The failure of the two types of freedom

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Section 22 sees Nietzsche challenging the two typical concepts of freedom in the 19th century: the concept of labor freedom ultimately reduces humans to "labor animals" subject to natural necessity, while the concept of negative freedom dilutes the freedom originally belonging to the minority into a universal right under "natural rights." Both concepts of freedom are merely a makeover of Christian morality. Under Nietzsche's challenge and the polarized political reality since the 20th century, they are both riddled with holes.

It is the duty of the free man to live for his own sake, and not for others. It was on this account that the Greeks looked upon handicrafts as unseemly. 

As a complete entity Greek antiquity has not yet been fully valued · I am convinced that if it had not been surrounded by its traditional glorification, the men of the present day would shrink from it horror stricken. This glorification, then, is spurious; gold-paper.

"We Philologists" 22, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

We often discuss freedom in two ways today. One is the state of being free to do whatever one wants, such as the meaning implied in "financial freedom"; the other emphasizes autonomy, that is, having a strong life pursuit and striving to achieve it, i.e. freedom for self-actualization. Sometimes we also associate these two understandings with Isaiah Berlin's negative freedom vs. positive freedom. But both understandings imply a premise: no offense. We generally assume that freedom should not constitute an offense to those around us. Therefore, we can see that both statements are very careful to avoid discussions about others. If others are introduced into the discussion, then the first understanding, similar to negative freedom, emphasizes that everyone can act arbitrarily only when others' freedom are unharmed, while the second understanding equates self-actualization with "contributing to others and society."

Nietzsche challenges both concepts of freedom in Section 22. Politically, the right emphasizes negative freedom while the left emphasizes positive freedom, but Nietzsche dismisses both. Since the 20th century, the left-right division in the political sphere has increasingly become outdated, leading people to forcibly invent the "horseshoe theory," suggesting that extreme right and extreme left ultimately converge, without ever explaining why. In fact, this is tantamount to saying that the left-right division has become ineffective in the face of new political realities. Why has it become ineffective? Because the premise of the left-right division, namely the human concepts of freedom underlying the two types of freedom, has become ineffective. This is largely due to Nietzsche.

Two concepts of freedom can be seen clearly in the 19th century. In the school of positive freedom, Hegel's absolute spirit movement serves as the cosmic process, and individual freedom lies in conforming to and aiding this process (alienation occurs when one goes against the process); Marx further materialized and class-ified it, but the logic remains fundamentally the same, as individual freedom still lies in conforming to the objective historical process, manifesting as aiding class struggle, seeing true freedom as liberated labor, and regarding production activities as the self-expression of society, etc.

Nietzsche's criticism of the positive freedom school is straightforward: if freedom is equated with labor (ancient Greek handicrafts), whether for oneself or for the people, humans will be degraded to natural dependents. Since labor is about solving survival needs, this concept of freedom means defining humanity with natural necessity. Humans pursue freedom to be unbound by natural necessity in the first place, to engage in free activities after solving basic needs, but now they define solving basic needs itself as freedom. If this counts as freedom, then animals are free too. In other words, man defined by labor is no longer living for himself but only for nature, and labor freedom becomes a new form of slavery.

In the camp of negative liberty, from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French Revolution, to Locke's theory of property rights, Mill's harm principle, and on to 20th-century neoliberalism, the core idea remains unchanged: each person has innate "natural rights," including the right to life, property, freedom of speech, etc. The role of the state is to protect these rights of each individual, ensuring that people do not infringe upon, harm, or do evil to one another.

Nietzsche's criticism of the negative freedom faction is more subtle. After mentioning that the ancient Greeks despised handicrafts, Nietzsche starts a new paragraph to discuss the overall value of ancient Greece and the true face of ancient Greece, which is terrifying enough to scare off modern people. What he is implying is that, if you rightists think that by seeing me Nietzsche criticize the left, you are on the same side as me, then you are greatly mistaken. Nietzsche intends to use a new interpretation of the ancients to form his own school. Why is the true face of ancient Greece terrifying? Because, the undignified handicrafts have always been left to the slaves to complete. That is to say, the freedom of the few citizens of ancient Greece is based on the labor of the many slaves. Such freedom is unequal, based on the infringement upon the freedom of most people. Nietzsche's claim of freedom is plain in sight: that freedom and equality is incompatible; that there is no such thing as natural rights, and every right is man-made; that, in order to achieve true and complete freedom, instead of the rightist version of restricted freedom, the few should be allowed even encouraged to harm the many. So Nietzsche would say that if today's people truly realize this, they would be scared off by the cruelty of the ancient Greeks.

It could be said that Nietzsche's criticism of negative freedom lies in the fact that negative freedom is actually a diluted version of genuine freedom (the brutal and ferocious concept of freedom among the ancient Greeks) originally belonging to a minority of citizens, so as to give freedom to the entire population. The diluted freedom is, as it were, something that everyone can get a share of, but it is much weaker than the original version. In fact, this diluted freedom is so bland that it fails to arouse people's enthusiasm for participating in politics, to the extent that even the freest and most progressive countries in the world suffer from political apathy.

In light of Nietzsche's previous critique of Christianity, here Nietzsche is also implying that both freedoms are manifestations of Christian values or slave morality in disguise. The labor freedom viewpoint is to reverse the original master-slave relationship, forcibly labeling the laboring slaves as the truly free ones and the non-laboring masters as the dependent and thus unfree ones. It defines the former's labor as good and the latter's exploitation as evil. The negative freedom viewpoint, on the other hand, advocates for each person to have certain, inviolable freedom rights, thereby extending the freedom originally limited to a few masters to the broader slave class. This, of course, is for the benefit of the slaves and reflects a slave-centric value system.

So both freedoms, when taken to their extremes, become populism, with one side emphasizing the lofty status of "the people" and the other emphasizing hatred and overthrow of "the elite". In practice, holding up the people and overthrowing the elite can coexist, which is why the extreme left and extreme right seem to converge eventually. From this perspective, Nietzsche's criticism is not so much a trigger towards polarized politics as it is a half-century prophecy of the danger of populism polarization. This is not because of any doctrine fabricated by anyone, but simply because everyone dares not face the grim reality as understood by the ancient Greeks.