Gabriela Basterra
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823265145
- eISBN:
- 9780823266883
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823265145.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
How does the causality of freedom affect the subject? This question concerns the alterity of the law and the subject's relationship with it. Kant refers to the law's impact on subjectivity in terms ...
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How does the causality of freedom affect the subject? This question concerns the alterity of the law and the subject's relationship with it. Kant refers to the law's impact on subjectivity in terms of respect (Achtung), a singular feeling originating not in sensibility but in practical reason. Respect produces a positive affect that furthers the law, but also a negative one whereby the law appears to consciousness as a threatening command. This chapter analyzes the positive and negative senses of respect in relation with two different conceptions of ethics that coexist in the Critique of Practical Reason, an immanent one defined by unconditionality (Analytic) and a transcendent one that privileges finality (Dialectic). Since, as this chapter shows, the discrepancies between these two conceptions parallel those between the third and the fourth antinomy of pure reason, it proposes to turn to the third antinomy for insight into an immanent ethical subjectivity.Less
How does the causality of freedom affect the subject? This question concerns the alterity of the law and the subject's relationship with it. Kant refers to the law's impact on subjectivity in terms of respect (Achtung), a singular feeling originating not in sensibility but in practical reason. Respect produces a positive affect that furthers the law, but also a negative one whereby the law appears to consciousness as a threatening command. This chapter analyzes the positive and negative senses of respect in relation with two different conceptions of ethics that coexist in the Critique of Practical Reason, an immanent one defined by unconditionality (Analytic) and a transcendent one that privileges finality (Dialectic). Since, as this chapter shows, the discrepancies between these two conceptions parallel those between the third and the fourth antinomy of pure reason, it proposes to turn to the third antinomy for insight into an immanent ethical subjectivity.
Gabriela Basterra
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823265145
- eISBN:
- 9780823266883
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823265145.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
If freedom can manifest itself in the world, it is only insofar as freedom is the excess that constitutes subjectivity. From a practical perspective, that freedom is actual means it motivates the ...
More
If freedom can manifest itself in the world, it is only insofar as freedom is the excess that constitutes subjectivity. From a practical perspective, that freedom is actual means it motivates the subject to act. Freedom manifests itself as a power to obligate that affects the faculty of desire through the moral law: we find ourselves responding to something without knowing to what. In the Critique of Practical Reason, being free means having freedom act in and through oneself, that is, being animated by a causality one does not understand. This chapter envisions the law as that which in the subject exceeds and addresses the subject as something other. It explores how the subject gives the law its power as cause by making of it the element that initiates and motivates the causality of freedom in oneself. Autonomy, it proposes, consists in offering oneself as origin of what has no origin.Less
If freedom can manifest itself in the world, it is only insofar as freedom is the excess that constitutes subjectivity. From a practical perspective, that freedom is actual means it motivates the subject to act. Freedom manifests itself as a power to obligate that affects the faculty of desire through the moral law: we find ourselves responding to something without knowing to what. In the Critique of Practical Reason, being free means having freedom act in and through oneself, that is, being animated by a causality one does not understand. This chapter envisions the law as that which in the subject exceeds and addresses the subject as something other. It explores how the subject gives the law its power as cause by making of it the element that initiates and motivates the causality of freedom in oneself. Autonomy, it proposes, consists in offering oneself as origin of what has no origin.
Gabriela Basterra
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823265145
- eISBN:
- 9780823266883
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823265145.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
The Subject of Freedom explores the idea of freedom theoretically as the limit that enables thinking, and practically as something other that constitutes subjectivity. Kant's introduction in the ...
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The Subject of Freedom explores the idea of freedom theoretically as the limit that enables thinking, and practically as something other that constitutes subjectivity. Kant's introduction in the third antinomy of an unconditioned freedom necessitates “the human being” that would embody it. In being constituted by freedom, this book proposes, the subject plays the role of the unconditioned that bounds objectivity. But explaining how freedom constitutes ethical subjects lies beyond reason's reach. The challenge practical philosophy faces is explaining how something that exceeds knowledge constitutes subjectivity and manifests itself through the subject's effects in the world. Traversed by an excess that lies beyond reason's ability to represent, what we here call subjectivity surpasses the bounds of self-conscious identity and its impulse to represent world and self as objects of thought. What, then, is ethical subjectivity? What is its relationship with the excess that allows it to emerge? Tracing Kant's concept of freedom from the Critique of Pure Reason to his practical works, this book elaborates some of Kant's most challenging insights in dialogue with Levinas's Otherwise than Being. It proposes that Otherwise than Being offers a deeply Kantian critique of Kant that pursues Kant's most revolutionary insights into ethics to their ultimate consequences, shedding unprecedented light on them. These insights, which have not necessarily prevailed in our time, have the potential to surprise and energize our thinking on the ethical and the political today. This book ultimately argues that the autonomous subjectivity freedom constitutes must be understood as a relationship with the alterity or excess that animates its core.Less
The Subject of Freedom explores the idea of freedom theoretically as the limit that enables thinking, and practically as something other that constitutes subjectivity. Kant's introduction in the third antinomy of an unconditioned freedom necessitates “the human being” that would embody it. In being constituted by freedom, this book proposes, the subject plays the role of the unconditioned that bounds objectivity. But explaining how freedom constitutes ethical subjects lies beyond reason's reach. The challenge practical philosophy faces is explaining how something that exceeds knowledge constitutes subjectivity and manifests itself through the subject's effects in the world. Traversed by an excess that lies beyond reason's ability to represent, what we here call subjectivity surpasses the bounds of self-conscious identity and its impulse to represent world and self as objects of thought. What, then, is ethical subjectivity? What is its relationship with the excess that allows it to emerge? Tracing Kant's concept of freedom from the Critique of Pure Reason to his practical works, this book elaborates some of Kant's most challenging insights in dialogue with Levinas's Otherwise than Being. It proposes that Otherwise than Being offers a deeply Kantian critique of Kant that pursues Kant's most revolutionary insights into ethics to their ultimate consequences, shedding unprecedented light on them. These insights, which have not necessarily prevailed in our time, have the potential to surprise and energize our thinking on the ethical and the political today. This book ultimately argues that the autonomous subjectivity freedom constitutes must be understood as a relationship with the alterity or excess that animates its core.
