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.
