Two great campaigns appear to have marked the history of the last century. The first, in the 19th century, can be termed the age of science and industrialization, as the new command of man over energy and electricity led to vast expansions of the industrial base and communications. There was hope that this alone would usher in a new and more humane world, but, by the first third of this century, Hitler and Goebbels had proved that these powers could be used in an opposite manner.
There followed a vast project of liberation from totalitarianism, colonialism, and prejudice of many sorts with a view to recognizing and realizing the freedom of all persons. The last half century might be said to have been marked especially by the march of mankind toward freedom. From the famous "Long March" of Chinese lore in the 30s, to the "March on Washington" by Martin Luther King in the 60s, to the world wide social reforms in the 80s, the aspiration of freedom has electrified hearts, evoked great sacrifices and defined human progress in our age.
Science and democracy have been the watchwords of modern history; now both are well within our reach. But, wherever there are two, the problem of their unity and harmony becomes central to the realization and value of both. So it is at the present moment that we are in search of an adequate context which will enable both science and human freedom to be realized under the title of democracy in our day. If this can be found, it will enable scientific capabilities truly to implement a humane and free life and our democracy to become, not a well-ordered tyranny of the majority, but a context for personal and social realization.
This suggests that we might helpfully reflect upon life in our century by considering science and freedom and the conditions for their realization. I must leave the direct consideration of Confucian thought to those sufficiently steeped in that tradition to be able to speak to it with the enthusiasm and insight it richly deserves. Rather, the present chapter will concern key points in the philosophy of Kant in the hope that this will suggest ways in which the Confucian tradition can make a substantive contribution to the conjoint realization of science and democracy in our day.
Descartes' requirements of clarity and distinctness for the human mind pointed modern philosophy toward what is fixed and necessary. Generally, this was below man; however, human life and relationships transcend neat categorization. Freedom is by definition not necessitated, and love, as self- giving, is essentially unique and spontaneous. If freedom and love are the highest of human realities, then the search for what is required for them (and hence manifest by them) promises an especially penetrating exploration into the heart of being itself.
What is of special interest here is not only that, after Descartes, this search was taken up by Kant, but that, in this process, Kant came inexorably to an aesthetic context for reality and for thought which is reminiscent of Confucius' notion of harmony. If the two be truly related in this, then an investigation of Kant may be a way of discovering both the central place in the thought of Confucius for modern notions of freedom and the special place of the Confucian culture and its peoples in the modern world.
Further, as Kant's path was through freedom, following his trajectory may enable one to discover a sense in which Confucian harmony is a philosophy of freedom. If so, this could be a significant route to the modernization of the Confucian tradition itself.
This chapter will explore this by (1) surveying philosophical notions of freedom in order to search out the common area of autonomy in contrast to the necessary and universal realm of scientific laws; (2) seeing how the inadequacies of the minimal sense of freedom as choice found in classical British philosophies of the liberal tradition and common in our day point to the principled sense of freedom in Kant; (3) analyzing the structure of Kant's Critiques as it leads the mind to an aesthetic context for realizing conjointly science and freedom; and (4) identifying the corresponding metaphysical Transcendent and its contributions to the sense of life in our day.
THEORIES OF FREEDOM
Every encyclopedia--especially philosophical ones--must contain a survey of the number of notions of freedom. What is of interest here, however, is not only to list the multiple notions of freedom, but to identify their range and inter-relations in order to arrive at some sense of the essence of freedom. In this there have been a number of basically convergent efforts. One is that of L.B. Geiger to winnow through the senses of freedom identified in Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (pp. 542-551). Geiger's study, done as part of a project for the Dictionnaire des termes fondamentaux de la philosophie et de la pensée politique, is limited to the seven definitions of Lalande and to their context in French philosophy.
Here, we shall draw especially upon the survey carried out by of Mortimer J. Adler and the team of The Institute for Philosophical Research, published as The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom. Their corporate examination of the main philosophical writings identified three correlated modes in which freedom has been understood, namely, circumstantial, acquired and natural, and the corresponding modes of self, i.e., "the ability or power of the self in virtue of which freedom is possessed," namely, self-realization, self-perfection and self-determination." This yields the following scheme:
Mode of Possession Mode of Self
1. Circumstantial <---------------> 1. Self-realization
2. Acquired <--------------------> 2. Self-perfection
3. Natural <---------------------> 3. Self-determination
To this schema, political liberty could be added as a variant of circumstantial self-realization and collective freedom as a variant of acquired self-perfection. The modes of self correspond to the modes of possession, thereby constituting a class; e.g., self-realization (as permitting an individual to act as he wishes for his own good as he sees it) will always relate to circumstantial mode of possession. It is possible, however, that a mode of self might correspond as well to an additional mode of possession. Thus, the circumstantial mode of possession is significant not only for self-realization, but also for self-perfection and self-determination.
Using the above scheme the Institute team categorized as follows the positions on freedom of the main body of philosophers.
Theories Involving Four Distinct Conceptions of Freedom, as follows:
(1) Natural Self-determination, (2) Acquired Self-perfection, (3) Circumstantial Self-realization, subordinate to and circumscribed by Acquired Self-perfection, (4) Political Liberty
Theories Involving One Conception of Freedom Having Two or More Distinguishable Aspects, as follows:
(A) With Natural Self-determination as distinct from Acquired Self-perfection only in the initial or preparatory phase of freedom, but fused with Acquired Self-perfection in the terminal or ultimate phase of freedom
(B) With Natural Self-determination and Circumstantial Self-realization together subordinate to Acquired Self-perfection as the fulfillment of freedom
This categorization has a number of uses: First, it enables one, at a glance, to identify something of the understanding and concerns regarding freedom of a particular thinker; Second, it enables one to gauge what comparisons between which philosophers might be possible and potentially helpful on a specific issue.
For our purpose of discovering not only the divisions but the nature of freedom, this categorization might serve a third purpose, namely, it can provide the material for an initial search for the common and, hence, the foundational notion of freedom. This will not be the same as a basic understanding of the ontology or psychology of politics of freedom--that must be the search of the particular theoreticians. However, if an area of convergence in the multiple understandings of freedom can be determined this can orient the attention of our historical and theoretical search toward answering the question, "What is freedom?"
The team of the Institute for Philosophical Research began their dialectical search for the answer to the question "what is freedom" by dividing theories of freedom among three categories, namely:
(A) Circumstantial freedom of self-realization: "To be free is to be able, under favorable circumstances, to act as one wishes for one's own individual good as one sees it";
(B) Acquired freedom of self-perfection: "To be free is to be able, through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as one ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature"; and
(C) Natural freedom of self-determination: "To be free is to be able, by a power inherent in human nature, to change one's own character creatively by deciding for oneself what one shall do or shall become"; to which can be added:
(D) Political liberty; and
(E) Collective freedom.
Note that each of these statements is not a generic statement over and above which the particular theories in the category add specific difference. Rather, they are analogous statements of the common content of the theories in that category. They are sufficiently open to embrace the different instances in the category and yet sufficiently distinct to enable these to be contrasted to the theories in another category. For example, (B) "To be free is to be able, through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as one ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature" states a common understanding, which is diversely realized by:
(B1) Aug ustine: To be free is to be able, through receiving God's grace, to escape from bondage to sin and to live in accordance with the divine law, expressing the love of God in everything one wills;
(B2) Spi noza: To be free is to be able, through the achievement of adequate knowledge of the eternal necessities, to conquer one's passions and live in accordance with reason or the laws of one's own nature; and
(B3) Fr eud: To be free is to be able, through acquiring insight, to resolve the conflicts within oneself and live with some approximation to the ideal of healthy or integrated personality.
All of these differ from A and C in that none of these thinkers would say that these are instances of the freedom which they propose, namely, that to be free is: (A) "to be able under favorable circumstances to act as one wishes," or (C) "by a power inherent in human nature to change one's own character creatively by deciding for oneself what one shall do or shall become."
If now we wish to use these three major types of freedom to look at a still further (X) level of generalization for a single analogous notion of freedom, then we could formulate this search in the following manner:
A man who is able
(A) under favorable circumstances, to act as he wishes for his own individual good as he sees it
or
B) through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as he ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature
or
(C) by a power inherent in human nature, to change his own character creatively by deciding for himself what he shall or shall not become
is free in the sense that he (X)
In carrying out this process of generalization in order to determine what is common to A and C, attention to the following points will be helpful:
a. Ability to Act: the power to act appears in A, B and C. It should be taken as open not only to actuation, but to the possibility of acting or not acting, even if that ability not be exercised or be related to different goals. Thus it is:
A. "the circumstantial ability to perform the movements called for by one's own desires and purposes," i.e., the good as one sees it for oneself,
B. "the acquired ability to will or live as one ought," i.e. for a goal that is set for and attracts all men, and
C. "the natural ability to decide creatively the course of one's life or action" with a view to formative changes in one's own character.
b. Analogous Concept: A general notion of freedom must be open to all of
these as regards actuation or at least the power to act, the nature of the ability as well as its goal. This openness, however, is not one of limitation achieved by simply omitting the difference; it is rather that of being broad enough to include all of these actually, though not explicitly.
c. S elf and Ot her: Note that all these concern the self, whether as "self realization," "self-perfection" or "self-determination," and that all do this with some implied contrast to an "other." In the vast survey of related philosophic literature this contrast to the "other" appears in terms of freedom as arising from within, or from my own will in contrast to something or someone outside of myself, or even to the lower and morally intransigent side of man's nature if it opposes one's freedom. One's decisions and plans are one's own only if made by this present active self, and not merely to and for him.
In addition to an ability to act in a certain way, which is present in all conceptions of freedom, we now see that such ability or power is that whereby the self is exempt from the power of another. Through the exercise of such ability or power, what a man does is his own act. It proceeds from his self, and the result it achieves is a property of his self--the realization of his self, the perfection of his self, the determination or creation of his self. It is not something which happens in him, not something which is imposed on him, not something which is done to him or for him.
The self, then, is the principle or source of freedom, of the acts he performs which manifest freedom. As the person is not free when subject to an alien power rather than to his own, the terms "independence" and "autonomy" are generally synonymous for "freedom" and "liberty." This is reflected in the treatment of freedom as liberation in ancient as well as contemporary times, of being one's own master (Aquinas, Spinoza) or of autonomy (Kant).
From these three general notions of freedom, Adler and his team drew the following most general statement of freedom: "A man is free who has in himself the ability or power whereby he can make what he does his own action and what he achieves his own property." This has two implications. First, freedom consists in being the active source of what one does or becomes, not, the passive object of what others do. Thus, what one becomes is the result of one's own making, and what one achieves is proper to oneself, i.e., his own or his property. Conversely, unfreedom consists in either lacking the power to make what one does one's own or being overpowered by another so that what happens to one is the work of another.
Thence arises the following composite statement of freedom in its three modalities (A-C) and in its most general form (X).
A man who is able
(A) under favorable circumstances, to act as he wishes for his own individual good as he sees it
or
B) through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as he ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature
or
(C) by a power inherent in human nature, to change his own character creatively by deciding for himself what he shall or shall not become
is free in the sense that he
(X) has in himself the ability or power whereby he can make what he does his own action and what he achieves his property.
What has been done thus far is to follow Adler's team at the Institute for Philosophical Research as it winnowed the breadth of philosophical literature to identify certain basic categories of freedom and then to draw out a general analogous statement of freedom. This has not been a theoretical or deductive procedure but a dialectical one. It looked historically for the various human understandings of freedom and drew from them a sufficiently open description of freedom to include--though not in explicit detail--the positive content of this basic and a shared human project and experience.
Now we shall reverse the field, that is, we shall look into the philosophical basis from which have arisen the various theories of freedom identified in the above process of generalization. Our goal here will be to bring to explicit detail the bases, modes and goals of freedom.
What appears striking is that, if one takes not the ways in which some theories overlap and include a number of types of freedom, but the pattern of those which are focused upon only one type of freedom, or if one looks to the highest type of freedom which a theory can take into account then one finds that each of the three types of freedom delineated by the Institute of Philosophical Research corresponds to an epistemology and metaphysics. Circumstantial freedom of self-realization is the only type of freedom recognized by many empirically-oriented philosophers; acquired freedom of self-perfection is characteristic of more rational, formalist and essentialist philosophers; natural freedom of self-determination is developed by philosophers who attend also to the existential dimension of being. This suggests that the metaphysical underpinnings of a philosophy control its epistemology and that especially in modern times this controls its philosophical anthropology and ethics. With this in mind, the following review of the three types of freedom will begin from their respective metaphysical and epistemological contexts and, in that light, proceed to its notion of freedom.
EMPIRICAL CHOICE: CIRCUMSTANTIAL FREEDOM OF SELF-REALIZATION
At the beginning of the modern stirrings for democracy, John Locke perceived a crucial need. If decisions were to be made not by the king but by the people, the basis for these decisions had to be equally available to all. To achieve this, Locke proposed that we suppose the mind to be a white paper void of characters and ideas, and then follow the way in which it comes to be furnished. To keep this public, he insisted that it be done exclusively via experience, that is, either by sensation or by reflection upon the mind's work on the materials derived from the senses. From this David Hume concluded that all objects of knowledge which are not formal tautologies must be matters of fact. Such "matters of fact" are neither the existence or actuality of a thing nor its essence, but simply the determination of one from a pair of sensible contraries, e.g., white rather than black, sweet rather than sour.
The restrictions implicit in this appear starkly in Rudolf Carnap's "Vienna Manifesto" which shrinks the scope of meaningful knowledge and significant discourse to describing "some state of affairs" in terms of empirical "sets of facts." This excludes speech about wholes, God, the unconscious or entelechies; the grounds of meaning, as well as all that transcends the immediate content of sense experience, are excluded.
As noted above by A dler and his team, the decision in metaphysics concerning the nature of reality and the corresponding decision in epistemology determines our understanding of the nature and meaning of freedom and, indeed, of human life. The results of the exclusions made by the empiricists are devastating for human life and meaning: there can be no sense of human nature and, hence, no freedom of self-perfection; there can be no sense of human existence and, hence, no natural freedom of self-determination.
In empirical terms, it is not possible to speak of appropriate or inappropriate goals or even to evaluate choices in relation to self-fulfillment. The only concern is which objects among the sets of contraries I will choose by brute, changeable and even arbitrary will power and whether circumstances will allow me to carry out that choice. Such choices, of course, may not only differ from, but even contradict the immediate and long range objectives of other persons. This will require compromises and social contracts in the sense of Hobbes; John Rawles will even work out a formal set of such compromises. Throughout it all, however, the basic concern remains the ability to do as one pleases.
This includes two factors. The first is execution by which my will is translated into action. Thus, John Lo cke sees freedom as "being able to act or not act, according as we shall choose or will"; Bertrand Russell sees it as "the absence of external obstacles to the realization of our desires." The second factor is individual self-realization understood simply as the accomplishment of one's good as one sees it. This reflects one's personal idiosyncracies and temperament, which in turn reflect each person's individual character.
In these terms, one's goal can be only what appeals to one, with no necessary relation to real goods or to duties which one ought to perform. "Liberty consists in doing what one desires," and the freedom of a society is measured by the latitude it provides for the cultivation of individual patterns of life. If there is any ethical theory in this, it can be only utilitarian, hopefully with enough breadth to recognize other people and their good, as well as my own. In practice, over time this comes to constitute a black-hole of self-centered consumption of physical goods in which both nature and the person are consumed; it is the essence of consumerism.
This first level of freedom is reflected in the contemporary sense of "choice" in North America. As a theory, this is underwritten by a pervasive series of legal precedents following Justice Bran __deis' notion of privacy, which now has come to be recognized as a constitutional right. In the American legal system the meaning of freedom has been reduced to this. It should be noted that this derived from Locke's politically motivated decision (itself an exercise of freedom), not merely to focus upon empirical meaning but to eliminate from public discourse any other knowledge. Its progressively rigorous implementation, which we have but sampled in the references to Hu me and Ca rnap, constitutes an ideology in the sense of a selected and restrictive vision which controls minds and reduces freedom to willfulness. In this perspective, liberalism is grossly misnamed, and itself calls for a process of liberation and enrichment.
FREEDOM OF LAW AND ESSENCE;
ACQUIRED FREEDOM OF SELF-PERFECTION
Kant provides the basis for another, much richer notion of freedom, which Mortimer Adler, in his study of freedom at the Institute for Philosophical Research, has called, "acquired freedom of self-perfection." It acknowledges the ability of man to transcend the empirical order and to envisage moral laws and ideals. Here, "to be free is to be able, through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as one ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature." This direction has been taken by such philosophers as Plotinus, Spinoza and Bradley who understood all in terms of ideal patterns of reason and of nature. For Kant, freedom consists not in acting merely as one pleases, but in willing as one ought, whether or not this can be enacted. Moral standards are absolute and objective, not relative to individual or group preferences.
But then we face the dilemma of freedom. If, to be of value, it must be ordered, can freedom be truly autonomous and, hence, free; conversely, if to be free is to be autonomous will it be surely a value. In both cases, can freedom be free? The dilemma is how persons can retain both meaning and value, on the one hand, and autonomy or freedom, on the other. One without the other--meaning without freedom, or freedom without meaning--would be a contradiction. This is the kind of question that takes us to the intimate nature of reality and makes possible new discovery. I would suggest that it may even allow us to appreciate from within the more intuitive insight of Confucius and, thereby, to engage this in new ways particularly adapted to present times. To see this, we must look at the structure of the three critiques which Kant wrote between 1781 and 1790: The Critical Decade.
The Critique of Pure Reason
It is unfortunate that the range of Ka nt's work has been so little appreciated. Until recently, the rationalist impact of Descartes directed almost exclusive attention to the first of Kant's critiques, the C ritique of Pure Reason, which concerned the conditions of possibility of the physical sciences. Its rejection of metaphysics as a science was warmly greeted in empiricist, positivist and, hence, materialist circles, as a dispensation from any search beyond what was reductively sensible and, hence, phenomenal in the sense of inherently spatial and/or temporal.
Kant himself, however, quite insisted upon going further. If the terms of the sciences were inherently phenomenal, then his justification of the sciences was precisely to identify and to justify, through metaphysical and transcendental deductions respectively, the sets of categories which enable the phenomenal world to have intelligibility and scientific meaning. Since sense experience is always limited and partial, the universality and necessity of the laws of science must come from the human mind. Such a priori categories belong properly to the subject inasmuch as it is not material.
We are here at the essential turning point for the modern mind, where Kant takes a definitive step in identifying the subject as more than a wayfarer in a world encountered as a given to which one can but react. Rather, he shows the subject to be an active force engaged in the creation even of the empirical world in which one lives. The meaning or intelligible order of things is due not only to their creation according to a divine intellect, but also to the work of the human intellect and its categories. If, however, man is to have such a central role in the constitution of his world, then certain elements will be required, and this requirement itself will be their justification.
First there must be an imagination which can bring together the flow of disparate sensations. This plays a reproductive role which consists in the empirical and psychological activity by which it reproduces within the mind the amorphous data received from without, according to the forms of space and time. This merely reproductive role is by no means sufficient, however, for, since the received data is amorphous, any mere reproduction would lack coherence and generate a chaotic world: "a blind play of representations less even than a dream". Hence, the imagination must have also a productive dimension which enables the multiple empirical intuitions to achieve some unity. This is ruled by "the principle of the unity of apperception" (understanding or intellection), namely, "that all appearances without exception, must so enter the mind or be apprehended, that they conform to the unity of apperception." This is done according to the abstract categories and concepts of the intellect, such as cause, substance and the like, which rule the work of the imagination at this level in accord with the principle of the unity of apperception.
Second, this process of association must have some foundation in order that the multiple sensations be related or even relatable one to another, and, hence, enter into the same unity of apperception. There must be some objective affinity of the multiple found in past experience--an "affinity of appearances"--in order for the reproductive or associative work of the imagination to be possible. However, this unity does not exist, as such, in past experiences. Rather, the unitive rule or principle of the reproductive activity of the imagination is its reproductive or transcendental work as "a spontaneous faculty not dependent upon empirical laws but rather constitutive of them and, hence, constitutive of empirical objects." That is, though the unity is not in the disparate phenomena, nevertheless they can be brought together by the imagination to form a unity only in cerain particular manners, if they are to be informed by the categories of the intellect.
K ant illustrates this by comparing the examples of perceiving a house and of a boat receding downstream. The parts of the house can be intuited successively in any order (door-roof-stairs or stairs-door-roof), but my judgment must be of the house as having all of its parts simultaneously. Similarly, the boat is intuited successively as moving downstream. However, though I must judge its actual motion in that order, I could imagine the contrary. Hence, the imagination, in bringing together the many intuitions goes beyond the simple order of appearances and unifies phenomenal objects in an order to which concepts can be applied. "Objectivity is a product of cognition, not of apprehension," for, though we can observe appearances in any sequence, they can be unified and, hence, thought only in certain orders as ruled by the categories of the mind.
In sum, it is the task of the reproductive imagination to bring together the multiple elements of sense intuition in some unity or order capable of being informed by a concept or category of the intellect with a view to making a judgment. On the part of the subject, the imagination here is active, authentically one's own and creative. Ultimately, however, its work is not free, but necessitated by the categories or concepts as integral to the work of sciences which are characterized by necessity and universality.
How realistic is this talk about freedom? Do we really have the choice of which so much is said in the West? On the one hand, we are structured in a set of circumstances which circumscribe, develop and direct our actions. This is the actual experience of people which Marx and Hegel articulate when they note the importance of knowledge of the underlying pattern of necessity and make freedom consist in conforming thereto.
On the other hand, we learn also from our experience that we do have a special responsibility in this world to work with the circumstances of nature, to harness and channel these forces toward greater harmony and human goals. A flood which kills thousands is not an occasion for murdering more, but for mobilizing to protect as many as possible, for determining what flood control projects need to be instituted for the future, and even for learning how to so construct them that they can generate electricity for power and irrigation for crops. All of this is properly the work of the human spirit which emerges therein. Similarly, in facing a trying day, I eat a larger breakfast rather than cut out part of my schedule; rather than ignoring the circumstances and laws of my physical being, I coordinate these and direct them for my human purposes.
This much can be said by pragmatism. But it leaves unclear whether man remains merely an instrument of physical progress and, hence, whether his powers remain a function of matter. This is where Kant takes a decisive step in his second Critique.
The Critique of Practical Reason and The Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals
Beyond the set of universal, necessary and ultimately material relations upon which he focuses in his first Critique, Kant points out that the fact of human responsibility is in the realm of practical reason. If man is responsible, then there is about him a distinctive level of reality irreducible to the laws of physical nature. This is the reality of freedom and spirit; it is what characterizes and distinguishes the person. It is here that the bonds of matter are broken, that transcendence is affirmed, and that creativity is founded. Without this nature, it would remain a repetitive machine; peoples would prove incapable of sustaining their burgeoning populations and the dynamic spirit required for modern life would die.
Once one crosses this divide, however, life unfolds a new set of requirements for reality. The definitiveness of human commitments and the unlimitedness required for its free creativity reflect characteristics of being which soar far beyond the limited, fixed and hypothetical relations of the physical order. They reflect rather the characteristics of knowledge and love: infinity, absoluteness and commitment. To understand the personal characteristics experienced in our own life, we need to understand ourselves not as functions of matter, but as loving expressions of unlimited wisdom and creative generosity.
Lo cke had tried too hard to make all public by reducing everything to the physical dimensions and concrete circumstances of human life. Instead, in order to understand the proper place of man in the universe, we must read ourselves and our situation from the opposite end, as expressions of conscious life, progressively unfolding and refining.
Many materialist philosophies of a reductionist character, such as positivism and the materialistic dialectic, would have been at the level of Kant's first Critique. The necessity of the sciences provides control over one's life, while their universality extends this control to others. Once, by means of Ka nt's categories, the concrete Hu mean facts have been suffused with a clarity corresponding to the rationalist's simple natures, the positivist hopes to achieve Descartes' goal of walking with confidence in the world.
For Kant, however, this simply will not do. Clarity which comes at the price of necessity may be acceptable and even desirable for works of nature, but is an appalling way to envisage human life. Hence, in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, K ant proceeds to identify that which is distinctive of the moral order. His analysis pushes forcefully beyond utilitarian goals, inner instincts and rational (scientific) relationships--precisely beyond the necessitated order which can be constructed in terms of his first Critique. None of these recognizes that which is distinctive of the human person, namely, freedom. For Kant, in order for an act to be moral, it must be based upon the will of the person as autonomous, not heteronomous or subject to others or to necessary external laws.
This becomes the basic touchstone of his philosophy; everything he writes thence forward will be adapted thereto, and what had been written before will be recontextualized in this new light. The remainder of his Foundations and his second Critique of Practical Reason will be composed in terms of freedom; in the following two years he would write a third Critique of the Faculty of Judgment in order to provide a context that enables the previous two critiques to be read in a way that protects human freedom.
In the Foundations, he recasts the whole notion of law or moral rule in terms of freedom. If all must be ruled or under law, and yet in order to be free the moral act must be autonomous, then my maxim must be something which as a moral agent I--and no other--give to myself. This, in turn, has surprising implications, for, if the moral order must be universal, then my maxim which I dictate must be fit to be also a universal law for all persons. On this basis, freedom emerges in a clearer light. It is not the self-centered whimsy of the circumstantial freedom of self-realization described above; but neither is it a despotic exercise of the power of the will; finally, it is not the clever, self-serving eye of Pla to's ro gue who can manipulate and cheat others. This would degrade that which is the highest reality in all creation. Rather, freedom is power that is wise and caring, open to all and bent upon the realization of "the glorious ideal of a universal realm of ends-in-themselves." It is, in sum, free men living together in righteous harmony.
The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
Despite its central importance, I will not remain with practical reason because it is rather in the third Critique of the Faculty of Judgment that Kant provides the needed context for such harmony, and thus approaches the aesthetic sensibility of Confucius in articulating the cosmic significance of freedom. Kant is intent not merely upon uncovering the fact of freedom but upon protecting and promoting it. He faces squarely modern man's most urgent question: how can this newly uncovered freedom survive when confronted with the necessity and universality of the realm of science as understood in the Critique of Pure Reason? Will the scientific interpretation of nature restrict freedom to the inner realm of each person's heart, where it is reduced at best to good intentions or to feelings towards others?
When we attempt to act in this world or to reach out to others, must all our categories be universal and hence insensitive to that which marks others as unique and personal? Must they be necessary, and, hence, leave no room for creative freedom, which would be entrapped and then entombed in the human mind? If so, then public life can be only impersonal, necessitated, repetitive and stagnant. Must the human spirit be reduced to the sterile content of empirical facts or to the necessitated modes of scientific laws? If so, then philosophers cannot escape forcing upon wisdom a suicidal choice between either being traffic directors in the jungle of unfettered competition or being tragically complicit in setting a predetermined order for the human spirit. Freedom would, indeed, have been killed; it would pulse no more as the heart of mankind.
Before these alternatives, Kant's answer is a resounding No! Taking as his basis the reality of freedom--so passionately and often tragically affirmed in our lifetime by Ghandi and Martin Luther King--Kant proceeded to develop his third Critique of the Faculty of Judgment as a context within which freedom and scientific necessity could coexist, indeed, in which necessity would be the support and instrument of freedom. Recently, this has become more manifest as human sensibilities have opened to the significance of culture and to awareness that being itself is emergent in time through the human spirit (see chapter I).
To provide for this context, K ant found it necessary to distinguish two issues as reflected in the two parts of his third Critique. In the "Critique of Teleological Judgment", he acknowledges that nature and all reality must be teleological, for if there is to be room for human freed om in a cosmos in which man can make use of necessary laws, if science is to contribute to the exercise of human freedom, then nature too must be directed toward a transcendent goal and manifest throughout a teleology within which free human purpose can be integrated. In these terms, nature, even in its necessary and universal laws, is no longer alien to freedom, but expresses divine freedom and is conciliable with human freedom. The structure of his first Critique will not allow Kant to affirm this teleological character as an absolute and self-sufficient metaphysical reality, but he recognizes that we must proceed "as if" all reality is teleological precisely because of the undeniable reality of human freedom in an ordered universe.
If, however, teleology, in principle, provides the needed space, there remains a second issue of how freedom is exercised, namely, what mediates it to the necessary and universal laws of science? This is the task of his "Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment", and it is here that the imagination reemerges to play its key integrating role in human life. From the point of view of the human person, the task is to explain how one can live in freedom with nature for which the first critique had discovered only laws of universality and necessity. How can a free person relate to an order of nature and to structures of society in a way that is neither necessitated nor necessitating?
There is something similar here to the Critique of Pure Reason. In both, the work of the imagination in assembling the phenomena is not simply to register, but to produce the objective order. As in the first critique, the approach is not from a set of a priori principles which are clear all by themselves and used in order to bind the multiple phenomena into a unity. On the contrary, under the rule of unity, the imagination orders and reorders the multiple phenomena until they are ready to be informed by a unifying principle whose appropriateness emerges from the reordering carried out by the productive imagination.
In the first Critique, however, the productive work was done in relation to the abstract and universal categories of the intellect and carried out under a law which dictated that phenomena must form a unity. The Critique of Pure Reason saw the work of the imagination in assembling the phenomena as not simply registering, but producing the objective order. The approach was not from a priori principles which are clear all by themselves and are used to bind the multiple phenomena into a unity. On the contrary, in the first Critique, under the rule of unity, the imagination moves to order and reorder the multiple phenomena until they are ready to be informed by a unifying principle on the part of the intellect, the appropriateness of which emerges from the reordering carried out by the reproductive imagination.
However, this reproductive work took place in relation to the abstract and universal categories of the intellect and was carried out under a law of unity which dictated that such phenomena as a house or a receding boat must form a unity--which they could do only if assembled in a certain order. Hence, although it was a human product, the objective order was universal and necessary and the related sciences were valid both for all things and for all people.
Here in "The Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment," the imagin ation has a similar task of constructing the object, but not in a manner necessitated by universal categories or concepts. In contrast, here the imagination, in working toward an integrating unity, is not confined by the necessitating structures of categories and concepts, but ranges freely over the full sweep of reality in all its dimensions to see whether and wherein relatedness and purposiveness or teleology can emerge and the world and our personal and social life can achieve its meaning and value. Hence, in standing before a work of nature or of art, the imagination might focus upon light or form, sound or word, economic or interpersonal relations--or, indeed, upon any combination of these in a natural environment or a society, whether encountered concretely or expressed in symbols.
Throughout all of this, the ordering and reordering by the imagination can bring about numberless unities. Unrestricted by any a priori categories, it can nevertheless integrate necessary dialectical patterns within its own free and, therefore, creative production and scientific universals within its unique concrete harmonies. This is properly creative work. More than merely evaluating all according to a set pattern in one's culture, it chooses the values and orders reality accordingly. This is the very constitution of the culture itself.
It is the productive rather than merely reproductive work of the human person as living in his or her physical world. Here, I use the possessive form advisedly. Without this capacity man would exist in the physical universe as another object, not only subject to its laws but restricted and possessed by them. He/She would be not a free citizen of the material world, but a mere function or servant. In his third Critique Kant unfolds how man can truly be master of his/her life in this world, not in an arbitrary and destructive manner, but precisely as creative artists bring being to new realization in ways which make possible new growth in freedom.
In the third Critique, the productive imagin ation constructs a true unity by bringing the elements into an authentic harmony. This cannot be identified through reference to a category, because freedom then would be restricted within the laws of necessity of the first Critique, but must be recognizable by something free. In order for the realm of human freedom to be extended to the whole of reality, this harmony must be able to be appreciated, not purely intellectually in relation to a concept (for then we would be reduced to the universal and necessary as in the first critique), but aesthetically, by the pleasure or displeasure of the free response it generates. It is our contemplation or reflection upon this which shows whether a proper and authentic ordering has or has not been achieved. What shows whether a proper and authentic ordering has or has not been achieved is not a concept, but the pleasure or displeasure, the elation at the beautiful and sublime or the disgust at the ugly and revolting, which flows from our contemplation or reflection.
One could miss the integrating character of this pleasure or displeasure and its related judgment of taste by looking at it ideologically, as simply a repetition of past tastes in order to promote stability. Or one might see it reductively as a merely interior and purely private matter at a level of consciousness available only to an elite class and related only to an esoteric band of reality. That would ignore the structure which K ant laid out at length in his first "Introduction" to his third Critique which he conceived not as merely juxtaposed to the first two Critiques of pure and practical reason, but as integrating both in a richer whole.
Developing the level of aesthetic sensitivity enables one to take into account ever greater dimensions of reality and creativity and to imagine responses which are more rich in purpose, more adapted to present circumstances and more creative in promise for the future. This is manifest in a good leader such as a Chu rchill or Ro osevelt--and, supereminently, in a Confucius or Ch rist. Their power to mobilize a people lies especially in their rare ability to assess the overall situation, to express it in a manner which rings true to the great variety of persons, and, thereby, to evoke appropriate and varied responses from each according to his or her capabilities. The danger is that the example of such genius will be reduced to formulae, become an ideology and exclude innovation. In reality, as personable, free and creative, and understood as the work of the aesthetic judgment, their example is inclusive in content and application as well as in the new responses it continually evokes from others.
When aesthetic experiences are passed on as part of a tradition, they gradually constitute a culture. Some thinkers, such as William Ja mes and Jürgen H ab ermas, fearing that attending to these free creations of a cultural tradition might distract from the concrete needs of the people, have urged a turn rather to the social sciences for social analysis and critique as a means to identify pragmatic responses. But these point back to the necessary laws of the first Critique; in many countries now engaging in reforms, such "scientific" laws of history have come to be seen as having stifled creativity and paralyzed the populace.
Kant's third Critique points in another direction. Though it integrates scientifically universal and necessary social relations, it does not focus upon them, nor does it focus directly upon the beauty or ugliness of concrete relations, or even directly upon beauty or ugliness as things in themselves. Its focus is rather upon our contemplation of the integrating images of these which we imaginatively create, that is, our culture as manifesting the many facets of beauty and ugliness, actual and potential. In turn, we evaluate these in terms of the free and integrating response of pleasure or displeasure, the enjoyment or revulsion they generate most deeply within our whole person.
Con fucius probably would feel very comfortable with this if structured in terms of an appreciation or feeling of harmony. In this way, he could see freedom itself at the height of its sensibility, not merely as an instrument of a moral life, but as serving through the imagination as a lens or means for presenting the richness of reality in varied and intensified ways. Freedom, thus understood, is both spectroscope and kaleidoscope of being. As spectroscope it unfolds the full range of the possiblities of human freedom, so that all can be examined, evaluated and admired. As kaleidoscope, it continually works out the endless combinations and patterns of reality so that the beauty of each can be examined, reflected upon and chosen when desired. Freely, purposively and creatively, imagination weaves through reality focusing now upon certain dimensions, now reversing its flow, now making new connections and interrelations. In the process reality manifests not only scientific forms and their potential interrelations, but its power to evoke our free response of love and admiration or of hate and disgust.
In this manner freedom becomes at once the creative source, the manifestation, the evaluation and the arbiter of all that imaginatively we can propose. It is goal, namely to realize life as rational and free in this world; it is creative source, for with the imagination it unfolds the endless possibilities for human expression; it is manifestation, because it presents these to our consciousness in ways appropriate to our capabilities for knowledge of limited realities and relates these to the circumstances of our life; it is criterion, because its response manifests a possible mode of action to be variously desirable or not in terms of a total personal response of pleasure or displeasure, enjoyment or revulsion; and it is arbiter, because it provides the basis upon which our freedom chooses to affirm or reject, realize or avoid this way of self-realization. In this way, freedom emerges as the dynamic center of our human existence.
There is much in the above which evokes the deep Confucian sense of the harmony and the role of the gentleman in unfolding its implications for daily life. This uncovers new significance in the thought of Confucius for the work of implementing in a mutually fruitful manner science and democracy in our times. Looking to the aesthetic sense of harmony as a context for uniting both ancient capabilities in agriculture with new powers of industrialization and for applying these to the work of freedom is a task, not only for an isolated individual, but for an entire people. Over time, a people develops its own specific sensibilities and through the ages forms a tradition and a culture, which is the humane capital for such a project. In this sense, one can look to the Confucian cultural heritage for its aesthetic sense of harmony as a way to carry forward the work of freedom in our day.
The Confucian sense of harmony is not a rationalist law whose unfolding would suggest an attempt to read all in an a priori and necessitarian manner. Its sense of life and progress is not that of a scientific view of history after the dialectic of He gel and M arx. Rather, Confucianism is a way of understanding humans as bringing their lives together in relation to other persons and in the concrete circumstances of everyday life. In this sense, it is not massively programmatic in the sense of a rationalist scientific theory of history. This may be very much to the good, for it protects against efforts to define and delimit all beforehand, after the manner of an ideology.
Further, one must not underestimate the cumulative power which the Con fucian sense of harmony and resonance can have when it brings together creatively the many persons with knowledge of their circumstances and in an effort to provide for life in its many modes. This extends from those farmers who know and love their land intimately and are committed to its rich potentialities (and analogously from all phases of productive economic life), to family members and villagers who love their kin and neighbors, to citizens who are willing to work ardently for the welfare of their people and nation. If the exercise of freedom is a concrete and unique expression of the distinctive reality of its authors, then the task is not how to define these by abstractive and personally stifling universal laws, but how to enliven all persons to engage actively in the multiple dimensions of their lives.
Philosophically, the Confucian attitude is of no less importance. For if harmony and resonance enable a more adapted and fruitful mode of the realization of being, then the identity and truth, dynamism and goodness of being are thereby manifest and proclaimed. In this light, the laws of nature emerge, not as desiccated universals best read technically and negatively as prohibitions, but as rich and unfolding modes of being and actualization best read through an appreciation of the concrete harmony and beauty of their active development. This, rather than the details of etiquette, is the deeper Confucian sense of the gentleman and sage; it can be grasped and exercised only with a corresponding aesthetic, rather than merely pragmatic, sensibility.
Nor is this beyond people's experience. Few can carry out the precise process of conceptualization and definition required for the technical dialectics of Platonic and Aristotelian reasoning. But all share an overall sensibility to situations as pleasing and attractive or as generating unease or even revulsion. Inevitably, in earlier times, the aesthetic Confucian mode lacked in the technical precision which is now available regarding surface characteristics of physical phenomena. But, in its sense of harmony, it possessed the deep human sensibility and ability to take into account and integrate all aspects of its object. This is essential for the contemporary humanization of our technical capabilities for the physical and social mobilization of our world.
EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM: NATURAL FREEDOM OF SELF-DETERMINATION
Thus far, this paper has looked at three notions of freedom which, in their difference, can compliment and unfold one another in mankind's modern effort to achieve maturity and play an increasingly responsible role in directing social life in our times.
First, we saw how, in the context of the Enlightenment and in order to make possible universal participation in social life, Locke limited the range of meaning to what was empirically available. This assured one sense of freedom, but limited it to choices between contrary qualities. The effort was well-intentioned, but he would seem to have tried too hard and compromised too much in single-minded pursuit of freedom of choice. As a result, the very notion of freedom has not been able to sustain itself, but over time has turned gradually into a consumerist black hole.
Second, we saw how Kant in his second Critique opened a new and much needed dimension of freedom based upon our nature or essence as free beings. This was based upon law, precisely as I assert for myself (autonomous) a law which is fit for all men (universal). It generates a sense of acquired freedom of self-perfection according to which I am able, through the acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as I ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature.
The aesthetic sense in Kant and, I believe, at the root of the Confucian insight dramatically enriches the pursuit of this freedom. The aesthetic integrates body and spirit, opens all to high ideals and locates in one's free response to the beauty and harmony of the whole the norm of creative human engagement in reality. Kant's work may suggest ways of rearticulating Con fucius' potential for contributing to the modern aspirations for freedom, while the Confucian culture can flesh out with centuries of lived experience the abstract model which Kant could only sketch during the decade in which he wrote his three Critiques. Together they greatly enrich the Enlightenment effort at constructing freedom by raising its goals and locating the exercise of human freedom, not only in terms of the human essence as autonomous, but within our aesthetic response to a sense of beauty and harmony which transcends us and inspires awe and delight.
This is progress, indeed, but, in his own philosophy, Hegel both pointed out in theory and illustrated in practice the potential this opens for a serious undermining of the sense of freedom. For, if the required context for freedom is based upon proceeding hypothetically `as if' all is teleological, then its very reality is compromised. If its exercise is restricted to the confines of the human imagination, then freedom becomes not only self-determining but self-constituting. Again, we have tried too hard and become trapped within what we can make or do.
We need to go beyond issues of nature and essence. Freedom is not only the articulation of a law, however autonomous and universal this might be (indeed, precisely to the degree that it is autonomous and universal) in the pattern of Kant's second Critique, nor at whatever stage of universalization of the sense of justice in the pattern of Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning. Freedom is not merely a nature reflected in moral judgements, it is human life and action. It is to be humanly, that is, to live fully; this is of the order, not of essence, but of existence.
Progress in being human corresponds to the sense of being. Thought moved from forms and structures, essences and ideas in Pl ato, to act in Aristotle and especially to existence in Chris tian philosophy (see Chapter IV). This definitively deepened the sense of human life with its triumphs and tragedies and set the drama we are living in our day. For it calls insistently for a humanization of the application of our technological abilities and indeed, of life itself. This must be not simply in terms of essence, that is of a moral law or an ideal befitting human nature. Rather, it must be in terms of existence, that is of deciding for oneself in virtue of the power inherent in human nature to change one's own character creatively and to determine what one shall do or shall become. This is the most radical freedom, namely, our natural freedom of self-determination.
This then is the real issue, indeed, it is the issue of the foundation, nature and extent of reality itself. As the deepest active striving of the human spirit, freedom is of the order of existence, indeed, it is the very meaning of human existence. This is the true reality of human freedom; it gives in turn human meaning to the lesser freedoms, namely, to the ability to choose between contraries and to decree universal laws, which are but shadows of the freedom of self-determination.
But if basic freedom is in the existential order, then the transcendent principle it requires must not be merely hypothetical (`as if'), but really existent. If freedom presents us with a limitless range of possibilities, then its principle must be the Infinite and Eternal, the one actual composite Source and Goal of all possibility. The transcendent is the key to real liberation: it frees the human spirit from limitation to the restricted field of one's own slow, halting and even partial creative activity; it grounds one's reality in the Absolute; it certifies one's right to be respected; and it evokes the creative powers of one's heart.
The source of the beauty imaged, progressively revealed and resoundingly reaffirmed by men at their deepest levels of heart and mind, must be actual as are the struggles of human life. It must also be infinite as the basis for human freedom and creativity. As such, these are ever open to new affirmation, rather than being exhausted, shut, delimited or predetermined. Finally, it must be personal as the principle of life lived in knowledge of truth rather than in falsehood and deception, in love and goodness rather than in hate and evil.
This actual, infinite and personal absolute is what Chri stians mean by God, and what they go on to unfold in terms of a Trinity of persons as Father, as Word, Lo gos or Son, and as Holy Spirit. It is what Hindus express so richly in the living terms of existence (sat), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ananda). It is what the Daoists suggest as the Spirit of all spirits and attempt to protect especially through negative terms which are echoed in Christian and Hindu negative philosophy and theology. For, precisely as Absolute, it must transcend the richest efforts of each people to articulate it, while yet inspiring every person and all peoples in their own histories and cultures. This will be the burden of the fourth chapter.
This takes us far beyond freedom as external choice between objects in our world and beyond internal selection of universal principles for the direction of our action. It is rather self-affirmation in terms of our orientation or teleology to perfection or full realization. It implies seeking when perfection is lacking and enjoying or celebrating it as attained. It is in this sense that stability in one's orientation to the good has classically has been termed holiness. One might say that it is life as practiced by the saints, but it would be more correct to say that it is because they lived in such a manner that they are called holy.
Thinking in these terms, it would be radically insufficient to reduce one's horizons to the human person in isolation from others, merely self-centered and self-concerned, for then life would be stymied at the confines of but one person. Indeed, such a person would have closed off his or her realization of being, which rather should be open to all of nature and especially to other persons. My concern for perfection should extend to other persons, not only as regards what I determine as my participation in being or even what I determine for them as their participation in being, for such an exercise of freedom on my part would return to me and remain limited within the confines of my being. Instead, by opening myself to others as free, that is, as they uniquely determine themselves, my engagement in being extends definitively beyond myself to their life and realization.
But persons are still limited, whereas my mind and heart are open to being without end. Situated in an existential context, the pointer of Kant's third Critique toward an infinite telos takes on further meaning. For it directs us toward the infinite, self-sufficient and properly creative source of our being. Corresponding to that act of infinite freedom by which we live and breathe and have our being, we unite with the act of being by which we are made to be, the act of love by which we have first been loved. Human growth in freedom is the process of self-correction and self-perfection to the point at which we are fully opened to that infinite act of freedom from which we come and to which we tend. The achievement of this openness is the state of Hindu and Buddhist enlightenment and of Christian mystical union in the divine. There God loves himself in me: "I live now not I," says St. Paul, "but Christ liveth in me." This indeed is freedom writ large and the reason why such a person must be at the dynamic center of every human effort that is good and constructive. This is the real key to civic virtue. It is a transforming presence in the heart of everyone who suffers injustice and, hence, the source of new life for person and society.
However, it is possible for man to fall away from the ideal. Human self-consciousness is not only limited, but can be degraded; it can sink from being creative in sharing of self to a self-centered grasping for being which withholds it from others. In responsible human beings, such defective modes reflect not merely their limitations as finite beings, but their refusal to open to others and their choice to close in upon self. In so doing, they abuse their freedom, which thus becomes at once not only their glory but their exposure to moral evil and collapse; its redemption will be studied in chapter four.
The struggle to realize freedom and overcome moral collapse is the content of the basic moral norm: do good and avoid evil. Christianity is centered upon this definitive human struggle in which Christ joins mankind, takes evil upon himself on the Cross, and rises victorious to new life. Its sense then is not to deny, but to conquer evil. This is the challenge it extends and the hope it generates.
In the Protestant Christian tradition, that sin has corrupted human nature, Hegel would say that truth content regarding the transcendent must first be revealed and then perfected by philosophy. The Catholic-Christian tradition, which sees the effect of sin not as corrupting but as weakening human nature, would consider this insight regarding the transcendent source to be within the proper capabilities of philosophical reason. In either case, however, it is not a matter of abstract theory but of discovering that the foundations of freedom as lived and experienced existentially can be only in a living God who created us out of love. Christianity brings further `good news', namely that God sent his Son to proclaim through the Resurrection that our freedom cannot be defeated by evil, but is resurgent and in the end will triumph. This is the full truth about mankind seen in relation to the transcendent Lord of Heaven.
To the Enlightenment sense of freedom as choice, awareness of the transcendent Creator adds that life is not only a matter of having, that is, of selecting between which physical realities we will consume, but of being, with its characteristics of self-identity, communication, justice and sharing. Beyond this, awareness of salvation through the Cross adds that even suffering can be redemptive and lead to resurrection in a new birth in freedom.
To the aesthetic awareness of K ant (and Con fucius), as described above, awareness of the transcendent as the context of human life adds a sense of human meaning, dignity and rights beyond anything that man can construct. It grounds the intuition of human meaning, dignity and rights. This, in turn, evokes a dynamic and creative response from mankind to the gifts of which its very reality is constituted. Historically as well as philosophically, this not only reflects the search of mankind for freedom in our day, but is its source and inspiration as well as its bulwark against ideological reduction to anything constructed by man, including the community itself. This, indeed, may be one reason for the paradox that, while the main Christian Churches today are sending fewer missionaries, Christianity is more sought by peoples engaged in nation building.
Conversely, the Enlightenment and Kantian (and Confucian) aesthetic sense are important for the unfolding of the Christian vision. The Enlightenment has given egalitarian form to the modern sense of freedom and, hence, to the search for universal participation in social decision making. The aesthetic sense can do much to temper the aggressive excesses of a fallen and, hence, self-centered sense of personal identity by a broad sense of harmony both with man and with nature. This is needed in our ever more complex and crowded world.
Confucianism as a sense of harmony seems exceptionally suited to providing the space for freedom and creativity in an increasingly technical world, particularly if grounded in an open and unlimited sense of being. If so, it can point the way to a life in which freedom is protected by justice and exercised as creative love.
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Ref: HARMONY AS A CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS OF FREEDOM: Kant and Confucius
