Abstract

This dissertation critically examines two possible approaches to interpreting the meaning of freedom--"reason" and "dread." My thesis is, first, that, although freedom has most often been understood conceptually in the reflection of Western ethics in terms of reason or rationality, this framework nonetheless partially obfuscates "what is going on" primordially in the experience of freedom, that is, in the eventfulness of freedom's own occurrence in the human world of life and death; secondly, that this occurrence can be understood more fully in terms of the event of its own actual occurrence--its own eventfulness--than in rational terms; thirdly, since the context or framework of freedom's occurrence is dread--the felt immediacy of the threat of nonbeing in existence --its significance can be understood more completely in terms of dread than reason. ;Specifically, several seminal interpretations of freedom--those of Aristotle, Kant, and Paul Ricoeur--are critically accounted and some of their difficulties are described. Then a novel account of "freedom in dread" is formulated in reference to the Grand Inquisitor's understanding of this phenomenon in the "Legend" from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The two characters are shown to symbolize two radically opposed "ways of freedom" which I call "Worship" and "Risk" . Worship and Risk are characterized as two primordial ways of responding to freedom as dread, that is, to the terrible eventfulness of our own occurrence in the world. Several implications of these two "ways of freedom" are explored and this conception is compared to the three interpretations of "freedom in reason"--those of Aristotle, Kant, and Paul Ricoeur