Freedom is the sacred object of political discourse, a point of veneration and strange agreements across bitter divides. Freedom is the ultimate treasure—“we prize our freedom”—the ultimate nostalgia—“we once were free”—and the ultimate promise—“we shall be free”. Freedom is the one value not to be questioned.
So let us question freedom. But because this is a blog post and not a monograph, let’s do so lightly and provisionally.
I will suggest three hypotheses to explore. These are not “positions”—more like thought experiments:
- Freedom is always partial: we deal only with degrees of freedom, not a binary choice between freedom and un-freedom.
- Freedom is always freedom in relation to some specific power, constraint or limitation.
- Freedom is only one value among several, and absent those other values, freedom’s own value is diminished.
About Hypothesis #2
The first hypothesis is rather obvious and probably uncontroversial. The slightest reflection confirms that only a deity, a being of infinite power and absent all constraints, could experience total freedom. However, in everyday rhetoric this obvious point is often buried. “Wealth will make you free” or “Revolution will make you free” are claims that pretend to some sort of complete and identifiable state. The appeal of this promise is clearly strong, because it keeps being promoted, even though it is clearly nonsense. “Freer” is an ugly word, drained of emotional resonance. “Land of the freer” hardly rings with patriotic pride. In most circumstances, however, “freer” is undoubtedly more accurate than “free”. There is no “free speech”, “free market” or “free society”. There are varying degrees of freedom in speech, markets and societies: a little (or a lot) less, a little (or a lot) more.
About Hypothesis #2
The second hypothesis—that freedom is always freedom in relation to specific constraint—is also unremarkable, but also gets occluded by the rhetorical impulse we have just touched on. To give this a stronger phrasing, we could say that the statement “I am free” is a grammatical anomaly. One cannot be “free” in the way one can be “happy” or “rich” or “sick”. To be free is not a state; it is a relation. One can only be free of. The sentence that begins “I am free” should always finish with that prepositional phrase. “I am free” is meaningless. “I am free of persecution”… “I am free of poverty”… “I am free of censorship”… these are meaningful statements. As, too are: “I am free of pain”… “I am free of resentment”… “I am free of delusions.” This is why the fight for “freedom” is always a fight against something that limits freedom. Absent that contest, “freedom” ceases to have meaning. (There is a relation between hypothesis #1 and hypothesis #2. To be free is only to be free of something specific, and that specificity sets a limit on my freedom.)
About Hypothesis #3
The third hypothesis—that freedom requires the presence of other values to hold value in itself—is perhaps the most tendentious, but to me the most interesting. It is an intuition more than a considered idea. I can illustrate it best with an example. As a poet, I attend readings by contemporary writers, some brilliant, some moderately good, some awful. Through all that I hear of today’s poetic output, I notice a recurring legacy of “modernism”—that aging but unkillable offspring of the late nineteenth century. Poets understand, almost universally, that the practice of their art is a practice of freedom. (This is why the Lithuanian master, Czesław Milosz, can say that poetry is always rebellious—implicitly political.) But there are terrible hazards in this understanding, because in poetry, freedom that is not held in tension by a constraining aesthetic degenerates into sloppiness—formal and emotional. And this sloppiness has become pandemic with the unthinking embrace of a modernist posture.
Great poets are Houdinis. They tie themselves up with formal constraints and then break free within those boundaries. They open vast spaces within self-imposed confines. This was obvious in the days of villanelles or sonnets or heroic couplets but is equally true of the great modernists—you just need a more refined ear to detect the constraints.
Without the complementary values of musicality, metaphoric precision, depth of perception and linguistic agility, mere freedom in poetry is empty. There is a paradox here, because those other qualities have a double impact: they set boundaries around the poet’s freedom, while also investing it with value.
I suspect the same is true of freedom in life. Our freedoms (from this or that constraint) need to be counterbalanced by values that both limit and enrich those very freedoms. For what is freedom—say freedom from tyranny—without respect? Without wisdom? Without consideration? Without humor? Without (dare one use the word in a philosophical context) love*?
Absent those counterbalancing values, an increase in freedom may be far from worthless. But it is surely impoverished.
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*The Indo-European root of the word “free” means “love.” Even today, the Dutch version “vrij” means “free,” while the verb “vrijen” means “to make love.”