| To
be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles—or so we think
at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces
its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not
exist. Freedom' Embrace explores these necessities of freedom.
J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces
debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about
knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most
fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption
of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated
to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity
and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings
from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which
vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to
envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and
norms may be judged and transformed.
By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations,
Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and
weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves
old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom
that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise
from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture. |
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