The German philosopher Edith Stein put her own body forward during the First World War. A graduate student, she took leave to volunteer as a nurse. When she returned to her dissertation, her time with the wounded guided her argument about empathy. “Do we not,” she asked, “need the mediation of the body to assure ourselves of the existence of another person?”
The word she used for “body” was Leib.
The first form of freedom, as I hope to show, is sovereignty. A sovereign person knows themselves and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments.
For Stein, we gain knowledge of ourselves when we acknowledge others. Only when we recognize that other people are in the same predicament as we are, live as bodies as we do, can we take seriously how they see us. When we identify with them as they regard us, we understand ourselves as we otherwise might not. Our own objectivity, in other words, depends on the subjectivity of others.
This is not how we are accustomed to seeing things. We imagine that we can just take in information ourselves, as isolated individuals. We believe that when we are alone, we are free. This mistake ensures that we are not.
The word Leib gets us to a new standpoint. The German language has two terms for “body,” Körper and Leib. The word Körper can denote a person’s body but also a “foreign body” (Fremdkörper), a “heavenly body” (Himmelskörper), the “racial body” (Volkskörper), and other objects thought to be subject to physical laws. A Körper might be alive, but it need not be (compare corpse). Stein says, “There can be a Körper without me, but no Leib without me.”
The word Leib designates a living human body, or an animal body, or the body of an imaginary creature in a story. A Leib is a Körper, subject to physical laws, but that is not all it is. It has its own rules and so its own opportunities. A Leib can move, a Leib can feel, and a Leib has its own center, impossible to graph precisely in space, which Stein calls a “zero point.” We can always see some of our Leib, but we can never see all of it.
Our liveliness is shared. When we understand another person as Leib rather than Körper, we see the whole world differently. The other person has a zero point, just as we do; those zero points make connections, creating a new web of understanding. It is thanks to the Leib of another that we are liberated from thinking of ourselves as outside the world, or against the world. A little leap of empathy is at the beginning of the knowledge we need for freedom.
If it is just me against the world, then all my grumpy late-night pronouncements are justified and true and deserving of attention. But let us imagine that my daughter (also) gets cranky when she is tired and says entirely unreasonable things. Seeing her, seeing that, I recognize a phenomenon in the world, and suddenly know more about myself. That example I owe to questioning from my son about the argument of this book. Knowing me and knowing his sister, he immediately knew what I meant, and then he could also see that this is objective knowledge, of the kind we cannot get alone.
Thanks to the Leib, phenomena come into view, those that are essential for life and for freedom: birth, sleep, waking, health, breathing, eating, drinking, sheltering, lovemaking, illness, aging, death. None of us remembers being born, but all of us were born. None of us will remember dying, but we remember others dying. Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance of understanding it.
Because the Leib is at the source of knowledge, it is also at the source of a politics of freedom. When we see other people as subjects like ourselves, we begin to gain objective knowledge about the world. If we see others as objects, we will lack essential knowledge not only about them but also about the world and about ourselves. This makes us vulnerable to those who would abuse us and rule us. We will see ourselves as objects, and we will be manipulated by others who treat us as such.
In this light, negative freedom is the self-deception of people who do not really wish to be free. Those who present freedom as negative ignore what we are, ignore the Leib. If we are just Körper, physical bodies, then the idea of negative freedom would make a kind of sense. Objects can be restrained by other objects. Freedom could just be freedom from, without aspirations or individuality, without any sense of what life is or should be. But when we correctly apprehend ourselves as a body in a human sense, as a Leib, we understand that freedom must suit that special state. It must be positive, not negative. Barriers are bad not because they block us as objects, but because they hinder us from understanding one another and becoming subjects.
Negative freedom is not a misunderstanding but a repressive idea. It is itself a barrier, a barrier of an intellectual and moral kind. It blocks us from seeing what we would need to be free. Those who want us unfree create barriers between us, or dissuade us from building the structures that would allow understanding. When we see ourselves as Leib, and understand the world, we see what we would have to build together in order to become free.
Edith Stein only ever held one university job, for a single academic year. She lost it when Adolf Hitler came to power. In April 1933 she wrote a letter to the pope, in which she tried to explain, in language he would understand, the position of Germany’s Jews: “We have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor.” She called the Church’s silence about Jewish oppression a “black mark” on its history.
Hitler took a view of the human body utterly opposed to Stein’s. In Mein Kampf, he wrote of Fremdkörper, “foreign bodies,” infesting the Volkskörper, the German racial organism. Rather than seeing each person in Germany as a distinct human body, Nazis portrayed the German race as a single organism and the Jews as the foreign objects, bacteria or parasites.
When my children were smaller, we lived in Vienna. When my daughter was in first grade and my son in third, we commuted to school on scooters across the Heldenplatz, where a huge crowd had welcomed Hitler just before Germany annexed Austria. That year I took my son to soccer practice in a stadium twice a week. One day, the coaches passed out violet jerseys, Leibchen, a word that sounds like “little body.” The boys threw off what they were wearing, pushed their arms and heads into their new shirts, and suddenly looked like a team.
Five years before that, when we waited for the bus for kindergarten, my then-three-year-old son was fascinated by the machines used to dig into the sidewalk and to spread tar on the exposed areas. The workers were preparing to lay Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones,” palpable memorials to murdered Jews. These inscribed metal plates, embedded in the pavement, remind us of where Jews once lived. The information they carry—names, addresses, sites of death—give us a chance to rehumanize, to restore, at least in imagination, what they lost. Before the Jews were killed, they were stripped of everything: first their property, then their clothes. Like the million or so other Jews murdered at Auschwitz, Edith Stein had to disrobe. This was theft, of course, but mainly humiliation, treating a Leib as a Körper, preparing everyone for murder.
Before my son’s birth in Vienna, German was for me a language of death: of Hitler’s speech at the Heldenplatz, of the sign over the gates of Auschwitz, of all the thousands of sources I had read in order to write about the Holocaust and other atrocities. Körper in all its forms was familiar, Leib less so. With my son, German became a language of life. I heard the word Leib in a Vienna maternity ward, from a nurse trying to teach breastfeeding.
Mothers remain in Austrian hospitals for ninety-six hours after giving birth, to learn to wash and feed the baby. In that space with those bodies for four days, I learned things I would not otherwise have known. The predicament of nurse, mother, and infant was different from mine, but I could understand something about it, then about myself and the world. I am freer as a father for having been there.
Your Leib pushes back into the world, changing it. It translates physics into pain and pleasure, chemistry into desire and disappointment, biology into poetry and prose. It is the permeable membrane between necessity and freedom. It is a Leib that is capable of the kind of concentration that marks a free and sovereign person. Körper we concentrate in a camp.
Stein was unable, as a woman in interwar Germany, to earn the credential and keep the job that would have suited her. After publishing her dissertation on empathy, she turned her energy to publishing the work of a friend and teacher who had been killed in battle, and then to editing that of Edmund Husserl, their supervisor. Husserl wrote letters of recommendation to the effect that she ought to be a professor of philosophy were it an appropriate role for women.
Jewish by upbringing, Stein had converted to Catholicism. After Hitler came to power and she lost her academic job, she took orders as a nun. Recasting her philosophy in biblical terms can help us see what is special about our bodies. Unlike contemporary German, Martin Luther’s first German translation of the Bible always uses Leib for the human body. As a Leib, we are neither gods nor objects, but nor are we just a dilution, something in between. The universe neither gives nor denies us freedom. It sets before us restraints that we can know, and it offers us the possibility of adding something new.
Because we are imperfect, we see the universe in ways appropriate to the limits of the human body. This is positional knowledge that God cannot have. Unlike God, we can choose to see ourselves and the world through others of our own kind. A familiar biblical verse makes Stein’s point about knowledge through the Leib of another: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
God has no Leib and is aware of the attendant limitations: “My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh” (Genesis 6:3). Stein put it this way: “We have to admit that if God rejoiced over the repentance of a sinner, he would experience no pounding of the heart.”
Our hearts do pound from excitement or exertion. Unlike God, we can be free, in the precise sense of turning the restraints of our universe into opportunities. God knows no adversity, and adversity has uses. Facing a law of necessity He does not face, we expand a law of freedom He does not know. And so:
The limits of an object are its limits.
The capabilities of God are His capabilities.
The limits of a Leib are its capabilities.
Jesus of Nazareth certainly had a Leib. He forgave the sins of a weeping woman who “began to wash his feet with her tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head” (Luke 7:38). When Jesus says that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41), we can relate. He suffered physical pain and knew that he would die. Unlike God the Father, Jesus is neither litigious nor vengeful, emphasizing instead the simple laws of loving God and loving one’s neighbor.
Whereas God quickly lost patience with his creations, exposing their imperfection by killing them, Jesus spoke patiently in riddles and allegories, forcing his listeners to think again. When asked whom we should regard as our neighbor, he told a story about a suffering Leib.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a Jew who has been “stripped of his raiment” is lying “wounded” beside the road. Other Jews walk by and do not help him. A non-Jew, a Samaritan, recognized the injured Jew as a fellow person, “had compassion on him” (Luke 10:30–33), tended his wounds, and found him shelter. Who is thy neighbor? He that showed mercy. Go and do likewise.
In the story, it is the Samaritan who is free. He is sovereign, in that he is acting according to his own values and is able to realize them in the world. The road that he walked was material, but not only. We are in nature but not entirely of it. Our bodies are subject to inertia, but we can choose to stop by the side of the road. Our bodies are pulled down by gravity, but we can raise someone else up from the ditch.
For the French philosopher Simone Weil, acknowledging the existence of another was an act of love. For her, loving one’s neighbor as oneself meant reading “the same combination of nature and the supernatural” in another person’s body that we experience ourselves.
The Bible also asks us to love “the stranger that dwelleth among you” as we love ourselves (Leviticus 19:34). “To love a stranger as oneself implies,” says Weil, “that we love ourselves as strangers.” Like many of her formulations, this one is a challenge. It is not just that we do right when we love a stranger. It is that we see ourselves as a stranger might see us, see what is strange in us, which is what we need to see. When we see ourselves as others see us, we know ourselves better. This is liberating. We experience the restraints of the external world and push against them, in the company of others who are doing the same. We are free when we know in which direction we wish to push and how we can do so.
Weil felt the restraints acutely. She suffered from migraines and physical awkwardness. That one academic year when Stein was able to teach, 1932–33, Weil spent in Germany. In 1934–35 Weil worked as a machinist and a packer in factories in France, to understand workers; the labor exhausted her. She volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 but injured herself immediately. During the Second World War, working in London for the French Resistance, she asked to be sent to occupied Europe with a group of nurses. Her supreme commander, Charles de Gaulle, thought she was crazy. Weil had trouble eating and died of illness during the war.
Weil called our bodies “a source of mystery that we cannot eliminate.” We are here as our bodies or not at all; we are free as our bodies or not at all. In notebooks that she kept during the war, Weil wrote of gravity and grace. We are a special sort of creature, subject to the laws of physics but able to understand them—and to bend them to purposes that are not reducible to them. The body wends its way between the world of things as they are and the world of things as they might be. Weil’s “mystery” was the presence of the body in both realms, the is and the ought. To be sovereign means to have a sense of what ought to be and how to get there.
Simone Weil liked sports. She thought that physical coordination enables “thought to enter into direct contact with things.” Practice creates, she thought, “a second nature, better than the first.” Like Weil, I was a poor athlete by nature, so I had to practice. I can swim thanks to a local swim club and instructors and a patient mother reading novels poolside. I could never do all the things in gym class that other kids found easy, so I trained myself. My mother recalls my jumping rope in the garage by myself for hours each day. I excelled at baseball because it was a sport I could practice alone or with my father.
As a kid, I loved to watch baseball live. It was a special treat to be in the stadium, my body with other bodies. I played the game and so could identify with the players. I idolized the Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine of the 1970s. I played make-believe games of baseball with a friend, batting as all the Reds players, imitating their stances.
The 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Boston Red Sox is the first I remember. In game one, the winning pitcher for the Red Sox was the ageless Afro-Cuban Luis Tiant. During the game, which I watched on television, one of the commentators mentioned that Tiant had worried about raising his son in the United States. I was barely six and not sure what the word prejudice meant.
A stadium is a site of education. The word comes from Greek and has to do with a fixed measurement. A stadium is an objectively defined site where intensely subjective things happen. In a group bigger than we can count, we learn things that we later find difficult to question. At Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, I learned the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I can’t remember not knowing the lyrics.
Awed by British cannon during the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key asked:
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The Reds brought together talented white, Black, and Latin American players. I don’t think I ever asked myself what it might mean for African American players to stand for a song about liberty that was written when their ancestors were enslaved. I do remember wondering what it meant for the players who were not American to stand for the anthem of another country.
Considering the Leib of others (as Stein put it), or seeing the strangers among us (as Weil said), we attune ourselves differently. Thinking about that physical act of standing at attention from other perspectives, we hear the anthem’s lyrics differently. The questions it poses become less rhetorical: Does the American flag wave today? Most assuredly it does. This is the easy part. But does it fly over “the land of the free”?
It is easy to imagine that freedom will be brought to us by a song, by jets over a stadium, by the land, by the ancestors, by the Founders, by capitalism. But is the notion that we are granted freedom right for a “home of the brave”? Is it not more courageous to ask what Americans have done, could have done, should do?
We say that a symbol stands for something, but all too often a symbol merely stands in for something. The American flag is supposed to stand for freedom, but it can very easily stand in for freedom. In singing the anthem, we treat its values as permanent, or as if they were enacted by song. But praise is not practice.
By no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest peoples of the world. An American organization, Freedom House, measures freedom by the criteria Americans prefer: civil and political liberties. Year after year about fifty countries do better than us on these measures.
Our northern neighbor Canada stands far above us. In a recent ranking, the United States shared a place with South Korea (a country Americans fought for), Romania (a post-communist country that few Americans would see as a peer), and Panama (a country that the United States called into existence in order to get a canal built).
The truth about the “land of the free” is more sobering still. Most of the countries with higher rankings than ours in civil and political liberties would surpass us by still greater margins in the measures that their citizens would consider elements of freedom, such as access to health care. If such measures were included, we would fall even further down on the scale.
The countries where people tend to think of freedom as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from. That should give pause for thought. Political systems that are oriented toward freedom to are doing better than we are on freedom from. This suggests that there is no contradiction between the two. Indeed, it suggests that freedom to comes first. That is not what we are used to thinking or want to think. It helps to look at others if we want to understand ourselves.
We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from, as negative. But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. Freedom to, positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world? If we don’t think of freedom as positive, we won’t even get freedom in the negative sense, since we will be unable to tell what is in fact a barrier, how barriers can be taken in hand and become tools, and how tools extend our freedom.
Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It is also a political trap, in that it involves self-deception, contains no program for its own realization, and offers opportunities to tyrants. Both a philosophy and a politics of freedom have to begin with freedom to.
Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some power to realize them. Insofar as such a thing can be measured, Americans could be doing better. As I write, in self-reported well-being, Americans are fifteenth in the world. In about fifty countries, people live longer lives.
Not long after I reached the age of fifty years, it seemed that I would die. When I was close to death, I thought about baseball.
One of my clearest memories from childhood is the first home run I hit, at the age of thirteen, in May 1983. The team uniforms were baby blue and navy, the white lettering advertising a local orthodontist. The team was stacked with talent at almost every position. That day we were playing on one of the few local fields that had a fence. The pitch to me was a fastball down and on the inside half of the plate, but too close to the middle. I stepped, turned on the ball just right, and hit it. The left fielder turned, took a step, and watched it clear the fence. The ball bounced on the asphalt of the parking lot and disappeared into the woods. My teammates whooped.
What I remember is the way the bat felt in my hands when I struck the ball. I knew that I had hit it just right. I had that feeling of rightness on my palms, in my wrists, up my arms, and into my thin chest. I was an alienated teenager who could program a computer; earlier that year, in school, I had created a game called “Lifegame” and was excited and then a little disturbed by how it could take over players’ attention. I had been obsessed since early childhood with the possibility that everything could be a simulation and that therefore I was not really alive.
But when the bat hit the ball, I knew that I was.
In moments of distress, my body calls for that memory, as it did during a serious illness in late 2019. That December an infection of my appendix spread to my liver and then to my blood, bringing about the often-lethal condition known as sepsis. As my body’s immune system tried to resist, it attacked my own nerves. My hands felt hot and tingled intensely, as though I were wearing mittens of heated steel wool.
At year’s end, in an emergency room in New Haven, I could feel my body floating between Leib and Körper. When I closed my eyes, I saw things that weren’t there. The burning that I felt had no connection to the world outside. I was exhausted and breathing hard, but not because of any effort I had made.
Some of the fault was mine. I had been raised to think of the body as just one more external constraint, to be resisted. Pain was to be ignored. If I injured myself during a game, I was never to touch where it hurt. And so when my appendix burst on December 3 during a visit to Germany, my first impulse had been to pay no attention. I was in the German welfare state to attend a board meeting and discuss a hospital, but somehow none of that seemed directly relevant to me.
I was also to give a lecture in Munich that evening on the question “Can the United States Become a Free Country?” I did it, covering my discomfort by telling jokes, and the pain seemed to release me from inhibitions. After the lecture, I found I was not very hungry and left dinner early for the hotel. I went to bed, but then the thought of my distant family induced me to call a cab and go to a hospital. I was proud of myself for doing that. Once there, though, I did not complain enough. The doctors released me with the wrong diagnosis and without prescribing antibiotics. I went to my board meeting.
If freedom is just negative, an absence of barriers, then the body comes into the story negatively, as just one more restraint. My own unfortunate attitude toward my body was consistent with a broader American mistake.
From regarding the body as an object, it is a short step to regarding it as a commodity. It seems normal in the United States to see the body as a source of profit. And that was my next problem.
I flew home from Germany with a burst appendix and peritonitis, then managed (at my wife’s urgings) to go to the doctor a second time. After being seen on December 15, I was referred to a New Haven hospital. This time the burst appendix was diagnosed, as was a lesion on my liver. But in their haste to get me out the door after the appendectomy, the doctors forgot about the liver. I left with an insufficient prescription for antibiotics and no referral for the liver abscess, about which I knew nothing at the time. (I learned about the detection of the liver growth long after the fact, reading my own medical records.) The infection then spilled into my blood.
One problem was me; another was commercial medicine; a third was race. In the emergency room in New Haven on December 29, I needed a Good Samaritan, I needed someone to recognize me through my body, and I had such a person. Her presence, sad to say, might have made things worse.
The physician friend who met me at the emergency room had no trouble seeing my Leib. We had run a race together in a thunderstorm. My convulsive trembling and high fever meant something to her. She understood that it was hard for me to communicate pain. She was not sure what was wrong, but she knew that my body needed more attention than it was getting. She spent the night in a chair beside me.
When my friend spoke up for me, though, she was deflected. Her colleagues saw the color of her skin rather than hearing her words. It was a cold December night, and she was wearing a purple fleece zipped up to her neck. I kept thinking that if only she would pull her hospital badge from behind that fleece, her colleagues might see her as a doctor rather than as a Black person. The nurse, the resident, and the attending physician set themselves up in opposition to my friend. If my friend said I was very ill, they were predisposed to think the contrary. They took my body less seriously than they should have. I almost lost my life—or, as people say in German, my Leib und Leben.
After more errors, I was eventually diagnosed with sepsis and treated for it; after a few more weeks and much more bungling, the liver infection subsided as well. Once I could walk around, I did. As in most American hospitals, there was nowhere really to go. So I walked up and down the corridor: one lap at first, eventually ten laps, twenty.
I needed to move. One day a nurse touched my arm as I was making my rounds and whispered to me that I was doing the right thing, as though the pursuit of happiness were a secret we shared.
Having nearly died in that American hospital, I gave some thought, pacing its corridors, to the “right to life.” In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s right to life is followed by a right to liberty and a right to pursue happiness. Liberty is in the middle.
Life comes first, which makes sense. We can only be free as a Leib. No Leib, no freedom. There can be a Körper without me, but no Leib without me, as Stein said. Negative freedom makes a Körper of us, one object of many, supposedly free when other objects are not in the way. That will not do. Whatever our freedom is, it must begin from what kinds of creatures we are, involve how we differ from the world beyond, and suggest how we make contact with that world and change it.
Liberty and life are connected, if perhaps not in the way that we are usually told. It is not that we have to trade the one for the other, freedom for safety. Had I been freer when I was sick, I would also have been more secure. The absence of freedom threatens life, just as threats to life undermine freedom.
In Jefferson’s list, the pursuit of happiness comes third. Contemplating happiness teaches us important things. It is different for each of us. This can be irritating. But the implacable diversity of ideas of the good demonstrates the possibility of freedom.
Jefferson thought that happiness required virtue. His contemporary the Marquis de Sade made an unforgettable case for vice—which Jefferson’s happy life was not without.
Schopenhauer says that happiness is given, Balzac that it is made.
Bentham says that happiness can be legislated, Dostoevsky that laws displace the thing itself.
Lafargue says that idleness brings happiness, Fourier proposes labor.
Burke says that beauty promises happiness, Kawabata and Murakami (like Ovid) that it brings woe.
Leopold Staff says that we are happy when we give the most, Irène Némirovsky when we give the least.
Lammenais says that we are happy when we expect much, Goethe when we expect little.
Epictetus says that happiness returns from whence we direct our love, the Buddha teaches us to expect no such reward.
Mickiewicz says that happiness is impossible amid suffering, Tertullian that this is our chance.
Żeromski says the young are happy, Cicero the old. (According to polling data, both are right, and it is the middle decades that are the unhappiest.)
Jean-Paul Sartre defines hell as other people, his contemporary Simone Weil as loneliness.
This irresolvable disagreement about how to pursue happiness affirms a right to liberty. Happiness has to do with what we value. The things we hold dear are real, but none of us values the same things in the same way as anyone else, nor is there a single correct way to order all the virtues. There is no one good thing of which all the others are just parts or examples. If there were such a singular good, our universe would be different, and freedom would be impossible. Were humans to agree on the sources of happiness, we would be far simpler creatures, subject to programming, incapable of freedom.
On only one point do we find agreement about happiness among thinkers at all times in all cultures: health favors it. When we are well, each of us wants different things. When we are sick, we all want to get well. The Leib comes first; only with the Leib healthy can we move on to other desires and claims and values. Illness not only hinders our pursuit of happiness, it jeopardizes our lives and constrains our liberty.
Freedom is about the body. The Founders knew this, but they knew little about the human organism. John Locke, an English philosopher important to American constitutional thought, treated health as an element of good government. Thomas Jefferson thought that after ethics, health was the most important thing in life. The Founders bemoaned the epidemics that plagued their young republic, but they had no remedies. We do. George Washington inoculated his troops the best way he knew how. We know better. He died after being bled by his doctors. We wouldn’t do such a thing.
The Founders held a variety of views about slavery, but even some of those who opposed its spread (such as Jefferson) owned slaves themselves. As a general matter, we can say that early American elites often did not see the body of an African as a Leib. They generally believed that people from Africa were not fully human, that their bodies were different from their own. This belief remains with us, and it makes it harder for us all to be healthy.
The racism was clear to me in the emergency room because I was dying. White people in the United States know about race, but they suppress that knowledge in an everyday covenant of ostensible ignorance. I did not learn about racism from the incident in the hospital; when I was at death’s door, what I already knew surged forward to clarify the situation, because it was relevant to my own survival. Only at the extreme did I need ordinary knowledge. Black Americans cannot deny what they know, because they need it to get through the day. When white people deny what we know, we turn situations where we might all do better into situations where we all do worse. While the doctors ignored my friend, I was dying a truth I hadn’t lived.
Slavery was conceived of as negative freedom: a right of the slaveowner to own property, with which the government was not to interfere. It is this tradition that leads some of us to think that government action must work against non-Black people if it is working for Black people. Negative freedom invites white people to think of themselves as self-sufficient, like plantation owners, with no need for government assistance. Then many white people (and other non-Black people) reject a right to health care since it means sharing it with Black people. This failure to recognize the Leib of the other leads to self-deception and unfreedom. In the end, one’s own Leib is also ignored and abused, or even killed. We die sooner when we live a lie.
I had three problems when I was very sick: my own attitude toward my body; the commercialization of medical care; and racism. These really amount to one problem. If we do not recognize the general predicament of illness and death, if we do not recognize all bodies, then we do not recognize our own predicament when we are sick and what it means for freedom. If we conceive of liberty only as freedom from, we don’t think expansively enough; we think only of ourselves, or about ourselves against the world. When we don’t see the bodies of others, we don’t really understand our own, and we end up giving away our own freedom and our own lives.
With respect to health, the idea of negative freedom is a dangerous relic of the past, of a time when the most that could be hoped for was property, slaves, and women to surround an ill man. We can do so much better now, and for everyone. A revolution in medicine and hygiene began after the Civil War. Physicians—and following them, governments around the world—implemented policies of hygiene, vaccination, and preventive care. These programs created not only the reality but the expectation of a much longer life.
Advances in medicine made possible a profound gain of freedom. People who are more confident about health will have greater ambitions for life. People who expect to live short lives are more likely to risk them in violence that, in turn, shortens the lives of others.
We can bring Jefferson’s thought to its logical conclusion and unite his three basic rights in a fourth: the right to health care. But we will only achieve that if we manage something that the Founders did not: recognizing other bodies as equally human.
Thanks to illness and inactivity, in 2020 I was clumsy. My limbs followed my directives imprecisely, and I sensed objects that were not actually there. Home from the hospital that spring, I looked for simple jobs that I could do with my body. While sweeping out the garage floor with my right arm, a catheter for antibiotics in my left, I happened across a Wiffle ball and a red plastic bat. My daughter grabbed the bat, and I put down the broom and tossed her the ball with my good hand. She hit it on the first try.
My daughter was about to turn eight. She did not even know which sport had been invoked. Teaching her to play catch as I convalesced, I had an odd feeling. Because my body had unlearned much of what it once knew, I was uncannily aware of all the motions I made to throw and receive the ball. I was more conscious of space and time, or rather of how, in its humble neuromuscular self-regulation, my body had at one time mastered them. As I got well, I slowly returned to a state that I had achieved long before by practice. I was free in that I no longer had to think about what I was doing. Simone Weil called this habitude.
Practice does not make perfect. Nothing makes us perfect, fortunately. But practice does lead us to habitude and to grace, a quality otherwise absent from the universe. By June 2020, four months after I left the hospital, two months after the tube came out of my arm, my daughter could play catch, and so could I. The half-perceived arc of her throws sublimated into my half-aware certainty of when and where the ball would cross the plane of my body, and into the half-conscious movement that brought it unerringly into my glove. In my lack of awareness of what I was doing, I was free.
When I played baseball in the early 1980s, I was a pitcher. Pitching is a bit like declaring freedom. You are alone, elevated on a mound, in your little chalk circle of honor, labor, and despair. The game turns on what you do next.
On the pitcher’s mound, as I came to a set before my windup, I visualized what would happen next. I imagined the pitch I was about to make—let’s say a fastball up over the inside corner—and I saw, in my mind’s eye, the batter hesitate and lose time judging whether it was a ball or a strike, swing late and too quickly, and miss. I even saw his grimace. In a visualization of this sort, which Stein called “an intention permeating the whole,” another world appears, a beat ahead of this one. Not always, but often, I could bring the two worlds together, pitch as I wanted to, and cause the reaction I expected. In a phrase of Roger Angell’s that I treasured as a kid, the baseball was my “little lump of physics.”
We are neither gods nor objects. We are humans who can become sovereign. Freedom is neither the lack nor the acceptance of constraints, but rather the use of them. The mound is sixty feet and six inches from home plate, and it is elevated ten inches above the ground; that both restrains and enables a pitch. We are free to do only the things we can do, which are usually things that others taught us to do and that we practice. What a pitcher does on the mound is a result not only of choices appropriate to a game situation, but of all the repetition that came before.
The same holds for any choice we make. Just thinking about the virtues is not enough; as Aristotle said, we have to practice them by working them into the world. “Nature resists,” says Simone Weil, “but it does not defend itself.” You feel that resistance when you pick up a baseball or touch the strings of a guitar. The guitar strings resist the pick but yield the chord. The baseball resists as you lift it but yields as you place a middle finger on a stitch, a forefinger against the middle finger, snap your wrist, and throw a curveball. Nature gives way in beauty. When we know how to play, and that we want to play, the resistance and the yielding are the same thing.
Pitches follow rules that we did not make, and arcs that we do make. I know my throw by how my daughter receives it, and I adjust; that is knowledge I cannot attain by myself. The ball leaves my hand with my purposes attached. They are not in the first four dimensions of space and time but in a fifth, in what Edith Stein called “the world of values.” Behind all my throws to my daughter are also my thoughts about how she might grow up, and in each of my throws is every throw from my own father. I do not make the world of values or the world of things, but I do sometimes make small passages between them. In this humble way, I am sovereign.
Stein wrote that the person belongs to both worlds, subject both to the “law of necessity” and to the “law of freedom.” I belong to two realms, and I can stand with one foot in each. I can bring the ball through from necessity to freedom. It is still my lump of physics. My daughter is a pitcher now, too, in softball, so the lump of physics is also hers. She has chosen how to perform a task that is both very much like and very different from pitching a baseball. That decision is hers, and yet it has something to do with what she saw in me.
When we play catch, the targets are not all in the physical world. The hand that throws and the hand that catches is Leib. My daughter holds up her glove, and I can put the ball in its web, from a shorter distance or a longer one. I hold up my glove just before her throw reaches me, directed not only by her strength but also by her purpose. A little arc of aspiration trails behind the arc of a ball, like the tail of a comet.
In describing how physics treats us, Simone Weil spoke of “a double law, an evident indifference and a mysterious complicity.” The universe is unaware of us, yet it sometimes plays along. The example of the thrown ball is hers.
One day the next summer, of 2021, my daughter and I were playing catch on a running track at the edge of an old shtetl, now a Polish town near the Lithuanian border. Then we went to the main street to get ice cream. While standing in line at the soft-serve kiosk, we saw some saxophonists taking a break in front of the (former) synagogue, the White Synagogue of Sejny.
I know, and my daughter knows, that the town’s Jews were murdered after the Germans expelled them at the beginning of the Second World War. After the war, in communist Poland, the synagogue was used as a warehouse. In 1989, as communism came to an end, the building was taken over by a small troupe of actors, artists, and musicians who called themselves Borderlanders. They had a peculiar idea: that people would be freer if they could use art to see themselves, others, and the past.
The Borderlanders then began to teach local children, Poles and Lithuanians, how to play klezmer, the Jewish popular music that was widespread in Poland before the war. Day after day, year after year, local boys and girls accepted the gift of music, learning how to play instruments. Every year new kids, as young as five or six, joined the older ones. I have been listening to the orchestra play in that synagogue for longer than my daughter has been alive. I have seen the young kids become teenagers, and the teenagers become young women and men.
Each new capacity contributes to our sovereignty and so belongs to freedom. Because they can play instruments, the musicians express themselves as they would not otherwise have been able to. The music they play is Jewish, and they practice in what was once a largely Jewish town, and they perform in what was once a Jewish temple. Their breath connects them to a world of values that one day will come to them. When the moment arrives to ask what it means to have a synagogue without Jews, those Jews are not entirely absent. They are, in some way, present in the music, and the music is present in the kids—present in their bodies, in their muscles as well as in their minds.
People cry in the White Synagogue in Sejny, listening to the music. I am brought to tears when young people in the audience have the courage to dance. Much of this music was meant to be joyful, after all. Some of it is wedding music. Some of it, come to think of it, was played at my wedding.
My daughter’s relatives, three or four generations earlier, were murdered in the nearest big city. The Jews of Białystok, her mother’s father’s people, were shot and gassed to death by the tens of thousands, having been rounded up in the local stadium. As I write this vignette, my daughter is there, in Białystok, attending the university graduation ceremony of a Polish babysitter who has become a friend.
My daughter exists only because her ancestors on her mother’s father’s side left Białystok, and those on her mother’s mother’s side left Ukraine. The first graduation ceremony she attended was in Białystok, the first wedding in Ukraine. She was a flower girl.
Sovereignty has to do with the body, with what we learn to do. It also has to do with the past, with the world we inherit. “The past and the future,” says Weil, “are man’s only treasures.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, my daughter donated all her money to Ukrainians. During the first few weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I kept getting phone calls from American Jews, people whose ancestors had fled Ukraine, asking how they could help. They were able to recognize the injustice.
Ukraine, today the site of Putin’s war of destruction and extermination, has long been an object of empires. For Stalin, it was a “fortress” of resources that were to be extracted for “internal colonization.” Hitler wanted Ukraine as Lebensraum, living space. In these colonial fantasies, Ukrainians were not seen at all, or were seen as subhuman.
Leib first reverts to Körper in the mind. In Nazi propaganda, east Europeans were subhuman beasts. On Soviet posters, rich peasants were pigs. Russian television today takes this notion to a postmodern extreme: Ukrainians are to be exterminated because they are Nazis, Jews, gays, Satanists, ghouls, zombies, vermin. The next step is violence, the opposite of recognition of the Leib. When we torture or humiliate a body, we further objectify it. After the body has been degraded and the person humiliated, the killer finds the work easier to bear. Some enjoy it.
In dehumanizing others, we make ourselves unfree. If we see others only as Körper, we cannot see ourselves as Leib; we lose the promise of our own freedom. So we can only get to freedom with the help of those we might otherwise demean, mistreat, or ignore. At a rehabilitation facility in Kyiv, I watched a soldier with two prosthetic legs work out on a treadmill while practicing boxing. Another young man, who had left a safe job in another European capital, lost his left arm and leg. He worked his right arm with a forty-kilo barbell. Talking to these men, I see myself in a different way, recognize a bit better how I reside in my body.
My own arguments about freedom would be impossible without the physical presence of others. I am writing by myself, but I am not really alone. Zelens’kyi told me that “we never really speak, others speak through us,” and with these words he was making some of Edith Stein’s points. We learn from people with whom we spend time, whom we respect—a word that, in its origins, means “look back, look attentively.” We understand their thoughts in a different way when we have acknowledged them as people. We are more aware of our own thought processes when we think together with others. Even the books that stay with us are often given to us by people we know.
Some of the thoughts at the origins of this book arose in conversation with an admired historian friend who suffered from the neurodegenerative disorder known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS. By late 2008, my friend was no longer able to write in the typical sense, since he could no longer raise his hands.
I wanted him to work, so I proposed that we compose a book together on the basis of recorded conversations. I took for granted that we would have to be in the same room. Only with him could I acknowledge and challenge him. Only in the presence of the disease could we work around it. My friend felt the same way: when I called him to propose the idea, he just said, “Come over.”
We worked together during the two years before his death.
My presence did work on my friend, whose name was Tony Judt, as a provocation, in a positive sense. He needed answers that were better than my questions. He wanted to remember everything that he had ever read, and he just about could. Talking to Tony, I concentrated, tapping capacities that otherwise would have lain dormant. With our phones put away, with cases of books around us, with Tony’s eyes on me, I recalled citations and passages with him. Together we achieved something that would have been beyond either of us as individuals: the book that Tony titled Thinking the Twentieth Century.
One of the thinkers Tony and I found ourselves discussing was Edith Stein. She could not have written her dissertation on empathy and knowledge without the wounded soldiers. She started from the assumption, basic in philosophy since Immanuel Kant, that others were her equals, that the German men she treated were her fellow human beings.
Equal dignity is easy to grant in theory. But how do we recognize others in practice? Tending the wrecked bodies of men wounded at the front, Stein found that we acknowledge others through the Leib.
In the spring semester of 2022, ten years after Tony’s and my book was published, I assigned Stein’s dissertation to incarcerated students. We would read it together for the seminar in the philosophy of freedom I taught in a maximum-security prison. Though in a different way, this encounter with Stein was also inflected by illness: a pandemic. The course was supposed to have begun several weeks before it did, but prisoners and guards were sick in large numbers. I had to wait for the prison’s Covid protocol to change before I could get inside. In January and February 2022, the students had their course packets and were doing the reading and did not want to wait.
I knew that I had to be in their space, at least in some limited way. That was, after all, Stein’s point. Twenty years of classroom teaching had taught me the same. The students appreciated the contact, when it came, when I could enter the prison and join them in the classroom. They were quite ceremonious about the seminar; part of the ritual was that skin touched skin. Coming from different cellblocks, called over the loudspeaker by their numbers, they were happy to be bodies in the same space. Each arriving student gave the others hugs. Each one of them wanted to touch me when the class began and ended: I got white-guy handshakes.
We used the word Leib a lot. One of my incarcerated students, Dwayne, seemed captivated by Stein and summarized her arguments beautifully. You “have to see the body of others to see your own body,” and so objectivity “is not being yourself without distractions, it is recognizing the other body as being like your body, and then seeing the world.” “When I am imprisoned in my own self,” wrote Stein, “I can never get beyond the world as it appears to me.” But “thanks to empathy I get repeated appearances of that same world that are independent of my perception.” It is empathy that allows us to know that the external world is real.
Empathy, in other words, is not a condescending concession of a rational person to the emotions of others, but the only way to become a reasonable person. To acknowledge the corporeality of others is not a gift to them but a step toward our own reason. “The constitution of the foreign individual,” wrote Stein in her dissertation, “was a condition for the full constitution of our own individuality.” The bodies of others allow us to see them as subjects, as in the same predicament as we are. Empowered then by empathy, we can see ourselves as others see us. That helps us both to know ourselves and to know the world. That knowledge, in turn, makes us better subjects, more sovereign.
We have to see the bodies of others as subjects, because otherwise we cannot see ourselves as subjects. And if we fail to do that, we cannot be free.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, other bodies I knew, friends or colleagues or students, were in trenches or bomb shelters or in flight from the Russian invasion. At the time of that first class in prison, March 2022, Ukrainian friends with families were trying to find a way to flee Kyiv. My incarcerated students wanted to hear about the war. I was not supposed to turn my back on them, but I did so the first day to draw battle maps on the whiteboard.
We imagined a disaster thousands of miles away, in a country that none of my students had visited, and that to them at first was all but unknown. The application of what we were discussing, though, was clear enough. If Russian invaders believed that Ukrainians were less than human, then raping women and executing men was no crime: Ukrainian bodies were objects to begin with. In acting this way, of course, the Russians opened the logical possibility that they, too, were simply objects: to be sent somewhere to die pointlessly on the basis of lies. If we do not recognize one another through the Leib, we not only cause suffering to others but bring unfreedom to ourselves.
What if I think that my body is something more than a Körper, but no one else agrees? Then (my students pointed out) others can attach and detach meanings to me as they will, and my own values will never make their way out into the world. I can be enslaved, tortured, segregated. If I do not exist as a Leib because the existence of my group is denied, I can be subjected to genocide.
The students appreciated Stein’s contention about the Leib but wondered how far she would have taken it. After all, the soldiers she treated in the First World War were her fellow Germans—or fellow white people, as my students saw it. Most of my students were Black, and all of them expressed this suspicion.
Meeting during the first four months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, my students came to see that Europeans can colonize other Europeans—that is, that white people can colonize other white people. Their realization calls into question the universality of the American notion of “white people”—or, when construed positively, provides an example of empathy.
The students extended their literary and philosophical references to Ukraine and applied their personal experiences to those of Ukrainians. My student Alpha expressed solidarity in the highest degree when he said, “The suffering of Ukrainians affects me as a Black man.” By the end of the class, Alpha said that he admired Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelens’kyi as an anti-colonialist.
In their querying of Stein, the students were onto something, though I resisted them at the time. Stein was certainly a German nationalist when she wrote about empathy in 1917. She considered it “out of the question that we will now be defeated.” She was probably not thinking critically then about the German war aim of conquering Ukraine and treating it as a breadbasket. In her field hospital, though, she was treating soldiers of the multinational Habsburg army as well as German soldiers. Ukraine did not exist at the time, and its lands were divided between Russia and the Habsburg monarchy. So young Ukrainian men were fighting on both sides. Confronted with their wounded bodies, Stein empathized with their predicament.
Would she have empathized with Black men? That’s where the students had their doubts. For their part, though, they were able to imagine her position and to empathize both with her and with Ukrainians past and present. One student, Michael, was aware of another moment when Ukraine was treated colonially: the political famine in Soviet Ukraine. After the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a series of other wars, most of what is now Ukraine was incorporated by the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin saw Ukraine as a territory to be tamed and exploited. As a result of the collectivization of agriculture, millions of Ukrainians were brought to the verge of starvation. Stalin then took a series of decisions in late 1932 that ensured that about four million people in Soviet Ukraine in fact died. Michael knew a poignant detail: that Ukrainians during Stalin’s starvation campaign referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Having once cried for the slaves in the book, Ukrainians now identified with them. In one of his papers, Michael mentioned his own aged mother, whose African American son was in prison and had been for thirty years. In early 2022, Michael told me, she watched the news about Ukraine and cried. She could see.
The world in which Russia invades and tortures and America impoverishes and humiliates is one world, and it can be understood, especially when people are physically present. My incarcerated students learned the names of Ukrainian writers. When I took this manuscript to Ukrainian colleagues in Ukraine, they learned the names of my incarcerated students. There was something pleasing about conservative Ukrainian humanists sitting around a table in Lviv discussing the views of Alpha, a radical young African American thousands of miles away. They could see him. Thanks to everyone who was discussing the book, whether they were in an American prison or in a Ukrainian city mourning its dead, I gained a broader view.
Russia has become a genocidal fascist empire for many reasons, but one of them is negative freedom. This concept made it hard to see that its oligarchy was the antithesis of freedom (rather than a side effect) or that Putin was a fascist (rather than just a technocrat seeking wealth). And America has become a flawed republic threatened by oligarchy and fascism for many reasons, but negative freedom is among them. It leads us to think that we have solved our problems when we have privatized them, when in fact all we have achieved is separating ourselves from one another.
My country is also my incarcerated students’ country. They had done what they had done, and I have done what I have done, but there is a larger logic behind my being at Yale and their being in prison. The land that celebrated its bicentennial in 1976 was on the way to locking up more of its citizens than any other, as a matter of racial policy. That I was only about one-fifth as likely to go to prison as a Black person was due to no merit of my own.
One June day in 1976, a few weeks before I rang that bell, I was sitting in a yellow school bus, alone on a bench seat near the back. It was the last week of first grade, and I was looking at the elementary school yearbook.
It was a simple stapled affair, with a two-color cardboard cover, one glossy page for each class, black-and-white photographs in rows and columns, the teacher at the top left. In her picture, my teacher sported a tremendous Afro, thick round glasses, and a turtleneck sweater beneath a plaid overall dress of the sort she favored. A third-grader peering over my shoulder mocked me for the race of my teacher, calling out the standard term of abuse. It was the first time I had ever heard the word. I didn’t know what it meant, but I had a notion, since I knew the kid and his attitudes.
The bus route took us past the local swim club. As a boy, I wondered why it was a “club.” I took lessons and spent pleasant summer afternoons there with my brothers. Driving there in my father’s tiny convertible, top down, was an unforgettable pleasure. When I got older, I found it annoying to carry the membership card, especially since I was always losing things. It seemed strange to me that kids would brag about the different kinds of privileges afforded by the different colors of their card. A bored teenager checked the laminated credentials at the entrance.
It was a nice place. Perhaps no one had any bad intentions. And yet the swim club reflected an unmistakable national reality. Our subdevelopment was built after Supreme Court rulings and the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal for cities to exclude African Americans from public swimming pools. Around the country, municipalities then filled in their public pools with cement. Public goods like swimming pools passed to the private sector, where membership rules could informally enforce prejudice. This was a minor element of a larger political reaction to the Civil Rights Act.
When we choose not to recognize other bodies as human, we create specific social situations, which we then define as the state of nature. Having been excluded from swimming pools, Black kids were less likely to learn to swim than white kids. And so white kids were instructed that Black bodies were not buoyant. This was “common knowledge.”
There were at most one or two Black kids at the pool that summer of 1976, maybe none. There were certainly no Black kids on the bus that day. A social arrangement, the creation of zoned suburban neighborhoods, was keeping certain bodies apart.
In a space without Black people, the point of yelling a racial slur was to create a group: everyone against the absent teacher and against anyone who defended the absent teacher. If we use language to treat others’ bodies as objects of one color, we define ourselves as objects of another. We enter into a mindless physical collectivity, a racial mob. We sacrifice our own Leib to the cause of denying the Leib of another.
School might help, but we have to be taught to acknowledge the Leib of the other. I was lucky in that I was challenged at home and saw African Americans in settings chosen by my family. But I do not remember being challenged at school. What we learned about Jim Crow was that it had come to an end. We should have known that Jim Crow inspired German racial laws, which made Jews (such as Edith Stein) second-class citizens. Along with the laws came initiatives from below, such as banning Jews from swimming pools.
It might seem like a small thing, but no one ever taught me about the swimming pools.
Freedom begins with sovereignty, and sovereignty has to do with bodies. And so the philosophy of freedom begins with a baby’s cry. Babies pull us to the philosophical issues that are so basic that they escape attention. I began to see the world differently when I cut my son’s umbilical cord.
We are all born into a blurry storm of circumstance. This is an experience we all share, though none of us recalls it. We know about birth and can consider it only thanks to others. Recalling that we all begin with a shriek can deliver us from philosophical errors that stand behind American oppression.
In American culture, birth is surrounded by taboos. The silence around the most significant moment in life shields our prevailing notion of negative freedom from some basic critiques. Birth reveals its absurdity. A newborn is not going to become free thanks to the absence of something. You can summon others to a journey toward freedom with a beautiful declaration, but you cannot abandon a baby at the foot of a mountain with a benediction of liberty.
A negative idea of freedom seems plausible when we begin our thought process from an idealized image of adults and forget the bodily predicament that we all shared as newborns. If we begin from magical maturity, we can assume that freedom is only a matter of defending what we already have, of what already exists. Defining freedom only as something that can be lost, we never ask how it was gained, how people become sovereign in the first place.
Sovereignty usually means the sovereignty of the state, its capacity to dominate or at least to set the terms of life. But if we regard freedom positively, we can think of sovereignty differently, as being about the person rather than the state. We then take the first step toward a better justification for government.
How did we come to think of a government as sovereign? To imagine a situation in which citizens have some sort of standing or rights, we treat sovereignty as inhering in political institutions. The notion, in traditions such as ours, is that at some point there was a social contract, in which people—idealized adults, of course—met and agreed to form a government. The problem with this move is that such a thing never happened.
The American case comes about as close as can be: people met and agreed upon the Constitution. But the men who wrote that document can hardly be thought to be representative of everyone. Even had they been perfectly representative of the wealthy white landowner class, the exclusion of the non-landed, the African Americans, the women, and the Native Americans means that their covenant can hardly stand on its own in modern times. And why exactly should newborns be subject to an ancient order that they could not possibly have chosen? How is that freedom?
Fascists pointed out the problems with this tradition of sovereignty. The most intelligent of them, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, argued that true sovereignty resided not in following the rules, as laid down by the contract, but in making an exception to them. Whoever could make the exception was the true sovereign. An Adolf Hitler taking advantage of a Reichstag Fire to declare a state of exception was thus an ideal sovereign.
Schmitt’s view, though, was nothing more than cleverness. Rule breaking, though it appeals to the emotions, cannot be sovereignty. Negating an illusion does not generate substance. To say that he who makes an exception is sovereign is at most a statement of fact about power, leaving entirely open what sovereignty means or ought to mean. The fascist notion of sovereignty is puerile, a boyish joke. We need to begin not with overgrown boys but with actual children.
The fascist solution is incompatible with freedom, but the fascist critique of the social contract does reveal a problem. If we expect people to accept the institutions into which they were born, on the basis of an agreement that is largely (or totally) fictional, how can that be generative of freedom? A constitution must not only constitute but reconstitute, over and over again. This can be done.
The solution is to relocate the idea of sovereignty in the person. Freedom is the value of values, because it is the condition in which all other values may be exercised. A government is not legitimate just because it has power and uses the word sovereign to embellish decrepitude and deception. It is legitimate insofar as it enables freedom, enacting policies that allow young and coming generations to become sovereign.
A person has a beginning, and that is the opportunity. To enable freedom, a government must begin at that beginning, with birth and with youth. Practically, this is indispensable to freedom; ethically, it is indispensable to legitimacy, since freedom is the value of values. Governments do not produce children, but a good government can make child-rearing more likely to ease the way to a life in freedom.
A government that does not claim to be sovereign, but that aims for the sovereignty of its children, legitimizes itself by its work for freedom. And it does so with respect not to a myth of the past or to people who are dead but with respect to each coming generation and to people who are coming to life.
In thinking about freedom, we tend to leave out the time between birth and maturity, the formative period of life. The first form of freedom, sovereignty, is blocked out. We have no chance to consider what a baby’s body is, what efforts and policies that Leib will need.
A baby will need nourishment, shelter, and warmth. A baby will need other people, an upbringing, an education. The Roman historian Livy defined freedom as “standing upright oneself without depending on another’s will.” At some point in the logic of life, this definition is true—but not while we are in the womb or at the nipple, unable physically to stand upright. When we are very young, we all need someone else’s goodwill if we are to learn to stand at all. Because we live in time in a certain direction, we cannot make up later for what we were not given earlier.
We are born undeveloped compared to other mammals. Our large heads (for our large brains) require us to leave the womb early, before we are capable of much of anything. Yet with time and attention, especially in the first months and years, those large brains can become capable minds.
Humans evolved to be patient and evaluative, as hunters, gatherers, nomads, and farmers, and as parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents of children who need years of attention. Patience and evaluation continue to serve us in our modern world. But such capacities arise only if young people make contact with people around them. The creation of individuality must be a social act.
Just bearing a child does not bring the knowledge that mothers (or parents or a family) need, nor the time needed to apply it. Babies are thrown into a world that, if governed by negative freedom, must be senseless and grotesque. They cannot be raised by the absence of barriers. They need things they cannot themselves know. No infant can liberate its parents, or give them time, or set policy. Freedom works as a larger cooperative project, over generations, or not at all.
Those who care about childhood should care about freedom, and those who care about freedom should care about children. This means caring about the society into which the next American baby will be born. Individual freedom is a social project and a generational one. For people to grow up in freedom, the right structures must already be in place when they are born.
And so not just the philosophy but the work of freedom begins with birth. We labor, though, under a tradition of philosophy that looks away from life’s most fundamental moment. The existentialists and their teacher Martin Heidegger thought that our problem was that we ignore death. That conclusion, meant to be grim and bare and masculine, actually skirts the issue, as Edith Stein pointed out. The real problem is that we ignore life.
My wife, Marci Shore, who is writing a book about the larger tradition of which Heidegger and the existentialists were part (phenomenology), was deep into it during her pregnancy. When she was in labor, a nurse complimented her on her German. She answered, in German, gasping, “I am good on obstetrics and phenomenology.” Heidegger has the idea of “being toward death.” I (later) told Marci that she should write a pregnancy memoir called “being toward life.”
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man,” says Hannah Arendt. “Politically, it is identical with man’s freedom.” Sovereignty begins with birth and arises as a child is held, loved, reared, and educated. For the universe, a human birth is nothing special; for us humans, natality is the possibility of a life in freedom. We close that potential when we limit freedom to avoiding other objects, or begin our philosophy with death rather than life.
Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children. Her father died when she was young. Four of her siblings died before she was born. Growing up in these conditions, she understood that the “creation of capabilities belongs to freedom.”
Reading Stein in prison, my students seized on the point that children need to spend time with adults to become sovereign. As children, they themselves had wanted attention from adults that they could not get. The research is on their side: negative childhood experiences correlate strongly with adversity in later life.
Simone Weil wrote that “the one thing that man possesses that is essentially individual, that is absolutely his own, is his capacity to think.” And yet in the million years our species has trod the earth, this “essentially individual” capacity has never been developed individually. Babies who are left alone learn nothing. This is, sadly, not just a hypothesis. Historians have all too much confirmatory evidence—from the Gulag, for example, or from the orphanages of communist Romania.
Our knowledge of early childhood development can enable sovereignty. We know that the Leib gains most of its capacities during the first five years of life, as the brain grows to nearly full size. And we know that the process is social. The brains of infants are primed for contact, but infants cannot make contact by themselves. Neural pathways emerge when babies are physically touched. Babies are good at recognizing faces when they are held so that they can see them. Their throats, tongues, and lips are capable of forming words, but do so only when they can imitate someone else’s speech.
Putting alternatives in front of very young children is easy. Teaching them to evaluate and choose is harder. It takes caring people who have the time to care. Choice is a reality outside but also a capability inside. We need the ability to see alternatives as well as the external capacity to realize them. An American way to make people unfree is to wax on about choice but deny children the capacities they will need to make choices (or to realize that they have been denied them). The richer our capacities, the more alternatives we see, and the more choices we can make.
How many alternatives present themselves to us has to do with how we feel. Positive emotions broaden the range of choices we see and extend our experience of time. Negative emotions limit that range to immediate fight or flight. Fear is like that, limiting us to the binary. It turns our minds into circuits, our bodies into objects: Leib recedes into Körper.
With help, small children learn to name and regulate their emotions. Fear is sometimes appropriate, but knowing it and naming it are steps toward controlling it—and toward preventing others from manipulating it. Regulating emotions is a step toward the evaluation that enables freedom. If we are nothing more than our first reactions, we are prey to the people who arouse those reactions. Only individuals can resist pressure from others, yet it takes others to create such individuals. We can learn to govern ourselves only with the right kind of guidance, at the right stage of life.
Abundant research indicates what helps small children to gain these basic capacities: constant physical and vocal contact; trusting relationships; unstructured play; and choices about things and people. The attributes we need to be free individuals are available to us only through coordinated action. Babies can be raised and educated to become free, but babies cannot create for themselves the setting where this is possible. Since freedom requires capacities that we cannot develop by ourselves, we owe our freedom to others. Every free adult had manifold help as a child.
When we think of jobs that are associated with freedom, the first that comes to mind might be pilot or cowboy. Motherhood belongs to freedom. As the Ed and Patsy Bruce song reminds us, all those cowboys had mamas. The occupations that are most relevant to freedom are the caregivers: the elementary school teachers, the preschool teachers, the childcare workers. A society concerned with freedom would respect such people and pay them well.
Freedom requires capacity, capacity requires attention in childhood, and attention requires time. It follows that parents’ time, the mothers’ above all, belongs to freedom. Adults lend to children a special kind of time, one that children cannot give adults, one that children cannot give children, one that adults cannot give adults.
Simone Weil said that everything precious in us comes from others, not as a gift but as “a loan that must be constantly renewed.” Children borrow from adults a special kind of time. They can repay the loan only much later, when they are adults, by giving time to someone of the next generation. Government serves as a kind of guarantor of the loan, creating the conditions in which those who raise children can have time. A land of the free pays it back and pays it forward.
In leaving out birth from the account of freedom, we also make it impossible to accommodate the Leib of women. Because women can be impregnated by rapists, the orientation of their Leib has to be different from that of men. In previous understandings of freedom, this issue did not arise, since it was assumed that women and slaves served the freedom of a powerful few.
Treating freedom solely as the absence of barriers gives us no instruction about rape. An idea of negative freedom as freedom from violence can seem to help here. It understates the stakes, though: it is not just that we have the right not to be raped, but that we should be able to live lives without the trauma or anticipation of rape. What people can become is limited by both the prospect and the memory of rape, and we can fully grasp this idea only when we take the bodies of others seriously.
Acknowledging the Leib of women also means understanding that they think about childbirth in a way that men generally do not. Women have to decide whether and when to have children, and they have to adjust other parts of their lives. Negative freedom leaves them to make those adjustments alone. If we make accommodations for childbirth, we remove a source of unfreedom for women and improve the chances that children can grow up free.
Death is simple and tempting. Fascism beguiles us with meaning drawn from the death of others and from our own. It is much easier to philosophize when we ignore what is most alive about us, when we fail to confront what Weil called the mystery of our bodies.
The death principle crept into philosophy early, in Plato’s cave. Plato’s conviction was that the things we experience in this world are not fully real but are rather imperfect copies of some ideal version of each thing. And so each bell, for example, is somehow just an emanation of a perfect bell that exists somewhere else, as is each tree or each bed in each maternity ward. We live under the illusion, Plato thought, that these things are fully real; it is the task of philosophy, he taught, to deliver us from this mistake. For this purpose, he provided (in his Republic) the memorable allegory of the cave.
Imagine that people are in chains, deep in a dark cavern, and can only look forward, at one cave wall. Behind them is a fire, and between them and the fire, people walk back and forth behind a wall, holding up a succession of “carved objects.” All the enchained people can see are shadows cast on the wall before them. This, says Plato, is what our existence is like. We are shackled in a cave, gazing at a play of shadows, believing that we are in reality. We must think our way out, to a world where each thing exists in an ideal form.
This is a very evocative notion, and of course it cannot be proven false. Its plausibility, though, depends on ignoring basic experiences of life.
If you watch a childbirth, it is hard to think: This is a shallow, partial replica of something else, only a reflection of some ideal birth taking place on an ideal plane. When my wife experienced complications after the birth of our son, I did not think: This blood is not actual blood and this red is not actual red but just a hint of what blood and red might be. When the nurses left our newborn son with me while doctors sprinted from another wing of the hospital to operate on her, I did not think that the violet of his eyes was nothing more than an emanation of some ideal violet or eye, nor that the sound of the rushed footfalls in the hall was anything other than the only reality. And what is true of birth is true of the moment after birth and of all the moments thereafter. There is no cave, except the one we enter when we close our eyes to the world and our hearts to others.
There are indeed ideals, but they are not ideal bells or beds. They are virtues, notions of how the world might be different from and better than it is. As sovereign individuals, we learn to care about these ideals, and balance them, and bring them to life. We can also learn to create them. We don’t borrow from an ideal world. We reach toward it and expand it.
If we think, though, that the world we experience is not the real world but is only a cave or (as people say now) a computer simulation, then we might conclude that such activity makes no sense. If we believe that life is elsewhere, then freedom is senseless, since we have no power to exist on that other plane, let alone to change it. Our only chance at freedom would seem to be to reach that elsewhere by shedding our imperfect bodies by dying (or as people imagine now, becoming one’s own digital avatar).
This is the primal form of negative freedom: we can be free only by removing a barrier, and that barrier is our own bodies. We reject Leib and seek Körper. We embrace the death principle.
This conclusion haunts Plato’s argument. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates, his teacher, describe the cave. Socrates is the archetype of the lonely philosopher, whose truths are beyond this world. After Socrates is sentenced to death, he calls the separation from his body a “release,” a liberation. This cannot be right. Our body is not just one Körper among others, blocking some other life that is elsewhere and preventing us from reaching that higher state. Our Leib is special in that it touches both the realm of what is and the realm of what should be.
The allegory of the cave, properly understood, makes this case. As told by Plato, it wrongly conveys what people would experience. It makes no corporeal sense. Socrates says that “such captives,” the people bound in the cave, “would consider the truth to be nothing but the shadows of the carved objects.” No, they would not. Socrates ignores the bodies of the shackled people. If people were in fact shackled in a cave, their first reality would be their own bodily suffering, the iron on their flesh, not the shadows on a wall. When they noticed the shadows, the ones to which the shackled people would attend first would be their own. The shadows they would actually see on the wall, most consistently and most intelligibly, would be those of their own bodies.
The shackled people would have the truth of their own suffering. Within seconds, they would also apprehend the connection between certain shadows and their own bodies. Before long, they would also understand that they were not alone. They would see the shadows of other bodies and identify them as such. Even were they somehow chained so that they could not turn their heads to see the other people’s bodies, they would quickly apprehend that the shadows on the wall that were similar to their own led back to other bodies, other people. They would understand that those others must be in a similar predicament, sharing a similar experience. And as they understood others, they would better understand themselves. This is what would actually happen in Plato’s cave. The shadows of the “carved objects” would seem dubious and artificial, and rightly so.
So the cave allegory, if we do the optics correctly, leads to an entirely different conclusion from the one proposed by Plato and accepted by tradition. As a thought experiment, it actually shows that knowledge begins with the body, and that understanding begins from recognizing the presence of other bodies. The story of the cave, which is the story of Western philosophy, developed the way it did only because the body was written out of existence.
And so a correction must be made. Plato knew Socrates as a highly individuated adult, someone who was indifferent not only to prevailing opinions but to his own body and its pains and pleasures. No doubt Socrates was an admirably free person. He risked death for what he believed. But it is his capacity for freedom, rather than what he said about freedom, that interests us. Freedom is not about being right, which is elusive, but about trying to do right. How did Socrates come to be free? The answer cannot really begin from his thinking, right or wrong as it might have been. It has to begin with his life.
Socrates himself gives us a hint. Like all of us, Socrates had a mother. He spoke of her in one of his philosophical inquiries, comparing his own work as a philosopher to hers as a midwife. Toward the end of his life, Plato tells us, Socrates compared philosophy to childbirth, and thoughts to children.
His mother’s name, Phaenarete, means “realizes virtue,” a touching promise. We cannot realize virtue on our own, but we can learn to do so with the help of midwives and mothers and other people. Socrates, wrong as he was on other matters, rightly said that none of us is self-sufficient. Children need help from mothers, mothers need help from midwives, everyone at the beginning of life needs the help of others.
Natality, not fatality. Better a womb than a tomb. Thinking of Socrates’s mother, we begin the philosophy of freedom not from an enclosing cave but from an opening world.