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6 ——— Freedom and Alterity The Out-of-Placeness of Freedom There is a ready objection to the description of good and evil in terms of the environmental categories of “in-placeness” and “out-of-placeness .” It is that “out-of-placeness,” rather than characterizing evil, is essential to ethics. This is because the possibility of ethics is that of freedom . To be free, however, is to be “out-of-place.” It is, in Sartre’s words, the “possibility, which human reality has, to secrete a nothingness which isolates it” (Sartre 1966, 60). This “isolation” is our separation from our environment. Because we can escape its determination we can ethically appraise and act to change our situation. Given this, we cannot assert that “in-placeness” is a sufficient basis for ethics. Ethics involves judging the frame we have been placed in. Thus, animals are “in” nature, framed by their environment; yet we cannot say that they are ethical. Neither can we say that “goodness,” defined in environmental terms, has an ethical component. What is lacking is freedom, the very freedom that separates us from nature. The philosopher Luc Ferry formulates this objection in terms of our unnaturalness. He writes: [M]an is the antinatural being par excellence. . . . This is how he escapes natural cycles, how he attains the realm of culture, and the sphere of morality, which presupposes living in accordance with laws and not just with nature. It is because humankind is not bound to instinct, to biological processes 147 148 Ethics and Selfhood alone, that it possesses a history, that generations follow one another but do not necessarily resemble each other—while the animal kingdom observes perfect continuity. (Ferry 1995, xxviii) What distinguishes man is his freedom. In Ferry’s words, “His humanitas resides in his freedom, in the fact that he is undefined, that his nature is to have no nature but to possess the capacity to distance himself . . .” (5). This capacity allows us to have culture, history, and so on. Instead of simply repeating the biologically determined patterns of the past, we can distance ourselves from our predecessors, judge their achievements, and advance culturally. The fact that animals cannot do this shows that the inner distance implied by freedom and required for cultural advance is not part of nature.1 That it is not is also shown by the distinction between acting freely and being determined by an “interest.” Nature acts according to interests. Thus, animals act prompted by the advantages that their circumstances offer. Freedom, however, consists in the ability to abstract from interests. As Ferry notes, in reference to Kant, “it is . . . the ability to separate oneself from interests (freedom) that defines dignity and makes the human being alone a legal subject” (32). Being such a subject requires “a refusal to allow oneself to be limited to any particularity” (15). It requires the self-distancing that permits us to view ourselves from the perspective of a law applying to everyone.2 Doing so, we disregard the interests that arise through our particular situations. We consider ourselves as subjects, not of our environment, but of a universal law. Now, the fact that we can do this leads to what is, arguably, Kant’s central insight: As free beings, the only thing that can bind us to follow the moral law is ourselves. Ethics, in other words, is a matter of self-limitation .3 Thus, we need ethics precisely because, unlike the animals, we have escaped the control of nature. Having distanced ourselves from it, we are not subject to its laws or constraints. Ethics, then, does not just demand for its possibility the separation of the self from nature. As self-limitation, it is a necessary response to the freedom that accompanies this. In essence, then, Ferry’s objection is that, rather than being a matter of fitting in with some pregiven circumstances, ethics implies a radical subjective autonomy. Its possibility is that of the subject that has freed itself from any frame in which it might appear.4 At least in outline, my answer to this is apparent from the preceding chapters. I do not deny the necessity of freedom, but only the characterization of it as out-ofplaceness . The independence and autonomy of the subject, rather than a manifestation of placelessness, is a function of the subject being framed by its others. Human subjects abstract each other from “nature” in the Kantian sense. What makes this abstraction possible, what sets human [3.128.203...

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