Mill on Liberty and the Internet
Scott Rosenberg has written an excellent appreciation of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. (It requires a Salon premium membership or the willingness to sit through an ad.) Scott contextualizes Mill brilliantly, getting past the standard “take-away” that one person’s liberty ends only where another’s begins. He writes:
The opposing force that elicited Mill’s redefinition of liberty was nothing so old-fashioned as an oppressive king. Nor were encroachments on freedom of the press his concern… Mill’s eloquence on behalf of liberty was inspired by what he saw as a deadening sameness of opinion infecting his contemporaries. He looked around at mid-century England and saw it filled with “conformers to commonplace, or timeservers for truth.” His fellow citizens had become containers of received wisdom, receptacles of “dead dogma.”
The antidote to such stagnation, he maintained, was not simply toleration of nonconformists but vigorous engagement with “heretical positions”…
I love On Liberty – although I officially haven’t read it in a Long Time – because of its elegant radical reframing of the question of rights. Rather than being legislated by kings, God or nature, they are simply the default and their limits are defined operationally: how long is your arm and where exactly is my nose?
But I don’t share Mill’s optimism about rationality. If we were entirely rational creatures, disengaged from our own opinions and committed only to an abstract truth, then every day we could have deep conversations with positions we are convinced are thoroughly wrong. But, we are rooted in our times, in our culture, in our psychology, in our interests, in our voice, in our bodies. We cannot escape those roots to have lofty, toga-clad discussions in which all points of view are welcomed and considered equally.
Scott’s essay is subtler than I’m being about this. He reminds us that Mill understood that “every era must accept the inevitability of being revised, corrected and judged by those who come after.” Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.
Scott ends by pointing to the Internet as “the vastest marketplace of ideas that mankind has yet managed to create,” an “unbounded and still growing embodiment of Mill’s ideals.” Lovely point, yet I think Mill would also find the Net vastly disappointing because of its frequent lack of reason and the commonplace of “echo chambers” that exclude views that are one degree to the left or right.
But we should not be disappointed, IMO. Yeah, sure there are appallingly stupid and nasty arguments and gangs that exist simply to think the same thought over and over and over. We are all guilty of this. I certainly am. Now, we could be elitists about this. Mill was, as Scott points out. Heidegger, with his criticism of the inauthentic jibber-jabber of mass man (das Mann), was. But, hell, if history’s taught us one thing it’s that we’re the jibber-jabbering animals. There’s no escaping it; there’s just better or worse, more or less. The fray of bad ideas passionately expressed and commonplace ideas intersecting at impossible angles is our condition, and it’s been made grand by the Internet.
Fittingly, while checking the spelling of “das Mann,” I came across a lively debate over Heidegger’s Nazism.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
In the words of the great philosopher Joey Ramone, are we not all, like Sheena, in a sense Punk Rockers?
Gabba Gabba we accept you, we accept you one of us
David,
Great post today. You have a wonderful way of speaking of philosophy. You bring life to philosophy.
A quibble. I don’t read Heidegger as being critical of ‘idle chatter’. I think he said that idle chatter is part of our throwness, our inherited way of being. It is inauthentic because we are thrown into it. We have not choosen it. By it’s nature, ‘Das Mann’ is not something of one’s own. The English words ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ bear a sense of moral judgement that I am told is not present in the German. ‘Authenic’ and ‘Inauthentic’ are possible ways of being.
I think good pop music is an example of ‘owned’ or authentic idle chatter. When you hear Madonna singing a pop song, you are hearing an authentic voice. She has choosen ‘das Mann’ and made it her own.
FWIW,
Paul
Paul, thanks for the compliment.
My reading disagrees with yours, although it’s been so long since I’ve opened a copy of Being and Time that I’m likely to be way wrong. My understanding is that “eigentlich” (authentic) has a value sense, similar to our calling an antique “authentic” or “fake”. You can “own up” (isn’t “own” the root of “eigentlich”?) to your thrownness or not. I don’t *think* Heidegger holds open the possibility of living a life entirely free of participation in Das Mann and idle chatter, but I thought he nevertheless held them in disdain. Idle chatter is a way of denying the fact of death, after all.
David,
I had a very wonderful but idiosyncratic education in Being and Time. I took a 2 year ‘reading group’ seminar with a Swiss woman who knew Heiddeger when she was a teenager, her father was a colleague of Heiddeger. Frequently she would try to create a visual to help us understand the poetry lost in the German to English translation. The best I can recreate is “own” as a verb. We don’t ‘own’, we are in the process of ‘owning’. It’s an action we do or not take. Heidegger worked on this idea his entire life and ended up with ereignis.
To your comments, I can hear her saying “True but it’s not strategy”. We don’t flee from our death defensively. We flee from our death because we know about it. We are being-towards-death. To be crude, it’s a property of man’s unique being.
Your reading of Heidegger is the existentialists reading. You are in good company. Heiddeger writes from a non-Cartesian perspective. It is very hard to take his ideas into a Cartesian world. Of course, for now, that is where we live.
1. Almost full agreement with your first two paragraphs. Yes, being-towards-death is an ontological fact, and I like the way you (or your teacher) say that it’s not a strategy. And yet, there has to be a difference between authenticity and inauthenticity. In your first msg, you equate thrownness and inauthenticity. I disagree. As I understand it, authenticity doesn’t escape thrownness. Nothing can. Rather, authenticity embraces the situation we’re thrown into. But at the point, authenticity becomes pretty much uninteresting to me. What would it mean to engage in idle chatter “authentically” and does it matter?
2. The sad truth is that I think authenticity gets clearer if you read B&T as a proto-fascist tract where authenticity is tied to the set of terms that promote the uber view of German culture: historic destiny, tied to the earth, heroes, dying well. The authentic person, in this view, is the German who accepts his destiny.
3. Maybe “being owned” would be better for “Ereignis.” “The Event of Appropriation” still sounds to me like a badly translated WWF event. I still like “owning up” for “authenticity.”
4. Oddly, my dissertation was in some ways an attempt to refute the existentialist reading of Heidegger with which I generally consider to be off the mark, particularly around Heidegger’s stress on the significance of possibility.
David,
I have been reading your post for some time now. I am just wondering how old are you? Most of what your views are what i would expect from someone over the age of 40.
I do however usually agree with you!
Kitchen, I assume you mean that my views are exceptionally wise, tempered by experience and wide-ranging learning. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Please?
I’m 53.
What suggestions can you offer to understand Heidegger’s Philosophy
Heidegger is a great philosopher to read in a course. He’s tough to just sit down and read.
FWIW, I blogged a bit about him here:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/001467.html