blue and brown books

Warning: Long and Convoluted Reading Ahead

What is freedom really? What does a person mean when they say their freedom is impeded upon? What do we mean when we talk of government (the verb, not the noun)?

This of course relates to the most “Introductory” of “Intro” questions “Are we as human beings in control of our own will, or are we determined by our biologies, god or some other higher control?”. I would say that how you answer this question relates entirely to several issues we’ve touched on so far. Namely, the question of ’something rather than nothing’, and the majority of the ‘A Cat Named Schrodinger‘ series that looks at epistemological foundations.

A podcast I’ve been listening to for some time now is Philosophy Bites, which is a short philosophy podcast that is very well produced and well presented. As an aside, far too often ‘philosophy’ podcasts, blogs, etc. are too whimsical, mild and broad (the present company included!). Bites is a short and concise presentation of an idea or notion or thinker often by someone who has committed a great deal of their own work to the topic at hand. I highly recommend this as it stays true to the tradition and the academic pursuit itself, in the format of a kind of interview or seminar.

On a recent edition of Philosophy Bites was Quentin Skinner and his attempt to define the state by way of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The reason I bring this particular discussion up is not for any specific contention with Hobbes, or Skinner’s interpretation, but that it is all together a typical and well presented view of ‘the State’ and what we typically think it means ‘to be governed’ thereby making a case for how we typically view the notion of freedom, and freedom of will.

Hobbes is the grandfather of the liberal democracy, and furthermore this idea of Leviathan is the foundation of all social and political philosophy thereafter. Also, for the upcoming Letters to Nana I’ll be discussing the idea of ‘Social Contract‘ and ‘State of Nature‘ at length, and this might help with some clarification. (Although, saying that it is by no means required listening. These are very accessible ideas!)

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Essentially, Hobbes makes the case that we as human beings, at our most natural and uninterrupted stage, are ultimately free. That, before we lived in cities with families and governments, our purest selves were animalistic brutes, bent on only our own interests. With the incorporation of the state and our families and our social ties, we give up a kind of ‘right to everything’ in exchange for a kind of civilization. All the while, these brutish doppelgangers scheme inside of us.

This is why the prisoner’s dilemma is considered a given, why we think of breaking the law as the loss of one’s composure and why we continue to blindly economically support a system that assures us that blind support is a bad thing. (that was really meant to be an aside remark…) Freedom, in this case as we are discussing it, is the absence of impediments. It is a freedom from obstacle, or life of least resistance. This is how we typically think of being free, that we are ‘unchained’ from our problems that ‘tie us down’ etc.

It’s not surprising that at this point you might be asking why this is interesting at all, or how freedom could be anything but what we’ve outlined here. What of the ‘freedom’ of interest? In the Hobbes example of the ‘natural state’, we are entirely sure of our own interest and act upon them. How are we ‘free’ if we are merely slaves to our own biological functions?

Instead of maintaining that the external social ‘obstacles’ in our lives (government, taxes, family, obligation, etc.) are impediments, consider that these are the only aspects that constitute us. Consider a life without these things, are we able to maintain the same personality without these ‘obstacles’? Furthermore, without this social infrastructure, are we even people? This notion of freedom is entirely misplaced if it does not account for how our social ties are necessary for the development of our consciousness.

From Charles Taylor in What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty

“Freedom can’t just be the absence of external obstacles, for there may also be internal ones. And nor may the internal obstacles be just confined to those that the subject identifies as such, so that he is the final arbiter; for he may be profoundly mistaken about his purposes and about what he wants to repudiate. And if so, he is less capable of freedom in the meaningful sense of the word.”

The issue at hand is that this notion of freedom might in fact be unfounded, and impossible to actually achieve. Even though our consciousness depends on rules, and structures of information in order for there to be content of the mind, we consistently and ignorantly value an animalistic and self-centred existence masked as a supposed freedom.

All that we have are the rules and structures of social interaction; there is no prior to these institutions. For indeed, prior to these institutions, we are not even sentient, let alone sapient beings. It is not possible to discern which ‘feelings’ to follow, for how are we to know that they are actually what we really want if we are essentially bestial?

If our goal is a ’state of nature’, what would a state of nature, free of social bias, look like? The question is as valuable as asking “what does nothing look like,” in the same sense that we cannot see ‘nothing’ if ‘nothing’ is the absence of all things. We cannot tap in to this (seemingly) natural sense, for it is entirely unnatural and as artificial as the biased social life that we think we are living in.

I have always thought that philosophy was somehow worthwhile in of itself. Whereby studying great texts and engaging in discussions of great ideas, I was performing some sort of interesting and inherently important project for the world at large. After all, these writers are the people who have been in the business of making and breaking history. The leaders of revolution, the upheaval of cultural norms, the transformation of entire belief systems has occurred as a result of their ideas. The Enlightenment, the Da-Da movement, the Bolshevik revolution, the Protestant Reformation, these are all examples of tremendous social change resulting from philosophical practises.

I would argue that philosophy is the root of all of these things, and that any development on the theoretical side of a discipline such as political theory, literary theory or theology is philosophical. Furthermore, these instances are the very kind of act that philosophy is. I would say that Philosophy’s task, speaking in this grandiose and extravagant way, is the ideological development of humanity. The study of Philosophy, which we do here in the academy, is more on side of the development, maintenance and education of that ideological development; however, it is no more in control of it than the average hobo off the street.

This is not to say that philosophy is a project to be taken lightly nor is this an evolutionary account of ideas. The main purpose of Philosophy is the development of a better way of living. “Better” might be construed as more efficient, more profitable, more economically viable than previous periods of time history. Instead, I would want to make the case that ‘better’ ought to be for the development of a commonality among human beings, an organic and moral way of living together for a kind of humanitarian good.

The original notion presented of ‘government’, that ‘freedom’ is a freedom from is detrimental to the project of philosophy and above all, it encourages self-interested activity. It provides an unfounded excuse for the horrific things that we do for one another. It also breeds an ignorance to reasoning and justification in that it purports a kind of pre-self, or second self. In fact, it is awkward to even question the concept of freedom at all, for of course we act as though we’re freely in control of our lives as it is, regardless of whether it is the case or not.

Philosophy’s task is an active and ongoing one. It is at the head of all ideological revolution, political action, economic development, social relationships and self-reflection. Philosophy is entirely accessible to anyone at any time; in fact we do it every day.

Government, as in the verb, is not something we ought to be avoiding, but strongly developed. The human consciousness, as I intend to begin to make the case, is founded on rules and laws. The social system, and the government of that system on the human consciousness are one in the same thing. Our societies are us, and we are them.

Hobbes is only being used here as presenting the notion of a State of Nature, and the Social Contract. I have really not done justice to this idea. There are many versions of this argument, with many variations, and interpretations on those variations. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I’m trying to outline here. Whether or not Hobbes makes a case for freedom in the ‘positive’, or ‘negative’ way, I do not know. I have always read Hobbes in the negative light, but this might be a mistake.

Nonetheless, this has only been a suggestion that the way we typically think of ‘free will’ might be a misguided and ignorant view.