So we are exhausted by the brittle novelty that is supposed to animate our lives. History is no guide because it provides us with too many possibilities.
Yet there is something stirring again and it comes from an unexpected source. It will allow us to retrieve the freedom we thought we had lost. The blog tells us we should not shy away from this change. It may seem frightening, but it is actually profoundly liberating.
Also, these comments will be in part a fierce rebuttal of the ideas of rationalist scholars like Susan Neiman and Amartya Sen. With this blog I intend to take the fight to them.
• My first objective is to launch a ferocious assault on the objectifying turn in Western culture and the unassailably powerful institutions (market capitalism, our hallowed research universities, the system of positive and natural law) it has spawned. We start to thaw out our lives again by rescuing the freedom that the great contrarians in the European tradition—Montaigne, Nietzsche, Marx and, above all, Rousseau—sought. From the very outset my writings will spurn the shallow notion of freedom that has now been appropriated by those who wish to reduce it to just another concept with useful, indeed utilitarian, implications.
• The blog will disinter the archaeological layers of ideas that have shaped our notions of freedom and knowledge and which have accumulated over the history of European-influenced culture. (There are also some interesting parallels with the shift from a Confucian text-based li to nature-based wen scheme in the Sung dynasty in 12th century China and I shall touch on that very briefly at some point.) And then I will do something else: I intend to show readers how another axial change in our culture has already begun.
• I then hope to radically redefine the meaning of freedom. Freedom has motivated some of our greatest movements but now seems utterly drained of vitality. Yet how I do it is what really matters. I am not just dusting off some tired old notions and writing a dry exegetical tract. By (a) reworking the debate between freedom and authority in terms of how we engage with the material world in the most elemental sense, i.e. whether in a Socratic (i.e. Plato) or pre-Socratic (Rousseau) way, and (b) then showing that we don’t fight for freedom but default into it by displacing the Platonist project into the electronic world, I will be approaching this in a rather original way.
• It is equally important to see this for what it is not. Despite the many references to technology it is not about trans-humanism. Nor is it a speculative foray into the philosophy of history. Nor, again, is it a New Age pamphlet. Its goals are avowedly political, not futuristic. It is a resonant call to non-action—in the same way Gandhi’s satyagraha was a form of passive resistance— an appeal not to stand in the way of burgeoning change.
The material in this blog will have two main themes, each with several interlocking sub-themes:
Theme 1: Freedom has no essence; it cannot be made an object of our understanding because it makes understanding possible. Freedom allows us to act. Thinking is just an act. Yet thinking and especially reasoned thinking are given pride of place in our modern culture. In fact, we are imprisoned by the need to think and all our acts are subordinated to this one act. The blog reasserts the freedom that is our inheritance and that by restoring freedom we are restoring life’s 'other acts'. The notion of a just society then emerges from these other acts. Not surprisingly, the view of “justice” espoused here is at odds with the rational conception of justice formulated by thinkers like John Rawls and Susan Neiman, as well as the tempered-rationality of Amartya Sen.
Theme 2: How do we put ourselves back in freedom? We attain it by displacing thought-acts to the electronic realm. Already a sophisticated synthetic economy exists in some Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs. (The Chinese government has recently tried to stamp out synthetic money and the South Korean authorities are monitoring whether commercial transactions in some of these online games are spilling over into the material world.) I argue that much more of our lives can be transferred to that realm, hollowing out our lives, and refilling them with these other acts.
