{"id":130,"date":"2006-12-26T13:20:14","date_gmt":"2006-12-26T21:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/phlogma.com\/?p=130"},"modified":"2009-07-10T13:30:55","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T21:30:55","slug":"berlin-on-freedom-to-and-fro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aporia.net\/phlogma\/philosophy-and-sex\/gender-differences\/berlin-on-freedom-to-and-fro-130","title":{"rendered":"Berlin on prepositional freedoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Notes on Isaiah Berlin,\u201cTwo Concepts of Liberty.\u201d\u009d<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

119<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Tobias<\/a>
Tobias Wong<\/a>,
Another notion of possibility<\/em><\/div>\n

Berlin paraphrases Heine who was thinking of Kant: \u201cphilosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor\u2019s study could destroy a civilization.\u201d\u009d [Heine, a friend of Karl Marx, was trying to weigh in on the side of philosophers, who, by and large, are ignored by the mill of history until, and as, convenient (even Marx). Just about anything or anyone, not just Rousseau (harnessed by Robespierre)—a scripture, a box cutter, a distaste for broccoli—can be, has been<\/em> employed to hurry on events. The difference between a philosophy and a boxcutter is that one requires less imagination to use.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

127<\/em>
\nThe negative conception: \u201cliberty from<\/em>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

128<\/em>
\nAll interference is bad as such, according to Mill\u2019s classical conception, while noninterference is good as such.<\/p>\n

But Mill also thought the individual ought to develop his capacities and character in a number of civilized, (non-piggish) ways that he claims negative liberty is conducive to. Few dispute this as far as it goes, but is negative liberty a necessary<\/em> condition for this second Millian imperative? Berlin, citing James Stephen\u2019s attack on Mill, suggests that it is not.<\/p>\n

129<\/em>
\nThe notion of a certain sacred sphere of personal autonomy is a modern notion, perhaps not older than Occam.<\/p>\n

129-130<\/em>
\nThe connection between self-government or democratic institutions and negative liberty is not as tight as advocates of each may want to believe. Some autocracies may be more efficient at protecting this kind of liberty.<\/p>\n

130<\/em>
\nTo think otherwise leads us to the positive conception of freedom\t\u2014freedom to<\/em> rather than mere freedom from<\/em>\t\u2014one that asks \u201cWho is to say who I am, and what I am not, to be or do?\u201d\u009d [Lorenne Clark<\/a> in her feminist critique of liberty makes use of this distinction.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

131<\/em>
\nFor it is this—the \u2018positive\u2019 conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to—to lead one prescribed form of life—which the adherents of the \u2018negative\u2019 notion represent as being, at times, no better than as specious disguise for brutal tyranny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On this page, Berlin neatly characterizes what he means by a \u201cpositive freedom.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

132-134<\/em>
\nHe calls attention to the tendency for freedom to be hypostatized into a supervenient conceptual entity overarching the particular freedom any given individual may have or claim. It then becomes the temptation to serve this larger notion at the expense of unreformed ignorance or recalcitrant inertia that may preside in the individual. This slip in service is the beginning, Berlin says, of tyranny. He finds the idea residing in Plato and Hegel (and, presumably, in Marx). It facilitates neglecting the actual, flawed selves with their local vagaries in favor of some derived \u201chigher,\u201d\u009d \u201ctruer\u201d\u009d self. The individual\u2019s wish can be discounted, the individual even discarded, since nothing peculiar to him comes to represent anything of value to the larger derived or imposed conception.<\/p>\n

134<\/em>
\nIt is one thing, Berlin continues, to coerce the individual for his own good and another to attribute agreement to go along with this coercion to the higher, truer<\/em> self in the individual. The latter move obviates criticism targeted at the coercing institution. The institution can take cover in the imputed better self of the individual. It would always be the inferior self that would be criticizing.<\/p>\n

This \u201csleight of hand\u201d\u009d played with the notion of freedom is more easily accomplished, it seems to Berlin, with the \u201cpositive\u201d\u009d than with the \u201cnegative\u201d\u009d one.<\/p>\n

[Berlin no doubt had Soviet Russia in mind, but I think that was an accident of his time. Today, I see the \u201cnegative\u201d\u009d notion evincing the same ambitions. It has made itself sacred to the point that now it demands coercion in its service. Any gesture perceived as critical or resistant of its hallowed status is dismissed as rooted in a grab for illegitimate institutional power. In the United States in the first decade of the new millennium, for example, \u201cdemocracy\u201d\u009d and \u201cfreedom\u201d\u009d are forcibly exported. The suggestion that this may be paradoxical is branded a failure to understand their universal applicability. The only kind of interference (e.g., taxation) permissible is that to indulge the vocation of carrying through with the application.<\/p>\n

That negative freedom, construed as noninterference, is a moral good presupposes some basis for thinking that human beings left alone<\/em> are and do good things. Is this true? We can’t mean this literally or the supreme moral condition would consist of living on an otherwise hospitable desert island alone. To introduce even one other<\/em> is to interfere. Moral considerations enter only with this initial interference. Now this individual must share the island. He or she must accede to interference for the very possibility of good to arise.<\/p>\n

Thus the Biblical Adam was, until Eve made her debut—whatever God may have thought of his creation, not only ignorant of, but incapable<\/em> of goodness. She was an other<\/em>: in this case, not only an other who counted but an other qualitatively—thus introducing and<\/em> complicating morality at once. She brought into being both knowledge of and capacity for goodness.<\/p>\n

At the opposite extreme would be the individual as an atom in a vast compound: interchangeable, expendable, and serviceable only to the extent the compound requires. A bee in a hive. Good here attaches to the welfare of the hive. Noninterference in the affairs of this particular bee amounts to rejection and constitutes a positive non-good (i.e., \u201ca bad\u201d\u009d) for the collective and for the individual but only so far as it suits the collective which alone would be significant.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think Berlin is right to suggest that one or the other of these freedoms is more<\/em> susceptible to political abuse. Which<\/em> will depend on the ascendancy of other factors. That they will<\/em> be abused is the only thing certain. Given this, perhaps we can modulate the abuse by dividing up power between them. Given, further, as we argue elsewhere, that each of Berlin\u2019s two notions of liberty is tied to a gender—even central to its definition, we arrive at one argument for parity of the sexes<\/a>.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

135-6<\/em>
\nThe search for autonomy by retreating from desire and possession becomes a search for security, something at first glance quite different from freedom. <\/p>\n

138<\/em>
\nThe notion of the primacy of the autonomous individual (in Kant and Rousseau)<\/p>\n

is a form of secularized Protestant individualism, in which the place of God is taken by the conception of the rational life, and the place of the individual soul which strains toward union with Him is replaced by the conception of the individual, endowed with reason, straining to be governed by reason and reason alone, and to depend on nothing that might deflect or delude him by engaging his irrational nature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

139<\/em>
\nBerlin looks askance at the tendency to enhance autonomy by jettisoning desire.<\/p>\n

The doctrine that maintains that what I cannot have I must teach myself not to desire; that a desire eliminated, or successfully resisted, is as good as a desire satisfied, is a sublime, but, it seems to me, unmistakable, form of the doctrine of sour grapes: what I cannot be sure of, I cannot truly want.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He fears the strategic use of this strategy for shaping private visions of liberty and happiness by governing institutions. [First, the desire transcended is not as good<\/em> as the one satisfied: it is better, superior—or rather, more accurately, altogether incomparable at least in the view of our Kant-inspired crew. It is this incommensurability<\/em> that radically limits its application to politics, which is always firmly planted in the soil of matter and desire. Once you have altered your conception of what is fundamentally (ethically) valuable, if you are then offered control over what formerly<\/em> you wanted control over, you will refuse it. Its attraction for you should have dissolved with the conversion. The grapes haven\u2019t soured, there aren\u2019t any. There is<\/em> a difference.<\/p>\n

It is not simply the problem of \u201cteaching\u201d\u009d oneself \u201cnot to desire.\u201d\u009d It is either that of ceasing to have a self that requires teaching or an unregenerate faith in the teachability of selves. The latter is a view that Berlin does not appear cynical enough to deny (as indeed I might), nor would it help his case, given where he is going with his pluralist recommendations.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

140<\/em>
\nIf a tyrant succeeds at persuading his subjects to be happy with less, hasn\u2019t he exploited the ethical insight above for political gain? So Berlin asks. This can\u2019t be right—at least not politically. A nation of saints and martyrs can be manufactured in this way: after all what\u2019s it to good people what source their salvation and enlightenment stems from? Self-flagellation or political torture, all\u2019s well that ends well. [The problem, as Diogenes noted long ago, is that masters, too, need salvation. For their<\/em> own good, we must not neglect our tyrants. This<\/em> is what is wrong with tyranny: its inhumane treatment of those at the top. Berlin would be caught up in a misunderstanding if he thought this merely a joke.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

141-4<\/em>
\nBerlin outlines \u201cthe positive doctrine of liberation by reason,\u201d\u009d tracing it through Hegel and Marx.<\/p>\n

145-8<\/em>
\nHow nearly all eighteenth century philosophers used reason to circumscribe a freedom that was compatible, even identical, with law. All but Bentham and the Anarchists. \u201cBut all forms of liberalism founded on a rationalist metaphysics are less or more watered-down versions of this creed.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

149<\/em>
\nHow to get people to accept \u201cfreedom\u201d\u009d of this sort. Fichte on how education works: \u201cyou will later recognize the reasons for what I am doing now.\u201d\u009d [A great faith must be placed in the possibility that the child will not later recognize that the reasons were bad. Or only as good as the reasons for doing something quite opposite.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

151<\/em>
\nFichte the \u201cprogenitor\u201d\u009d of the \u201cheroic doctrine\u201d\u009d that people must be molded as raw material into something they themselves would appreciate as a worthy form were they judging with their higher, rational selves. Comte scientizing: if we don\u2019t allow free thinking in chemistry, why do we allow it in moral and political thought?<\/p>\n

152<\/em>
\nWe have wandered from our liberal beginnings. This argument employed by Fichte in his latest phase, and after him by other defenders of authority, from Victorian schoolmasters and colonial administrators to the latest nationalist and communist dictator, is precisely what the Stoic and Kantian morality protests against most bitterly in the name of the reason of the free individual following his own inner light. In this way the rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible, from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-reflection to an authoritarian state obedient to the directives of an élite<\/em> of Platonic guardians.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[A major premise in Berlin\u2019s pluralist argument. \u201cNot logically valid,\u201d\u009d Berlin admits, but \u201chistorically and psychologically intelligible.\u201d\u009d Doesn\u2019t this militate, a little, against Heine\u2019s phrase earlier? If philosophers are to be blamed or credited for all that may \u201chistorically and psychologically\u201d\u009d follow from their assertions, validity be damned, indeed they have much to answer for, like the makers of box cutters. (I belabor the point because it also applies to Otto Weininger\u2019s checkered reception.)]<\/strong><\/p>\n

153-4<\/em>
\nIn a long footnote to a passage explaining how Kantian reverence for the individual\u2019s capacity for reason could somehow evolve into the most brutal illiberalism and tyranny headed by a abstract notion, Reason, pitted against all human vagary—Berlin admits that human vagary is empirical. What reason could mean divorced from any link to human material desire or velleity puzzles Berlin. Kant\u2019s kingdom of disembodied ends in harmonious and eternal deference to each other is Kant\u2019s endpoint: where his explanations stop. [Heterocosmicity<\/em> arises, however, in Kant as elsewhere, because of a deep-seated need on the part of fully half of the species: the male half, that part governed or aspiring to be governed by a masculine principle—to the extent it seeks governance at all. (This, as Weininger reminds us, does not mean all<\/em> men nor exclude all<\/em> women, nor does it include any man entirely<\/em>, but, more as heuristic than sortal, it does describe one of the two<\/em> determining principles of the \u201chuman condition,\u201d\u009d to give that overused phrase a slight twist in meaning.) Reason elevated to the skies is an idolatry he<\/em> is singularly liable to. But it is easy to exaggerate what is gained in this case, however, by calling it what it is, idolatry<\/em>. It turns out he needs<\/em> this myth: it is his<\/em> particular tragedy that he does. This is why it persists. It will show itself in any competing notion of liberty championed by men<\/em>. The pluralism Berlin is headed toward, thus, is misleading if it suggests that the enlightening contrast is going to be had with some empirically derived form of liberalism. The contrast lies elsewhere.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

156<\/em>
\nNext, Berlin considers the heteronomy of seeking status, recognition, of even having an identity, etc.—all meaningless outside a social context:<\/p>\n

The need spoken of here is bound up wholly with the relation that I have with others; I am nothing if I am unrecognized.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

158<\/em>
\nBerlin wants to reserve a proper sense of the word \u201cliberty\u201d\u009d for one or the other of his two pet varieties and distinguish \u201csocial liberty,\u201d\u009d the feeling of individuals who need and desire common dependence and affiliation in groups. It is a different \u201cuniversal craving\u201d\u009d than freedom of the sorts he describes. It finds identity, meaning, and purpose in being connected to a group. Moreover, it wants to call this true<\/em> \u201cliberty.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

159<\/em>
\nBut he confesses, \u201c.the craving for status is, in certain respects, very close to the desire to be an independent agent.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

161<\/em>
\nThe purest liberalism (Mill and Constant [and, probably, Nozick]<\/strong>), with its minimal deference to social connection, has always appealed to \u201ca small minority of highly civilized and self-conscious beings.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

162<\/em>
\nIt is the non-recognition of this psychological and political fact (which lurks behind the apparent ambiguity of the term \u2018liberty\u2019) that has, perhaps, blinded some contemporary liberals to the world in which they live. Their plea is clear, their cause is just. But they do not allow for the variety of basic human needs. Nor yet for the ingenuity with which men can prove to their own satisfaction that the road to one ideal also leads to its contrary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

162-3<\/em>
\nRousseau\u2019s notion of (positive) liberty as the liberty to interfere in other people lives. Mill reacted to this threat to negative liberties. <\/p>\n

164<\/em>
\nWhen Rousseau declares \u201cby giving myself to all I give myself to none,\u201d\u009d Benjamin Constant \u201ccould not see why, even though the sovereign is \u2018everybody\u2019, it should not oppress one of the \u2018members\u2019 of its indivisible self, if it so decided.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Hobbes, of course, just called it enslavement, no matter who (or what) was doing it, and proceeded to find some justification for it.<\/p>\n

165-6<\/em>
\nBerlin suggests that \u201cthe chief value for liberals of political—\u2018positive\u2019—rights, of participating in the government, is as a means for protecting what they hold to be an ultimate value, namely individual—\u2018negative\u2019—liberty.\u201d\u009d [But how can the negative libertarian, even in theory, pull this off? Suppose a movement in liberal government is afoot to deliberately<\/em> curtail personal negative freedom, assuming those in the movement know what they were doing (if they do not, then we can see the negative libertarian having an advisory role), may not these acquisitive libertarians<\/em>, viz<\/em>, those in government wishing to acquire new positive liberties, exercise their negative liberty to gain the perceived positive liberty? Could then our dismayed negative<\/em> libertarian consistently<\/em> want to thwart them? Would he* have to express himself as a positive libertarian to assert his (or our?) negative liberties? He has the same problem a militant anarchist has. He wants to tell me I have no right to do what he tells me I have every right to do. Surely someone somewhere has called this \u201cthe paradox of libertarianism\u201d\u009d. Thus, though the positive libertarian may well be about to sell us down the river, the negative one tells us he can only help us by not helping us. The negative libertarian may comment on it, ruefully, I suppose. And perhaps that is no small thing—unless I, that is, as a member of a majority of positive libertarians, decide we\u2019d rather not be bothered with such static and shut him up. For I, or we, collectively, know what is good for us. Who is going to say to us that we don\u2019t? Surely not our negative libertarian who is, in principle, in the worst position to do this. (*Editor\u2019s note:<\/em> Luno, who is usually quite careful about his pronouns, no doubt, intends to imply that it is more likely going to be he<\/em> than she<\/em>.)]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Democracies have no special affinity for freedom on principle. If it gets in the way, freedom will suffer. For this reason only rights<\/em>, not governments, may be given absolute authority. There are \u201cfrontiers\u201d\u009d beyond which no state may go in its treatment of individuals, no matter the source of its authority. These have to be built into a generally accepted concept of human being and transcend any conditions or environment one may find oneself in. They stand as \u201cabsolute barriers to the imposition of one man\u2019s will on another.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

166<\/em>
\nThis is almost at the opposite pole from the purposes of those who believe in liberty in the \u2018positive\u2019—self-directive—sense. The former want to curb authority as such. The latter want it placed in their own hands. That is the cardinal issue. These are not two different interpretations of a single concept, but two profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life. It is as well to recognize this, even if in practice it is often necessary to strike a compromise between them. For each of them makes absolute claims. These claims cannot both be fully satisfied. But it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction that each of them seeks is an ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

167-72<\/em>
\nBerlin does not believe that all the ends of human beings, no matter how lofty or well-meant, can be brought into harmony with each other. There is ample empirical evidence for this in the lessons of Nazi Germany or Marxist Russia (or, he might (or could) have added, contemporary American programs for world ideological hegemony). He finds the positive conception of self-directive, self-perfecting, a priori<\/em> teleologies morally bankrupt. Yet, he is careful to admit that these conceptions are indeed behind much beneficial social and political reform. And therein lies tragedy. There is a moral imperative to face individual choice between values; we cannot escape it. The choice is real and the imperative is real. The former because there is no single answer, the latter because responsibility beckons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notes on Isaiah Berlin,\u201cTwo Concepts of Liberty.\u201d\u009d 119 Tobias Wong,Another notion of possibility Berlin paraphrases Heine who was thinking of Kant: \u201cphilosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor\u2019s study could destroy a civilization.\u201d\u009d [Heine, a friend of Karl Marx, was trying to weigh in on the side of philosophers, who, by and large, … <\/p>\n

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