fullspate

Freedom:

what on earth is it?

Up until the end of the Middle Ages in Europe people went to war in the name of God. For a brief period in France in the 18th century they went to war for liberty, equality and fraternity. Not long after, equality and fraternity were quietly dropped and freedom remained as the sole cause for which young soldiers in Europe and across the Atlantic laid down their lives.

For the boys with the big guns on the front line "freedom" may seem to be a fairly simple thing. If you live in a democracy and can vote for your political representatives, then you are free. However, some people whose business is not to fight but to think too much about things would argue that this apparent simplicity is a delusion, and that the concept of freedom is a very slippery one indeed.

Since the 18th century there has been a long debate about just what this thing called freedom is. To begin to understand that debate you need to appreciate the role played in it by our peculiarly modern concept of science and its view of nature ("nature" being the name for everything that science studies). As modern science developed, it established a new concept of nature - a mechanistic or deterministic view of all natural processes. For the scientist, everything that happens in nature is an effect of some cause which happens prior to it. If the cause or causes are present, then the effect will take place of necessity.

Scientists were very excited about this new view of the universe. It seemed as if everything could be explained by identifying some fairly simple laws, as Newton had started to do in his book on the fundamental principles of nature. But for people concerned about humanity this was worrying. We had long believed we were free, in some sense, but now science looked as if it might be able to explain all human activity in the way Newton explained the behaviour of moving objects. Our actions seem to be "up to us", but is this just a delusion? Are we just one more cog in the mechanism of the universe, or is there a spark of freedom in us somewhere which enables us to escape the grip of science and go beyond the senseless chain of causes and effects?

Nature didn't always look like this, and that affected how people thought about freedom. For Aristotle and Plato things in nature had goals in much the same way as we have. The stone thrown up in the air has its goal: the goal of getting back to its natural resting place in contact with the earth. According to this teleological view of the universe we are free if nothing obstructs us when we try to achieve the ends that we naturally want to achieve. If this is your views of nature, you can quite happily believe that we are both entirely natural and free. But with the rise of modern science people had to rethink what we mean by human freedom. The concept of freedom had to become much more radical. But what might that radical freedom be?

People started to look closely at the individual, taking him or her to pieces and trying desperately to find something going on that could be said to be free and entirely independent of the mechanism of nature. One of the thickest and most important books on this subject was written towards the end of the 18th century by the German philosopher Kant. He said that humans are part of nature in that they have desires which scientists can observe and explain, but they also have something else. They don't automatically do what they want to do. They can stop and take an intellectual step back to think about whether they ought to do what they want to do. They can make moral judgments about their desires, and this is what they do when they act freely. Kant was a big fan of morality (and probably not very good at parties). His conclusion was that we are free when we do what we morally ought to do, not when we just do what we want to do.

People do make judgments about their desires. People do think about what they morally should do, and they don't always selfishly pursue their own private interest, but don't they still end up doing what they want to do? When people think about things morally, don't they do so because they want to? When they fight for justice aren't they driven by a desire, a passion for justice?

There is something fishy about the way Kant and his followers set up the problem of freedom. They picture the individual in isolation and assume that if desire plays any role at all he sinks back into the realm of nature and is lost. To see how silly this is you just have to remember one or two things about the social life of human beings. The intelligent life of Kant's moral agents is only possible because they have a language, and language is only possible for those who belong to a specific society. Of course other forms of life in nature are social, but only ours has such a sophisticated language. That capacity for language - a natural capacity - makes culture possible, and our different cultures shape and reshape the entire natural foundation of human life. If societies are mechanisms, they are a peculair kind of mechanism - one that defines and redefines itself in an unpredictable way.

Our capacity for language also makes it possible for us to be concerned with our individuality - a kind of individuality which we don't see anywhere else in the natural world. Dolphins have partners for life, but no dolphin ever wanted a tatoo or wanted to develop an original style of music. We have a desire for recognition - and that desire might make us seem utterly natural beings - but what we want recognition for is something that exists nowhere else in nature: our individuality. "Look at me. I'm the first white guy to make it really big in the black world of hiphop."

That same linguistic ability also makes it possible for us to be concerned about abstract ideals. When you do something to support Amnesty International, for instance, because you are concerned about the human rights of political prisoners being tortured in foreign jails, you are doing something very unnatural. There are no rights in nature. Only beings who can think in very abstract terms can appreciate what rights might be.

There is surely not one but a number of ways that we express and live our freedom. One is the concern for individuality. Another is our concern for abstract ideals. Yet another is our ability to look back at the past, to reinterpret and criticise what we have done. By critically looking back we can break repeated patterns of behaviour and thereby alter the way we behave in the future. In doing this we might focus not only on our personal lives but also on the things we have been doing as a society. This connects with a very important freedom for us: the freedom to criticise, to disagree, to dissent, and consequently the freedom to protest. We don't just want the freedom to choose between Pepsi and Coke. We also want the freedom to make some strong and public objections to the whole soft drinks business.

Another interesting issue is the relationship between freedom and unfreedom. According to the Kantian view of things it seems like a cruel twist of fate that we are both free and unfree. Surely it would be so much better if we weren't troubled by all these inclinations, desires, cravings, yearnings, itches and the rest. Others have realised that it is in the struggle to express your freedom that you feel most free. Freedom needs its opposite: unfreedom. One proponent of this idea was the great Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher writing at the end of the 19th century who, by the way, won the prize for the philosopher with the biggest moustache. He had the profound thought that we only know we are free, and we only really live our freedom by struggling to overcome something that restrains us. In Freddy's own words:

"How is freedom measured? It is measured by the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort which it takes to stay aloft."

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