We have devoted a considerable portion of this month's issue to the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Americans, who are aware that France has been our ally since the time of our own revolution, empathize with the French celebration. The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, shares with the flag and the bald eagle the distinction of symbolizing our own nation and civilization.
The great motto of the French Revolution--Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity--expresses values we Americans respect greatly. Yet, it would be dishonest if we did not note the distortions these values suffered during the Revolution. In one of his rare poetic moments, Hegel referred to the concept of absolute freedom, as it came to be expressed in the French Revolution, as "absolute death, meaningless death, as meaningless as quaffing a glass of water or clefting a head of cabbage."
French intellectual life at the time of the Revolution was dominated by the philosophers. Some, like Holbach, were empiricists, who believed that knowledge started with sensation. These sensations produced a picture of an external world that was in principle completely knowable. Others, like Condorcet, following the model of inquiry initiated by Descartes, were rationalists. Conceiving of the world on the basis of mathetmatical logic, they believed it was governed by fundamental axioms the mind could grasp intuitively.
If God--who had made the world but then left it to its own devices--knew the initial conditions of the atoms, he would be able to predict the entire future. Men were machines in a clocklike world that science, in principle, could understand thoroughly. Because ignorance had destroyed the initially happy state of nature, science would be required to restore such a state in modern society--even if humans had to be forced to be free.
It is this aspect of the French Revolution that justified the Terror in the minds of its partisans. And it is this aspect of the French Revolution that inspired the Bolsheviks. It is the concept of limitless freedom--the kind of freedom that Hegel satirized--that today inspires a number of discontented groups in the United States.
Although the German language, with its immense penumbra of connotations, permits the looseness of reasoning that one finds in a Mein Kampf, it is the lucidity and precision of the French language that inspires a type of rationality that allows a few a priori axioms to constrain thought about life and politics.
The absolute freedom that Hegel called absolute death is an abstract freedom that lacks concrete connectedness. All freedoms are dependent upon correlative constraints. For example, if an object is to be free to roll, it must have a rounded shape that makes it difficult for it to rest on the crest of a slope. The ability to think rationally is dependent, among other things, on not taking mind-altering substances. There is no absolute freedom and no absolute perfection, at least not in this life, where every choice and every freedom involves a trade-off.
The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity also require trade-offs. Any attempt to absolutize one of these values will impose intolerable costs on the others. Possibilities are limited by circumstances. Novelty--and this
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