Stress and Freedom

I reviewed Peter Sloterdijk's book on self-formation in the last issue, and here he takes a historical view of the concept of freedom from ancient Greece to the present era. He argues that political communities arise 'in response to a form of anxiety or stress' and applies this to the Greek polis with its concept of eleutheria. Central to the book is a discussion of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which I read while studying French in the 1970s. His was a 'felt existence' expressed by the modern individual as a subject free of stress in the natural world. This situation makes him useless in a utilitarian sense and a forerunner of loafing, which is no use to society as a whole. Sloterdijk further argues that the notion of reality is a construct of modernity by defenders of objectivity, reminding readers that the solitary Rousseau was also the author of The Social Contract and the notion of general will. For Sloterdijk, the origin of freedom lies in noble disposition and generosity and liberality in the sense of sympathy. This is a highly original reading of the genealogy of freedom.