Freedom from control paradoxically requires an inner self disciplined in specific ways.

Evidence

The paradox inadequately appreciated here is that the self to be liberated from external control must be subjected to the control of a liberating self already and always free, aware, and in control of its own desires. Susan Wolf identifies this metaphysical conundrum and the failure of recent philosophers to solve it. In place of the obsessive attempts to define the freedom of the subject as its ability to create its self, Wolf offers an alternative by drawing on the commonsense notion of being sane: “The desire to be sane,” she writes, “is thus not a desire for another form of control; it is rather a desire that one’s self be connected to the world in a certain way—we could even say it is a desire that one’s self be controlled by the world in certain ways and not in others.” This notion of sanity presupposes knowing the world practically and being known practically by it, a world of accumulating probabilities rather than constant certainties. It allows us to think of moral agency in terms of people’s habitual engagement with the world in which they live, so that one kind of moral insanity occurs precisely when the pain they know in this world is suddenly no longer an object of practical knowledge. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 353

Categorization

• XREF: This redefinition of agency as habitual practical engagement (‘sanity,’ being controlled by the world) parallels the critique of liberal self-sovereignty that structures Asad’s whole secularism argument and echoes in Cooper’s treatment of how modern subjects internalize discipline. — connects to: Control society replaces discipline with entrepreneurial self-direction — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 51
• DEFINE: Wolf’s ‘sanity’ reframes moral agency away from self-creation toward practical attunement with the world.