Freedom
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[edit] Programme Information
- Broadcast date: July 4th, 2002
- Contributors: John Keane, Bernard Williams, Annabel Brett
[edit] Transcript
Melvyn Bragg: Hello, Mahatma Ghandi said that freedom and slavery are mental states, that maybe but in the last 25 centuries, freedom has been a subject of enquiry for philosophers, theologians and politicians who've attempted to define the conditions required for humans to be free, not just in their minds but in the wider world. Some have argued that man is naturally free, and no law should confine his liberty, others countered that laws are the only way to preserve freedom, they protect us from the slavery of the abyss. Individual freedom is a recent invention, "is freedom service?" some have asked. The very idea of freedom is riddled with constraints, limitations and qualifications, and yet it's seen by many as the most basic of human rights, and for some as a principle worth fighting and dying for. How did freedom become such a powerful value, and is there such a thing as natural freedom or is it always culturally defined? And what happens when our ideas about freedom conflict? With me to discuss on the 4th July - Independence Day, for the land of the free, are John Keane, professor of Politics at the University of Westminster, and author of the forthcoming "History of Democracy", Bernard Williams, fellow All Souls, Oxford, professor of Philosophy at the University of California, and author of the forthcoming book "Truth and Truthfulness", and Annabel Brett lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge, and author of "Liberty, Right and Nature (?) :Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought". John Keane, in the Greek world of men and gods, how much freedom did they think it was possible for human beings to achieve in their own right?
John Keane: Well freedom is one of those promiscuous words, one could say that there's no such thing as freedom, luckily, because freedom always entails conflicting definitions, different institutional forms of freedom and of course conflicts with other ideals, so to talk of freedom is to go troping and troping the Greeks did, it was a very precious image for the classical Greek world. You can find all kinds of remaining texts riddled with the word. Pythagoras "no man is free who is not master of himself. Plato tells us that children are raised in the ideal republic under the banner of freedom by inculcating the polity within them and then they are set free, and Democritus that great democrat says that freedom through democracy is much more desirable than so called well being under tyrants. So freedom is an agreed principle, and agreed language for the Greeks, but what's striking is their disagreement about it's meaning and basically there are two different approaches. One is the idea that freedom is responsibility towards others, and it can come in a couple of forms. For example through a well-ordered polity, which is based on reason, this is Plato's idea, he speaks about rulers as craftsman of freedom. The other version of this idea of freedom as responsibility towards others is through public life. This was the view for example, that the democrats championed, but not everybody accepted this, and one of the really interesting things about the Greek world of freedom, were those early shall we say the anarchists, punks, the cynics, the dogs, who thought that freedom was an utterly conventional term, who set out...set about trying to satirise, through humour, but seriously through humour, the existing customs and understandings of freedom so that for them, freedom is living simply, it's living outrageously, urinating, defecating, masturbating, in the Agara...free love...
Melvyn Bragg: You came a long way from Plato quite quickly there, John!
John Keane: We have! (chuckles break out) And so we have in short, the view that freedom is in the Greek world a deeply contested term, that's why I say there's no such thing as freedom, luckily.
Melvyn Bragg: When you talk about freedom in that sense, just to define something a little more clearly, you're talking about freedom for a few men?
John Keane: Yes.
Melvyn Bragg: We’re talking about a society in which there is slavery, there are women who are non-political persons and so and so forth....
John Keane: In which foreigners...
Melvyn Bragg: Can you just define that a little bit?
John Keane: Yes, it is of course a language. The language of freedom is restricted to a small minority of the population over 20, male, property owning, having slaves, no women, no foreigners, no craftsman and this is a very restricted view and yet highly infectious, and one can see that the very birth of the ideal of democracy, the very birth of cynicism, the protest against social customs and political conventions is part of this cauldron which we call freedom.
Melvyn Bragg: Annabel Brett, how did they justify having slaves and not allowing in craftsman, foreigners and women and so on?
Annabel Brett: One of the most famous proponents of this idea that there was some kind of natural distinction between people who should be ruled and people who were by nature fitted to rule is of course Aristotle. Now Aristotle's views on freedom are quite interesting, he does in book 4 of the politics, canvas what he calls the democratic idea of freedom, and this is the idea that, we might find very attractive, that you can live as you will, it's living for the moment, that is what freedom is. But for Aristotle that's a false ideal, because that means that you're dominated by the moment and by your pleasures of the moment, and by appetite, and his definition of a natural slave in book 1 of the politics, is really the extreme of that, this is the person who really does not have the reason at all, at least in a form in which it's sufficient to command oneself. So for Aristotle the natural master, and in fact the naturally free person is the person with reason, because it's reason that gives you the ability to direct yourself, a natural master has foresight [1Cor 13:12] - he can see ahead, so that he can escape for this kind of immediacy of the desires of moment, the animal world and into a rational world of freedom, which is of course, for Aristotle, the world of the city.
Melvyn Bragg: Bernard Williams, would you like to take up on anything that's been said before moving forward?
Bernard Williams: Well, the point I really want to emphasise, is that there's one notion of how free we are in acting, as people as deliberative persons, as people who can think what to do, and another notion of freedom which is a political status, and one feature of the ancient world is to link those two questions together by saying, there are some people who are just better at deciding what to do, and they should have full political freedom, and there's other people, like women, who are very bad at deciding what to do, because they get overcome by their passions, and they're not very clever. Moreover, moreover, the ancients had a condition of political unfreedom, which was totally radical, the condition of being a slave and that literally meant, well it was different in different parts of the ancient world, but it fundamentally meant in Athens being somebody else's property. Now Aristotle tried to justify that outrageous political system, in terms of a theory of the mind, he tried to say, there were natural slaves because they weren't capable really of thinking what to do.
They were as it were deliberative disasters, slaves. Now this is complete bunkum, and most ancient Greeks didn't believe it. Most ancient Greeks didn't think that slavery was justified, they thought it was necessary. They took the same view as we do of there being some people in considerable poverty.
Namely, they don't....it's not really that it's just ..it's just that it's an inevitable of a necessary system.
Melvyn Bragg: Can I....?
John Keane: But...may I say that....
Melvyn Bragg: Sorry...
John Keane:..here the question of slavery is tied very intimately to freedom, but I think that in the ancient Greek world, it was understood a little bit differently that Bernard has just put it. First of all there is the problem of the necessaries...the production of the necessaries of life. The Greeks typically had an aristocratic understanding of freedom, someone has to give birth to children, someone has to produce children, someone has to produce food, and other necessaries of life....
Bernard Williams: (agrees indistinctly)...sure.
John Keane: ..and this is...and this is an ineluctable fact.
Bernard Williams: Sure, sure.
John Keane: The other point about slavery is of course that there is an ethnocentrism to the Greek conception of slavery, namely, the distinction between freedom and slavery is the distinction between us, we Greeks who are fee, and those, to the east, the Persians who are barbarians.
Melvyn Bragg: Can I just try to see what the Christian tradition..is it possible to bring together Augustine and Aquinas? I know it's terrible but still. The Augustine idea, well from the book of common prayer, service is perfect freedom.
What did Christians bring to the idea of freedom?
Annabel Brett: What we've been looking at with classical freedom is this idea of autonomy or self-governance, it's reason, that gives you the ability to command yourself. Now Augustine is going to combat that from the root up, that's pride - to think that we can govern our own actions morally, through our own human capacities alone, through reason. For Augustine, everyone, good men and bad men - and women - because we're now in the Christian tradition -are dominated - and the question is - who are you dominated by?
Are you dominated by your lusts and your appetite, and that's a classical idea which is "sin", so that's that classical idea of unfreedom as slavery to the passions, translated into a Christian context.
But to escape from that, you don't escape by sort of overcoming your passions with your reason, you accept submission to God, you accept God as your master. The person who is dominant over you.
And through being dominated by God, through service to God, therefore you achieve freedom. So the whole ancient ideal of autonomy, freedom, reason, that kind of clump of ideas, is radically criticised by Augustine..it's ..we have to turn to God, we have to humble ourselves and accept the domination of God over ourselves, in order...in ourselves to dominate over our passions.
Melvyn Bragg: Bernard Williams, did Aquinas take that idea and try..he did take that idea and try to splice it with the Aristotelian idea...
Bernard Williams: Yes he did.
Melvyn Bragg: ...and tried to hold onto the idea still of freewill, to get back onto the freewill. Can you explain -is it possible to briefly explain - how he did that?
Bernard Williams: Well I think...I mean there are two different distinctions here -two different points - one is about the goodness of God, namely that God obviously wishes the best for humanity....
Bernard Williams: ..and there question then is "What political order, best will express god's goodwill"? What form of submission is appropriate to people? Then..but there's another question that arises from the power of God, and Augustine was enormously impressed as Calvin was, to be later, which was one of his inheritors, by the power of God. So it has to be the case for instance, that the salvation of human beings is already decided by God. There's no question of going to God and saying, demanding salvation, you can't produce as it were, a set of Green Shield Stamps and say you know "I've done all these good things, so you must save me" - God has absolute power over you, that means that there has to be a theory of freewill in terms of what it is to choose, which is compatible with God's power and foreknowledge, and that's very nasty problem in Christian theology. Augustine enormously emphasised God's power and foreknowledge, Thomas allowed - the details obviously very complicated - but allowed more like an every day or common sense conception of what it was to choose.
But again, I absolutely agree that...I mean the notion that we are supposed to be master over our passions, and that we shall be helped by God in doing this, this would be common to both Christian conceptions.
Melvyn Bragg: Your..sorry..John Keane, d'you think the Christian - the introduction of the ideas through Augustine and Aquinas, d'you think they added to ..there was an accretion in as it were the force of freedom, by those developments? They've been talked of as the first sort of inner freedom.
John Keane: It no doubt did , partly by introducing the possibility of the universality of freedom, but also one can see this in the early Protestant rebels, John Milton for example, one sees a twist that's given to this theological conception of freedom, namely that God has given most, not Catholics (Bernard laughs), not non-English, but as given most reason, and that reason can be abused as Adam did when he sinned, but that reason gives us conscience, it gives us the possibility of responsibility in the world and Milton as is well-known gives this a republican twist. So within that Christian framework there is a rebirth during the 16th, end of the 15th, and early 16th centuries there is a rebirth of a republican conception of liberty, and here the idea is that monarchy is everything, which is antithetical to freedom and so topping the monarch seems to be a God given obligation.
Melvyn Bragg: You have the idea, you fill up the notion around the word "dominion”, Annabel Brett, can you give us some idea of what you mean by that?
Annabel Brett: Yes, I mean if we're talking about freewill and Aquinas, not just Aquinas in 13th century Christian thought - generally, the internal capacities of reason and will were seen as free faculties, free capacities, in the sense that they weren't determined by their object, so that will doesn't have to choose or to will any one thing, it is free to choose one or another.
And this freedom, they understood as a kind of dominion, it has dominion over its own action. So we are seen as having dominion over our own actions, that is what freedom is, that is what liberty is, and it's a sort of translation from a very internal notion of freedom of having these free capacities to the freedom of the human being.
But I think what's interesting about this idea that we have self dominion- dominion over ourselves - this is very much following on from an idea in Genesis. In Genesis said "Let us make man in our image and after our own likeness and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea and the bird of the air" etc etc
Now, for a 13th century scholastic, being in the image of God, because God has dominion, he is Lord, we ourselves are Lords, we have dominion primarily over ourselves, but that dominion over ourselves which is liberty, is what enables us to have dominion over the rest of the world.
And it's what means that the rest of the world can never have dominion over us, so that that fish can never have dominion over me, nor can a lion. There's something about humanity, about freedom about liberty which naturally gives us dominion over the rest of the world.
Melvyn Bragg: And if you can prove that certain sections of the human and the global community are nearer fish or nearer lions, than nearer human beings, you can have dominion over them.
There was a dispute as to whether the native American Indians were human or not.
Annabel Brett: Absolutely, what were these things running around in the woods, were they Cicero's wild men? Or perhaps Aristotle's natural slaves, I mean had we now found Aristotle's natural slaves. These sort of human looking but non-rational creature, who could therefore be hunted and enslaved and expropriated, because they didn't really have anything of their own, they were not self owners, they did not have mastery over themselves.
Melvyn Bragg: So butchery had a philosophy, as it were..
Annabel Brett: Oh absolutely...
Melvyn Bragg: In America and Australia.
Annabel Brett: Very much so.
And what's interesting is that some of the humanists in the 16th century, used Aristotle's text directly to say "Aha this is what we've got", what's very interesting I think is that the followers of Aquinas and a group of people who are quite often forgotten in English political thought, these are the 16th century Spanish theologians, trying to theorise the Spanish encounter with the American Indians said "No -these people are human beings, they are in the image of God, they have reason, and therefore they have dominion over themselves, and therefore they are capable of dominion over other things, which is property, and over other people, which is jurisdiction, and therefore we cannot just hunt them like animals".
If we're going to declare war on them, we must have a just cause.
Melvyn Bragg: Can I just shift forward Bernard Williams, and ask you, you've argued that the theory of toleration was born in the 17th century, among others, and this is moving the idea forwards - is maybe the wrong idea - but it's amplifying the idea. Can you give us some idea of that?
Bernard Williams: Well I think it picks up very much from John Keane mentioned earlier about the remarks in Milton, and the Aria Progitica (??) about the freedom of speech, this is in a certain way, a new idea, a modern idea. Now I think in the 17th century you begin to see - and perhaps it was earlier than that - but notably in the 17th century - you begin to see the emergence of the idea that if people...the truth will be discovered by allowing people to speak freely, and the ...certainly Locke, strongly felt that the right way to discover the truth about most matters, was to allow at least a considerable degree of freedom of discussion, and also what is very closely allied to that toleration of different kinds of belief.
Melvyn Bragg: Can we take that on John Keane? You've mentioned Milton, but we can also bring in Hobbes here and we have the idea of toleration and the development of the ground, as I see it, the enlarging of the ideas of freedom with Locke, we have Hobbes going back to "You must serve, there must be an absolute monarch, any deviation from that is bad, life is mean nasty brutish and short and so on.
John Keane: Yes I think Bernard has put his finger on a development at this time, one can talk about the modernisation of freedom, the emergence of a complex idea of freedom, which is I think, largely absent in the ancient world, namely that there are multiple freedoms, there is a problem, a jurisdictional problem of their peaceful harmonisation. How is it possible for people with different conceptions of the liberty to live side by side without civil war, this is Hobbes's starting point, and his solution, disgusting to many lovers of freedom at the time, is that something like a mortal God -the Leviathan, should crack the whip and bring them all to order.
Melvyn Bragg: The biblical monster - the king of all the children of pride, yes.
John Keane: Yes, under whose omnipotence, there are still measures of freedom possible.
But these basic political freedoms, cherished the Greeks, the democrats and others that one could govern oneself, in and through law, through annual parliaments, through fixed electoral districts, through freedom of speech, this of course Hobbes wants to eliminate.
Bernard Williams: Well there's quite and important point about Hobbes, namely he didn't think that.... he there was necessarily a sovereign, if you had a state, a society or a state, he didn't think it had to be a monarch, he actually thought the best form of sovereignty was actually monarchy, because it was the only one that'd do the job best, but you see Hobbes was fundamentally right in principle, he had a very special empirical belief about what the world was like, he was right in principle, he thought the fundamental aim of the state was security, the aim was to bring it about that people would not kill each other., fundamentally.
He thought that was the overwhelming aim of the exercise. Now he also believed that there were many forces - and you can give an entirely modern analysis of what he believed - he thought there were many forces that tended to lead people to kill each other.
He thought that was fundamental feature of human nature under uncertainty.
And he thought that the overwhelming purpose of the state was to generate enough certainty to bring it about that people could actually cooperate. That was his.... he was right, that's dead right, that's what the state is for, in good part.
He had an empirical belief however, that the best way of doing that, was by having extremely authoritarian institutions. He didn't think, as a matter of fact, that you could bring about the required degree of security to achieve cooperation, except by a pretty terrific form of state power. Now I think we've happened to discover that if the wind's blowing in the right direction and things are fairly favourable, that doesn't have to be so.
Melvyn Bragg: There was a big twist, sorry John Keane, can I just take it on a bit, there was a big twist in the French revolution which was greatly as everybody knows to do with liberty and the development of liberty, when terror was used to pursue or some people would say to persecute, liberty. That had an explosive effect, as explosive effect as liberty itself, didn't it?
John Keane: It did, Madame Rolanse, last words, uttered before being topped something like "Oh liberty, what crimes have been committed in thy name", summarises I think well one of these modern trends. So here we have some paradoxes. One is that to the extent that freedom comes to be seen as a sort of individual entitlement, then it requires a mortal God, a sovereign power of the kind Hobbes recommended, but freedom also, in the name of freedom, in the name of constructing the publics which for example Rousseau thought was the necessary antidote to this Hobbesian idea of a sovereign territorial state, in the struggle for republics, terrible crimes can be committed in the name of freedom.
And I think that for that..for these reasons, something new was born in the 18th century, which is of basic importance in any discussion of modern freedom, namely the idea of a civil society, as a necessary check, plurality of freedoms that are non-governmental that serve as a necessary check upon absolutist power of the kind that the French revolutionaries tried to institutionalise, and which Hobbes himself had in mind.
Melvyn Bragg: As this is July 4th, and as America was founded on the idea of rights and so and so forth, let's spend the rest of the time talking about where freedom for rights found themselves there. Annabel Brett, the American Republic is founded on an idea of rights, what...is there a distinction, between freedom and rights?
Annabel Brett: That's a kind of complicated question. I think that historically some theorists simply ran the two together, and Hobbes will tell you that right it liberty and opposition to the law. Some other theories do distinguish in that liberty is more a personal individual thing, it's connected with ideas of freewill, of my being able to do a theory of action, being able to do one thing rather than another, and right is the aspect of that freedom which comes into play, when there are other people around.
So that right, imports some kind of idea of justice which gives people their due, their right, their measure of freedom. So right is if you like, the aspect of my freedom when we are talking about a plurality of individuals who have to live together.
Melvyn Bragg: Bernard what did the American documents, those great documents at the end of the 18th century, what did they bring to the tale?
Bernard Williams: Yes I don't think it's at all... I don't think it can be right to say that rights and freedoms are necessarily the right thing. One reason for that is, it depends on what rights people are said to have, I mean under the Orsean (?) regime, the aristocracy had all sorts of rights to push the peasantry around for instance. I think it's not rights that go with freedom but equal rights.
And I also think, that is to say rights that are possessed equally by every citizen of the state, and also we always have to remember that one person's rights in limitation on somebody else's freedom.
The aim of the American state I take it, the aim of the American Constitution was to produce the largest degree of free action, which was compatible with a rightful legislative shape to the whole thing. Now there is a problem that everybody knows about, namely that Americans are greatly devoted to worshipping this document that came from the end of the 18th century, as later amended the American Constitution, but they have, as we all know, enormous problems in interpreting it, because the founding fathers, wrote various things into this document, the meaning of which was clearly a good deal more restricted than it now has turned out to be. One of them memorably is the right to bear arms, which was probably meant with something to do with the militia, but now turns out that if you're in South Dakota you can have a hidden handgun.
Now that doesn't seem to be a great help to freedom, it's a right all right, but I don't think it's a great help to anybody's freedom.
Melvyn Bragg: Can we talk through Tom Paine, and it gladdens your heart John Keane, a European Paine, Englishman’s ideas on freedom, and how he'd been seeded in the States?
John Keane: Yes, I mean the great idea, vision of Tom Paine is that of the Philadelphia model of freedom.
A large territorial state in which there is a complex understanding of freedom. Paine is the first to use this originally Lockeian idea of a civil society for revolutionary ends. The resistance of Americans to British imperial domination is seen as the struggle of a civil society and of civil liberties against this popish despotism. And in Paine one can see the attempt to find the institutional forms for this complex understanding of freedom. I think in retrospect it was the beginning of the end of any notion of absolute freedom, that freedom has somehow guarantees, whether by God or in the universe, or linked to truth, that freedom is a contestable ideal, and that restrictions upon freedom are paradoxically a condition of freedom. This is what the Americans have taught us, they don't practice it very well all the time, but it remains and enduring experiment, I think, in the modernisation of freedom
Melvyn Bragg: Do you agree with that Bernard? Can you give us a summary on that?
Bernard Williams: Well I think that the great French social theorist Detocville(?) went to America and wrote this book "Democracy in America" in the 19th century, he said that one of the great threads that there would be under this system, was another tyranny, not of the state, but of public opinion, but of conformity, the desire that people should stick together in their opinion, and John Stuart Mill in our own tradition made that point very central to his own theory of freedom, and that public opinion, the informal constraints of social conformity can be as threatening as power exercised by a sovereign.
And I think that is very central to modern conceptions of freedom, and America gives us both tremendous warnings in that direction, there's also great encouragement to some extent that it can be overcome.
Melvyn Bragg: Well thank you all very much. Next week I'll be talking about psychoanalysis and democracy with Adam Phillips, Michael Bowie and Sally Alexander, but thanks to John Keane, thanks to Annabel Brett, thanks to Bernard Williams, thanks for listening, that's it.
Transcript by Lee Borrell.
