Freedom

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani starts from a distinction he takes from Rousseau: doing what one wills is not the same as doing what one pleases. He illustrates it with two high-school students woken at six in the morning: the one who gets up expresses his will, the other follows his pleasure. To obey the law one has prescribed for oneself is to be free. He sees in this a prefiguration of Kantian autonomy and of Marx's idea that man makes man12. Drawing on Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, he contrasts the freedom of the void, which turns into a fury of destruction, with the classical freedom of character. For him, true freedom is individuality, that is, the particular raised to the universal. It is not given in advance: it is a path of liberation that runs through labour and through recognition by others34. He also presents it as the result of millennia of praxis5. With Clouscard, he criticises libertarian liberalism, which stays at the pleasure principle, and formal freedom: "everything is permitted, nothing is possible". These criticisms lead him back to what the individual owes to the collective6. Finally, he puts forward the hypothesis of a link between tonal music and the fate of individual freedom in Europe.

1. 1L comme Liberté26 Dec 2014
2. 2#1.6 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?10 Dec 2015
3. 3Hegel Plage 4/52 Feb 2016
4. 4"Napoléon ou les raisons de la ruse", avec Dominique Pagani2 Dec 2024
5. 5#6 Réponses aux questions30 Nov 2020
6. 6[ENTRETIEN] DOMINIQUE PAGANI - Michel Clouscard et la trahison de mai 687 Feb 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 9 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.