Research into Liberty (3) - Applied Interests

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In a manuscript entitled "Freiheit verstehen" ("Understanding Liberty"), I had endeavoured to give an account of "Freiheit als Merkmal unserer Zivilisation" ("Freedom as a hallmark of our civilisation"). In my account of liberty, I intended to present a complete and consistent argument in her favour, adding up to a rounded synopsis of mutually supporting affirmative perceptions of liberty as represented in historiography, philosophy (with a special emphasis on epistemology), economics, politics and law. 

The more or less tacit expectation was that I would be able to arrive at a complete theory of liberty, based on the idea that liberty would naturally unfold, if the spontaneous interaction of free individuals was protected by certain rules and institutions from damaging influences on an optimal evolutionary order.

Thus, implicit in my conception of coherent freedom was the assumption that a certain set of rules and institutions would combine with the propensities of human nature to bring about an automatic evolvement toward freedom, i.e. a state of human development in which unprecedented levels of personal autonomy, productivity and wealth are attained under peaceable conditions.

However, as I was to discover two and a half years into the project, I was on the wrong track. It turned out that the faultiness of this approach was due to methodological misdirection. In principle, on a purely formal level, a complete and consistent argument in favour of freedom is feasible. Yet, its sustainability is to be ascertained only if lower levels of abstraction are admitted, where empirically saturated conditions become visible that confront any assessment of the reality or practical feasibility of a certain vision of freedom with significant new information forcing qualification and revision.

Holistic defenders of liberty either (a) ignore these "intermediary conditions" (conditions intermediary / situated between premises and expected outcomes, determining the feasibility of the latter) or they (b) tend toward selective evidence, purporting to corroborate the predictions produced by their highly abstract causal / justificatory set of basic arguments. 

The one insight most corrosive to grand unified accounts of freedom pertains to the inescapably political nature of human interaction. Human interests are of such enormous and natural diversity, comprising highly rivalrous and incommensurable stances and ambitions, that uniformity can be achieved neither in terms of perception or interestedness, nor in terms of justificatory evaluation. 

While my attempt at a general theory of freedom was intended to outline a social order representing an alternative to a highly politicised society, my findings eventually convinced me that the freer a society is the more politicised it will, of necessity, be.

This kindled in me a strong interest in political philosophy. Or rather, politics. A semantic correction that seems to me in order, in so far as some political philosophy does not appear to be primarily interested in politics, but in artefacts of specialised reasoning, loosely related to political reality.

So, ultimately, conditions that may be described as feasible freedom (as opposed to infeasible ideological utopias of freedom) are characterised by very high levels of political activity which expresses, generates and conciliates intense political dissension and competition.

Long before freedom begins to approach the purity zone demanded for her in various ideological visions, in reality, she diffuses into a heterogeneous farrago of opinions and interests. She is far more modus vivendi than being all of a piece. 

At the end of the day, my interest in freedom has spawned an strong interest in the political processes that achieve feasible freedom - dynamic equilibrium of unprecedented mass dissension in the face of societal peaceableness.

Therefore, encouraged by my findings described above, it appears that the prior operational issues to be looked into to better understand freedom as a hallmark of our modern civilisation relate to the factors that support the balance between dissension and peace that is feasible freedom. 

Having realised that complete and coherent justificatory systems of argument are incapable of capturing the phenomenon of freedom, I have become additionally interested in trans-rational mechanisms that ensure cohesion or other requirements of societal functionality, where these can not be attained by justificatory uniformity and consistency. I am also interested in the interplay and competition between rational and transrational tributaries to the dynamic equilibrium of feasible freedom.

As a further result of my findings, I recognise the need to address intermediary conditions, which is the same as calling for more attention to details and evidence of an empirical kind.

See Research into Liberty (2) - Intermediate Status and Forward Links - Ethics and Finance.