The meaning of free speech

8 July 2024

[NOTE: This is the ninth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]

Administration versus politics

I’ve used the phrase free speech a lot in this series of articles without really saying what I mean by it. That was on purpose, of course. But it’s time to show my hand and explicate my tacit redefinition.

As you might have guessed, my use of the term is inspired by Hannah Arendt, and in particular by her understanding of freedom as the opposite of necessity. Her distinction between freedom and necessity maps neatly onto that between the public sphere and the private realm, so let’s recap the main points of that distinction.

The Public Sphere

1. Freedom and action: The public sphere is where freedom is realized through action and speech. It is the space of politics, where individuals come together to deliberate, debate, and make decisions about common affairs.
2. Visibility and plurality: In the public realm, individuals appear before others: their actions are visible, their words audible, and they can be recognised as unique individuals. This visibility and interaction with others is essential for political freedom.
3. Political life: The public realm is the sphere of political life (bios politikos), where individuals engage in activities that go beyond mere bodily survival and are directed towards creating and maintaining a common world.
4. Immortality and legacy: Actions in the public realm have the potential to achieve a form of immortality through remembrance and the creation of lasting legacies. It is where individuals can leave their mark on the world.

The Private Realm

1. Necessity and labour: The private realm, often associated with the household (oikos), is governed by the necessity of sustaining life. It is the domain of labour and biological needs, where activities are repetitive and aimed at maintaining the body’s basic functions.
2. Invisibility and privacy: Activities in the private realm are hidden from public view. This realm is characterized by privacy and the absence of the public gaze, allowing individuals to take care of their personal and familial needs.
3. Economic management: The private realm includes the management of the household economy, ensuring that resources are produced and distributed to meet the needs of life.
4. Exclusivity and isolation: Unlike the public sphere, which thrives on plurality and interaction, the private realm is more isolated and exclusive, centred on the family unit rather than broader community engagement.

Opposition and interdependence

Arendt sees the values of the public and private spheres as fundamentally different. The public realm values freedom, action, and speech, while the private realm is dominated by necessity and the repetitive cycles of labor. In this she draws on the classical distinction made in ancient Greece, where the public realm (the polis) was the space for free men to engage in politics, while the private realm (the oikos) was where women and slaves took care of the necessities of life.

Yet, while Arendt emphasises the opposition between these realms, she also acknowledges their interdependence. The public realm relies on the private realm to free individuals from the burdens of necessity, allowing them to participate in political life. Conversely, the stability of the private realm provides the necessary space for citizens to hide from the public arena and recharge their batteries.

Arendt critiques modern society for blurring the boundary between the public and private realms, particularly through the rise of the social , which is characterised by bringing private concerns into the public sphere. She argues that, in blurring this boundary, modernity has led to the erosion of true political freedom, since the public realm becomes dominated by issues of necessity and economic management, rather than being a space for genuine political action and discourse.

Free speech

Free speech, as I define this phrase, means speech that has nothing to do with the private concerns of sustaining biological life. Speech that has as its primary function attending to bodily needs, or making a living, or any economic activity at all for that matter, is by definition not free; it belongs to the realm of necessity. Only speech that is free of any such taint is truly free. The utterances of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues are preeminent examples of free speech in this sense. The utterances of a “philosophy professor” teaching a class at a modern university are not; the professor is speaking to her students as part of her job, which is her way of making a living, and the primary function of her speech in the lecture theatre is therefore to serve her bodily needs and those of her immediate family. This is one reason why it is impossible for “philosophy professors” to do philosophy at university.

You may have noticed that certain words in the previous paragraph are underlined. From now on, and for the rest of this series, I will underline words and phrases that I use in a specific sense that differs from the everyday senses in which they are commonly used. In most cases, the specific sense in which I use these terms is that which Hannah Arendt assigns to them; in the rest, the sense is directly inspired by Arendt’s usage. Since my articles are published on Medium, which indicates hyperlinks by underlining, the underlined words are also hyperlinks that will take you to a glossary I plan to write for the key terms in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. At the time of writing (8 July 2024), this glossary is only a stub, but I hope to expand it (slowly) over the coming weeks and months.

Conversely, when I don’t underline a term that I define in the glossary, I am using the word in its everyday sense. For example, when I talk about private property in future articles, the fact that I underline the phrase means that I will have in mind the particular sense in which Arendt uses it. By contrast, when I use the phrase private property without underlining it, I am most definitely not using it in the specific way that Arendt does, but in the commonly understood sense of the term as it is generally used today, and which may be found in any good dictionary.

Socrates teaches Alcibiades