Homeland of Freedom

Seeking True Freedom in a World of Universalized Placelessness

Freedom has been questioned countless times throughout history. Because it has been expounded from so many directions, we have convinced ourselves that we know what freedom is.

Everyone agrees that Enlightenment thought is a remarkable body of ideas. But what matters is that the human freedom born through the Enlightenment took indigenous root only in parts of Europe, or more broadly in parts of the West. Because the modern world still operates under the strong hegemony of the Western universalist consciousness, it remains difficult to notice that this freedom is in fact regulated by place.

Freedom that was originally born under the regulation of a specific place was sublimated into a universal for all humanity, packaged, and exported and shared with peoples beyond the boundaries of that place. But this is only the generous way of putting it. For peoples in different places who carry their own historical and cultural contexts, it was not enlightenment. It was coercion and nothing else. The universalized freedom then merged with the concept of liberation. But the problem is that once it crosses into a different place, there is no guarantee that the freedom one believes in is legitimate.

In other words, a freedom universal to all humanity can never be realized through any method that has been attempted so far. It can only be thought about within the limits of the place where the Enlightenment occurred. This indigenous character runs through the foundations of Enlightenment thought: reason, liberty, equality. But the moment an individual ignores or loses awareness of this dimension of place, what they are doing will inevitably contain an element of coercion for the other side. This has been raised as a problem before, yet it does not appear to have been genuinely internalized.

That said, freedom as mediated through the Enlightenment connects to the civic consciousness of liberty against the state, and on this point its effectiveness is beyond question. What must not be misunderstood is that the issue is not a blanket critique of freedom. The essential point is that the exteriority of the concept of freedom is always subject to the regulation of place. Lose sight of this and freedom becomes a confusion.

If we focus on this exteriority of freedom, the following becomes clear. For peoples living in countries that have not historically passed through the stage of restraining the state by the power of citizens, even if not through a full citizen revolution, and who do not carry a Western context, the freedom they hold is probably not the same as what the majority of people today understand by the word. This is a truth. But truth is not a single absolute universal answer. Nothing is more subject to transformation by place than truth. My view is that truth is pluralistic. Move the time or the place and truth changes easily.

The problem is that the freedom most people unconsciously assume they know is not necessarily freedom at all. This harbors a great contradiction. As with truth, my view is that freedom is profoundly pluralistic. If I were to state just one thing about the essence of freedom it would be this: the only question is whether freedom exists within your own heart. Everything returns to this point.

Here a fissure opens in how freedom is understood. If we think of freedom as a collective problem concerning large groups, then freedom in the Enlightenment context is certainly the most effective framework. But even that cannot become universal, as the state of the world today makes plain. At a minimum, what our experience tells us is that the only question that ultimately deserves to be asked is whether freedom exists within yourself. Everything else is exteriority, and the two must not be treated as the same. In the post-Enlightenment mode of thinking premised on separation, collective consciousness compressed into exteriority will inevitably invert toward defending the interests of the community. Rather than the antiquated class struggle that locates the problem in the exterior, there is no means of transforming exteriority other than relentless introspection directed at oneself.

If freedom inevitably inverts when brought into the exterior, nothing embodies this tendency more starkly than the Enlightenment itself. The Enlightenment’s own beginnings were confined to the places within which Rousseau and Montesquieu could communicate. Whether it was the French Revolution or the Glorious Revolution in England before it, this quality is exactly the same.

The descendants of people who situated this kind of thought at the core of their tradition do indeed have this species of freedom rooted in them. For those who inherit a place this is only natural. And when these descendants of a given place still constitute the majority at the civic level, the regulation of place will always transmit its memory to the people as a quality of the land. Those who carry this invisible inheritance of place-spirit with particular strength do not easily waver no matter how the era shifts. They stand on soil and they have grown from roots planted in that soil.