Glucksmann contrasts two senses of freedom. One, you can call emancipatory, eschatological or, as he chooses to label "epic". According to this vision (actually "visionary" is another possible label for this conception) freedom is a progressive acquisition of a sort of disconnection from human nature or fate envisioned as an external determinant, and a gaining of complete mastery and power over human fate, something that will bring on a radically new phase in human history, a sort of golden age, if you will. There are obviously religiously inspired versions of this "epic" outlook, and just as obviously, secular versions.
This is contrasted with a more modest vision of freedom, as being liberty in a setting of uncertainty. This is the freedom of someone like Socrates, a freedom that critically questions, and in the very act of questioning, recognizes that there is no inevitability in progress. It recognizes that men and women make the same mistakes with their freedoms repeatedly, even while they also do marvelous things. It recognizes hubris as a constant risk, with tragic consequences.
He makes an interesting argument that this latter outlook can be seen as a logical outgrowth of the theology of the ancient Greeks. Unlike the monotheistic Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition that features not only a beneficent and perfect God (who has all the "omni" properties mind you), but also, a promised end to human travails, the Greek religion features (to put it mildly) imperfect Gods and a seemingly endless cycle of bickering and fighting, and no vision of an end or eschaton.
This forced the humans to say "hey look, we're basically on our own in this world that is and always will be capricious, even as it is also to some extent, rationally cognizable. So, we'd better do what we can to rationally deal with it, and get down to the nitty gritty of exercising our freedom to create tolerable modes of governance." The Gods, looking on, no doubt said something like "hey, good luck with that. If we cannot pull that feat off, you can't either, you frail creatures."
So, permanent crisis, and adjustment to crisis is the human condition, even as it is at the same time, free. Glucksmann:
Athens taught us that free will and critical thinking go together. The necessity of submitting celestial voices and their dictates to the painstaking criticisms of reason is a matter not of pride but of modesty: it is not because I think myself good or intelligent, but because I know I am fallible and capable of deceiving myself, that I am bound to investigate oracles, just as Socrates did with the Delphic message. The evil spirit—perhaps myself—“often disguises itself as an angel of light,” Immanuel Kant later observed. To think is to defend one’s freedom against one’s imagination and to guard against a deceiving God, for “we were all children before becoming men,” as Descartes said, and spent many years governed by our passions, not our reason.
To believe that it is enough to believe is a pathology that threatens every religion, even a secular and materialist one. To listen to voices without ever questioning them is superstition. To fail to examine the authenticity of one’s commitments is arrogance. The combination of superstition and arrogance yields fanaticism: God is in me, and I am in God; there is no point in thinking, since my brain already occupies a little part of paradise. Free thought, by contrast, requires us to look reality, including unfortunate reality, in the eye. In response to the claims of a prayer that commands, implores, and requires, Aristotle proposes a cool attention that points out and observes. Non-pathological religions distinguish the temporal and the spiritual: king and priest in the Bible, caliph and preacher among the Muslims, the way of the world and the way of faith in the Christian tradition. “I believe in order to understand,” say Augustine and Anselm, the first intellectuals of post-Roman civilization.
To discover one’s freedom is to recognize a capacity for self-intoxication and self-deception, and thus to condemn oneself to doubt. This experience of freedom is primary for a current of modern philosophy, just as it was for the thinkers of antiquity. Descartes, in this sense Socrates’s son, called it “a freedom, by which we can refrain from admitting to a place in our belief aught that is not manifestly certain and undoubted, and thus guard against ever being deceived.”
There is much more in the article than this overarching theme, including; a discussion of Plato's Platonism its eschatological flavor as typified by the Symposium vis-a-vis its tension with the more realistic view of freedom espoused by the paper; Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, his thoughts on slavery; the Greek tragedians and their thoughts on the separation of the private and public spheres (Sophocles's Antigone); and Alexander the Great's cosmopolitanism. [What's that Macedonian doing in this discussion? Ask Aristotle the Stagirite.]
Hold on. Hold on. A Western Union Telegram (get it.."western" ha ha) from Themistocles. Something about the importance of political freedom, and freedom's reliance on deterrent power, protection by judicious application of force..
Reading from the telegram:
"What? No mention of me? I feel slighted. If it wasn't for me Periclean Athens would have never occurred. You can't have all that high falutin' culture if you've been carted off as slaves somewhere in Persia, or if you're dead. Right?
Come on.
I tell ya, I get no respect. I ensure my home state's freedom, the survival of nascent Western culture, and what do I get? A swift kick in the ass, I end up in Persia. Magnesia to be precise. Thanks a lot Athens. Thanks..
Sincerely,
Themistocles, son of Neocles"
Backgrounder:
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