THE CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING SUGGESTIONS.
1. We have now seen that the problem of Self-Government may be regarded from a point of view other than that which presented it as a contradiction in terms. The contradiction depended on the absolute opposition between self and others which was embodied in the prima facie idea of society; the result of which was that all increase of individuality and all assertion of self were at the first view hostile as regarded others, and liberty, the condition of individuality, became a negative idea, prescribing as it were a maximum of empty space, to be preserved against all trespassers, round every unit of the social whole. We saw that notions of this kind were pushed so far as to endanger the fundamental principle, according to which self-affirmation is the root of morality, and it was maintained that the ethical attitude essentially lay in the negation and limitation imposed by social life upon the natural tendency to self-assertion. [1] According to these ideas, the self in society is something less than, if it could so exist, it would {125} be out of society, and liberty is the arrangement by which, at a sacrifice of some of its activities, it is enabled to disport itself in vacuo with the remainder.
[1] Pp. 27 and 73.
But if we may give weight to the suggestions of the two previous chapters, the assumptions which we work with are transformed. The difference of principle is that the average individual, such as each of us takes himself to be in his ordinary [1] trivial moods, when he sees, or thinks he sees, nothing in life but his own private interest and amusement,—this average individual is no longer accepted as the real self or individuality. The centre of gravity of existence is thrown outside him. Even his personality, his unique and personal being, the innermost shrine of what he is and likes to be, is not admitted to lie where a careless scrutiny, backed by theoretical prejudice, is apt to locate it. It is not in the nooks and recesses of the sensitive self, when the man is most withdrawn from things and persons and wrapped up in the intimacies of his feeling, that he enjoys and asserts his individual self to the full. This idea is a caricature of the genuine experience of individuality. It is true that to feel your individuality is to feel something distinctive, which gives you a hold and substance in yourself and a definite position among others, and, it may be, against them. But on a careful consideration, it will be found that this substance and position are always sustained by some kind {126} of determinate achievement or expansion on the part of the self. It always comes from taking hold of the world in some definite way; which, just because it is definite and affirmative, is at once a distinct assertion of the self, and a transition from the private self into the great communion of reality. The simplest machine will show us that it is the differences of the parts which enable them to make a whole. And so, we are now suggesting, it is in the difference which contributes to the whole that the self feels itself at home and possesses its individuality.
[1] There is a difficulty in stating this point without confusion, just because the “ordinary” individual, being at the bottom different from what he seems, is actually determined in all sorts of ways, consciously and unconsciously, by demands and ideas which go far beyond what he would admit to determine him.
Following up such thoughts as these, we see that there is a meaning in the suggestion that our real self or individuality may be something which in one sense we are not, but which we recognise as imperative upon us. As Rousseau has said of the social self, we say more generally of the self or life which extends beyond our average private existence, that it is more real than we are, and we only feel ourselves real in proportion as we identify ourselves with it.
With such suggestions in our minds, we see the problem of liberty in a new light. Liberty, no doubt, is as Rousseau has told us, so far agreeing with Mill, the essential quality of human life. It is so, we understood, because it is the condition of our being ourselves. But now that it has occurred to us that in order to be ourselves we must be always becoming something which we are not, or in other words, we must always recognise that we are something more than we have become, liberty, as the condition of our being ourselves, cannot simply be something which {127} we have, still less something which we have always had—a status quo to be maintained. It must be a condition relevant to our continued struggle to assert the control of something in us, which we recognise as imperative upon us or as our real self, but which we only obey in a very imperfect degree. Thus it is that we can speak, without a contradiction, of being forced to be free. [1] It is possible for us to acquiesce, as rational beings, in a law and order which on the whole makes for the possibility of asserting our true or universal selves, at the very moment when this law and order is constraining our particular private wills in a way which we resent, or even condemn. Such a law and order, maintained by force, which we recognise as on the whole the instrument of our greatest self-affirmation, is a system of rights; and our liberty, or to use a good old expression, our liberties, may be identified with such a system considered as the condition and guarantee of our becoming the best that we have it in us to be, that is, of becoming ourselves. And because such an order is the embodiment up to a certain point of a self or system of will which we recognise as what ought to be, as against the indolence, ignorance, or rebellion of our casual private selves, we may rightly call it a system of self-government or free government; a system, that is to say, in which ourselves, in one sense, govern ourselves in another sense; not as Mill has said, by each one of us being subject to all the “others” (taking “others” in the same sense in which each of us is “one”), {128} but by all of us, as casual private units, being subject to an order which expresses, up to a certain point, the rational self or will which, as rational beings, we may be assumed [2] to recognise as imperative.
[1] For limitations see ch. viii. below.
[2] In principle, actual individual assent is not needed. The question when the assumption breaks down belongs to the subject of the duty of rebellion and the significance of punishment.
2. Before proceeding to develop the idea of liberty, we may consider for a moment the closely analogous idea of “nature” and what is “natural.”