Radical Freedom and its Discontents
According to Charles Taylor (Hegel and Modern Society, 1979, pp. 156f), historically the trend toward the radicalization of freedom comes from four key moves. It is an adventure in nihilism. It involves a decontextualization, a shaking loose of the self from definitions of human nature and from the natural world, the cosmic order, social space, or history. This gets back to Michel Foucault’s notion of getting free of oneself and his critique of the present. There are four stages to this move and four consequences.
Stage (a) The new identity of the self-defining subject is won by breaking free of the larger matrix of a cosmic or societal order and its claim. Freedom is defined as self-dependence, and self-sufficiency. It entails a negative concept: freedom is won by breaking the hold of the lower oppressed self (constructed by a disciplinary society for Foucault) so that one might explore one’s potential, experimental self. (Ibid., p. 156)
Stage (b) Human nature is not simply a given, but is to be remade, reinvented. To be integrally free, one must reshape one’s own nature. The only kind of situation which this view can recognize is one defined by the obstacles to unrestricted action, which have to be conquered or set aside as external oppression; liberation is a process which results in freedom from shackles. One of the key shackles is the identity given to one’s self by others. (Ibid., pp. 155, 156)
Stage (c) In this stage, there is a celebration of the Dionysian expressive release of instinctual depths (the uncensored self) of the human animal. ‘Modern society is seen as the oppressor of the spontaneous, the natural, the sensuous or the “Dionysiac” in man’ (Ibid., p. 140). Rooted in Schopenhauer, this dark and pessimistic view of freedom and the human condition leads to despair about freedom understood as self-dependence, because this sort of freedom can release violence and many other forms of negative human self-expression. There is both fear of, and celebration of, such human desires in the third part of Foucault’s oeuvre, the later ethical works.
Stage (d) The final stage of this Nietzschean nihilism is the death of all traditional values (transvaluation of all values) and the admission that ethics is grounded in the will to power. The empty self risks ending in nihilism, that is, self-affirmation through the rejection of all values. One after the other, the authoritative horizons of life, Christian and humanist, are cast off as shackles on the will. Under these circumstances, freedom means dependent in one’s actions only on oneself, lacking accountability to God, principle or society (Ibid., p. 157). Foucault’s ethics seems to include all four stages. He points enthusiastically in the direction of freedom, but does not offer parameters or guidelines of how to proceed, intentionally so. Nor does he offer ways of avoiding or managing the most negative results of this kind of freedom. Read More…
(IVP Academic 2014) is a systematic look at the possibility of moral knowledge in various metaethical systems, with an argument that a theistic, and specifically Christian, worldview is the most plausible way to ground the reality of morals.
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