Practical Freedom
How the assertion of freedom undermines freedom
This piece brings greater depth to the distinction I recently made between ‘ontological freedom’ and ‘practical freedom’ in my talk “Renewing Liberation Theology under Capitalist Conditions” at ’s conference Rosy Cross 2: Radical Theology meets Emancipatory Politics.
This line of thinking continues a theme I’ve been exploring for a long time about how the message of liberation has become a key mechanism of control today. But more than that, what should we do to make freedom liberating again? I intend to address that question more explicitly in a second part coming soon.
Two Freedoms
Freedom comes in two types, both intimately related.
As humans, we enjoy an ‘ontological freedom’ which I describe simply as ‘the power to envision things otherwise than how they are.’ Through the powers of imagination and language, animated by both desire and will, we can bring something new into the world. We can see the halo of possibilities which surround every moment, the teeming virtuality of nature’s past and future lives.
Humans can intervene into this reality precisely because we are not pre-determined by the paths of instinct, and thus, as creatures of desire and drive, we can exercise the power of decision which brings about one state of affairs as opposed to another. This ability to see the world otherwise, and thus to re-make it, stems from our very constitution as beings defined by lack and excess.
However, we can distinguish another type of freedom which both supports and depends upon our ontological freedom — ‘practical freedom.’ I define practical freedom as the conditions which make the exercise of ontological freedom possible. These are the physical, psychological, symbolic, social, and spiritual conditions through which and because of which I am able to exercise my powers of creativity, decision, and mutual relation with others.
While my freedom as a human allows me the powers of imagination to think the possibility of air flight, as well as to decide to remake my world by introducing this possibility, without the material or social conditions for the invention of the airplane which makes these new possibilities actual, this ontological freedom remains purely virtual. Thus practical freedom differs from ontological freedom because it operates within the limits and structures of the real, needing the support of certain constraints afforded by others and our world, but it surpasses ontological freedom in that it can exist in actuality, rather than remaining a pure possibility confined to an individual or group’s subjective space.
The relation between the two is symbiotic — we need ontological freedom to engage in the play of possibilities, but without the regular exercise of practical freedom, our ontological freedom inevitably becomes diminished or simply impotent. Use it or lose it — as we become more passive and immersed in our world’s flows, the less we become able to envision it ‘otherwise’ and to enact new interventions in our situation. We become reactive and instinctual rather than creative or free, and the only way to resist this congealment of our ontological freedom is through acting freely in our world to renew those conditions which make the practical exercise of our ontological freedom possible.
Dying on the vine
In contemporary Western society, the limitless assertion of ontological freedom has undermined practical freedom. We have confused the two (or perhaps been swindled by an obfuscation) which concludes from the fact of our ontological freedom that we must therefore resist any form of limitation, alienation, or decision as an attack on our very human-ness.
The ideology of our moment maintains that: {human beings must be absolutely practically free, otherwise they are not ontologically free}. Consequently, the realm of practical freedom which demands tradeoffs, failure, limit, decision, and contingency has been elided, and ultimately outsourced to the job of technology to deliver — whether it be the state apparatus itself, markets and the corporation, or digital technologies like the smartphone, technics has been tasked with giving us the practical conditions for the infinite exercise of ontological freedom.
Ontological freedom requires social and material conditions for its function, such as language or writing, some key tools of practical freedom, but these tools necessarily place certain limitations upon us even as we adopt them. Human beings develop through our tools, as each technology has its own tendencies and affordances, and thus these tools are never simply subordinate to us — we are changed by our encounter with them, and as we use them to objectify ourselves, we will find that both our vision and capacities have been transformed.
It seems that the more that technology does for us, the less capable of exercising freedom we have become, both individually and communally. An example from Plato’s Phaedrus — King Thamus pointed out that the inventor of writing, Thoth, had misunderstood the new technology of writing by thinking that it would improve people’s memory. Rather, as King Thamus foresaw, it would have the opposite effect. Writing externalizes memory, making it no longer necessary, thus leading to a degradation in the powers of memory, replaced by the reminding function of the written word. In the end, scribes who rely on writing would come to only possess the appearance of wisdom, a simulation without the substance. While this externalization of the memory function clearly offers some important benefits (some of which you are enjoying right now in reading this), rarely do we understand what we might be giving up in adopting a particular technology, or the consequences for our social and spiritual lives.
The perpetual expansion of technology and its domain, as well as the type of technologies we have yield ourselves to, has begun to tighten the noose around our neck, cutting off the oxygen to the organs we need to engage in free activity. Dying from lack of energy and disuse, these organs of freedom begin to atrophy and wither away. As we have offloaded more and more of our capacity to exercise our practical freedom of working on the world, and ourselves, we are discovering that we must have the world delivered back to us by technology.
In the 1970’s, an aphorism circulated in IBM which said that “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” Of course, after all a while, one can plausibly blame all one’s decisions on the computers even as things get worse and wosre. But, what if the ability to be held accountable is precisely what makes a decision? That one must risk suffering a loss may be the substance of a decision.
Technology has hijacked this demand for infinite freedom to generate myriads of new technologies at paces faster than we can properly evaluate them or adjust to the changes they introduce into our lives. Neil Postman in his book Technopoly distinguishes between tool-using societies, technocracies, and technopolies, and he argues that it’s really this state of “technopoly” which is detrimental, not technology itself. We live under the reign of a technopoly which unconditional affirms technology as good, relentlessly pursues the progressive subordination of every human value to quantification and technique, and releases itself to the proliferation of technology as an autonomous force pulling us along. As Nick Land has said, “It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself.”
We have ensnared ourselves in this technological trap because we believed that to truly possess our ontological freedom as humans we must experience infinite practical freedom. Any limitation on our practical freedom constitutes an affront to our spiritual inheritance as human beings, our ontological freedom to think the world “otherwise than being.” These technologies promised an infinite expansion of practical freedom, and this offer of limitless practical freedom was made all the more urgent by its conflation with our dignity as human beings.
Under the guise of human rights which would guard against the violation of our innate ontological freedom as humans, we ended up losing access to that freedom by handing it over to (1) the social technology of the state and governance, (2) the material technologies of tools and machines, and (3) the inhuman technology of capital, markets, and information. Just like how writing killed memory by outsourcing it to an external entity, so too we are killing every living human phenomenon and value by converting them into commodities which can be processed by Capital, that global techno-intelligence which is using us to construct itself.
While Americans are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as free, we are shockingly unfree. Our enslavement rarely takes the insidious form or repressive and explicit prohibitions (although it certainly does, and increasingly so since the political shifts which came to fruition under the Covid-19 pandemic), but power operates at the highest level of politics and the lowest level of psychology as a regime of desires, a reality-simulation, and a techno-ecology which silently sidelines all the other alternatives, drawing us into its grip without us realizing that other options exist.
Technology monopolizes our imagination, rendering the alternatives invisible.
We struggle to envision the alternatives to our current situation because it’s precisely the experimentation with practical freedom which supports and stimulates our capacity for ontological freedom. Without this experimentation in the realm of practical freedom, our ontological freedom is diminished. Without actually living very different lives, we cannot see how life can be different.
We struggle to envision the alternatives to our current situation because it’s precisely the experimentation with practical freedom which supports and stimulates our capacity for ontological freedom.
When I look at American society today, I see a culture which fiercely advocates for the freedom of individuals to speak or act according to their desires, but this passionate idea has become increasingly absurd when we realize how our range of action has been dramatically curtailed. We remain at the level of continually asserting our ontological freedom, but then demanding that institutions provide us with those practical means for exercising limitless freedom. We demand to be called by our pronouns of choice, but cannot dictate our working hours.
For decades the managerial elite have been working on providing us with the affordances we have demanded (and many we have not), and lo and behold, these technological means have enslaved us rather than made us free. Freedom is an activity which one must undertake for one’s self, both individually and in relation to others, but it cannot be delivered to you by the intervention of an expert or purchased as a good or service from a corporation. You must personally practice freedom, or your freedom gradually disappears.
Unfortunately, this should have been obvious, because limitless practical freedom is impossible. It’s an infantile fantasy, and a contradiction in terms. Freedom can only be enacted in particular moments by particular people, all of which demand a sober engagement with context, limit, and lack. We live in a “Disneyland” culture (as my psychoanalyst friend is fond of saying) where we do not believe in tradeoffs anymore. We have lost what Dan Garner of
calls a “tragic sociology” — a social analysis which realizes that some goods are incommensurable, and thus the entire social dimension of human life depends upon the act of ‘decision’ which discusses, coordinates, and values some goods to the exclusion of others.“We are doing things before they make sense,” says Nick Land. Doesn’t this describe modern life so well? Whether it be the computer, the smartphone, artificial intelligence, whatever — the moment a new technology comes into existence the unbearably urgent demand to adopt it as quickly as possible emerges from nowhere in particular but suddenly appears everywhere all the time. Not only have we lost the awareness of the possible tradeoffs of adopting certain tools for exercising practical freedom, but we have even lost the social coordination mechanisms for evaluating these technologies to make decisions about whether and how we want to use them. Technology has begun to envision our world otherwise than being, and we have handed the reigns over to this emergent intelligence, allowing it to lead us down whichever virtual pathways of time which it blindly chooses.
Next week I’ll raise the question of the renewal of the bespoke, the unique, and the provisional, all with the aim of asking how we can begin dis-intermediating our exercise of practical freedom from the various machinic object forms which have captured our imagination, our capacities, and our social relationships.