Intellectual Freedom: Value or Concept?
In a peer-review comment I received on “Wittgenstein and Intellectual Freedom”, the reviewer questioned my description of Intellectual Freedom as a concept. Is it not rather a value, as library values statements insist? Or is it perhaps something else. I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot, as I think being clear on what IF is is fundamental to any kind of discussion about. Note that, I don’t think - following Wittgenstein - we can pin IF down to some concrete referent. Words achieve meaning through use, and can mean different things in different contexts. But I do think it helps us to try to clarify what we do mean when we use the term.
Intellectual Freedom is often included in library values’ statements. For example, the Vancouver Public Library “values” page reads as follows:
We value:
diversity
access for all
intellectual freedom
learning and curiosity
patron-centred services
community-led planning
community partnerships
innovation and creativity
respectful spaces and communication
staff development and collaboration
effective use of resources
sustainability
What meaning is communicated by framing Intellectual Freedom in this way? First of all, the phrasing indicates that values are binary. A library either values diversity or it doesn’t, values intellectual freedom or it doesn’t, values community-led planning or it doesn’t. This causes problems for conflicting values (as we know, VPL’s “valuing” of intellectual freedom conflicted with its valuing of community-led planning when it platformed a transmisic speaking group). It also causes problems for neutrality; a library can’t be neutral if it values things, because values are conceived as goods. You can’t neutrally value or pursue a good. The whole concept of neutrality is incoherent, but especially so when you consider it alongside library statements of values.
But the binary of valuing/not-valuing here constructs each value as a simple thing, to be valued or not, but not in need of analysis. Presenting something like Intellectual Freedom as a simple value obscures its very complex nature, and attempts to pre-empt thinking about it by presenting it merely as a simple value to be upheld or not. Ironically enough, this position of Intellectual Freedom leads to more polarized debate than if its complex nature was admitted and analysis of it the common stock of the profession.
By positioning IF as a simple value, all of the component parts of the term slip away. What do we mean by “intellectual”? What do we mean by “freedom”? A simple, atomistic presentation of IF as a value closes down any ability to dig into those component parts. We are unable to ask what Intellectual Freedom means at all. We know that it is impossible to dig into the component parts of IF because we are almost always immediately referred to other foundational things to buttress the idea of IF as a value: the First Amendment, the Charter of Rights. IF can’t stand on its own, but has to be supported by some other legal or moral text.
So I prefer to think of IF as a concept, not only something constructed out of component parts, but a theoretical abstraction from real struggles and contests. IF has a history, a genealogy, and component parts. Out of “intellectual” and “freedom”, I’ll use freedom as an example, as IF is always aligned with other “rights and freedoms” like free speech and free expression.
In the inherited political structure of Canada, the US, and the UK, freedom is a state of individuality outside of social relationship, bonds, and obligations. An individual is free when they have no relationships to anyone else, free to decide for themselves how to spend their time, what opinions to hold, what activity to perform, when and in what manner. This concept of freedom may be held to be a metaphor, or as the literal true precursor to social relations. In any event, this concept of individuality is carried into modern liberalism, where to the freedoms described above are added the freedom to enter into a contract, the freedom to own and dispose of property, etc. This is the lineage of freedom that lies behind and within IF. IF become then the ability of an individual to exercise their intellectual activity free of any social relationships.
What should be immediately clear from this description is that such “free individuals” could only exist alongside another group of individuals who are not free. A truly free, Robinson-Crusoe-like figure could not survive in the material world without a colonial subject like Friday, slaves, women, or children to support them. So from the outset, we realize that such individual freedom is spurious.
Additionally, there is never a point at which human beings live outside of social relations. We are born into a culture, to parents who already exist within a culture, and (perhaps especially) into a language that long pre-exists us. This in itself has grave implications for the idea of intellectual freedom: how can an individual be intellectually free when they cannot even freely choose their first language? For this language determines the cultural artifacts they can consume, constitutes in groups and out groups (at the level of language, but also of dialect and even accent), and indeed shapes - through the discourse available in that language - how we think things.
Thirdly, and this bears some relation to the second point, individual freedom presumes that everything is contingent, everything can be changed. But there is such thing as necessity: I was born in Winnipeg, I am not free to change that fact. This is not to say that some things previously considered natural and indisputable facts cannot at some point be found to be contingent and mutable, but that subjectively speaking, from the perspective of one’s own intellectual activity, there are some things which are necessary, and which constrain the scope of intellectual activity itself.
There are other ways of thinking about freedom, but by presenting IF as a simple value, we have to take its individualistic freedom along with it.
Thinking about Intellectual Freedom as a value not only prevents us from digging into its complex nature and its history, it presents it - as values are often presented - as a timeless, transhistorical thing to be valued or not. Rethinking IF as a concept allows us to understand its history, but also - and perhaps more importantly - to understand that it can and will change. We do not have to remain committed to individualistic formulations of Intellectual Freedom, we can choose to value other formulations, ones which lead to different (hopefully better) political commitments. These commitments are denied when IF is treated as a value; they become inescapable when it is treated as a concept.
One last point: the commitment to liberal (possessive) individualism is by now really in the minority in the social sciences. It retains a popular currency not only because it seems like intuitive common sense, but because it is an important ideological plank in the construction and maintenance of liberal (bourgeois) hegemony. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to reject liberal individualism: any social constructivist theory of subjectivity will get you there: critical realism (in the philosophy of science), many feminisms, many anti-racisms, queer theory, etc. To hold on to IF as a value makes it that much harder to dislodge the individualism that lies at the heart of the concept; but it will need to be dislodged if we are to move beyond the old, stale debates around censorship and the individual rights and freedoms enshrined in the settler-colonial laws of North America.