On Freedom, page 8
Contact
In thinking about freedom, we tend to leave out the time between birth and maturity, the formative period of life. The first form of freedom, sovereignty, is blocked out. We have no chance to consider what a baby’s body is, what efforts and policies that Leib will need.
A baby will need nourishment, shelter, and warmth. A baby will need other people, an upbringing, an education. The Roman historian Livy defined freedom as “standing upright oneself without depending on another’s will.” At some point in the logic of life, this definition is true—but not while we are in the womb or at the nipple, unable physically to stand upright. When we are very young, we all need someone else’s goodwill if we are to learn to stand at all. Because we live in time in a certain direction, we cannot make up later for what we were not given earlier.
We are born undeveloped compared to other mammals. Our large heads (for our large brains) require us to leave the womb early, before we are capable of much of anything. Yet with time and attention, especially in the first months and years, those large brains can become capable minds.
Humans evolved to be patient and evaluative, as hunters, gatherers, nomads, and farmers, and as parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents of children who need years of attention. Patience and evaluation continue to serve us in our modern world. But such capacities arise only if young people make contact with people around them. The creation of individuality must be a social act.
Just bearing a child does not bring the knowledge that mothers (or parents or a family) need, nor the time needed to apply it. Babies are thrown into a world that, if governed by negative freedom, must be senseless and grotesque. They cannot be raised by the absence of barriers. They need things they cannot themselves know. No infant can liberate its parents, or give them time, or set policy. Freedom works as a larger cooperative project, over generations, or not at all.
Those who care about childhood should care about freedom, and those who care about freedom should care about children. This means caring about the society into which the next American baby will be born. Individual freedom is a social project and a generational one. For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.
And so not just the philosophy but the work of freedom begins with birth. We labor, though, under a tradition of philosophy that looks away from life’s most fundamental moment. The existentialists and their teacher Martin Heidegger thought that our problem was that we ignore death. That conclusion, meant to be grim and bare and masculine, actually skirts the issue, as Edith Stein pointed out. The real problem is that we ignore life.
My wife, Marci Shore, who is writing a book about the larger tradition of which Heidegger and the existentialists were part (phenomenology), was deep into it during her pregnancy. When she was in labor, a nurse complimented her on her German. She answered, in German, gasping, “I am good on obstetrics and phenomenology.” Heidegger has the idea of “being toward death.” I (later) told Marci that she should write a pregnancy memoir called “being toward life.”
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man,” says Hannah Arendt. “Politically, it is identical with man’s freedom.” Sovereignty begins with birth and arises as a child is held, loved, reared, and educated. For the universe, a human birth is nothing special; for us humans, natality is the possibility of a life in freedom. We close that potential when we limit freedom to avoiding other objects, or begin our philosophy with death rather than life.
Loan
Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children. Her father died when she was young. Four of her siblings died before she was born. Growing up in these conditions, she understood that the “creation of capabilities belongs to freedom.”
Reading Stein in prison, my students seized on the point that children need to spend time with adults to become sovereign. As children, they themselves had wanted attention from adults that they could not get. The research is on their side: negative childhood experiences correlate strongly with adversity in later life.
Simone Weil wrote that “the one thing that man possesses that is essentially individual, that is absolutely his own, is his capacity to think.” And yet in the million years our species has trod the earth, this “essentially individual” capacity has never been developed individually. Babies who are left alone learn nothing. This is, sadly, not just a hypothesis. Historians have all too much confirmatory evidence—from the Gulag, for example, or from the orphanages of communist Romania.
Our knowledge of early childhood development can enable sovereignty. We know that the Leib gains most of its capacities during the first five years of life, as the brain grows to nearly full size. And we know that the process is social. The brains of infants are primed for contact, but infants cannot make contact by themselves. Neural pathways emerge when babies are physically touched. Babies are good at recognizing faces when they are held so that they can see them. Their throats, tongues, and lips are capable of forming words, but do so only when they can imitate someone else’s speech.
Putting alternatives in front of very young children is easy. Teaching them to evaluate and choose is harder. It takes caring people who have the time to care. Choice is a reality outside but also a capability inside. We need the ability to see alternatives as well as the external capacity to realize them. An American way to make people unfree is to wax on about choice but deny children the capacities they will need to make choices (or to realize that they have been denied them). The richer our capacities, the more alternatives we see, and the more choices we can make.
How many alternatives present themselves to us has to do with how we feel. Positive emotions broaden the range of choices we see and extend our experience of time. Negative emotions limit that range to immediate fight or flight. Fear is like that, limiting us to the binary. It turns our minds into circuits, our bodies into objects: Leib recedes into Körper.
With help, small children learn to name and regulate their emotions. Fear is sometimes appropriate, but knowing it and naming it are steps toward controlling it—and toward preventing others from manipulating it. Regulating emotions is a step toward the evaluation that enables freedom. If we are nothing more than our first reactions, we are prey to the people who arouse those reactions. Only individuals can resist pressure from others, yet it takes others to create such individuals. We can learn to govern ourselves only with the right kind of guidance, at the right stage of life.
Abundant research indicates what helps small children to gain these basic capacities: constant physical and vocal contact; trusting relationships; unstructured play; and choices about things and people. The attributes we need to be free individuals are available to us only through coordinated action. Babies can be raised and educated to become free, but babies cannot create for themselves the setting where this is possible. Since freedom requires capacities that we cannot develop by ourselves, we owe our freedom to others. Every free adult had manifold help as a child.
When we think of jobs that are associated with freedom, the first that comes to mind might be pilot or cowboy. Motherhood belongs to freedom. As the Ed and Patsy Bruce song reminds us, all those cowboys had mamas. The occupations that are most relevant to freedom are the caregivers: the elementary school teachers, the preschool teachers, the childcare workers. A society concerned with freedom would respect such people and pay them well.
Freedom requires capacity, capacity requires attention in childhood, and attention requires time. It follows that parents’ time, the mothers’ above all, belongs to freedom. Adults lend to children a special kind of time, one that children cannot give adults, one that children cannot give children, one that adults cannot give adults.
Simone Weil said that everything precious in us comes from others, not as a gift but as “a loan that must be constantly renewed.” Children borrow from adults a special kind of time. They can repay the loan only much later, when they are adults, by giving time to someone of the next generation. Government serves as a kind of guarantor of the loan, creating the conditions in which those who raise children can have time. A land of the free pays it back and pays it forward.
In leaving out birth from the account of freedom, we also make it impossible to accommodate the Leib of women. Because women can be impregnated by rapists, the orientation of their Leib has to be different from that of men. In previous understandings of freedom, this issue did not arise, since it was assumed that women and slaves served the freedom of a powerful few.
Treating freedom solely as the absence of barriers gives us no instruction about rape. An idea of negative freedom as freedom from violence can seem to help here. It understates the stakes, though: it is not just that we have the right not to be raped, but that we should be able to live lives without the trauma or anticipation of rape. What people can become is limited by both the prospect and the memory of rape, and we can fully grasp this idea only when we take the bodies of others seriously.
Acknowledging the Leib of women also means understanding that they think about childbirth in a way that men generally do not. Women have to decide whether and when to have children, and they have to adjust other parts of their lives. Negative freedom leaves them to make those adjustments alone. If we make accommodations for childbirth, we remove a source of unfreedom for women and improve the chances that children can grow up free.
Opening
Death is simple and tempting. Fascism beguiles us with meaning drawn from the death of others and from our own. It is much easier to philosophize when we ignore what is most alive about us, when we fail to confront what Weil called the mystery of our bodies.
The death principle crept into philosophy early, in Plato’s cave. Plato’s conviction was that the things we experience in this world are not fully real but are rather imperfect copies of some ideal version of each thing. And so each bell, for example, is somehow just an emanation of a perfect bell that exists somewhere else, as is each tree or each bed in each maternity ward. We live under the illusion, Plato thought, that these things are fully real; it is the task of philosophy, he taught, to deliver us from this mistake. For this purpose, he provided (in his Republic) the memorable allegory of the cave.
Imagine that people are in chains, deep in a dark cavern, and can only look forward, at one cave wall. Behind them is a fire, and between them and the fire, people walk back and forth behind a wall, holding up a succession of “carved objects.” All the enchained people can see are shadows cast on the wall before them. This, says Plato, is what our existence is like. We are shackled in a cave, gazing at a play of shadows, believing that we are in reality. We must think our way out, to a world where each thing exists in an ideal form.
This is a very evocative notion, and of course it cannot be proven false. Its plausibility, though, depends on ignoring basic experiences of life.
If you watch a childbirth, it is hard to think: This is a shallow, partial replica of something else, only a reflection of some ideal birth taking place on an ideal plane. When my wife experienced complications after the birth of our son, I did not think: This blood is not actual blood and this red is not actual red but just a hint of what blood and red might be. When the nurses left our newborn son with me while doctors sprinted from another wing of the hospital to operate on her, I did not think that the violet of his eyes was nothing more than an emanation of some ideal violet or eye, nor that the sound of the rushed footfalls in the hall was anything other than the only reality. And what is true of birth is true of the moment after birth and of all the moments thereafter. There is no cave, except the one we enter when we close our eyes to the world and our hearts to others.
There are indeed ideals, but they are not ideal bells or beds. They are virtues, notions of how the world might be different from and better than it is. As sovereign individuals, we learn to care about these ideals, and balance them, and bring them to life. We can also learn to create them. We don’t borrow from an ideal world. We reach toward it and expand it.
If we think, though, that the world we experience is not the real world but is only a cave or (as people say now) a computer simulation, then we might conclude that such activity makes no sense. If we believe that life is elsewhere, then freedom is senseless, since we have no power to exist on that other plane, let alone to change it. Our only chance at freedom would seem to be to reach that elsewhere by shedding our imperfect bodies by dying (or as people imagine now, becoming one’s own digital avatar).
This is the primal form of negative freedom: we can be free only by removing a barrier, and that barrier is our own bodies. We reject Leib and seek Körper. We embrace the death principle.
This conclusion haunts Plato’s argument. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates, his teacher, describe the cave. Socrates is the archetype of the lonely philosopher, whose truths are beyond this world. After Socrates is sentenced to death, he calls the separation from his body a “release,” a liberation. This cannot be right. Our body is not just one Körper among others, blocking some other life that is elsewhere and preventing us from reaching that higher state. Our Leib is special in that it touches both the realm of what is and the realm of what should be.
The allegory of the cave, properly understood, makes this case. As told by Plato, it wrongly conveys what people would experience. It makes no corporeal sense. Socrates says that “such captives,” the people bound in the cave, “would consider the truth to be nothing but the shadows of the carved objects.” No, they would not. Socrates ignores the bodies of the shackled people. If people were in fact shackled in a cave, their first reality would be their own bodily suffering, the iron on their flesh, not the shadows on a wall. When they noticed the shadows, the ones to which the shackled people would attend first would be their own. The shadows they would actually see on the wall, most consistently and most intelligibly, would be those of their own bodies.
The shackled people would have the truth of their own suffering. Within seconds, they would also apprehend the connection between certain shadows and their own bodies. Before long, they would also understand that they were not alone. They would see the shadows of other bodies and identify them as such. Even were they somehow chained so that they could not turn their heads to see the other people’s bodies, they would quickly apprehend that the shadows on the wall that were similar to their own led back to other bodies, other people. They would understand that those others must be in a similar predicament, sharing a similar experience. And as they understood others, they would better understand themselves. This is what would actually happen in Plato’s cave. The shadows of the “carved objects” would seem dubious and artificial, and rightly so.
So the cave allegory, if we do the optics correctly, leads to an entirely different conclusion from the one proposed by Plato and accepted by tradition. As a thought experiment, it actually shows that knowledge begins with the body, and that understanding begins from recognizing the presence of other bodies. The story of the cave, which is the story of Western philosophy, developed the way it did only because the body was written out of existence.
And so a correction must be made. Plato knew Socrates as a highly individuated adult, someone who was indifferent not only to prevailing opinions but to his own body and its pains and pleasures. No doubt Socrates was an admirably free person. He risked death for what he believed. But it is his capacity for freedom, rather than what he said about freedom, that interests us. Freedom is not about being right, which is elusive, but about trying to do right. How did Socrates come to be free? The answer cannot really begin from his thinking, right or wrong as it might have been. It has to begin with his life.
Socrates himself gives us a hint. Like all of us, Socrates had a mother. He spoke of her in one of his philosophical inquiries, comparing his own work as a philosopher to hers as a midwife. Toward the end of his life, Plato tells us, Socrates compared philosophy to childbirth, and thoughts to children.
His mother’s name, Phaenarete, means “realizes virtue,” a touching promise. We cannot realize virtue on our own, but we can learn to do so with the help of midwives and mothers and other people. Socrates, wrong as he was on other matters, rightly said that none of us is self-sufficient. Children need help from mothers, mothers need help from midwives, everyone at the beginning of life needs the help of others.
Natality, not fatality. Better a womb than a tomb. Thinking of Socrates’s mother, we begin the philosophy of freedom not from an enclosing cave but from an opening world.
Unpredictability
Improbable States
My world opened up through reading, a capability I owed to others. People brought me to books, and books brought me to people. As I came of age, I was fascinated by the Czech dissident Václav Havel and his account of freedom, so different from the one I had imbibed in school or from movies. I was reading Havel in 1989 as communism came to an end in his native Czechoslovakia and throughout eastern Europe. The texts that captivated me arose when I was a child, in 1975 and 1978, around the time that I was ringing that bell and first thinking about freedom.
Havel started as a poet and ended as a president, with time as a playwright and a prisoner in between. Born in an interwar Czechoslovakia that was still democratic and independent, he was a small child when Nazi Germany dismembered his country in 1938, and a boy of twelve when communists took it over in 1948. Havel was fortunate in the care taken with his education, despite the circumstances. During the Prague Spring of 1968, a brief moment when Czechoslovak communists permitted freedom of assembly and of speech, Havel spoke up for multiparty elections.
After the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact allies) invaded Czechoslovakia that August, Havel was blacklisted and could no longer legally publish his plays. He moved from Prague to the countryside and eventually took a job at a brewery. In 1975 he wrote a two-character play “about” the experience, to be performed among friends. Audience is set in a police state occupied by its superpower neighbor, both of which are ruled by communist parties notionally following Marxism. Yet the play has no ideology and no soldiers, and only a single policeman, who is present only in conversation.
In thinking about freedom, we tend to leave out the time between birth and maturity, the formative period of life. The first form of freedom, sovereignty, is blocked out. We have no chance to consider what a baby’s body is, what efforts and policies that Leib will need.
A baby will need nourishment, shelter, and warmth. A baby will need other people, an upbringing, an education. The Roman historian Livy defined freedom as “standing upright oneself without depending on another’s will.” At some point in the logic of life, this definition is true—but not while we are in the womb or at the nipple, unable physically to stand upright. When we are very young, we all need someone else’s goodwill if we are to learn to stand at all. Because we live in time in a certain direction, we cannot make up later for what we were not given earlier.
We are born undeveloped compared to other mammals. Our large heads (for our large brains) require us to leave the womb early, before we are capable of much of anything. Yet with time and attention, especially in the first months and years, those large brains can become capable minds.
Humans evolved to be patient and evaluative, as hunters, gatherers, nomads, and farmers, and as parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents of children who need years of attention. Patience and evaluation continue to serve us in our modern world. But such capacities arise only if young people make contact with people around them. The creation of individuality must be a social act.
Just bearing a child does not bring the knowledge that mothers (or parents or a family) need, nor the time needed to apply it. Babies are thrown into a world that, if governed by negative freedom, must be senseless and grotesque. They cannot be raised by the absence of barriers. They need things they cannot themselves know. No infant can liberate its parents, or give them time, or set policy. Freedom works as a larger cooperative project, over generations, or not at all.
Those who care about childhood should care about freedom, and those who care about freedom should care about children. This means caring about the society into which the next American baby will be born. Individual freedom is a social project and a generational one. For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.
And so not just the philosophy but the work of freedom begins with birth. We labor, though, under a tradition of philosophy that looks away from life’s most fundamental moment. The existentialists and their teacher Martin Heidegger thought that our problem was that we ignore death. That conclusion, meant to be grim and bare and masculine, actually skirts the issue, as Edith Stein pointed out. The real problem is that we ignore life.
My wife, Marci Shore, who is writing a book about the larger tradition of which Heidegger and the existentialists were part (phenomenology), was deep into it during her pregnancy. When she was in labor, a nurse complimented her on her German. She answered, in German, gasping, “I am good on obstetrics and phenomenology.” Heidegger has the idea of “being toward death.” I (later) told Marci that she should write a pregnancy memoir called “being toward life.”
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man,” says Hannah Arendt. “Politically, it is identical with man’s freedom.” Sovereignty begins with birth and arises as a child is held, loved, reared, and educated. For the universe, a human birth is nothing special; for us humans, natality is the possibility of a life in freedom. We close that potential when we limit freedom to avoiding other objects, or begin our philosophy with death rather than life.
Loan
Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children. Her father died when she was young. Four of her siblings died before she was born. Growing up in these conditions, she understood that the “creation of capabilities belongs to freedom.”
Reading Stein in prison, my students seized on the point that children need to spend time with adults to become sovereign. As children, they themselves had wanted attention from adults that they could not get. The research is on their side: negative childhood experiences correlate strongly with adversity in later life.
Simone Weil wrote that “the one thing that man possesses that is essentially individual, that is absolutely his own, is his capacity to think.” And yet in the million years our species has trod the earth, this “essentially individual” capacity has never been developed individually. Babies who are left alone learn nothing. This is, sadly, not just a hypothesis. Historians have all too much confirmatory evidence—from the Gulag, for example, or from the orphanages of communist Romania.
Our knowledge of early childhood development can enable sovereignty. We know that the Leib gains most of its capacities during the first five years of life, as the brain grows to nearly full size. And we know that the process is social. The brains of infants are primed for contact, but infants cannot make contact by themselves. Neural pathways emerge when babies are physically touched. Babies are good at recognizing faces when they are held so that they can see them. Their throats, tongues, and lips are capable of forming words, but do so only when they can imitate someone else’s speech.
Putting alternatives in front of very young children is easy. Teaching them to evaluate and choose is harder. It takes caring people who have the time to care. Choice is a reality outside but also a capability inside. We need the ability to see alternatives as well as the external capacity to realize them. An American way to make people unfree is to wax on about choice but deny children the capacities they will need to make choices (or to realize that they have been denied them). The richer our capacities, the more alternatives we see, and the more choices we can make.
How many alternatives present themselves to us has to do with how we feel. Positive emotions broaden the range of choices we see and extend our experience of time. Negative emotions limit that range to immediate fight or flight. Fear is like that, limiting us to the binary. It turns our minds into circuits, our bodies into objects: Leib recedes into Körper.
With help, small children learn to name and regulate their emotions. Fear is sometimes appropriate, but knowing it and naming it are steps toward controlling it—and toward preventing others from manipulating it. Regulating emotions is a step toward the evaluation that enables freedom. If we are nothing more than our first reactions, we are prey to the people who arouse those reactions. Only individuals can resist pressure from others, yet it takes others to create such individuals. We can learn to govern ourselves only with the right kind of guidance, at the right stage of life.
Abundant research indicates what helps small children to gain these basic capacities: constant physical and vocal contact; trusting relationships; unstructured play; and choices about things and people. The attributes we need to be free individuals are available to us only through coordinated action. Babies can be raised and educated to become free, but babies cannot create for themselves the setting where this is possible. Since freedom requires capacities that we cannot develop by ourselves, we owe our freedom to others. Every free adult had manifold help as a child.
When we think of jobs that are associated with freedom, the first that comes to mind might be pilot or cowboy. Motherhood belongs to freedom. As the Ed and Patsy Bruce song reminds us, all those cowboys had mamas. The occupations that are most relevant to freedom are the caregivers: the elementary school teachers, the preschool teachers, the childcare workers. A society concerned with freedom would respect such people and pay them well.
Freedom requires capacity, capacity requires attention in childhood, and attention requires time. It follows that parents’ time, the mothers’ above all, belongs to freedom. Adults lend to children a special kind of time, one that children cannot give adults, one that children cannot give children, one that adults cannot give adults.
Simone Weil said that everything precious in us comes from others, not as a gift but as “a loan that must be constantly renewed.” Children borrow from adults a special kind of time. They can repay the loan only much later, when they are adults, by giving time to someone of the next generation. Government serves as a kind of guarantor of the loan, creating the conditions in which those who raise children can have time. A land of the free pays it back and pays it forward.
In leaving out birth from the account of freedom, we also make it impossible to accommodate the Leib of women. Because women can be impregnated by rapists, the orientation of their Leib has to be different from that of men. In previous understandings of freedom, this issue did not arise, since it was assumed that women and slaves served the freedom of a powerful few.
Treating freedom solely as the absence of barriers gives us no instruction about rape. An idea of negative freedom as freedom from violence can seem to help here. It understates the stakes, though: it is not just that we have the right not to be raped, but that we should be able to live lives without the trauma or anticipation of rape. What people can become is limited by both the prospect and the memory of rape, and we can fully grasp this idea only when we take the bodies of others seriously.
Acknowledging the Leib of women also means understanding that they think about childbirth in a way that men generally do not. Women have to decide whether and when to have children, and they have to adjust other parts of their lives. Negative freedom leaves them to make those adjustments alone. If we make accommodations for childbirth, we remove a source of unfreedom for women and improve the chances that children can grow up free.
Opening
Death is simple and tempting. Fascism beguiles us with meaning drawn from the death of others and from our own. It is much easier to philosophize when we ignore what is most alive about us, when we fail to confront what Weil called the mystery of our bodies.
The death principle crept into philosophy early, in Plato’s cave. Plato’s conviction was that the things we experience in this world are not fully real but are rather imperfect copies of some ideal version of each thing. And so each bell, for example, is somehow just an emanation of a perfect bell that exists somewhere else, as is each tree or each bed in each maternity ward. We live under the illusion, Plato thought, that these things are fully real; it is the task of philosophy, he taught, to deliver us from this mistake. For this purpose, he provided (in his Republic) the memorable allegory of the cave.
Imagine that people are in chains, deep in a dark cavern, and can only look forward, at one cave wall. Behind them is a fire, and between them and the fire, people walk back and forth behind a wall, holding up a succession of “carved objects.” All the enchained people can see are shadows cast on the wall before them. This, says Plato, is what our existence is like. We are shackled in a cave, gazing at a play of shadows, believing that we are in reality. We must think our way out, to a world where each thing exists in an ideal form.
This is a very evocative notion, and of course it cannot be proven false. Its plausibility, though, depends on ignoring basic experiences of life.
If you watch a childbirth, it is hard to think: This is a shallow, partial replica of something else, only a reflection of some ideal birth taking place on an ideal plane. When my wife experienced complications after the birth of our son, I did not think: This blood is not actual blood and this red is not actual red but just a hint of what blood and red might be. When the nurses left our newborn son with me while doctors sprinted from another wing of the hospital to operate on her, I did not think that the violet of his eyes was nothing more than an emanation of some ideal violet or eye, nor that the sound of the rushed footfalls in the hall was anything other than the only reality. And what is true of birth is true of the moment after birth and of all the moments thereafter. There is no cave, except the one we enter when we close our eyes to the world and our hearts to others.
There are indeed ideals, but they are not ideal bells or beds. They are virtues, notions of how the world might be different from and better than it is. As sovereign individuals, we learn to care about these ideals, and balance them, and bring them to life. We can also learn to create them. We don’t borrow from an ideal world. We reach toward it and expand it.
If we think, though, that the world we experience is not the real world but is only a cave or (as people say now) a computer simulation, then we might conclude that such activity makes no sense. If we believe that life is elsewhere, then freedom is senseless, since we have no power to exist on that other plane, let alone to change it. Our only chance at freedom would seem to be to reach that elsewhere by shedding our imperfect bodies by dying (or as people imagine now, becoming one’s own digital avatar).
This is the primal form of negative freedom: we can be free only by removing a barrier, and that barrier is our own bodies. We reject Leib and seek Körper. We embrace the death principle.
This conclusion haunts Plato’s argument. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates, his teacher, describe the cave. Socrates is the archetype of the lonely philosopher, whose truths are beyond this world. After Socrates is sentenced to death, he calls the separation from his body a “release,” a liberation. This cannot be right. Our body is not just one Körper among others, blocking some other life that is elsewhere and preventing us from reaching that higher state. Our Leib is special in that it touches both the realm of what is and the realm of what should be.
The allegory of the cave, properly understood, makes this case. As told by Plato, it wrongly conveys what people would experience. It makes no corporeal sense. Socrates says that “such captives,” the people bound in the cave, “would consider the truth to be nothing but the shadows of the carved objects.” No, they would not. Socrates ignores the bodies of the shackled people. If people were in fact shackled in a cave, their first reality would be their own bodily suffering, the iron on their flesh, not the shadows on a wall. When they noticed the shadows, the ones to which the shackled people would attend first would be their own. The shadows they would actually see on the wall, most consistently and most intelligibly, would be those of their own bodies.
The shackled people would have the truth of their own suffering. Within seconds, they would also apprehend the connection between certain shadows and their own bodies. Before long, they would also understand that they were not alone. They would see the shadows of other bodies and identify them as such. Even were they somehow chained so that they could not turn their heads to see the other people’s bodies, they would quickly apprehend that the shadows on the wall that were similar to their own led back to other bodies, other people. They would understand that those others must be in a similar predicament, sharing a similar experience. And as they understood others, they would better understand themselves. This is what would actually happen in Plato’s cave. The shadows of the “carved objects” would seem dubious and artificial, and rightly so.
So the cave allegory, if we do the optics correctly, leads to an entirely different conclusion from the one proposed by Plato and accepted by tradition. As a thought experiment, it actually shows that knowledge begins with the body, and that understanding begins from recognizing the presence of other bodies. The story of the cave, which is the story of Western philosophy, developed the way it did only because the body was written out of existence.
And so a correction must be made. Plato knew Socrates as a highly individuated adult, someone who was indifferent not only to prevailing opinions but to his own body and its pains and pleasures. No doubt Socrates was an admirably free person. He risked death for what he believed. But it is his capacity for freedom, rather than what he said about freedom, that interests us. Freedom is not about being right, which is elusive, but about trying to do right. How did Socrates come to be free? The answer cannot really begin from his thinking, right or wrong as it might have been. It has to begin with his life.
Socrates himself gives us a hint. Like all of us, Socrates had a mother. He spoke of her in one of his philosophical inquiries, comparing his own work as a philosopher to hers as a midwife. Toward the end of his life, Plato tells us, Socrates compared philosophy to childbirth, and thoughts to children.
His mother’s name, Phaenarete, means “realizes virtue,” a touching promise. We cannot realize virtue on our own, but we can learn to do so with the help of midwives and mothers and other people. Socrates, wrong as he was on other matters, rightly said that none of us is self-sufficient. Children need help from mothers, mothers need help from midwives, everyone at the beginning of life needs the help of others.
Natality, not fatality. Better a womb than a tomb. Thinking of Socrates’s mother, we begin the philosophy of freedom not from an enclosing cave but from an opening world.
Unpredictability
Improbable States
My world opened up through reading, a capability I owed to others. People brought me to books, and books brought me to people. As I came of age, I was fascinated by the Czech dissident Václav Havel and his account of freedom, so different from the one I had imbibed in school or from movies. I was reading Havel in 1989 as communism came to an end in his native Czechoslovakia and throughout eastern Europe. The texts that captivated me arose when I was a child, in 1975 and 1978, around the time that I was ringing that bell and first thinking about freedom.
Havel started as a poet and ended as a president, with time as a playwright and a prisoner in between. Born in an interwar Czechoslovakia that was still democratic and independent, he was a small child when Nazi Germany dismembered his country in 1938, and a boy of twelve when communists took it over in 1948. Havel was fortunate in the care taken with his education, despite the circumstances. During the Prague Spring of 1968, a brief moment when Czechoslovak communists permitted freedom of assembly and of speech, Havel spoke up for multiparty elections.
After the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact allies) invaded Czechoslovakia that August, Havel was blacklisted and could no longer legally publish his plays. He moved from Prague to the countryside and eventually took a job at a brewery. In 1975 he wrote a two-character play “about” the experience, to be performed among friends. Audience is set in a police state occupied by its superpower neighbor, both of which are ruled by communist parties notionally following Marxism. Yet the play has no ideology and no soldiers, and only a single policeman, who is present only in conversation.
