Liberty is overrated; we should direct our efforts more to liberation. Liberty is a state, liberation a process. Can freedom ever be achieved as a state? We know what it has always meant: Im a property owner too, so give me liberty! The man in the ghetto has only his body as his property; what can he do with that? When has liberty ever meant anything but the rights of certain people with a certain quantity of property to exercise domination over others in the name of their freedom and their right? You can see this with feminism and black liberation, which in the hands of a triumphant liberalism have meant black and women bosses and managers who had better be obeyed like all bosses, but with the added alibi that if you criticize their power you are taking advantage of their weakness and oppression that are constitutive of their identities as members of these groups. Furthermore, is liberation empowerment in any sense, including that of autonomy and self-management. Self-rule has always been for those ruling others. Feeding workers and poor people ideologies of self-management and success is a way of subjecting most of them to management more broadly and a few of them to opportunities to realize happiness in the name of mere success and power. Popular sovereignty, or power to the people, one of the great bourgeois ideologemes, is a dead end and always was. It always means some leaders rule in the name of the people they represent. We need a new political philosophy. I prefer liberation to liberty in part because of its relativity. And because liberty is inseparable from autonomy and responsibility and property and management and security, national and otherwise. It is a complete dead-end. Liberation is from oppression, but oppression means weighed down and liberation means becoming free and is always a process. We will always be somewhat weighed down as long as there is nature and finitude, including embodiment and death. The absolutely liberated person is freed from his body and language and, in his after-life in utopia or nowhere, he has attained nothingness in place of being. The relatively liberated person is less determined by his body, family, history, and language than he was yesterday. We can conceive of progress in this way. Indeed, a fully realized progress, the end of history, is an absurdity, unless we define it to mean some big and so far always decisive burden freedom from which will seem totalizing in a certain way. Another way of putting this is that we must abandon the Platonic idealism of thinking that the good and aspects of it can be instituted in an effectively absolute fashion. Though of course all ideas that we could take up as ideals imply something of the sort. Liberation is not an entelechy that approaches God or completion, because it is not modeled on a narrative that makes historical time the story (literally, history or lhistoire). There is no single line to which all events are reducible; if anything, particular events create their own lines or spaces and the idea of a grand narrative is one of a time that is determined by a single term or event, which might be the arche or origin or the telos or final cause or both. We need process without cause, without an essential meaning. Meanings are plural unless there is a God and this God has an architectural plan for what will happen, but in that case the future is determined and is not the realization of possibility. There is no God who is cause of Being and master of the universe of space and time. There is no God because there is no universe. What we think of as such in cosmology can be useful thought as such from a certain perspective but to do so is to assume that nature speaks a language, and only one language at that. Does the past exist at least? We have recollections and it is possible to ascertain that there are events that have happened. Do they have a logic? Yes, but only in a theory that is an interpretation of them, arrived at for some purpose in the present related to possibilities and projects. Thus it is technological. I have not arrived at a solution to this problem, but in the modern world change is progress and desirable, and I am not convinced we should abandon that perspective. The question is what kinds of change will we have, and for whose benefit?
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 06:37:41 +0000
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