Video Archives - "The Destiny of Freedom" Lecture by Philippe Nonet (2012)

Monday, October 15, 2012: “The Destiny of Freedom: From Kant to Heidegger”

Participants: Philippe Nonet, a professor at U.C. Berkeley who holds a Doctor of Laws and a Ph.D. in Sociology

In his lecture at Bard College, Philippe Nonet traces a history of metaphysical freedom from Kant to Heidegger, touching on Nietzsche and, in the end, elaborating on a view of freedom oriented towards the future of humanity. An edited version of Professor Nonet’s lecture appears in Volume 2 of HA: the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Order it here.

Nonet contends that there is a necessary decision to make with regards to freedom. Historically, freedom has been thought of as the highest possibility of the will, but freedom of the will, he says, “attains its most extreme possibility in modern technique.” Technique ultimately plays a crucial role in Nonet’s idea of freedom. It is the end result of the kind of freedom linked to the will, and it actually threatens to extinguish freedom insofar as it can make all men into laborers, who unlike workers cannot determine their own actions. This, says Nonet, is what Max Weber means by ‘slavery without a master,’ a society bound in servitude to the demands of technique.

In reality, freedom’s destiny is to be divorced from the will and grounded in something higher. Nonet tells the history of freedom in three stages. First, to understand this higher ground for freedom, Nonet looks to Kant. The will for Kant is ultimately like the Aristotelian God, the god of metaphysics (not religion). This god—a first principle—is the source of itself, and subsequently of all things. Kant’s universal will is the will to set oneself under oneself as a universal law for oneself, thus establishing the rational will as the source of freedom.

Philippe Nonet

Second, Nonet argues that Nietzsche is an ultra-Kantian. Kant’s ethic of pure duty postulates that the essence of human being is willing. Nonet argues that the will to will in Kant—which makes the will like God—is in Nietzsche transmogrified into the will to power, or the ability to control the conditions of the will’s own self-actualization. Nonet sees the rise of technique as the submission of will’s actualization, leading, in turn, to mankind’s slavery to the demands of labor. As a result, the will to will rises to a position of unchallenged domination, which leads mankind to stop asking metaphysical questions of itself. This produces a type of age, our age, characterized by interchangeability; even good is radically substitutable. Technique has then turned all objects into disposable things.

Finally, Nonet shifts his focus to the higher law under which freedom can escape technique. Such an understanding emphasizes the importance of moving freedom into the ground of unconcealment in the Heideggerian sense, freeing freedom from the human will by removing freedom to a mutual experience by man of the manifestation of Being. This he calls das Gestell, an untranslatable German term. It is a law above the law. For Nonet, it is most important to de-link freedom from the will and move it into the realm of humanity’s relationship with Being itself. Freedom can only then become a component of the experience of Being. In Nonet’s mind, this is the fate of freedom.

For readers of Arendt, Nonet’s talk is important because it touches on the Heideggerian philosophical context that plays a very important background role in all of Arendt’s work. The videos contain extensive Q&A portions, which are well worth watching. An edited version of Professor Nonet’s lecture appears in Volume 2 of HA: the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Order it here.

Analysis by Dan Perlman

Watch Nonet's lecture in full below:

Philippe Nonet: The Destiny of Freedom from Kant to Heidegger Day 1 from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.

Philippe Nonet: The Destiny of Freedom from Kant to Heidegger Day 2 from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.