How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XVII. When Freedom Becomes Historical

If the future can be changed by human action, then freedom acquires a new meaning.

Earlier philosophy had certainly asked what it means to be free. Aristotle had distinguished voluntary from involuntary action; the Stoics had asked how freedom could be possible within a determined cosmos. Political philosophy had asked when obedience is legitimate and when authority may be resisted.

But historical consciousness changes the question.

If human beings inherit a world they did not make, yet participate in making the world that comes after them, then freedom cannot be understood simply as the absence of constraint.

The constraints themselves have histories.

Institutions, laws, economic arrangements, customs and forms of knowledge shape what people can do. Yet they are also human creations. What appears at one moment as an unavoidable feature of the world may turn out to be the result of earlier choices and circumstances.

This creates a distinctive philosophical possibility:

freedom can become the transformation of conditions.

Hegel develops this possibility in a particularly systematic form. For him, freedom is not simply doing whatever one happens to want. A person can only exercise freedom within a social world that gives action intelligible forms. Freedom therefore has a history: human beings gradually come to recognise themselves as free through changing forms of social and political life.

The paradox is important.

We become free not by escaping history, but through it.

Marx would radicalise the problem differently. If human beings' possibilities are shaped by material conditions and relations of production, then abstract declarations of freedom may conceal forms of dependence that those declarations do not remove.

To be free, on this account, may require changing the conditions that produce the dependence.

History therefore becomes politically consequential in a new way. If institutions have histories, they can be criticised historically. One can ask not only whether an institution is just, but what conditions produced it, whose interests it serves, and what other arrangements its history makes conceivable.

Freedom becomes connected to possibility.

But this produces a new difficulty.

If our actions are themselves shaped by historical conditions, then who is doing the changing?

The agent who wants to transform society is already formed by the society they want to transform. Human beings inherit the language, concepts, desires and institutions through which they imagine alternatives.

The historical subject is therefore both product and producer of history.

This is a deeper problem than the old opposition between freedom and necessity. The question is no longer simply whether human beings are determined by causes.

It is whether beings formed by a history can acquire the capacity to alter the conditions that formed them.

Once that question becomes philosophical, freedom is no longer merely a property of an individual.

It becomes a relation between human agency and historical possibility.

And this opens another question that neither abstract individualism nor simple historical determinism can easily answer:

How can a society change itself when the people who change it are themselves products of that society?