Sven Brinkman is a Danish philosopher and psychologist who has written two books, "10 Old Ideas in a New World" and "Stands Points." In the latter, he explores why modern life can feel like "Liquid Modernity," and why the typical approach to personal development and self-improvement doesn't help us from drowning in it.
00:02:07.900He was in World War II and fled from – he was a Jew, so he fled to the UK and worked as a sociologist there.
00:02:15.920And he developed this account of our times based on the idea that things have become fluid.
00:02:24.400They have become liquid, and he called it liquid modernity,
00:02:27.540in order to distinguish it from a more solid modernity.
00:02:31.700You know, with industrial society, with sort of stable social norms, people knew what to do.
00:02:40.220They were perhaps also quite often caught in a certain social position that it was difficult to escape from, and so on.
00:02:47.440But then in the latter half of the 20th century, after the war, and especially after the countercultures of the 60s and 70s, the youth revolt,
00:02:58.920we developed – or they developed a consumer society, a liquid modernity, when – you know, even Marx – Karl Marx predicted this in the 19th century,
00:03:09.340when he said that with the advancement of capitalism, all that is solid melts into air.
00:03:14.100That's the famous phrase, all that is solid, solid melts into air.
00:03:19.060And Bauman saw this, that everything had melded into air.
00:03:23.080Nothing was stable, nothing was permanent.
00:03:26.080Everything was suddenly up to the individual.
00:03:30.600And the individual had to engage in constant self-optimization, self-improvement, self-development,
00:03:37.340work in learning organizations, be ready for lifelong learning, and so on and so forth.
00:03:43.240All of which, I should add, are processes that have a positive side.
00:03:49.780But when these things are constantly demanded of the individual, it's not really that positive.
00:03:55.940It's actually very difficult to live up to.
00:03:58.840And it creates stress and anxiety and depression in individuals,
00:04:03.140and it makes it very difficult to navigate as an ethical being, to navigate morally,
00:04:09.520when everything solid is suddenly melded into air.
00:04:13.520I think all of us have felt that stress and that anxiety of like,
00:04:17.380I've got to lose weight, and I've got to do this to get my job,
00:06:01.780We have to lose weight again or become happier, fitter, more productive.
00:06:07.060Now, I'm quoting a song by Radiohead, I believe.
00:06:08.900And so, when we discover this, it really creates a deep kind of despair that I think is behind all these epidemics of stress, depression, and anxiety that we see all across the Western world.
00:06:24.500Even in a rich country like my own in Denmark, we find epidemics of these mental problems.
00:06:32.560And, of course, this is a very complex problem, but I think much of it has to do with what Baumann originally called liquid modernity.
00:06:41.420And I also think the problem with self-help, too, is, and you articulate this in the book, is that I think what people fundamentally want,
00:06:48.760they want a sense of significance and meaning.
00:06:50.660And self-help says, well, if you do these things, you will find significance and meaning.
00:10:30.940What are my commitments as a human being within these relationships that I'm part of?
00:10:36.200So your second book, Standpoints, talks about some of these outside commitments that we can live, you know, stand firm or standpoints that we can stand firm on.
00:10:45.820And we'll talk about these here in a bit.
00:10:47.520But another interesting thing you do in Standpoints, that you describe modern life not only as liquid modernity, but it's also it's become completely instrumental.
00:11:38.580And then we do Y in order to achieve Z and so on and so forth.
00:11:42.920And so everything has become, of course, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but we can be more concrete later.
00:11:49.480Everything almost has become a stepping stone to something else.
00:11:53.880And so we never really experience intrinsic meaning.
00:11:56.900Or if we do, we are constantly in doubt whether it's okay, whether we are wasting our time, because shouldn't we be doing something useful, something that will take us to the next stage or the next step or whatever in our development plans?
00:12:12.280So that's the problem of instrumentalism.
00:12:14.680It exercises meaning from our lives because meaning is connected to that which is intrinsically meaningful and intrinsically valuable.
00:12:24.680And then, of course, the big question is, what is intrinsically meaningful and valuable?
00:12:30.540And the book is actually about that question.
00:12:33.340Well, before we get to that question, what are some insidious examples of instrumentality in modern life where people don't realize they're being instrumental, but they are?
00:12:43.860Well, I try to provide a lot of examples from different areas of life.
00:12:48.360And sadly, they're very easy to think of.
00:12:51.180For example, to begin with my own sort of local life in the institutions that I'm part of, we have public universities in Denmark, and I'm part of that.
00:13:00.880And we used to have independent universities that saw knowledge as an end in itself.
00:13:08.260I mean, we should develop knowledge in order to be wiser, in order to find out more about the world that we live in.
00:13:16.420And now universities are increasingly controlled by political goals that say that, well, we should develop knowledge that will help us increase our gross national product, that will help us become more effective, be able to beat the Chinese in the global competition for market shares and so on.
00:13:38.000And that leaves so many forms of knowledge without a chance, knowledge of ancient Greek, knowledge of French culture, philosophy, whatever, because it isn't really something that can boost the gross national product of the country.
00:13:59.020So knowledge is no longer an end in itself.
00:14:01.880But more seriously, or more, you know, at least in an ethical sense, more problematic is that when we begin to approach human relationships instrumentally, when we begin to think of friendship as something that is a tool for the individual's success.
00:14:20.180If you look at, I mean, we call them friends, the connections we have on Facebook, instead of a circle of friends, we now have LinkedIn connections and so on.
00:14:46.060I mean, friendship, if you have a friend, you will be there for the other, regardless of what you sort of can take away from that, I mean, or get out of it.
00:14:58.460A friend is not an instrumental person in your life.
00:15:01.440A friend is someone you will help, regardless of, you know, any ulterior gains you may get from that.
00:15:09.060But love relationships, I mean, romantic relationships, have also increasingly become instrumentalized.
00:15:16.200We navigate in our love life, according to the question.
00:15:23.120Who will realize me and myself to the greatest possible extent?
00:15:28.600How can I really commit to another person?
00:15:30.920If I always have this question in the back of my mind, could there be someone else who is better, who's a better tool, basically, in the project of making me happy?
00:15:44.920And I mean, these are just some examples of instrumentalism, which is, I think, so prevalent in our culture that it's, in a way, actually quite difficult to talk about because it's so basic now.
00:15:57.500So it's more or less our basic outlook on life and other people.
00:16:02.100No, when I read that idea about instrumental, I started thinking about other ways I've seen it prop up, particularly in the self-help genre.
00:16:07.980Because, like, I'm guilty of this as myself, like, when I've written articles on our website, like, you need to do this thing because of this.
00:16:14.480Like, one was, like, gratitude, right?
00:16:16.480It's not long, you should be grateful just to be grateful.
00:16:36.020It's a fundamental human value to play.
00:16:38.100And now, in schools, you know, they have play curricula that, exactly as you say, as opposed to boost the pupil's math scores, you know, linguistic competencies or whatever.
00:16:51.500And, you know, even these very particular human phenomena that we don't see in other living creatures, at least that we're aware of, for example, forgiveness.
00:17:01.080There's a chapter about forgiveness in the book, and I find this a most fascinating topic.
00:17:05.800But when you look at how forgiveness is treated in the self-help literature, and even by, you know, serious psychologists, it's almost always instrumentalized.
00:17:17.740And I mean by that, that people are encouraged to forgive others because it will make them feel better.
00:17:24.700It will, you know, set them free and they can live their lives in a different and more productive way and so on and so forth.
00:17:30.360And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that.
00:17:47.440I forgive you in order to achieve this myself.
00:17:51.040But really, if you think about it, forgiveness, if it even exists, and that's an open question, but if it exists as a human phenomenon, forgiveness, then it's a gift.
00:18:00.940It's something you give unconditionally.
00:18:04.020And that is characteristic of all these phenomena that I call standpoints, all these phenomena that have intrinsic values.
00:18:12.460If we put them into a calculus and ask, so what's in it for me to forgive, what's in it for me to love, what's in it for me to live in a way that protects the intrinsic dignity of the other person and so on, then we really reduce these human values to instruments for our own purposes.
00:18:35.520And I think that is, in a way, I don't want to be too dramatic, but in a way, it's a form of ethical violence, I believe.
00:18:43.100And you also make the case that this instrumentality can lead to nihilism or nullism.
00:18:50.760There is a very interesting philosopher, Simon Critchley.
00:18:53.620He's at the New School of Social Research in New York City, originally from the UK.
00:18:57.880But he writes about these things, and I found in his work this distinction between two kinds of nihilism.
00:19:08.680One is, well, nihilism is the theory, if you will, or the belief that nothing ultimately has value.
00:19:17.760If there is value in the world, it's something we subjectively project onto the world.
00:19:23.680The world itself is just, you know, matter in motion, or, you know, like, you know, Woody Allen would talk about, you know, existential philosophers would talk about, the world is absurd, there's no value in the world, it's all meaningless, right?
00:19:40.600And then the philosophical tradition of nihilism and existentialism will say that we have to create value, and we do that subjectively, exactly by looking into ourselves and then projecting this value onto the world.
00:19:57.540And then Simon Critchley makes this distinction between two kinds of nihilism.
00:20:02.380One is active, and it says that, well, values have been destroyed by, I don't know, modern society, capitalism, yeah, modernity, whatever.
00:20:13.880And then we have to, you know, actively create value together.
00:20:18.620In the most extreme case, this is done through revolutions, you know, like in communism or terrorism, as in, you know, Islamic terror and so on.
00:20:29.400But they try to create a certain order in the world that has meaning.
00:20:34.460Of course, for most of us, fortunately, this is not an option.
00:20:38.700We are neither Islamic terrorists or communists or anything like that.
00:20:43.320So, for us, the option is what Critchley calls passive nihilism.
00:20:48.080And that is about creating meaning exactly through what you talked about before, this inward-looking movement.
00:20:56.540I create meaning by finding out what is important for me, what feels right for me.
00:21:02.460And if it feels right for me, then it is right.
00:21:05.260And then I am allowed and I should be encouraged to project that onto the world as such.
00:21:11.920And I find out about what is right for me through mindfulness or life coaching or meditation or psychotherapy or any other kinds of, you know, techniques of self-discovery, self-improvement and happiness that we have available in the modern world.
00:21:31.060And the point is that this, at first glance, it looks like something liberating.
00:21:37.840It looks as if it's emancipatory because it gives the individual so much power to create meaning and purpose.
00:21:45.260But Critchley would say, and I would agree with him, and a host of philosophers and also psychologists are now sort of discovering that it's not really emancipatory.
00:21:58.960It's actually the opposite because it makes us solely responsible for everything in our lives, which is unbearable.
00:22:06.720It's a form of despair, as my compatriot son Kierkegaard would say, and we become little gods in our own lives.
00:22:15.180And that is not really a good way of living for human beings.
00:22:18.420So again, we are back to the necessary search for alternatives.
00:22:24.100If we are not the sole creators of meaning, purpose, and value, if we cannot passively discover it within ourselves and create it, then how can we find it?
00:22:38.200And again, the answer must be that we should look for it in our relationships to something beyond ourselves, other people, nature, culture, history, tradition, all the important institutions in our democracies and so on.
00:22:51.980So we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:22:57.520So let's talk about some of these standpoints.
00:22:59.820You start off with Aristotle, and I think you start off with him because he kind of lays the foundation for the rest of these.
00:23:06.100He was like the father of anti-instrumentality.
00:23:09.500What was his idea that you took from him on how to stand firm on something firm?
00:23:14.700Well, to be a bit, to say it in a rather simple way, I would say Aristotle, who was a fantastic thinker and scientist, I mean, in all the different disciplines, we have biology and physics and chemistry and psychology and so on.
00:23:32.120And psychology, sorry, Aristotle inaugurated, in a way, all these different scientific disciplines.
00:23:37.640And I would say that his greatest discovery, and in a way, it's a discovery that is up there with Darwin's discovery of evolutionary processes and Einstein in relativity theory, even though it sounds much more trivial.
00:23:55.380Aristotle discovered that there are certain things, certain values in the human world that are intrinsically valuable.
00:24:05.180He discovered that there are certain things we ought to do just in order to do them.
00:24:11.560And if we instrumentalize them, we really, well, shoot ourselves in our feet, as we say.
00:24:19.440If we walk by a river and we witness a small child who's about to drown in the river, and we stand there considering, should I really try to save this child?
00:24:48.240You know, there is research, serious research done in health psychology that supposedly, allegedly demonstrates that if you do such moral acts, you live longer.
00:26:32.920I would add, you know, democracy or trust or, of course, for Aristotle, also ethical action and so on and so forth.
00:26:41.600But that project has sadly been, well, forgotten.
00:26:47.540It's too strong because, of course, we have had philosophers working in this line of thought all the time.
00:26:52.800But I think in liquid modernity, with the rise of instrumentalism, it has really become difficult to pose this fundamental question, what is just valuable in itself?
00:27:06.140We tend to think that nothing is valuable in itself.
00:27:08.440It's just valuable because I choose that it's valuable.
00:27:12.080But that's nihilism, and that's not going to help us.
00:27:15.660Yeah, Aristotle, I mean, has had a huge influence, not only on the world of philosophy, but also theology.
00:27:19.720I mean, he had a big influence on Aquinas, where Aquinas basically took Aristotle's idea of the good, like you do something because it's good in of itself, and, you know, said, like, well, you do something because God says to do it, right?
00:27:31.640Because God is good, and you're going to follow him.
00:27:33.520And so you see that play out as well in the world of religion, too.
00:27:37.900Yeah, Aquinas is quite an interesting character.
00:27:40.340He tried to synthesize the Greek legacy, particularly from Aristotle, whom he simply referred to as the philosopher.
00:27:47.300I mean, Aristotle was just the philosopher, even though, you know, he knew about Plato and many other philosophers.
00:27:56.280But to synthesize Aristotle and Christianity was the great project for Aquinas.
00:28:02.200And I mean, if you look at, I know that I'm a psychologist, but I also have a background in philosophy, and I follow philosophy, academic philosophy.
00:28:09.520And if you look at all the philosophers working around the world, I mean, so few of them are now interested in the questions that we now talk about, in the questions that Aristotle and Aquinas were interested in.
00:28:23.520Most of them work on, you know, little technicalities in modal logic or, you know, something about bioethics, whatnot.
00:28:32.140And all these things are important, too.
00:28:35.120But my point is that most of us become interested in these questions, in philosophy, because we want to know how to live our lives.
00:28:43.500And I think philosophers really should return to those ancient questions, because that is really the reason why we have philosophy, in order to help us address those questions.
00:28:54.520So, Aristotle, you do good because it's good.
00:28:58.620The second philosopher and an idea you took from him was Kant, and this is the idea of dignity.
00:29:03.440So, what is dignity, and what does the instrumental view replace dignity with in the modern world?
00:29:08.680Yeah, for me, it's important that Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of the Enlightenment, follows the chapter on Aristotle.
00:29:16.180Aristotle and other Greek philosophers were very clear that because humans have a unique kind of rationality, we're able to fathom that certain things are intrinsically valuable.
00:29:30.620We should do the good in order to do the good, and not in order to achieve anything else.
00:29:35.760We may achieve something else, but that's not the reason why we should do it.
00:29:38.980But the Greeks did not know that human beings are intrinsically valuable, and the term we traditionally use to address that is dignity, human dignity.
00:29:52.420I mean, Aristotle had slaves, women were not considered as rational beings that one could really count on in the Greek polis.
00:30:03.040And so, in the history of ideas, it's a revolution in our view of human beings, and probably Jesus was the first to talk about this, and it entered philosophy in different ways.
00:30:18.640But it's very clear in the Enlightenment with Immanuel Kant when he says that human beings have dignity, which means that we cannot trade humans on a marketplace.
00:30:30.060We cannot think of human beings as creatures with a price that we can buy and sell.
00:30:50.940The problem is if we only have instrumental relationships to other people.
00:30:55.380As he would say, we should never treat other people exclusively as means, but also always also as an end in itself, as an end in themselves, right?
00:31:07.460So, if I go and buy some milk in the shop, in a way, the person in the shop is an instrument that I use in order to buy my milk.
00:31:16.020And conversely, I am an instrument for the shopkeeper because I give him or her some money.
00:31:23.640And so, we have this market relationship to each other, and that's perfectly fine.
00:31:28.280We engage instrumentally with each other.
00:31:30.980But let's say that the shopkeeper has a heart attack while I'm buying my milk, so I cannot get my milk.
00:31:36.520Then it's very disturbing because I wanted my milk.
00:31:40.180And so, if I begin to shout in the shop and say, well, please give me a new shopkeeper because this one broke down.
00:31:46.620I need a new one so I can get my milk.
00:31:52.440And then the problem is, also according to Bauman, with whom I began to talk about liquid modernity, that we have these instrumental relationships to other people in our times, which makes the other just a tool for my desires and preferences.
00:32:11.300The other becomes someone I should make use of in order to realize whatever wish I have to buy my milk to become successful or happiness in life, to make a career or whatever.
00:32:25.860And again, it's okay to have an instrumental relationship to others as long as it is grounded in a much more fundamental understanding of the other as an end in itself, as we all are.
00:32:41.940I mean, that is, we have human rights.
00:32:51.180Perhaps we are gradually losing it, unfortunately.
00:32:54.500But we should have this fundamental understanding that everyone has equal value just in virtue of being human, regardless of what we produce, of what we achieve, of how beautiful we are, how rich we are, how successful we are.
00:33:13.700You know, regardless, we have equal value.
00:33:17.020That's a radical idea when you think it through.
00:34:19.840But in my opinion, it's certainly the jewel in the line of thought that runs, well, at least from the birth of Jesus, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and up to our times.
00:34:33.120And we should do whatever we can to protect that jewel.
00:34:36.020Something that you touch on the book, and I've noticed too after I read about this, read this chapter, was not only do we sometimes, not sometimes, but often treat others merely as a means and instrumentalize others.
00:34:49.540But we also do it to ourselves, right?
00:34:51.300We don't have, like, there's like not a sense of self-dignity, right?
00:34:54.440And you see this where people, I don't know, do things on social media to get attention, right?
00:35:06.240And like, but they're doing it because like it'll bring them value, it'll get them attention, which would hopefully lead to money and fame, whatever it is they think they want.
00:35:14.860You talk about the fact that it will bring them attention.
00:35:18.280And I think that is very precise because attention has become how we really think of value today.
00:35:27.540If you can get attention almost, you know, regardless of why you get attention, then you have done something valuable, which when you think of it is a rather insane idea because you can get attention by, you know, doing all sorts of silly things or evil things by killing others or whatever.
00:35:45.920So we have this attention economy that is really, I would say, dangerous and part of this whole system.
00:36:24.940It figures already in Genesis, you know, when Adam and Eve begin to feel shame the moment they achieve self-consciousness because they have eaten from the tree of knowledge, from the forbidden fruit.
00:36:38.000So it's intimately connected to self-consciousness, so it's intimately connected to self-understanding shame.
00:36:43.160And the danger we have now is, well, one of the dangers, there are many, but one related to this point is the danger of shamelessness.
00:36:53.480If we are not capable of feeling shame, but we will do anything to attract attention, then we no longer have dignity.
00:37:02.340And ultimately, we can no longer be moral beings because the capacity to feel shame when you do something shameful is fundamental to morality.
00:37:14.940And it's not a coincidence that, you know, an incapacity to feel guilt and shame is a key criterion for antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy or psychopathy.
00:37:29.440If psychopaths exist, I'm not an expert in that field, but if they exist, the key defect is probably this lack of shame.
00:37:41.140And so, again, to return to the self-help world and the idea of self-development, much of what goes on there is about learning to avoid shame, to, you know, not feel shame.
00:37:55.480And I think this is very wrong because, well, of course, the point is not that we should go around and feel ashamed all the time, certainly not, but we should have the capacity to feel shame and guilt and all the other moral emotions without which we couldn't be moral creatures.
00:38:17.300All right. So, dignity is a standing standpoint.
00:38:21.160The next one you talked about that stuck out to me was an idea you took from Nietzsche, which is interesting because Nietzsche, you know, I think incorrectly is believed to be sort of the father of nihilism and et cetera.
00:38:32.680But he wasn't. He actually had some really interesting ideas about what to do in this liquid modern world of ours.
00:38:39.100And one standpoint you took from him was the idea of promises.
00:38:42.240What can we learn about promises from Nietzsche?
00:38:43.900Yeah, I should say that I don't pretend to provide a complete interpretation of, well, neither Aristotle or Kant and certainly not Nietzsche.
00:38:56.420I admire much in Nietzsche. There's also much in his works that I disagree with.
00:39:02.480I think he's often misunderstood. As you said, people read him as a nihilist.
00:39:07.460In reality, he saw the problem of nihilism in Western culture.
00:39:11.820He saw actually many of the problems because he was a genius more than a hundred years ago, many of the problems that we now talk about.
00:39:20.680But I think he did not really come up with good solutions, if you will.
00:39:27.480But there is this passage in one of his books when he talks about the human being as a creature with the right to make promises.
00:39:36.980And so I am interested in the role of promises in human life and in the conditions that must exist in order for such a wonderful thing as a promise to make sense in the first place.
00:39:55.100It's a unique human, uniquely human phenomenon.
00:39:58.780And what is the precondition for promising something?
00:40:04.560Well, a promise only makes sense if you have what another philosopher, a Frenchman called Paul Ricoeur, called self-constancy, right?
00:40:15.760Because if you're not the same person tomorrow when you are going to, you know, fulfill the promise as you were yesterday when you made the promise, then the practice of making promises is meaningless.
00:41:13.040That was Sven Brinkmann two months ago.
00:41:15.460And now I'm a new and better version of myself.
00:41:17.800I'm no longer obliged to do what the old Sven Brinkmann promised.
00:41:21.240Now, because I've paid so much money to my life coach or whoever who taught me that I should do whatever I feel like doing and not think of what other people think of me.
00:41:33.940And it illustrates the idea of promising from Nietzsche and the idea of self-constancy from Recur that without this continuity in our commitments, in ourselves, in our personhood, nothing in the human world can really stick together.
00:41:54.940And then I'm worried when I read the self-help books or I look at how we're encouraged to act in our lives by all sorts of psychologists and therapists and what have you who say that, well, life is about constant development.
00:42:28.420And in reality, of course, life is about both aspects, self-constancy and self-development.
00:42:34.200But if you only emphasize one of them, if you only emphasize self-development and forget about self-constancy, then ethical life is no longer possible.
00:44:05.920Yeah, I'm not sure that she actually believes that there is no truth.
00:44:09.560But she says, well, even if there is no truth, there might be and there might not be.
00:44:14.840But even if there isn't one, then we can still be truthful.
00:44:18.880We can still live our lives in a way that commits us to certain things, that gives us this kind of self-constancy that I just talked about with reference to recur.
00:44:29.800So that's a way of arguing in favor of these standpoints without committing myself to, you know, a very strong form of objectivism.
00:44:41.820The idea that these fundamental values just exist outside space and time, outside human life and so on, I don't think they do.
00:44:50.540I think there is a certain truth to be found there.
00:44:53.500But Ahrendt says, well, even if there isn't such a truth to be found, then this doesn't leave us without standpoints.
00:45:01.980It doesn't leave us without value, non-subjective value, because we can still be truthful.
00:45:08.820Even if everything happens by chance or by coincidence, well, that doesn't mean that you should act by coincidence, right?
00:45:19.600This thought also goes back to the ancient Stoics, actually.
00:45:23.700Marcus Aurelius, the wonderful philosopher, emperor, known mainly today through the movie Gladiator.
00:45:30.620He said that even if everything happens by coincidence, then still you don't have to act yourself by coincidence.
00:45:39.800And I think that is something worth considering.
00:45:42.720So, one last standpoint I'd like to talk about from a philosopher is Camus, which I thought was interesting because, you know, earlier we were talking about sort of this nihilism of, you know, life is absurd.
00:45:54.960This is kind of brought up by the existentialists.
00:46:03.100But you were able to find a standpoint from him.
00:46:05.380What was that standpoint you took from Camus?
00:46:07.260Yeah, I have quite an ambivalent relationship to the existential philosophers.
00:46:13.800I think there are, you know, sparks of genius, obviously, in Sartre's works and in the works of Camus.
00:46:21.560But especially with Sartre, I think it slides too easily into subjectivism and nihilism.
00:46:29.480I mean, the idea that we just create value subjectively.
00:46:32.740It's not there before we live or before we decide that something is valuable.
00:46:38.020I think Camus is much more sophisticated than that simple form of existentialism.
00:46:45.500And I also think that he would dislike being referred to as an existentialist.
00:46:49.820Of course, we can talk about him as an existential thinker.
00:46:55.220And people, when we mention those today, address those today, they tend to think of them as, you know, people who saw human freedom as absolute.
00:47:08.260Human life is about being free without constraints.
00:47:12.820And then Camus says in one of his articles that freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges, but of responsibilities.
00:47:22.980And if you have responsibilities in order to be free, then you don't create yourself and your own life and all the values that are important out of nothing.
00:47:36.140No, you discover in a way that something is already valuable and you already have responsibilities because you already have relationships to other people.
00:47:48.920And Camus would say that this is not a threat to freedom.
00:47:52.960On the other hand, it's a precondition for freedom.
00:47:55.840And I think initially it's a difficult thought to grasp, but I think it's very deep and I think it's very true.
00:48:04.420If I can return to Immanuel Kant, we talked about him in the context of human dignity.
00:48:10.420He has such a wonderful image of what I mean and what Camus meant in one of his books.
00:48:16.400He, it's a metaphor of the dove, you know, the bird that flies through space and it feels the pressure of the wind on its wings and Kant imagines that the dove thinks to itself,
00:48:33.620well, it's okay to fly, I kind of like it, but it would be better if I could fly in a vacuum because then there wouldn't be this annoying air that blocks my free, you know, movement through space.
00:48:53.680And then Kant says, well, little dove, you forget one thing, namely that if you were in a vacuum, you couldn't fly, you would fall to the ground because it's the air that at one or the same time, in a way is blocking your free flight, but it's also making it possible, right?
00:49:16.540So in a vacuum, there is no air, so you just fall to the ground.
00:49:19.720But it's these factors outside yourself that actually resist your free movements through space or through life, if you will, that also enables you to be free and enables you to move around.
00:49:35.560So if you didn't have responsibilities, if you didn't have commitments, if you were just an atom that looked inside yourself for whatever, you know, motive for what should I do, I don't know, let me feel about it inside myself instead of let me think about it, then you wouldn't be free.
00:50:08.200And freedom is not the same as acting out of chance.
00:50:12.880Freedom is acting in a conscious, willed, and responsible way.
00:50:19.020And I think Camus actually articulated that very well.
00:50:22.000All right, so that standpoint from Camus is like freedom is a standpoint, but it's not the freedom of liquid modernity where there's no restraints, you do whatever you want.
00:50:30.000It's a freedom that's tied with responsibilities.
00:50:32.960Yeah, it's what Isaiah Berlin, the great historian of ideas, called positive freedom.
00:50:40.820He worked with two concepts of freedom or liberty, a negative one and a positive one.
00:50:47.080And the negative one is probably the one we have today.
00:50:51.740And it means that we are free when there are no constraints.
00:50:55.800I mean, we are free when we are free from demands, constraints, outer structures that impinge on us, whatever.
00:51:05.100And that's why he called it negative freedom, because it's a freedom from something.
00:51:08.900But positive freedom is a freedom to do something, is a freedom to try to live up to the responsibilities and commitments we have.
00:51:19.720And I don't think one of these concepts is totally correct and the other is totally wrong.
00:51:26.640I think our idea of freedom has different sides.
00:51:32.220And I think it has both positive and negative aspects, to use the terminology of Berlin.
00:51:38.720But I think we have forgotten about this idea of positive freedom, that we are not born free, if you will, even though a baby has certain preferences, it has certain needs, it has certain desires.
00:51:53.240And even if all those needs and desires are fulfilled all the time, then we don't think of it as free.
00:52:00.480That's strange, because it cannot act.
00:52:11.980Well, because the baby has not yet become an autonomous person that is able to be responsible for what he or she does, the baby has no commitments or no responsibilities yet.
00:52:30.980So we become free when we gain responsibilities in our lives.
00:52:35.260And again, the important point is to understand that all these outer demands, constraints, and responsibilities, they are not a hindrance to human freedom.
00:52:48.040No, they are a precondition for human freedom.
00:52:50.200And I think that is what we need to acknowledge.
00:52:53.500Well, Sven, there's so much more we could talk about.
00:52:55.120We could have talked about your fellow Dane, Kierkegaard, and his idea.
00:52:58.620But where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:53:00.960Well, I have written a whole lot of books, some of them in English, some have been translated into English.
00:53:12.500We talked about the first two in the series, Stand Firm and Stand Points.
00:53:17.100But there is a third book called The Joy of Missing Out, which is more about how to create communities, institutions, well, even societies, actually, in which these standpoints become visible, in which we can institutionalize them and live in accordance with them.
00:53:39.860So it's not just an individual project.
00:53:43.780So those three books, apart from that, I tweet Sven Brinkmann, but mostly in Danish.
00:53:54.980I also have a podcast, a radio program, but also in Danish.
00:53:59.800So I'm afraid that people have to learn Danish if they want to listen to my voice.
00:54:05.840But if they do that, they can actually also read Kierkegaard in the original language.
00:54:11.160So they can follow in the footsteps of Jean-Paul Sartre, the great existentialist, who learned Danish in order to read Kierkegaard in Danish.