by JL Wall

Two weeks ago (but I’m just now getting to it) Patrick Deneen helped reiterate a point that I’ve become particularly keen on over the past year or so:

My argument, in a nutshell, is that the liberal arts were based on the teaching of an older form of liberty, namely the liberty that is achieved through self-governance. Its role has been increasingly displaced with the rise of the new liberty – achieved through the new sciences – namely, the liberty from limits aimed at the fulfillment of our desires.

and

For the humanities – the older science – liberty had been understood to be the achievement of hard discipline, the learned capacity to govern appetite and desire, to tame the unlimited cravings of the will and achieve a condition of self-government. For the new science, liberty was constituted by the removal of obstacles, by the overcoming of limits, by the transformation of the world – whether the world of nature, over which humans increasingly exercised control by means of science and applied technologies, or even the nature of humanity itself, a nature that was believed to be as malleable as nature had proven to be.

Case in point, for me: Sophokles’ Antigone is just as ill-at-ease with the title character as it is with Kreon, despite the fact that she follows the laws of the gods and he refuses to, despite the fact that her individualism sits better with modern audiences than Kreon’s blind near-authoritarianism.  A polis in which there is only one vote is not a polis, Kreon Haimon [EDITED 4/15: Whoops! -- JLW] says.  And, in the eyes of the play, neither have liberty and neither is the ideal citizen.  Antigone’s interpretations of what is right, her radical freedom from any restraint, separates her from society as much as Kreon’s decrees do him — this despite the fact that she is right to offer her brother the minimal burial rites required by the gods.  One could not be free except among fellow freemen, within society.  Say what one will about the particulars, it is a liberty that requires restraint and responsibility.

Or, since we’re in the proper season for it: Pesach is a celebration of liberation from slavery.  It is a deliverance into freedom, however, that culminates with the reception of the law and the Covenant at Sinai.  Deliverance into freedom required the revelation and acceptance of responsibility.

Freedom isn’t just another word for nothing left to lose. (The word you were looking for, Mr. Kristofferson, is “desperation,” or, if you needed more syllables, “Backed up against a wall.”  Neither actually give you choice, just alternatives that you might sometimes confuse for it.)

     Filed under: civil liberties, education