Preguntar por la libertad

We propose to explore Hannah Arendt's concept of will and its relationship to freedom. We return to Tassin's distinction between the ‘philosophical genealogy’ and the ‘political genealogy’ of the concept of freedom, in order to reflect on Arendt's critique of the philosophical tradition. We argue that Arendt does not preserve one and reject the other. This involves detecting the ‘metaphysical fallacies’ of tradition and analyzing the experiences they conceal, without attempting to refute them as mere logical or scientific errors. We recover the theoretical productivity of the concept of will in Arendt's analysis of Augustine. We discuss the redemption of the will through love of the world. We conclude that the concept of will indicates that, thanks to the tensions it engenders, we can ‘not-will’; non-will indicates the possibility of resisting a given order and things and disposes us to change; the redemption of the will through love, as proposed by Augustine, can be understood, in a reinterpretation by Arendt, as redemption through love of the world. This is possible if we understand the articulation between the concept of initium and principium and the concept of the world understood as the lovers of the world who co-constitute it.