Athens & the Instability of Freedom

[Xoria]

How do freedom, free will, revelation, philosophy, the Athenian experiment in democracy, and history all tie together? Can freedom last? Can we survive it's consequences? Andre Glucksmann explores the answers in a piercing article in City Journal.

http://city-journal.org/2010/20_4_histor...eedom.html

Just two excerpts below, but I highly recommend the entire article. I hope that both of you who read it, enjoy it as much as I did.

By the way, since so many have been questioning the way this community is administrated, there are some clues within this article to understanding both the underlying causes of these problems, and the overreactions to them. They are not necessarily within these brief excerpts, however.
Excerpt:

Athens taught us that free will and critical thinking go together. The necessity of submitting celestial voices and their dictates to the painstaking criticisms of reason is a matter not of pride but of modesty: it is not because I think myself good or intelligent, but because I know I am fallible and capable of deceiving myself...
To listen to voices without ever questioning them is superstition. To fail to examine the authenticity of one's commitments is arrogance. The combination of superstition and arrogance yields fanaticism: God is in me, and I am in God; there is no point in thinking, since my brain already occupies a little part of paradise. Free thought, by contrast, requires us to look reality, including unfortunate reality, in the eye.

To discover one's freedom is to recognize a capacity for self-intoxication and self-deception, and thus to condemn oneself to doubt. This experience of freedom is primary for a current of modern philosophy, just as it was for the thinkers of antiquity.

Thought question: what do you do with this doubt? Does/should it lead to action or passivity?

Excerpt:

It happens that Athens's ultimate problem was this hybris, this loss of measure, which always threatens freedom. As Thucydides showed, this imprudence was at once the motor of Athenian liberty and the cause of its fall. Athens was not always able to find the right mean between movement and rest, innovation and conservation, expansion and restriction. It pitched drunkenly between those poles and ultimately smashed against the reefs of impetuousness.

In light of Athens's difficulties, Aristotle makes the question of the right mean the central problem of philosophy. Virtue consists of the right mean, meaning not indecision or softness but a point of equilibrium (which we must always rediscover) of human freedom. For freedom invariably produces disequilibrium. To live freely, in other words, is constantly to seek equilibrium within disequilibrium. Aristotle counsels neither pure rest nor extreme movement. It can even happen that excess can be good'€”in a situation characterized by excess. The right mean is determined by suitability to the challenges of the world and of the moment. This is the antidote to hybris.

This reminds me of Barry Goldwater's statement at a Presidential nominating convention in 1964: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
And this also from Goldwater:
"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood...leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism."
http://city-journal.org/2010/20_4_histor...eedom.html

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