Interview with Frank Ruda on "Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism"

Frank Ruda's book Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (University of Nebraska Press 2016) presents a compelling reading of authors diverse as Martin Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Freud. They grapple with the limits of human freedom, and obviously so. Because we understand freedom - at least since Aristotle - as a capacity or a capability to choose freely between different options. Expressed with a formulation of Harry Frankfurt: "An action is free only if the agent could have done otherwise." However, Ruda - who is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee - shows that this intuitive and classical formulation of freedom of choice is deceptive. It suggests that we can choose the amount of freedom we want to live up to in the same way in which we can choose between tea or coffee. But this is a trivialization of freedom. We do not get up in the morning determined to be more free this week than last week. And one reason for this is that freedom is not at our disposal. As such it touches upon questions of fate and predestination. Philosophers from Luther to Hegel and from Descartes to Freud know this. They conceptualize through the concept of freedom a point of negativity, or - metaphorically speaking - a ground zero of human agency and autonomy. This is why topics such as fatalism, predestination, morality or divine providence, to name just a few, guide the argument of the book: to abolish freedom for the sake of freedom.
The Interview is conducted by Dominik Finkelde SJ, Professor of Philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy and Sophie Adloff, student of philosophy.
The Interview was published on New Books Network on April 12, 2021.
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[@asozialesnetzwerk]

Very interesting and insightful. Thx for this fascinating conversation.

[@PoetOfNoise]

Thank you, very interesting conversation! The introduction to the dual oedipal situation and the notoriously impervious logics of sexuation was as approachable as it gets, I wish he would have had a little bit more time left to expand on it.

[@vitoroliveirajorge368]

Frank Ruda is a very brilliant thinker. What he is saying here is CRUCIAL.

[@miralupa8841]

Ruda begins at 4:22

[@hulangenacht9368]

why did u alsways rephrase the questions of the student lol?

[@CONSERVATIOSUI]

It is probably the case that Ruda does not take Hegel's beginning of representation in the will at all as its conceptual principle of bourgeois law and its morality. Therefore, he understands neither the will in its abstract form, nor morality, nor the morality of bourgeois economy and bourgeois state as a logically necessary consequence of the will. Ruda does not see them precisely as the realization of this conceptual principle. Therefore, he does not even bother to examine this Hegelian sequence for logical consistency. Instead, he simply allows Hegel's conceptual starting point in abstract free will to hold, and conversely plausibilizes the Hegelian beginning to and with the forms of bourgeois reality. Ruda thus positions against Hegel's very own ideas participation in the social production of wealth as the principle of his theory of rights. However, there is no place in Ruda's entire argumentation where he even attempts to categorically point the way to the Hegelian will-forms of law starting from this alternative principle.

[@martinwalter5759]

Thank you for your comment. Since Ruda argues from a Marxist perspective and the argumentation is not supported but rather polluted by (hidden) psychoanlytical assumptions, it is one of the books, which tries to please the reader by the usage of a rather rhetorical styl then by logical analysis.

[@peteroconnor6394]

@@martinwalter5759 Why don't you practice what you preach?

[@peteroconnor6394]

@Sebastian M. Spiegelberg instead of asking Frank Ruda what his position is you guess.

[@martinwalter5759]

@@peteroconnor6394 This claim doesn't infer anything logically. Where is the suppositum?