 |
| Image credit. |
Freedom, or its synonym liberty, is a place-holder concept. It refers to far more than what we can have in mind or even be aware of at any particular mentioning of the term.
Even if it is well-defined with respect to one characteristic or a number of its aspects, at some point the term becomes a noise accompanying an increasingly diluted intuition.
Take this meaning of the term:
freedom is the absence of arbitrariness
In the manner of concentric circles, this definition enters our mind as if taking the form of (1) reasonably audible sounds, followed by (2) less distinct echoes, and finally petering out in (3) a large aura of noise.
In the first stage, imagining an act of arbitrariness, like a king taking illegitimate revenge on a defenceless subject, we may be able to convince us - with good reason - of a clear meaning of the definition.
In the second stage, realising that it is not always self-evident what might or might not count as an arbitrary act, the range of meaning gets more diffuse.
In the third stage, we enter still more deeply into Popper's World Three, which presents us with the unforeseen implications of the initial shape of a theory: implications spread widely, revealing a vast hinterland of uncertain, indeterminate, or even contradictory conjectures and conclusions.
Freedom seeks to widen the range of an individual's options for autonomous acts. This necessarily unleashes diversity and the attendant potential for disagreement.
Freedom is an invitation to the widest possible dissension in a population. For this reason, she can only be viable in the long term if she also provides the cohering forces that prevent such systemic discord from breaking up an order tending toward a durable balance between freedom's strife and freedom's peace.
Peace among equals can only be maintained if strife is allowed, while strife must be curtailed so that it never suspends peace.
Freedom resits ideological capture. There cannot be partisan ownership of her. Any one group may contribute their own concept of liberty, but none can claim to represent freedom in the only admissible and authentic way.
Real freedom, or feasible freedom, as I like to call it, is a living organism that is undergoing constant change in its inner and on its frontiers. The elements she consists of change, wax and wane in their import and alter their relationships and relative weight vis-à-vis one another.
When economic competition is a more specifically tasked discovery process, then freedom is a discovery process at large. The intricate intertwining of the political, legal, and economic spheres set aside, economic competition seeks new desires and ways to satisfy these, while equally searching for efficient assignment of means and resources to human needs. It is set to gather information from which it is possible to approximate how to rank and accordingly best distribute our economic capabilities to the most worthy tasks. In this it will be congruent with patches of the space spanned by liberty, but the latter extends far beyond this plane of congruence. Thus, among other things, liberty incorporates discovery processes that delimit our "ranking and distribution of economic capabilities" and the social permissibility of objectives aspiring to the status of "the most worthy tasks."
Notwithstanding attempts at ideological capture of liberty, it is not possible to derive one single variant of overall economic policy as the sole legitimate instantiation of liberty in the economic sphere.
Freedom is an evolutionary accident, propelled to take on her modern shape by congenial constellations of power politics. Freedom is a gradual discovery, whose stages of growth are being experimented upon. Upon her unfolding, we witness a constant interlocking between spontaneous processes - not under direct or any human control - and conscious human design. Freedom is not self-evident, but socially self-defining. In her capacity as a discovery process, functional reconstruction reveals, freedom seeks to maximise her ability to gather useful information; to that purpose, she admits the entire gown-up population to the game of information gathering. She involves all full-aged individuals in the discovery process that she is.
Freedom
stands for a set of characteristics that will tend to contain different
elements depending on who is asked to specify the members of the set.
Freedom resits ideological capture. There cannot be partisan ownership of her. Any one group may contribute their own concept of liberty, but none can claim to represent freedom in the only admissible and authentic way.
Real freedom, or feasible freedom, as I like to call it, is a living organism that is undergoing constant change in its inner and on its frontiers. The elements she consists of change, wax and wane in their import and alter their relationships and relative weight vis-à-vis one another.
When economic competition is a more specifically tasked discovery process, then freedom is a discovery process at large. The intricate intertwining of the political, legal, and economic spheres set aside, economic competition seeks new desires and ways to satisfy these, while equally searching for efficient assignment of means and resources to human needs. It is set to gather information from which it is possible to approximate how to rank and accordingly best distribute our economic capabilities to the most worthy tasks. In this it will be congruent with patches of the space spanned by liberty, but the latter extends far beyond this plane of congruence. Thus, among other things, liberty incorporates discovery processes that delimit our "ranking and distribution of economic capabilities" and the social permissibility of objectives aspiring to the status of "the most worthy tasks."
Notwithstanding attempts at ideological capture of liberty, it is not possible to derive one single variant of overall economic policy as the sole legitimate instantiation of liberty in the economic sphere.
Freedom is an evolutionary accident, propelled to take on her modern shape by congenial constellations of power politics. Freedom is a gradual discovery, whose stages of growth are being experimented upon. Upon her unfolding, we witness a constant interlocking between spontaneous processes - not under direct or any human control - and conscious human design. Freedom is not self-evident, but socially self-defining. In her capacity as a discovery process, functional reconstruction reveals, freedom seeks to maximise her ability to gather useful information; to that purpose, she admits the entire gown-up population to the game of information gathering. She involves all full-aged individuals in the discovery process that she is.
So how can the term freedom be given (1) a sufficiently clear and (2) a sufficiently useful meaning, and, taking both aspects - (1) and (2) - into a account, a sufficiently flexible meaning?
To be continued.
To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment