A free society needs a foundation. Part 2

I first published this series of articles in the German-speaking area under #freie-gesellschaft. I started the attempt to translate this article series also for the English-speaking countries. I have only a limited command of English and have therefore used a translation program. However, many terms are very difficult to translate because there is no clear translation for some words. I hope, however, that at least the meaning of the content will be understandable.
for the English readers I will open the section #free-society

Is "the" society the place of freedom, as the expression "free society" in the title seems to say? I consciously emphasize "these" here. The answer has been firmly anchored in our consciousness for centuries: the place of freedom is the ego. When we talk about freedom, we have to look at the ego. Whether the ego lives or uses its freedom or not, it is at least endowed with freedom.

In an age in which the freedom of the ego is to be taken seriously, one cannot help but think of the ego from the ego and back in every form of free sociality. And only when a society gives space to the freedom of the ego will one be able to speak - metaphorically - of a "free society".

With regard to a free society, I also speak of a humane society or of a humanely organized society. Here I use the word humane simply in the sense of "according to human nature" (Cicero: humanitas), without any sacral-clarifying or twisted painting. If the word "humanity" is to mean something meaningful at all, then it can only refer to the really existing ego (including its talent for freedom!). This is especially true for thinking about the relationship of the ego to the you, i.e. about the we, first of all. In this respect, the word "humane" - as it is used here - aims at the ego reference that is to be made visible everywhere. Without this reference, all confessions of humanity are nothing but loudmouthed sayings and hollow proclamations.

The idiom "conclusive-human society" means: I am enabled to build up my relationship to others (according to the circumstances) in such a way as it wants to itself - but without denying a you the same right. It's about the freely designed interaction of an ego with its counterpart, the you, in particular with the you in the form of rulers (or supposed rulers), but here we come even closer to speaking. This contact should be characterized by freedom everywhere.

But what is freedom? Many of us - confronted with this question - will have to answer like Saint Augustine once did with the question about the essence of time: "If you don't ask me what it is, then I think I know. But if you ask me, then I don't know anymore." So the series of articles owes the question a more tangible answer.

Freedom is a main theme of the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Immanuel Kant calls this period the "age of critique". Critique in Kant's mind is radical in the truest sense of the word. He writes: "Religion, through its holiness, and legislation, through its majesty, want to withdraw from it. But as then they arouse just suspicion against themselves, and cannot claim to undisguised respect.

Whoever speaks in this way signals that he does not trust the authorities, neither the ecclesiastical nor the state. From Kant's sentences speaks a kind of thinking to which one could have imputed a proper portion of heresy on the part of the church of that time and a proper portion of anarchism on the part of the state of that time.

A few decades after Kant, this way of thinking was once again expressively enforced by the gifted, often grossly misunderstood freedom thinker Max Stirner.

The quotation on "holiness" and "majesty" shows that Kant probably already found out that ecclesiastical or state supremacy produced rather primitive forms of human religiosity or human society.

Heinrich Heine called Kant's critique of pure reason with a view to its heretical tendency "the sword that cut off the head of European deism". Later articles will show that this also happened to Kant's "majestic legislation".

Kant's extraordinary kindness has been testified to many times. However, he has wielded the hammer of enlightenment with a malevolence that is unparalleled. The hammer has crushed much thought or half-thought. Stirner could only surpass malice in tone, but not in substance.

Enlightenment does not aim at the transformation of man in the sense of improving his character. It aims to increase knowledge. No information script, no matter how haunting, can make man - essentially endowed with a light side and a shadow side - a radiant demigod. Kant knew: "Nothing completely straight can be made of such crooked wood as what man is made of".

The outline given here is tailored to man as he is, to the "old" man, so to speak. This is man, whose ambivalent nature has remained the same over the millennia and will probably not change in the future. Only that he has recently found himself in a somewhat unpleasant state of mind, which is pressing for cleansing. Enlightenment can bring about such cleansing. It can help the enlightened person to become more aware of himself and his circumstances.

This applies in particular to everything that has to do with freedom. Here I see a deficit of consciousness. Man already has freedom in himself, even if he often appears to be "sluggish about freedom" (Mathias Döpfner, "Die Freiheitsfalle" 2011). But he is not always aware of his talent for freedom, including all the consequences that this entails.

Vague, partly obscure visions of freedom have existed for a long time. The "classical" one, which originated in the European Enlightenment, still has the greatest relation to reality. In the following contributions I will try to give more shape to this vision, according to its original and radical impetus. The focus is on the groundbreaking insights Kant has brought to bear. For him, freedom was "his most important maxim of thought and life" (Manfred Geier, "Kant's World - A Biography" 2013), for which he also accepted personal risks and disadvantages. It was also Kant who recognized that a radical transformation of thinking (the "Copernican Revolution" he called it) was necessary in order to grasp freedom comprehensively.

Not everything can be taken from the social theories of the Enlighteners. Thinking has progressed. But the basic questions about the relationship between society and ego, between society and freedom, between ego and power were already posed in all sharpness at that time and, to a large extent, were answered sufficiently coherently.

As a remedy for the straightening of a relationship between self and society that is perceived as disturbed, it is offered again and again: the way from the self, the way to more community, to more collectivity ("sociality", "solidarity"). Adolf Hitler deserves the credit of having summed up the deification of the collective and the demonization of the ego living its freedom: "You are nothing; your people are everything. Against this holism, which is still firmly invoked today, it is not easy for the ego. It can only gain a reputation with difficulty. Only slowly does it conquer the stage of social-theoretical disputation.

Let us - my readers and I - start the other way round: Let us not use society, the collective, the people, but the ego as the highest reference point and from here try to comprehend free sociality. Such a reversal of vision is not so far from the natural as to require us to laboriously practice it. At least an experiment should be possible before this other horizon. Perhaps such an experiment leads to results that we can cope with better. Perhaps this will give us the opportunity to give social affairs a more pleasing colour than they do today.

If the ego, the individual, is to become the focus of a discussion on social theory, the first thing that needs to be clarified is: what is this ego that is supposed to be given freedom within a society? What do I mean when I constantly say "I, I, I"? Does this I mean my body, its organs, my thoughts and feelings, my activities, my character? On the one hand yes, but on the other hand also - - no. What about the expression "I want", for example? Do my body, my organs, my feelings, my thoughts, my character hide behind this will? Such questions lead to embarrassment and require clarification (but that will only come in the next article).

The relationship of the liberty-gifted ego to the liberty-gifted you is still in the dark today. The explication of this relationship is too complex to be conjured up in one fell swoop. In the series I have started, I try to solve the problem taking into account the limits of our cognitive faculty. How does the ego - taking these limits into account - even come to think that you are also an ego? (Will appear in the 4 article).
Further questions will follow: What kind of existence of the ego is it that is given freedom? How does the ego get there to also grant freedom to the you? (When dealing with these questions in the next articles, the readers should not allow themselves to be distracted or distracted by the schoolmasterly or high school teacher-like nature of such discussions.)

We see our claim to freedom as a right given by nature and call it natural law. All have the same right to free development of life. Whoever finds this sentence evident and does not ask for a justification for it can omit the somewhat difficult metatheoretical considerations in the next 3 articles.

All trains of thought presented in the series are based on natural law. Among other things, it has also found its way into the German constitution. There it only appears in the form of derivatives. Thus its original meaning becomes blurred and contradictions arise (but we will come to this a little later).
On the basis of the research results from the sections 5 contributions to the series the questions arise, which I then try to answer in the main part.

All future contributions can be found under #free-society.

For today should be good,

Your @zeitgedanken

#free-society #anarchy #freedom #voluntaryism #blog