In Law, a freedom is a Hohfeldian immunity to do a certain thing at a certain place, at a certain time, with certain people. It is a justiciable matter. Are two consenting adults, in the privacy of their own home, free to engage in a particular type of sexual, commercial, political or other activity? If yes, does this freedom extend to engaging in that activity in public? Courts and Legislatures may decide these questions in one way. Mass movements and political campaigns may challenge such decisions.
This has always been obvious to Anglo-America which has a Common Law- not a Civil Law- tradition. The endogenous provision of incentive compatible freedoms under bonds of law has been a great driver of economic growth and social change in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. One may say this is done under the rubric of 'artificial reason' rather than anything metaphysical, theological, or arising from notions of 'Enlightened' despotism. At one time, it may have been thought that the pedantic Germans or the garrulous Gaul could arrive at sustainable mechanisms for ensuring freedom prevailed but, for Hannah Arendt's generation, this was obviously false. Yet, old habits die hard. Having run away to America, the silly bint wrote-
To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a hopeless enterprise.
It was so successful an enterprise that America, which was dedicated to finding good answers to that question, was able to rescue a goodly portion of Western Europe from tyranny.
It is as though age-old contradictions and antinomies
easily resolvable with a ramified type theory or just by 'buck stopped' protocol bound juristic decisions such that relevant 'intensions' come to have sufficiently well-defined 'extensions' for most practical purposes
were lying in wait to force the mind into dilemmas of logical impossibility so that, depending which horn of the dilemma you are holding on to, it becomes as impossible to conceive of freedom or its opposite as it is to realize the notion of a square circle.
No. It was as though Arendt was either too lazy or too stupid or too financially dependent on peddling the gibberish she had been taught, to admit the bleeding obvious.
In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience,
Our conscience is part of our consciousness. So is our ability to do arithmetic. I felt it was against my conscience to do my Arithmetic homework. But this was not because of any antimony or contradiction. It was because I was and am a lazy cunt.
telling us that we are free and hence responsible,
No. If you have an immunity, i.e. a freedom, to do or not do a certain thing, then you are under no obligation in that respect and thus can't be held responsible by any authority for what you chose to do with your freedom. Thus I am free to watch TV rather than learn Arithmetic. True, you may say I am responsible for my own poverty and ignorance but I can get my own back by saying you are responsible for shoving your own head up your own arse so as to feast upon the turds stored in your bowels. In other words, if you talk nonsense, I can talk nonsense of a yet more insulting type.
and our everyday experience in the outer world, in which we orient ourselves according to the principle of causality.
Utility, maybe. Causality- fuck off. In the Social World, what is observationally accessible is correlation not causality
In all practical and especially in political matters we hold human freedom to be a self-evident truth,
No. We hold that guys who wrote the American constitution said they considered various things 'self evident'. But we also hold that they only got to do so because they won, and kept winning, wars. But winning wars has a lot to do with economics and doing deals and creating and sustaining alliances based on material interests. It has nothing to do with stupid shit taught by useless pedants.
and it is upon this axiomatic assumption that laws are laid down in human communities,
No. Positive law is law as command. The assumption is that the command will be enforced. If people believe the command won't or can't be enforced, it is not a command. It is a dead letter.
that decisions are taken, that judgments are passed.
No. Decisions and judgments are utilitarian in nature and are based on trade offs between costs and benefits.
In all fields of scientific and theoretical endeavor, on the contrary, we proceed according to the no less self-evident truth of 'nihil ex nihilo'
No actual scientist or economic or other useful type of theorist bothers with any such assumption. The plain fact is 'axioms' come from nothing. They may be useful. They may not. But in either case there is nothing real or true or substantial associated with these axioms or principles or laws.
of nihil sine causa,
Fuck off! You say 'there must be some cause for your refusal to admit that you want to suck me off. I think it is because your Mother did a real number on you.' I kick you in the slats. My point is we don't always know what is real but we do know that there are lots of imaginary things to which equally imaginary causes are attributed.
The truth is that the truth does not matter. Only what is useful does.
that is, on the assumption that even "our own lives are, in the last analysis, subject to causation"
there is no 'last analysis'. Correlation exists for some things, not others, and it is useful to establish when and where it exists. Causation does not matter. I want to know how you made money. I don't want to know what caused you to make money. This is because I want to make money. I don't want to know why your toilet training caused you to become 'anal retentive' and thus predisposed you to get rich.
and that if there should be an ultimately free ego in ourselves,
we should charge it rent?
it certainly never makes its unequivocal appearance in the phenomenal world, and therefore can never become the subject of theoretical ascertainment.
Empirical ascertainment. Theoretically you can ascertain any theoretical shite whatsoever.
Hence freedom turns out to be a mirage
but that mirage turns out to be a rhinoceros which turns out to be an aubergine which turns out to be freedom and not a mirage at all. Anybody can talk nonsense.
the moment psychology looks into what is supposedly its innermost domain;
its innermost domain shits on its eyes.
for "the part which force plays in nature, as the cause of motion, has its counterpart in the mental sphere in motive as the cause of conduct."
The good news about Hohfeldian immunities- i.e. freedoms- is that though anyone is welcome to impute motives to anyone, no such motives need to be proved or otherwise asserted for legal transactions to proceed. Anyway, no one knows what part 'force' plays in nature. Our interest in nature has to do with living more securely or on a larger scale. 'Forces' are things we seek to harness for productive purposes. Mechanism design is about creating motives for non-coercive solutions to collective actions problems. At one time, there was a notion that elite paideia should inculcate 'motives' to do noble deeds in the children of the rich. But, it was always fucking obvious that the thing was eye-wash. Fear of Hell Fire may restrain the patrician. Fama, fair Fame, however, can be bought and sold.
It is true that the test of causality
correlation can be tested for. Causality is generally beyond our ken.
the predictability of effect if all causes are known cannot be applied to the realm of human affairs;
Yes it can. But all causes, to our current understanding, can't be known in any fucking realm whatsoever.
but this practical unpredictability is no test of freedom, it signifies merely that we are in no position ever to know all causes which come into play, and this partly because of the sheer number of factors involved, but also because human motives, as distinguished from natural forces, are still hidden from all onlookers, from inspection by our fellow men as well as from introspection.
There is no Momus window into the soul. When was this not known?
The greatest clarification in these obscure matters we owe to Kant
who, being from Arendt's own backward shithole of a hometown, had no experience or knowledge of life in a free country or the manner in which mechanisms burgeon such that freedoms becomes more ample and more secure. I suppose Kant hoped that Germany could be unified without the sword. Maybe if everybody adopted a particular way of thinking even the Imperial Diet could start making 'prescriptive judgments' which no Prince or Pope needed to enforce with threats of death or damnation. Sadly, Kant was as stupid as shit.
and to his insight that freedom is no more
or less
ascertainable
or sodomizable by invisible unicorns
to the inner sense
or the thinner sense or the dimmer sense or the sense that you are being sodomized by an invisible unicorn.
and within the field of inner experience than it is to the senses with which we know and understand the world.
Arendt didn't know shit about the world. Still she understood she needed to get the fuck out of the Europe of Kant and Hegel and get to empirical, pragmatic, America which is where the almighty Dollar tree grows.
Whether or not causality is operative in the household of nature and the universe, it certainly is a category of the mind to bring order into all sensory data,
No it isn't. It is merely a defeasible hypothesis. We don't care about the cause. We want to change the effect.
whatever their nature may be, and thus it makes experience possible.
Stupid shit inside the heads of stupid shitheads does not make anything possible or impossible or secure from sodomization by invisible unicorns.
Hence the antinomy between practical freedom and theoretical non-freedom,
But 'freedom' wasn't given to Kant by his reason. It was given to him by books written by Scottish or English dudes or French dudes who had been influenced by them. But the substance arose out of political and judicial developments in a Seventeenth Century England of which Kant had little understanding.
To say ' everything, including the will, is subject to natural laws' is to utter an impredicative statement with no informative content e.g. 'everything is sodomization by an invisible unicorn including unicorns and invisibility and sodomization'. The problem here is that relevant 'intensions' have no well defined 'extensions'. The words being used aren't connected to anything or, equally, can be connected to everything. True, if you use impressive words like 'Necessity' and 'Freedom', people may think you are profound whereas if you mention sodomy and invisible unicorns they may think you are taking the piss. But, in both cases, there is a common logical structure- viz. that of 'ex falso quodlibet'. From what is false or nonsensical anything false or nonsensical can be derived.
both equally axiomatic in their respective fields,
which are as utterly shit as the field in which everything is sodomized by invisible unicorns- including sodomy itself.
does not merely concern a dichotomy between science and ethics,
which arises from the difference between what is imperative and what is alethic
but lies in everyday life experiences from which both ethics and science take their respective points of departure.
Fuck off! Everyday life experience has nothing to do with the fact that a few pedants get paid a little money to babble nonsense to privileged adolescents.
It is not scientific theory but thought itself, in its pre-scientific and prephilosophical understanding, that seems to dissolve freedom on which our practical conduct is based into nothingness.
Nothing has ever been dissolved 'into nothingness' for either science or common sense. On the other hand it is true that the sodomization of sodomy by invisible unicorns gets dissolved to nothingness by being sodomized by invisible unicorns though, needless to say, the reverse equally occurs because of the sodomization of sodomy by the invisibility of the unicorn which subjects it to sodomy so incessantly as to dissolve its own essence as the antimony of the apotheosis of the apothecary who sells haemorrhoid medicine to the unicorn self-sodomized by its own ineluctable invisibility.
For the moment we reflect upon an act which was undertaken under the assumption of our being a free agent,
e.g. Arendt's decision to emigrate to the USA
it seems to come under the sway of two kinds of causality, of the causality of inner motivation on one hand
she wanted to be affluent and secure
and of the causal principle which rules the outer world on the other.
She had to get on a boat to get to America because it was on the other side of an ocean
Kant saved freedom from this twofold assault upon it by
learning Kung Fu?
distinguishing between a "pure" or theoretical reason
which is the only thing which can distinguish anything from itself. But it is inaccessible to us. True we can apply such methods of applied reason as are available to us to try to say something about pure reason- but these are mere arbitrary ipse dixit assertions. True, if we knew of a single 'synthetic a priori' truth, we might have some reason to hope otherwise. But no such beastie exists.
Suppose I say 'Socioproctology is a subject only understood by Xartifarters. It was a renegade Xartifarter who revealed this. Sadly, he dropped dead immediately afterwards. In order to distinguish Socioproctology from other disciplines we need to find a Xartifarter.' There is nothing intrinsically wrong or fallacious about my reasoning. If Xartifarters exist and they have the property ascribed to them, then my distinguishing between Socioproctology is useful enough even though the criteria of demarcation is not accessible to me or any other non-Xartifarters. But the last of them may have died out of the world. There is no point making the distinction.
and a "practical reason" whose center is free will,
Surely, the freest will is that which can bring about its object without any further instrument- be it of reason or the imagination or the ineluctability modality of the sodomization of invisible unicorn? The centre of 'practical reason' is pragmatic, utilitarian, calculation and the making and keeping of contracts.
whereby it is important to keep in mind that the free-willing agent, who is practically all important, never appears in the phenomenal world,
He appears all the time in open market. Also, people swiping left on me on Tinder were free agents. It's just that they were intimidated by beauty and pendulous man-boobs.
neither in the outer world of our five senses nor in the field of the inner sense with which I sense myself.
Arendt was incessantly fisting her inner self- right?
This solution, pitting the dictate of the will against the understanding of reason,
you have to will yourself to reason or have a reason to exercise your will-power. Why not pit shitting and farting against each other?
is ingenious enough and may even suffice to establish a moral law whose logical consistency is in no way inferior to natural laws.
Natural laws are not currently consistent with each other or can only be made so by positing things which are as yet not detectable- e.g. Cold Dark Matter or Energy.
But it does little to eliminate the greatest and most dangerous difficulty, namely, that thought itself, in its theoretical as well as its pre-theoretical form, makes freedom disappear
but, thanks to incessant sodomization by invisible unicorns, it immediately reappears
quite apart from the fact that it must appear strange indeed that the faculty of the will whose essential activity consists in dictate and command should be the harborer of freedom.
Why should this be strange? It is well known that the entire faculty has been sodomized by invisible unicorns. Don't ask what their rectums don't now harbour.
To the question of politics, the problem of freedom is crucial, and no political theory can afford to remain unconcerned with the fact that this problem has led into "the obscure wood wherein philosophy has lost its way."
Every political theory can remain unconcerned with stupid shit. The fact is, if you have a better political theory then you could have a better structural causal model of the Polity and thus make a lot of money predicting the results of elections or helping PACs achieve their legislative aims.
It is the contention of the following considerations that the reason for this obscurity is that the phenomenon of freedom does not appear in the realm of thought at all,
Sure it does. American and British Juries had been deciding habeas corpus cases because 'the phenomenon of freedom' appears in the realm of thought and action and the law and economics and international diplomacy. I suppose one could say 'there was no such thing as slavery because some Stoic philosophy uttered some bullshit or because darkies prefer plucking cotton under the lash.'
that neither freedom nor its opposite is experienced in the dialogue between me and myself in the course of which the great philosophic and metaphysical questions arise,
only shitty questions arise in the minds of shitheads who studied nonsense at Uni.
and that the philosophical tradition,
is shit
whose origin in this respect we shall consider later, has distorted,
because it is shit
instead of clarifying, the very idea of freedom
but only as conceived by shitheads who studied shit
such as it is given in human experience by transposing it from its original field, the realm of politics and human affairs in general, to an inward domain, the will, where it would be open to self-inspection.
Arendt's inward domain was shit. Still, as a refugee, she was entitled to make a bit of money peddling useless shite from the old world.
As a first, preliminary justification of this approach, it may be pointed out that historically the problem of freedom has been the last of the time-honored great metaphysical questions
which have always corresponded to stupid and obscene questions
such as being, nothingness,
or shit and the anus of its own anus such that shit might emerge from shit
the soul,
which only matters if there is an after-life
nature,
i.e. the universe
time,
Which turns out to be real mathsy and beyond the comprehension of stupid pedants who studied shite in Collidge
eternity,
which only matters if Heaven exists or if our consciousness could be transferred across material bodies.
etc. to become a topic of philosophic inquiry at all. There is no preoccupation with freedom in the whole history of great philosophy from the preSocratics up to Plotinus, the last ancient philosopher.
This is nonsense. There was always an antinomy with respect to freedom and Fate- i.e. pre-destination. If you accidentally fall down and hurt yourself, how do you know you did not secretly will yourself to do so? Equally, how do you know it wasn't because of the evil plan, involving sodomization by invisible unicorns, by which all things are brought about?
And when freedom made its first appearance in our philosophical tradition,
it does so in discussions of mythological characters. Were the great deeds and the great dooms they came to a matter of accident or of design? Could things have been otherwise? Do Gods make playthings of humans or do humans fabricate their own dark fates which encompass those of the immortal Gods.
It was the experience of religious conversion of Paul first and then of Augustine which gave rise to it.
Nonsense! Saul was a Jew. Jehovah directly intervened in human affairs. Then Christ did so because, it turned out he truly was the son of God. Augustine's importance stems from his declaration that it must always remain a mystery why God predestines some babies to eternal damnation while others will gain Heaven. The Occasionalism of Descartes, Liebniz etc. makes God the only efficient cause. We are monads synchronised in pre-established harmony. Freedom is an illusion. But, everything may be an illusion. Indeed, there may be no 'hypokeimenon' or 'more real' undergirding of reality because there is nothing but a dream of a dream.
The field where freedom has always been known, not as a problem, to be sure, but as a fact of everyday life, is the political realm.
No. It is the judicial/commercial world. The political realm has always recognized there may have to be restrictions on such freedoms under exigent circumstances or for some pressing purpose of public policy.
And even today, whether we know it or not, the question of politics and the fact that man is a being endowed with the gift of action must always be present to our mind when we speak of the problem of freedom;
No. We don't have to keep in mind the fact that people fart or belch or are free to fart and belch when considering any political question which impinges on our Hohfeldian immunities.
for action and politics, among all the capabilities and potentialities of human life, are the only things of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists,
Nonsense! We can have a wholly deterministic structural causal model of the polity or the economy.
and we can hardly touch a single political issue without, implicitly or explicitly, touching upon an issue of man's liberty.
Only in the sense that we can't do so without implicitly or explicitly touching upon the issue of invisible unicorns incessantly all that is.
Freedom, moreover, is not only one among the many problems and phenomena of the political realm properly speaking, such as justice, or power, or equality; freedom, which only seldom in times of crisis or revolution becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all.
No. The desire for greater freedom or opulence or sexual opportunities may be the reason people emigrate. The reason political organizations exist is because they yield rents to those who control them. People may be happy enough to pay these rents if collective action problems are solved well enough thereby.
Without it, political life as such would be meaningless.
No. Political life under a tyranny has meaningful rewards and punishments. Indeed, political activity there may be more intense and dramatic whereas it may be routine and boring in a free society.
The raison d'etre of politics is freedom,
No. It is survival as a collective. Some political regimes may feature lots of Hohfeldian immunities. Some may deprecate the notion that any such exist even if they don't bother to police farts and belches.
and its field of experience is action.
No. It is potential actions- e.g. threat points- which have to be estimated or intuited but which are outside the realm of empirical observation.
This freedom which we take for granted in all political theory and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into account is the very opposite of "inner freedom," the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free.
There is also the inward space of the rectum up which you can stick your head to escape your own stupidity and the realization that you wasted your life studying and teaching nonsense.
This inner feeling remains without outer manifestations and hence is by definition politically irrelevant.
Outer manifestations don't matter in politics. People estimate inward commitment. Are the lickspittles of the regime just going through the motions or are they true believers? Here, it is often the case that, expectations create reality.
Whatever its legitimacy maybe, and however eloquently it may have been described in late antiquity, it is historically a late phenomenon,
No. It is a phenomenon associated with the first agricultural and pastoral revolutions. Even into the nineteenth century, European farmers and pastoralists were moving to far off continents in pursuit of a different bundle of Hohfeldian immunities- i.e. freedoms. Such movements continue in parts of Africa and Latin America and South Asia. Sadly, the freedoms of indigenous peoples are compromised by this process.
and it was originally the result of an estrangement from the world in which worldly experiences were transformed into experiences within one's own self.
This could be said of any experience whatsoever. A mighty fart may be transformed, within one's own self, into a Lutheran driving away of the devil or else, as in my case, into a premonition of that final fart by which I will escape gravity's surly bonds and attain the ultimate escape velocity
The experiences of inner freedom are derivative in that they always presuppose a retreat from the world,
No. They don't presuppose shit. For some going to a rave and dropping E is the gateway. For others it might involve quitting a lonely penthouse apartment for a penitential, over-populated, Ashram.
where freedom was denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access.
Unless they drug you or torture you or just evince a little sympathy.
The inward space where the self is sheltered against the world
doesn't keep you dry in a rain storm.
must not be mistaken for the heart or the mind, both of which exist and function only in interrelationship with the world.
How about the soul?
Not the heart and not the mind, but inwardness as a place of absolute freedom within one's ownself was discovered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in the world and hence lacked a worldly condition which, from early antiquity to almost the middle of the nineteenth century, was unanimously held to be a prerequisite for freedom.
No. Not getting conquered and enslaved was the precondition. True some Stoics said you could be free while yet a galley slave but that's like being fat while being thin or being a cat while being a dog.
The derivative character of this inner freedom, or of the theory that "the appropriate region of human liberty" is the "inward domain of consciousness,"
is stupid shite only worthy of a Hitler worshipping Heidegger.
appears more clearly if we go back to its origins.
in stupid shit some pedants started peddling in Plato's Academy
Not the modem individual with his desire to unfold, to develop, and to expand, with his justified fear lest society get the better of his individuality, with his emphatic insistence "on the importance of genius" and originality, but the popular and popularizing sectarians of late antiquity, who have hardly more in common with philosophy than the name,
which is stupidity
are representative in this respect.
Arendt represented the utter pointlessness of her education. But she also displayed a lively survival instinct. Immigrate to where the pay is better. If you have nothing to bring to market save stupidity, tart up that stupidity in metaphysical rags. Always talk bollocks. You too will find your niche. But freedom isn't about crawling into an octopus pot and dreaming away a summer moon. It is about either choosing to contribute to an incentive compatible solution to a collective action problem re. providing remedies for rights' violations for a bundle of (albeit defeasible) Hohfeldian immunities- i.e. freedoms. Arendt, I suppose, was a nimble enough 'free-rider'. But if everybody is a free-rider there is nothing to be ridden. Still, I suppose, you can still pretend to be inwardly free to mystically defraud the non-existent Welfare system and thus have the last laugh on those who aren't starving to death because they have proper jobs.
No comments:
Post a Comment