nate, diane, alfred, others?
i have been trying to finish my response to Alfred's long posts on the
questions of the ideal and the movement from abstract to concrete and as so
often happens, other things start popping up in the meantime so . . .
hopefully some of the themes aren't just of momentary interest . . . but I
want to comment on this loose thread about freedom.
the theme of freedom that Alfred introduced seems to me to be more
ideologically laden than any other ideas brought up so far. not only is
there no "fact" that can be pointed to as corresponding to freedom, it's
very meaning can only be found by way of negation. and at the basis of any
freedom that's all you can inevitably find: negation pure and simple. Hegel
wrote extensively about freedom (as did all of the 18th century philosophes
from which time the great ideological notion of freedom springs onto the
stage -- slaves and serfs weren't contrasted to the free, they were
contrasted to citizens and nobility). initially the only freedom is
abstract negation, that empty transcendence that has nothing whatsoever for
its content. In the movie "Hurricane" this the great secret the Ruben
"Hurricane" Carter explained over and over to the Canadians who wanted to
liberate him from prison. He simply negated all human contact, everything,
he wanted nothing (he negated his desire) and therefor was free even in
prison, even in the hole with no light, or bed, or toilet, etc. this empty,
abstract freedom, which Sartre explored so deeply and totally as the
fundamental structure of consciousness itself, is the only form individual
transcendence of anything ever assumes -- nothingness plain and simple. and
Sartre also emphasized responsibility, but only in the sense that being
nothing, there was no thing that could be responsible for your condition:
not men, not patriarchy, not the bourgeoisie, not the landlords, not selling
Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918, etc. all of that was simply bad faith,
self-deception, it's not that the fact you were being exploited in the salt
mines since you were born a slave that was responsible for anything since
you could abstractly transcend that . . . quite buddhistic really . . .
perhaps it would be more fruitful to inquire into what experience we
attribute to our use of of the word "freedom" . . . as soon as freedom has
content it's something else, it's power, power over things and/or people,
and all power comes from outside any individual . . . from the individuals
negation of the negation of its own freedom, through the bad faith of
accepting something as what you are, because you aren't really anything
except that empty, abstract negation. What content could freedom possibly
have without becoming unfree, becoming power, and ultimately participating
in limiting freedom.
and we do have that cute little logical detail: a negation of a negation is
positive, but an affirmation of an affirmation is also positive,
consequently (as Russel and Whitehead, following Scheffler clearly
understood), the negation is all that is needed.
in other words guess it simply means that talking about freedom is talking
about nothing, its talk about emptiness, although i'm not sure if that means
its empty talk, it just seems that it doesn't have any content, freedom that
is..
so it's surprising to me, that in light of everything else Alfred writes
about looking at relations between concrete things (which i am still
waiting to have him identify), he should appeal to freedom which is not only
one of the most ideologically charged words of the entire period since the
18th century but one that also only has a truly and totally abstract
meaning.
Paul H. Dillon
'freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose,
and nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free.'
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