Freedom and Free thinking seem to have come under attack in Goa these days. This condition has been afflicting Goa for quite some time now. It seemed to have come in the open with cases being levelled on a renowned rationalist and free thinker from Goa. The levelling of FIR against acclaimed man of letters Datta Damodar Naik seems to have set the cat among the pigeons. Without getting into the immediate merits and demites of the case, which has its own place, here, I wish to think of the place of freedom and free thinking in our society.
Fredrick Nietzsche had said that philosophers of the future will be free spirits. Nietzsche did decry of the state of unfreedoms in his own days. He did speak of abuse of the that name ( freedom). He spoke of prevailing condition as a very narrow, restricted, chained-up spirit whose inclinations were pretty much the opposite of human intentions and instincts. Maybe Nietzsche’s views are still relevant and they are describing accurately our times in Goa as well as our country .
We seems to have become slaves of our tastes and ideologies and readily often feel offended by democratic rational discourse. We seem to have become what Nietzsche terms as the herd. The herd in our days have different names or misnames. Mostly what we call a herd following Nietzsche is rooted in religion and culture in Goa as well as our country.
A individual is massified and bundled into a group. He/she is merged into a larger identity, that Nietzsche called the herd. The herd today could be the nation, caste , religion, region etc. We do not seem to have teeth and stomach for the indigestible. We seem to have a demand on everything to become assimilative and digestible. No one can have excess free will. If someone exercises his/ her excess or surplus freedom, it is quickly viewed as excessive and transgressive and even taken as offence.
We are not able to tolerate the intolerable. Hence, cannot listen to the unsayable. This means many things have to remain unsaid. Silence then, becomes golden. We then become a society that loves to listen to its own voice. We only love our echo chambers. There is no room for the other voice. There is no room for dissensus. Dissent then becomes offence. We seem to have become terrified of the other voice. Our over indulgence with the self and its freedoms have led us to forget the freedoms of the other.
What we think as freedom of the self actually borders around egocentrism. This egocentrism produces a self-engrossed closed individual that has no place for the other and his/ her freedoms. This seems to have happened to us today. We have become closed selves. We have indeed become a herd that Nietzsche denigrated long ago. We have indeed become a perversion of Descartes’s Cogito. ‘I am a herd, therefore, I am’ seems to have become our way of life. Hence, those who do not belong to our herd are , thus, thought to be anti-national, anti-faith, anti- Self etc. We have several shades of this anti-Herds already being slammed on people who are thought to be outside our herd.
Herding of humanity is deeply based on our mimetics ( Mimesis). We become human by imitating our significant others like our parents. The paradox is that the herd is indeed the other. The self in the self of the herd is thus an alienated self. Hence, this deep hermeneutics of our mimetic becoming is showing that we are lost into a herd. This being lost into the other being/ herd is an alienation from the self. The alienated self, then, is projected on the other who is demonized and scapegoated as the other of the herd. The real other of the herd is the self itself.
Hence, maybe we have the challenge to think freedom away from Kantian notion of the same as capacity for choice. Although, Kant claims that this thinking of freedom is a rational consideration, (logon ekon), such a production of freedom as the capacity of choice takes us to Jean Paul Satre’s position that thinks of the other as a hell or block for the freedom of the self. Therefore, we have the challenge to rethink freedom. We have to also think freedom away from the anthropocentric conceptions of freedom such as those that think from the point of view of human emergence and transcendence from animality and sees freedom, language, reason and art as distinctly human.
This takes us to understand freedom as transgression. Freedom ,then become border crossing. It becomes interrogation and abandoning of the Platonic cave nurtured by our herd. It is a challenge to get out of our eco-chamber. It is a challenge to become an anti-Oedipus, anti-Oculus or the anti-Herd. It means the self that is seeking authentic freedom has to become a disassemblage that works to dismantle the assemblages of the herd. Such a self has to become the Schizo of Deleuze and Guattari.
But the herd dislikes the anti-Oedipus’s , anti-Oculus’s or the Schizos etc. Yet, we have to move from the freedom in the singular to the freedom in the plural. Freedom in the singular is the freedom given by the herd and has its life an being within the herd. Freedom in the plural is open to a wider world and opens us to stand beyond the herd and embrace the other. This experience of freedom takes us to listen to other voices. It opens us to listen to what remains unsaid in everything that is said. It leads us to listen to the silence and the silenced. This mode of experiencing freedom takes us to the freedom of the other. We, then, can feel the imperative of the call of the other and respond responsibly. Hence, the other is not a obstacle to our freedom but is a condition of our freedom. Such a freedom may not necessarily deherdize the herd. It can only open the herd to the other world. This opening of the herd to the world of the other will enherdize the herd.
