FREEDOM AND METAPHYSICS

Freedom is not a right, nor is it something human beings just have or possess, for, to begin with, men are not free. By nature they are indeed under two kinds of constraints: on the one hand, the limitations imposed by their environment, i.e. they are parts of the world, on the other hand, the threat of retortions by fellow beings, i.e. they are parts of mankind (which can be included within the former). Therefore, it does not make sense to utter declarations like: man is "born free", or freedom is "due to man," etc. And it is also wrong to claim that he should be given freedom, though it is mostly refused to him. For indeed: who owes him freedom? who refuses to give it?

Also, freedom is not the possibility to choose. That possibility is at most free will. But free will is a special faculty, the faculty to decide, whenever no specific reason can be put forward for making the decision, and this is not Freedom as such.

Especially, freedom is not the power to do just "whatever one wishes to do." It is not either--contrary to a view put forward by a number of existentialists of the middle of this century--the capacity to create possibilities of choice that were not there beforehand. Indeed, e.g. Sartre, who held that view, concluded that God is impossible, for if He did exist, man could not create `freely' or all by himself his own values, but ought to accept and ratify them as they are created by God. But people like Sartre make the mistake of confusing freedom and creativity. Creativity certainly confers upon man a mastery over reality and, consequently, helps in the promotion of specific values. But what is reality?

My answer is that reality is that which resists our attempt at grasping or apprehending it. Quite generally, resistance is the attribute of reality. For instance, what we call the physical world is and remains real as long as we do not succeed in apprehending it. But when we succeed in elaborating a physical theory about at least a part or an aspect of that world, e.g., the theory of gravitation or of electromagnetism, etc., some sort of apprehension has succeeded and that part or that aspect does not resist any more. Thus it is no more a reality, for we have replaced it by its formal model which we can use and apply successfully. At the same time the adequacy of the model has revealed a value, namely the truth of the theory which has been put forward. This successful apprehension of parts of reality is also a mastery over time, for even though the material world continues to change in time, the theory itself is independent of the temporal, it is simply true. Similarly, if the creation of a work of art succeeds in showing the beauty of an idea the artist has had about some aspect of reality, the latter has ceased to resist him or her, and another value has been promoted, which is no longer timedependent.

This, however, is not freedom itself, but a specific, though important, part of human action. Of course, it should be performed preferably when man is free, for if an artist, scientist or any professional works in a state of unfreedom, such as submission to the ideology of a political regime, the result of his endeavor will never be an authentic mastery over the resistance opposed by reality, and what he puts forward will not be actually valuable.

It is surely correct to begin with that man has a strong, primitive feeling for freedom, even a longing. Like Augustine writing on time in his Confessions, we can state the fundamental `paradox about freedom' by saying: As long as no one asks me what it is, I know, but as soon as I am requested to explicate it, I do not know what it is!

However, this primitive feeling is not mere nostalgia, since it is not something man had but then lost. That would be similar to the Platonic Ideas of which the soul could have a reminiscence from the time she was contemplating God's perfection. But if the soul had been contemplating such perfection, she would precisely not have been free, but tied by an ideal link.

The first consciousness concerning freedom is rather that we are not free to begin with; that is the reason for the Augustinian-like paradox about freedom. As we are imprisoned in all sorts of limitations, the first thing to do is not to revolt against it, but to understand, and to acknowledge that we are not free. Yet, it is not enough to acknowledge this fact; it must be accepted. Therefore freedom is not a matter of what we will, but of what we ought.

In other words, to accept the fact of one's own non-freedom is the condition sine qua non for the possibility to be free. This makes of freedom the source of morality, for if there were no such thing as freedom as just defined, man would remain within the bond of his limitations and would not have to distinguish between authentic values and inauthentic values, especially good and evil.

The condition for the possibility of my freedom is therefore that I acknowledge and accept not to be free to begin with. Here, I am suddenly speaking in the first person. I do this in order to establish the second fact, that only persons can be free. One will immediately ask: What is a person? The concept of a person was not clear to thinkers in antiquity. The very word comes from the Latin persona, where, however, it meant something else; it meant a mask, i.e. a cover of cloth or wax for protection or concealment of one's face, especially used by Greek and Roman actors `to look like' the characters of the play they played, which were mostly gods, demigods and heroes.

The modern signification of the word person is of Christian origin: the very first Person thought of was God himself, evidently capable of recognizing everything He does, and then the human individuals, capable of distinguishing their own acts from acts performed by others--a capacity which animals do not seem to possess. Whence a person can speak in the first person and also carry on a dialogue by speaking and addressing oneself in the second person, especially to God Himself in either invocation or prayer. It seems evident, that morality makes no sense without persons in that sense, whereas there is no such thing among stones, or stars, or even animals: the person is the pillar upon which morality can rest, for then there is me, and thee.

Once this condition of acknowledgment and acceptance is fulfilled, I can go on freely approaching reality and creating works of art, scientific theories, moral relationships with others. In short such works include any human action by whose virtue such and such value appears manifest, apprehensible by the mind and more precisely endowed with the double nature of possessing quality and quantity that makes it something valuable. For a value is defined by the encounter of quality and quantity, which makes it possible that it be offered, given and even sold to someone else. Indeed, we buy beautiful pictures, scientific or literary books, and all sorts of goods which we consider valuable for life. In this sense it is even alienable, i.e., transferable into an unknown property and eventually lost into a kind of vacuum. This induces some existentialists to see in it a negative aspect of human existence. Since for them human life, assumed `free' in its own right, cannot but alienate itself of its values and consequently run into a diminution and finally into an apparent absence of being, they interpret it, wrongly, as falling into nothingness.

In fact, the creative exertion related to the possibility of my being free has overcome the resistance opposed by reality. It is not that this reality has been reduced to something passive like a piece of cheese to be eaten. For it is not the resistance opposed by reality which has been accepted (actually, that had to be overcome); rather, it was the very circumstance of my imitating finitude that had to be accepted.

An infant baby does not know at birth that it is not free to begin with, yet from the time of its birth it is endowed with a feeling that something can be achieved to finally make it free. This achievement is always conditioned by the realization of all the constraints of its existence. In the womb of its mother, on the contrary, these constraints were not existent, for everything was automatically done for its ease and welfare. At the moment of birth, this situation collapses: birth amounts to being thrown into the multiplicity of constraints which create non-freedom. Man is not born free, not even if this phrase is meant to say that he was free before birth. Therefore, human existence appears from its very beginning in the world, not simply as the traditional `struggle for life' spoken of in bio-physics, but also and with comparable intensity as a `struggle for freedom' to be spoken of in meta-physics. The former of these struggles procures material goods, the latter one spiritual goods called values.

We have been taught that there are four so-called cardinal values: the true, the beautiful, the good, the divine. Some people no longer accept that teaching, asserting for instance that there is no such thing as the `divine' or even the `good'. It has indeed become the fashion to reject the divine on the ground that it can never be touched, or apprehended by any of our physical senses as we can see the beauty of pictures or hear that of music. There is even a tendency to replace all values by artificial products of the human imagination, as if everything valuable were of anthropomorphic nature, making man the measure--quantitative and qualitative--of all things. This is a fatal confusion of the analytic and the synthetic, leading to arbitrariness and resting upon the assumption that if one can produce something, anything, then it should be acknowledged and even offered for sale and for consumption. This tendency has become a main trend of contemporary civilization, not only in the West, but throughout the world.

Yet civilization is not culture; rather, it is the progressive loss and ignorance of the values, beginning with the divine and the moral. Our civilization, spreading throughout the world and accompanied by such loss and ignorance, is still more or less built on the search for truth and beauty. Yet even this is not quite so evident any more, for the promotion of authentic beauty is being replaced increasingly by mere `happening' and/or `pop' which is simply the release of the morally low, of baseness in its easy consumption. The search for truth is being progressively replaced by a wrong conception of technology where small and even big gadgets like computers are just meant to be sold for the sake of acquiring wealth and power. The main tendency of present civilization is to usurp power, not to promote value. This clearly runs against freedom, for it puts every one in dependency, those who have no power in dependency upon those who have, and those who have it in dependency upon their wealth which they must continually consolidate, which means setting ever more barriers to prevent its conquest by others.

Such views should not be interpreted as reactionary, for I am perfectly aware of the efficiency of computers and other inventions. But their spread do not make people freer than they were before. On the contrary, they make them more ant-like than ever, since people become more and more dependent on them for doing anything. So my argument is nothing but the description of a kind of phenomenon that not only strikes us today, but may be the fate of culture as such. That is, culture unavoidably degenerates into civilization, civilization being the flattening of values, especially the cardinal values, down to their disappearance. At the same time, to my mind, one of the most outstanding and positive features of mankind is, that it seems capable of overcoming the process just described and recovering again and again the status of culture out of its very ashes. This, I believe, has to do with freedom, for civilization and its growing flatness is the quintessence of constraints; it presses upon and squeezes mankind into something like an ant-hill, which is the strongest possible constraint.

For, when acting freely I am actually repeling the limits of the constraints imposed upon my freedom, i.e., enlarging their field beyond the limits thus far acknowledged. Then I am once again within circumstances of a non-freedom, for I encounter new constraints at further limits. But this is non-freedom at a higher stage, and this is precisely the dialectics of a situation in which I am never free in order to be able, by creating its possibility when accepting the situation, to give free play to my creativity.

However, before accepting not to be free let us now look for the reason why I am not free. In order to become free, I must at least make clear the fact responsible for it, namely, that I am part of a world where things are finite and unavoidably multiple. Yet I am capable of conceiving the opposite to that finitude and multiplicity, namely, Transcendence and Unity. However, neither transcendence, nor unity, can be the product of finitude and multiplicity, whereas it is thinkable that the latter are at the origin of the former. Indeed, the totality of the multiple is never One. Even at its limit, the finite cannot become infinite; it can at most suggest the transfinite, alone accessible to logical and mathematical reasoning. Therefore, asking the question of the origin of my freedom in spite of my being non-free amounts to asserting the incommensurable, and this is a way to say, that God is, without my ever being able to assign to Him anything truly adequate, since whatever `theory' I elaborate about my relationship with Him, will never but push back the limits of my finitude or reach "beyond that which is on this side of it".

In my German book, Metaphysics, the Science "sui generis" of the Incommensurable, I have called the attention of the Reader to the fundamental circumstance that what is metaphysical is such because of the incommensurability which reigns between the finitude of human standards and the radical infinity which is God's own. This is in contradistinction to the relationship existing between man and the world surrounding him including other human beings, even though the world may be so huge, for it remains measurable by human standards. Therefore, freedom surpasses all that is in the latter sense measurable, and must be one concept, perhaps among a few others, which compel one to enter the field of metaphysics. On the ground of its primacy, freedom amounts to a main entry into Metaphysics like a triumphal Arch leading into a big city. At the same time, the very form of the dialectics which leads to that conclusion shows that metaphysical discourse cannot rest on logic alone. For freedom unavoidably receives its very significance by being at the same time identified with and differentiated from non-freedom as its own contrary or opposite. This kind of reasoning has no place within logic proper, but must function within a discourse beyond logical discourse; that is precisely what is called dialectics.

CULTURE AND MORALITY

Early in this paper I noted with emphasis, that "freedom is not a right". This is in apparent contradiction with a two centuries old tradition going back mainly to the French revolution, but also with earlier Declarations published in England, France and the United States. Indeed, more or less all the successive "Declarations" which intend to establish fundamental `rights of man' avoid the problem of freedom. It is interesting to note that, in those early days, one did not realize that a necessary connection must exist between rights and duties, which led to a process of isolation accompanied by a one-sided, artificial emphasis on rights, as if they could exist `in their own right'. This implied that men need have nothing other than rights in order to be the beings they ought to be.

This is most typical of our arrogance which as a civilization is degenerate form of a culture, due mainly to mass-phenomena. The word arrogance comes from the Latin verb arrogare, meaning to claim. This claim amounts to changing the ought (`what sort of beings men "ought" to be') into what they want to, claim to, in short will be. It is, consequently, a blow or injury to morality.

To change this, note that although in former civilizations oppressed classes of the population complained about, and eventually had recourse to, insurrection against oppression, historians like to trace the first claim to Rights to the so-called Petition of Right (in the singular) presented 1628 by Parliament to King Charles I of England. This first document however does not declare freedom a right. Then, the famous Bill of Rights (in the plural) elaborated in February, 1689, by the English Parliament after the Revolution of 1688 had started against King James II speaks of the `fundamental rights of the Kingdom'.

Nearly a century later in North America, the so-called Assembly of Virginia wrote down a Declaration of Rights dated May 30, 1765, which was renewed as a petition to the English Crown in 1774 by the First Continental Congress held in Philadelphia. Finally, still on the North American Continent, we know of the Declaration of Independence dated 4th of July, 1776, by the United States. It took another ten years to write down the Constitution of the United States of America which was accepted in 1787 and, with the exception of some amendments, is still valid today. Surely, it was the intention of all such texts to promote some kind or idea of freedom, but they all did it against the oppression felt to have been as exerted by a formerly established autocratic authority which had acted in a way unbearable to major parts of their subjects.

But why should Freedom, if it is a fundamental determination of man, necessarily be declared against an oppression exercised by some sort of established authority? In doing that, one reduces freedom to a non-fundamental, hence secondary matter of thought. My contention is that Freedom is of primary, even primal, nature.

Whether the same remarks can be applied to the first text in French of a Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens) under the French Revolution is a question which I am tempted to answer with both yes and no. For there, something new is attempted, viz. to expound these rights as existing `in their own right' independently of a preestablished, possibly oppressive Authority, even though to begin with, the citizen is quoted beside the human being as such or man. This reduced the universality of purpose to the restricted status of a politically organized State in which oppression might arise. (However, "might" is different from "does".) Surely, the philosophical tendency, peculiar to the French, to generalize and look for universals gives this first Declaration and further declarations issued from then on a depth and universal meaning which are missing in the English and American texts. Those were not only older, but conceived within an intellectual climate which still today, as it was then, is much more matter-of-fact than the French tradition. Therefore, the French tradition throws on freedom--la liberté--a different light than does the Anglo-Saxon.

Of course, the ancient Greeks already had the notion of ; they even had festivities in honor of Zeus-the-Liberator called (notice the difference in the position of accents). Also they had the consciousness of a status of freedom of citizens which, however, is to be contrasted to the then existing status of non-freedom of slaves. In Greece, free citizens could not be sold, whereas slaves could be, etc. Therefore after all did not assume the universal character of a prime freedom which I have in mind; it was for the Greek a right reserved to a class of citizens among the living population. If much later for the English and more explicitly for the authors of the American Declarations, this right was no more to be reserved to such a class but extended to all, it was still conceived as a right (and slaves still existed there in 1787).

Verbally, it remained a right for the French Declaration. The first Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen was (written by the Archbishop of Bordeaux Jerome Champion de Cice), dated August, 26, 1789 and used as Preface to the Constitution of 1791, the first Constitution of France and prior to the death of King Louis XVI by decapitation). Surely, it was written with awareness of the American texts, but it was inspired also to a high degree by former declarations of principle issued by the French `General States' dating back to 1347, the French `Parliament of Paris' which was a High Court of Justice established in the 13th century, and by the corresponding provincial parliaments in the following centuries, and of course influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This first Declaration of the Rights of Man asserts freedom as the first of such rights, but restricts its applicability by the condition that the freedom of others be respected, which amounts to accepting duties.

This 1789 Declaration inspired all bills of rights issued later on in the West.¹ However, it was still circumstantial and had the middle class in mind more than the totality of the people. Therefore, even though 1789 marks the date of the French Revolution, the more fundamental Declaration of such rights in France dates from 1793 (the so-called `Year I'), for it asserts first and foremost the equality of all without restriction. It bears the same title, including the mention of the Citizen. In its Preamble, it speaks however restrictively of the French People, though universally of Natural human rights, . . . which are said to be sacred and inalienable rights assumed to constitute the basis of its (the people's) freedom and happiness, and it establishes these rights "in the presence of the Supreme Being." Then follows Article One, in which these rights are mentioned, four in number, in the following order: Equality, freedom, security, property.

Finally, in a new Declaration issued 1795 (the Year III of the Republic) the Declaration of Rights is completed by a Declaration of Duties, which I consider very important, but which very soon fell into oblivion in later discussions up to our days.

Of course, we know that towards the middle of our century, a new Declaration was issued to serve as a basis for the work of the United Nations. There, the list of rights is considerably augmented and the universality is meant to be total, although the way it is asserted does not seem quite so satisfactory to me, for it refers it to an independence of race, creed and other human traits, and one never can know whether their list is exhaustive.

How is it then that I dare to contest the nature of a right when speaking of freedom? Apart from the suggestions already made, it seems to my mind that the more rights are asserted as fundamental rights, the greater becomes the uniqueness of the role to be assumed by Freedom and the greater its independence towards, and primacy over, such rights. To be more specific: First of all, a right is by nature the claim to a specific exercise; yet freedom is not a specific exercise, i.e. one formulated distinctly beside similar exercises. Second, the opposite of a right is not a non-right, but a duty, whereas the opposite of freedom is non-freedom, but not another will-be specific determination of action.

According to the famous Vocabulary of Philosophy published by the French Philosophical Society under the editorship of André Lalande, a right has either of two possible meanings: (1) it is that which conforms to a precise rule and consequently can be claimed legitimately either because the laws prescribe it or because it follows from an agreement, or that which is allowed by the same laws or by the currently accepted morals. (2) If right is used in the singular, it is law, as opposed to fact, and includes all rights in the first sense. If among rights conforming to precise rules some are held as natural, i.e., as consequences of the very nature of man, then they can be called liberties, i.e., specific powers of action which should be at the disposal of men. However, these liberties are again in the plural. Neither (1) nor (2) actually include Freedom as such, in the singular and with the primacy of its significance.

I do not agree that freedom in the singular is the reunion of a multiplicity of liberties. Especially, I cannot accept the definition of freedom included in the 1793 Declaration according to which freedom is man's own power to do whatever does not hurt other men's rights. This is not so much because this definition forgets about hurting other beings than just human beings, but because the opposite of freedom, non-freedom, is not an absence of will, but precisely the beginnings of another will, namely, the will to accept non-freedom in order to get rid of it. Even though I am not very happy about Kant's views, I must recall that he at least did not introduce freedom among possible rights, but proceeded in the opposite way, defining rights from the concept of categorical freedom.

I am not contesting that freedom does not offer any resemblance whatsoever with a right. Yet at the same time it has also a kind of likeness with a duty, which renders the former resemblance misleading. It has its origin in the fact that the acceptance of a duty assumes the simultaneous claim to a right, and conversely the claim to a right requires a corresponding duty. However, the claim to a right is different from the assertion of freedom; for one can neither claim, nor accept freedom: one is free by accepting non-freedom. That is, freedom is still an ontic determination, whereas rights and duties are ethic determinations. Hence the dialectics of rights and duties is fundamentally different from the dialectics of freedom versus non-freedom.

But could it be said that the totality of rights constitutes freedom and, by way of consequence, that the totality of duties constitutes non-freedom, so that by assuming all these duties one would create the condition of possibility of all assignable rights, identified as freedom? I must answer in the negative. For neither are the rights at hand a priori before the existence of duties, nor are the duties at hand a priori before the existence of the rights in the same way as non-freedom is anterior to freedom and the accession to freedom puts one in a state of renewed non-freedom.

I would even refrain from saying that I have rights because I have duties, or have duties because I have rights. In an earlier paper, I explained that rights are exemplifications of a prototype of right, namely, the original right to have an offspring, and at the same time duties are the exemplifications of a prototype of duty, viz. the duty to make room for the same offspring. What would then be correct to say is, that one has rights and duties, or duties and rights if you prefer, simultaneously, without priority or precedence, and that is why the dialectics of rights and duties has a structure different from that of freedom which issues from the sequence:

(non-freedom)₁--> (freedom)₁--> (non-freedom)₂--> (freedom)₂ . . .

Especially, the exercise of a right that has become effective through the practice of a duty would not entail the practice of a new duty, yet a weaker one as compared with the preceding one and which would validate a new, re-enforced right.

Rights are sometimes usurped. That is, a usurper, like a dictator wrongfully seizing power, claims to possess rights which the others do not have or possess at most by his munificence. Freedom cannot be usurped, for to usurp an assumed freedom does not in the least make (more) free, on the contrary, it tightens the bonds of non-freedom.

The dialectics of freedom appears like a spiral developing on a cone, along which freedom and non-freedom bite each other's tail since they incessantly imply each other mutually in a progress whose two-stroke engine consists in acknowledgment and acceptance. There is no such thing in the dialectics of rights and duties which keep moving along two parallel but inseparable lines or rails allowing a linear motion, yet at the risk of moving with only one wheel on a single rail. If it is, on the one hand, condemnable to move on the rail of rights only, it is, on the other hand, vain to move on the rail of duties only, for it amounts to an undue alienation leading to false asceticism.

After all, there is only one spiral of the dialectics of freedom, whereas there is a multitude of parallel rails along which rights and respective duties can be exercised. Thus, freedom is like the actualization, in the mirror of human existence, of Oneness and Infinity in spite of their incommensurability in comparison with human dimensions, means and capacities. In contrast, rights and duties follow characteristically from the domain of finitude and multiplicity and are therefore commensurable with human standards. This is what finally makes jurisprudence possible, while jurisprudence does not qualify for judging about freedom. Especially, since finitude and multiplicity cannot succeed in founding the Infinite Oneness, while Infinite-Oneness generates finitude in multiplicity, rights and duties certainly can detach themselves, like double trails issued at points along the spiral-like dialectics of freedom, while they can never engender that spiral.

Therefore, in conclusion, the difference between `rights and duties' on the one hand, and `freedom' on the other hand, is of the same nature and of the same order as the difference between `physics' (or the other `ordinary' sciences), and `metaphysics', or between `ordinary arts' like music, dance, painting, sculpture . . . , and `poetry'. This is true not so much on the objective plane of the sciences, or on the subjective plane of the arts, as on the plane--which in my epistemological research I have called conjective because of the interrelationship existing within the community of beings. There morality as concerned with the relationships among fellow human beings, is different from a `meta-morality'. In the latter, man is not in correlation with other human beings as in morality proper, but with himself as if he `saw himself' in a big mirror producing the `other' as his own image. But since where is no other such big mirror than God Himself, the plane on which the problem of Freedom has to be tackled is of meta-physical nature. I could not say of meta-moral nature, because meta (Greek) and moral (Latin), if combined, yield a monstrous etymology. So if we agree to use ethics for morality in establishing our comparison, and keep poetry to designate the art which transcends the other ordinary arts, we can summarize this conclusion by establishing the following double proportion:

science = art = morality

metaphysics poetry metaethics using Latin words in the domain of finitude and multiplicity, and Greek ones in the domain of the Infinite Oneness.

University of Berne

Berne, Switzerland

¹Purposely, I do not translate the French word liberté (the unique one available in French) by `liberty' in English, for in English liberty designates primarily the state of being free from captivity, imprisonment, slavery, or despotic control (of. The Concise Oxford Dictionary).