Article by Nikolaj Schultz, Sociologist & writer for The NXT: Garden of Desire.
This article is based on the conviction that if political ecology is to succeed in creating political results and competing on an equal footing with the ideologies that defined the 19th and 20th centuries, then it must offer a concept of freedom and emancipation. (1)
“Can you hear me, Major Tom? Here I am floating in my tin can, last glimpse of the world, Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing left to do.”
Despite their differences, doctrines like liberalism and socialism offered political horizons formulated in terms of freedom – horizons that allowed for their political projects to be considered as emancipatory forces of history. Indeed, modern social orders can per definition be understood as social orders legitimised through ideals of freedom (Honneth, 2014). Indeed, even if We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1991), we always thought we were. And this included an enormously strong attachment to the ideal of freedom. Hence the need to take this ideal seriously when formulating a political ecology. Without a narrative of liberty, political ecology will never succeed; either together or alone. The human attachment to this ideal is simply too strong – emotionally, politically, aesthetically, existentially.
The point is thus not to abandon the notion of freedom, which is often regarded as the antithesis of ecology by scholars, activists, journalists, and green party politicians. Instead, the point is to reinvent the meaning of freedom. Is this possible? It is, because freedom has meant many things throughout the ages. ‘Freedom’ has been reformulated many times, as societies have changed historically, and the experience of freedom has never been fixed or static. Equally, a single ideal of freedom has never existed; there has always been a multitude of ideas of what constitutes freedom, although some formulations gained hegemony during various periods. So the problem is not that we lack legitimacy in reinventing freedom – this has taken place numerous times previously. The problem is rather that this seems difficult, as ecology is often presented as the opposite of what we consider to be freedom.
This is more a testament of our own lack of imagination and conceptual-historical provincialism, than an indication of the impossibility of the task. That said, if we are to approach the formulation of a new notion of freedom, it requires that we take a few steps back, and start with a set of initial operations. The first step will require us to demonstrate how our new ecological regime challenges canonical notions of freedom. This diagnosis will be followed by a tentative reconstruction. This will draw on both theoretical affiliations and empirical examples and show how today’s existing practices could resonate with new notions of freedom.
In this short article, I will try to portray these steps, but will do so in an unconventional way, one that intersperses theory with narrative and fiction. More concretely, I propose that we allow someone to help us find the path back into the garden. Who? David Bowie’s fictional character, Major Tom. Why? Well, it’s simple. If this character, who famously blasted off into the sky, only to lose connection with his own planet, was able to touch down on Earth again, then we probably all can. But before meeting our poor friend, the space adventurer, we have to first understand how he ended up out there, lost among the stars. And in order to do so, we have to first go back to Thomas Hobbes and his concept of freedom as a lack of constraints.
Freedom As Lack of Constraints
The history of the concept of freedom is long and confusing, but Isaiah Berlin’s seminal book Four Essays on Liberty (1969) can help us gather together some of its main tenets. In this article, he distinguishes between the three main concepts of freedom that have defined modern political thought. Firstly, what he calls ‘negative freedom’, a “freedom from”, an understanding of freedom indicating the absence of something (2). And secondly, two kinds of positive freedom, a “freedom to”, notion of freedom indicating the presence of something. (3)
According to Berlin, Thomas Hobbes emblematically developed and represented a negative concept of freedom, one that would become central to political liberalism. In Hobbes’ philosophy – in which the world fundamentally consists of distinct bodies – freedom is about the absence of external constraints. Basically, it has to do with keeping something at a distance – and thus, freedom becomes the power to move. Freedom is the lack of obstruction to movement and the action of bodies (Hobbes, 1991).
This notion of freedom has been criticised frequently over the preceding centuries, but what I wish to put forward here is yet another critique that we are able to explain with the help of insights from the Earth System Sciences. As indicated above, Hobbes’ mechanical gaze on the world as consisting of separate, falling bodies was crucial for his understanding of freedom. But in fact, the limit between the ‘human body’ and its ‘external’ environment is less self-evident than Hobbes made it appear. According to Lynn Margulis (1991; 1997), there is no real separation between bodies and external space; we humans are ‘holobionts’, consisting of the many organic agents (bacteria, primarily), that we always thought of as external to our bodies. Hence the difficulty with a concept that identifies freedom as the lack of external constraints to movement, since it is precisely the supposed ‘external’ that allows for movement, motion, breathing and action of the ‘internal’ to take place.
Put differently, to invent freedom as an absence of external constraints, one needs first to invent an artificial limit between the individual and external bodies. It is only when you construct a demarcation between an organism and its environment that understanding freedom as a lack of impediments for movement can appear natural. Hence, the following paradox: In order to think of freedom as a lack of limits, one first has to make a limit between bodies. Another paradox follows: The consequence is limitlessness, propelling one beyond the earthly conditions of habitability. The invention of one limit, between body and external space, results in a limitlessness in terms of movement, generating an endless move beyond the ecological limits of human survival on Earth. Why? Because limits were exactly what you had to trespass to realise your freedom.
And this is where we encounter our friend Major Tom. Because the final endpoint of thinking of freedom as a lack of limits for movement is not only trespassing the Planetary Boundaries of the Earth. Rather, it is ending up “sitting in a tin-can, far above the world”, before you finally touch down on a dead planet, Mars. This is where the ideal of negative freedom ultimately leads you; to an ugly, deserted, lifeless planet, without a Critical Zone (4).
Freedom and the Moral
Sitting up there in his steel space-container, Major Tom might feel inclined to reconsider – like Immanuel Kant – the separations between the “starry sky and the moral law within” himself. This would make sense, since it was precisely considering the relationship between the objective laws of nature and the subjective laws of morality that made Kant conclude that Hobbes’ notion of freedom was inadequate. From Kant’s perspective, Hobbes’ notion of freedom disregarded the sort of lack of freedom that could emerge when becoming enslaved by the heterogeneity of nature and one’s own passions. Instead of locating the practice of freedom in an external, objective, unobstructed room for movement, Kant developed instead a notion of freedom as being one’s own moral legislator. Kant argued that if the causal laws of nature were deterministic, then freedom had to be located beyond this realm of necessity. Only beyond the deterministic ways of nature could humans be autonomous. Hence his solution to locate freedom and morality beyond the empirical world, where the human is not determined by nature (Kant, 1998; 2015).
As Isaiah Berlin noted, Kant’s free individual is thus a “transcendent being, beyond the realm of natural causality” (Berlin, 1969: 12). Ultimately, freedom for Kant becomes acting in accordance with a set of formal moral maxims – the famous ‘categorical imperatives’ – which apply unconditionally; it is by following such moral laws, beyond nature’s causality, that human freedom is possible – what Berlin calls a positive concept of freedom as self-direction (Ibid.: 10). The supreme legacy of Kant is thus his sharp distinction between the objective laws of nature and the subjective laws of the morality of freedom. A realm of necessity on the one hand, a realm of freedom on the other.
But finding freedom in an internal, subjective sphere instead of in an external objective sphere seems to confuse Major Tom. It is true that he was first “floating in the most peculiar way”, which makes for a fine description with him realising the problem with understanding freedom as a lack of external constraints. But immediately afterwards, our space crusader realises that “(…) the stars look very different today”.
And, indeed, Major Tom is right. The stars do look different today, and if they do so, it is because today we are realising that it is impossible to make a distinction between “Nature” and the sky on the one hand, and the “Subject” and freedom on the other. Instead, what we are witnessing every day in the Anthropocene epoch is how morality and freedom are intertwined in the skies, the waters, the lands, and the soil – in increasingly worrying ways. Or, as Bruce Matthews put it; freedom today is “woven into the fabric of nature” (2011).
Freedom and the Social
Hence Major Tom’s next realisation, gazing down at Planet Earth; So many limits, so much limitlessness. First, a limit between the individual and external bodies, generating a notion of freedom leading to limitless movement in space. Then, a limit between the subject and the laws of nature, generating a limitless subjective freedom beyond nature. The second is as problematic as the first, since today, thinking of morality and freedom as disconnected from earthly conditions is as impossible as thinking of an individual body as disconnected from external space.
It was precisely these two sorts of limits and limitlessness in the concepts of freedom of Hobbes and Kant that G.F.W. Hegel attacked in his Philosophy of Right (2008), where he outlines a concept of ‘social freedom’ – or, what Berlin would call a positive freedom as self-realisation – actualized in the world, with others, through action. For Hegel, Hobbes’ negative concept of freedom leads you without any (normative) boundaries for desire; it becomes an ‘arbitrary will’, without any limits of action. Hence, the importance of Kant’s moral concept of freedom, implying a ‘moral will’ with the normative capacity of choosing between right and wrong. But according to Hegel, the problem with this concept of freedom is that it becomes “abstract, formal and empty” – in his perspective, Kant’s moral subject lacks the resources to create a “genuine, non-arbitrary conception of the good”. (Neuhouser, 2000: 32) (5).
With his own concept of freedom, Hegel tries to overcome these issues by proposing a positive understanding of freedom as something shared with others and realised in common ethical life. According to Hegel, it is in society that morality can gain a content, and it is through good social relations and institutions that humans can reach the highest form of freedom, one that is neither arbitrary nor abstract. As social members, individuals realise and actualize freedom through engagements in social life. Freedom is thus neither about keeping something at a distance, nor about retreating into one’s own moral subjectivity. Instead, it is about finding autonomy in social relations with other human beings.
By theorising freedom in this manner, Hegel radically changes the context, pathways, and ontological basis of freedom. As opposed to Hobbes, freedom is not found in the lack of connections, but rather in the presence of good connections with other humans. And as opposed to Kant, freedom is not found outside time and space, but realised inside it. Thus, the context of freedom becomes history itself, and its pathway is one of engagement instead of withdrawal, and its basis is relational rather than purity (6).
In this sense, one can imagine Hegel, shouting up to Major Tom, still up there confused in his space rocket, that he must abandon the bizarre idea of a limitless floating in external space, and limitless moral reasoning in internal subjectivity if he wants to be free. “Come down here and realise your freedom, Starman! There is nothing out there in that external space or in that abstract moral subjectivity that can free you! Freedom is not in external or internal limitlessness! You need to come down here to society, now, and reach your freedom in society, with others!”
However, unfortunately, the landing strip that Hegel cleared for Major Tom’s spaceship is a bit too, how shall I put it, narrow… Where did Hegel ask Major Tom to land his freedom, again? In the temporal and spatial context of a society – but only a society populated by human beings! Thus, yet another limit; just as Hobbes’ notion of freedom rests on a limit between the individual’s body and external bodies, and Kant’s concept of freedom rests on a limit between the moral subject and Nature, then Hegel’s notion of freedom rests on a limit between Society – a community consisting exclusively of human beings – and Nature on the other side.
Hence the problem with Hegel. His notion of freedom was to be realised in the ‘concrete mores and ethos of a culture’ – what he called ‘the living good’. But this living good was exclusively social, in the old sense of the term, it was consisted exclusively of humans; it left out the numerous other superimposing living entities that Gaia consists of, and that our New Climatic Regime demands us to pay attention to (Latour, 2017; 2018) – entities that in their own ways always pose the question again of what ‘good’ is. Indeed, Hegel did not consider the possibility of including non-humans in ethical life, and herein lies the problem with Hegel’s social concept of freedom in the Anthropocene: its sharp distinction between the social and ethical, and the natural on the other side. The consequence? Freedom, understood as “being-with-oneself-in-another”, remains an intersubjective human relation.
The Difficulties of Earthly Reintegration
Let us summarise. Even if Hegel rightly saw that freedom could only be realised through the practical engagements and connections with other living beings, he drew a limit between Society and Nature that does not allow an all-encompassing understanding of the many living entities one needs to renegotiate freedom with today. With Hegel, Major Tom learned how to experience a non-limitless freedom in the social sphere – but not yet in Gaia. How can Major Tom go on from this dramatic impasse? How do we reformulate freedom in our New Climate Regime, a freedom that necessarily needs to be negotiated with all the other living entities that today create ethical questions and concerns?
Sure, Major Tom has now returned to Earth, he is no longer floating around aimlessly in outer space, and he has even given up on the endless moral self-examination he engaged in up there. However he does find it rather hard to reintegrate into the society and the social institutions that Hegel pointed to as the altar of freedom. Sure, his family, his colleagues, his common citizens all greet him with a “Welcome home”, but to Major Tom, it can’t seem like a very welcoming Planet to return to. It does not even seem like home, because nothing is as it was before he left; the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising, as are the temperatures and the seas, the soil is drying out, and the insects he used to wipe off his car windshield have disappeared. Alas – the stars might have looked different, out there, but so does Earth.
NASA has given Major Tom a few weeks of work after his return, to “get back on his feet”, as they said. The first couple of days, Major Tom spends reading up on climate and Earth System Science, to get accustomed to his old-new home. As an astronaut, he finds it relatively easy to understand the science, but simply reading about “Holobionts”, “Great Accelerations”, and “Planetary Boundaries” fails to provide him with any new sensation of freedom (7). Spinoza was wrong; being free is not simply understanding the causal chains of things, because freedom is an experience. Furthermore, an explorer by heart, Major Tom finds it difficult to sit still. So, a couple of days after his return, he gets up, grabs his car keys, and starts to drive.
Our astronaut is driving forward, but without any idea of where he is going. Realising we have run out of theories of freedom that stand the test of the new Earth he inhabits, his horizons have blurred. Dizzy and confused, he turns right at a highway exit and stops the engine. Realising that he has stopped his car right next to a strange garden collective, he decides he could use some air, gets out of his car, and trespasses into the farm. Who knows, perhaps people will be nice!
Major Tom at The Farm
What Major Tom doesn’t know yet, is that he has just entered a ‘permaculture’ farm. He also does not realise that this is not a bad place to start, if you want to train your imagination for a reformulation of freedom, and if you want to practise your experience. Now, the point is obviously not that in the Anthropocene, everybody will have to move to a farm of this kind to experience freedom. The point is rather that these places are laboratories, where it is possible to encounter a new sort of civilizational avant garde (8), both in terms of ideas and practices, that we can learn immensely of, when it comes to thinking, feeling, and practising freedom differently.
Laboratories and avant gardes of this kind, with their theoretical and practical knowledge, are magnificently described by Laura Centemeri in her fieldwork on permaculture collectives (e.g. 2018). According to Centemeri, what these collectives are in the business of “commoning”, understood as a set of “self-determined value practices oriented towards the maintenance and reproduction of the socio-ecological system and its components” (Ibid.: 292). In other words, they subscribe to what we can call a new register of maintenance, a set of curious knowledges, technics, engagements, and practices, that seek to maintain the earthly conditions of subsistence.
How? Permaculture is not merely an agricultural method even though it is often considered as such. Instead, it is a way of redesigning and reorganising a wide range of material and immaterial means of subsistence – including soil, food, health, education, ideals, housing, agriculture, forestry etc. – in ways that are not simply ‘sustainable’, but that ensure the perennial reproduction of such phenomena. Through the mobilisation of a range of scientific and practical knowledge on topics such as water cycles, soils, cartographies, ecosystems, climate etc., permaculture not only seeks to regenerate the land, but furthermore to train a re-pairing and a re-inhabiting of the changing relations between humans and their earthly conditions, in a way that secures their long-term subsistence.
The goal is thus one of preserving and sustaining a set of interrelated, situated life-processes, through the above-mentioned situated knowledge, and by principles such as “Earth care, people care, and fair share” (Ibid.: 295). Hence, the maintenance and reproduction of soils and human ideals in the same breath. This is what Major Tom discovers as he strolls around, observing, and speaking to people at the permaculture farm. Here, the regeneration of soil and emancipation go hand in hand. They are reproduced together, through interlinked practices, where freedom is continuously renegotiated with the surprising activities of the non-human entities that secure the maintenance of life in biotic collectives (9).
What Major Tom sees here is not how these odd permaculture people escape universal values. It is rather that these earthly avant gardes constantly retest, renew, reinvent, or remake the shape of universal ideals through their encounters with living beings, whose unpredictable patterns of action continue to be surprising and worrying; surprises and worries one has to continuously reevaluate, in order to be free.
Major Tom – who we must remember was an ardent modernist until recently – might wonder if the things he is seeing in the garden make for any kind of ‘civilizational horizon’. Perhaps, but it’s a weird one; one constantly reflected upon and reinvented by paying attention to the traces your boots leave in the soil. In any event, it is in practices like this that we both see “emancipating” and “progress” taking on a completely new shape – one that is at once longer in terms of horizon, but also inevitably shorter in terms of the binoculars you gaze forward through. It is in such practices we see slow steps towards reconstructing collectives in a way where ideals of justice, freedom etc. are both articulated and practised through an account of ecological interdependencies.
As somebody explains to Major Tom, as he bows to the soil, then “(…) nature is like a colleague to me. I work with nature, and I have to know it, I have to be able to engage with it […]. I have to know the soil, its biochemistry. […] Sensibility, analysis by instinct is fundamental, but you need to rationalise. Harmony with nature is not in contradiction with planning” (Ibid.: 300). So indeed, it is a ‘civilising process’ in Norbert Elias’ sense of the term (1997) – it is a planning in terms of rationality. However, it is a planning that is always reconsidered, and it is a rationality that is neither absolute nor certain in terms of its end point, nor in terms of what agencies one will have to collaborate with, as one progresses. Painful, perhaps, but necessary – not least if you wish to live freely.
Freedom in the Garden
Major Tom has come a long way. He is no longer floating endlessly around in outer space, nor is he permanently trapped inside his own subjective moral soul – and finally, he is no longer lost in a society that floats endlessly above its earthly conditions of subsistence (10). All these invented limits; between the individual body and external bodies; between the human subject and nature; and between society and nature that left him with limitless forms of emancipation, he has left behind. And, oddly, it was by the exact opposition of such moves, that he begins to glimpse a new sort of emancipation. By spending time with his boots buried in the soil and seeing first-hand the limitlessness of the Critical Zone, he has gotten closer to sensing a reformulation of freedom, of emancipation, but this time one that is kept within the limits of the Planetary Boundaries of the Earth.
So, what is freedom, then? Well, to repeat, it is not the lack of constraints in eternal external space. Neither is it withdrawal from nature, into the eternal conundrum of moral subjectivity. And finally, it is not simply engagement in rational, good social institutions and ethical human relationships. Instead, what Major Tom has caught a glance of, is a sort of freedom that must be conceptualised and experienced along the lines of a reflexive, continuous negotiation with the different human and non-human entities that allows you to breathe, to eat, to feel, and yes, to move. This is what he’s seen here, and what one can find in similar ‘new materialist’ social movements: People, who collectively experience another sort of freedom, found by carefully nurturing, engaging with, maintaining, and listening to a multitude of heterogeneous voices and relations that their own human livelihoods depend on (11).
This also means that the promise of freedom is moved from the sphere of production to the sphere of subsistence or reproduction (12). This is where an earthly self-determination is possible – much rather than in the endlessly expanding horizon of growth. Hence the brilliant quote by Centemeri, who concludes that we ought to “rethink the sphere of subsistence as a place where to experience self-valorisation, self-determination and self-organisation while nurturing the awareness to live in more-than-human communities.” (Centemeri 2018: 303) Another way to put this is that it is the earthly dependencies of humans which allows them to move; their moralities are intrinsically interwoven in these relations; their social ethics depend on them. Individual, moral, and social freedom might not be discarded, but they are necessarily achieved through the continuous re-pairing, re-invention, and maintenance of a Critical Zone, where holobiontic humans are both trapped and freed.
In other words, Major Tom realises that freedom somehow becomes the practising of, the entering into, the ethical cultivation of the relations of both humans and non-humans that allows for an unfolding experience of self-determination and a certain sort of hetero-autonomy (13). This is not nearly as mysterious as it may sound, if we remember again that these permaculture collectives themselves insist on articulating their practices of ‘degrowth’, ‘soil care’, ‘slow living’ etc. as experiences of ‘emancipation’. As Centemeri writes, these practices are best defined as individual and collective engagement in the creation of “emancipatory commons of reproduction” (Ibid.: 394). Or, put differently: It is by tuning into the land and all its components, and re-nurturing the relationships with the Critical Zones’ multitude of living beings, that a new individual and collective experience of freedom emerges.
Rest assured; it will take a long time for such new avant-garde understandings and experiences of freedom to proliferate, infiltrate society, its collective imagination, its sensory and emotional registers. When Major Tom returns to NASA, his friends and colleagues will surely find it difficult to resonate with his new ideas and experiences! However, as he and we have seen, such new notions of liberty are nonetheless spreading slowly, and thus challenging the canonical Western, Modern notions of freedom. And, at least for Major Tom, he has realised that such reformulations of freedom are possible – and that they are already being experienced, and therefore are no longer floating around in space, without connection to the planet. Neither is he simply metamorphosing. No; he is emancipating. And to end where we started, then the success of political ecology might very well depend on paying attention to, reconstructing, and developing new narratives of this kind of freedom.
Footnotes
1: This article draws heavily, but not exclusively, on arguments developed and published elsewhere. Certain parts of the argument and phrases even overlap with or are reproduced from previously published work. See especially Schultz & Latour (2022); Schultz (2023); Carleheden & Schultz (2022). However, they are here redeveloped and given another narrative form.
2: For example external coercion or force.
3: For example (moral) autonomy or self-realisation.
4: Understood as the thin pellicule of the earth, ranging from the treetops to the ground water, where the overlapping actions between living agents such as soil, water, air and living organisms have made Life possible. See Latour & Weibel (2020)
5: Leading to what Durkheim (1961) identified as the pathological state of “anomie” and what Axel Honneth later called “suffering under indeterminacy” (2000). Or, put differently: A concept of freedom that generates limitless reasoning inside the subject.
6: To keep with Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, this is a “positive freedom as self-realisation” (1969:
7: For the scientific terms “Great Acceleration” and “Planetary Boundaries” and their political significance, see the first couple of chapters of Latour (2017).
8: I use this term in the sense Norbert Elias gives to the idea of a “pivotal class”, understood as a social class that leads the way in defining civilizations cultural and political horizons in a more rational way than the previously hegemonic collectives. See Elias (1997).
9: Situating these repertoires in terms of valuations, Centemeri distinguishes between “universal modes of evaluation” (value defined abstractly), “goal-oriented mode of evaluation” (use value to obtain a given objective) and “emplaced modes of evaluation” (value as experienced in contexts and through encounters) (Centemeri, 2018).
10: Indeed, Major Tom is no longer a Hobbesian astronaut, neither is he a Kantian puritan, nor is he a Hegelian state official. Instead, he is something like a gardener or a construction site worker, or better, a diplomat, on a journey to renegotiate, repair, and rebuild relations – a journey that he does not yet know all the pathways of, interlocutors on, and thus, the ending point to.
11: This is, indeed, as Hegel would say to experience freedom ethically by “being with one-self in another”, but it extends the scope of ‘others’ to include entities that we hitherto did not think as part of the realm of freedom (Hegel, 2008: §7)
12: See Latour & Schultz (2022) On the Emergence of an Ecological Class, for a similar argument on going from ‘production’ to ‘engendering’.
13: As Bruno Latour already indicated in Reassembling the Social (2005), freedom is thus not a lack of relations, it is the presence of good relations. In his After Lockdown (2021), he called this ‘liberating links’ and an emancipatory experience of confinement. If one is imaginative enough, one can even read Bruno’s Irreductions (1984) as pointing towards such diplomatic notions of emancipation.
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