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An Elegy for My Lost Freedom
What is the best format and structure in which to present my findings regarding "liberty as a feature of modern civilisation"?
My "problem" is "hereditary". I am still grappling with the legacy of my first approach to freedom. I used to think that while freedom is based on a hugely complicated recipe, she is the most delicious cake ever to be had. I considered it my task to collect the components of this gigantic recipe so as to present the complete picture of it. For then all of us could bake the pie together, or at least have everyone appreciate why this is the only cake to go for, and avoid obstruction during the project of building it to the fullest extent.
Maybe I even felt a pride, more than half hidden from myself, that the complicated recipe of freedom called for my unique abilities to get entirely collated and properly translated from the complicated facts and connections into an intelligible representation.
One effort I ought to have a go at in Attempts at Liberty is to spell out the nature of my conceit. It may throw light on the dogmatic promise of liberal thinking, i.e. the confident belief that there exists an exhaustive knowledge of freedom, the command of which enabling us to see the ultimate truth about the good society and how we are to comport ourselves in it. In actual fact, this lure of full intellectual command of the ideal distorts our perception of freedom. These temptations make us look for things that lie outside the real dimensions of freedom - the certainty and closure of a perfect model for society -, and overlook what is inside the vast and often vague expanse of real freedom, the largest event of peaceful mass dissension in human history.
Starting with an Account of What Freedom is Not - No
Yet, I am hesitant to start Attempts at Liberty with an essay on what liberty is not.
Partly, because it is still painful for me to acknowledge that liberty does not offer many of the services I used to think she did provide - especially an unerring guidance in all social issues. It turns out, reality is heavily saturated with freedom; there simply does not exist that tremendous backlog of unaccomplished liberty that I had divined, nor do we stand before an ocean of abominable violations of freedom. Much rather, we witness, daily and in heaps, situations whose indeterminacy and rival perceptions are interminable and petering out in a continental marshland of incompatible views. What works is not coextensive with what I held to be the demands of freedom; and the people who make the feasible world of freedom go round are not liberals reassuring themselves by my recipe.
I was moved by a mystical intuition of spontaneous order, an order held by me to be too complicated to fully understand, yet it was my Odyssean mission to understand it nonetheless, and my fate and prize that I could comprehend it at least a lot better than most other people. That bit better that, conveyed by my teachings, would mean revelation to them and a change of mood making them eager to join the brotherhood of liberty-seekers, entering the sweet solidarity of those who have a common cause, and not the faintest suspicion that there cannot be a common cause of such delight, and that liberty is a device ensuring the world does not perish from the absence of a common cause as complete and detailed as the one our dreams insinuated.
In truth, liberty is shot through with innumerable threads - values, concerns, contradictions -, and cannot be understood without grasping this enmeshment.
The greater the loss of mission and confidence, the more intense the feeling of a sinking heart, the more nagging the fear of having committed oneself to a pointless exaggeration and an ideal that is rendered trivial by the conditions of its operability - trivial at least relative to the great expectations once held, and trivial relative to countless other factors that I thought were controlled by liberty but turn out to be controlling her, admissibly so, it transpires, in a very large number of cases.
Starting with an Account of What Freedom Is - Yes
I cannot bear the prospect of ushering in my thoughts on liberty by relativising her importance and blurring her profile.
I need to start with a defence of liberty strong enough to echo her importance at any time, especially in moments when she is overshadowed and prone to be crowded out.
I, therefore, think, it is advisable to start with Stephen Holmes' accounts of liberty.
But, perhaps I should start with "A
Philosophical Subtlety of Great Effect," my own thoughts on the difference
between thinking about freedom and freedom as she actually prevails.
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