Freedom as an Ontological and Cultural Foundation

Abstract

Through a theoretical essay, the aim is to present a discussion of how freedom and culture are related based on how the subject appopriates, positions, and responds to events and the world in general. As the guiding thread of the discussion we elected the relationship between subjectivity and culture according to traditional and modern philosophical conceptions of the interrelation between freedom, subjectivity and culture. For the discussion around the idea of freedom we rely on the phenomenological and existential thought of the French philosopher Claude Romano and the Austrian psychiatric Viktor Frankl. From the British philosopher Terry Eagleton, the Polish historian Stanislaw Grygiel and the Italian philosopher Angela Ales Bello, we present concepts and views on how culture is understood, how it distances itself from and relates to the ideas of nature and civilization. We highlight the implications of considering freedom as a personal position as a condition for existence, permanence, and continuous reconstruction of culture. We conclude that the originally human potential of creation and free action carries implications that unify subjectivity and objectivity, individual life and social life, subject and culture. Implying, still, in an ethical dimension that is not restricted to the particularisms and wills of each society that generate indifference, but that invites to reposition the centrality and unity between subjectivity and culture.