Free At Last

The great paradox is that we live in times that stress a wildly disproportionate freedom and autonomy (from nature, society) and that, also, encourage us in the same instance to believe that we can explain our lives through science and theoretical reason-as if life itself was nothing but a part of the great mechanical causality that we call 'necessity'.

We say we are free to do what we desire but have no or little inclination of the possibility that we can also be a 'slave of our desires'. We are coaxed into believeing that freedom resides in this and this alone: the ability to choose between competing goods. The allure of a happiness that is an unending increase and not just the entering into an expansive space, an exalted state of being beckons...we are enticed by it, drawn to it...Marx would say that we prefer it to the limited perfection of the ancient world. So, not just the voluptuous seduction of possibilities but the constant running up against limits and obstacles and the overcoming of them is what draws us on. In fact, it is hard to conceive of this type of freedom without the corresponding sense of limitation or constraint.



In the central political tradition of the west there is an irreducible tension between highly valued ideals: freedom, equality, and solidarity. Freedom -thought of as in terms of 'rights'- can lead to grossly unequal outcomes. The right to follow one's own self-interest can be compatible with stark disparities in incomes and yet still be considered 'fair'. At another level, it might be asked if such a freedom to act doesn't sometimes jeopardize social solidarity. Do market exchanges only meet the needs of strangers? Thus, within the political tradition there are disparate sources of value (and this is to put to one side the metaphysical critique of such a limited conception).

Closely following this critique, the conservative might argue that 'passive citizenship'-a concern for trinkets and baubles and a reneging on civic action, a withdrawl into ourselves that is on par with the men and women of late antiquity-is the modern from of democracy and a limited one at that too. The dispiriting implication of this strand of thought being that representative democracy limits each person's ability to act for himself. Inextricably linked to this perceived lack of real freedom is the growth of a mass society in which each person's actions are likely to be inconsequential-even if one were able to disentangle them from the myriad other causal factors behind events. In some sense, we all live in 'welfare states' and the question of power, the freedom to determine one's own life, remains a complex one.

A culture that is dominated by experts , paid specialists who inform us on matters ranging from the environment , style , fashion, diet, economics, seriously undermines the justification for caliming to be enlightened and free from priests and authority. The all-pervasiveness of powerful medias and their ability to generate, manufacture, consent and a climate of opinion considerably weakens our autonomy.

Another dimension of the question rests on the claim that freedom or alienability allows us to think of ourselves as separated from out bodies, other people, and nature. If we can exchange these things then this in no small way depends on our first thinking of them precisely as 'things'. Of course, there can be little doubt that this ability to abstract, to get away from ourselves, has served us well-the question here is really of redressing the balance, and nothing more. What does it mean to think of nature only as a commodity and what are the implications of doing so? Do we impinge on the best view we have of ourselves and other people if we think of them as possessions of the self?

Does the freedom of the desiring self, then, come at the expense of the integrity of being? Behind the notion that freedom is 'willing' is the existential perpsective that holds existence to precede essence, whether the 'given' be God, Nature, or the past. Very rarely do we stop to reflect that existence is given to us and not something of our own making..a pure gift that has to be returned. Our modern views of freedom derive, then, in the last resort, from a reversal of values that places action and 'making' ahead of contemplation.

To say 'the truth shall set you free' is already to relate freedom to something that is higher than it. What would it mean, politically speaking, to think of freedom in connection with the virtues rather than with the ability to choose? This presupposes the broader question of how freedom is linked to value. To the modern mind, the fact that something is freely chosen suggests that it has greater (utility) value but this is quite the opposite of the older way of thinking about things: something is valuable, desirbale, and therefore it will be chosen. In fact, in some cases, when it comes to the good is it even correct to always talk in terms of choice?

The modern concept of freedom must work, in the final analysis, to devalue if not destroy the very idea of intrinsic worth. it is not without reason that economics can only talk in terms of exchange-value and not in terms of worth (see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition). If we are free to choose then pushpin is as good as poetry said the man. There can be no question of 'tastes' or, if there is, then tastes themselves are considere to be completely arbitrary or subjective.

If we think of freedom in this way, as a series of rebellions against an established order of things, then is it any surprise that there's a pervading sense of cultural exhaustion, that there can be , as George Steiner puts it, no new beginnings? One can dismiss this as cultural pessimism, for sure. But I think a closer look might draw our atention to the deeply nihilistic implications of such a shallow conception of freedom. With Brando, we well might ask: Have you ever considered any real freedoms?