Negative" and "positive" freedom: ontological foundations and socio-philosophical analysis

The author shows that the first concepts of freedom had a negative meaning, they represented freedom as the internal independence of the subject. Based on the considered approaches to the understanding of freedom, the main features that distinguish negative from positive freedom are derived. Negative freedom is associated with the absolutization of the subject, i.e. individual, and the negation of the universal, in its extreme it is always abstract and empty of content. Such freedom borders on arbitrariness, and the framework separating these two concepts can only be determined through the subjective moral ideas of the individual himself. A consequence of the abstract nature of “freedom from” is the difficulty of applying negative freedom to the analysis of political processes: for example, a republican form of government and democratic institutions can act as a guarantor of freedom, understood as the absence of external coercion, but they do not follow from it itself. At the same time, the creation of a synthetic theory that would consistently combine the two approaches is also problematic for a number of reasons. But the main reason why the two approaches seem to be opposites is that negative approaches to freedom, unlike positive ones, always ultimately appeal to the singular, unique, and therefore abandon attempts to apply an essential approach to a person and reach an objective understanding of human essence, to find out the universality of human nature.