Absence and Freedom

I thought this might be a good time to discuss some of the roles absence plays in philosophy. Surprisingly enough, absence plays a profound role in philosophical discourse. In Existentialism, for example, the presence or absence of another person plays a significant role in how we operate as human beings. In argumentation, negative arguments rely on the opposing position having an absence of proof to support itself. Arguments against the existence of God use this strategy of absence extensively. In social and political philosophy absence is critical to defining freedom. Given the siege on civil liberties in the last few years, this seems to be a valuable topic to explore.

There are, generally speaking, three types of freedom that are discussed in social and political philosophy: absolute freedom, positive freedom, and negative freedom. Absolute freedom is exactly what it sounds like, the complete absence of constraint or, conversely, the complete ability to act. However, as a term, it has very little social or political currency. A social or political structure, no matter how democratic, dictatorial, or totalitarian, effectively begins from the notion that the behavior of the individual members of the group are constrained in some fashion, usually by laws.

Positive freedom is defined as the potential to act or pursue goals within constraints. This is particularly relevant to societies. Every society has laws, legal systems, or methods of constraint. These are not absolute constraints. While an individual or corporation is forbidden from acting in particular ways in the pursuit of making money in business, neither is forbidden from pursuing profit or creating a successful business. They can pursue goals, can act, to achieve their ends within the confines of the constraints established by society or government.
Negative freedom is another matter. It is defined as the absence of constraint. You can walk, sleep, eat, etc., as and when you wish assuming there is nothing external to forbid these things (medical conditions, financial burdens, and so on). While seemingly similar, positive and negative freedom are characterized by one fundamental difference; the locus of control.

In positive freedom, the locus of control is external: laws, customs, mores, and taboos. In negative freedom, the locus of control is internal; your own wants and desires.

Now, to participate in a society, we are all more or less forced to accept that a large part of what we experience is positive freedom; the ability to act within constraints. However, in recent years, the right swinging government has been looking to diminish what negative freedoms we do have as well as increasing the constraints of our positive freedom. Freedoms such as privacy, in particular, have suffered from the rallying cry of security. While we indeed must accept constraints, we need not accept a government's stance that all freedom is for sale on the auction block of security. Positive freedom is only as good as the reciprocal restraints on government.

Intersubjectivity and Relationships

Relationships are one of those topics that receive a great deal of attention. Everyone from psychologists to newspaper columnists talk about it. Women’s magazines always feature at least one or two articles about better understanding relationships. Books on every aspect of relationships from better listening to better sex are readily available from every imaginable perspective. Some of the literature is great and some of it is shallow, useless crap. However, as a philosopher, the element of interpersonal relationships that I find the most interesting comes out of the existentialist schools of thought: intersubjectivity.
Intersubjectivity, in brief, is the idea that when dealing with another person you grant them, or at least should grant them, the status of a being-for-themselves rather than that of an object of your perception. That seems simple enough in theory. Now think about any interpersonal relationship that you have. Have you ever stopped listening to the other person and thought about what you are going to say next? Of course you have. We all have at some point. That’s one of the ways to turn someone into an object, rather than granting them a legitimate status as a being-for-themselves. To treat someone as a being-for-themselves is to acknowledge that they have an existence, a mind, and thoughts independent of you and that this entitles them to not be treated as an object by you. If you stop listening and think about what you’re going to say next, you have chosen to make that person an object whose purpose is to be the recipient of your ideas.
Most of us have people in our lives that we pretty consistently treat as beings-for-themselves: significant others, family members, and close friends. Those represent deeply personal or highly valuable relationships with complex and profoundly charged emotional content. There is a matrix of expectation, obligations, and cultural norms that predispose us to offer a heightened state of attention and being-for-themselves status to those with whom we share these relationships. In point of fact, to fail to offer them being-for-themselves status can not only have powerful social consequences, but can lead to painful cognitive dissonance. Being dismissive of those we care about, whose opinions we value, is a difficult and maybe even an unnatural act. Yet, those relationships represent a very small percentage of the interpersonal relationships that we engage in on a regular basis. What about the relationships that we are less invested in? The casual acquaintance? The co-worker? The register-jockey at the grocery store? Do the same rules apply equally there? Should they?
The answer is, of course, that we don’t deal with the randomly met person, casual acquaintance, or counter clerk with the same level of attention that we do when dealing with the more personally valuable relationships in our lives. The same set of expectations, obligations, and cultural norms don’t apply in those situations. We don’t experience the same emotional content. In simple terms, the interpersonal context has changed in dramatic ways. It is those changes which make it so easy to dismiss the pain of the person we just met as not our problem, to accept the firing of a casual acquaintance with aplomb, or to treat a clerk as a moron. They don’t exist as beings-for-themselves to us. They exist as objects and we give them the same regard we would an object. This is the juncture at which the concept of intersubjectivity becomes problematic.
The argument can be made that we should be offering the same being-for-themselves status to any person that we encounter. The more realistic view of this is that we cannot offer that status to everyone and do anything else. Consider the amount of time and energy and attention that needs to be devoted to maintaining close personal relationships. That is essentially the expenditure that would have to be made on every person you encounter in a day to treat everyone as beings-for-themselves. It would not only be exhausting, it would consume every moment of your day. It is probably only realistic to maintain between six and twelve of these genuinely intersubjective relationships at a time.
That is not, however, to say that we can’t apply some of the lessons of intersubjectivity to the more casual relationships in our lives. While it is not practical to try to treat everyone as a being-for-themselves the way we do family, friends, and lovers, we can certainly work to remember that the people we encounter do have thoughts and feelings independent of our own. We may not respect those thoughts or know what those feelings are, but we can remember that our behavior will have more impact on another person than it would on the object we try to treat that person as being.