Leafing through Jurgen Habermas’s Unity of Knowledge and Interest, the philosopher states: “Freedom could be explained only by our designating an interest that men take in obeying moral laws. On the other hand, obeying these laws would not be moral action, and thus free action, if it were based on a sensual motive … Of course, reason cannot become subject to the empirical conditions of sensuality” (Habermas). The idea of the ‘affection of sensuality by reason’ in an action subjected to moral laws seems to merely preserve reason from experience. If the experience of obeying laws is more sensually appetizing than disobeying laws, then the mass public of individuals will lean towards obedience because it feels good. “In the dimension of self-reflection, it is in accomplishing self-reflection that reason grasps itself as interesting” (Habermas). So through the act of self-reflection I begin to understand that I have a genuine affection and interest towards following reason rather than madness. But it seems more often, the enticing seduction of disobedience overcomes the fantasies of many.
Slavoj Zizek, in his latest book, Living in the End of Times, reflects on the infamous old Communist tirades against ‘formal’ bourgeois freedom, and even as absurd as they were, “there is a pinch of truth in the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: ‘formal’ freedom is that freedom to choose within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while ‘actual’ freedom grows when we can exchange the very coordinates of our choices” (Zizek). Rather than being determined to choose between only Pepsi or Coke, Democrat or Republican, Capitalist Democracy or Communist tyranny, the people actually get to make quality choices rather than imposed options placed upon them: formal versus actual. The non-negotiable fixtures of branded choices leave freedom yet to be actively reached. “The best way to grasp the core of the obsessive attitude is through the notion of ‘false activity’: you think that you are active, but your true position, as embedded in the fetish, is passive” (Zizek).
As for Theodor Adorno, “A human being who is not mindful at every moment of the potential of extreme horror at the present time must be bemused by the veil of ideology, that he might just as well stop thinking at all” (Adorno). Amongst his dialects of History and Freedom, we learn that to a certain extent the touchstone of freedom is the Individual, but that “genuine freedom has been degenerated into an ideology” where sovereignty has based the freedom of others always against the offense of apriori (Adorno). The freedom of the Vietnamese was considered offensive in its ideological form to the United States in outset, and hence such acts of ‘freedom’ of US contradiction distorts the meaning of freedom in a genuine sense, and merely became false activity.
On a slighter scale the outset of freedom does not mean “I will have that’. Freedom lies elsewhere, freedom should allow us on principle to free the world from material want (Adorno). The point, at which ‘want’ can be abolished, would alleviate and elevate the importance of civil and human needs rather than materialist gain. “Growth of freedom is not to be sought in the relations of production, which is the solution preferred by superficial minds, and this does not mean that everyone should have enough money with which to buy a fridge and to go to the cinema, where such transactions increase their un-freedom. Freedom lies elsewhere” (Adorno).
On another note, Antonio Faundez, the Chilean Intellectual, in a dialogue with the renown Brazilian scholar of education, Paulo Freire, stated: “When people speak of ideology, they wrongly think only of ideas, and they don’t realize that ideas gain strength and are really a form of power only to the extent that they take concrete shape in the actions of our daily lives.” The ideology of action, not ideas, is power ruled by facts embedded in everyday activities. In following, the irritating author V.S. Naipaul caught my interest briefly in his novel Guerrillas, when I cut-up several parts of the text from the character Roche’s thoughts:
"I’ve built my whole life on sand. He had thought of himself as a doer; it surprised him now to be so far from that self, to be a man who waited on events; and the placidity with which he waited on events gave him, as he awakened in the mornings, a sense of alarm, which before dying … And he could neither act nor withdraw; he could only wait. …. He could have blamed the system or to have blamed the world for not living up to the system, … Responsibility didn’t end with failure, or with the abandoning of beliefs that had prompted certain actions." (Naipaul)
Responsibility or inertia seemed to give the character the optimistic sense that if he waited just a bit longer, he would be a part of something that would enable a more genuine action than perhaps just merely building life on sand before the ocean comes rushing in (Naipaul).
Antonio Faundez reflects that the masses continual resistance backs up the dominant ideology to change, where the masses have gotten too comfortable in their discomforts. But change is inevitable. Struggling against the embodiment of testosterone and fashion’s limitation to freedom as youth in revolt stick to merely wearing the Che or Mao or Hope t-shirts. But like the Women’s Suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and previous direct active challenges to the dominant ideology, the social space inevitably changes. The freedom, which we 'genuinely' have come to embrace, has been achieved through direct action and not by waiting around for those in power to gift us. So then we must question whether freedom is a luxury, a sensual obligation, or a human right to breathe? Or does it lie elsewhere in the undefined?
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