What is the difference between freedom and liberation? Is it the same to be free and to be liberated? For example, if I am at liberty to go where and do what I please, does it follow I am free? Or, more precisely, that I feel free? I do not think so. As philosophers Frantz Fanon, María Lugones and Jean-Paul Sartre have noted, each from their individual perspectives, freedom is a much more complex state.
Self-assertion and independent expression of will are important for the experience of freedom. Liberation can be granted from the outside, but freedom can only be achieved by an inner drive for independence. To feel free, I have to want it first.
Freedom cannot be given to me or enacted upon me. I cannot experience freedom against my will.
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However, when I want to be free, I want to be recognised as such. My wish alone is not enough for me to experience freedom. Lack of recognition entails tension and conflict. We are dependent on each other for reciprocal recognition of each other’s independence (free agency). For you to recognise me as a free agent, we both must want it. Reciprocal recognition enables the experience of freedom.
“I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions.”
Fanon (1967, emphasis added)
Therefore, the “Other” matters. Without the other, there can be no reciprocity, no mutual recognition. However, not all ways of relating to the other constitute reciprocal recognition. Sometimes, the other becomes an instrument for our self-absorbed preoccupations, an object like a mirror that we expect to reflect an image of ourselves we want to see. It is what the feminist philosopher María Lugones called the arrogant perception. In his striking words, Fanon offers a vivid example of this problem.
“Every self-positioning or self-fixation maintains a relationship of dependency on the collapse of the other. It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I build my virility… I try to read admiration in the eyes of the other, and if, as luck would have it, the other sends back an unpleasant reflection, I run the mirror down: the other is a real idiot. I have no intention of revealing my nakedness when confronted with the object. The object is denied its individuality and liberty. The object is an instrument. Its role is to allow me to achieve my subjective security. I am full of myself (the wish for fullness) and allow for no scission. “The Other” comes onstage as a kind of fixture. The hero, that’s me. Applaud or criticize—I don’t care; I am the center of attention. If the other wants to intimidate me with his (fictitious) self-assertion, I banish him without further ado. He ceases to exist.”
Fanon (1967, emphasis added)
In this form of relating to others, they may, in principle, be at liberty to act as they wish, but when/if they do, they are banished and denied. As political history shows with countless examples, you can liberate an entire country from whatever real or perceived adversity with no plan or intention to recognise its residents as free agents. To many of us, this sort of ‘liberation’ can appear hypocritical, but perhaps that is at least partly because we believe that being liberated and being free means the same thing.
Recognising the crucial role “the other/s” play in our sense of self and personal freedom, Sartre put the following words in the mouth of one of the characters in his play Huis Clos (No Exit), first published in 1944:
“Don’t lose heart. It shouldn’t be so hard, convincing me. Pull yourself together, man, rake up some arguments. [no response follows] Ah, wasn’t I right when I said you were vulnerable? Now you’re going to pay the price, and what a price! You’re a coward, Garcin, because I wish it. I wish it – do you hear? – I wish it… So you’ve no choice, you must convince me, and you’re at my mercy.”
From Sartre’s “Huis Clos”
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