Late Husserlian concept of freedom is ‘hazy’

Alexei Says: October 15, 2007 at 11:40 am Interesting discussion, as always, Sinthome. I’m tempted to respond in (late) Husserlian terms:

• Isn’t ‘freedom’ a theme or horizon in and through which we establish, and re-activate the sense of our world?
• that is, isn’t the concept of freedom something that’s necessarily ‘hazy,’ since it is not a determinate object (in the sense of Gegenstand), but precisely that guiding ideal, that Telos, which is always being re-negotiated and transformed by our engagements with a world via the development of thinking?
• Isn’t it expressed in the cultural object we have produced?
• And, since a Telos arises out of a given cultural formation (an objektivitaet), which is itself the product of previous performances, Might the problematic of ‘Freedom,’ not mark the very problematization of intentionality itself — i.e., that what was intended and what was actualized are not identical, and hence require further effort to distill the spontaneous potentials that ‘inhere’ within the sediment of history, within the world for us?

larvalsubjects Says: October 15, 2007 at 12:27 pm Not only were you tempted to respond in late Husserlian fashion, but I think you did respond in late Husserlian fashion! I think one of the traps of this question lies in conceiving freedom as an eternally abiding attribute of beings such as ourselves, rather than as a situated product of situations, as you describe here.