Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Thesis #3*
Every human being is a seeker. He is free to explore and investigate the world in order to expand the boundaries of previous knowledge and to express his pursuit of truth and happiness, provided that others are not thereby restricted in their general personal rights.
For many centuries mankind was searching for an answer to the question whether the earth was a disc or a globe. In his writing “Of the Heavens” published in 340 B.C. the Greek philosopher Aristotle brought three weighty arguments for the latter assumption. First, during a lunar eclipse, the earth’s shadow on the moon is round. If the earth were a disc, it would have to be long and elliptical. Secondly, one can observe that the polar star is lower in southern regions than in northern regions. And thirdly, how could one explain otherwise that from a ship at the horizon first the sails and then the hull appeared? All three explanations are based on sensual experience and more or less simple logical conclusions. Nevertheless, this thesis was highly controversial until the Middle Ages.
When in 1514 the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus came to the conclusion that the planets did not revolve around the earth but around the sun, he probably did well to circulate this thesis anonymously. For he had to fear that he would be branded a heretic by the church. The Italian philosopher and mathematician Galileo Galilei, who in 1609, almost a hundred years later, came to the same conclusion as Copernicus, was accused of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. The Inquisition accused him that his heliocentric view of the world contradicted the Holy Scriptures. It forced him to recant his theses and imposed house arrest on him for the rest of his life. But although Galileo remained a devout Catholic, he held the conviction that science must be independent. As British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking put it, he “was one of the first to argue that man can understand what moves the world and — more than that — he can arrive at that understanding by observing the real world.“ Hawking himself made a crucial contribution to understanding the origin of the universe with his groundbreaking theory of black holes.
In 1784, while astrophysics was embarking on a search for the origin of the universe, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant asked in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” what man’s role was in this world. In contrast to animals, which develop into representatives of their species in a natural process of maturity, maturity has a different meaning for humans for Kant. “It cannot be separated,“ explains Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, “from taking responsibility, an achievement that depends on the ability to think for oneself and is anything but self-evident.” Kant places the concept of “self-inflicted immaturity” at the center of his revolutionary thinking: “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s intellect without the guidance of another.” Human maturity depends on the capacity to take responsibility for oneself and for others. By declaring man’s independent thinking to be the measure of his maturity, Kant raises the question of the conditions under which people are able to think freely. In his view, societies can promote or hinder free thinking. Even enlightened science must be questioned, insofar as it declares knowledge to be the only authority. Absolute priority, Boehm articulates however, must be given to independent thought in order to “recognize truth beyond factual knowledge, to come up with new ideas beyond conformism, to recognize the duty of justice beyond interests and consensus, to draw radical hope beyond surrender to the status quo.”
According to Boehm, the human being is characterized by a moral rather than a biological, zoological, sociological, or anthropological category. This means “that it depends on only one quality: freedom.” Freedom, therefore, is also, in his view, the basis of a radical universalism that grants every human being the right not to have his or her thinking limited by an alien authority. In Kant’s view, thought is not limited by religion, science, or the state, nor by God. In this sense, man becomes a seeker who strives for higher principles such as truth, justice and happiness, even if they are in blatant contradiction to reality in most cases or they are limited by social conditions.
But what is the relationship between politics and these philosophical principles of a radical enlightened philosophy? Can man’s actions be guided by these principles, or does he strive only for the realization of his own interests? With Hannah Arendt we can argue “that human beings , even if they pursue only their interests and have certain worldly goals in mind, cannot help but bring themselves in their personal uniqueness to the fore and into play.” The so-called “subjective factor” is thus a component of every form of politics. By saying “I’m gay. And that’s a good thing.” former governing mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit made his homosexuality public. What linguistically came across as so inconspicuous and nonchalant reveals a humanly and morally unambiguous claim to individual freedom. Since the statement was publicly announced at a party meeting of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the sentence “And that’s a good thing.” took on a political character. It is tantamount to a moral positioning, which is not based on an identity-political argumentation, but on the reclamation of general human, universal values, as laid down in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776: “The following truths we hold to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;…; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”.
Art also claims for itself general values, which include in particular freedom of expression and subjective choice of subject. This freedom finds its limit when it proclaims inhuman, racist or anti-Semitic contents. Within the framework of so-called identity politics, which plays a strong role in right-wing populist and left-wing identity discourses, cases have been accumulating in recent years in which artists, writers, or journalists, among others, are denied the right to stand up for minorities or victims of structural violence in the name of universalist values. In 2017, the debate surrounding an artwork by American artist Dana Schutz entitled “Open Casket” caused a worldwide sensation. The painting uses as its subject the photograph of the open casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black American who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. In her petition to the curators of New York’s Whitney Museum, black American artist Hannah Black argues that Schutz is using “black pain as raw material….;white freedom of speech and artistic freedom have been founded on coercion against other people, not natural rights. The image must go.” Here, one artist denies another the right, from a primarily human perspective and with her artistic means, to image and condemn this horrific crime.
An Open Letter from writers and authors, published in the literary magazine “Harper’s” in 2020, speaks out against this kind of discrimination and exclusion: “The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive regime or an intolerant society, irretrievably damages those who have no power and results in fewer and fewer people being empowered to participate democratically….. As writers, we need a culture that gives us room to experiment, to take risks, and even to make mistakes… If we don’t defend what our work depends on, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.” Among the signatories of this letter was the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie, who was the victim of an assassination attempt in August 2022 in the U.S. state of New York and had been condemned to death since February 14, 1989, by a legal order (fatwa) issued by the then Iranian head of state Ayatollah Khomeini for his writing “Satanic Verses“.
As soon as the scope for public debate is restricted by arbitrary exclusion, a liberal democratic society must examine whether this calls into question its own framework of legitimacy. The increasing relevance of social media has, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas notes in his most recent publication, caused “a new structural transformation of the public sphere” through which the communal “inclusive sense of the public sphere” is increasingly being lost. On the other hand, social movements such as the so-called “Arab Spring” or “Fridays for Future” have gained particular momentum and popularity through these new forms of communication. However, a critical point is reached when “the emotional reaction of a select group of citizens is presented and accepted as the voice of the people.” In this form of TV and Internet populism, the Italian writer Umberto Eco already saw characteristics of a fascist movement in 1995. Right-wing populist actors who pretend to represent the opinion of the “people” and often provide fake news, discredit democratic diversity of opinion and thus undermine independent thought.
- * I came across this photography at the remarkable museum and documentation center Greenwood Rising commemorating the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. www.greenwoodrising.org
*This essay is written complementary to Thesis #3 of our paper 48 Theses — How we can live together better, that you can find at https://48thesen.de/en/. This series will be continued. Further information about the author on my LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-udo-g%C3%B6%C3%9Fwald-077a711a7/.
