{"id":591,"date":"2007-08-02T13:02:41","date_gmt":"2007-08-02T18:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=591"},"modified":"2007-08-02T13:02:42","modified_gmt":"2007-08-02T18:02:42","slug":"the-axiom-of-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=591","title":{"rendered":"The Axiom of Choice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the <em>Critique of Practical Reason<\/em>, Kant shows us a double, or split, subject. On the one hand, there is  the subject as a rational being, whose will takes on the determining form of universal law; on the other hand, there is the empirical subject, whose will is determined extrinsically and contingently. The &#8220;<em>autonomy<\/em> of the will\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is thus opposed to the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153<em>heteronomy<\/em> of the power of choice [<em>Wahl<\/em>].\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Kant&#8217;s association of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153choice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with the heteronomy of a will that has been extrinsically determined, and in opposition to an act of freedom, especially needs to be recalled today, given the current hegemony (in both theory and practice) of neoliberal economics and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rational-choice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d political science. For these approaches, everything is, and ought to be, determined, by individuals making choices among various possibilities in a world of scarcity or limited resources. From a Kantian point of view, this sort of market-driven \u00e2\u20ac\u0153choice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is absolutely incompatible with any genuine notion of freedom or autonomy. To put it a bit crudely, but not inaccurately, you can have consumerism and the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153free market,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or you can have democracy and self-determination, but you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant shows us a double, or split, subject. On the one hand, there is the subject as a rational being, whose will takes on the determining form of universal law; on the other hand, there is the empirical subject, whose will is determined extrinsically and contingently. The &#8220;autonomy of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=591\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Axiom of Choice&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}