I've been reviewing your philosophy, and I have some serious questions concerning your ideas about free will. First, though, let me say that I agree with your idea that freedom is ontological: that we are free because we are not really a self (or an it-self, as it were) but rather a presence-to-self (or the transcendence of the self). The implication of your argument is clearly that we are somehow "other" from ourselvesùthat no matter what we are or what others ascribe to us, we are a nihilistic opposite of it simultaneously. Or, in other words "we are 'in the manner of not being it'" (Flynn). This idea, in my mind, descends from Pascal's famous aphorism: "I think, therefore I am" (Hajek). The presence to self that you refer to is really an echo of Pascal's thinking man, that idea that because we have a concept of what we are not, or what is beyond us, that necessarily means that we are.
I believe, however, that you take this argument a little too far. While I agree that part of out self-identity is defined by that which we are not, I do not believe, as you did, that what a person is constituted as is a function of another's project and is not something that the person can make themselves be. Or, in other words, your concept that "I am constituted as a "Frenchman" in and through the hostility emanating from that German; I am constituted as a "man" in the resentment of that woman; I am constituted as a "Jew" on the basis of the other's anti-semitism; and so on" (Crowell). I do not agree with you on this point, because I believe that it sets up a conception of my being that I cannot control or refute. In defining my being through another's eyes, I lose my ability to control my own actionsùin essence, I lose my free will. I realize that you were using this idea as a method for showing why social reality is comprised of perpetual conflict, and yet I just cannot buy into the idea that part of our identity
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