Academic literature on the topic 'Freedom facticity'

Abstract How is philosophical knowledge related to the world in which it is produced – and how should it be related? In the article, “world” refers to the whole of historically established, politically contested and materially constituted practices. Three ideal-type relationships are distinguished: affirmatively in the world, negatively against the world, and with the world. The article argues for the latter because it combines the two decisive insights of the first two relationships: the insight into philosophy’s facticity, i. e., it being bound to the world, and the insight into philosophy’s freedom, i. e., that it can, nevertheless, turn against that world. Political epistemology is needed to explicate any philosophy with the world because it holds together, in a productive tension, minimal materialism as the core of the insight into philosophy’s facticity and the irreducibility of thought as the core of the insight into philosophy’s freedom.

The objective of this study was to better understand the meaning, for the person deprived of freedom, of living in prison with tuberculosis and its treatment. The research was conducted using the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger, applied to 22 interviews realized in five prisons located in the state of Pará, Brazil. The results and its hermeneutics made possible to understand that the person deprived of freedom understands their condition and transcends their facticity and difficulties to achieve the cure of the disease, living as beings of possibilities, revealing their authentic way of facing tuberculosis and its treatment in prison.

Starting with the emphasis that Levinas puts on the role of otherness in the constitution of subjective dimension, this paper discusses how the articulation of this process and the consequences that derive from it recall specifically Fichtean themes. Although the relation between Levinas and Fichte has not been thoroughly examined in the literature yet, it can nevertheless be shown that themes such as the “call” of the subject from the outside, from the unattainable dimension of an otherness irreducible to any immanence and the factual and finite character of its correlative freedom can be understood by reference to the categories that Fichte develops in his texts on law and morals. The reference to Fichte, who already in his considerations on the Wissenschaftslehre recognizes an external Anstoß as determining the reality of the subject, will allows to elucidate the fundamental structure of Levinas’ thought. Particular attention is paid in Levinas to the belonging of otherness to an immemorial past, which in the impossibility of being traced back to the presence of consciousness finds the guarantee of its radical transcendence. Thus, another temporal (or rather, extra-temporal) dimension is configured which also in Fichte refers to an “exteriority” that cannot be assumed by the subject, but only ascertained a posteriori, hence its factual character. Through an interpretation of the fundamental meaning that the primacy of otherness over sameness has in Levinas and the attempt to reflect this relationship through the reference to similar Fichtean motifs, it becomes clearer that the basic meaning of a radical thought of otherness does not cancel the sameness of subject, but on the contrary allows to found it by referring it to its constitutive, unavoidable heteronomy.

The main purpose of this study was to provide a philosophical reflection on the relevance of Heidegger’s notion of innovation to the unemployment crisis in Africa. The study used a combination of phenomenological and analytical methods for the study. It was found that Heidegger’s philosophy of innovation has its basis in his concept of lostness. Dasein finds itself thrown into the world without prior information. Dasein finds itself in facticity without any help. Under facticity and fallenness, Dasein lives the inauthentic life that is characterised by averageness, publicness, and distantiality. As the Design struggles to meet its possibilities, Dasein is required to be authentic. It is authenticity that is implied with innovation in this study. It was found that Heidegger’s philosophy of innovation is characterised by individuality, unscientific and unconventional, resoluteness and respect for individual uniqueness. Heidegger’s philosophy of innovation can be relevant to African efforts to end the unemployment crisis when there is a balance between communalistic life and individual life under freedom. Moreover, the unemployment crisis can be fought against when the Africans are aware of the individual identities that make them complement each other in the community. It was concluded that the philosophy of innovation is an appropriate solution to the employment crisis not only in Africa but in all communities in the world that are struggling to fight unemployment.

In this article, I examine Peter Morgan's TV series The Crown (2016–present) through the lens of Sartrean and Beauvoirian existentialism. I argue that the character of Queen Elizabeth II holds a special place in the royal family, as the monarch who demonstrates the compatibility of duty and tradition with existential freedom and authenticity. I also demonstrate the series’ commitment to breaking the illusion of inhumanity that the royal family tries to maintain, by showing that the royals are not out-of-reach ideals, but humans who struggle to transcend their exceptionally binding facticity. As portrayed in The Crown, Queen Elizabeth's lucidity on her situation leads to honest introspection, which dispels any attempt at self-deception, and therefore prevents her from slipping into bad faith.

Jean-Paul Sartre, based on the phenomenological method and existentialist philosophy, described human reality as freedom in situation, understood in the indissoluble unity between itself and itself, that is, between freedom and facticity. Existence of the subject is not given abstractly, it occurs in a concrete space, circumscribed in materiality and acquires meaning in the light of the project of being. In defining the concept of situation, Sartre uses the notions of "my place" and "my surroundings", portraying materiality as a boundary condition of freedom. From this notion of spatiality, the present work aims to establish relations between the Sartrian concept of situation, as defined in Being and Nothingness, and the concept of territory used in several areas of knowledge that approach the relation between person and environment, such as geography, anthropology, ethology, psychology and other areas of health. The multiple possibilities of interdisciplinary interlocution of the notion of territory result from the dynamics of the concept, which is not limited to the physical environment, but brings together social and symbolic aspects in an integrated and dialectical way. Discussing the approximations between the concepts of territory, territoriality and situation contribute to the interdisciplinarity of the different areas that use them in professional practice

The author shows that freedom as an event is a condition for the possibility of the entire metaphysics and history of the West. As a fundamental driver of events, freedom must manifest in its three ‘ontological’ spatiotemporal ways of appearing in connection with chance and necessity, facticity and contingency, chaos and emergence. The first is the one that opens up philosophy as a possibility of thinking beyond a reduction to myth, religion, art and science, establishing its own autonomy in the age of the technosphere. The second is the one that has its political meaning of action, determination and the creation of something new in history, starting from the idea of the sovereignty of the people and ending in the post-imperial sovereignty of a large area (Gro§raum), as Carl Schmitt defines the end of the era of the nation-state in the history of the world and the transition to the form of the imperial order of power and their permanent struggle for rule over the territory of the Other. The third is the one that appears as the last sign of resistance against all kinds of enslavement and reduction of man to thing-object-information in the system of rule of the posthuman condition with homo kybernetes as the last form of “spiritual Being” of Human in general. Key words: metaphysics, West, freedom, technosphere, homo kybernetes.

This chapter argues that God is an eternal fact, thus an eternally contingent consequence, the factum brutum. Employing Schelling’s later notion of “unprethinkability” it is argued that as unprethinkable primal being is not unthinkable but only post-thinkable. Being, including the being of God, can only be thought in its consequence. If being exists in a cold, mute, neutral and mechanistic way, then being, post factum, proves ungodly. But, if being exists graciously, personally and as the result of freedom, then being exists in a godly way. Whether or not unprethinkable being is then consequently to be identified as Godly or ungodly is something only constituted retroactively, that is, neither a priori nor even a posteriori, but per posterius.

As a receiver and giver of love, the self is both subject to transformation and open to exogenous creative powers. In dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard, the chapter constructs subjectivity as continuous becoming rather than given facticity; while gifted from God in inchoate form, the self is constructed in time, history, and relationships of love and belonging. The chapter conceptualizes the self as containing a double layer of universality and particularity and discusses the interrelation of these layers. Regarding particularity, it explores the medieval notion of haecceity as developed by John Duns Scotus and explicates its contribution to contemporary understandings of human difference and singularity. Using universality as a baseline, it examines how the particular self is bilocated in time and eternity—or history and a transhistorical reality extending from God’s life—and characterized by necessity and freedom, concluding that it is this kind of subjectivity that grows through love attachments.

In this chapter I argue that there is a radical contingency to one’s being born into one’s particular life as it unfolds from one’s birth onwards. For each of us, it is an ultimate fact that admits of no further explanation that I am born the particular individual I am and no one else. Using Sartre’s work, the chapter examines this radical contingency along with the connected phenomena of facticity and groundlessness. However, the chapter criticizes Sartre’s conception of radical freedom and puts forward in its place an idea of sedimented sense-making. On this basis, situatedness is re-interpreted to say that we are situated in that we continually make sense of our circumstances in sedimented ways. Autonomous choice and reflection are just one subset of ways in which we can make sense of the succession of circumstances that come down to us from birth.

Like the other German Idealists, Schelling began his philosophical career by acknowledging the importance of Kant’s grounding of knowledge in the synthesising activity of the subject, while questioning his establishment of a dualism between appearances and things in themselves. The other main influences on Schelling’s early work are Leibniz, Spinoza, J.G. Fichte, and F.H. Jacobi. Schelling adopts both Spinoza’s conception of an absolute ground, of which the finite world is the consequent, and Fichte’s emphasis on the role of the I in the constitution of the world. At the same time he seeks both to overcome the perceived fatalism entailed by Spinoza’s monism, and to avoid the sense in Fichte that nature only exists as the object of the I. After adopting a position close to that of Fichte between 1794 and 1796, Schelling tried in his various versions of Naturphilosophie from 1797 onwards to find new ways of explicating the identity between thinking and nature, claiming that in this philosophy ‘Nature is to be visible mind, mind invisible nature’. In his System des transcendentalen Idealismus [System of Transcendental Idealism] (1800) he advanced the idea that art, as the ‘organ of philosophy’, shows the identity of what he terms ‘conscious’ productivity (mind) and ‘unconscious’ productivity (nature) because it reveals more than can be understood via the conscious intentions that lead to its production. Schelling’s ‘identity philosophy’, which is another version of his Naturphilosophie, begins in 1801, and is summarised in the assertion that ‘Existence is the link of a being as One, with itself as a multiplicity’. Material nature and the mind that knows it are different aspects of the same ‘Absolute’ or ‘absolute identity’, in which they are both grounded. In 1804 Schelling becomes concerned with the transition from the Absolute to the manifest world in which necessity and freedom are in conflict. If freedom is not to become inexplicable, he maintains, Spinoza’s assumption of a logically necessary transition from God to the world cannot be accepted. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit [Of Human Freedom] (1809) tries to explain how God could create a world involving evil, suggesting that nature relates to God somewhat as the later Freud’s ‘id’ relates to the developed autonomous ‘ego’ which transcends the drives that motivate it. The philosophy of Die Weltalter [The Ages of the World], on which Schelling worked during the 1810s and 1820s, interprets the intelligible world, including ourselves, as the result of an ongoing conflict between expansive and contractive forces. He becomes convinced that philosophy cannot finally give a reason for the existence of the manifest world that is the product of this conflict. This leads to his opposition, beginning in the 1820s, to Hegel’s philosophical system, and to an increasing concern with theology that tries to answer Leibniz’s question of why there is something rather than nothing. Hegel’s system claims to be without presuppositions, and thus to be self-grounding, following the rationalist notion of substance as necessary being. While Schelling shares with Hegel the idea that the relations of dependence between differing aspects of knowledge can be articulated in a dynamic system, he thinks that this only provides a ‘negative’ philosophy, in which the fact of being is enclosed within thought. What he terms ‘positive’ philosophy tries to come to terms with the facticity of ‘being which is absolutely independent of all thinking’ (2 (3): 164). Schelling endeavours in his Philosophie der Mythologie [Philosophy of Mythology] and Philosophie der Offenbarung [Philosophy of Revelation] of the 1830s and 1840s to establish a complete philosophical system by beginning with ‘that which just exists … in order to see if I can get from it to the divinity’ (2 (3): 158), which leads to a historical account of mythology and Judeo-Christian revelation. This system does not, though, overcome the problem of the ‘alterity’ of being, its irreducibility to a philosophical system, which his critique of Hegel reveals. The direct and indirect influence of this critique on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Levinas, Derrida, and others is evident, and Schelling must be considered as the key transitional figure between Hegel and approaches to ‘post-metaphysical’ thinking. His ideas are also increasingly being associated with the idea that the ecological crisis is revealing how humankind’s relationship to non-human nature needs to be radically rethought.