The Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In the tradition of transcendental philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy tackles the experience of being existing as freedom itself. Nancy attempts to draw an ontological ground for experience by calibrating existence as its own freedom. He finds an angle through Kant, Hegel and Heidigger so as to release being from the world of ideation. He takes the split of phenomenon and unifies it as its own logical independence, citing the cut as the logical difference of being itself rather than one of ideation or sensuous apperception.
This is a rather easy cut to make. Jean-Luc Nancy runs through the gambit of freedom from a variety of standard sources and then ends with questions of morality. Since he has separated being from thought, there remains little to guide a relationship between being and thought. He ends up with this hard nugget of being that is totally independent, finishing with an experience of being that is free. Free not only of categorical imperatives but also breath-takingly free of any kind of understanding what so ever. We now have nothing to guide our decisions about being when left to being itself.
In many ways this is a very boring book, despite my interest in philosophy. Nancy ends with an ontological version of “laissez faire” where we are free for whatever. This is disgustingly relevant, obviously, to our post-industrial capitalism so that in a way Nancy didn’t even really need to write a book on this topic… as it isn’t particularly useful to anyone.
Despite his impressive range of quotations and his attempt at systematizing being and freedom — which is near impossible to be coherent about since each of these different philosophers offer different systems of their own — his distortions end up saying very little new. This is a bad kind of academic-philosophy because it re-calibrates thought in a way that leaves the familiar categories realigned without introducing any new idea whatsoever.
In that way, its an embarrassing book to read because it’s written so backwards it ends up being “so what?” So the rift of freedom, experience and being has been widely struggled with for centuries! Why don’t you say something that we don’t already know? Just because there has been a problem doesn’t mean that this problem needs to be revisited.
