The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel

A ground-breaking study of Kant and Hegel, rethinking autonomy as a form of life.

This book develops comprehensive new accounts of both Kant's and Hegel's mature theories of freedom and their interrelation, providing a better understanding of both authors in general and the first comprehensive account of their original concepts of 'life' in particular.Autonomy is one of the central aspirations of our time, yet there is a growing worry that autonomy, as we have understood and practised it, has not liberated us but subjected us to new forms of domination. In his ground-breaking reinterpretation of Kant and Hegel, Thomas Khurana reveals the source of these problems in the very concept of autonomy and develops a new understanding of human self-determination. While the dominant conception of autonomy gives rise to the paradox of self-legislation and remains caught up in a dualistic opposition of freedom and nature, we can overcome these problems by understanding freedom as a form of life. Elaborating both Kant's and Hegel's compelling concepts of life, Khurana shows that we are not autonomous despite or against our living nature, but by inhabiting it in the right way. To understand freedom, we need a critical theory of our second nature.