Since I wanted to launch the “Philosophy Commentary” column, I had long been bursting with topics I wanted to write about, but when it came time to write, I no longer knew where to begin.
Might as well start with an old topic: “freedom.” As for freedom, I have already written many articles discussing it; in fact, everything that needed saying has more or less already been said. But related discussions often involve the similarities and differences between freedom and equality, as well as specific issues such as freedom of speech, and they are not written in a very accessible way either. Here, I want to offer a popular-style commentary on the concept of “freedom” alone.
Some time ago I took part in writing two chapters of a civilization history textbook. When discussing how to write about Greek science, I was told to be cautious in speaking of “freedom,” that freedom is a modern concept, very complex, and that explaining what freedom meant in antiquity would be troublesome, and so on. In short, I can understand the political sensitivity contained in the word “freedom,” so it is not strange that some people do not want the word to appear too often in official textbooks; in the end, I was able to compromise. But I do not accept this logic of “because the concept is very complex, it is not suitable to talk about.” In fact, many concepts have very different meanings in antiquity and in the modern world, and distinguishing them clearly is indeed a “troublesome” task. Among all such “complex” concepts, freedom is actually relatively simple; if freedom cannot be discussed, then nothing can be discussed at all.
When chatting with an older fellow student some time ago, we also mentioned that in China, many times it does indeed seem that “left-wing” scholars are more academic and more rigorous, while right-wing scholars appear naïve or superficial. But the crux lies precisely here: right-wing scholars advocate respecting “common sense” and respecting the most straightforward truths, and therefore believe that the public has both the right and the ability to participate in political discussion and has the right to voice its own views. Left-wing scholars, because the problem is “very complex,” try to cut off the public’s participation, promoting Strauss’s so-called tradition of “esoteric transmission,” and excluding the superficial masses and open everyday language from politics.
Many concepts really are very complex, and one of the major tasks of philosophers is to clarify concepts and put these tangled notions in order, tracing them back to their sources. But to restore order by tracing back to the source begins with following the trail from the origin; we always first grasp and care about the “flow” of a concept, and only then do we pursue its “source.” We can say that modern people’s everyday understanding of a certain concept has strayed from its original meaning, but we cannot say that modern people’s use of that concept is wrong. For example, the original meaning of the character “囧” is something like “bright,” but now people use it to describe awkwardness or embarrassment; clearly you cannot grab a dictionary and accuse everyone of using it wrongly. The steam engine was initially used for pumping water, and later people mounted it on steamships; you certainly cannot say they used it wrong. Apart from certain fixed referents, every word or every tool always has some room for “misuse”; precisely because of this, language develops and technology advances. And the reason “misuses” can spread is always that they are indeed “useful.”
Therefore, when judging whether I should use a certain concept in discussing a topic, or whether I should deploy a certain tool in doing something, the key is not to offer a clear and precise definition of that concept or tool, but rather to ask: do they actually have use? Can they produce the effect one wants to convey?
The basic mode of this column is to restore philosophical concepts to the context in which they are used. It does not aim to provide some standard meaning of a term, but rather to reveal how we actually understand these concepts, and in what other ways we might understand them.
What I’ve just said is really still only a general introduction to this column: the articles in this series may be serious or lighthearted, but their basic feature is to dispel the aura of mystery surrounding philosophical concepts.
Back to the point: let us talk about “freedom.” The concept of freedom, like science and democracy, really is rather troublesome. These are all new terms that spread in Chinese only in the twentieth century, having been translated through Japanese from Western languages; in ancient China, it is hard to find corresponding concepts. This has left a persistent gap in our understanding of these Western concepts, and it has also led to many debates over whether science, democracy, or freedom are universal or specifically Western. These debates are of course meaningful, but that does not mean that only experts with profound academic training are fit to talk about “freedom.” Some concepts are complex not because few people can understand them, but precisely because most people can understand them.
For example, “being/is” is also a concept that came from the West, seemingly the core theme of the entire history of Western philosophy. But classical Chinese simply does not have the copula “be,” so does that mean Chinese culture as a whole cannot converse with Western philosophy? Not necessarily. When we get the chance, we can talk specifically about the problem of “be.”
The lack of a concept in classical Chinese corresponding to “freedom,” like “being,” is first and foremost a matter of Chinese grammatical structure. The English freedom is a nominalized form of free, and the suffix -dom often turns some kind of “state” brought about by an “action” into a noun. Thus boredom comes from the action bore; the original meaning of bore seems to be “to drill,” and from that comes the sense of annoying or pestering. This kind of nominalization in English encourages a way of thinking that detaches concepts from context. For example, as an action, there is always an agent and a bearer of the action. If I say, “The teacher’s preaching is driving me crazy,” that is very simple, but in Western languages the expression might be “I’m dying of boredom; this is because of the teacher’s preaching…” When put that way, it seems as though what is driving me mad is not the teacher but “boredom,” and this thing seems not to be within my personal emotions, but like some objective object. Then we can speak of being afflicted by boredom, expelling boredom, and so on.
But all of this is really just an illusion produced by grammatical structure. In fact, boredom is not a “thing”; “because of boredom” in essence means “because of the teacher”; “expelling boredom” in essence is not expelling some thing, but distancing oneself from the teacher, or adjusting one’s own state of mind.
The nominalized “freedom” likewise produces this illusion, as if “freedom” were a ready-made “thing” sitting there somewhere, and then we “possess” it, “pursue” it, or “deprive” someone of it. But in fact no such thing exists. Pursuing freedom, like expelling boredom, is essentially wishing to adjust one’s environment.
In concrete contexts, “pursuing freedom” is really always pursuing some specific thing. For instance, a child locked at home by his parents says he wants a bit more freedom; what he probably means is that he wants his parents to meddle less in his affairs, or more specifically, that he wants to be able to get online and play games or something.
In one context, freedom means being able to play games; in another, freedom means walking out of prison. So across all kinds of different contexts, there are always certain common features, which is why we use the word “freedom” to speak of them all.
This actually involves the ancient debate between nominalism and realism, which I will discuss in more detail when I have the chance. For now I can simply say that I think nouns are neither, as realism claims, directed toward some kind of objectively real thing, nor, as nominalism claims, something that in logic and in time comes after “particular things.”
Here let us look at the matter in a plain, commonsense way: for people to reach consensus about a noun, communication is necessary. Even for nouns that refer to some already-existing thing, the process of communication is very complicated. For example, if there are five red apples on the table and I point to them and say “apple,” have you then grasped the meaning of the word apple? Of course not. In fact, you do not know whether I mean apples, red apples, red, five, the table, or perhaps fruit or food. When I point to three green apples in a basket and also say “apple,” you then narrow the range. But sometimes more communication does not necessarily make the range narrower. For example, when you discover that someone else also points to a smartphone and says “apple,” perhaps you become confused; the range that had already narrowed becomes vague again… Of course, I could point to the two characters “苹果” printed in black and white in a dictionary and say “apple.” In that case you might learn it faster, but the premise is that you already understand the meaning of the word “苹果”; so how did you come to understand the word apple in the first place?
So the word “freedom” is complex, mysterious, and ambiguous, but we need not take it too seriously, because other words are about the same. Compared with words like “eating” and “sleeping,” the word “freedom” is neither simpler nor more complex, neither more sacred nor more humble.
The title of this article is “Freedom Is Like Being Treated to a Meal,” and this is the first layer of meaning: namely, the word freedom, like the word eating, is simple—or complex—in just the same way.
What does “eating” mean? The word eating is not defined by some thing called “food”; on the contrary, the thing called “food” is often defined by the action of eating. The same thing, eaten at different times and in different settings, is sometimes a meal, sometimes a snack, sometimes a sample, and sometimes even medicine.
Behind the concept of “eating” there is both nature and society. It is related to the natural functions of the human body—people can eat, know how to eat, need to eat, and like to eat. Because people have the ability and the need to eat, they can understand the concept of eating. On the other hand, this ability and need gradually solidify in social settings and become a custom, around which all kinds of technologies and institutions develop: planting and cooking, rice bowls and chopsticks, markets and restaurants, and also timetables and work systems that leave time for meals, and so on. All of these environments provide space for “eating.” “Lunch break,” “canteen,” “treating someone,” “the dinner table,” and so on all leave room for “eating.”
So to understand the concept of “eating,” as with any concept, one must first understand the whole environment, often an entire lifeworld or an entire language system. We did not learn the word when pointing at five red apples and saying “apple”; rather, we learned it when we understood the “space” embodied in the word.
That is the second layer of meaning in “freedom is like being treated to a meal.” That is to say, “freedom,” like “eating,” also has a dual foundation in nature and society. First, everyone has some capacity for freedom: people can be free, know how to be free, need freedom, and love freedom. People have the ability and the need for freedom. What exactly is this “ability”? It is the ability to break free from compulsion and decide for oneself. Decide what, then? That is, to “make choices.” The ability involved in freedom is nothing more than the ability to decide, the ability to choose.
That people can choose is a fact, not an unsolved mystery. Of course, why humans can choose, where free will resides—these may be philosophical problems endlessly debated, but the fact that people can freely make choices is not something controversial. Just as why people dream, what dreams mean, or even how to distinguish dreams from reality can be difficult questions for science and philosophy, the fact that people dream is simply a fact and not something controversial.
Like the ability to eat, under ordinary circumstances the ability to be free cannot be taken away, except in special cases—for example, if a person is killed or turned into a vegetative patient, then both the ability to eat and the ability to be free are taken away. In more common circumstances, when we speak of depriving someone of freedom, what is deprived is not the ability or thing called “freedom,” but certain specific, concrete options. For instance, I can take away the rice bowl in front of you, thereby restricting your “eating.”
Freedom is first and foremost a natural capacity: everyone is “born free.” This is not a slogan for which one must struggle, but a fact, just like the fact that everyone can eat from childhood. But that does not mean the capacity for freedom cannot be cultivated, promoted, or suppressed. Just like eating: although it is based on the body’s natural functions, it still requires cultivation and discipline after birth, as with any bodily function. Every child needs to learn how to eat, and even adults often still need to learn techniques and etiquette for eating.
Abilities differ in degree: an infant’s ability to eat is still weak, while an old person may have deteriorated. For example, asking Li Lianpo “Can you still eat?” is to suspect that his ability to eat has declined. On the other hand, being able to eat does not mean one “knows how to eat,” that is, it is a matter of skill. For example, a foreigner who is not used to Chinese food and does not know how to use chopsticks will very likely “not know how to eat” at a Chinese table; a rich second-generation heir who is used to having food brought to his mouth may also “not know how to eat” when alone in a remote and impoverished place. Knowing how to eat is a matter of the degree to which a person fits or adapts to the environment.
The capacity for freedom is similar. On the one hand, there are differences in people’s capacities: a child who has not yet formed a strong self-awareness has a relatively weak capacity for freedom; likewise, the capacity for freedom will atrophy in people who have grown accustomed to obedience and dependency. On the other hand, cultivating the capacity for freedom also requires coordination between the individual and the environment. People need to learn to adapt to the environment in order to make better use of freedom, and the environment can also provide spaces that are more or less conducive to freedom.
Since freedom is the ability to choose, then if I can choose between steamed buns, rice, or bread, I am always a bit freer than if I can only choose between steamed buns and rice. So maintaining a free environment is nothing more than ensuring that people have more room for choice. Of course, sometimes the problem is more complicated: for example, whether the freedom to choose between steamed buns and rice is freer than the freedom to choose between corn and bread is impossible to say. But in many actual contentious situations, the issue is not so complicated.
Apart from directly harming life, the capacity for freedom cannot be deprived by any environment. Even if all I have to eat are steamed buns, I can still choose whether to eat them in big bites or small bites, whether to eat while thinking of dried salted fish, or while cursing them as dog shit; all of this is something I can choose for myself.
So why are Chinese people unfamiliar with this concept? Because the space the environment leaves for it is too narrow. For example, everyone has the ability and need to eat, but in some environments eating merely lets one sustain life, whereas in other places eating is also endowed with the status of social etiquette, enjoyment of life, and so on. Likewise, sex is an ability and need everyone has, but some environments suppress and avoid it at all costs, some environments indulge it without caring at all, while others endow it with many layers of meaning.
In some societies, “freedom” occupies a prominent place on the levels of thought, technology, institutions, and so on, leaving room for people to make their own choices in many links of social activity.
Then, specifically, what should be done in order to help create a more free social environment? This is a very complex question, and I cannot answer it. But it is not all that complex either. Here freedom and eating are still just as simple—or just as complex—namely, what should be done to make the masses eat better? That is also a question that is hard to satisfy everyone on. There will be many disputes and difficulties in terms of guiding principles, technical conditions, and concrete operations. The saying “governing a large country is like cooking a delicate fish” really is exactly like that.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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