Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to focus on subjectivity in a normative sense and to suggest a necessary relation between the freedom to be "fully" oneself and justice. Through exploration of texts by Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Emmanuel Levinas, I attempt to trace the relation of subjectivity to goodness, and to show that the freedom of subject to be is grounded in the first place as responsibility. The point I want to make in this project ultimately is that it is possible to speak meaningfully of the freedom to be oneself only with reference to a transcendent measure, against which the expression of oneself in one's humanitas or as kath hauto can be witnessed. This measure I am calling justice. In the respective works of Arendt, Weil, and Levinas, justice as the transcendent measure of the subject's freedom is neither argued nor inferred. Yet, for all three thinkers what it means to be oneself is inextricably bound to the responsibility one bears for one's place and life in the world among other human beings. And for each of these philosophers the responsibility of the subject, which lies at the root of his or her freedom, stands in relation to that which lies altogether outside the subject. It is the relation of the subject to transcendence that I want to describe through an analysis of themes elucidated by Arendt, Weil, and Levinas, and thereby show what I propose here: that justice informs the freedom of the subject to fully be himself or herself. But this is not to say that freedom is the reward of justice or that it is justly rewarded. For Arendt, Weil, and Levinas, each a thinker grounded in the tradition of Existential and Phenomenological philosophy, no hidden telos directs meaning in being; no innate capacity directs human beings to the good. For each of these three thinkers it is the dearth of goodness and the lack of justice in human existence that inspires their respective points of departure for explicating the freedom to be as the responsibility of being. I want to say that their unique and distinctive texts already intimate what I wish to argue here: that it is in view of justice transcendent to freedom that the responsibility of the subject has measure and meaning