Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dissiness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.
Søren Kierkeggard – Concept of Anxiety
In Towards a Critical Existentialism (forthcoming), I take up two common ways of thinking about freedom, popularized by Isaiah Berlin. The first is what Berlin refers to as the “’negative’ freedom,” by which he means “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree…” (Berlin 1969, 156). This seems by far to be the sense of freedom most people have in mind when they worry about their freedoms. Is the government preventing me from purchasing a gun, preventing me from going to a restaurant, football game, or to school unless I am vaccinated against Covid-19 or wearing a mask? Just a brief survey of the signs people bring to freedom rallies offers an indication of what they are concerned about—they don’t someone someone, and in particular a government, preventing them from doing what they “could otherwise do.” One attendee to the rally brought a sign saying, “My Grandma did not survive the Holocaust for me to be masked or vaxxed against my will!”; another’s read, “I call the shot not you”; and finally, a common sign at one rally in Bloomington, Indiana, read “Ethical health care equals right to refuse.” The shared sentiment, it seems clear, is that the mask and vaccine mandates are forcing a choice upon them that they ought to be free to make for themselves. Berlin refers to this sense of freedom as negative for it is a freedom from government, or it concerns itself with the space where government does not have a say in what one does or chooses to do.
In the second way of thinking about freedom, the guiding question is not where the limits of our freedom lie, or where I am justifiably limited in doing what I could otherwise do, but instead the question what am I free to be or do becomes important. The distinction may seem subtle, but it is critically important. From the perspective of negative freedom, there is little concern with who you are as a person, with what your highest self might be for instance. The concern here is simply with whether your actions were done within the limits of the law, and whether the limits of those laws are appropriate. Mask mandates, for example, are challenged precisely because they are seen as placing improper limits on our freedom. From the perspective of positive freedom, by contrast, one is concerned with realizing their fullest potential, and this often takes the form of identifying with, and acting on behalf of, a group or community that is taken to be greater than oneself and the fulfillment of one’s true identity. This is where Isaiah Berlin is wary of positive freedom, preferring negative, for in the name of the group or entity that is the source of one’s true self one becomes justified in creating conditions whereby “coercing others for their own sake,” as Berlin puts it, becomes a means to an already justified higher end. The position of positive freedom, and Berlin no doubt had the experience of Nazi Germany in mind, thus leads one, Berlin concludes, “to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the goal of man (happiness, fulfilment of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfillment) must be identical with his freedom’ (162).
It is at this point where the critical existentialism I develop enters the scene. As even a cursory reading of existentialists lays bare, a great emphasis is placed upon freedom. This freedom, however, is not the positive freedom of attaining a predetermined end or goal, such as fulfilling one’s essential nature. As Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, urges, the nature of our freedom as conscious beings is irreducible to any of these already established traditions, customs, or expectations that are offered to us as our true and proper goal. If anything, positive freedom involves a forced narrative we are expected to adopt as that which makes sense of who we are and who we ought to become. The forced nature of these narratives is counter to the freedom existentialists find to be inseparable from who we are as human beings. Sartrean freedom, therefore, is not a positive freedom. At the same time, however, it is not a negative freedom. As the Kierkegaard quote that heads this post indicates, the problem with our freedom is not one of making sure that the government, or those with power, leave us alone and allow us to make our own choices, but rather it is the problem of determining what to do in the first place. From the perspective of negative freedom, it is assumed that one already has a clear handle on what one’s choices are and how we are to go about making them. One’s ability to choose is thus not the issue with negative freedom but it is rather the infringement upon this choice that is the problem. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the dizziness that comes with the anxiety of freedom is precisely the problem of embracing the infinite possibilities inseparable from the finite choice before us, recognizing that one’s choice has not removed the specter of possibility from our actions. Freedom, therefore, is embracing the problem of choice, living the problem that our choices entail both the necessity of that which is, that we chose this and not another thing, and the possibility that remains inseparable from this choice. This is the difficult synthesis that is human existence, as Kierkegaard and many of the other existentialists see it, and a critical existentialism is attuned to the problems that come with this synthesis. In a word, this is the problem of freedom.