At first when I read this I thought Bernstein was drawing a comparison that was anti-discipline. Martin Buber spoke of it in defining the absolute of Art in I/Thou. Buber said that once you chose your product, if you were going to be an artist about it, you would give up all other products and processes in pursuit of the perfection of the system that this product represented. As I got to the end of the article, Bernstein circled back and pleasantly surprised me. REH
Song of Freedom By J.M. Bernstein When Janis Joplin achingly sang that "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," she (or the song's composer, Kris Kristofferson) was critiquing a widely held ideal of independence: namely, the aspiration toward maximum liberty from all binding attachments and obligations. Isn't it obvious, the argument goes, that each promise, and each unbreakable emotional bond, entails a loss of true freedom, an abrogation of true independence? Joplin's refutation is simple and elegant: in actuality, absolute freedom is a picture of perfect emptiness, since if you have nothing left to lose, you have nothing. However much the ideal of unencumbered freedom has become associated with the Declaration of Independence, freedom from binding attachments is no part of its philosophical underpinnings. In protesting against British tyranny, the American colonists were not proclaiming an ideal of individual freedom from government. On the contrary, they were pleading the cause for a vital conception of political community. No words are more redolent of this ambition than the concluding sentence of the Declaration: "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." What stands behind "The Declaration," providing it with all the support it can possibly have, is the "mutual pledge" of its signatories. Their pledging to one another everything - not just their fortunes and honor as individuals, but their very lives - is the ethical substance of the document. It is how the American "we" steps onto the world stage. Too often in the reading of "The Declaration" its background assumptions - the resounding words of its preamble - are unduly privileged. What we take to be self-evident, that all men are equal and endowed with unalienable rights, is intended to be explanatory about why we have systems of government and what they are meant to do - protect those rights. However, it is neither the rights themselves nor their self-evidence that the preamble is emphasizing - they were commonplace notions of the time; and, even if they were not, a list of self-evident moral truths would still be idle in practice if no one paid attention to them. As a posse of philosophers has argued, following the lead of Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution," the ground note of the preamble is Jefferson's "incongruous phrase" "We hold," with its implication that the self-evident truths that follow were somehow lacking in authority despite their divine sanction. It is that "we" taking those truths as definitive of the human condition that made them the very "we" that founded this nation. Holding, pledging, and binding themselves to those truths gave them a political identity, a political "we," and gave those truths political authority and significance. Ever since Lincoln revived the Declaration to provide a corrective to the Constitution, it has been easy to forget what a work of collective self-making the Declaration is. And while the words of the preamble were indeed fateful in the overthrow of slavery, the remainder of the document does not mention individual liberty or individual rights; rather, it is concerned with who "we" Americans already are as a political community, and how the British king and Parliament have committed "repeated injuries and usurpations" that violently attack the integrity of our political community. At present, we hear much talk of how government is failing, how it, that "thing," the government is betraying the people, as if there were some absolute divide between the people and government, as if there were some notion of absolute freedom that was compromised by its attachments to political community. There is, finally, no "people" apart from the government, and no government apart from the people, there is no "I" without this "we," and no "we" without each "I." When the founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, thus creating the "we" of America, they understood that such a pledge was the condition under which life, liberty, and happiness could be pursued; without that pledge, there would be nothing left to lose. Janis and the founders are here in profound agreement. _____ J.M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of five books. He is now completing a book entitled "Torture and Dignity." Excerpt from blog discussion in today's NYTimes.
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