Abstract
In the third Untimely Meditation, Nietzsche observes, ‘[Our] schools and teachers simply abstain from an education in morality or make do with mere formalities: and virtue is a word that no longer means anything to our teachers or pupils...’ The context for this remark is a scathing critique of the values of 19th century Europe in the shadow of enlightenment thinking and radical industrialization, the crowning achievement of which was the discovery of and supposition that liberty should be the foremost orienting concept of societies and individuals. The intuition is that from this soil, and this alone, will everyone genuinely have the capacity to pursue whatever ends they idiosyncratically determine to be worthwhile.
This aggrandizing of liberty does not make claims on what the good life might look like, since that is up to each individual to decide. Nevertheless, we might wonder how neutral this concept really is, and if it is appropriate to také it for granted as the paragon of values. The freedom to fashion one’s life for oneself however one sees fit seems to be a self-evident notion to modern sensibilities.
Indeed, by design liberal systems are meant to maximally optimize possibility while at the same time guard against the potential for tyranny. For it seems equally evident that if one begins imposing external, superordinate values upon others, she necessarily simultaneously begins to infringe upon their basic human rights and dignity—to disrespect their autonomy and subvert their freedom.
In light of these observations, we extrapolate that an auxiliary characteristic of liberty is a sort of neutrality, i.e., a detachment from or indifference to the affairs of others. Prima facie, this all sounds like a reasonable ideal. However, what we would like to challenge here is the notion that liberty is in indeed such a pure and sterile value.
It only appears like liberty leaves prescriptive or otherwise evaluative propositions to individuals themselves, but in reality to think firstly from liberty is already to be making a claim about what is worthwhile to endorse. To wit, in establishing liberty as the cardinal value, we are implicitly suggesting that the good life is one that is minimally constituted thereby.
However, we would like to suggest that liberty alone is not in fact neutral, and perhaps it is not even the most promising value for facilitating what a truly flourishing human life might look like. A competing paradigm could be one that unapologetically endorses some kind of conception of the good life.
Perhaps we would do better to begin not with liberty, but with something like care or compassion; or perhaps even more polemically, with passion itself, as the historical antithesis of the logos. In this project, we would like to venture a proposal about beginning our political projects from an explicitly value-laden paradigm—one that does make claims on what constitutes the good life, and that entails that specific policies, namely basic income programs, will be necessary features thereof.