Heretical freedoms

Abstract

This commentary explores Whitehead and Hannah's engagement with Paul Ricœur's conception of freedom. Their account frames freedom as an emergent, embodied experience negotiated between voluntary and involuntary conditions, challenging notions of autonomy and structural determinism. Drawing on Nancy's co-existential ontology and Esposito's ideas of community and immunity, this commentary poses freedom the challenge of the we – of thinking the experience of freedom as a plural opening onto difference rather than an individual possession.

Introduction

Whitehead and Hannah offer a range of original reflections for geography in relation to the question of freedom through a conversation between the writings of Paul Ricœur and recent developments in smart/intelligent technology. The account of freedom pursued seeks to think about freedom in terms of embodied, lived experience and the potential to be otherwise. The subject here is neither pregiven and autonomous, nor dissolved into a series of inhuman structures. Instead, Whitehead and Hannah's subjects negotiate the poles of voluntary and involuntary circumstances. Freedom becomes an emergent quality rather than something possessed or withheld. This represents a welcome contribution to human geography's ongoing question of the subject of experience.

Here, I focus on the conceptual side of Whitehead and Hannah's argument and how it opens avenues for further thought when it comes to geographic accounts of freedom. There is much ground opened here for further critical conversations to emerge in thinking with the work of Ricœur. At the same time, though, Whitehead and Hannah's account throws into relief a range of other work that geographers have yet to properly engage with that grapples with related questions around the experience of freedom.

Some opening heresy

Whitehead and Hannah show that there are wider possibilities to think with phenomenology than has so far been the case in human geography, but which remain sympathetic to ongoing considerations of themes like embodiment, subjectivity, and experience. In this, Whitehead and Hannah's intervention raises a range of constructive critical tensions with a host of scholarship that geographers have thus far not considered sufficiently. In the fervour of geographers’ embrace of post-humanist thought over the past three decades, a host of concurrently developing phenomenologies have been, in relative terms at least, largely ignored.

Whitehead and Hannah hesitate to call the insights developed in the article ‘post-phenomenological’, given their efforts to remain concerned with human experience. I would have no such hesitation to call their developments post-phenomenological. A key aspect of geographical post-phenomenologies is that ‘there has been a move away from the assumption of a subject that exists prior to experience towards an examination of how the subject comes to be in and through experience’ (Ash and Simpson, 2016: 49). Developments around object-oriented ontologies and speculative realism have indeed pushed post-phenomenologies away from a concern with subjective experience into inter-objective realms. However, that doesn’t mean that there has been a jettisoning of subjectivity or a concern of experience entirely. There is indeed a range of post-phenomenologies which seek to stick with experience but thought in a way that decentres the human subject as possessor of that experience in favour of a consideration of the composition of subjectivities in their relations with others (see Simpson, 2025). Equally, it is possible to trace such a post-phenomenological line of thought from Husserl and Heidegger through a host of continental thinkers who have undertaken comparable critical departures from a more traditional phenomenology. As Ricœur himself noted, ‘the history of phenomenology is a history of Husserlian heresies’ (Moran, 2000: 3), and both the engagement with Ricœur here and the critical confrontation stage with contemporary socio-technical circumstances are a welcome continuation of such heresy.

I risk being charged with trying to hold Whitehead and Hannah against their will in bringing them into such post-phenomenological lines of thinking. However, naming it as such helps us see that Ricœur is not alone in 20th-century phenomenological thought in seeking to rethink freedom outside of the prescriptions of certain versions of political theory, and more generally, the assumption (or abandonment) of the autonomous self-positing free subject. Here, I want to consider some of that work which critically engages notions of freedom with a concern for experience like Ricœur, but does so with a fundamentally different starting premise. That is, rather than thinking about the body (singular) and its relations with the voluntary and involuntary, this work starts from the question of bodies always being with bodies, and how we might think freedom considering that. It asks: how can we be free, together?

A coexistent experience of freedom?

Echoing Whitehead and Hannah's account of the experience of freedom as articulated by Ricœur, Jean-Luc Nancy seeks to rethink this experience in a range of linked terms. We can see a different version of an attempt to produce a ‘non-dualistic phenomenological description of freedom as a mutually constitutive intertwinement of the voluntary and the involuntary’. However, there is a fundamentally different starting point in Nancy's pursuit of a ‘co-existential’ mode of analysis. This emerges from a critical conversation with Heidegger's phenomenology and specifically his account of ‘being-there’. Nancy reverses the order of Heidegger's analysis, placing ‘being-with’ (mitsein) as primary to any being-there (dasein). For anything to be a being-there, it must already have been a being-with. Or in Nancy's (2000: 27) own words: ‘Existence is with: otherwise nothing exists’, making this being-with the ‘minimal ontological premise’. We can see connections to Ricœur's account of freedom in terms of the subject unfolding through complexifying and differentiating experiences. Or rather, that the subject emerges as a perpetual process of ‘presencing’ in and through its relations, as an ‘incessant coming-and-going’ (Nancy, 1991: 98). Important here, though, is that for Nancy we cannot be free alone, for all being singular is a being singular plural (Devisch and Schrijvers, 2011).

Looking more specifically at what Nancy (1993) has to say on the experience of freedom, he seeks a liberation from metaphysical accounts of freedom whereby freedom is not some sort of inherent property or foundation of a subject. In this, we find common points of reference with Ricœur. Nancy seeks to do this by providing a co-existential account of freedom based upon an ‘understanding of birth, and the fact of being thrown, through birth, into freedom’ (Devisch and Schrijvers, 2011: 268). We are thrown as finite and contingent beings. In this being thrown, Nancy makes clear that freedom is not about a subject retaining a capacity or being withheld from a possibility of being free, but is rather something we are. Nancy (1993: 13–14) suggests that ‘Freedom perhaps designates nothing more and nothing less than existence itself’, but this existence itself is conceived as a ‘free arising of existence in its own singular and plural way’ (Devisch and Schrijvers, 2011: 277). For Nancy (1993: 66), ‘each time freedom is singularly born’ and so freedom becomes the possibility for difference, for things to be different, for change. In the experience of freedom, there is not a foreclosure of existence in terms of essence, but this being thrown into an unfolding in which we perpetually find ourselves, but also differ from ourselves. The spacing or presence of existence. Or as Devisch and Schrijvers (2011: 270) put it: ‘Freedom opens us to the world, and to each other, each time’ and so ‘there is hope here, for the withdrawal of all substances and essences is nothing less than a liberation’.

Another important figure who focuses on this sort of co-existential understanding of subjectivity is Roberto Esposito. Esposito also ‘ties freedom to the singular plural model of existence’ (Bird and Short, 2013: 9). Rather than being predicated around the autonomy of a self-grounding subject or making freedom something one has that could be appropriated, Esposito considers freedom to be something that one is and, in that, freedom is understood to be expropriating, freeing subjects to their exteriority. For Esposito (2013), to think freedom, we need to consider it within the context of our relations with others, and so the tensions present in how community is often conceived.

Esposito (2010) identifies this relationality through the etymology of the Latin term ‘communitas’, which has at its root ‘munus’. This means ‘gift’ or ‘obligation’ to another. This significantly shifts the terms of common conceptions of community, away from some form of common belonging and identity towards an expropriating relation that can never be fulfilled. Community exposes us to the other, binds us to something beyond us. Esposito (2011) contrasts this with the Latin term ‘immunitas’, which shares that root ‘munus’, but marks the removal from this obligation to the other; this relation to what we are not relieves us from obligation. As Esposito (2013: 49) explains, ‘Whereas communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to themselves, encloses them once again in their own skin’. And in terms that speak closely to a host of developments we have been seeing for some time now in society today, he suggests that we are in something of an immunitary age when it comes to how we are positioning ourselves in pursuit of a (false) freedom.

Esposito seeks to move away from such understandings of freedom founded in an already formed subject for which freedom is a quality or a good to be (re)gained, that would make the subject proper (and so no longer common) in being excused from obligation or demands from others. Instead, Esposito (2013: 52) seeks to think freedom in a way that is connective and focused upon relation, ‘exactly the opposite of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the individual’. Freedom comes to be an affirmative force focused on ‘expansion, blossoming, or common growth, or a growth that brings together’ (Esposito, 2013: 52). This freedom is articulated, like Ricœur, through reference to ‘birth’ in the sense of ‘an aggregating power of a common root’ and so forming ‘a locus of plurality, difference, and alterity’ (Esposito, 2013: 55). Here freedom becomes proper when it is proper to no one. Freedom is, echoing Nancy, pure being, the irreducibility of singularities. Freedom is what resists immunisation and so remains open to difference and differing: ‘It is the beginning, pulsing, or crack that suddenly opens in community – a community that opens itself to the singularity of every existence. This is the experience of freedom’ (Esposito, 2013: 56).

Conclusion

Whitehead and Hannah have opened interesting avenues for thought in their critical engagement with the work of Ricœur on the experience of freedom. In my case, that has led to the posing of the question of the ‘we’ and what might emerge when we think the experience of freedom in co-existential terms. What happens when the community or the intersubjective is the frame of reference for thinking freedom? What happens when we start with bodies, not the body? What if we were to take the starting point that every subjectivity is always already an intersubjectivity? Or, in other words, what if we were to subject Ricœur to a co-existential reading? In addition to the critical confrontation with socio-technical developments Whitehead and Hannah stage, the posing of the question of the we introduces further issues of import in bringing these ideas to bear on our present. In the context of contemporary political trajectories focused on nativism, populism, and other assertions of the rights (or lack thereof) of individuals and the way they should be exempted from relations with others who trouble them, where does this leave us? At a time when the world feels increasingly divided in the name of the individual and where the critical project of communitarianism appears to struggle in response, thinking freedom in a non-immunitary way, which recognises our inescapable and originary being-with others, seems vital if we are to develop new ways of living together in the world today.