In Our Time - Freedom

Episode Date: July 4, 2002

Melvyn Bragg considers what it is to be free and how freedom became such a powerful value. Freedom has been a subject of enquiry for philosophers, theologians and politicians who have 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 laws should confine his liberty. Others have countered that laws are the only way to preserve freedom; they protect us from the slavery of the abyss. The very idea of freedom is riddled with constraints, limitations and qualifications, yet it is seen by many as the most basic of human rights and for some as a principle worth fighting and dying for. With John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Westminster; Bernard Williams, Professor of Philosophy, University of California; Annabel Brett, Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, U.K. forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Mahatma Gandhi said that freedom and slavery are mental states. That may be, but in the last 25 centuries, freedom has been a subject of inquiry for philosophers, theologians and politicians who have attempted to define the conditions required for humans to be free, not just in their minds, but in the wider world. Some of our good that man is naturally free and no laws should confine his liberty. Others have counted 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 of us? The very idea of freedoms riddled with constraints, limitations and qualifications, 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 of July Independence Day for the land of the free are John Keene, Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster, an author of a forthcoming history of democracy. Bernard Williams, fellow of all so as Oxford, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, an author of the forthcoming book Truth and Truthfulness, and Annabel Brett, lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge, an 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? 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 trooping, and trooping 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. 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, an agreed language for the Greeks, but what's striking is their disagreement about its 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, and he speaks about rulers as craftsmen 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, anarchists, punks, the cynics, the dogs, who thought that freedom was an utterly conventional term, who 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 agorah, free love. We came a long way from Plato quite quickly, though you're on. We have. 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. When you're talking about freedom in that sense, just to define something a little bit more clearly, you're talking about freedom for a few men. Yes. We're talking about society in which that is slavery.

There are women. who are non-political persons and so and so forth. Can you just define that a little bit? 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 craftsmen. 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 as a protest against social customs and political conventions, is part of this cauldron, which we call freedom. Anne-Melbride, how did they justify having slaves and not allowing in craftsmen, foreigners, women and so on?

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, by nature, fitted to rule, is of course Aristotle. Now, Aristotle's views on freedom are quite interesting. He does in book four of the politics, canvas what he calls, the democratic ideal 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 one 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 a reason that gives you the ability to direct yourself. The natural master has foresight. He can see ahead so that he can escape from this kind of immediacy of the desires of the moment, the animal world, and into a rational world of freedom, which is, of course, for Aristotle, the world of the city. Bernard Wernes, would you like to take up on anything that's being said before moving forward? Well, the point I really want to emphasize 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, the ancients had a condition of political unfreedom, which was totally radical, namely 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. They were slaves because they weren't capable really of thinking what to do. They were, as it were, deliberative disasters, slaves. Now, this was 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 who are in considerable poverty. Namely, they don't. It's not really, it's just. It's just that it's an inevitable product of a necessary system.

May I say that here, the question of slavery is tied very intimately to freedom, but I think in the ancient Greek world, it was understood a little bit differently than Bernard has just put it. First of all, there is the problem of the necessary

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 nurture children. Someone has to produce food and other necessaries of life. And this is an ineluctible fact. The other point about slavery is, of course, that there's an ethnocentrism to the Greek conception of slavery.

Namely, the distinction between freedom and slavery is the distinction between us, we Greeks, who are free, and those to the east, the Persians, who are barbarians. 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 that, well, from the Book of Common Prayer, service is perfect freedom.

What did Christians bring to the idea of freedom? What we've been looking at with classical freedom is this idea of autonomy or self-governance, it's a 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 by reason. For Augustine, everyone, good men, 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 the classical idea, which is sin. So that's that classical idea of unfreedom of slavery to the passions translated into a Christian context. But to escape from that, you don't escape by that

by sort of overcoming your passions with your reason. You accept submission to God. You accept God as your master, the person who's 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 criticized by Augustine. 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. Bernard Williams, did Aquinas take that idea and tried to, he did take that idea, tried to splice it with the other stratelian ideas, and try to hold onto the idea still of free will, to get back under the free will.

Can you explain, is it possible to believe you to explain how to that? I mean, there are two different distinctions here, but two different important points. One is about the goodness of God, namely that God obviously wishes the best for human. humanity. And the question then is what political order best will express God's goodwill, what form of submission is appropriate to people. But there's another question that arises from the power of God. And Augustine was enormously impressed, as Calvin was, to be later, which is 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 free will in terms of what it is to choose, which is compatible with God's power and for knowledge. and that's a very nasty problem in Christian theology.

Augustine enormously emphasised God's power and foreknowledge. Thomas allowed, well, the details are obviously very complicated, but allowed more like an everyday or common sense conception of what it was to choose. But again, I absolutely agree with 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 conception. John,

John King, do you think that the Christian, the introduction of the idea through Augustine Aquinas, do you think they added to those an accretion in, as it were, the force of freedom by those developments? It had been talked of as the first sort of inner freedom. It no doubt did, partly by introducing the possibility of the universality of freedom, but also in, 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, not non-English, but has 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 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. You have the idea, you fell up the notion around the word dominion under Wilbred. Can you give us some idea of what you mean by that?

Yes. I mean, if we're talking about free will in Aquinas, not just an Aquinas in the 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's 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-dominian dominion over ourselves, this is very much following on from an idea in Genesis. In Genesis, God said, let us make man in our image and after our in likeness, and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, etc., etc.

Now, for the 13th century scholastic, being in the image of God, because God has dominion, he is lord, is that 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 a 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. And if you can prove that certain sections of the global community are nearer fish, nearer lions and nearer human beings, you can have dominion over them. There's a dispute as to whether the Native American Indians were human or not. 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 creatures 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.

So butchery had a philosophy, as it were, in America and Australia. 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, here is what we've got. What's very interesting, I think, is that the followers of Aquinas, a group of people 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're 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. Can I just shift forward, Bennett, Williams, and ask you, you've argued that a theory of toleration was born in the 17th century, and discussed by John Locke, among others, and this is moving the idea. Well, forwards may be the wrong idea, but it's amplifying the idea. Can you give us some idea of that? Well, I think it picks up very much from what John Keyne mentioned earlier about the remarks in Milton and the area of pagetica 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 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. Can we take that on, John Keane?

You mentioned Milton but we can also bring in Hobbs 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 law. 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. Yes, I think Bernard has put his finger on a development at this time. One could 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, that there is a problem, a jurisdictional problem of their peaceful harmonization. How is it possible for people with different conceptions of 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. The biblical monster, the king of all the children of pride. Yes, under whose omnipotence, there are still measures of freedom possible, but these basic political freedoms cherished by the Greeks, by 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. Well, there's quite an important point about Hobbes, namely he didn't think that he thought 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 only the one who would do the job best. But, you see, Hobbs 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, that 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. lead people to kill each other. He thought that was a 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's 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. There was a big twist, sorry, John Kit, can I just take it on it? There's a big twist in the French Revolution, which was, brightly 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? It did, Madame Rolland's last word spluttered 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 that Hobbes recommended. But freedom also, in the name of freedom, in the name of constructing republics,

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 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 institutionalize and which Hobbes himself had in mind. As this is July the 4th and as America was found in an idea of rights and so and so forth,

let's spend the rest of the time talking about where freedoms or rights found themselves there. Annabel Brett, the American Republic, is founded an idea of rights. Is there a difference? Is there a distinction between freedom and rights? That's a kind of complicated question. Historically some theorists simply ran the two together. I mean, Hobbes will tell you that right is liberty and in opposition to the law. Some other theorists do distinguish in that liberty is more a personal, individual thing.

It's connected with ideas of free will 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 there do, their right, their measure of freedom. So that right is, if you like, the aspect of my freedom when we're talking about a plurality of individuals who have to live together. Bernard, what did the American documents, those great documents at the end of the 18th century,

what did they bring to the table? Yes, I don't think it can be right to say that rights and freedom are necessarily the same thing. One reason for that is it depends on what rights people are said to have. I'm under the Auxian regime, the aristocracy had all sorts of rights to push the peasantry around, for instance. And 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 right is a 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 it turns out that if you're in South Dakota, you can have a hidden handgun. Now, that doesn't seem to me 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.

Can we talk through Tom Payne and Glantz Your Heart, John Keen, European-Pain Englishmen's ideas on freedom and how it'd been seeded in the States? Yes, I mean the great idea, vision of Tom Payne is that of the Philadelphia model of freedom. A large territorial state in which there is a country, complex understanding of freedom. Pain is the first to use this originally Lockean idea of a civil society for revolutionary ends. The resistance of the Americans to British imperial domination

is seen as the struggle of a civil society and of civil liberties against this popish despotism. And in Payne, 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 an enduring experiment, I think, in the modernisation for you. Do you agree with that, Bennett? Can you give us a summary on that? Well, I think that the great

French social theorist de Tocqueville went to America and wrote this book, Democracy in America, the 19th century. He said that one of the great threats that 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 opinions. And John Stuart Mill, in our own tradition, made that point very central to his theory of freedom. And that public opinion, the informal constraints of social conformity,

can be as threatening as any 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, has also a great encouragement at some extent that it can be overcome. 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. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.