I am less tired tonight than I was last night but I am still here scrambling to write a paper before my eyes glue themselves shut. My tutor forget we had an appointment which will force me to do more work.. Now I am comparing Kant's concept of freedom in the Metaphysics of Morals against Hegel's concept in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
Kant likes to think that there are two worlds the world of appearances, everything that as human beings we have access to; the other world is the world of noumena of things in-them-selves. We cannot know anything about this world it is beyond our ability to know (how can make such a claim is a problem). We are not free in the world of the appearances we act according to the causal laws of nature, but we are free in the world of the noumena and thus we can think of ourselves as free even when others see us as determined. Kant likes to have his cake an eat it too.
Hegel on the other had believes in only one world in which there is no divide between our thoughts and objects. We come to have freedom from indeterminesse, from the empty abyss of nothing, the ummmm, the universal. This universal is absolute possibility, freedom. Once a certain thing is willed there is a unity between the particular (that which wills a certain individual thing) and the universal because the particular is contained in the universal and the universal only finds determinacy in the particular, this union is the will which is simultaneously free and constrained. Hegel read too much eastern philosophy, he deals in contradiction much too often...
I prefer Kant to Hegel, but what he describes is not really freedom, it is the hope that we are free, maybe it is even what happens when we act. I read a bout a psychological studied that a certain area of the brain is activated before we choose something to give us the illusion that we have free will.
These are the things that I like the most in philosophy the self, freedom of the will (or lack thereof), and morality. I guess I don't really mind staying up with these friends.... so long
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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