Freedom Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Freedom is a prime example of what W. B. Gallie refers to as “essentially contested concepts,” a term that refers to concepts that participate in a tradition of conflicting interpretations so fundamental that they are permanent and without resolution. Understanding the concept of freedom means understanding the fundamentally different ways in which the concept has been used. A particularly important distinction is that between freedom from hindrance on one hand and the freedom to fully realize one’s potential on the other. This difference roughly corresponds to that between the Anglo-American tradition of “freedom from” and the continental European tradition of “freedom to,” although that puts it a little too simply.

Drawing fine semantic distinctions, such as that between freedom and liberty, will not help us understand freedom. In practice, the terms are synonymous, as the British philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin points out in his famous work “Two Concepts of Liberty. ”We can pursue the meaning of freedom by deciding which distinctions are useful and which are not and even whether approaching freedom by making fine distinctions is fruitful.

Negative And Positive Freedom

Berlin argues that we should not confuse freedom with every good thing, such as a decent income and life chances. Freedom, Berlin says, means lack of restraint. He calls it “negative liberty,” not because it is bad but because the definition focuses on limits to actions. Berlin says that to know freedom, you must ask how many doors are open to you and how wide they are open.

Berlin defines “positive liberty” as the freedom to realize one’s deepest ambitions, to participate in one’s own governance, and to become who one truly is. Under positive liberty, one is not free just because no one prevents him or her from speaking out in public or from getting a better education. Because positive liberty includes the means to realize one’s values, one is free only when he or she has the means to get others to listen to him or her and only when one has a decent education, which is often what it takes to open doors in this world.

Berlin does not dismiss positive liberty, but he worries that emphasizing positive liberty as true freedom risks giving too much power to the government or even to fellow citizens. For a person to possess the means to self-development, such as a college education, he or she may have to be more heavily taxed, which could restrict freedom to travel, for example. Berlin asks, How much freedom does a person really have when the majority of citizens, rather than the tyrant, tells that person what to give up to be free? Furthermore, positive freedom is more likely to result in the confusion of freedom with constraint. Jean-Jacques Rousseau notoriously remarked that the individual may be “forced to be free” by the community if the individual fails to understand that his or her good is bound up with that of the whole.

Another distinction that is well known among those who study freedom is what Benjamin Constant called “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns.” Ancient liberty, the liberty of classical Athens, for example, is the freedom to participate in one’s own self-governance, so as not to be governed by another city-state or polis. The ancient notion of freedom inspired German-émigré political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who sees the apex of freedom as residing in the Athenian polis. Modern liberty, by contrast, is the freedom to be left alone by government to make money and enjoy the pleasures of private life. Most people in contemporary society see participating in government as, at best, a civic duty. Participation is hardly ever understood as the essence of freedom.

What has changed in the modern world to transform the meaning of freedom so completely? The simple answer is the rise of individualism, in which people come to think of themselves as autonomous centers of value or choice. This view is epitomized by French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. In our minds and imaginations, he claims that men and women are absolutely free. Sartre says that while we cannot make the world in any way we want, we are free to interpret our world in any way we choose. The trouble is that I am not the only one in the world. When I live with others, they become the enemy of my freedom, as it is everyone’s natural tendency to view themselves as they imagine others see them. In seeing myself this way, I betray my original freedom, defining my situation in relationship to the other.

Sartre calls this betrayal bad faith (“mauvaise foi”). For Sartre, freedom has nothing to do with the fact that the world resists people’s will. Freedom means that people have a choice about how to react to everything that happens to them and how to come to terms with it. Indeed, Sartre holds that, for the most part, we choose our passions. Somewhere deep inside each one of us there is an empty space that Sartre calls “néant,” or nothingness, which no one and nothing can touch. That place is freedom, for in it, people can give the events of their lives any meaning they choose. For example, I may see prison as a chance to liberate myself from a life of crime, as Malcolm X did.

What Is Freedom Good For?

The concept of freedom can be written as a history of competing definitions, a history that could be organized in many ways. However, a more fruitful approach would be to consider why freedom is such a difficult concept in the first place. German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel put it this way: “No idea is so generally recognized as indefinite, ambiguous and open to the greatest misconceptions . . . as the idea of freedom: none in the common currency with so little appreciation of its meaning” (Philosophy of Mind, 1971, 239). It seems there is something about freedom itself that makes it, at least in the modern West, both an unquestioned good and a questionable concept.

Instead of asking, What is freedom? it is more useful to ask, What is freedom good for? Here, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill is useful. Mill’s (1975) argument appears to be a straightforward utilitarian argument: “Freedom allows the maximum of self-expression consistent with the rights of others, and in this way, the marketplace of ideas is enlarged. More speech puts more ideas in play, and from these ideas, the best will eventually be chosen and so freedom brings progress.”

Such an interpretation is not incorrect. However, a closer reading of Mill reveals his aristocratic side. Mill was never primarily interested in the freedom of the average man or woman. Mill valued freedom as providing an opportunity for an exceptional few to make of their lives a work of beauty. From this perspective, freedom is the means, and the cultivation of individuality is the end. Hence he writes,

“It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human begins become noble and beautiful objects of contemplation. In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units, there is more in the mass that is composed of them. I might here close the argument: for what more or better can be said of any condition of human affairs than it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best things they can be? Or what worse can be said of any obstruction to good than it prevents this?” (On Liberty, 1975, 59–60)

Freedom As Communal Virtuosity

If Mill were interested in freedom for the sake of the richness and virtuosity of the individual, then Hannah Arendt may be seen as taking this argument a step further by claiming in “What Is Freedom?” that freedom is virtuosity. Freedom is not just the cultivation and development of certain excellences. Freedom resides in the public performance itself in which we act and speak in public, showing others who we are and bringing something new into the world. Only through such acts of political creativity do humans overcome the entropy that would otherwise overtake human existence.

While critics often focus on Arendt’s nostalgia for an ancient Athenian ideal of politics that no longer has a place in the modern world, the more salient problem with her vision of freedom is that, in the end, it fails to include the full scope of human interaction. A critical reading of her work suggests that it is the role of our fellow citizens to serve as an audience, so someone may be present to appreciate and remember our noble words and great deeds. Even a virtuoso needs an audience who can understand and appreciate his or her art.

A vision of freedom that is better suited to the shared character of political life is required. Jazz musicians talk about being “in the groove,” a state of improvisation that involves not just one person’s music but also the music of others in the group. Although individual skills and talent are involved, they do not create the groove. It is created by the space among the players, and as such, “in the groove” is a temporary creation, as transient as the performance. If “in the groove” is a spontaneous experience at one level, at another level it reflects spontaneity built on hundreds of hours of negotiation, learning to barter the musical assertion of others with one’s own musical self-assertion. “In the groove” is, of course, not just an account of playing jazz music. It is a way of thinking about the complex sharing with others that freedom requires. It is about creating freedom in a complex space that is framed by the activities of those who make and share the freedom they create.

This communal virtuosity has sometimes been experienced in times of great political struggle. In Arendt’s “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” her reference to the “lost treasure” refers to the poet René Char who joined the French Resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II (1939–1945) and found himself. Arendt writes, “Wherever he went he appeared as he was to others and to himself. . . . He could afford to ‘go naked.’ These reflections . . . testify to the involuntary self-discourse, to the joys of appearing in word and deed without equivocation and without self-reflection that are inherent in action” (Arendt 2000). Arendt argues that such an experience could be brought into mundane, everyday political practice. She takes Thomas Jefferson’s ward system as a model for a participatory democracy that may not be compatible with freedom as lack of constraint, or negative freedom, but a space in which average citizens flourish through political participation.

Yet it may be that Arendt continues to ask of politics what it cannot—and perhaps should not—deliver. In particular, one wonders whether political freedom is really the realm in which such ambitions should be realized, especially in the day-to-day grind of administration and party life or even for such a good cause as the French Resistance. Recall Berlin’s simple caution that because freedom is good does not mean that it is every good thing. Contemporary political philosopher Richard Rorty argues in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that conflating politics and self-development—that is, ignoring the distinction between public and private—is risky business.

Freedom’s Affinity With Constraint

The equation of freedom with constraint is at least as old as the Greek and Roman Stoics and reaches its apotheosis, although certainly not its end, in the work of Immanuel Kant. Consider Epictetus, who taught that the path to freedom is to want only what happens to us. “Whoever wants to be free, therefore, let him not want or avoid anything that is up to others. Otherwise, he will necessarily be a slave” (Handbook, c. 15). Desire is the enemy of freedom, for it is desire that confronts us with a world of possibilities beyond our control.

Therefore, the stoic “is on guard against himself as an enemy lying in wait” (Handbook, c. 48). In sum, “do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well” (Handbook, c. 8).

That the stoic achieves freedom by means of self-constraint, never wishing for anything he cannot have, is not news. But how does Immanuel Kant, personification of the Enlightenment, fit into this scheme? For Kant, human freedom is the freedom to accept objective reality, such as the laws of nature, or the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is a standard of rationality from which all moral principles are derived: act only according to those principles that you would have become universal laws. For example, to steal when you do not want stealing to be legal for everyone is, in Kant’s view, a logical contradiction. Kant believes that the laws of objective reality, which appear to be external to human beings, are actually the unwitting projections of human reason. Thus, to accept these laws is equivalent to accepting what we ourselves have willed or made. “The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings insofar as they are rational; freedom would be the property of this causality that makes it effective independent of any determination by alien causes” (Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 1981, 49). Although a person may rebel at the determination of these laws, if the person is rational, he or she will accept these laws, knowing that he or she helped make them. This is not Stoicism. Rather, it is a stoicism gone on an idealistic adventure, discovering that all the things people once thought were constraints on freedom were actually willed on themselves, as rational beings, all along.

Freedom As Experience And Practice

Let us give the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the last word on Kant’s strategy, recalling that they are writing during the postwar era in American life, in which the self-censorship of movies was at its peak. “Kant intuitively anticipated what Hollywood has consciously put into practice: Images are precensored during production by the same standard of understanding that will later determine their reception by viewers. The perception by which public judgment feels itself confirmed has been shaped by that judgment even before the perception takes place” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 2002, 65–66).

The point, of course, is that to call self-censorship freedom because it conforms to what one would have wanted anyway ignores the possibility that what one wants depends on what one thinks one can have. And why would anyone restrict his or her imagination in this way? It would be done to protect the illusion of perfect freedom. If I cannot imagine having something, then I need not experience the limits to my freedom.

What lesson is to be drawn from all this? Perhaps only that it makes more sense to go out and test one’s freedom, even risk losing it, than to devote entire philosophies to guaranteeing that one’s freedom is already absolute. In the end, freedom is an experience and a practice, not just an idea or a concept.

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