broken circle

Have you ever considered any real freedoms?

---Brando, in Apocalypse Now.


n and r (but not the vowels, I daresay) are sceptical of this idea of freedom and bounds. Well, yes, so am I ! Being brought up in a very free way-how else to put it?- I guess I've never been a stickler for rules, order, system. Danke, swami, ubo. Perhaps that's why I can never take any authority figures seriously and why I'm so sarcastic/irreverent toward them (and you thought it was just my bad manners and untidiness!) Well, okay, don't make a song and dance about it. We never really took religion seriously, either...which was, I think, actually, a profoundly religious approach. If you get it, you'll get it.

So, here are some excerpts from a book I'm reading (please note, O mighty Dougal, I say reading, not read!).

In order to enjoy negative freedom a person already has to be a person.

Having any old preferences, interests, wants, desires, is not, actually, what makes us distinctive, or individuals. As Frankfurt (and Sen after him) says: the idea of a person depends on second-order preferences, the ability to take a step back (and out) and evaluate our impulses. Judgement requires distance. Negative freedom is necessary, but not sufficient. What, ultimately, counts is the expansion of our capabilities and that is bound up with the very notion of positive freedom: human flourishing...what we can do, and can be.

I act, therefore I am; or even better, as the Russians might say (see Lesley Chamberlain's wonderful 'Motherland')..I act therefore we are; we act , therefore I am.

freedom as genuine self-realization, as the growth and enrichment of each person's experience, according to each person's lights.

Is this a substantive notion of the good? If so, is there a (democratic) consensus or does this open the door to paternalism. One must be sceptical of general theories, but at least here we're being made aware of the delicate balance between freedom and necessity. The question becomes not: how can I know, but how can I think, here and now or, even better, how can I live, here and now ('can' is not necessarily should or ought).

But here's the dope:

To view institutions as enemies of freedom, and all conventions as slaveries, is to deny the only means by which positive freedom in action can be secured..convention and custom are necessary to carrying forward impulse to any happy conclusion. A romantic return to nature and a freedom sought within the individual without regard to the existing environment finds its terminus in chaos...Not convention, but stupid and rigid convention is the foe.