On Freedom, page 7
Acknowledging
One of the thinkers Tony and I found ourselves discussing was Edith Stein. She could not have written her dissertation on empathy and knowledge without the wounded soldiers. She started from the assumption, basic in philosophy since Immanuel Kant, that others were her equals, that the German men she treated were her fellow human beings.
Equal dignity is easy to grant in theory. But how do we recognize others in practice? Tending the wrecked bodies of men wounded at the front, Stein found that we acknowledge others through the Leib.
In the spring semester of 2022, ten years after Tony’s and my book was published, I assigned Stein’s dissertation to incarcerated students. We would read it together for the seminar in the philosophy of freedom I taught in a maximum-security prison. Though in a different way, this encounter with Stein was also inflected by illness: a pandemic. The course was supposed to have begun several weeks before it did, but prisoners and guards were sick in large numbers. I had to wait for the prison’s Covid protocol to change before I could get inside. In January and February 2022, the students had their course packets and were doing the reading and did not want to wait.
I knew that I had to be in their space, at least in some limited way. That was, after all, Stein’s point. Twenty years of classroom teaching had taught me the same. The students appreciated the contact, when it came, when I could enter the prison and join them in the classroom. They were quite ceremonious about the seminar; part of the ritual was that skin touched skin. Coming from different cellblocks, called over the loudspeaker by their numbers, they were happy to be bodies in the same space. Each arriving student gave the others hugs. Each one of them wanted to touch me when the class began and ended: I got white-guy handshakes.
We used the word Leib a lot. One of my incarcerated students, Dwayne, seemed captivated by Stein and summarized her arguments beautifully. You “have to see the body of others to see your own body,” and so objectivity “is not being yourself without distractions, it is recognizing the other body as being like your body, and then seeing the world.” “When I am imprisoned in my own self,” wrote Stein, “I can never get beyond the world as it appears to me.” But “thanks to empathy I get repeated appearances of that same world that are independent of my perception.” It is empathy that allows us to know that the external world is real.
Empathy, in other words, is not a condescending concession of a rational person to the emotions of others, but the only way to become a reasonable person. To acknowledge the corporeality of others is not a gift to them but a step toward our own reason. “The constitution of the foreign individual,” wrote Stein in her dissertation, “was a condition for the full constitution of our own individuality.” The bodies of others allow us to see them as subjects, as in the same predicament as we are. Empowered then by empathy, we can see ourselves as others see us. That helps us both to know ourselves and to know the world. That knowledge, in turn, makes us better subjects, more sovereign.
We have to see the bodies of others as subjects, because otherwise we cannot see ourselves as subjects. And if we fail to do that, we cannot be free.
Seeing
In Ukraine, meanwhile, other bodies I knew, friends or colleagues or students, were in trenches or bomb shelters or in flight from the Russian invasion. At the time of that first class in prison, March 2022, Ukrainian friends with families were trying to find a way to flee Kyiv. My incarcerated students wanted to hear about the war. I was not supposed to turn my back on them, but I did so the first day to draw battle maps on the whiteboard.
We imagined a disaster thousands of miles away, in a country that none of my students had visited, and that to them at first was all but unknown. The application of what we were discussing, though, was clear enough. If Russian invaders believed that Ukrainians were less than human, then raping women and executing men was no crime: Ukrainian bodies were objects to begin with. In acting this way, of course, the Russians opened the logical possibility that they, too, were simply objects: to be sent somewhere to die pointlessly on the basis of lies. If we do not recognize one another through the Leib, we not only cause suffering to others but bring unfreedom to ourselves.
What if I think that my body is something more than a Körper, but no one else agrees? Then (my students pointed out) others can attach and detach meanings to me as they will, and my own values will never make their way out into the world. I can be enslaved, tortured, segregated. If I do not exist as a Leib because the existence of my group is denied, I can be subjected to genocide.
The students appreciated Stein’s contention about the Leib but wondered how far she would have taken it. After all, the soldiers she treated in the First World War were her fellow Germans—or fellow white people, as my students saw it. Most of my students were Black, and all of them expressed this suspicion.
Meeting during the first four months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, my students came to see that Europeans can colonize other Europeans—that is, that white people can colonize other white people. Their realization calls into question the universality of the American notion of “white people”—or, when construed positively, provides an example of empathy.
The students extended their literary and philosophical references to Ukraine and applied their personal experiences to those of Ukrainians. My student Alpha expressed solidarity in the highest degree when he said, “The suffering of Ukrainians affects me as a Black man.” By the end of the class, Alpha said that he admired Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelens’kyi as an anti-colonialist.
In their querying of Stein, the students were onto something, though I resisted them at the time. Stein was certainly a German nationalist when she wrote about empathy in 1917. She considered it “out of the question that we will now be defeated.” She was probably not thinking critically then about the German war aim of conquering Ukraine and treating it as a breadbasket. In her field hospital, though, she was treating soldiers of the multinational Habsburg army as well as German soldiers. Ukraine did not exist at the time, and its lands were divided between Russia and the Habsburg monarchy. So young Ukrainian men were fighting on both sides. Confronted with their wounded bodies, Stein empathized with their predicament.
Would she have empathized with Black men? That’s where the students had their doubts. For their part, though, they were able to imagine her position and to empathize both with her and with Ukrainians past and present. One student, Michael, was aware of another moment when Ukraine was treated colonially: the political famine in Soviet Ukraine. After the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a series of other wars, most of what is now Ukraine was incorporated by the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin saw Ukraine as a territory to be tamed and exploited. As a result of the collectivization of agriculture, millions of Ukrainians were brought to the verge of starvation. Stalin then took a series of decisions in late 1932 that ensured that about four million people in Soviet Ukraine in fact died. Michael knew a poignant detail: that Ukrainians during Stalin’s starvation campaign referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Having once cried for the slaves in the book, Ukrainians now identified with them. In one of his papers, Michael mentioned his own aged mother, whose African American son was in prison and had been for thirty years. In early 2022, Michael told me, she watched the news about Ukraine and cried. She could see.
The world in which Russia invades and tortures and America impoverishes and humiliates is one world, and it can be understood, especially when people are physically present. My incarcerated students learned the names of Ukrainian writers. When I took this manuscript to Ukrainian colleagues in Ukraine, they learned the names of my incarcerated students. There was something pleasing about conservative Ukrainian humanists sitting around a table in Lviv discussing the views of Alpha, a radical young African American thousands of miles away. They could see him. Thanks to everyone who was discussing the book, whether they were in an American prison or in a Ukrainian city mourning its dead, I gained a broader view.
Russia has become a genocidal fascist empire for many reasons, but one of them is negative freedom. This concept made it hard to see that its oligarchy was the antithesis of freedom (rather than a side effect) or that Putin was a fascist (rather than just a technocrat seeking wealth). And America has become a flawed republic threatened by oligarchy and fascism for many reasons, but negative freedom is among them. It leads us to think that we have solved our problems when we have privatized them, when in fact all we have achieved is separating ourselves from one another.
Swimming
My country is also my incarcerated students’ country. They had done what they had done, and I have done what I have done, but there is a larger logic behind my being at Yale and their being in prison. The land that celebrated its bicentennial in 1976 was on the way to locking up more of its citizens than any other, as a matter of racial policy. That I was only about one-fifth as likely to go to prison as a Black person was due to no merit of my own.
One June day in 1976, a few weeks before I rang that bell, I was sitting in a yellow school bus, alone on a bench seat near the back. It was the last week of first grade, and I was looking at the elementary school yearbook.
It was a simple stapled affair, with a two-color cardboard cover, one glossy page for each class, black-and-white photographs in rows and columns, the teacher at the top left. In her picture, my teacher sported a tremendous Afro, thick round glasses, and a turtleneck sweater beneath a plaid overall dress of the sort she favored. A third-grader peering over my shoulder mocked me for the race of my teacher, calling out the standard term of abuse. It was the first time I had ever heard the word. I didn’t know what it meant, but I had a notion, since I knew the kid and his attitudes.
The bus route took us past the local swim club. As a boy, I wondered why it was a “club.” I took lessons and spent pleasant summer afternoons there with my brothers. Driving there in my father’s tiny convertible, top down, was an unforgettable pleasure. When I got older, I found it annoying to carry the membership card, especially since I was always losing things. It seemed strange to me that kids would brag about the different kinds of privileges afforded by the different colors of their card. A bored teenager checked the laminated credentials at the entrance.
It was a nice place. Perhaps no one had any bad intentions. And yet the swim club reflected an unmistakable national reality. Our subdevelopment was built after Supreme Court rulings and the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal for cities to exclude African Americans from public swimming pools. Around the country, municipalities then filled in their public pools with cement. Public goods like swimming pools passed to the private sector, where membership rules could informally enforce prejudice. This was a minor element of a larger political reaction to the Civil Rights Act.
When we choose not to recognize other bodies as human, we create specific social situations, which we then define as the state of nature. Having been excluded from swimming pools, Black kids were less likely to learn to swim than white kids. And so white kids were instructed that Black bodies were not buoyant. This was “common knowledge.”
There were at most one or two Black kids at the pool that summer of 1976, maybe none. There were certainly no Black kids on the bus that day. A social arrangement, the creation of zoned suburban neighborhoods, was keeping certain bodies apart.
In a space without Black people, the point of yelling a racial slur was to create a group: everyone against the absent teacher and against anyone who defended the absent teacher. If we use language to treat others’ bodies as objects of one color, we define ourselves as objects of another. We enter into a mindless physical collectivity, a racial mob. We sacrifice our own Leib to the cause of denying the Leib of another.
School might help, but we have to be taught to acknowledge the Leib of the other. I was lucky in that I was challenged at home and saw African Americans in settings chosen by my family. But I do not remember being challenged at school. What we learned about Jim Crow was that it had come to an end. We should have known that Jim Crow inspired German racial laws, which made Jews (such as Edith Stein) second-class citizens. Along with the laws came initiatives from below, such as banning Jews from swimming pools.
It might seem like a small thing, but no one ever taught me about the swimming pools.
Contract
Freedom begins with sovereignty, and sovereignty has to do with bodies. And so the philosophy of freedom begins with a baby’s cry. Babies pull us to the philosophical issues that are so basic that they escape attention. I began to see the world differently when I cut my son’s umbilical cord.
We are all born into a blurry storm of circumstance. This is an experience we all share, though none of us recalls it. We know about birth and can consider it only thanks to others. Recalling that we all begin with a shriek can deliver us from philosophical errors that stand behind American oppression.
In American culture, birth is surrounded by taboos. The silence around the most significant moment in life shields our prevailing notion of negative freedom from some basic critiques. Birth reveals its absurdity. A newborn is not going to become free thanks to the absence of something. You can summon others to a journey toward freedom with a beautiful declaration, but you cannot abandon a baby at the foot of a mountain with a benediction of liberty.
A negative idea of freedom seems plausible when we begin our thought process from an idealized image of adults and forget the bodily predicament that we all shared as newborns. If we begin from magical maturity, we can assume that freedom is only a matter of defending what we already have, of what already exists. Defining freedom only as something that can be lost, we never ask how it was gained, how people become sovereign in the first place.
Sovereignty usually means the sovereignty of the state, its capacity to dominate or at least to set the terms of life. But if we regard freedom positively, we can think of sovereignty differently, as being about the person rather than the state. We then take the first step toward a better justification for government.
How did we come to think of a government as sovereign? To imagine a situation in which citizens have some sort of standing or rights, we treat sovereignty as inhering in political institutions. The notion, in traditions such as ours, is that at some point there was a social contract, in which people—idealized adults, of course—met and agreed to form a government. The problem with this move is that such a thing never happened.
The American case comes about as close as can be: people met and agreed upon the Constitution. But the men who wrote that document can hardly be thought to be representative of everyone. Even had they been perfectly representative of the wealthy white landowner class, the exclusion of the non-landed, the African Americans, the women, and the Native Americans means that their covenant can hardly stand on its own in modern times. And why exactly should newborns be subject to an ancient order that they could not possibly have chosen? How is that freedom?
Fascists pointed out the problems with this tradition of sovereignty. The most intelligent of them, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, argued that true sovereignty resided not in following the rules, as laid down by the contract, but in making an exception to them. Whoever could make the exception was the true sovereign. An Adolf Hitler taking advantage of a Reichstag Fire to declare a state of exception was thus an ideal sovereign.
Schmitt’s view, though, was nothing more than cleverness. Rule breaking, though it appeals to the emotions, cannot be sovereignty. Negating an illusion does not generate substance. To say that he who makes an exception is sovereign is at most a statement of fact about power, leaving entirely open what sovereignty means or ought to mean. The fascist notion of sovereignty is puerile, a boyish joke. We need to begin not with overgrown boys but with actual children.
The fascist solution is incompatible with freedom, but the fascist critique of the social contract does reveal a problem. If we expect people to accept the institutions into which they were born, on the basis of an agreement that is largely (or totally) fictional, how can that be generative of freedom? A constitution must not only constitute but reconstitute, over and over again. This can be done.
The solution is to relocate the idea of sovereignty in the person. Freedom is the value of values, because it is the condition in which all other values may be exercised. A government is not legitimate just because it has power and uses the word sovereign to embellish decrepitude and deception. It is legitimate insofar as it enables freedom, enacting policies that allow young and coming generations to become sovereign.
A person has a beginning, and that is the opportunity. To enable freedom, a government must begin at that beginning, with birth and with youth. Practically, this is indispensable to freedom; ethically, it is indispensable to legitimacy, since freedom is the value of values. Governments do not produce children, but a good government can make child-rearing more likely to ease the way to a life in freedom.
A government that does not claim to be sovereign, but that aims for the sovereignty of its children, legitimizes itself by its work for freedom. And it does so with respect not to a myth of the past or to people who are dead but with respect to each coming generation and to people who are coming to life.
