Politics and Freedom

Politics and Freedom James Mensch, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2G2W5, jmensch@stfx.ca The role of freedom in political life is often taken for granted. Were one limited to the daily news, one would think that politics had largely been absorbed by economics, that its chief function was promoting the growth of the economy. Even when this is broadened to include society’s collective interests in the health, education and welfare of its citizens, the sense of the political seems consumed in the technocratic imperatives of running a modern state. How anemic this sense actually is can be seen by the fact that all the functions defined by these imperatives can be carried out in a tyranny. To define politics in terms of such functions, in fact, misses what is essential to the political. A tyranny exists to the point that decisions are concentrated in a single individual, party, or system. Politics, however, involves give and take. It is the art of compromise. It is the way that we deal with our plural condition, the way we manage the plurality of views and interests that mark our collective life. Political parties are formed to represent these. Their absence in a tyranny points to what is lacking in the contemporary sense of the political. What is missing is a sense of alternatives. Marxism, with its “one party states,” does not allow for such. Neither does the attempt to reduce politics to economics, that is, to see political choices as determined in advance by the “iron laws” of the marketplace. In each case, we ignore the role freedom plays in politics. Such freedom involves choices whose scope is not limited in advance by a particular dogma. When we attempt to understand it, a number of questions arise. It is unclear, for example, how the openness of real choice can fit into the organized structures of political life. What prevents the expressions of freedom from disrupting this life? What sets limits to their arbitrariness? The general question here concerns the adaptability of freedom to a political context. I am going to argue that the possibility of freedom’s not rending the political context comes from freedom itself. It is implicit in the ways freedom gets its content, that is, the actual options that are available to it. My position is that freedom is inherently political because its origin is social. The Coincidence of the Politial and the Social Since Darwin’s time, we have been accustomed to call man a “social animal,” ranking him along with other such social species as bees. Social animals are those whose mutual dependence makes them live together. Following Aristotle, we also call man a “political animal,” indicating his tendency to organize himself politically. Less often noted is the coincidence of these designations. In the original sense of the Greek, when humans were called “political animals,” the reference was to a form of social organization, that of the city or polis. To be a political animal was to be an animal that lived in cities. Living the life of the city was living a political life. Participation in its politics was the special way the human expressed his life as a social animal. Such participation, in other words, distinguishes human sociality from that of other animals. A number of animals—bees, for example—have social structures. They can be seen to organize themselves according to the different roles demanded by their social hierarchies. They do not, however, have political structures. The roles they take up are biologically determined. This, however, becomes less true of the more complex animals, for example, chimps and wolves. Such animals can manifest complex familial and social structures. Social strructures on the level of the family are, however, not yet political. The political coincides with the social at the level of the city. This is why Aristotle sees man’s emergence as a political animal with the arising of the city. See Aristotle, Politics, 1252b 9—1253a 2. For humans, however, these roles are political. However much those who possess them attempt to declare such possession “natural”—i.e., springing from birth and descent—it is clear that their possession is a matter of contention. The determination is political. It is the outcome of contending factions, each pursuing what it takes to be its interests, each making choices as to what these interests are and how best to pursue them. As indicated by the use of the word “choice,” the operative character here is freedom. Freedom determines the way humans organize themselves as social animals, turning the expression of their social nature into politics. For humans, the political and social coincide because they are both free and mutually dependent. Their mutual dependence encourages them to live together in communities. Their freedom makes the life of such community “political.” The fact that the political is tied to a specific kind of social organization—that of the community—points to the correspondence, not just of the political and the social, but also of freedom with the social. This implies that just as the social life of humans is determined by their freedom, so also their freedom is determined by their social life. Human freedom gains its specifically political character in the multiple interactions that make up social life. How Others Give us the Content of our Freedom To see how this occurs we need to remind ourselves that the content of freedom consists in the choices available to it. That freedom involves more than choice—for example, desires and the ability to reason out the consequences of pursuing them—goes without saying. It is, however, not to our purpose to elaborate these factors. For an account of them from a phenomenological perspective, see Mensch, Postfoundational Phenomenology: Husserlian Reflections on Presence and Embodiment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 53-67. Such choices are not abstract. They are not pulled from thin air, but rather are the result of our encounters with others. Thus, the child first becomes aware of them as she learns how to make her way in the human world: how to eat at the table, dress herself, ride a bicycle, read, and so on. Each new project gives her another option, another way of being and behaving. It enriches the range of the choices she can conceive. The same happens in later life. As adults, whatever we see others do tends to be regarded (whether favorably or unfavorably) as a human capacity. As such, we regard it as one of our own possibilities. Even though we might never choose to actualize a possibility, it still forms part of what we could be capable of given the appropriate motivations and circumstances. When it is an act we disapprove of, our not performing it, involves in some measure our willing not to do so. This enrichment of our options is also an enrichment of the meanings the world has for us. These meanings are both linguistic and disclosive. When a child’s caregivers teach her her initial projects, they accompany this with a constant stream of verbal commentary. She first learns, for example, the word spoon as she learns to use it to eat. Its meaning is given by its function, and its function is set by the particular projects her caregivers introduce her to. As is obvious, the more multiple the projects an object is involved in, the more multiple are its meanings. Paper, for example, can mean something to start a fire with (a combustible material). It can also mean something to write upon, something to fold to make a paper airplane, a surface for drawing, and so on. Each new use discloses a new aspect of it and adds to what comes to mind in connection with the word. This same holds generally. The pragmatic meanings of the objects that fill our world reflect our understanding of how we and others “make our way” in the world. Their multiplicity of meanings is correlated to the multiplicity of our projects and thus indicates the options that form the content of our freedom. This account is basically Heideggerian. See Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985), p. 261. Our awareness of this content has a double effect. On the one hand, it separates us from our given situation. On the other, it animates our questioning of this situation. Both follow from our awareness of the alternative ways of being and behaving, i.e., the alternative ways of disclosing the world that our others have shown us. Each individual, in confronting such alternatives, is invited to consider his own way of ways of being and behaving in terms of a range of possible alternatives. In considering his present situation as disclosed through his current projects as just one possibility among many, he takes it as something that could be otherwise. Doing so, he robs it of its necessity. Rather than being taken as necessarily determining him, he regards it as something that could be changed. With this, we have the freedom that Sartre describes when he writes: “For man to put a particular existent out of circuit is to put himself out of circuit in relation to the existent. In this case he is not subject to it; he is out of reach; it cannot act on him, for he has retired beyond a nothingness. Descartes, following the Stoics, has given a name to this possibility, which human reality has, to secrete a nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 60. I think that this secretion of nothingness is essentially social. It cannot occur without the alternatives that others present us. Confronting these alternatives does not just separate the individual from a given situation—that is, loosen its hold on him. It also places the situation in question. It invites him to ask for the reason why the situation is as it is. Now, to ask why something exists the way one finds it is to implicitly assume that it could be otherwise. To reverse this, we can say that it is the assumption that a state of affairs is not necessary, but rather could be otherwise, which first raises the question of the cause of this state’s being as it is. It makes us inquire into the circumstances upon which our present situation depends. Given that political debate begins with such questioning, we can see why free societies generally oppose censorship. Freedom to speak and to publish is not just one expression of freedom among others. It is essential to its genesis. Politically, it is through our spoken and written words that we present to one another the alternative ways of being and behaving that result in alternative ways of disclosing the world. Such words, then, are the carriers of the content of our freedom. They determine the direction of the debates through which free societies shape their course. This relation of freedom to language extends to all the forms of its expression. In its ability to depict alternatives, language as such is a reservoir of freedom. This is because in the multiplicity of its meanings, it preserves the multiplicity of projects that generated the disclosures such meanings signify. Through their implicit reference to these projects, its meanings collectively present to us the content of our freedom. Thus, the impoverishment of language through the narrowing of the horizons of discourse is itself an impoverishment of freedom. The Social Origin of the Hiddenness of Human Agency To take freedom as resulting from our encounters with other people is to admit its vulnerability. It can be impoverished by others. Its very genesis can be stunted by the various agencies of social control. At the extreme, it can be brought to a standstill. The special character of this view can be seen by contrasting it with the type of thinking that takes freedom as essential to the self, i.e., as a something belonging to human selfhood apart from our social interactions. Those who see the state as a social contract founded by consenting individuals generally assume that freedom has this innate character. The basis of politics for such theorists is our natural, i.e., inborn, freedom. John Locke, for example, writes: “To understand political power right[ly] and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit ….” John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, §4 (New York: Library of Liberal Arts Press, 1952), p. 4. It is because they have this freedom that they can form the social contract. For Hobbes, who considers the natural state of man a “war of everyone against everyone,” this liberty was equally prior to society. In this war, what is commonly called the “right of nature … is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 1, ch. 14 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 99. For both Locke and Hobbes, politics begins with a contractual limitation of this original liberty. By contrast, the claim I am advancing is that this liberty is social. It is a function of our existence as social animals. The empirical evidence for this view consists in the susceptibility of humanity to tyranny, that is, the ability of states, systems, and ideologies to limit human freedom for long periods of time. It also involves the importance tyrannies place on the control of ideas, that is, on the control of the language that serves as its medium. Were liberty innate, the break-up of a tyranny—no matter how long its duration—would necessarily involve the restoration of our “natural” freedom and with this, our ability to immediately recommence the social contract. Such, unhappily, is rarely the case. The reason that the recovery from a tyranny is so difficult is to found in the social character of freedom. Freedom is not some “private,” innate capacity of individuals. In fact, the very notion of the “private” is posterior to their relations to each other. To see this, we have to ask why we assume that humans are free. What is the evidence for this assumption? How, in other words, do we recognize another person as a free individual? To answer this question phenomenologically is to describe this recognition in terms of intention and fulfillment. For most things, we recognize something as itself when it shows itself as we intend it, that is, as we expect it to appear given our past experience. The intention, we can say, forms our anticipatory interpretation of a given experience. Now, there are four possible relations of intention to fulfillment. The givenness of what we intend can exactly match our intentions. It can be other than what we intend—as is the case when we are simply mistaken. The givenness also can be less. It can, for example, not offer the detail that was part of our intentions. Finally, givenness can exceed our intentions. In showing itself, the object offers us more than what was intended. A comic example of the intention to another person not finding an adequate givenness is provided by the mistake sometimes made of assuming that a store mannequin, when seen from a distance, is actually a sales person. As we approach it, we see from its stiffness and lack of response, that it is merely a mannequin. We expected to catch its eye; our intention included a person’s ability to respond to our gaze. But in remaining fixed, the mannequin offered us less than what we intended. What about the other person exactly matching our intentions? The difficulty here is that such an other is not actually other. This becomes clear when we examine what a complete givenness of the other would entail. Were I to intend the other in his actual self-presence, the goal of my intending would be a literal looking through the other’s eyes. What I would really want to grasp would be how the world appears to this person, that is, what he sees, thinks and feels. As is obvious, were this goal fulfilled, our two consciousnesses would merge. A consciousness that was fully present would not be other, but would rather be part of my own. This means that the very success of my intention in finding a corresponding fulfillment would rob it of its intended object, which is, after all, not myself but rather someone else. The remaining alternative is that of an intention that intends its own surpassing. In intending the other I expect that the other will surpass the content of my intention. Thus I recognize an other as a person by virtue of her behaving as I do, but not in any strictly predictable way. There is always a certain excess in what she shows me. She is not limited to the content of my intention, that is, to the anticipations that arise from my interpretation of her situation. She acts out of her own interpretation. To intend her as such is, in fact, to intend the inadequacy of one’s intention. The intention directs itself towards a fulfillment that will exceed it. Its object is an exceeding givenness. This excess manifests the otherness of the other. It also confronts us with the openness of the future. The other will be what she will be, not simply what I determine and anticipate from my perspective. Insofar as I intend her as determining her own behavior through her own interpretations, this excess is also experienced as the presence of her freedom. Her otherness is thus experienced as an alterity of agency, one that I take to be as free as my own. What is the origin of this excessive presence? Is it some “private” innate capacity of the individual or is it irremediably social? The claim here is that it is social. In fact, what we take to be the private or hidden quality of the freely willing self is itself a result of finite individuals interacting with other such individuals. It stems from the fact that each person gains from its others an awareness of human possibilities, one that exceeds its finite capacity. Thus, each of us knows that a knife can be used to take a life, though few of us have employed it for this purpose. This very awareness is a kind of excess. To borrow a pair of terms from Levinas, we may call the sum total of an individual’s public history, the “said.” This history serves as basis for predicting his or her behavior. The person’s actual behavior we can call “the saying.” To assert that “the saying” exceeds “the said” signifies in this context that the other has a private side, a nonpredictible dimension that exceeds what is publicly available. This dimension is the content of our freedom. It forms the core of our alterity. This alterity, however, does not arise from some transcendent, metaphysical grounding. It is not a function of a nonappearing agency. Rather, its ground is our others, or more precisely, the possibilities that they exhibit and that we internalize. This internalization gives each of us our privacy and the content of our freedom. Privacy, in this context, is not a matter of choice, not a matter of choosing to keep things hidden, for example, deciding to not say all that one knows. It is rather an ontological condition. It stems from our finitude, that is, from our incapability of exhibiting or even expressing all that we are capable of. To do so would be to engage in an infinite task. We would have to express the totality of meanings that form the content of both our language and our freedom. Political Freedom versus Abstract Willfulness I began by asking how freedom can fit in with the organized structures of political life. What prevents its rending this life? Why isn’t its expression one of pure willfulness? The answer is that the freedom that functions within and maintains the structures of political life is a freedom that is faithful to its origin. As such, its expression is always in terms of a context, one given by others. Its content is formed by the ways of being and behaving that are shaped by the various projects of individuals and groups. To the point that these projects coincide there is a commonality in the content of freedom. To the point that they do not, interests will clash. Such a clash, however, is always in a context. Thus, the excess of the other—the excess stemming from his interpretation of a given situation—involves an overlap. It is never totally distinct. The other’s understanding, which consists in the meanings that he gives to a particular situation, is not simply other than my own. The meanings are shared, but not entirely. The excess—the non-coincidence—is the other’s freedom. It manifests the other’s non-predictability and is the engine of newness in our encounter. What we share, however, is what allows us to manage this, to accommodate our differing interpretations. Politics is the art of this accommodation. As the “art of compromise,” it is the way we deal with the excessive quality of our others. Thus, in political life, we assume that others may not share our interpretation of a given situation. Not seeing it as we do, they will not act as we would. Their interests may, in fact, be opposed to our own. In a tyranny, agreement is secured by power, by the suppression of the other’s freedom. In politics, however, it is a matter of negotiation, of give and take, of compromise. The possibility of such compromise points to a fundamental difference in the way politics and tyranny view freedom. In a tyranny, freedom is individual and abstract. Its pure expression is the arbitrary whim of the individual. This lack of context makes compromise impossible. The contentless will, to the point that it takes no regard of others, i.e., does not take into account their interpretations of a given situation, has no grounds for compromise. It is, thus, limited to an all or nothing mode of expression. It is just such a will that can rend political life. In extreme cases, such as that of the Nazi “seizure of power,” it can bring it to a halt. The end of political life is marked not just by a concentration of power. Its fundamental feature is the suppression of the alternatives that form the content of freedom. Thus, the ideal for a tyranny is a populus that has no idea of such alternatives. It is a populus that thinks, acts and discloses the world according to a limited number of state approved projects. So disclosed, this world cannot offer any evidence running counter to the claims of the state. Freedom in such a world operates within a limited set of options, each of which, when enacted confirms the others in disclosing a single reality, one with no evident alternatives. In such a world, the private or the hidden has all but vanished. This is not just because privacy is suspect (or even forbidden) in totalitarian societies. It is because the totality of meanings that form the content of both language and freedom has been severely limited. The totalitarian ideal is that of limiting the saying to the said. It is that of evacuating the “excess” of the hidden so that everything about an individual is publicly available and, hence, subject to state control. With this, we can see why, when a tyranny is suddenly lifted, the freedom that results has no resemblance to the “natural liberty” assumed by the social contract theorists. What we have, instead, is a liberty that lacks any context. The state-approved context has vanished, but the individuals that remain have no practice in presenting one another with the alternatives that could replace it. The result is a profound breakdown of civil society. Civil society is based on the overlap and excess of the interpretative accounts of the shared political and social space. Such interpretations point to the plurality of projects that overlap, yet differ. In civil society, the disclosed presence of the social space is multiply determined by such projects. It is “excessive” because the individuals inhabiting it are excessive. It is subject to multiple interpretations, and hence always capable of exhibiting the new. To live in such a space one has to be capable of negotiating the difference between such interpretations. So defined, this space is that of politics. Corresponding to this, politics is the art of this negotiation. The survivors of a tyranny must learn this art; they must also learn how to provide one another with the materials for such negotiation, these being their different ways of viewing and interpreting the world. What this amounts to is the construction of a civil society. It is only in terms of such society that their freedom can gain the specifically political character that works with rather than rends political life. Freedom versus Sovereignty The difference between political freedom and the freedom that lacks a defining context can be put in terms of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between sovereignty and freedom. Sovereignty, she writes, is “the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership.” To conflate freedom with sovereignty is to assert that to be free, one must be sovereign, one must have a complete autonomy and mastery of one’s situation. This conflation is, she notes, an ancient error, “which has always been taken for granted by political as well as philosophic thought.” The error is that it ignores the essential plurality of the human condition. In her words, “If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same, then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty … is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men inhabit the earth.” This condition of plurality, she adds, does not obtain, “as the tradition since Plato holds, because of man’s limited strength, which makes him depend upon others.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1958), p. 234. It obtains because human action is always entangled. This entanglement is not just a result of the complexities of human action, which are such that they inevitably ensnare the actor. As Arendt expresses this, “… the human capacity for freedom … by producing the web of relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an extent that he appears more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer of what he has done” (ibid., 233-34). It comes from the social character of freedom. For freedom to have a political expression, it must be plural. It must draw its content from the web of human relations. Freedom is itself conditioned by the plurality of the human condition. This conclusion can be expressed in terms of the Czech philosopher, Jan PatocÚka’s belief that “… political life in its original and primordial form is nothing other than active freedom itself.” It is a life that exists “from freedom for freedom.” Jan PatocÚka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák, ed. James Dodd (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1996), p. 142. The statement holds if we take this freedom to be collectively grounded. So understood, politics arises from the excess that each of us gains from our others, the very excess that each of us presents to our others. Politics is from freedom as springing from this excess. It is for freedom insofar its result is a continuation of this excess. The excess is the margin by which the other exceeds our intentions. Thus, in political life, alterity is at the heart of public debate. It begins with differing interpretations of a situation, differing views of how to handle it. The public discussions that characterize political life presuppose this excess. They continue it insofar as the different options they publicly air achieve a public presence as possible courses of action and, hence, form part of the content of our collective freedom. In such debates, politics, in its very practice, aims at something more than the particular goals that its practice involves. Beyond all the goals involving the economy, public safety, welfare, health and so on, politics wills its own continuance as a free activity. It wills the multiply-determined social space that makes possible political action. Endnotes 18