BORDER-LINE FREEDOM

It is difficult to find a most hackneyed word in the whole history of the political philosophy than Freedom.

From the concept of Eleutheria, the personification of Liberty in the classical Greek era, to the Roman Libertas, gradually up to the freedom from sin conceived by the medieval Christian thinkers, to the civil liberties of the Enlightenment and, finally, to the present day.

The meanings may have changed, but not the signifier: freedom.

“Socialism and freedom” was advocating the Fabian Society in the ‘20s.

“Fascism and Freedom Movement” is the official name of an Italian Political Party.

Mill, Milton, Hobbes, Locke: the common denominator of the philosophers who initiated liberalism was precisely the defense of freedom.

And so on. Hardly ever you’ll find any political doctrine that doesn’t claim the right (and/or the privilege) to defend freedom.

In this article, I would like to introduce three thinkers, who lived in different eras, and coming from extremely different cultural backgrounds, united, in my opinion, by an idea of “individual freedom” somehow extreme. So markedly sui generis that it appears, as the title itself suggests, at the very borders of freedom.

The first thinker of this strange trio is Tommaso Campanella.

In his most famous work, written during his 27 years-long period of imprisonment, Campanella theorized a utopian city in which, to achieve the total freedom of the spirit, any individual referred his own freedom to the community.

A sort of Sovietism ahead of its time, in which the community member is accountable for all his actions toward the city institutions.

Said institutions watched over the harmony of the community, to the extent of controlling the most intimate and personal aspects of their citizens, even the reproductive act.

Let me be clear, it is necessary to contextualize the period in which the work was written, the imprisonment that had hardened the heart of the Calabrian philosopher, the apparent state of madness that Campanella had to pretend for years to keep his head attached to his neck, and more.

Campanella was a lover of freedom of thought, for the defense of which he had been seeing the sun behind the bars for most of his existence. What Campanella theorized was a community in which everyone totally gave up their freedom and their rights for the harmonious functioning of the state. The City of the sun, ruled by a prince who excels in all the arts, assisted by three collateral principles who have names evoking the ministries of the Orwellian Ingsoc: Wisdom, Love and Power.

The community is, therefore, totalitarian in the most “twentieth century” sense of the word. Everything is controlled by the state, and the punishments for those who do not respect the rules, drawn up by the men themselves for the happiness of men, are terrible. And everyone lives happily, or at least they are “forced into happiness” by a system that trades the freedom of the individual in full for the social order.

From extreme collectivism to the extreme individualism of the other two characters in this article.

The Marquis De Sade: the man who went down in history for his dissolute life, and his pornographic and gore novels, in which there was an exaltation of (basically) every perversion. An uncomfortable character for any political system in which he lived (ancien régime, revolutionary period, Napoleonic reign).

The idea of Sade the “libertine” (an epithet that he particularly preferred in the description of the characters of his novels) is the extreme individual freedom. A pure will that cannot be limited by laws or moral dogmas dictated by society, and therefore coming from the outside. Nor from any behavior, inhibitory restraint, feeling of pity, and therefore not even from restrictions dictated by one’s self.

A tyranny of nature, intended as “human nature”, in which the individual, created to enjoy, cannot have any other goals but the satisfaction of his passions, to which laws and sentimental relationships would create an obstacle. We talk about nature because in Sade the idea of God is ridiculous: the divinity is merely a human creation, conceived for containing those impulses of nature.

And, the most hilarious part (to Sade): said Nature is even portrayed as a creation of the elusive “God”, when it is, in fact, challenged by this.

The oppression of the weak is a “due act” according to the Marquis’vision; at least of those who live in his novels. Nature itself has created them weak (not only in the physical sense but also weak on the social scale), then it is right that these are used by the strongest ones for the purpose of creating their own pleasure. And pleasure, in Sade, is sexual pleasure tout court.

The Marquis (and this is the main difference with the last of the triad, Max Stirner) also theorized a community, which he saw achievable in the post-revolutionary Republic. In the pamphlet “Frenchmen, some more effort if you wish to become Republicans” contained in what is one of his most significant works “Philosophy in the bedroom”, Sade imagines a state without laws, a utopia of an anarchic nature in which there is no “All against all”, but rather the “Strong against the weak”. Because the “wolves don’t eat each other”.

Not solely “homo homini lupus” (man is wolf to a man), but also “lupus lupus lupi non est” (wolf isn’t a wolf to another wolf).

And finally the last piece, Max Stirner, the founder of what is today called “anarcho-individualism”, but to which the philosopher rather gave the label of “conscious selfishness”.

His main work, “The ego and its own” often gets lost in affectedness and sophistry: a difficult text (especially in the initial parts), hard to digest, sometimes confusing, sometimes repetitive ad nauseam. But this seems to be Stirner’s plan: to exhaust the reader, in order to “hit” him better.

Stirner’s doctrine is not very difficult, however, to summarize: the individual does what he believes is right for him. This must be his compass: every gesture must be guided by the maximization of his well-being.

Individual freedom is simply the full freedom of the individual.

The ego, the only one (the unique in certain translations from German), respects his own law and shuns all those institutions agglomerating him with other individuals (the State, the Church, associations, parties, and such). There are no universalisms, religions, political ideals that can bind individuals to each other because for the Ego the only conceivable ruler to follow is himself. And, as long as community rules and conventions help him do so, then they are welcome.

The individual must enjoy himself; his freedom is not conceivable if not outside any external intellectual, moral, legal constraint.

And how can extreme individualism be combined with a community? Well, to be honest, Stirner only briefly mentions this point. His response is a federation of individuals, who agree among themselves for voluntary limitations of their freedom in order not to hinder that of the other. Limiting contracts that make “law between the parties”, but which you have the full and total right to cancel or waive.

A utopia described in a summary way, almost unwillingly. Because Stirner probably doesn’t care about the form of government. The Ego, and on this the philosopher is willing to spend rivers of ink, respects the laws and conventions of society as long as it suits him to respect them.

I don’t kill and I don’t steal because I don’t want to go to jail. And I avail myself of government protection as long as I am too weak to guarantee myself that no one will rob me or kill me.

According to Max, the individual has the right to take what he deems necessary for his well-being (I don’t think out of “puritanism”, rather more because of a different mindset, Stirner does not emphasize sexual pleasure like the Marquis De Sade).

What if the established order no longer protects my well-being? In this case, the only weapon to free oneself is rebellion: an action done by the individual, for his own benefit. The revolution, which forcedly starts from the union of intentions with other individuals, is counterproductive because, precisely, it cannot take place if not with a union among subjects, hence potentially harmful and limiting for the freedom of the individual. Humanity itself is the sum of individual egoisms, where everything that is “collectivizing” is a misleading unnatural abstraction.

There is nothing right except what I decide as good for myself. And there can be no freedom except that I take for myself with “power” (whether it is physical, charismatic, intellectual…), and not conceded, as if it were a sop.