(Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)
Brad Littlejohn originally titled his lecture "Christ and Liberty: Retrieving the Freedom of a Christian in an Age of License." As he explained at the outset of his lecture, his theme morphed into a riff on Isaiah Berlin's famous Two Concepts of Liberty in the days preceding the Convivium. In any event, I'll limit my initial comments to a brief background of the issue and Littlejohn's attempt to re-frame the answers to two important questions: What is freedom? And what is freedom good for?
Littlejohn began with a rapid review of the history of the meaning of freedom in the West through the lenses provided by Hannah Arendt and Oliver O'Donovan. Briefly: freedom for the Greeks = freedom from necessity; for the Romans = freedom as the opposite of tyranny and participation in the life of the commonwealth (rule of law); for Medieval folks = living in a city free from imperial control or in a land with concessions from the king (e.g., Magna Carta); for Reformation-era Protestants = "to serve Him is perfect freedom;" for English constitutionalists = constitutional checks on arbitrary rule plus a dollop of private property (as a means to check arbitrary rule); for Kant = each individual exercising perfect universal rationality (i.e., the categorical imperative); and for J.S. Mill = to experiment with life limited only by the harm principle. Of course, none of these understandings were hermetically sealed from others.
Thence to Isaiah Berlin who famously in 1958 formulated his two concepts of liberty: negative and positive. Liberty in the negative sense is world-centered; no one in the world can act against me. Positive freedom, by contrast, is agent-centered; we are free to seek and serve our true purpose. Berlin did not believe that there is a knowable "true purpose" for all human beings thus leaving negative freedom as the only workable concept. Individuals remain free to pursue their self-identified true purpose of course but no society (and certainly no polity) should seek to "free" itself in a positive direction.
Enter Oliver O'Donovan who as a thoughtful Protestant makes two relevant observations. First, conceptions of freedom vary depending on the nature of the threat perceived by a society. In other words, there is a historically contingent aspect to any understanding of freedom. Second, and more important, whatever one's concept of freedom, it presupposes meaningful choice, i.e., the capacity to take meaningful action. An action, distinguished from a mere act, entails knowledge and moral agency. In yet other words, there must be some good to which a person directs an act for that act to be meaningful (or free). If an act is not meaningful, there's no point to calling it free. Random bursts of undirected activity have no more moral significance than Brownian motion. In such a case there is thus no reason to care about freedom and the sooner we forget about "freedom," the better.
After laying this groundwork, Littlejohn posited the question, Is there a framework or schema that takes seriously the different historical "takes" on freedom? Alternatively, is there a way to correlate freedom from external necessity, the rule of law, reason, pursuit of the Good, and to allow room for moral agency? His answer will comprise my next post.
Brad Littlejohn originally titled his lecture "Christ and Liberty: Retrieving the Freedom of a Christian in an Age of License." As he explained at the outset of his lecture, his theme morphed into a riff on Isaiah Berlin's famous Two Concepts of Liberty in the days preceding the Convivium. In any event, I'll limit my initial comments to a brief background of the issue and Littlejohn's attempt to re-frame the answers to two important questions: What is freedom? And what is freedom good for?
Littlejohn began with a rapid review of the history of the meaning of freedom in the West through the lenses provided by Hannah Arendt and Oliver O'Donovan. Briefly: freedom for the Greeks = freedom from necessity; for the Romans = freedom as the opposite of tyranny and participation in the life of the commonwealth (rule of law); for Medieval folks = living in a city free from imperial control or in a land with concessions from the king (e.g., Magna Carta); for Reformation-era Protestants = "to serve Him is perfect freedom;" for English constitutionalists = constitutional checks on arbitrary rule plus a dollop of private property (as a means to check arbitrary rule); for Kant = each individual exercising perfect universal rationality (i.e., the categorical imperative); and for J.S. Mill = to experiment with life limited only by the harm principle. Of course, none of these understandings were hermetically sealed from others.
Thence to Isaiah Berlin who famously in 1958 formulated his two concepts of liberty: negative and positive. Liberty in the negative sense is world-centered; no one in the world can act against me. Positive freedom, by contrast, is agent-centered; we are free to seek and serve our true purpose. Berlin did not believe that there is a knowable "true purpose" for all human beings thus leaving negative freedom as the only workable concept. Individuals remain free to pursue their self-identified true purpose of course but no society (and certainly no polity) should seek to "free" itself in a positive direction.
Enter Oliver O'Donovan who as a thoughtful Protestant makes two relevant observations. First, conceptions of freedom vary depending on the nature of the threat perceived by a society. In other words, there is a historically contingent aspect to any understanding of freedom. Second, and more important, whatever one's concept of freedom, it presupposes meaningful choice, i.e., the capacity to take meaningful action. An action, distinguished from a mere act, entails knowledge and moral agency. In yet other words, there must be some good to which a person directs an act for that act to be meaningful (or free). If an act is not meaningful, there's no point to calling it free. Random bursts of undirected activity have no more moral significance than Brownian motion. In such a case there is thus no reason to care about freedom and the sooner we forget about "freedom," the better.
After laying this groundwork, Littlejohn posited the question, Is there a framework or schema that takes seriously the different historical "takes" on freedom? Alternatively, is there a way to correlate freedom from external necessity, the rule of law, reason, pursuit of the Good, and to allow room for moral agency? His answer will comprise my next post.
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