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Modernising the two ideas of liberty part 2: a tale of two Monks

By George Weigel - posted Thursday, 16 May 2002


The implications of Ockham’s nominalism for the moral life and for politics are not hard to tease out of this brief sketch of his basic philosophical position. In his history of medieval philosophy, Josef Pieper writes that, with Ockham, "extremely dangerous processes were being set in motion, and many a future trouble was preparing." Servais Pinckaers, perhaps today’s premier Catholic analyst of the history of moral philosophy and moral theology, goes so far as to describe Ockham’s work as "the first atomic explosion of the modern era." The atom he split, though, "was . . . not physical but psychic," for Ockham shattered our concept of the human soul and thereby created a new, atomized vision of the human person and, ultimately, of society.

With Ockham, we meet what Pinckaers has called the freedom of indifference.

Here, freedom is simply a neutral faculty of choice, and choice is everything, for choice is a matter of self-assertion, of power. Will is the defining human attribute. Indeed, will is the defining attribute of all of reality. For God, too, is supremely willful, and the moral life as read through Ockhamite lenses is a contest of wills, a contest between my will and God’s imposition of his will through the moral law.

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Ockham’s radical emphasis on the will is an idea with very serious "real world" consequences. Not only does it sever the moral life from human nature (which, for a nominalist, doesn’t exist), but at the same time, and because of that, it severs human beings from one another in a most dramatic way. For there can be no "common good" if there are only the particular goods of particular men and women acting out their own particular willfulness.

Here, in the mid-fourteenth century, is the beginning of what we call today the "autonomy project": the claim that human beings are radically autonomous, self-creating "selves," whose primary relations to others are relations of power. From its Ockhamite beginning, as Pinckaers writes, "freedom of indifference was . . . impregnated with a secret passion for self-affirmation." Thus, over time, freedom was eventually led into the trap of self-interest from which Immanuel Kant tried, unsuccessfully, to rescue it by appeals to a "categorical imperative" that could be known by reason and that would, it was hoped, restore a measure of objectivity to morality. On a long view of the history of ideas, and freely conceding the twists and turns of intellectual fortune along the way, William of Ockham is the beginning of the line that eventually leads to Nietzsche’s "will to power" and its profound effect on the civilization of our times.

Freedom, for Ockham, has little or no spiritual character. The reality is autonomous man, not virtuous man, for freedom has nothing to do with goodness, happiness, or truth. Freedom is simply willfulness. (And if, at this juncture, you hear Frank Sinatra singing "I did it my way" in the back of your mind, you are not mistaken.) Freedom can attach itself to any object, so long as it does not run into a superior will, human or divine. Later in the history of ideas, when God drops out of the equation, freedom comes to be understood in purely instrumental or utilitarian terms. And if the road on which Ockham set out eventually leads to Nietzsche, it also leads, through even more twists and turns, to Princeton’s Peter Singer (author of the major article on "Ethics" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica), and his claim that parents ought to have a few weeks to decide whether their newborn child should be allowed to live. Ideas, indeed, have consequences.

From the Greeks down to Aquinas, every moral philosopher of note had assumed that the pursuit of happiness is the primary moral question.

With William of Ockham, the profound linkages among freedom, virtue, and the pursuit of happiness are sundered: morality is mere obligation, freedom is mere willfulness. When Western thought took a decisively subjectivist turn in the seventeenth century, and when that subjectivism eventually gave birth to a principled skepticism about the human capacity to know anything with confidence, the result, which is much with us today, was the emergence of an intellectual culture of radical moral relativism lacking any thick notion of the common good.

By positing a profound tension between freedom and reason (or, in his construction, will and reason), Ockham created a situation in which there are only two options: determinisms of a biological, racial, or ideological sort, or the radical relativism that, married to irrationalism, eventually yields nihilism. In either case, freedom self-destructs.

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I suggest that this tale of two monks sheds light on why Isaiah Berlin’s "two concepts of liberty" are finally unsatisfactory. Although Berlin concedes at the outset that "political theory is a branch of moral philosophy," he simply does not conjure with the "atomic explosion" that Ockham created in moral theory or with its results in political thought.

When Berlin writes that "I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity," such that "political liberty is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others," he is taking an Ockhamite tack from the outset. Berlin openly admits that his "positive liberty" begins in "an act of will".

In fact, however, his formulation of "negative liberty" also assumes that freedom is essentially a matter of the will. "Negative liberty" is simply that which allows me to avoid too many collisions with the wills of others. But this concept of "negative liberty," as Norman Podhoretz correctly noted, doesn’t tell us much about how we resolve the inevitable conflicts between wills without raw coercion, or even why we should do so. "Negative liberty" accurately describes one important aspect of the political organization of freedom: the need to circumscribe and regulate coercive state power by law. But Berlin’s "negative liberty" cannot provide an account of why that freedom has any moral worth beyond its being an expression of my will. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are drastically disconnected here.

Berlin goes so far as to suggest that, for a "schoolman" like Aquinas, as well as for the Jacobins and communists of the modern period, it is legitimate to force others into living their freedom rightly. That kind of crude coercion was certainly true of Jacobins and communists, but it is no part of a Thomistic theory of freedom. For the philosophical anthropology that underwrites Aquinas’s freedom for excellence, an anthropology that contains thick moral convictions about the inalienable dignity and value of every human life, also demands a commitment to the method of persuasion in politics. Indeed, as the history of the past three decades has shown, it is today’s devotees of "negative liberty" as reinterpreted by postmodern radical skeptics and relativists who are the primary exponents of coercion in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity"— even if that coercion is mediated through split decisions of the United States Supreme Court.

Isaiah Berlin could not escape — and perhaps did not even recognize — Ockham’s trap. That is why his "two concepts of liberty" ultimately break down. And that is why we require, as individuals and as a society, a deeper understanding of the nature of freedom today, an understanding that challenges the freedom of indifference with freedom for excellence.

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This is part two of an extract from the inaugural William E. Simon Lecture given to the 25th Anniversary of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Part one examines the two concepts of liberty in a modern context, and part three proposes a modernised view of the Two concepts of Liberty. The whole paper can be downloaded here.



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About the Author

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy and heads the Catholic Studies project.

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