Excerpt of Freedom from Reality

FREEDOM fro m R E A L I T Y

The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty

D. C. SCHINDLER

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2017 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: What Is Good?

1

Part I. John Locke and the Dialectic of Power 1 Locke’s (Re-)Conception of Freedom

000

2 The Political Conquest of the Good in the Second Treatise 000 Part II. Modern Liberty as a Flight from the Real 3

The Basic Shape of Modern Liberty

000

4

Symbolical Order and Diabolical Subversion

000

5

A “Society of Devils”

000

Part III. Retrieving the Origin as the Essence of Freedom 6

Starting Over and Starting After: A First Foundation in Plato and Aristotle

000

7

Plato: The Golden Thread of Freedom

000

8

Aristotle: Freedom as Liberality

000

Conclusion

000

Notes

000

Bibliography

000

Index

000

Introduction What Is Good?

This book aims to dig as deeply as possible into the philosophical roots of the problematic modern conception of liberty and to propose an alternative way of thinking about freedom in the light of what is uncovered. The sense of what we take to be the problem is nicely captured in the following oft-quoted passage from G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics: We are fond of talking about “liberty”; but the way we end up talking of it is an attempt to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “education”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good.

The modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace unadulterated liberty.” This is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.”

He says, “Away with all your old moral standards; I am for progress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.”

He says, “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lies the hopes of the race, but in education.” This, clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”1

1

2

Fre e do m from R eal it y

Now, it has become clear, since Chesterton’s time, that his description of the “modern man” needs to be qualified in a number of ways: there is a sense in which modern man cares a great deal about morality and religion, and no longer advocates “unadulterated liberty” with the same naive enthusiasm Chesterton seems to ascribe to him. Indeed, there are just as many instances of summary and unapologetic restraints placed on liberty, in a manner that can be described as specifically modern. Nevertheless, Chesterton’s observations hit on something essential, which has become if anything even more evident than it was when he first recorded them, namely, that we have separated what we mean by freedom from a substantial notion of the good, and we have in fact turned it thereby into a substitute for the good; that this substitution comes to expression not just in our explicit discussions of freedom, but more generally in our institutions and “values,” and in a variety of other cultural phenomena; and, finally, that this substitution entails a fundamental logical incoherence, which is to say that it both expresses and gives rise to patterns of fragmentation and contradiction. At the same time, however, we will suggest in this book that an eclipse of the good from the horizon that defines the operation of the human will entails a radical shift in perspective that tends to hide the very problems this incoherence generates, or to cast them as irrelevant for all intents and purposes. To reflect on what this means, and what implications it has, is one of the primary goals of our exploration here.

To reflect properly on what is at issue and what is at stake requires, among other things, a resistance to this tendency, which may be characterized in this context as a reduction to pragmatic or political concerns as finally determinative. It is an oversimplification, but it is not altogether false, to say that the movement from the classical to the medieval and then to the modern period in the philosophical approaches to freedom is a movement from the ontological or metaphysical to the moral, and then to the political2—what it means to be free was asked initially as a question concerning a mode or state of being, then a question concerning the use and operation of the power of the will, and finally a question concerning the configuration of power (being—will—power).

This description is certainly an oversimplification, because in a certain respect the question of freedom always at least implicitly includes all three dimensions at once, regardless of which particular dimension re-

Introduction 3

ceives the primary focus, and also because a departure from metaphysical roots entails a distortion of both the moral and the political, isolated as separate realms. In the fragmentation that results, each comes to have both too much and too little significance; each encroaches on the others even as it surrenders its own proper meaning. However this may be, to the extent that the description hits the mark it means that we have tended increasingly to begin, so to speak, on the surface in our reflections on the question of freedom. But one cannot even understand the surface properly except from the perspective of the depths. It is accordingly our aim to trace the issues that arise in the question of the nature of freedom to their metaphysical roots. The extent to which the aim succeeds, and the value of the fruit the effort bears, is of course something that others will have to judge.

A basic presupposition of this book—which will have to justify itself over the course of the investigation— is that an adequate approach to the notion of freedom will have to include three features: (1) it must understand freedom primarily in ontological terms; (2) it must recognize an essential connection between freedom and the good; and (3) it must see relation to the other as an intrinsic part of the meaning of freedom. These three features, of course, are not the sole qualities of an adequate conception (there are certainly many more: a relation to intelligence and truth, a kind of self-possession, and so forth), but we single these out because they serve, as we hope to show over the course of our study, to bring what appears to be the essential nature of freedom particularly into focus.3 Not all of these three aspects have always been thematic in the history of the discussions of freedom; indeed, in the classical view, the role of the “other” has tended to present certain problems, or at the very least tensions that mature into problems in the dawning of modernity. Nevertheless, we would like to propose, at the outset, that the three aspects we have mentioned are intrinsically related, to such an extent that each stands or falls with the others. To put the matter simply here — though we will eventually see a need to qualify aspects of this— the priority of the good is what makes freedom ontological, that is, a reality that is more than merely moral or voluntary insofar as it precedes the deliberate activity of the agent. By the same token, this priority entails a subordination of the will to what is other, so that a recognition of otherness

4

Fre e do m from R eal it y

of a particular sort as intrinsic to freedom is a condition for the continuing affirmation of the priority of the good.

As we hope to show, these three features converge, in terms of their metaphysical significance, in the notion of actuality. For classical thought, actuality is perfection or, in other words, it is what the good is.

Moreover, being itself is understood in terms of actuality, though this interpretation recognizes an analogical diversity. Aristotle makes a distinction between first actuality, substance, which is defined by form, and second actuality, which is, as it were, the being’s self-enactment through the achievement of its end. The end is precisely an achievement, and so represents more than what is simply given already in the form of the substance considered in itself. In this respect, man’s full actuality, the free self-enactment of his nature, is necessarily also a selftranscendence—that is, it is an engagement with his other. Actuality thus brings together being, the good, and the other in a unified whole.

It is because of the centrality of this notion that Aristotle insisted on the absolute priority of actuality to potency (and thus to power and possibility),4 which is what precisely makes potency intelligible and significant—indeed, in a basic sense real. As the will begins to emerge in the course of philosophical reflection, and move slowly into the center, it tends to be formulated as an increasingly autonomous “power” of the soul. Interpreted as an integral “part” of reality, that is, part of the meaning of actual goodness, the will “makes sense.” But insofar as it is isolated in itself, over against the actuality of the real, it becomes disordered, chaotic, and destructive, but for the very same reason meaningless and unreal. One could characterize modernity, in fact, precisely as a detachment of potency from act, which entails a tendency to subordinate the latter to the former in a way that is perfectly opposed to the classical understanding.

All of this is stated in a condensed form, which will need to be unpacked and developed, but it may be helpful to the reader to see at the outset the “nutshell” version of the argument that will be offered in this book, which is divided into three parts. Part 1 is an exploration of the thought of John Locke, who is taken to offer a formulation of the concept of freedom, both at the anthropological and at the political level, that is representative of modernity generally. Part 2 explains the precise sense in which this concept is “diabolical” and endeavors to

Introduction 5

show the traces of this “diabolical” concept in the basic institutions and values of modern liberalism. Finally, part 3 seeks to retrieve an alternative conception of freedom by going back to original sources. It is hoped that this work of retrieval is the beginning of a project that will continue in future investigations.

In somewhat more detail, the argument of the present book unfolds as follows. Chapter 1, “Locke’s (Re-)Conception of Freedom,” presents Locke’s substantial revision of the first edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which concerned above all a reworking of the chapter outlining his vision of freedom and the will, as a sort of symbol of the philosophical revolution in early modern thought. The driving question of the chapter is a basic one in the scholarly literature: Does Locke ultimately have a compatibilist or a libertarian theory of the will—or in other words, does Locke subordinate the will to a naturalistic determinism or does he present the will as a self-causing power that is finally responsible only to itself? The basic argument is that both of the interpretations can be justified, not because of any straightforward inconsistency in Locke’s thinking, but most fundamentally because the notion of power, as Locke interprets it, is essentially dialectical or “selfsubverting.” In the first edition of the Essay, Locke had articulated the essence of the will as power, but he still retained features of more traditional views of the will as a kind of desire that is responsive to the good.

Friends and critics therefore accused him of rendering the will a passive instrument of nature. In his revision, he cast off the traces of a classical vision of freedom and sought to strengthen the will’s self-determining power by introducing concepts he seems to have acquired from a reading of Malebranche. This chapter concludes, however, that, because he leaves power in place as the essence of the will, he does not manage to resolve the basic problem. Instead, he injects the dialectic ever more profoundly into the logic of human agency.

It has become common for scholars to identify a tendency in Locke to make fundamental claims in his Second Treatise on Government, which he subsequently goes on to reverse (mostly by implication) as he unfolds the meaning of those claims. Chapter 2, “The Political Conquest of the Good in the Second Treatise,” tries to show that these reversals are not (necessarily) deliberate attempts to deceive, but instead result from Locke’s self-subverting notion of power that we describe in

6

Fre e do m from R eal it y

chapter 1: pure potency is effectively impotent in the face of actual conditions, and so what is affirmed as essential in one respect (as potential) can turn out to be effectively irrelevant in another (in actuality). Thus, through a reading of the Second Treatise, the chapter brings to light a number of the inconsistencies that lie at the foundation of Locke’s political vision: the lawless state of war is in fact what the state of nature, apparently governed by the fundamental natural law of mutual respect, looks like when it is made actual. Along similar lines, because the equality of goods in the natural state is essentially a matter of potential, it can turn out to coincide in principle with the extreme inequality of possessions, especially once money is introduced. Political authority depends on consent, but that consent, by which one surrenders one’s authority as an individual to the power of the state, ends up being imputed (i.e., imposed from above) as having been implicitly given. One thus has no actual control over one’s consent. At the very same time, because, in Locke’s view, individuals retain a “right to revolt” that is determinable according to their own criteria, the surrender they are taken to have made is never binding in fact, and so individuals arguably never consent to an authority greater than their own will. When power is made the principle of political organization, the result is a series of absolutes that get relentlessly displaced by their opposites, so that order can be established only in appearance, and as a mere instrument to be exploited for nonpolitical ends. The chapter ends with a summary consideration of Locke’s notion of religious liberty in this light, as a transition to part 2.

In order to open up the investigation to the central theme of the book, Chapter 3, “The Basic Shape of Modern Liberty,” argues that what we have discovered in Locke is a pattern that can be seen in modern thought generally. The chapter makes this argument by presenting a succinct account of the anthropological and political notion of freedom in landmark modern thinkers who are conventionally taken to represent antipodes to Locke the supposed empiricist: namely, Spinoza (the supposed rationalist) and Kant (the supposed reconciler of rationalism and empiricism). We show that, in spite of genuine and significant differences in their theories, all of these thinkers share five features that we may take as characteristic of modern liberty: (1) a view of freedom as a kind of active power; (2) a belief that freedom of this sort is

Introduction 7

incompatible with heteronomy, paradigmatically in the form of another will; (3) a reduction of political order to the preservation of natural rights through the regulation of external behavior; (4) a rejection of any a priori religious tradition; (5) a tendency to allow freedom, in spite of its pure spontaneity, to collapse into various natural, ethical, and political determinisms.

Chapter 4, “Symbolical Order and Diabolical Subversion,” proposes that the notion of the “diabolical” serves in a particular way to capture the essence of the modern conception of liberty. It first illuminates the meaning of the diabolical by contrasting it with its etymological opposite: the symbolical. The Greek verb sym-ballō means “to join together”; symbols, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has explained, were originally the tesserae hospitales, pieces of a bone or pottery broken apart and distributed to members of a bond formed in an act of hospitality, able to be rejoined by those members or their descendants in a future act, which is both a remembrance of the original generosity and a new event itself. The notion of the “symbolical” is borrowed from Paul Ricoeur in this context to describe the “premodern” cosmos, in which all things are tokens of the good that stands at the origin as first cause, and so all have a certain aptness for a fundamentally generous and generative unity. By contrast, dia-ballō means “to divide,” “to set apart or at odds.” A philosophical interpretation of the “diabolical,” then, is offered in terms of six features, which are shown to bear a consistent inner logic: (1) the diabolical presents a deceptive image that substitutes for reality; (2) it is characterized by an essential negativity; (3) it renders appearance more decisive than reality, and indeed, better than reality according to the measure of convenience and efficiency; (4) it has a supraindividual dimension that is nevertheless impersonal: that is, it tends to take the form of an essentially self-referential system; (5) it is “soulless” in the sense of lacking an animating principle of unity; and (6) it is essentially self-destructive. Having characterized the diabolical, the chapter then returns to the basic pattern of modern liberty, elaborated in chapter 3, and shows how the notion serves to bring its various aspects to an intelligible unity. The chapter concludes by connecting modern liberty, on the one hand, with a contemporary expression (a definition of liberty offered by the U.S. Supreme Court), and, on the other, with an ancient pair of myths (the garden of Eden and Plato’s cave).

8

Fre e do m from R eal it y

Kant famously suggested that a proper political order ought not to depend on the virtue of its citizens but should be able to keep peace even in the case of a “society of devils.” Thus, chapter 5, “A ‘Society of Devils,’” argues that the reigning conception of freedom presupposed in modern thought has tended to give the form of the diabolical, outlined in chapter 4, to the various values, practices, and institutions on which freedom bears or in which it has a particular place. In a word, this chapter looks at the cultural and political manifestations of modern liberty in the light of the basic argument of the book. A preliminary section argues that a notion of liberty is embodied in the conceived structure of action and in the objective institutions that arise from and form action, especially in the particular configuration of means and ends. A “symbolical” configuration of the relation between means and ends is then presented as a foil to a “diabolical” configuration, which is taken to represent in a schematic way the general cultural form of modern liberty. The rest of the chapter shows how this form turns up in sometimes surprising ways in an array of phenomena, from the anthropological to the political and to the cultural more broadly. In each case, there turns out to be some form of a self-subversion, in which the only means permitted for the pursuit of the desired end contradict its attainment. The chapter explores this self-subversion under the following headings: choice, self-determination, autonomy, rights, privacy, equality, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, the power to vote, technology, free market, academic freedom, freedom of information, and, finally, power itself. It ends by showing how this form appears in a destructive way at the outermost and innermost spheres of human existence: God and the body.

We thus move to part 3. Within a brief compass, chapter 6, “Starting Over and Starting After: A First Foundation in Plato and Aristotle,” begins by presenting an argument that a critique of culture made at the ontological level, though appearing prima facie to be more despairing, in fact opens up a real possibility of hope to the extent that it enters into the soil of reality, so to speak, beyond the roots of the problem; next, it points to an alternative understanding of freedom by recalling the original sense of the words for freedom and offering a philosophical interpretation of the etymology; and, third, it presents a brief apologia for the coming exposition of Plato and Aristotle as represen-

Introduction 9

tatives of a common tradition that brings forth the original meaning. It is suggested that the reason intellectual histories of the notion of freedom and the will so often ignore Plato, or include him at best merely as a foil, is that they take the “diabolical” conception criticized in this book for granted as the norm.

Chapter 6 shows that freedom originally meant “belonging to an ethnic stock or family line.” In chapter 7, “Plato: The Golden Thread of Freedom,” Plato represents a specifically philosophical appropriation of this organic conception, giving it a properly metaphysical foundation and thus a metaphysical scope. For him, freedom most basically has the “symbolical” sense of the belonging together of all things in the good. This chapter, in one respect, concedes the general criticism of Plato for lacking a conception of free will as the spontaneous power to choose. On the other hand, however, it mounts a partial defense of Plato by arguing for the necessity of what such critiques often overlook, namely, the “effective” priority of goodness. This priority allows a unity between the intellect and, eventually, the will in our interpretation of human action, and it does not entail the elimination of creativity and spontaneity, as critics might fear, but in fact makes such things possible. The chapter culminates in a proposal that the primary model of freedom, in Plato, is “begetting/giving birth in the beautiful,” a model that turns up analogously in all human action, no matter how trivial. It concludes by showing that this model of freedom is not disruptive or antagonistic by its own inner logic, as a diabolical conception cannot avoid being, but instead naturally generates further degrees of order.

For the same reason, freedom turns out for Plato to have an essentially social, and so political, form.

Although Aristotle is typically taken to depart significantly from Plato on the issue in question, chapter 8, “Aristotle: Freedom as Liberality,” proposes to read Aristotle principally as one who deepened the Platonic tradition and developed some of its indispensable components. Aristotle provides the classic formulation of the primacy of actuality, on the basis of which the present book mounts its critique of modernity. Focusing above all (but not exclusively) on the De anima and the Nicomachean Ethics, this chapter considers the implications of the primacy of actuality for Aristotle’s understanding of motion in general, and then more specifically for the motions that characterize

10

Fre edom f rom R ealit y

the human soul, namely, perception, thought, and action. It argues that such motions are to be understood most basically, not as mechanical events that effect some measurable change, but instead as analogous expressions of an unfolding of perfection. In the light of this interpretation, the neglected virtue of liberality (eleutheriotēs)—which, not incidentally, shares the root of freedom (eleutheria)—as the proper unity of giving and receiving wealth, turns out to present a paradigm of free action. In relation to this paradigm, the forms of human activity that Aristotle held to be highest, namely, contemplation and moral action, are shown to represent complementary expressions of the communication of goodness, the unity of giving and receiving the good. The chapter concludes by highlighting the essentially social dimension of freedom that we saw also in Plato: on the one hand, it argues that friendship presents a culminating synthesis of the contemplation and action that constitute human freedom, and, on the other, it interprets political authority as a unity of giving and receiving freedom in the concrete form of community.

The book ends with a brief conclusion that draws a basic contrast between the alternative (“symbolical”) notion of freedom as a fruitful belonging together in the good and the (“diabolical”) conception of freedom presented in parts 1 and 2. It ends by criticizing, once again, any response that would simply renounce the will and modern freedom (e.g., Heidegger) and proposes instead a recovery of the love of the good that the will cannot in any event evade.