Page - 138 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

139 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom the ideal of autonomy. The modern self wants to constitute itself via the other – the world. In other words, it wants to become what or who it always already was. Its identity is pre-existent. This logic is at work in the popu- lar slogan ‘become who you are’.9 The modern project consists of finding your ‘proper’, ‘true’ self. Taylor calls this the “buffered self”: the self that, by subjecting alterity to its identity, closes itself from any outside (Taylor 2007). In the creating freedom sought by Camus, I am not a self; this ‘self’ still has to be created in the realm of freedom. But this presupposes that the self is only free if it loses itself, gives itself away or puts itself at stake. Or rather, since these formulations still presuppose a subject that loses, that gives, that puts at stake: the self is only free if it stops being a self. In Hegel’s phenomenology these two modalities of the self – the self-constitutive self and the self that loses itself in estrangement – are both present and thought of in a dialectical complexity. This freedom escapes the classical debate on negative and positive liberty, which continues from John Stuart Mill via Isaiah Berlin to the young Tay- lor.10 Negative liberty is being free from. It marks the absence of external obstacles to realize myself. The political side to this is that negative liberty engenders individualism considered as a basic democratic value: to liber- ate oneself from manipulation and ultimately repression. Positive liberty is being free to or toward. The self still remains in charge but now enters into relation with the other: the world and the other humans with which that world is filled. The other is no longer seen as an obstacle, but as an entity that only comes to life through my free, positive action, according to my capabilities. It is the liberty to fulfil an ideal, or to bring a project to a suc- cessful result. Not the self is the goal here, as in negative liberty (I want to be able to be myself), but the world outside the self. As stated above, the creating freedom puts these two modes of liberty un- der pressure. How? The Meaning of Social Imaginaries An answer to this question may be found if one realizes how creation coin- cides with imagination. I will have to leave aside here the immense scholar- In the creating freedom sought by Camus, I am not a self; this ‘self’ still has to be created in the realm of freedom. 9 Although this slogan is derived from Nietzsche’s work, we will see shortly that Nietzsche, e.  g. in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, seeks a very different understanding of freedom and humanity. 10 See John Stuart Mill’s well- known On Liberty (1859), Isaiah Berlin’s equally influential Two Con- cepts of Liberty (1958), and Charles Taylor’s lesser known “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” (Taylor 1985).