340. Levels of freedom revisited

Here I revisit the different levels of freedom that I discussed earlier in this blog (item 49), to make a connection with the discussion of Kant and Žižek in the preceding items.

On the lowest level is the freedom as usually seen in ordinary language: the freedom from constraint or interference. One can do what one likes. This is also called negative freedom. God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to sin.

Beyond that there are freedoms in the form of access to sources of ‘the good life’. First, there, comes the freedom of Kant: freedom in the form of being freed from the impulses of lust, desire, addiction or self-interest, in unconditional obedience to ‘the Law’, the symbolic order, of what it is ‘right’ to do, untainted by personal urges or interest. I characterized this as follows: not following what one wants but what one thinks one should want. Kant gave humanity the freedom not to sin.

This leads to the problems identified by Kant and discussed at length by Žižek, that such Law is arbitrary, unclear, ambiguous, indeterminate, and contradictory, depending on contexts of action, and therefore cannot be justified in terms of justice and rationality. Also, it originates from grabs of political power, and therefore needs to be hidden. As a result, according to Žižek some illusionary, non-existent ideal ‘objet-a’, is taken to stand in for it, absconded and dressed up in ideology. The freedom of Žižek now is to break free from it. Since Kant defined deviation from the Law as evil, Žižek accepts that this freedom is evil, and most evil, or ‘diabolically’ evil, as he calls it, when it is not motivated by desire or self-interest, but as a matter of principle, in pursuit of a new symbolic order. I characterized this as a change of what one thinks one should want.    

Beyond that, I claimed, on the highest level there is freedom in the form of ability not to exercise one’s views and convictions about the good but to change them; not to change or replace the Law, but one’s thinking about it. By many, this change of oneself is held to be impossible. I argued that it is possible but for it one needs the opposition form others with their views and convictions. I was inspired to this by Levinas’ ‘philosophy of the other’, so I now call it the freedom of Levinas.

My point now is that this latter freedom is the freedom needed to make democracy work.

There still is the issue, a recurrent theme in this blog, how to escape from the symbolic order. For Foucault: how to achieve an authentic life, and he had no answer. For Žižek, a break with it is evil, even ‘diabolically’ so. I think there is way out.

In my discussions of meaning, I used the difference, proposed by de Saussure, between the established, synchronic order of ‘langue’, and the creative, open-ended, diachronic process of ‘parole’, living language use, which yields openness of meaning. I tried to formulate that also in terms of the hermeneutic circle.

I now propose that something similar applies more widely, in the ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ that Žižek claimed for the ‘objet-a’. If the order cannot be fully specified, it is open, and this yields a possible escape. The indeterminacy of the ‘objet-a’ is not to be deplored but to be celebrated, whether it concerns our view of objects in the world, our self, or the symbolic order. Imperfection on the move. If this is accepted, exit from the existing order may be odd, quaint, and will certainly cause some isolation, lack of recognition, and loneliness, but it is not diabolical. People should read poetry more.