Abstract

Are freedom, rationality, and morality intrinsically connected? Or perhaps freedom's very nature is transgression, going beyond rationality and ethics? These questions are the center of my discussion of free will and arbitrariness in Kant's late writings. Kant's interlocutor here is Dostoevsky's underground man, a passionate proponent of the Russian _volia--("freedom," "unfettered, arbitrary will"). The underground man questions freedom's relationship to rationality and moral law and insists that free will, arbitrariness and even tyranny are inseparable. Finally, in its attack on rational conceptions of freedom the _Notes offer a surprisingly consistent, that is, self-destructive, philosophical pursuit of arbitrariness