Abstract：In the modern debate about the concept of freedom, both standard compatibilism and incompatibilism take it for granted that a negative form of freedom must be presupposed theoretically at the very outset. For both of them, human freedom is regarded as a ready-made innate state of the subject. Merleau-Ponty (梅洛-庞蒂) thoroughly abandoned the conceptual framework of causality as such in order to develop a non-standard form of compatibilism related to the problem of freedom. For him, human freedom can only be understood as a normative achievement. His conception of normative freedom is grounded on a theory of practical self-consciousness of the embodied subject. Such a subject must be self-conscious of selfhood as a free agent who responds to the normative demand from the style of the world. The free subject can only gain a normative identity to realize normative “I” through a mutual recognition of human subjects within the bounds of a normative institution. As such, both the world and others are no more understood as constraints but innermost components in the unique structure of the normative “I”. In this paper, we will finally argue that our freedom amounts to such a normative achievement that human subjects can only make altogether in their mutual recognition within the normative bounds of the world.
Liu Zhe. The Concept of Normative Freedom Merleau-Ponty’s Non-Standard Compatibilism in the Phénoménologie de la Perception[J]. Journal of Peking University(Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2022, 59(5): 60-71.
