The Garden of Fetters
by Matt Stoltz, 2005
'Community is the shop in which thoughts are constructed and deconstructed, and history is the terrain they seize and surrender' (Hollinger, 68). This passage from David Hollinger brings up an important question for us to consider, namely, what price do individuals pay once their communities subscribe to such thoughts and ideas? One significant feature of the philosopher is that they are the craftsmen whose vocation in the 'community shop' is to manufacture ideas and thoughts that grant us the ability to, correspondingly, orient ourselves in the world. Philosophers usurp the clay of humanity and shape it according to distinct ideas by employing this method of 'construction, destruction, surrendering, and seizing' and, in so doing, they inevitably gouge out eyes, hack off limbs, and slice deeply into the flesh of humanity ultimately leaving it perversely constrained. Our journey through the garden of intellectual history provided evidence which showed how these ideas forged by philosophers contained a number of constraints for individuals. By excavating ideas found in the works of Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, and Freud we can determine how these ideas fettered the individual.
Plato
An obtrusive constraint found in Plato's Republic was the role of poetry and art in the ideal state. However, before we delve into the intrinsic constraints of Plato's ideas let us first consider some of the context in which they arose. First, the advent of the dialectic philosophy provided a method by which the public sphere could engage in philosophical discourse to arrive at consensual 'truths.' Next, this 'market philosophy' circulated a variety of different ideas each of which had multiple points of view circling the same concept. For instance, a group of men, each with their own distinct ideas, could have come together and discussed, through a process of absorption and negation, the idea of justice, ultimately hammering the idea down until a consensually accepted idea of justice was rectified. Eventually, Plato stepped into the marketplace, hammer in hand, and inaugurated his 'dividing line' which bifurcated reality into two parts; that of being and becoming. From this line Plato declared that knowledge and reason orbited truth, reality, and being more closely than any other industry at the disposal of humanity. Consequently, through this declaration the arts obtained notoriety of the lowest form of reality and were designated antithetically to knowledge belonging only to faith, opinion, and becoming, It was through such a line that individuals became most inhibited and suffered from the hacking, gouging, and slicing of Plato's idea's.
Plato showed strong aversions toward art, especially poetry, throughout the text. He was committed to ostracize certain 'ugly' poets such as Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles from his 'ideal state' on the grounds that they told the "greatest falsehoods" and were "stories of gods making war on or plotting against or fighting other gods" (55). Plato did not want the people of his community to associate imperfection with the gods because it would have caused the foundation of his politics and ethics to totter. The vibrations of such tottering would be felt because Plato believed justice regulated both politics and ethics, in which case, if the gods were imperfect and injustice was a potential attribute, why would the people be compelled by unjust gods? In the text there was an obvious antagonistic relationship between art and reason which Plato himself pointed out when he wrote of poetry, "...let us tell her also, in case she should accuse us of brutality and boorishness, that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (296). As a result of this antagonism and the potentially corruptible nature of art Plato initially vowed to "...set a watch over the makers of stories, to select every beautiful story they make, and reject any that are not beautiful" (54).
Now that we have considered some of the context and ideas arising from the platonic era let us weigh in the intrinsic constraints of such a worldview. As we well know, Plato built his worldview around the idea of justice, but let us not forget that his prejudice concerning the arts profoundly factored into that worldview and established a monopoly on the kind of art that would be admitted into his 'ideal state.' Plato demanded that poets made "their poems only in the image of the good" (79) and he hacked the 'bad' arm of poetry off. Through such a dismissal, art would have been fundamentally constrained and limited only to representations of the 'good', and it could no longer have communicated the pain, suffering, and agones which went along with the human condition. Plato's state, in that sense, deprived its citizens from a basic need to associate and identify themselves with proper artistic representations of the 'bad.' Furthermore, the censorship of art would have castrated the artists by virtue of the fact that they were not allowed to represent that 'bad' half of the human condition; in the end they were confined to only one half of the dividing line, namely, being.
Augustine
Moving along to our next philosopher, St. Augustine, we will come to recognize that his idea of transcendence fundamentally constrained the individual. Proceeding in a similar fashion, we will first consider the context in which Augustine's idea's were forged, and then examine the idea's before starting in on their constraints. Augustine entered into the scene of Western intellectual development after the death of Christ when pagan and Christian cultures were hostile towards one another. Also, through the death of Christ God entered into the human realm and altered it through the conceptual introduction of revelation and salvation. Returning to the aforementioned tension, the pagans viewed time as cyclical, whereas the Christians saw it as progressively linear. Augustine, born of the pagan culture, was groomed by his family to become an intellectual heavyweight, and was deeply affected by this tension between the two cultures. He was influenced by the Roman statesman Cicero, who afforded Augustine much of his rhetorical skills, and Manicheism which justified his lecherous career as a youth, and finally Neoplatonism which provided Augustine with a basis for his cosmological views. In Augustine's autobiographical book Confessions he accounted for the problems he had with his own will, especially the will of his sexuality, and the sensual world. From his self reflections and confessions he addressed a perennial question of philosophy, namely, why would a perfect God allow imperfection in the world He created? Augustine confronted this question in the text, and in it we can locate his idea of transcendence.
Augustine's notion of transcendence arose from the problem of the will. The question of why a perfect God would permit imperfections lead to a dichotomy of good and evil which was applied to the will, and created a conflict of wills where 'two wills were at odds with each other' (172). Augustine identified these two wills and called one the will of habit, which was owned by the instincts, and the other he called the will of truth, which was owned by God. In Augustine's youth he was dominated by the will of habit and wrote, "...my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error" (40/41). Eventually, Augustine overcame his 'error' and subordinated the will of habit to the will of truth once he encountered the prophet Continence who told him "Close your ears to the unclean whispers of your body, so that it may be mortified" (176). From there, Augustine adopted ascetic tendencies; for instance he wrote, "let me not be my own life, for when I lived of myself, I lived evilly: I was death to myself" (286)... "Command me to do what you will" (245)! Why would Augustine forfeit his will to God? Well, mostly because he believed "...there [were] other waters, immortal and kept safe from earthly corruption" (322). Obviously, Augustine favored the will of truth because it led these 'immortal waters.' This idea of 'immortal waters', or we can now justly identify it as transcendence, is where individuals feel the sword of constraint.
Augustine's ideas of transcendence and the will render constraints for the individual. Provided Augustine's claim that eternal salvation was determined by ones adherence to the will of truth, or rather God, he helped insight the fear of God within the individual, and aided in the disillusionment of the instinctual will. For example, Augustine wrote "The eye is attracted by beautiful objects, by gold and silver and all such things...But our ambition to obtain all these things must not lead us astray from you, O Lord, nor must we depart from what your law allows" (48). Consequently, such candor, especially when descending from positions of power, could galvanize an individual to suppress the 'beautiful objects' of this world and encourage one to subscribe solely to the 'law' of God. In other words, such language promoted the complete and utter submission to the will of God while, at the same time, marginalized instinctual impulses. Furthermore, statements like "...to love this world is to break troth with you" (34) and "...the world is drunk with the invisible wine of its own perverted, earthbound will "(45) does not make the individuals experience in this world any more livable. At bottom, Augustine's worldview laid the bedrock for an individual to be tortured by the pangs transcendence and feel overwhelmed by the weight of question marks surrounding it. In the end, Augustine's ideas, which forged the complete and utter dedication to the metaphysical world of eternal salvation, commissioned a constraint whereupon the individual lost the ability to will for him or herself.
Rousseau
Our next illustration will excavate the notion of the general will found in Rousseau's philosophy and determine its constraining effects. First, Rousseau came about when science and the Enlightenment had stepped into the front line of Western intellectual history. Ultimately, science had replaced religious institutions which were stigmatized by the religious wars and the protestant reformation. One product of the Enlightenment was empirical science and the advent of natural world theorists. Rousseau was certainly a natural world theorist but showed reluctance towards association with the Enlightenment movement, rather he considered himself more of a romanticist. Romanticism wanted to shed the skin of the past to create a movement in which art was unfettered, and it represented 'art for arts sake and no other .' Many natural world theorists such as Newton, Locke, and Hobbes, were fundamentally allied with the Enlightenment and believed that nature was mechanical. On the other hand, Rousseau repudiated nature as a mechanical entity and claimed that it contained individual will, subjective knowledge, creative impulses, imagination, and spirit and nature . From this non-mechanical nature sprang Rousseau's concept of the general will which was very much a reaction against a mechanical nature in which people consented to 'slavery' and 'subordination to the monarch.'
The general will concept was a reaction against the tyrannies of government rule. Rousseau clearly voiced his resentment of authoritative oppression when he wrote, "Since no man has natural authority over any other, and since force creates no right, we can only conclude that agreements are the basis of all legitimate authority among men" (12). This resentment led to the manifestation of the general will concept which attempted "To devise a form of association which will defend and protect the person and possessions of each associate with all the collective strength, and in which each is united with all, yet obeys only himself and remains as free as before. Such is the fundamental problem that the social contract solves" (17). In other words, the general will becomes a surrogate monarch, in the sense that it indefinitely reigns over the state and is each individual's heritage, where all 'associates' or members of the community own a share of the collective authoritative stock; the obvious difference of course being that power is more widely distributed in the general will theory. Rousseau justified his general will theory because it solved the problem of inequality for him. For example he wrote, "...the fundamental pact substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature has produced among men, so that while they may be unequal in strength or intelligence, they all become equal by agreement and rights" (23). Here, we reach a point in which the general will theory constrains the individual.
The general will constrains the individual in at least two ways, namely, by the subordination of the 'strong' and by the coercive nature of the 'agreement' itself. First, the above passage indicated the abrogation of inequality in which case the 'intellectually and physically stronger' individual was brought down and given equal share in the power. We can account for such a transfer of power where the strong were forced to hand over their power to the 'general will' by noting the French Revolution. Bringing in this piece of anecdotal evidence provides us the vantage point of seeing some of Rousseau's theory being put into practice. The Reign of Terror, a wave of executions visited upon the 'strong individuals' of the time, emblematized the antithesis of the general will theory because it 'forced ' the strong to transfer power, and at the same time it showed just what kind of barbarism the general will was capable of , not to mention the fact that through such 'force' alone it illegitimatized itself. Next, the agreement is coercive by nature in the sense that once the general will theory is instituted the amount of 'agreement' on the part the of individual diminishes with every successive generation. In other words, a second generation individual living under the influence of a general will government will not have the opportunity to 'agree' to its authority, rather he/she will simply inherit a share of power in the general will, much like under a monarchy where individual would inherit the authority of the monarch. Rousseau stated that "force creates no right" (12), yet once the general will becomes instituted it forces the individual to conform to its will.
Freud
Our final model will address the work of Sigmund Freud and how his ideas of guilt and religion constrain the individual. Freud came about during the rise of liberalism, and the end of his career was situated in-between the two world wars. A major component of liberalism was that it advocated political, social, and economic doctrines which emphasized the individual and their ability to interpret their own subjective meaning of reality . However, Freud, a staunch positivist, lived in Vienna and was apart of a group called the "Die Jengen" or the Young which resisted the 'paternal impediments' of liberalism. In his book Civilization and its Discontents, Freud set out to do just that with his claim that guilt and religion, both of which arose from paternal agencies, were the source of unhappiness.
Freud wrote in his book, "...my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt" (97). Also, Freud claimed that the sense of guilt originated from paternal agencies associated with the Oedipal Complex, or more generally, positions of authority such as a father or a God. It is important to know that Freud associated the term guilt with religious ideology and, therefore, felt that the two went hand in hand in terms of our 'loss of happiness.' For instance, Freud scrutinized the Christian tablet that postulated 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself' by saying that "If civilization imposes such great sacrifices... [Then] we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization" (73). As you can see, Freud noticed that individuals were committed to sacrifice as soon as he/she entered into a community. Furthermore, he suggested that in order to obtain happiness we had to reduce our sense of guilt, which as we have already established as being consistent with religion, so that we can become happy. In other words, Freud argued that individuals should be reluctant to adhere to any paternal agencies (such as religion) which breed a sense of guilt. Here, we reach the point where Freud's claims constrain the individual's ability to have faith in religion.
Underlying the premise of the book was a scathing criticism of religion which could influence an individual's ability to have faith in it. Freud's assumption in the book was that civilization and its discontents were caused by a plethora of repressions that were brought on through the guilt complex, now affiliated with paternal agencies. He took us through historical narratives which were nostalgic for the kind of natural man who had power over his instincts and could channel them according to his own impetus, rather than the community's. With that, Freud's assumptions and historical narratives provide a galvanizing force which suggests that we dismiss any religiously motivated moral framework and fulfill our most immediate needs so that we can become happy. After reading Freud's book a religious individual could easily be persuaded into doubting his/her own faith, and anyone who was seeking to associate him/herself with a religious organization now has to consider Freud's theory of unhappiness. In other words, the work attacked the institution of religion as being a source of guilt, and therefore discontent, at which point an individual considering religion as a means to enrich their experience in this world would now be constrained by Freud's theory.
Concluding Remarks
We have excavated artifacts from four monumental philosophers throughout Western intellectual history and reached the apex of our argument which postulates that their ideas fundamentally constrain the individual. We can now imagine a community with walls so high that escape is futile and the individual is ultimately anchored by the weight of these philosophical ideas. We can see the philosopher turn our community into a prison where he alone is the gatekeeper, the locksmith, and the prison guard who furnishes our cell and paints the walls with all the colors of his thoughts.
Afterword
You have seen the author argue for and against democratic principles, as well as for and against religion. Admittedly, this essay is unquestionably full of ideological contradictions. However, these contradictions are superfluous to the essay's contention that each idea interpolated into the community comes at a cost for the individual. To add one final contradiction to the essay, one could easily portray the philosopher as both an intellectual meddler, which was what this essay set out to prove, yet at the same time the philosopher could easily be portrayed as an intellectual hero.