Freedom
ELI5
Freedom, in this tradition, doesn't mean you can do whatever you want — it means you're the kind of being that is never completely "full" or settled, always pulled forward by what you lack, and that gap is what makes you capable of choosing, desiring, and being responsible at all.
Definition
Freedom, as it appears across this corpus, is not a property or faculty belonging to a pre-constituted subject but the ontological structure through which subjectivity itself is constituted — and simultaneously the site of its most fundamental undoing. The corpus traverses three interlocking registers of this concept. In the Sartrean register (dominant across the Being and Nothingness occurrences), freedom is identical with the being of the for-itself: because consciousness is "not enough," because it is constitutively a lack of being rather than a plenum, it is radically free — condemned to choose, unable to escape the nihilating movement that defines it. Freedom is not a capacity one possesses but the very mode of existence of a being that "makes itself a lack of being." This is why, for Sartre, "Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible" — there is no substrate beneath freedom from which it could be derived or by which it could be limited, except by another freedom. In the Kantian register (occurrences from the Critique of Pure Reason and Zupančič), freedom is a transcendental-structural concept: it belongs to the intelligible character of the subject, operating outside phenomenal time and natural causality, and it is precisely this transcendental freedom that makes evil — not merely empirical wrongdoing but radical, structural evil — possible. Kant's "propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom" means that freedom is not merely the condition of morality but equally the condition of its failure. In the post-Kantian / fatalist register (Ruda's Abolishing Freedom), freedom is paradoxically constituted retroactively through forced necessity: "freedom emerges out of a struggle," is never given in advance, and is most genuinely realized when the subject acts as if it were not free — collapsing the voluntarist conception of freedom entirely.
What unifies these registers, and connects them to the Lacanian framework established by the cross-referenced canonical concepts, is the shared insight that freedom is inseparable from lack, negation, and the split subject. Sartre's equation of freedom with lack directly anticipates the Lacanian formulation of the subject as constituted by missing signifiers: freedom as "the concrete mode of being of the lack of being" maps onto the barred subject ($) whose being is hollowed out by the signifying chain. The Sartrean for-itself — perpetually nihilating the in-itself, unable to coincide with itself — is structurally homologous to the Lacanian subject defined by aphanisis and constitutive fading. Freedom, then, is not liberation but the name for this irreducible non-coincidence with oneself: the gap that makes desire, language, ethics, and subjectivity possible.
Place in the corpus
Within the corpus, "Freedom" functions as a node that connects the phenomenological and existentialist literature (primarily jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological, with 18 occurrences) to the Kantian critical tradition (kant-immanuel-critique-of-pure-reason) and to contemporary post-Lacanian interventions (provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, alenka-zupancic-ethics-of-the-real-kant-and-lacan-2000). It sits at the intersection of Subjectivity and Lack: the canonical synthesis of Subjectivity establishes that the subject is constituted through loss and splitting, never self-identical; Freedom is the name this corpus gives to that very structure when viewed from the side of action and decision rather than from the side of signification. Similarly, Freedom is intimately linked to the canonical concept of Negation — particularly in its Sartrean formulation where the for-itself's constitutive "internal negation" of the in-itself is precisely what freedom is. The Sartrean corpus provides the phenomenological groundwork; the Kantian and post-Kantian sources (Zupančič, Ruda) then move freedom from an existential description to a structural-transcendental concept capable of grounding ethics and responsibility within a Lacanian frame. Freedom also converses with Anxiety: both name the experience of the subject at the limit of its own structure — Anxiety as the affect of the Real pressing in, Freedom as the ontological condition that makes that pressing-in possible and inescapable.
The concept's most specific theoretical contribution to the corpus is the equation of freedom with lack: in jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological, "Freedom is really synonymous with lack" and "Freedom is the concrete mode of being of the lack of being" — a formulation that, while Sartrean in origin, functions within the broader corpus as a bridge between existentialist ontology and Lacanian theory of the subject. Ruda's provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata pushes this further by arguing that freedom is not a capacity but a retroactive result of forced determination, making it a structural analogue to the Lacanian subject's constitution in the future anterior: one "will have been free" only in the wake of the act, not before it.
Key formulations
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (p.565)
Freedom is really synonymous with lack. Freedom is the concrete mode of being of the lack of being.
The quote is theoretically loaded because it directly identifies two terms — "freedom" and "lack" — that the broader corpus keeps in productive tension: "lack" is the Lacanian-Sartrean operator that constitutes both desire and the subject, while "concrete mode of being" insists that freedom is not an abstract capacity but an ontological condition immanent to existence itself, making freedom structurally co-extensive with the barred subject ($) whose being is defined by the missing signifier.
Cited examples
This is a 30-occurrence concept; the corpus extractions did not surface a curated illustrative example. See the source page(s) above for the surrounding argument and the cross-referenced canonical concepts for their cited examples.
Tensions
This is a 30-occurrence concept; intra-corpus tensions and cross-framework comparative analysis are reserved for canonical-level coverage. See the cross-referenced canonical concepts for those layers.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (10)
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#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.101
Good and Evil > Degrees of evil
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of "radical evil" is systematically misread when applied to empirical historical events like the Holocaust; it is instead a transcendental-structural concept—the necessary consequence of freedom itself—that explains the possibility of non-ethical conduct, not its empirical magnitude, and that this misreading enables a reductive "ethics of the lesser evil."
Kant situates the problem on another level: an actor's disposition [Anlage] is neither good nor evil but neutral; temptation is not irresistible, yet evil deeds are still done. Kant's solution to this problem is that one has to recognize the propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom.
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#02
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > ON THE ANTITHESIS.
Theoretical move: Kant stages the antithesis position in the Third Antinomy: the defender of universal natural causality argues that positing a dynamical first cause (transcendental freedom) is unnecessary and destructive of the lawful, continuous nexus of nature, while acknowledging that an infinite causal regress is equally incomprehensible—thus establishing the genuine antinomial tension between nature and freedom.
if the existence of a transcendental faculty of freedom is granted—a faculty of originating changes in the world—this faculty must at least exist out of and apart from the world
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#03
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that the same subject can be understood under two distinct modes of causality — an empirical character (as phenomenon, governed by natural necessity) and an intelligible character (as thing-in-itself, outside time and free from causal determination) — thereby resolving the cosmological antinomy between nature and freedom without contradiction, and grounding the practical concept of the moral 'ought' in reason's spontaneous causality.
And thus nature and freedom, each in the complete and absolute signification of these terms, can exist, without contradiction or disagreement, in the same action.
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#04
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK I. > SECTION IX. Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas.
Theoretical move: Kant argues that transcendental freedom and natural necessity are compatible by distinguishing the empirical character (causality of reason as it appears in phenomena, fully determined) from the intelligible character (reason as a purely intelligible faculty, unconditioned by time), thereby showing that the same action can be subject to both natural law and rational self-origination without contradiction.
This freedom must not be described, in a merely negative manner, as independence of empirical conditions, for in this case the faculty of reason would cease to be a cause of phenomena; but it must be regarded, positively, as a faculty which can spontaneously originate a series of events.
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#05
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Predestination as Emancipation > <span id="unp-ruda-0013.xhtml_p27" class="page"></span>Exaggerating Exaggeration, or Letting (God) Be . . . (God)
Theoretical move: Luther's distinction between necessity-as-immutability and necessity-as-compulsion reframes freedom as itself the locus of evil, making subjects more (not less) responsible for what they cannot change—a theological anticipation of Freud's logic of unconscious responsibility that grounds a structural account of predestination without recourse to simple determinism.
freedom as capacity is not freedom; it is rather 'in all men the kingdom of Satan'
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#06
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Predestination as Emancipation > Letting God be . . . (Good)
Theoretical move: The passage expounds Erasmus's position in the free will debate against Luther: by introducing a gradated theory of grace, human-divine cooperationism, and a distinction between antecedent and consequent necessity, Erasmus attempts to preserve both God's omnipotence and human freedom, framing the debate as ultimately revolving around the proper causality of grace and freedom — and positioning Luther's absolute necessity as a politically dangerous, anti-humanist excess.
Erasmus proposes to call freedom 'a power of the human will by which a man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them.'
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#07
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > Desiring Fortune
Theoretical move: By routing Descartes's critique of fortune through Hegel's critique of eudemonistic ethics, the passage argues that Aristotelianism illegitimately universalizes natural causality into the realm of freedom, and that the fatalist corrective consists in recognizing the *absolute impossibility* of luck—thereby dissolving hope and its constitutive error of treating unknowable outcomes as merely contingently possible.
Aristotelianism … absorbs the very freedom of actions into nature and makes them dependent on the future outcomes of things that we cannot influence.
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#08
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda
Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom > The Freedom of a Fatalist
Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Cartesian freedom is not a capacity but a result—something that happens to the subject through a contingent, unthinkable determination (figured as God). This yields a paradox: one is truly free only when forced to be, so the fatalist imperative "Act as if you were not free!" becomes the condition of genuine freedom, opposing all Aristotelian naturalizations of essence.
Freedom is thereby not the content of my thought but its form.
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#09
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.98
The End of All Things > The Conflict of Determinisms: Intelligible Fatalism
Theoretical move: Ruda, reading Schmid's "intelligible fatalism," argues that the subject emerges from an unresolvable conflict between two determinisms (rational/moral freedom and phenomenal causality), such that freedom is neither a given capacity nor contingency but is constituted retroactively through the forced, impossible decision to act morally—yielding a split subject and a transcendental antagonism as the only ground of ethics.
Freedom emerges out of a struggle... it is never given, never automatically realized, never granted, not even if it is at the same time considered to be the ultimate capacity of rational beings.
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#10
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.25
The Kantian Parallax
Theoretical move: Žižek argues, via Karatani's reading of Kant, that the "parallax view" names an irreducible structural gap between positions that cannot be synthesized or reduced; he then radicalises this by showing that transcendental subjectivity, freedom, and ontological difference all inhabit precisely this "third space" between phenomenal and noumenal—a space structurally homologous to the Lacanian Real as pure antagonism and to the Not-all logic of sexuation.
Our freedom persists only in a space in between the phenomenal and the noumenal. It is therefore not that Kant simply limited causality to the phenomenal domain in order to be able to assert that, at the noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents.