possible takes ontological precedence over the real in the realm of human affairs by no means implies that we have to accept a version of human freedom that stresses the radical independence from external forces of an autonomous individual. The ontological characterization in question does not even initially speak of properties ascribed to an individual human being or the faculty of the will, but more primordially to the way a world, in casu a moral world, is opened, and the way in which human beings find themselves emplaced in a world where the moral appears to matter. In the terminology of hermeneutical phenomenology, it expresses the point that a present reality only appears as it does within the horizon of an underdetermined future and hence in light of (still) unrealized projects, ideals, values, narrative trajectories etc. That is to say; the present state of affairs only becomes what it is because it is always already transcended, from the ground up, toward a range of possibilities. At this point two fundamental problems present themselves and both revolve around the ontological issue of the modal characteristics of social practice: First, if the present is disclosed in light of a range of possibilities that can be spelled out, for instance, in terms of future projects, values and ideals, would this not simply—with half a turn of the hermeneutic circle—once again reinstate the ontological priority of the given, the hegemony of the positivist metaphysics of reality? After all, are these projects, values and ideals not themselves grounded in the historico-cultural reality in which they are pursued? And secondly, if the category of possibility really takes priority in ethical life, how are we to conceive of the practical necessity with which ethical matters make itself known in human life? In the Durkheimian picture it is the reality of “attachment to group” and the disciplining, sanctioning power of society that constitute the “moral engines” in social practice (Durkheim 1973; 2010: 43ff). But if it is possibility and not a given reality that takes ontological priority, how can “possibility” be said to drive ethical life and necessitate ethics as an inexorable dimension of practical life? Both of these problems involve questions of such magnitude and complexity that they each go well beyond what a single essay can address satisfactorily, let alone exhaustively. All I can hope for here is to begin qualifying these problems and make a convincing case for a certain existential phenomenological approach to them. In what follows, I will hence present one path into the intricate web of questions they raise. In the first section, I consider the notions of the real (and the actual) and the possible, and direct the further investigations toward the idea that an anthropology of ethics should concern itself not only with “the possibilities of human freedom”, but equally so with an experiential exploration and explication of the conditions of possibility of such possibilities. This line of argument will simultaneously indicate an opening in the circularity that threatens to reinstate the hegemony of the metaphysics of reality as pointed to in the first problem outlined above. In the second section, I will follow a clue from Kierkegaard’s moral psychology as to the experiential domain in which the possible insects and unsettles the real. Here I make the case that the advent of ethical possibility is to be explored in terms of moral experiences that are characterized by the passivity of moods and pathic stirrings, rather than the active comportment of reflective agency. Throughout the final three sections, I will present an elaborate phenomenology of the moral experience that Marco Evaristti’s art installation Helena and El Pescador (2000) elicits. By qualifying and pursuing the question of how the moral experience of possibility in and of itself institutes a dimension of practical necessity, I address the second problem raised above. Since the notion of freedom that emerges from these explorations more precisely relates to a fundamental feature of the human condition that calls forth and demands our practical engagement, rather than to free agency in the face of constraining structures, or the Kantian autonomous subject, or the Foucauldian active exercise of freedom in the care of the self, I will term this phenomenon—which I take to be an originary existential moral engine—the provocation of freedom.

In this chapter, I argue that the critical, emancipatory aspect of the Hegelian notion of freedom, namely social freedom needs further investigation and elaboration. This is because our social freedom curiously requires that we undergo particular experiences, that we are led by 'forces' we cannot and should not (entirely) control. After sketching out the ways in which recent philosophical contributions have been trying to 'naturalise' freedom, I expound on an argument developed by Adorno in Negative Dialectics against the Kantian conception of autonomy, and apply it to Hegel's notion of social freedom as well. I argue that Adorno calls our attention to the impulsive, or affective components of freedom, thus highlighting what can be considered its negative nature. I then concentrate on some passages from James Baldwin's Another Country, to provide a paradigmatic exemplification of social freedom, namely passionate or erotic love, that turns out to be particularly revealing when illustrating my revised notion of social freedom.