Essay Forth Into Liberty

There is something sad and pathetic about a twenty-nine year graduate student playing with margins and font sizes to get his work to fit within five pages. In my efforts to increase my stipend and/or get out of service work forthe English department, I'm applying for a fellowship outside of my department. The fellowship asks for me to write an essay on "liberty," and in doing so, I have become aware of just how potentially confining such an essay topic can become.

For instance, one important aspect of "liberty" is that it ought to include the freedom to write more than five pages. Take John Stuart Mill's work On Liberty, for example. The book is a lot longer than five pages. Heck, even people writing on bondage go longer than that--Luther's Bondage of the Will, again with the length. Or, on the other hand ... what if I wanted to define "liberty" in just one sentence, like Locke does? Would they give me the scholarship? I think not. This essay assignment has become like the mythic character Procrustes, the host who got his guests to fit in his bed by either stretching them out on the rack or cutting off their feet.

Another important aspect of "liberty" is conceiving of it in a manner that is relevant to you in your own unique historical moment. For instance, for me personally at this juncture, the true picture of "liberty" is one involving fellowship providers showering me with money so that I can get my dissertation done and not have to do departmental service for my stipend. You see the problem. In writing on "liberty," I must inevitably write on something that is not the liberty foremost on my mind. I am in bondage to the selection committee and what I think they want me to say. Sure, technically I have the "liberty" to submit a one-sentence essay that simply says, "Give me money or I shall hate you, sincerely, me," in the same sense that I have the "liberty" to hit myself repeatedly in the head with a banjo. Until I passed out from the blows, in which case I would lose this precious freedom. In which case I would not be free. Which proves the case that I am not at liberty now. I'm not allowed to write a nice simple, honest message expressing my boundless greed. You would think that the boundlessness of my greed would show how much I've imbibed the principles of liberty and freedom, but no! I think we're all led pretty inexorably to the conclusion that we must contradict liberty in the very attempt to instantiate it. I bet if Derrida were here, he'd agree with me, but he's not at liberty to be here, because he's dead.

I am not only limited by page length, my desire to represent my own beliefs accurately, my desire to receive money, and Derrida's being dead, but I am also limited by how I want my professors to see me. Since the scholarship asks for letters of recommendation, a couple profs have asked to see my essay so that they can formulate their letter to address the scholarship. Now, an important feature of "liberty" is that people are free to agree with your ideas, or free to think you are a dunderhead. Now, and this is the weird thing so get your mind around it, upon occasions in which two separate people exist, each of them may believe that the other person is being a dunderhead. Stunning, but I have had the lab results analyzed. Now, this would not pose a problem if not for the fact that sometimes a third person exists who wants money and wants neither of the two parties to think he is a dunderhead. Since there is so much ideological disagreement about what constitutes liberty, I wondered if perhaps the trick to getting different parties to agree with me is to define liberty in as abstract and ambiguous terms as possible.

I then started to think, perhaps I am not the only person to get this idea of celebrating the fuzziness of liberty in the abstract. Take amendment 4 of the Constitution, for example: it condemns "unreasonable searches and seizures" and that warrants should only be issued "upon probable cause." I think we can all agree. This is part of the problem. There are probably a large number of totalitarian regime type people who think that they would be being reasonable. And it wouldn't really be fair of me to expect each constitutional amendment to explicate the concrete conditions for what's "unreasonable" or what's "probable" ... and neither would it be fair for the essay readers to expect me to explicate what liberty actually is! Bwah-hah-hah, eureka!

Since I cannot include these particular insights about liberty into the body of the essay itself, I have determined that it is only here, here in the realm of pseudoprofundities, that I can be at true liberty. Or can I? Even here, I must impose self-censorship, being careful that if my secret identity ever becomes known to the world, I have said nothing incriminating through the strict maintenance of methodical vagueness and lack of clarity. Here, here is where I am free--to say nothing.