While in ancient Israel, in Mesopotamia, and in ancient Egypt they did not seem to have terms like liberty and freedom, these terms appeared in ancient Greece and Rome, around 500 B.C. (Eleutheria for Greece, Libertas for Rome). However, at this time slavery was common in all these countries and was contrary to our more recent notion of liberty, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 clearly said: Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person. Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery and in servitude and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. However, is this declaration always true everywhere?
When monotheistic religions became the main religious groups the notion of liberty took another signification. Only God can be free, and humans are under his jurisdiction. Eleutheria and libertas had no reason to exist and the only liberty for man is to accept this power of God.
More recently, Sartre in Existentialism is a humanism (1946) tries to go further and said: Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. — We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.
Finally, can the idea of distinguishing between positive and negative liberty solve this question? Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in the negative sense. Is there a third way to consider liberty?
There are many other questions that this notion can raise, and no solution seems for the moment accepted by all humans. Is a more scientific treatment of this notion able to solve these problems?
1. Man's [civilization] knowing about the existence of another man [civilization].
2. Man or for that matter any researcher can go only from "known" to "unknown."
3. The colonial ideology has affected historiography of the colonized nations.
4. Chronology has been important factor to decide the antiquity.
5. Religious dogmas working in the minds of researchers stop them to think beyond the bearers....
6. The ideas of concept, precept and development of script, language and literature pose another challenge....
7. With all these, the concept of "liberty" works................
I would doubt the question is answerable by a 'more scientific' treatment, by definition science depends on measurable predictable responses that are independent of belief/morality. The Laws of Gravity do not require belief in them for them to operate. In contrast concepts of liberty are entirely socially constructed and do not have testable universals. This of itself may be a contributor as to why such notions change with time, as societies change which doctrines of liberty they find convenient change to suit the mores of a given society.
Dear Kopalle Venkata Ramakrishna, Timothy Edward and other readers,
First, thank you for your answers to my question.
Kopalle proposes six ideas in order to permit the concept of “liberty” to work. But he don’t say us what concept of “liberty” he is considering, as I previously presented so many different concepts mainly contradictory. However, is he trying to propose a more scientific treatment of this question putting his ideas as axioms to understand a more general notion of “liberty”? If this is the case I will be very happy to see these axioms more precisely discussed, as ideas without which the observed properties of liberty would be inconceivable or impossible. I will be very happy to have more details on his ideas for this discussion.
Timothy doubts that the question may be answerable by a ‘more scientific’ treatment. If I could agree with this statement, I wonder if science will have to depend on measurable predictable responses to exist. If this is the case it may be difficult for social or biological science to exist. The mechanistic view of science proposed for example by Frederick Suppe in his book on: The semantic conception of theories and scientific realism (1989), does no more consider the logical positivist analysis of theories, and is frequently used now to treat problems in biological and social sciences. I think that it is in this way that we can consider a scientific approach of liberty.
Daniel
The concept of liberty seems a bit problematic with respect to scientific analysis since it relies implicitly on an agent will (in the sense internal mental state) and the extent to which the agent will can be legitimate (liberty of opinion), exercised (political liberties).
The central position of the agent will is where I see the difficulty with respect to scientific analysis. In order to fit our direct intuition, we quite often assume that will is actually free and that this free will we all have are essential features distinguishing our minds.
However, it could be argued that our mind are ultimately reducible to the activity of our brain. If we refuse hypothesis of an invisible soul and examine what is the material substrate more likely to be at source of our internal world, the brain seems like the only possible candidate. Our self consciousness and the resulting feeling of having an inner self that is making the thinking in a completely free manner might be illusion though. This internal world in which we are apparently completely free is the result of a specific electric state of our neurons and synapse, they are not in themselves this inner world but clearly they are permitting it to happen.
If our mind is so strongly embodied in matter, why to suppose that it has essentially different properties than matters? Specifically what could be its liberty as it ultimately would be necessarily deterministic, once given a state of the brain and the electric charge of neurons at a time t, there would be a unique possible value at time t+dt (given dt small enough at least). What we internally experience as free will is actually the only way things could have go with this precise brain in a precise environment.
Of course I'm not saying it's possible to predict anyone thinking based on any measures. The variability introduced by our immediate environment and senses would anyway make impossible to tell anything meaningful regarding someone internal world state.
I'm not even sure that, if the idea of deterministic consciences would be true, it would have much implication on how we can understand mind and liberty. It's emotionally something that feels important, to have this private world where there is something that is me that is really in charge in the secret of my mind, but maybe I overate this importance.