The Art of Freedom

On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence

Juliane Rebentisch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745682136, 9780745682129
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The concept of democratic freedom refers to more than the kind of freedom embodied by political institutions and procedures. Democratic freedom can only be properly understood if it is grasped as the expression of a culture of freedom that encompasses an entire form of life. Juliane Rebentisch's systematic and historical approach demonstrates that we can learn a great deal about the democratic culture of freedom from its philosophical critics.

From Plato to Carl Schmitt, the critique of democratic culture has always been articulated as a critique of its ãaestheticization". Rebentisch defends various phenomena of aestheticization Ð from the irony typical of democratic citizens to the theatricality of the political Ð as constitutive elements of democratic culture and the notion of freedom at the heart of its ethical and political self-conception.

This work will be of particular interest to students of Political Theory, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

PART I
An Antique Diagnosis of a Crisis

1
The Provocative Beauty of Democracy: Plato

For Plato, as for all classical philosophers, “politeia” does not so much characterize a community's constitution as it does its way of life. This way of life, however, is said to depend on what counts as its highest good.¹ According to the classics, this is what ties together the different perspectives of ethics and politics. Plato claims that in a democracy with its corresponding way of life or – as we would call it today – culture, this supreme good bears the name of “freedom.” Therefore, the true object of Plato's reflections on democracy, for which he uses Socrates² as his mouthpiece in Book Eight of The Republic,³ is the idea of freedom that is constitutive of democratic culture. Although – as Plato has Socrates observe coolly – some might regard democracy as especially colorful and perhaps even as the “fairest regime” (Rep 557c) given that it allows for ethical diversity and the freedom to choose one's own way of life, it is nevertheless second bottom in Plato's hierarchy of forms of government, just above tyranny. For Plato, democracy's fair appearance is misleading, and he argues that the democratic “thirst for freedom” (Rep 562c) necessarily leads to unfreedom. It privileges the desires, thereby undermining rational judgment, destabilizing the will, and producing individuals who are weak in every respect – even politically. Plato condemns the man who is “well disposed toward the multitude” (558c) as a man of dazzling weakness and the colorful diversity of democratic culture as a sure sign of its decline. Democratic aestheticization is consequently a harbinger of tyranny.

This is not a diagnosis to which we will readily agree. However, even in the context of an apologia for democracy and its beauty, we are well advised to examine the concept of democratic freedom in the contrasting light of a radically opposed position. For it is often the case that those who seek to banish a concept from our practical and theoretical consciousness have a particularly strong sense of its implications.

1. Freedom and Indeterminacy

Curiously enough, Plato's investigation of democracy focuses on freedom rather than equality, though he does not provide any further justification for doing so. Instead he has Socrates quote democrats' self-understanding, i.e. the widespread opinion that freedom constitutes democracy's highest good (Rep 557b and Rep 562b). He begins his discussion with an empirical observation of the self-understanding of democratic culture that is implicit in democratic discourse. He views the democratic principle of equality as a mere corollary of exousia, i.e. democratically granted freedom, according to which one has the “licence…to do whatever one wants” (Rep 557b). This license is granted to all persons regardless of their status or birth, to “equals and unequals alike” (Rep 558c). Democratic equality has no substance and is not founded on similarities; it is entirely formal, applying to anyone and everyone living in freedom. Yet Plato's first objection concerns the implication that anybody can invoke the principle of democracy in order to speak in its name. After all, exousia implies the permission to speak freely, even for those who seek to persuade and seduce the masses.⁴ This necessarily creates an opening that can be exploited by charismatic figures who equate their own will with that of the democratic community as a whole, thereby presuming to have authority and potentially subverting the dominant authorities. In a democracy, as Plato has Socrates explain, nothing is obligatory. The democratic idea of freedom compels nobody to exercise authority or to submit to it against their will. People need not fight in wartime, and they may wage a private war in peacetime. They need not be forbidden from holding political or judicial office (Rep 557e). In a democracy, even citizens punished with death or exile can be pardoned (Rep 558a). In principle, anyone who wishes to found a state can simply pick and choose a constitution at will, as if they were in a “bazaar” (pantopolion). Given the freedom (exousia) it allows, democracy can entail “all species of regimes” (Rep 557d).

It is striking how topical this classical diagnosis remains even – or perhaps especially – today.⁵ Hardly any state today would not claim to be democratic. The modern age has not only witnessed constitutional monarchies and parliamentary, presidential, liberal, and welfare-state democracies, but also people's democracies in the Soviet Union or in China, as well as various military dictatorships which have adorned themselves with the title of democracy. Here we might think of Franco's so-called organic democracy in Spain or Trujillo's “Neo-Democracy” in the Dominican Republic. “Democracy” apparently specifies neither a particular form of government nor a particular kind of constitution, rather the term is characterized by its very indeterminacy. This is not the result of some theoretical incapacity; the indeterminacy of democracy, i.e. its dependence on performative and formative acts, must be grasped as one of its essential features. Doing so has always been one of the major challenges facing any theory of democracy.

According to Plato, the indeterminacy of democracy is originally due to exousia, i.e. the democratic freedom to do as one wishes. The term goes back to the impersonal expression exesti (“it is permitted, lawful”) and associates freedom with opportunities or freedom of action. This meaning bears an astounding resemblance to our contemporary, liberal idea of negative freedom, though the modern concept of subjective rights, which associates the liberal concept of negative freedom with the protection of individual ways of life from external threats, is foreign to the concept of exousia.⁶ Aside from this difference, both the political discourse of antiquity and the liberal concept of negative freedom raise the same difficult question: What is the scope of a concept of freedom founded on the freedom to act as one pleases?⁷ Even the neutral meaning of exousia can potentially be abused and turned into hubris, licentiousness, recklessness, arrogance; in short, transgressions cannot be excluded from its conceptual horizon. According to Plato, this is precisely what makes exousia problematic not only for the community as a whole, but also for the lives of individuals within that community.

At the level of the community, which, because of its democratic foundations, cannot defend itself from power-hungry rogues, “an extreme of liberty” (Rep 564a) within democratic exousia will lead at some point to “an extreme of subjection,” i.e. tyranny (ibid.). Moreover, and more importantly for our purposes, Plato cautions that we should distrust the fair appearance of democratic culture even before it turns into tyranny. He has Socrates claim that, like a “cloak (himation) decorated in all hues,” democratic culture is “decorated with all dispositions” and that many “would judge this the fairest of regimes,” just as would “boys and women looking at many-colored things.” But unlike women and children, the philosopher cannot be content to take pleasure in the colorful diversity of a culture in which everybody lives as they please. The task of the philosopher is instead to see through the fair appearance of the democratic patchwork. Beneath this fair appearance, the philosopher finds nothing of substance, and this constitutes democracy's most severe flaw. Not only is a democratic constitution a mere cloak (or disguise) that can be tailored at will, the way of life privileged by democratic society essentially lacks any substance. Both its form of government and its way of life can take on the most diverse appearances. At the level of democratic culture, those who can easily assume different identities most clearly embody the democratic idea of freedom. Democratic “man” is characterized by his “versatility,” and “the attractiveness of his combination of a wide variety of characteristics” matches “the variety of the democratic society. It's a life which many men and women would envy, it contains patterns of so many constitutions and ways of life” (Rep 561e).

In this sense as well, Plato's diagnosis is astoundingly topical. The presence of those who have mastered the art of living (Lebenskünstler), as well as the general recognition their experimental lifestyles enjoy, count as the hallmark of modern Western democracies.⁸ Similar to the problem of democratic government, Plato sees the major problem of democratic self-government in the indeterminacy that is only partially cloaked by its various manifestations. In both cases he sees the source of this problem in an exaggerated notion of freedom, which dominates both government and self-government and thus unifies the dimensions of ethics and politics in the democratic way of life. It is only logical, therefore, that Plato should base his critique of democracy on this understanding of freedom.

The ethical problem of self-government is especially significant in this connection. If the essence of a society is defined by what is considered its highest good, then the way of life that embodies this good most completely will be its most definitive way of life. A critique of democracy must show that its dominant form of life does not live up to the ideal of a truly good life. In other words, it will have to demonstrate that this form of life does not fulfill its claim to enable freedom. Democratic freedom must be proven deficient with regard to the very masters of the art of living who embody this freedom most completely. Therefore, a defense of democracy, its understanding of freedom, and the diversity of its culture must begin by addressing this argument. The point is not merely to defend democrats' propensity for experimentation and their interest in innovation against the conservative mindset of the traditionalists, as has so often been done. Instead, it is a matter of finding the proper understanding of freedom in the first place.

2. The Slavery of the Tyrant

In an initial, preparatory step, the critical thrust of Plato's complex objection to the democratic form of life becomes especially apparent when he seeks to demonstrate the inner connection between democracy and its opposite, tyranny. On the level of self-government, just as on the level of government, the figure of the tyrant is paradigmatic of that unfreedom to which democratic freedom's own lack of restraint must ultimately lead. Although a tyrant never imposes restrictions upon himself and thus represents an extreme case of a person who does whatever he wants, Plato argues that he cannot be called “free.” The tyrant's incapacity for moderation and restraint instead makes him a slave to his own desires. A life determined exclusively by desires therefore depends on things to whose existence and stimuli we react in a merely passive way; it focuses solely on individual things, rather than on the principles that transcend these individual impressions. This is a life that is necessarily unstable. At ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Origins of the Text
• Introduction: Aestheticization – An Apologia
• PART I: An Antique Diagnosis of a Crisis
• PART II: The Ethical-Political Right of Irony
• PART III: Democracy and Aestheticization
• Index
• End User License Agreement