What does free speech really mean?
18 June 2024
Philhellenism (“the love of Greek culture”) first arose as an intellectual movement at the dawn of the nineteenth century, when Europeans such as Byron and Shelley began to advocate for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Revolutionary nationalism had been spreading across Europe since the French Revolution and Greece was no exception. As the power of the Ottoman Empire declined, the rising affluence of Greek merchants allowed them to found new institutions of learning and to pay for young Greeks to study in Western Europe. There they came into contact with the radical ideas of the European Enlightenment and romantic nationalism. Educated and influential members of the Greek diaspora, such as Adamantios Korais and Anthimos Gazis, brought these ideas back to Greece with the double aim of raising the general level of education and strengthening the sense of national identity.
The influence went both ways. The Greek diaspora helped to build tremendous sympathy for the Greek cause throughout Europe, especially Britain. English writers, most famously Byron, took up arms to join the Greek revolutionaries. Philosophical radicals, Whigs, and evangelicals all helped to finance the revolution. The London Philhellenic Committee helped insurgent Greece to float two loans in 1824 (£800,000) and 1825 (£2,000,000). Shelley’s last published poem during his lifetime was a verse drama entitled Hellas, which he wrote with a view to raising money for the Greek War of Independence.
Shelley’s poem is but one example of the enormous influence of Philhellenism on European Romanticism. A whole generation of artistic and literary intellectuals began to look to Ancient Greece as the birthplace of Western culture, an honour which had previously been assigned to Rome. The idea of reviving the spirit of Ancient Greece gave rise to a new view of the West as embodying Athenian notions of democracy and freedom. Classicists and romantics alike envisioned the casting out of the Turks from Greece as the prelude to a revival of the Golden Age of Classical Antiquity throughout Europe.
Prominent American intellectuals soon caught the bug. The American physician Samuel Howe took up arms to join the Greek revolutionaries. The free speech clause of the First Amendment was reinterpreted in the light of Plato and Aristotle, as if the United States was the true heir, not of the Roman Republic, as the Founding Fathers had intended, but of the Greek politeia.
It was Cicero who first rendered politeia into Latin as res publica, but in so doing he paved the way for a great many misunderstandings, just as Aquinas did when he rendered Aristotle’s definition of man as a being with λόγον ἔχον (lógon échon) into Latin as animal rationale: the Greek word λόγος (lógos) refers principally not to reason or rationality but to the spoken word, discourse, and dialogue. In Aristotle, it usually designates a particular kind of dialogue, namely dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική, dialektikḗ), which is a conversation between people who hold different points of view but who share a common commitment to pursue the truth through argument. Dialectic resembles debate, but it specifically rules out any attempt at persuasion, which would imply that one person knows the truth already and believes that his interlocutor does not. Those who wish to persuade rather than to engage in the shared pursuit of truth must turn to a different art — rhetoric. Rhetoric is the antithesis of dialectic.
The pursuit of truth for its own sake by means of dialectical conversation is only possible, argued Aristotle, when those who participate in the conversation are free and equal. In Athens, this meant citizens. Women, children, and slaves were not in a position to take part in such conversations because they were neither free nor equal. Only when the citizen left the realm to which women, children, and slaves were confined — the private household (oikos) — and entered the public forum of the polis, could he engage in dialectical conversation with his free and equal peers. The noble domain of politics was therefore utterly distinct from that of economics (Greek οἰκονομία, oikonomia, which is merely “the way (nomos) to run a household (oikos)” — a practical and wearisome task better to left to homestead managers and butlers). When the citizen returned home at the end of the day, he was no longer free, but had to resume the heavy burden of governing his estate.
If Aristotle had read the First Amendment, this is how he would have understood the term free speech: as the pursuit of truth by means of dialectical conversation between free and equal citizens, who are free of all worldly demands, because their bodily needs are all taken care of by the women and slaves back home. Anyone whose time is taken up with things like farming, cooking, cleaning, and childrearing is clearly not at liberty to engage in speech that is truly free, which is the exclusive preserve of politics and philosophy. Or, as Nathaniel Hawthorne once put it:
Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar — the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity — are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.
Unfortunately, by the time that Philhellenism got underway in nineteenth century Europe and America, the original Greek understanding of free speech had long been obscured by the legacy of Rome, which was to Athens what Californian neotrantra is to the esoteric yogic traditions of India — in other words, a vulgar misunderstanding and a barbaric perversion. The “liberal democracy” of the United States Constitution has about as much in common with Athenian politics as the dictatorship of Napoleon (the pig, not the man) has with the Seven Commandments of Animalism. Indeed, it is hard to think of anywhere that politics has existed, in its original Aristotelian sense, since the death of Socrates, with the possible exception of the rap battles of hip-hop, nor any place that has been conducive to philosophy since the Athenian Agora. Plato’s Academy was certainly not.
Perhaps the only public forum today where philosophy can flourish is the consulting room of the Lacanian psychoanalyst; everywhere else is too private (in the Aristotelian sense, as a realm where the burdensome business of keeping body and soul together rules out the possibility of free speech). As such, psychoanalytic associations are now the Western world’s only remaining speech communities. If Athenian politics was the world’s first true speech community, psychoanalytic associations are its only true heirs.
It may not have escaped the reader’s notice that the vulgar misunderstanding of free speech enshrined in the many barbaric manifestos of modern “liberal democracy” — and in particular the mistaken attribution of this error to the Ancient Greeks — first arose in the context of Western support for the Greek War of Independence and its corollary, Western opposition to the Ottoman Empire. Philhellenism was inseparable from Islamophobia, and the idea of free speech as a core Western value was inextricably linked with the view of Islam as a fundamentally despotic religion. Shelley composed his famous poem, The Revolt of Islam, in 1817, as support for the Greek cause spread like wildfire through the salons of Europe. Although the poem does not explicitly focus on Islam, it is clearly Islam that Shelley has in mind when he addresses the general subject of religion, and the work draws on classic Orientalist tropes and themes. Likewise, the Ottoman massacres at Chios in 1822 inspired Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting Scenes from the Massacre at Chios; the vigour with which the Muslim aggressor is painted, together with the dismal rendition of the victims, recreates Shelley’s Islamophobia in visual form. Other philhellenic works by Delacroix were inspired by Byron’s poems, which echo the same tropes.
It is ironic, then, that the idea of free speech in Islamic philosophy always remained much closer to Aristotle’s original concept than did the philosophy of Latin Christendom, from which the Western idea of “liberal democracy” would later emerge, after the Reformation and its bastard offspring, the Enwhitenment. Perhaps this is why psychoanalysis was never required in the Islamic world; the idea of free speech still existed there, at least in theory, while by the time Freud stumbled on the technique of free association, the true meaning of free speech had been long forgotten in Europe.
