A Social Theory of Freedom

Mariam Thalos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138931589
• eBook ISBN: 9781317394945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory, rather than a theory that places itself in opposition to the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent's conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one's aspirations and one's circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one's self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one's life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a political one.

Part I
Freedom Is a Logic

1 An Existential Prelude

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

—Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

The main character of Toni Morrison’s brilliant novel Song of Solomon utters this line in a moment of clarity. It shall serve as the refrain of my book, my existential anthem. Coiled within its deceptively simple sentiment is an understanding of freedom as a return on investment—an investment constituted by struggle, specifically against chains. The chains are crucial, as is the apprehension of their true function. The message I aim to bring out is that one has to make of oneself someone who is free. A free person is a freed person—better yet, a self-freed person. Thus it is no more a mark of freedom to rage against ineluctable physics or immutable human biology than simply to wish away impediments of every kind. Freedom is not simply a matter of being unencumbered. Impediments are simply not the point.

Freedom, by contrast with idle daydreaming, is a matter of intelligent struggle. It is the intelligence of the struggle that renders it freedom. This book will be arguing that freedom is a logical relationship—a certain intelligent distance—between one’s circumstances (which may include the demands of others) and one’s own aspirations, which are actions (and powerful ones) in their own right. Freedom is not a simple material reality, although it rests on a variety of capacities inherent in the living matter that comprises us (notably, but not exclusively, cognitive capacities on which aspirations rest). In other words, freedom is much less concerned with how events are brought about, and more concerned with how certain aspects of a person’s life fit together, past to future, within that person’s conceptualization of things. And while I shall insist upon intelligent struggle, I shall not insist upon intellectual struggle. Freedom is not academic.

I will present a full-fledged theory of the operations of freedom in Chapters 2 and 3. The present chapter presents material preliminary to that theory, material meant to situate the theory in the context of current and recently inhabited philosophical territory in both Anglo-American and European contexts.

My conception of freedom emerges from within a certain framework, namely the framework wrought at least in its infancy by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Mine is thus a conception of freedom worked out partly from within a specific branch of the existential tradition. But mine is not precisely that existentialism; it is instead a cousin or extension of it. It is an extension hospitable to the social and cognitive sciences, especially those sciences that throw light on the nature of social struggle, whereas initial explications of existentialism in the Sartrean school were very self-consciously anti-science—demanding resistance to limiting human universals, particularly as regards gender and race.¹

Still, without engagement with the seminal ideas in the writings of Sartre and Beauvoir, my ideas would have been malformed, underdeveloped and fundamentally lacking in depth. The insights that Beauvoir and Sartre can lend are profoundly illuminating, though unfortunately their writings are not as well studied in Anglo-American strands of philosophy today as they deserve to be. In tribute to Sartre and Beauvoir, I shall present some of the ideas we share in common first, while simultaneously marking my dissent at critical points, until it will be time to take leave entirely of these intellectual benefactors. I will signal that fork in the road when we reach it.

It is fair to say that Sartrean existentialism has few friends in today’s academy. Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of the Good presents a scathing caricature of that branch of existentialism, representing it as the intellectual veneer upon a posh lifestyle. I will strive to show that this indictment is undeserved.² Sartrean existentialism unites in a distinctive way two elemental insights that are found nowhere else together: (1) the insight that phenomenological analysis—the analysis of experience from the “inside”—counts for little unless it can be fused with an analysis of agency from the “outside,” and one (moreover) with room in it for freedom; and (2) an analysis of encounters with loci of foreign subjectivity (“Others”) that represent the permanent possibility of systemic, irresolvable conflict. When forged together, these elemental insights constitute a worthy humanism as well as a foundation for social science. Moreover, such an existentialism is a fitting companion to every form of liberationist activism. It is capable of fomenting revolutions of the kind most devoutly to be wished for.

The Impossibility of Freedom?

Philosophy since the era of Immanuel Kant has been skeptical of the idea that there is room for freedom in any “objective” (or as philosophers in the European tradition say, “transcendental”) description of the world: freedom is in evidence only from a non-objective vantage point (indeed it can have no bearing on how things really are in themselves³). This is Kant’s legacy. Such a position might well be supposed furthered by a certain argument, due to Thomas Nagel, that he has advanced independently, about different “points of view.” In the opening paragraphs of The View From Nowhere (1986, 3), Nagel announces that he will be grappling with

a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole…. [And t]hough it is a single problem, it has many aspects. The difficulty of reconciling the two standpoints arises in the conduct of life as well as in thought. It is the most fundamental issue about morality, knowledge, freedom, the self, and the relation of mind to the physical world.

But what exactly is this problem Nagel speaks of? Why is there any difficulty at all with integrating a first-personal perspective with what Nagel calls an “objective” perspective—something that I shall more neutrally refer to as a non-personal or apersonal perspective?

It appears to Nagel that, “given a complete specification of the condition of the agent and circumstances of action, it is not clear how this would leave anything further for the agent to contribute to the outcome—anything that he could contribute as source, rather than merely as the scene of the outcome” (113–4). For in any non-personal perspective on the world, “we cease to face the world and instead become part of it; we and our lives are seen as products and manifestations of the world as a whole” (114). In other words, since the world contains no subjects, because “everything I do or that anyone does is part of a larger course of events that no one ‘does’, but that happens, with or without explanation,” it must not contain any freedom either (114).

My argument will show that Nagel’s quandary is no quandary at all. The reconciliation Nagel speaks of is decidedly impossible (as he rightly thinks), though for quite different and indeed trivial reasons. The reconciliation he speaks of is impossible because his own construal of “points of view” simply dictates that it is. Nagel seems to believe that the reconciliation is impossible because the non-personal perspective entails that actions are events in the world to which the agent can contribute as a “source rather than merely as the scene of the outcome.” The agent, in that point of view, seems to dissolve into a puddle of “risk factors” or something of the kind, rather than to hold together as an engine and hence source of outcomes. I say that even if it’s true that the apersonal viewpoint carries an entailment that entities embedded in it are decidedly not sources, the entailment does not come from authoritative axioms regarding how to construe non-personal perspectives. So we should simply reject Nagel’s construal. For why should someone who acknowledges the apersonal viewpoint as a legitimate one also accept axioms that enjoy the entailments Nagel speaks of? There are no indefeasible reasons for doing so. It is quite sensible to refuse such axioms and hold out for a different characterization of the apersonal point of view, one without these implications—especially if one is (for one simple example) conducting a social-scientific inquiry that draws on elements of game theory.

But more importantly, I will insist that one should not conflate “points of view,” on the one hand, with “axioms,” on the other. If there is any entailment of Nagel’s conclusion (to the effect that the agent is no source but is instead merely “scene” in the apersonal point of view), it must come from a true analysis of the ontology and metaphysics of a point of view. The form of words Nagel uses suggests a phenomenological approach—he seems to suggest that he is providing analysis of points of view. But he nowhere offers a phenomenological analysis of this topic. To attain a true phenomenology of the point of view, we have to proceed differently—the way we ourselves shall be proceeding, for instance, following the lead of the incomparable Jean-Paul Sartre.

There are to be sure important metaphysical features of points of view—features that can be adduced through a phenomenological analysis. And it is indeed correct that these features have bearing on the question Nagel raises. But Nagel’s own framework—the analysis he himself produces—does not genuinely treat these features of points of view at all. His analysis simply does not capture what it is to have a point of view. It misses entirely the characteristic elements. That is its deep flaw, in light of its stated objectives. Once the phenomenology of points of view is revealed—as it will be once we turn to a Sartrean analysis instead—we will notice a true conflict. But in no way does this true conflict amount to irreconcilability between points of view, in the logical sense that Nagel has in mind. Thus Nagel does not cast doubt on the objectivity of freedom, any more than did Kant. But Nagel’s error suggests that we require rather better understanding of freedom than we have had so far—an understanding that does not merely put it as the contrary of determinism. It is now time to deliver on some of these promissory notes.

Points of View

Freedom applies (when it does) to occasions of action. But how can we conceive of action as even potentially an opportunity for exercising freedom? The iconic model of action in contemporary analytic philosophy is as an event consequent upon a pair of other events, understood as the occasioning of two mental attitudes: one, a desire, and the other a companion belief about how that desire can be satisfied in the present circumstances. Furthermore, the consequence relation is construed as a specimen of causal relation: desire plus belief conjointly cause action. I will refer to this as the interventionist conception of action because it proposes that action is an intervention in an ongoing stream of events connected by relations of cause and effect. If this were the only way to construe action, then quite plausibly Nagel’s contentions would be unavoidable; certainly there is no reason here to postulate a space for freedom, and quite possibly to do so is to court incoherencies. But there is plenty of reason to question the interventionist model as an adequate or complete conception of action.

In 1979, John Perry published an influential paper that began thus:

I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.

I believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making a mess. And I was right. But I didn’t believe that I was making a mess. That seems to be something I came to believe. And when I came to believe that, I stopped following the trail around the counter, and rearranged the torn sack in my cart.

(Perry 1979, 3)

Perry writes that before he believed it was he himself who was making the mess, the only appropriate response open to him, as someone who desired the mess-making halted, is to search out the mess-maker. When he learned that that person was himself, the options suddenly changed. And that the only difference between the former condition and the latter is a specification of belief utilizing an indexical such as “I,” “here” or “now”—whose elimination removes our ability to act directly upon the relevant scene.⁴

By contrast, I don’t believe that indexicals, as such, have much to do with the basic preconditions for action. (To believe as much is to set oneself up to repeat Nagel’s mistake since that takes the phenomenology out of focus and brings to the fore instead the ways we describe it.) “Essential indexicals” are symptomatic of a deeper requirement for action: in order to take appropriate action, the would-be agent must appreciate her- or himself as situated vis-à-vis the action context in a way that makes changing something about that context conceivable. The agent must be able to embed her or his point of view within the larger scene. More precisely, the agent must be able to appreciate how she or he is embedded vis-à-vis that scene. This requirement goes beyond the interventionist conception. But it is not, as such, a matter of indexical belief. We have to recognize that many non-human animals without language, and certainly without indexicalized language, are nonetheless capable of action in relevant ways, even if they are not sophisticated agents in the ways that humans can be (at least some of them). But even the naive agent must appreciate how his or her point of view intersects upon the scene on which she or he would act.⁵ To recognize that this does not come to the same thing as utilizing an indexical, one only needs to notice that appreciating one’s embedding in a scene is a much larger requirement than being able to say (for instance) that I am the mess-maker; the former requirement demands a much greater command of the details of the scene than the latter. So, for example, someone appreciating a narrative of days gone by as historical or completely fictional will appreciate that their point of view does not admit of action upon any narrated scene in that narrative simply because they command the details of their own embeddedness vis-à-vis the target environment. Relatedly, someone looking at a photograph of Perry’s sugar trail, taken from Perry’s own vantage point once he learns that he is the mess-maker, does not automatically have the options that Perry reports finally feeling empowered to pursue. Agency requires at the very least that one has some command over the details of one’s point of view in relation to the target environment. Agency is thus very demanding in metaphysical terms; but its demands are not linguistic. It demands an appreciation of one’s point of view in relation to a scene or environment in view. It demands appreciation of details that amounts to what one can only refer to as command of the situation—indeed to the point where one is actually creating one’s little corner of the world. This condition is what Sartre would refer to as being for-itself. It is, for Sartre, a precondition of being a conscious subject of experience. I will be contending that this is the very logic of experience. In my view, action is intertwined with and consequent upon experience of this sort. Thus an account of agency must emerge from an analysis of this type of experience. This is existentialism.

In Favor of Freedom

I shall simply stipulate that from here on out, when I say “existentialism” or “existentialist,” I will be referring to the existentialism of Sartre and his circle, as well as those who participated later on in the program of research he launched—such writers (and they were initially all French thinkers) as Beauvoir or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The word “existentialism” is used in many ways, and I don’t mean to deny anyone else the right to use it as they wish. Indeed it is used within the discipline of philosophy to embrace also the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, among many others. I shall not be engaging in any substantial way with the ideas propounded by these thinkers. However, to alleviate the burden of unrelenting qualifiers for this book’s readership, I will simply dispense with the adjective “Sartrean” when I wish to refer to the brand of existentialis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Freedom Is a Logic
• 1 An Existential Prelude
• 2 Freedom Worth Wanting
• 3 The Grammar of Experience and the Logic of Freedom
• 4 Existential Syllogisms
• Beyond the Logic of Freedom
• 5 The Difference a New Conception of Action Makes
• 6 Paradoxes of Freedom
• Existential Foundations of Social Science
• 7 Self-Making
• 8 Love Relationships The Space for Self-Making
• 9 Alliance and Solidarity
• Conclusion The Meaning of It All
• References
• Index