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Marquette Studies in Philosophy #12
Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Dispair
Treating Kierkegaard as both a great thinker and a corrective to our time, this work provides accounts of his key concepts of anxiety and despair. It explains the radical significance of these concepts for our understanding of freedom, and shows how humanity can profit from Kierkegaard's labours. Foreword by Alastair McKinnon.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
Paperback
First published August 7, 1996
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August 23, 2019
In a free society, should it be legal to burn the symbol of freedom?
The understanding of the concept of freedom that has shaped the modern world is one that comes out of the enlightenment. Freedom is understood to mean being able to do whatever you want. Freedom's scope is wide. As Walker Percy writes, we seek freedom's praise to be liberated by education from the traditional bonds of religion, by democracy from the strictures of class, by technology from the drudgery of poverty, and by self-knowledge from the tyranny of the unconscious so that each of us are left to do whatever we want. Freedom's promise, that one will no longer be enslaved to ignorance, social expectations, the church, the state, poverty or even controllable drives, is a Faustian bargain. For freedom promises freedom from enslavement, but in exchange it offers the freedom not to be oneself, and ultimately to become self-enslaved. Left with freedom's promise and no clear blueprint as to what to do with it, freedom becomes enslavement.
The understanding of the concept of freedom that has shaped the modern world is one that comes out of the enlightenment. Freedom is understood to mean being able to do whatever you want. Freedom's scope is wide. As Walker Percy writes, we seek freedom's praise to be liberated by education from the traditional bonds of religion, by democracy from the strictures of class, by technology from the drudgery of poverty, and by self-knowledge from the tyranny of the unconscious so that each of us are left to do whatever we want. Freedom's promise, that one will no longer be enslaved to ignorance, social expectations, the church, the state, poverty or even controllable drives, is a Faustian bargain. For freedom promises freedom from enslavement, but in exchange it offers the freedom not to be oneself, and ultimately to become self-enslaved. Left with freedom's promise and no clear blueprint as to what to do with it, freedom becomes enslavement.
Displaying 1 of 1 review