Freedom

A while back I wrote a post (Nurturing the Inner Anarchist) explaining how my anarchist values were motivated less by hope for social change than by a quest for self-preservation and authenticity. I haven't changed my mind about that, but recently I've had several conversations with people that have challenged me not so much to rethink my anarchist values but to clarify them.

First of all, I need to clarify what an anarchist society would look like, beyond explaining what an anarchist society isn't (capitalistic, hierarchical, coerced....). An anarchist society, at it's simplest level, is a free society, a society in which all individuals are free. Admittedly, that's a rather worthless generalization, worse than "democratic nation", but it's a start. The next step is to define freedom.

And, if the truth be told, I can't define it. I don't know that anyone can, because I doubt any person alive today has ever really experienced freedom and I won't pretend to proscribe a free society if I haven't ever experienced its primary condition. Moreover, even if freedom could be, at this time, directly experienced, I don't think the experience could be put into words, could be reified. In fact, part of my definition of freedom is that it can't be reduced to information--it can't be entirely abstracted. Freedom is a subjective experience. But, as I mentioned to my blogger pals recently, it isn't private. It isn't solipsistic. Just as our bodies are dependent on the surrounding environment, so too is freedom contingent on the physical body and the environment that creates and nourishes that body. That isn't to say that our minds can't increase our levels of freedom. Our minds, being inseparable from our bodies, can clearly mitigate physical limitations, our "freedom from"--but they can't completely overcome material reality.

So while I can't give a clear and precise definition of freedom, I think I can give a partial, clarifying, picture; I can describe and specify it.

As explained by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, there are two concepts of freedom: "freedom from" and "freedom to". In my description of freedom, the latter takes precedence. I don't mean, however, to minimize "freedom from". Without a certain measure of "freedom from", "freedom to" is impossible. We must, that is, be free from those restraints that prevent us from surviving--up to a point. We must have freedom from food scarcity, disease, jailers, and axe-murderers. We need the ability to live. But not indefinitely. We can't and shouldn't expect freedom from any and all physical limitation. We can't and shouldn't try to free ourselves from our bodies or the environment that produced those bodies. We can't be free from bad weather or from the need to eat or from the inability to move mountains with our thoughts or from death. To carry the concept of freedom to such ridiculous extremes means to create an idea of freedom that is essentially negative, a freedom
that isn't derived from living but from being free of humanity, or even existence--a freedom from the very thing, life, that makes freedom possible. And that leads me to the second concept of freedom, "freedom to". That, also, in my mind, has to be limited. We shouldn't expect or want to have freedom to do anything--the freedom to run as fast as a cheetah or fly like an eagle or shop like an American. We should have freedom only to do one thing--to become fully human, to realize our subjective potential. What that means to me is that we require the freedom to relate to the world around us completely, serenely, and drunkenly, with the full intensity of our human natures--that we have the means of discovering the radical potential in all of our relationships--that we have the unlimited freedom, as human beings, to commune. I have no wish to become another person or thing, to be free from lust or pain or the human body. Freedom is NOT transcendence. To me, such a freedom isn't freedom at all, but escape--escape from life and from freedom. Real freedom doesn't negate but requires absolute responsibility, something human culture as we now know it prohibits us from fully practicing. And until the material conditions change, real freedom, real communion, can't exist. The individual, then, can't be free until the social conditions he lives in are free, as well. Those social conditions can be changed but they can't, unilaterally, be transcended. And while the individual within modern society can't be truly free, she can, through revolt, by accepting the responsibility of creating a free world, at least attain a higher degree of freedom, more authenticity and more intimate relations, than if she surrenders to the artificial freedom of escapist fantasy.