When we talk about freedom, what we are keen to be free from is a moving target. Today’s conservatives, if they have an intellectual bent, often refer to themselves as “classical liberals.” The term is apt; the view of freedom that they generally cherish is one that was articulated at the founding of modern liberalism by John Locke and others. If you visit Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, you will see a prominent portrait of Locke in the parlor, and his Two Treatises of Government is echoed at various points in the Declaration of Independence. For the founding generation, the thing we needed to be free from was clear: the arbitrary exercise of coercive power by the political sovereign, who lived in England.
At the close of the previous chapter I turned this “classical” mantle into a criticism, suggesting libertarians have an outdated view of where the threats to freedom lie. This may have seemed an indulgent digression into politics in a book ostensibly about attention. But in fact the birth of liberalism is a crucial moment for our inquiry, because Locke fleshed out the idea of freedom in a way that was necessary for his political arguments, but also resonated far beyond politics, and continues to inform the ideal of autonomy that has become second nature for us. Locke’s redescription of politics required a redescription of the human being, and of our basic situation in the world. Ultimately it required a new account of how we apprehend the world.
To anticipate:
• We are enjoined to be free from authority—both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims to knowledge. If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.
• The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility. This is both a political principle and an epistemic one.
• We achieve this, ultimately, by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves. Reality is not self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it.
• Attention is thus demoted. Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly. If such an encounter isn’t possible, then attention has no official role to play.
Let’s step back for a moment. In this book I am picking out a few topographical features of modern culture, and suggesting that we see them as part of a larger landscape. Like trees in the foreground, we have various polemics about our novel digital landscape; the larger forest consists of a set of assumptions about how our minds work that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Of course, these were not originally assumptions, but well-articulated assertions. As such, they were addressed to somebody; they were part of a conversation. In recovering this historical context, we see that the conversation didn’t start out as a serene inquiry into how our minds work. It began as a quarrel about politics.
The quarrel was “won,” as a historical fact, by the party that was directed by a single master principle: to liberate—whether from the ancien régime, ecclesiastical authority, or Aristotelian metaphysics. That is why the term “liberalism” is useful for characterizing the big metaphysical and anthropological picture that was established in these revolutionary centuries. But what does intellectual history, looking back three hundred years, have to do with the current crisis of attention? Quite simply, the experience of attending to something isn’t easily made sense of within the Enlightenment picture. To see our way through our current predicament, we need a good account of how attention works. And to get that, we first need to become more self-conscious about this intellectual inheritance, and hold it up to scrutiny.
Doing so will help us see an underlying unity in the features of contemporary life we have examined thus far. We have considered the problem of mental fragmentation and arbitrariness that results when our contact with the world is mediated by representations: representations collapse the basic axis of proximity and distance by which an embodied being orients in the world and draws a horizon of relevance around itself. We noted the prominence of a design philosophy that severs the bonds between action and perception, as in contemporary automobiles that insulate us from the sensorimotor contingencies by which an embodied being normally grasps reality. The case of machine gambling gave us a heightened example of this kind of abstraction, and made clear how such a design philosophy can be turned to especially disturbing purposes in the darker precincts of “affective capitalism,” where our experiences are manufactured for us. We saw that the point of these experiences is often to provide a quasi-autistic escape from the frustrations of life, and that they are especially attractive in a world that lacks a basic intelligibility because it seems to be ordered by “vast impersonal forces” that are difficult to bring within view on a first-person, human scale. I argued that all of this tends to sculpt a certain kind of contemporary self, a fragile one whose freedom and dignity depend on its being insulated from contingency, and who tends to view technology as magic for accomplishing this. For such a self, choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way. Finally, I argued that such a choosy self is especially pliable to the “choice architectures” that get installed on our behalf by various functionaries of psychological adjustment.
These features of our world are hard to criticize because, though they may be appalling once described in the way that I have, they are intimately connected to our defining virtues as modern Western people. I have already suggested that much of what I have described can be understood as a cultural working out of Kant’s ideal of autonomy. Now I want to go back further, behind Kant, and investigate some earlier moments in the Enlightenment when we first got set on our trajectory. This is likely to cut close to home, as these earlier moments saw the articulation of those political principles that we rightly cherish. I believe they are robust enough that we may continue to cherish them while taking a cold-eyed look at the way they reverberate out from politics to inform wide swaths of culture, in ways that may no longer be well suited to our circumstances.
It is instructive to regard our current landscape, and the ideal self who inhabits it, as the sedimented result of a history of forgotten polemics, the common feature of which is that they have been animated by the will to liberate. Self-understanding, then, requires digging down into the history of philosophical thinking, for it is in these quarrels that the sediments have gotten deposited. The point isn’t to reach bedrock—some foundational, ahistorical self—but rather to do like a geologist and get a clear sectional view of the strata. If we could accomplish this, I think it would help us see the topography of current experience a little differently.
THE COUNTERFACTUAL ORIGINS OF LIBERALISM
For John Locke, the main threat against which it was necessary to assert freedom was the arbitrary exercise of coercive power by the political sovereign. The political theory that prevailed at the time legitimized such power by positing a fundamental difference in kind between the sovereign and everyone else. Various arguments tied monarchy to God’s will: the sovereign was God’s representative on earth, or there was a nestled order such that child is to parent as citizen is to sovereign, and sovereign is to God. Locke’s strategy, however sincere (and scholars disagree on this), is to offer a theological argument of his own: God is so much greater than man, the difference is so unfathomable, that this relation mocks any attempt by one man to claim godlike coercive power over another.1 We are all equal in our smallness before God. Therefore our natural estate is one of freedom in relation to one another.
Locke spells this out further: once upon a time we lived in a “state of nature,” the defining feature of which was the absence of some recognized authority, a third party to arbitrate disputes. At some points in the Two Treatises this appears to be a historical claim about how we once lived; at other points it is a conceptual device to describe the moral relations that obtain between persons who have not consented to a common government. In this state, it is merely the dictates of one’s own reason that one obeys—there is no such thing as “authority.” The problem is that this tends to become a “war of all against all,” as Thomas Hobbes had put it. Political society is instituted in a decisive moment when people give their consent to abide by a common judge in whom they invest authority, at which point they acquire political rights and responsibilities. The issue of consent is key; this is the source of the legitimacy of all authority, and of the rights one retains against that authority.
We may allow ourselves to wonder, when does this all-important act of consent happen? I was born into a society that was already up and running, and isn’t this the case for almost all of us? Maybe I give my consent to the regime tacitly, for example by walking on the public roads. But I don’t have much choice in this, do I? If I veer off the public road and try to bushwhack my way over land, I will quickly encounter NO TRESPASSING signs. Other people got here first. Locke’s theory of legitimate authority founded on consent describes not the normal course of things but a hypothetical moment of political founding. It is not the founding moment of any actual revolution, but of a fable in which there is no already existing society and the land is unclaimed. At the foundation of our political anthropology is a creature who comes into existence in a moment of free deliberation (shall I consent to this arrangement?) that occurs in a present unconditioned by the past. The freedom of the liberal self is the freedom of newness and isolation. Locke’s state-of-nature thought experiment is explicitly counterfactual. Its premise is that “you can understand man and his moral and practical endowments only in isolation from the settings in which he might realize those endowments or, much less, be endowed with them in the first place,” as Matt Feeney puts it.2 The liberal self is not situated.
FREEDOM AS SELF-RESPONSIBILITY
Locke’s concern with illegitimate authority extends beyond the kind that is nakedly coercive to the kind that operates through claims to knowledge. His political project is thus tied to an epistemological one. The two are of a piece, because “he is certainly the most subjected, the most enslaved, who is so in his Understanding.” Locke does some of his most consequential liberating in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Charles Taylor points out that “the whole Essay is directed against those who would control others by specious principles supposedly beyond question.”3 These are the priests and the “schoolmen,” those carriers of an ossified Aristotelian tradition. The Reformation notwithstanding, political authority and ecclesiastical authority remained very much entwined and codependent in Locke’s time.
Political freedom requires intellectual independence, then. Locke takes this further. Following Descartes, he calls on us to be free from established custom and received opinions, indeed from other people altogether, taken as authorities. “We may as rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know by other Mens Understandings … The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not a jot more knowing, though they happen to be true.”4
The project for political freedom thus shades into something more expansive: We should aspire to a kind of epistemic self-responsibility. I myself should be the source of all my knowledge; otherwise it is not knowledge. Such self-responsibility is the positive image of freedom that emerges by subtraction, when you pursue far enough the negative goal of being free from authority.5
But this self-responsibility brings with it a certain anxiety: If I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, this provokes me to wonder, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge? An intransigent stance against the testimony of others leads to the problem of skepticism.
How do we know some evil genius hasn’t deceived us? Even our own senses lead us astray, for example in optical illusions. Descartes takes the very existence of an external world as a legitimate problem for philosophy to worry about. In his search for certainty—for a foundation for knowledge that would be impervious to skeptical challenge—it occurs to him that the experience of thinking (“I am thinking”) is beyond doubt. If I am thinking, I must exist. This is the secure beginning point that must serve as the foundation for knowledge altogether. What we need, then, are rules for the conduct of the mind, which we can follow from this secure beginning to build up certain knowledge. It is not the content of our thinking that matters now, but how we arrive at that content. To repeat Locke’s formula, “The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not a jot more knowing, though they happen to be true.” This entails a new conception of what it means to be rational. The standard for rationality is no longer substantive, but procedural, as Taylor points out. And this means that the standard for truth is relocated: it is no longer found out in the world, but inside our own head; it is a function of our mental procedures.6
Attention is therefore demoted. Or rather, it is redirected. Not by fastening on objects in the world does it help us grasp reality, but by being directed to our own processes of thinking, and making them the object of scrutiny. What it means to know now is not to encounter the world directly (thinking that you have done so is always subject to skeptical challenge), but to construct a mental representation of the world. Another early modern thinker, Giambattista Vico, summed up this view very succinctly: We know only what we make.7
TRUTH AS REPRESENTATION
Vico’s motto captures pretty well the revolution in science carried out by Galileo and Newton. Natural science became for the first time mathematical, relying on mental representations based on idealizations such as the perfect vacuum, the frictionless surface, the point mass, and the perfectly elastic collision. What this amounts to, Martin Heidegger says, is “a projection of thingness which, as it were, skips over the things.”8
One way to state the conviction that all of these Enlightenment figures shared is that reality is not self-revealing. The way it shows up in ordinary experience is not to be taken seriously. For example, we see a blue dress, but “blue” isn’t in the dress; it is a mental state. Descartes and Locke both insisted on a distinction between “primary qualities,” which are properties of things themselves, and “secondary qualities,” which are a function of our own perceptual apparatus. The true description of the dress would refrain from invoking the latter sort of property, and say not that it is blue but that its fabric reflects light of a certain wavelength (as we would now say), which we see as blue. We are to take a detached stance toward our own experience, and subject it to critical analysis from a perspective that isn’t infected with our own subjectivity.9
Let us pause for a moment to let the weirdness of all this sink in. Notice that we have moved from an argument about the illegitimacy of particular political authorities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the illegitimacy of the authority of other people in general, to the illegitimacy of the authority of our own experience.
In telling the story of the Enlightenment in this sequence, I want to suggest that the last stage, the somewhat anxious preoccupation with epistemology, grows out of the enlighteners’ political project of liberation. Their organizing posture against authority compelled the enlighteners to theorize the human person in isolation—abstracted from any pragmatic setting in which he might rely on the testimony of others, or indeed on his own common sense as someone who has learned how to handle things. It is probably true that reality is not self-revealing to the detached bystander. But that is because, as I have argued in Part I of this book, it is by “having to do with” things that we grasp them—not simply as subjects, but as agents. We do this every day, finding our way through a world that we share with others. The passive, isolated observer who is posited as the beginning point for the Cartesian/Lockean account of knowledge is a person who has been shorn of those practical and social endowments by which we apprehend the world. If such a creature actually existed, we can well imagine that he would be gripped by the question of how he could know anything. For this person, the “thing in itself” would indeed be an inaccessible mystery.
This is our condition, according to Enlightenment epistemology. Today’s mainstream cognitive psychology inherits this view, and proceeds on the assumption that representation is the fundamental process by which we apprehend the world. This process happens entirely within the bounds of the skull; we may as well be brains in vats. The new ideas about embodied perception and cognitive extension, which connect thinking to doing, pose a radical challenge to this entire picture. I believe one reason the new ideas are being resisted (in addition to the usual sociological reasons why disciplines resist new ideas) is that, as I have just demonstrated, the origins of modern epistemology are intimately bound up with the origins of our moral-political order.
What is at risk, when we start revisiting the question of how we encounter things, is the whole chain of forgotten polemics by which a very partial view of the human person got installed in our self-understanding: the anthropology of modern liberalism.
According to that understanding, other people play an entirely negative role in our efforts to grasp reality and to achieve intellectual independence. In Part II, “Other People,” I will argue precisely the opposite.