Practice of Unfreedom

The "practice of unfreedom" names the specific pathological condition of the will that Descartes's fatalism is designed to counter. In Ruda's reading of Descartes, the will falls into unfreedom when it orients itself toward objects that are dependent on fortune—externally contingent, beyond the subject's mastery—and thereby becomes enslaved to the temporality of chance and the volatility of desire. This corruption of self-determination is not accidental but structural: whenever the subject's wanting is directed at something it cannot secure, the will is captured by the very contingency it seeks to overcome, producing a form of practical bondage. The "practice" in the phrase signals that this is not a metaphysical thesis but an enacted, habitual condition—the subject is continuously doing unfreedom by desiring in the wrong way.

Crucially, this unfreedom is opposed not by an act of pure autonomous will but by a kind of fatalism—Cartesian belief in divine providence and immutable necessity. The paradox Ruda reconstructs is that only by surrendering the will to an absolute external determination can the subject free itself from the more insidious internal determination that fortune exerts through desire. This move is positioned explicitly against Aristotelian eudaimonistic ethics, which grounds the good life in the cultivation of excellences directed at achievable ends; for Ruda's Descartes, such a program only deepens unfreedom by giving it a respectable philosophical form. The practice of unfreedom is therefore the target that Cartesian fatalism aims to abolish.

Within provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, the concept of the practice of unfreedom serves as the negative foil around which the entire argument for Cartesian fatalism is organized. It is what fatalism is a remedy for, not merely an abstract philosophical problem but a lived, practical condition of the desiring subject. The concept therefore does significant structural work: it grounds the case for fatalism in an ethics of the will rather than in metaphysics alone.

Among the cross-referenced canonical concepts, "practice of unfreedom" is most tightly entangled with Desire and Dialectics. The Lacanian account of Desire illuminates why unfreedom is structural rather than contingent: because desire is constituted through the Other's field and circles around an unobtainable object (objet a), a desire directed at fortune-dependent objects is not just imprudent but formally enslaving—it installs the Real's unpredictability at the heart of the subject's self-relation. Dialectics is relevant because Ruda's argument has a dialectical structure: freedom is achieved not by directly willing it but by passing through its opposite (fatalism, surrender to necessity). Anxiety is implicitly at stake as well: the will's capture by fortune-dependent desire can be read as the condition in which the lack that sustains desire is constantly threatened with exposure, generating the anxiety-ridden oscillation between anticipation and disappointment that Lacan associates with desire's non-satisfaction. The concept of Ideology is also in the background, insofar as the practice of unfreedom can be read as the subjective correlate of ideological capture—the spontaneous, habitual orientation of the subject toward objects that reproduce its own subordination.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (page unknown)

Hence what Descartes tries to tackle is the practice of unfreedom.

The phrase is theoretically loaded precisely because of the word "practice": it shifts the problem from metaphysical freedom-vs-determinism to an enacted, habitual, day-to-day condition of the will, making unfreedom something one does rather than something one suffers passively. Combined with "tackle," it frames Cartesian fatalism not as a theoretical position but as an intervention into a concrete problem of subjective life, anchoring the philosophical argument in the register of ethics and praxis.