Anyone who undertakes a general survey of the political and cultural landscape of our time is bound to leave with a sense of apprehension. Throughout the world, we not only observe the rise of political extremism, irrespective of conservative or liberal dispositions, but also the prevalence of a looming confusion, created by a social milieu where knowledge is found in abundance. Although such ubiquity of information has put vast stores of truth and wisdom at our disposal, it has rarely translated into prospects of making meaningful decisions. No matter where we turn, we are confronted with an endless array of choices and the very act of choosing, if anything, is either paralysing or simply reminds us of our own insignificance. The lived experience of those born into this world of excess can hardly be pleasant. And with increasing age one is almost forced to participate, making choices as the reality around them grows infinitely more complex.

Even old ways of life which were largely rooted in the religions and myths of particular cultures have waned in their ability to offer lasting guidance. In virtue of an increasingly interdependent world, we find ourselves in perpetual contact with a plethora of ideas and perspectives, relegating the answers offered by specific cultures as simply one among many others. When there are so many different seemingly contradictory ways of looking at the world and living in it, on what grounds is it possible to choose one over others? Isn’t what dictates choice ultimately then the product of one’s own whims and preferences? Ever since the turn of the 20th century, these questions have gradually taken precedence as life itself became largely demystified under the aegis of science. The analytical instruments which were subsequently let loose had surveyed the entire breadth of human existence, rendering most parts of it either partially or fully explicable. There was no part of human nature whose investigation was now considered sacrilege. And no place of obscurity in one’s own existence where doubt could find shelter. It was no longer possible to merely believe in a set of rules and precepts because there was no ground upon which any of them could be permanently justified. They were all just tentative answers to the problems of life and it was up to the individual to choose his own truths and dispel the uncertainty on the strength of his own capacities.

Karl Popper in his book, The Open Society and its Enemies, called this the “strain of civilization”. He argued that what separated a closed society from an open society was the fact that in the latter, people were able to distinguish between natural and moral laws. Natural laws, according to Popper, were often accepted by everyone without question because they represented an unchanging objective reality. For the longest time, the mores and taboos of primitive cultures were also considered to be an extension of natural law and therefore required their uncritical acceptance. He believed the progress of civilization was marked by a certain inflection point where people recognized that the morality which governed them was largely a product of their own interactions. If this were to be true, the individual was free to both choose how the prevailing norms dictated one’s course of life and bear the repercussions of any consequent wrongdoing. When morality is liberated from the perception that it is as immutable as any natural occurrence, there is an immediate loss of objectivity that takes place. Popper envisioned history through the lens of two opposing forces, one of which called for the restoration of this objectivity and thereby relieving the burden of freedom. While the other emphasized the importance of the individual and accepting the labour of one’s free existence as the mark of a refining consciousness.

By investigating the works of prominent thinkers like Plato, Hegel and Marx, he hoped to show that totalitarian ideologies were a radical attempt to reestablish the foundations upon which one could permanently make judgements of right and wrong. Similar to how science operated on a plane of objectivity and thus could be applied to all of humanity, the ideologies which emerged from these thinkers sought to formulate an inexorable moral framework by excavating the laws which governed history itself. The derivation of broad general theories from particular observations, characteristic of the scientific process, was applied to historical events giving birth to what Popper called “historicism”. For instance, Marxism proposed that the laws underpinning the stages of civilization could be understood by analysing the means of production which were prevalently used during the time, like late stage capitalism being marked by the technologies of the industrial revolution. Marx believed that our intellectual and moral considerations were largely governed by the economic relations within which they were embedded. And each person, as a result, by voicing out their values and concerns was merely vying for the ascendancy of their own socio-economic class. Although this part of Marxism admits to the fact that the norms and ideas predominant in each stage of society were relative, it could still pronounce moral judgements. In the words of Marx himself, since the progress of history was invariably governed by the laws that he had unearthed, the least we could do is “lessen the pangs” in the birth of each stage of civilization. Therefore the kind of actions conducive to the laws of history were deemed virtuous and those that impeded it were considered decadent and against human progress.

Despite its emphasis that human values were products of social and historical context, Marxism sustained moral convictions on the belief that it could free itself from the biases of its time. It assumed that it was possible to climb to the altar of moral objectivity by treating history with a certain scientific impersonality. So implicit in Marxism, like almost all historicist ideologies, was the belief that one of the greatest sources of human suffering lied in the choice between good and evil. What partly constitutes the allure of such ideas is that they represent an abiding desire to restore the tribal way of life and to remain ensconced in the blissful comfort of a time where the distinction between the individual and the collective was dubious at best. Therefore by summoning the powers of thought, such ideologies endeavoured to provide an all encompassing shade against the scorching light of an enlarging consciousness. But in spite of their moral veneer, records of history abound with instances where such totalizing forces either impede or positively stifle the functioning of personal and social life. They vainly attempt to replace the natural suffering of choice with an artificial finality where the intellectual and moral horizons of an individual are choked to the point of suffocation. The history of Communism and Fascism, the stale defense of the Prussian authoritarian state by Hegel and Plato’s ideal society trying to arrest all forms of “change”, are all places where the desire to eradicate individual choice found its loudest expression. But due to the fact that the social experiments informed by these ideas have mostly failed, the appeal in grand unifying frameworks, especially of the moral kind, has slowly waned and withered. However, there’s a more pernicious strain of thought that has developed in the aftermath of these failures which, although attempts no kind of grand unification, still furthers the legacy of extricating one’s moral freedom.

The common failure of all historicist ideologies lied in the fact that the task of anticipating history and formulating an overarching moral worldview was too ambitious. It was far easier to achieve unity by labouring in the opposite direction, or rather by deconstructing existing frameworks of truth and morality. Since it was no longer possible to arrive at a consensus which enjoyed unanimous agreement, the only path that remained was to emphasize the relative nature of all forms of knowledge, be it moral or otherwise. The method of reducing different kinds of truth to the ever changing social and historical context and finding comfort in the ensuing disorder is commonly termed as the “sociology of knowledge”. Although a part of Marxism was sympathetic to the view that all knowledge was relative, it could never be fully pursued because it was antithetical to the marxist attempt of formulating an objective historical picture of the world. But once this obligation to “synthesize” had been removed, the idea could operate without reservations, swallowing worldviews and sharply deconstructing them to show the dubious foundations upon which most our certainties lived.

Popper noticed that soon after the failures of historicist ideologies, there were growing strands of deconstructionism in the field of philosophy, language and politics. They sought to prove that existing frameworks of knowledge and morality were not only determined by man made constructs but that they also constricted the personal liberty of those who believed in them. Even the natural sciences was not spared from the criticism that its most cherished theories, arrived at through years of reasoned debate and experimentation, were considered true partly because of social agreement. The central question which informed the sociology of knowledge was that in view of the sheer difference in human perception, the variety of rules and norms that has governed society in various times of history and the possibility of even our most axiomatic truths fading to uncertainty, what was the ground upon which anything could be deemed true? What could be the ground besides the agreement of feeble minded men desperate to ensure that they do not crumble under the weight of their individuality? Therefore all truths were nothing but empty pretensions lulling the minds of those who were afraid to live unfettered. Who were afraid to think for themselves and assert the radical freeness of their existence. In the sociology of knowledge, the reluctance to accept the burden of freedom was replaced by an absolute surrender to it. Although abiding truths and values were considered practical necessities for peaceful coexistence, what grounded them were the beliefs and rules we had constructed. It was collective choice and social arrangements that ultimately determined what was true and moral but underneath the veil, they were all mere possibilities, not one of which was necessarily better than the other. There were infinite ways of looking at things, infinite ways of being and though we were curtailed by the world to choose, we existed beyond the choices themselves.

Despite the appearance that such an idea furthers the cause of freedom and the open society, Popper understood that it committed the same error as historicist ideologies. It assumed that objectivity was a state of mind or a frame of reference that could be achieved through a dispassionate evaluation of competing perspectives and values. What distinguished historicism and its successors was the attempt to establish objectivity within oneself and thereby formulating a worldview that sought to avoid the general pitfalls of human thought. However, it was impossible to achieve this within the confines of a singular mind or a framework. Popper believed that objectivity was fundamentally an intersubjective process that emerged out of individuals arguing vehemently for their own set of ideas and principles. It emerged out of the attempt to synthesize one’s own experience and justify it within the realm of shared discourse. When this occurs between people, each individual finds new ways of constellating their own experience instead of losing themselves in an endless quest of being objective. In light of these views, it becomes obvious why the sociology of knowledge does not champion the ideal of freedom because the freedom it achieves comes with the abdication of personal responsibility. When knowledge itself is relative, all choices become equally valid. So it becomes possible to exercise the limits of freedom without having to worry about the consequences because an individual no longer feels compelled to synthesize his own experience. He does not find it valuable to justify or assimilate his choices within an outlook because of the futility in comprehending a world that seems perennially uncertain. He lives a double life where he chooses as a tangible body but understands as a disembodied mind.

I believe the history of consciousness is also the history of such a progressive disembodiment. Like Popper claims, the fight for the open society began with the realization that humanity was, in some fundamental sense, separate from the natural order of things. Once it became evident that the rules which governed our ways of life were largely self imposed, the individual could no longer entertain the illusion that he existed within the flow of nature. He was free to choose in his own capacity. And the burden of his choice rested in the question of how does a mind, that becomes progressively disembodied with the refining of consciousness, choose as an individual self? How does a mind that is capable of surveying the entire world with the powers of its reason and imagination make grounded moral decisions? The suffering of choice consists in the embodiment of this very conflict and, as we have seen, there are many forces in the world which find this pain unnecessary. Therefore both historicism and its successors thrive on the human instinct to exist in a plane of unbothered objectivity. They attempt to find an intellectual and moral ground that transcends the mire of competing perspectives and values. They console the individual that he does not have to make sense of the world in his own capacities by offering him an illusory sense of finality which preserves his disembodiment.

I think the contemporary world is rife with the presence of such disembodied objective souls. Even in the realm of general conversation, two opposing views rarely find a consensus because they are considered to be nothing more than the product of two irreconcilable subjective experiences. A person faced with such uncertainty either swings to the historicist side of things, blindly accepting an overarching worldview at the exclusion of all others. Or they exist in a pre conscious gloom, making choices momentarily and abandoning themselves to the realization that the world is fundamentally unfathomable. However, in both of these instances the mind that is untethered by the enlarging of consciousness and perception is never brought back to its origin. The conditions of modern life, especially the abundance of information, only further accentuates this fracture by drowning individuals in a sea of irrelevance. As Aldous Huxley writes, the “crevice of time between desire and its fulfillment” has narrowed to a point where there is little room for conscious reflection. Therefore what is prevalently sought, under the pretext of freedom, is the comfort to choose without having to intellectually or morally account for it. Without having to make judgements about the world and its people or admitting to the possibility that, in the process, one can commit grave errors.

So freedom, when removed from these expectations, fundamentally consists in the voluntary acceptance of a bifurcated existence. It consists in the courage to choose and understand the world on the basis of an intellectual and moral footing while acknowledging their imperfections. It consists in the perpetual attempt to bring back a mind that tends towards the palace of lofty objectivity. Most importantly, it consists in the effort to weave together the disparate meanings of one’s own experience and grounding it in the realm of shared discourse. The ideal of freedom does not depend on objective representations of the world that preclude further knowledge. It depends rather on specific interpretations born out of the lived experience of individuals. And it is in the sum of these interpretations, mediated by the desire to refine and enlarge one’s own understanding, that objectivity finds its truest expression. The path towards a just and free world, as a result, is paved by such flawed interpretations progressively refining themselves with the aid of one another. But to interpret the world through a mind that increasingly recognizes its own futility calls for more than just the maneuvers of thought. It requires the awakening of a moral feeling imparted by the idiosyncrasy in one’s own perception. It requires an inexplicable zeal to look at the world through one’s own eyes, despite having at our disposal so many other ways of seeing. It is in the surrender to the confines of our body, to the confines of our limited vision do we find even a semblance of true freedom.