The Speech of Freedom
When Americans speak of "free speech," we tend to mean unconstrained speech — speech that is not limited by rules or authorities. Our recent debates and controversies surrounding free speech focus on the question of the extent of free speech. Harvey Mansfield argued in these pages that questions of more or less speech tend to crowd out questions of quality. As he put it, "[o]ur need to define permissible speech tempts or compels us to find value in any speech that is permitted. We pass from permitting speech because it is valuable to valuing speech because we permit it."
By reducing the valuable to the permissible, we overlook the range of purposes inherent in our capacity for speech. What's more, we miss the distinctly human dimensions of speech, and how this capacity situates human beings in the world.
We can see a similar dynamic at work in the interplay of the principles that ground our liberal democratic order. In America, we claim free speech as a fundamental right. We believe that our right to free speech is, in turn, rooted in our natural right to liberty. In other words, our right to free speech comes from what we are as human beings. We have the right to speak freely because we are free.
Is this right? Just what is the relationship between our freedom and our capacity for speech? To discern this, it will be helpful to examine the arguments of free speech's opponents.
Free speech comes under threat today because we tend either to deny or take for granted the nature of our freedom. Critics of free speech assert our un-freedom, while the friends of free speech shy away from trying to demonstrate what they think ought to be axiomatic. More clarity about the nature of speech and its relationship to human freedom will enable us to navigate our current dilemmas more effectively.
SPEECH AS INSTRUMENT
Critics of free speech often base their arguments on two different concerns. Some make the case against free speech by suggesting speech is so powerful that it must be limited. Speech is a means of domination — a tool wielded by the skilled and determined in order to take advantage of others. We can call this the "speech-as-instrument" argument.
Other critics say speech isn't very powerful at all, due to its inability to transcend the characteristics that define each individual. Speech must be limited in order to ensure that each of us is respected in our particular identities. We might label this the "speech-as-inescapable-expression" argument. What unites these two critiques is the assumption of a certain un-freedom in human beings.
Let's first consider the idea of "speech as instrument." Speech, in this understanding, is rhetoric used by the powerful to secure their own well-being at the expense of others. We should fear speech and censor it accordingly because of its power to raise some human beings above others.
The fact that speech is so used and understood by some is a very old problem — one that Plato addressed in the Gorgias, a dialogue named after a prominent rhetorician.
Gorgias tells Socrates that rhetoric is "the greatest good and the cause both of freedom for human beings themselves and at the same time of rule over others in each man's own city." He explains that the rhetorician is distinguished by his capacity to persuade judges, legislators, and the like — meaning his craft is rooted in matters of justice and injustice. So powerful is rhetoric in this arena, Gorgias contends, that its practitioner is able to make others his slaves.
Socrates responds by wondering how the rhetoric of which Gorgias speaks differs from the rhetoric that might be involved in the exercise of any art whatsoever (e.g., the physician's art). Gorgias eventually suggests that the rhetorician is superior to and more powerful than particular experts, who often cannot persuade people to act on their expert knowledge. For example, a rhetorician will be more effective in compelling a patient to follow a physician's prescription than the physician himself. Rhetoric, in Gorgias' view, neither depends on nor produces knowledge, but rather a certain kind of conviction or belief.
Amid his assertions about rhetoric's grand power, Gorgias also betrays some concern that the teacher of such an art might be held responsible if one of his students deploys the art for unjust ends. Socrates highlights Gorgias' moral confusion: Gorgias seems to want rhetoric to be both a pursuit rooted in knowledge of justice and also an instrumental, morally neutral art that can be reshaped for different circumstances. And he wants no responsibility for the potential misuse of this art by his students. As the late Nalin Ranasinghe of Assumption University put it, Gorgias'
interests are technical and his main concerns are with efficient causality — even though he does hope that the means he provides will be directed toward the right ends....He cannot have it both ways; he cannot claim to be a master of moral persuasion and confess that he cannot successfully direct the moral character of his students.
At this point, Gorgias is replaced in the conversation by one of his students, Polus, who is much less given to shame than his teacher.
Polus finds the status and power of men like Gorgias impressive. He even suggests rhetoricians possess a similar stature to great tyrants — those who rule vast territories, accumulate great wealth, and therefore seem to provoke envy in people everywhere. Polus argues that such individuals are enviable in the sense that they have the freedom to do whatever appears good to them. No prohibition, whether internal or external, circumscribes their range of possible action.
Contrary to what Polus suggests, Socrates argues that tyrants actually have the least power in cities. This puzzles Polus, who identifies tyranny's allure precisely in the capacity of tyrants to do whatever they want. They seem to be the freest of human beings.
One element of Socrates' long refutation of Polus is particularly important: He makes a distinction between wanting something in the narrow sense of the satisfaction of some immediate desire and wishing or intending one's own good. The Greek verb here translated as "wishing" is related to the word for "council," and thus implies a kind of deliberation. The verb appears over 15 times in the course of the exchange between Socrates and Polus. Socrates is trying to get Polus to appreciate the distinction between mere desire and deliberate rationality — between wanting and wishing.
Wanting is closer to mere desire, which humans share with animals. Wishing, according to philosopher Robert Sokolowski, is "the intelligent form of wanting," or "rational wanting." Wishing, properly understood, can become the "principle and origin of action." In wishing for something, we must begin to think about different steps that we might take in order to secure the good that is our ultimate object. We begin to think in terms of ends and means. As Socrates says to Polus: "We do not wish those things that we do for the sake of something, but [we wish for] that thing for the sake of which we do these things." Wishing is a movement toward a deeper, more sophisticated posture relative to the world around us, and toward a freedom that involves a new kind of self-engagement.
Such movement is not easy or automatic. Consider the phenomena of impulse buying and buyer's remorse. Advertisers know we are susceptible to letting our desires overcome our deliberative capacities. As Sokolowski put it, "buyer's remorse is often a sign that wishing and its deliberation were smothered by simple wanting."
Our rationality only fully awakens when we consider the goodness or badness of our desires, and whether and how we might satisfy them. Whereas "voice," according to Aristotle in a famous passage at the beginning of his Politics, can reveal pleasure and pain, speech allows for the discernment of justice and injustice, good and bad. Insofar as a doer of injustice remains subject to unexamined desire, this person is not really free.
Raw desire should not direct our speech. Nor can we expect unimpassioned reason to reliably master our desires. Rather, reason and speech ought to inform and shape desire. This is how Socrates' distinction between wishing and wanting leads him to the principle that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice. Suffering injustice, he discovers, is consistent with a kind of self-command, while doing injustice is usually the result of a loss of self-command. Our capacity for speech induces reflection about ourselves and how we relate with others, leading to this conclusion. In turn, self-reflective action reshapes our desires; we increasingly want to be just because we first wished to be so.
Plato is trying to show us that the sort of speech that presents itself as a powerful tool of manipulation is actually quite weak, for it presumes a certain un-freedom on the part of its practitioners. We need not fear it or even censor it — we can combat it with Socratic dialectic, which encourages a disposition toward rigorous self-examination.
SPEECH AS INESCAPABLE EXPRESSION
Other critics of free speech believe its proponents are mistaken in thinking that speech can offer a kind of transcendence. Rather, they argue that we are all prisoners of our "lived experience" or historical circumstances — captive to our "preferences," as social scientists like to say. Unregulated speech inflicts harm, the argument goes, when it questions or challenges what seems inescapably true about each of us in our own particularity.
Consider a story Frederick Douglass tells his readers in his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom. The 16-year-old Douglass is hired out to a harsh overseer named Covey. One Friday, Douglass collapses due to exhaustion and is savagely beaten by Covey. He manages to flee to the woods for refuge. His condition becomes so miserable that he "would have exchanged [his] manhood for the brutehood of an ox." Douglass realizes that he either must go back to Covey or make a break for freedom, but determines that a successful escape is all but impossible.
After staying the night with a sympathetic black family, Douglass goes back to Covey. Covey reveals his intention to mete out a brutal beating as punishment for Douglass's disobedience, yet Douglass tells us that he had resolved that morning to obey every order but absolutely not allow himself to be beaten. A remarkable two-hour battle ensues in which Douglass repels Covey's blows without ever going on the offensive himself.
Douglass tells his readers that this day was the turning point in his life. "It rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty....I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW." He calls it a "resurrection" from slavery. This attitude of "manly independence" enables him to reach the point where he no longer fears death. He says that "[t]his spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form." Never again would he be whipped.
By claiming that he was now free in fact despite remaining a slave in form, Douglass makes a remarkably subtle distinction. It rests on the distinction between freedom and un-freedom — self-directed action versus action dictated by another. Douglass comes to understand that he attained the capacity for self-directed action despite the absence of any opportunity for the full exercise of such capacity. He argues that through his battle with Covey, he attained a level of self-possession such that he could understand himself as free in a crucial sense. His action, his physical contest with Covey, served as the predicate for his fresh self-understanding.
Recall that earlier, Douglass had been willing to trade manhood for brutehood. He grasped his own humanity by feeling it as a burden. The incidents of that weekend taught him something fundamental about his own humanity — to view it as something he could comprehend despite remaining in a formal condition of bondage.
Douglass's experience was not self-evident to him. The battle itself did not automatically yield his new understanding: He had to evaluate himself later in light of his act. The incident occurred around 1834. He recounted it in his first autobiography about a decade later, and then again in the revised form above in 1855. How much reflection — through speaking and writing — must have gone into extracting the lessons he related to readers?
This is not to suggest that Douglass slapped paint on the bare canvas of experience. Rather, his reflection through speech caused something powerfully real yet inarticulate to become articulate and therefore available to others. Speech rooted in genuine reflection can allow others to grasp that which seems inescapably particular to ourselves. Without such confidence, we underestimate the power of speech to connect us to one another.
SPEECH AND FREEDOM
Another example from the life of Frederick Douglass helps us see the interplay between speech and freedom. While living in Baltimore earlier in life, the young Douglass hears Sophia Auld, his owner's wife, reading aloud from the Bible. She did so frequently, and Douglass explains that it "soon awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn." Douglass asks Mrs. Auld to teach him to read, and she happily obliges.
When Mr. Auld discovers what his wife has done, he is furious. He tells his wife that book learning is the quickest way to make a slave unfit for his work. "If you learn him now to read," Auld scolds her, "he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself." Douglass's gloss on Auld's remarks is revealing:
Such was the tenor of Master Hugh's oracular exposition of the true philosophy of training a human chattel; and it must be confessed that he very clearly comprehended the nature and the requirements of the relation of master and slave. His discourse was the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.
Auld unwittingly makes it clear to Douglass that speech in the form of the written word can allow him to transcend his slavish condition. Douglass can now clearly perceive that there exists a connection between the written word and freedom, but he cannot yet comprehend the nature of this connection.
In truth, the relationship between speech and freedom has a paradoxical aspect. Speech enables human beings to find a wholeness that exists when directed desires seek real goods. Yet speech also allows for a certain self-distance, for the confrontation of mystery and the questioning of our own motivations and behavior.
Socrates teaches Polus that those who treat speech as a mere tool for manipulation have forgotten speech's power to seek the human good. Such people are unfree, having lost the capacity for speech as the sharing of reason. We need not be seduced into sharing their un-freedom by accepting their view of speech.
The speech-as-instrument argument presumes a radical separation of speech and speaker. According to this view, speech has little power to inform or evaluate desire and action; rather, it functions as a mere tool to be mastered without regard for purpose. It is not seen as an integrated capacity of soul. That sort of speech ought to be met with challenges and invitations that would restore the proper unity of speech and speaker.
Bringing a different emphasis, Frederick Douglass reminds us that this search for the human good must involve speech directed toward ourselves. We can make sense of our own experiences and our own desires by forcing ourselves to give reasons. When we make such an effort, the problems we confront become intelligible to others. Whereas the speech-as-inescapable-expression argument assumes a rigid unity of speech and speaker, through reflection and speech, we introduce the possibility of achieving distance from ourselves.
We should reject the view of speech that denies this very real, if difficult, possibility. Apprehending the relation between speech and freedom therefore depends on a more sophisticated understanding of the relation between speech and speaker, one that somehow seeks both integration, like Socrates, and self-distance, like Douglass.
THE LEVELS OF SPEECH
Of course, not all speech is thoughtful speech. Some speech merely registers a perception. The utterance "ouch!" can be heard by another, but it isn't addressed to anyone in particular; it is just a reaction to a situation. On another level, "the pan is still hot" registers a state of affairs through predication. It's more than a mere perception; this assertion about the pan is a proposition offered to another human being. The assertion derives its intelligibility from a certain syntactical structure: P is H. The logical form of the pan being hot is offered as a complex whole to another. As Sokolowski explained in his Phenomenology of the Human Person:
The formal structure of subject and predicate [P is H] arises, therefore, because the speaker focuses the mind of the listener first on the whole object in its identity as something to be articulated, and then on a part or a feature of the object, in a manner that couples them.
What is particularly noteworthy about Sokolowski's argument here is his suggestion that speech is what allows thinking together. The speaker and listener do not merely surface "ready-made rational forms" from their minds through language. Rather, each of them thinks "the thing being articulated" through words. Thus each predication becomes a kind of public act, linking speaker and listener, as the thing being articulated is revealed as a whole with certain parts or attributes to each interlocutor.
What implications does this understanding of language have for thinking about freedom?
Westerners today are accustomed to thinking about freedom in terms of independence or autonomy. Reflecting on Douglass's story, we immediately appreciate his quest for the concrete freedom to not be subject to another's will. Yet young Frederick intuited that the written word — a certain kind of speech — could open up to him a further freedom, a new way of being in the world. His capacity for more sophisticated articulations of the world would grow with more facility in speech. Perhaps most importantly, facility in speech would also allow Douglass to operate in an ever more public world. He would find a deeper-than-legal independence through a deeper engagement with others. Sokolowski put it this way:
We give and receive in the world of thinking as well as in the more practical world, and we might even say that we give others the ability to know, by helping them bring this power into a healthy active state, one in which they will be eager to let things come to light. There is a distinctive kind of friendship and justice in our cognitive achievements.
Sophia Auld offered her assistance in bringing young Frederick's powers into a more active state. When Hugh Auld delivered his lecture on why such instruction would not suit Frederick Douglass as a slave, these reasons convinced Douglass that he sorely needed such pursuits. Hugh Auld unwittingly articulated the possibility of genuine personhood for Douglass, sharing in reason with young Frederick despite himself and despite his convictions about human inequality.
We can also make declarative statements about things in the world: "I think that pan might still be hot." Here the state of affairs (the pan being hot) is specified and thus predication has occurred. More significantly for our purposes, the speaker's presence has been announced.
Sokolowski highlighted the profundity of the intervention of the first-person pronoun in language. One might not think there is much of a difference between a declarative statement ("I think the pan might still be hot") and an informational statement ("the pan might still be hot"). Both use reason to register the same state of affairs. However, something further happens in the declarative statement. Here, the speaker discloses himself as the one who registers the state of affairs. According to Sokolowski, such a statement
captures and expresses me, the rational agent, right in the actual exercise of my reason....Declarative speech gives us the primary intuition of the personal in its actual presence, the rational in its actual exercise, and the original distinction of the person from his context.
Declaratives demonstrate the rationality characteristic of human beings while also showing human beings to themselves as they engage in such activity.
FREEDOM THROUGH VERACITY
Here, then, are the first three levels of speech: first, voice, or the "sublinguistic" level, which merely expresses a feeling and seems first and foremost reactive; second, a report or display, where a state of affairs comes to sight for speaker and listener; and third, declaratives, where the first-person singular becomes manifest. On the fourth and final tier, human beings philosophically reflect on themselves as the beings who engage in these different levels of speech. Here we need tools like metaphor and analogy to analyze the peculiar human situation.
The move from the first tier into the next three tiers entails the move from perception into thinking. We take the thing perceived and we present it in a new light. We articulate the thing as a whole with certain attributes. Whereas a mere perception cannot really be shared, when human beings predicate, they accomplish something for their listeners. The articulations or logical forms that emerge through speech (e.g., P is H) are, Sokolowski emphasized, "not primarily in the mind of a single person by himself." Rather, they arise between speaker and listener. Language, according to Sokolowski, establishes the publicness of thinking. Thinking is not first and foremost a private mental activity which is then made public through speech. This gets the relationship between thought and speech exactly backward. Sokolowski put it this way:
Solitary thinking is internalized conversation. We tend to think of speech as voiced thought ("thinking out loud"), but we should think of silent thinking as unvoiced speech. The public performance is the dominant and paradigmatic one; it is not the symptom of something done wholly within ourselves.
This means that human freedom is more intimately bound up with speech and therefore social life than we usually appreciate today.
But freedom depends less on mere speech than on veracity, or, in Sokolowski's words, "the human inclination to attain the truth of things." Veracity is neither reducible to our rational capacity nor is it a passion. It calls forth our cognitive abilities but also depends on our moral desires. When in the Gorgias, Polus wrongly isolates our capacity for speech from our desires, Socrates tries to show him that veracity is actually a unity, a compound — an "eros involved with rationality," to use Sokolowski's phrase.
Veracity permits human freedom by allowing our engagement with the world and with ourselves: We engage the world by saying something true about it, leading us to discover that we must therefore engage ourselves in a new way. This development of speech is not automatic — it requires cultivation through desire. We must want the truth.
If we fail to recognize the deep connection between the human capacity for speech and freedom, we will continue to underestimate what speech can accomplish — both in terms of knowledge of the world and self-knowledge. When we demand less and think less of our speech, we assume our un-freedom. As veracity moves us toward the truth in its daily manifestations, we feel a greater degree of freedom in ourselves and therefore demand more freedom in political life. "The conquest of freedom in daily life implies above all else a daily fight against falsehood, a daily fight for truth," said Yves Simon. Mere expression is not enough: The fight against tyranny begins with exercising our distinctly human capacity for speech.
