Chris Doss wrote:
>
> But isn't self-determination part of the (premodern)
> notion of free will?
No. For Dante predestination is a mystery that only God, not even the highest angels, can comprehend. Milton's God simply declares, I made him free, and builds a great epic on that nonsense.
Butler (& Hussrl, Heidegger, Laclau&Mouffe, and hundreds of other 20th-c thinkere) lack Dante's humility or Milton's arrogance so their prose becomes dense for a really good reason: what they believe (and what 400 years of capitalism has pretty much imposed on any attempt at sophisticated philosophy) requires complex statement. Society, trees, human relations really exist independently of the human mind -- but somehow (Buitler, Heidegger et all endlessly equivocate on this) we don't know how we know that things exist, so there is an endless struggle to show how things exist even though we don't know that they exist we somehow do know they exist.
Those who sneer at Butler's prose are really being quite silly, aside from confusing the subject matter even more than she ever does. She is being quite clear om expounding a dense subject matter.
The problem is that, like Milton and every other bourgeois thinker and poet, she begins with the isolated individual who knows that the world exists but cannot find a way to from his/her isolation to the world out there. She knows that society exists, but cannot find a way from the isolated individual to the socialized individual. (Notice that Charles has to resort to the mysticism of instinct to find the way from the individual to the social.) The history of bourbeois philosophy is the history of a noble struggle to achieve the impossible: a coherent path from individuals who begin in isolation and find their way to sociao existence. It can't be done, and of course the prose it produces is dense, as is the poetry.
Carrol