On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

The five forms are: sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone.

The five forms of freedom!

The labor of freedom begins after the labor of a mother. A baby has the potential to evaluate the world and change it, and it develops the requisite capabilities with the support of and in the company of others. This is sovereignty. Coming of age, a young human being learns to see the world as it is and to imagine how it might be. A sovereign person mixes chosen virtues with the world outside to make something new. Thus unpredictability is the second form of freedom. Our bodies need places to go. We cannot as young people create for ourselves the conditions that will allow us to be sovereign and unpredictable. But once those conditions have been created, we rebel against the very institutions that made them possible and go our own way. And this mobility, the third form of freedom, is to be encouraged. We are free to do only the things we know how to do, and free to go only to places where we can go. What we don’t know can hurt us, and what we do know empowers us. Freedom’s fourth form is factuality. No individual achieves freedom alone. Practically and ethically, freedom for you means freedom for me. This recognition is solidarity, the final form of freedom.

Examples of the five forms of freedom.

A provocation works when a less powerful entity turns a more powerful actor against itself. The attack of 9/11 was one of the most successful provocations of all time.

Designs of terrorism, a less powerful opponent turns a more powerful one against itself!

The 2003 invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left the United States poorer, less secure, and less trusted. That war was an adventure in negative freedom, waged to create an absence.

Example of negative freedom...Iraqi invasion.

Seen through the lens of negative freedom, Putin seemed like a technocrat interested in money. The assumption was that wealth would bring rationality, and rationality would bring democracy.

The false idea of negative freedom when dealing with Putin.

The Russian case might serve as a warning. In the twenty-first century, American capitalism has also been driven toward monopoly, wealth concentration, and decadence. When we think that we are exceptional in our devotion to freedom, our overconfidence makes us vulnerable to the propaganda of tyrants pitched at what we want to hear. If we believe that freedom is negative, the problem is only a barrier outside, and never our own lack of judgment. When I returned to the United States in 2014 after a year away, I was struck (as were my Ukrainian and Russian friends) by how well Russian social media functioned in American politics. That Americans had been fooled by Russia about Ukraine was bad enough. But in 2015 and 2016 Americans were fooled by Russians about other Americans. In 2016 the oligarchical American presidential candidate won, with Russian assistance.

Misinterpreting Russia with the idea of 'negative freedom.'

Whether we will be free will depend on us—not just on what we do, but on why we do it: our ideals.

The importance of ideals in determining real freedom.

On the Thursday, Russia invaded, and my student reported to his unit. Zelens’kyi stayed in Kyiv, and Ukrainians fought. The American experts had excluded freedom as a factor in the world, so their prediction was incorrect. They had patiently explained that Zelens’kyi would leave the country; American intelligence officers advised him to do so. All

Negative freedom, led both US and Russia to think Ukraine would surender in three days after Zelensky fled Kyiv.

Like freedom in general, freedom of speech is not negative but positive, not about the barriers but the person, not about an absence but a presence. We protect free speakers because truth threatens the power of tyrants.

Positive freedom!

An unfree person can always try to run. But sometimes a free person has to stay. Free will is character.

Freedom

A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of the knowledge we need for freedom.

The understanding of the differences in German between korper and Lieb...lieb is animated, alive, aware of those around them and can connect.

Knowing me and knowing his sister, he immediately knew what I meant, and then he could also see that this is objective knowledge, of the kind we cannot get alone.

Connection is an integral part of freedom.

Because the Leib is at the source of knowledge, it is also at the source of a politics of freedom. When we see other people as subjects like ourselves, we begin to gain objective knowledge about the world. If we see others as objects, we will lack essential knowledge not only about them but also about the world and about ourselves. This makes us vulnerable to those who would abuse us and rule us. We will see ourselves as objects, and we will be manipulated by others who treat us as such.

Differences in human beings as subjects (Lieb) and objects (korper or inanimate object).

Your Leib pushes back into the world, changing it. It translates physics into pain and pleasure, chemistry into desire and disappointment, biology into poetry and prose. It is the permeable membrane between necessity and freedom. It is a Leib that is capable of the kind of concentration that marks a free and sovereign person. Körper we concentrate in a camp.

The differences between lieb or life and korper (body) synonymous with death and no freedom.

Unlike contemporary German, Martin Luther’s first German translation of the Bible always uses Leib for the human body. As a Leib, we are neither gods nor objects, but nor are we just a dilution, something in between. The universe neither gives nor denies us freedom. It sets before us restraints that we can know, and it offers us the possibility of adding something new.

More expansion on the idea of lieb!

Because we are imperfect, we see the universe in ways appropriate to the limits of the human body. This is positional knowledge that God cannot have. Unlike God, we can choose to see ourselves and the world through others of our own kind. A familiar biblical verse makes Stein’s point about knowledge through the Leib of another: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). God has no Leib and is aware of the attendant limitations: “My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh” (Genesis 6:3). Stein put it this way: “We have to admit that if God rejoiced over the repentance of a sinner, he would experience no pounding of the heart.” Our hearts do pound from excitement or exertion. Unlike God, we can be free, in the precise sense of turning the restraints of our universe into opportunities. God knows no adversity, and adversity has uses. Facing a law of necessity He does not face, we expand a law of freedom He does not know. And so: The limits of an object are its limits. The capabilities of God are His capabilities. The limits of a Leib are its capabilities. Jesus of Nazareth certainly had a Leib.

More philosolphy and theology of lieb and what it means for the concept of freedom.

Whereas God quickly lost patience with his creations, exposing their imperfection by killing them, Jesus spoke patiently in riddles and allegories, forcing his listeners to think again. When asked whom we should regard as our neighbor, he told a story about a suffering Leib.

Can God not understand freedom due to his lack of limitations? With limitations/human frailty comes understanding of the difference between happiness and sadness, pain and pleasure, freedom and lack of freedom.

In the story, it is the Samaritan who is free. He is sovereign, in that he is acting according to his own values and is able to realize them in the world. The road that he walked was material, but not only. We are in nature but not entirely of it. Our bodies are subject to inertia, but we can choose to stop by the side of the road. Our bodies are pulled down by gravity, but we can raise someone else up from the ditch.

We are in nature but not necessadily of it...true freedom to act differently.

Weil’s “mystery” was the presence of the body in both realms, the is and the ought. To be sovereign means to have a sense of what ought to be and how to get there.

A true sense of mystery.

The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from. That should give pause for thought. Political systems that are oriented toward freedom to are doing better than we are on freedom from. This suggests that there is no contradiction between the two. Indeed, it suggests that freedom to comes first. That is not what we are used to thinking or want to think. It helps to look at others if we want to understand ourselves. We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from, as negative. But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. Freedom to, positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don’t think of freedom as positive, we won’t even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom. Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to.

More 'freedom to' as positive freedom and 'freedom frolm' as negative. There tends to be more civic and political freedom in 'freedom to' countries such as Canada than 'freedom from' countries such as the US, Panama, and South Korea.