H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PERONE

 G.: Perone’s title has been nagging at me: La filosofia della libertà. S.: Better nagged by liberty than by necessity. G.: Perhaps, though necessity at least often wears plainer clothes. S.: You prefer plain clothes. G.: I prefer words that do not arrive trailed by incense. S.: Libertà arrives trailed by Europe. G.: And by metaphysics, theology, cafés, revolutions, and footnotes. S.: Secrétan deserves some of that. G.: Secrétan deserves his accent, at any rate. It makes him sound as though freedom were being discussed under dim lamps. S.: And Perone, under Pareyson, picks exactly that figure. G.: Which is what amused the Senior Common Room. Someone says “La filosofia della libertà in Secrétan,” and suddenly liberty becomes a thesis-topic rather than a political inconvenience. S.: You would start with the word free. G.: Naturally. One must begin where the trousers are. S.: You mean “real” wears the trousers. G.: “Real” does, in one line of inquiry. Here “free” may wear them, though less steadily. S.: Because it is all over the place. G.: Exactly. Free fall, free man, free act, free country, free hand, free love, free trade, free verse, free school, free gift, and, to modern shame, alcohol-free. S.: You dislike the later compounds. G.: I dislike them as a moralist dislikes new upholstery. Still, they are useful. S.: I brought you the OED trail, such as one can glean from the public edge of it. G.: Ah yes. Tell me when sugar-free and alcohol-free first emerge respectably. S.: The exact OED entry dates are behind the paywall, but the broad indication is that these -free compounds are well established in modern commercial and descriptive English, and not merely yesterday’s American barbarisms. [oed.com] G.: That is cautious to the point of Englishness. S.: I can be firmer only in a limited way. The -free suffix itself is much older, of course, and productive for centuries. The specifically consumer compounds, things like alcohol-free and sugar-free, are modern enough to belong to the world of labels and dietetics, but not so new as to be post-war inventions pure and simple. [oed.com] G.: So Speranza’s suspicion that I may have heard them from the New World is plausible, but not necessary. S.: Exactly. The New World may have accelerated the vulgarity, but not invented the morphology. G.: Good. Then free as suffix deserves a place in the family. S.: Especially because Isaiah Berlin complicates the matter: free to, free from. G.: Yes. He gave a lecture and acquired an entire century’s textbook distinction. S.: Positive and negative liberty. G.: Quite. Though I prefer to begin not with Berlin’s categories but with the uses from which the categories were abstracted. S.: Hence your scale. G.: Exactly. Let us start at the bottom, or perhaps the top, with free fall. S.: A stone. G.: Yes. A stone in free fall. Here “free” means roughly unconstrained by supporting contact, not exempt from gravity, still less self-legislating. S.: So physical freedom is not liberty in the moral sense at all. G.: No. It is release from one kind of impediment within a causal order. S.: Then free-growing. G.: A plant. One says a plant is free-growing when it is not stunted, not pot-bound, not clipped into topiary by a sentimental gardener. S.: Though phototropic still. G.: Precisely. Even free-growing ivy still crawls after light like a provincial after preferment. S.: So its freedom is flourishing under natural tendency, not election. G.: Excellent. That is why the scale matters. Free-growing is already more organic than free fall, but still not deliberative. S.: Then the animal. G.: Yes. The free animal can wander, forage, turn, flee, approach, choose among proximities, perhaps even hesitate. Freedom there includes locomotion and appetite under perception. S.: But not yet means-end analysis. G.: Not in the strict philosophical sense. A dog may deliberate a little, but not usually under a maxim. S.: Then the human agent. G.: Or at least the rational agent. There freedom enters through the possibility of action guided by reasons, not merely causes. S.: Means-end reasoning. G.: Exactly. One is free, at minimum, if one may select means to an end without relevant external coercion. S.: That is already a limited liberty. G.: Quite. It is instrumental freedom. Free to get the thing done, assuming the end is already fixed. S.: And the ultra-free agent. G.: Ah yes. The ultra-free agent is free not merely in the means but in the ends. He is free to choose what shall count as his end, at least within some intelligible range. S.: Extrinsically, you said. G.: Yes. Free in relation to pressures that would otherwise fix the end from outside—custom, appetite, authority, compulsion, perhaps even natural teleology if one is arguing with Aristotle before breakfast. S.: Then Kant enters. G.: Naturally. For Kant, autonomy means not merely selecting means cleverly but giving oneself the law under which action counts as rationally one’s own. S.: So freedom is not caprice. G.: Heaven no. Caprice is the undergraduate parody of autonomy. S.: And Prichard. G.: Prichard reminds one, in his own way, that obligation and action are not to be dissolved into psychology or mere desire. The free act has to be thought in relation to what one takes oneself to have reason to do. S.: Which returns us to means and ends. G.: Yes. One may be very “free” in the vulgar sense and yet entirely unfree in the evaluative structure of one’s action if one never questions the ends that have colonised one. S.: Such as. G.: Fashion, ambition, appetite, ideology, dietetics, and sugar-free biscuits. S.: You do not trust sugar-free biscuits. G.: No sane man should. They are a perfect linguistic case, though. S.: Because the suffix -free there means free from. G.: Yes, free from sugar, not free to sugar. S.: That would be a different and happier packet. G.: Exactly. Which gives us Berlin’s two great heads of freedom in a grotesque supermarket miniature. S.: Negative liberty on the label. G.: And usually positive disappointment in the mouth. S.: Let us linger on the morphology. You said “free” may wear the trousers less steadily than “real.” G.: Yes, because “free” does not merely contrast with one sort of sham. It radiates across many fields: physical release, legal status, political independence, moral agency, costlessness, exemption, absence of ingredient, looseness of style, generosity of access. S.: Free verse. G.: A good case. Free verse is not verse with no constraints whatever; it is verse not bound by certain traditional metrical regularities. S.: So “free” rarely means absolutely unconstrained. G.: Precisely. It means unconstrained relative to some salient bond. S.: Which makes it contrastive in an Austinian way after all. G.: Very much so. Perhaps “free” wears a jacket where “real” wears trousers, but both are contrastive workers. S.: Free from what. G.: Exactly. Or free to do what. The preposition is half the philosophy. S.: Berlin would approve. G.: Berlin approved of prepositions more than many metaphysicians do. S.: Then alcohol-free. G.: Yes. There the thing is free from alcohol. Negative liberty with a bottle-neck. S.: Sugar-free likewise. G.: Quite. Not sovereign sugar, but sugar excluded. S.: The OED first citations, then, if not exact, at least conceptually belong to the rise of labelling, commercial reassurance, and the language of regulated abstention. G.: Excellent phrase. Regulated abstention. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it, though it may improve diets more than prose. S.: Then what interests you in the suffix. G.: That it reveals how freedom-talk slides from moral and political dignity into ingredient management without ceasing to be the same morphological family. S.: So the family resemblance can mislead. G.: Often. One begins with free will and ends with caffeine-free as though one had travelled no philosophical distance. S.: But one has travelled a great deal. G.: Indeed. From autonomy to absence of stimulant in four syllables. S.: Let us map the scale more neatly. G.: Very well. First, free fall: absence of support, not absence of law. Second, free-growing: absence of stunting, presence of natural directedness. Third, free animal movement: locomotor and appetitive latitude. Fourth, instrumental rational freedom: selection of means to fixed ends. Fifth, fuller agency: reflection on ends. Sixth, autonomy in something like the Kantian sense: self-legislation under reason. S.: And where is Berlin. G.: Berlin cuts across the scale. Negative liberty concerns impediments and exclusions. Positive liberty concerns agency, self-direction, mastery, perhaps rational self-rule. S.: Which is why free from and free to matter. G.: Exactly. A slave may become free from his master before he becomes free to direct a life. A drunkard may become alcohol-free without becoming free in any enviable sense. S.: Or may become less cheerful. G.: That too. S.: Then Perone’s liberty in Secrétan is nowhere near supermarket suffixes. G.: No, but the suffixes help remind us how wide the family is, and how dangerous it is to assume one unified metaphysical essence under every use. S.: Austin would approve of beginning with the uses. G.: He would, though he might grow impatient if one then insisted on returning to metaphysics. S.: And you do insist. G.: I insist only that after lexical therapy some pressure remains. Freedom is not exhausted by the dictionary, any more than reality was exhausted by the adjective “real.” S.: Solved or resolved. G.: Resolved again, please. S.: So “the problem of freedom” is like “the problem of reality.” G.: In one sense, yes. Pseudo if it ignores the uses. Genuine if, after sorting the uses, it still asks what kind of agency, causation, normativity, and self-direction the uses presuppose or distort. S.: Secrétan wants the first principle itself to be free. G.: Yes, which is a splendidly continental way of refusing to let freedom remain a local human property. S.: Freedom as absolute principle. G.: Exactly. Not merely my faculty, but the very character of first principle, world-production, moral obligation, perhaps even divine act. S.: Which is very far from free fall. G.: Yet not wholly unrelated. The metaphor of release, spontaneity, non-necessitation, self-originating activity lurks behind both, though transformed beyond recognition. S.: So there is a history of deepening. G.: Or inflating, depending on one’s mood. S.: Today you are only moderately severe. G.: Perone softens me a little. S.: That is dangerous. G.: Yes. Now let us ask whether “free” wears the trousers. S.: Does it. G.: Sometimes. In many phrases the contrastive burden does rest on “free”: sugar-free, duty-free, care-free, smoke-free, free-range. S.: Free-range is another fine case. G.: Indeed. A hen free-range is free from cages, though not free from being eventually deplumed. S.: So negative liberty with agricultural irony. G.: Very much so. S.: Then “free” in these compounds behaves almost like a privative suffix. G.: Yes, though the privation is always relative to some previously expected or potentially confining element. S.: Hence the botanical interest. G.: Precisely. One must classify the species: free from x, free to y, free with z, free in manner, free by status, free by costlessness. S.: Free with one’s money is not free of one’s money. G.: No, though the result may converge. S.: And cost-free. G.: Another vulgar modernity. Yet again the same morphology. S.: Then do you think alcohol-free and sugar-free are philosophically unserious. G.: Not at all. They are linguistically instructive precisely because they force the contrastive question into a narrow, concrete form. Free from what? Not metaphysics, but ingredient. S.: Which reminds one that the “from” construction may be older and perhaps more basic than the “to.” G.: Perhaps older in some practical uses, yes. One is first released from chains before one is capable of legislating ends. S.: Yet politically the “to” is often the nobler aspiration. G.: True. Berlin’s distinction matters because negative liberty alone can leave one formally unimpeded and substantively adrift. S.: Or manipulated. G.: Quite. One may be “free” in the legal-negative sense and still have one’s ends manufactured by appetite, ideology, or advertisement. S.: Sugar-free advertisement. G.: Exactly. S.: Then the Kantian move is to say that true freedom lies not in following inclination but in giving oneself the rational law. G.: Yes. Which is why so much ordinary freedom-talk looks thin beside autonomy. S.: And Prichard. G.: Prichard’s severity helps because he does not let moral thought collapse into descriptive psychology. If one asks what one ought to do, one is already in a space where freedom cannot be merely the capacity to satisfy whatever impulse happened to arise. S.: So the ultra-free agent is not the capricious one, but the one whose ends are critically examinable and, ideally, self-endorsed. G.: Precisely. S.: Which is not how supermarkets use the suffix. G.: No, but supermarkets rarely improve upon Kant. S.: A pity. G.: A continental pity, yes. S.: Let us return to the OED. If the exact first citations are not to hand, can we still say something about the history of -free. G.: Certainly. The suffix is ancient and productive, and modern commerce exploits an old pattern rather than inventing it. The novelty lies not in -free itself but in the consumer compounds and their regime of reassurance. [oed.com] S.: So sugar-free and alcohol-free are modern in application, old in morphological right. G.: Exactly. Which is enough for philosophical purposes unless one is trying to terrorise lexicographers. S.: You are often trying to terrorise lexicographers. G.: Only to improve them. S.: Then would you say “free” is one word or a family of related uses. G.: A family, certainly, though not an accidental heap. There is enough continuity of contrastive structure to justify one entry, but not enough essence to justify careless metaphysics from the dictionary alone. S.: Which is your usual doctrine. G.: It has served me well. S.: Then Perone’s “philosophy of liberty” and your “conceptual geography of free” are not enemies, merely non-identical enterprises. G.: Precisely. He begins with liberty as a philosophically central principle under a history of rupture and memory. I begin with the uses of free and ask what conceptual and rational structure they disclose. S.: One smoky café, one Oxford pantry. G.: A little unfair to Oxford pantries, but yes. S.: And where does free will go on your scale. G.: Somewhere between instrumental and autonomous agency, depending on what one means by it. The phrase is notoriously unstable. S.: “Free will” may mean absence of external coercion, or absence of internal compulsion, or capacity for genuine alternatives, or rational self-determination. G.: Very good. Which is why philosophers should distrust it slightly until the surrounding machinery is specified. S.: Whereas “free fall” is much easier. G.: Yes. Stones are cooperative philosophers. S.: Plants less so. G.: Plants merely incline. S.: Animals wander. G.: Humans justify. S.: Or fail to. G.: Which is where philosophy begins. S.: Then perhaps the final scale should be put almost proverbially: free fall obeys law without support; free-growing obeys life without pruning; the free animal obeys appetite without a leash; the rational agent may govern means without governing ends; the autonomous agent governs even the end under reason. G.: Splendidly done. S.: And the sugar-free biscuit. G.: Governs nothing but appetite by label. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Turinese, with a little New-World packaging around the edges.