Book Review: The Freedom Paradox – Towards A Post-Secular Ethics

At first, it seemed strange that Clive Hamilton, author of Affluenza and Scorcher and feisty former executive director of the Australia Institute should be writing a fairly heavy book on philosophy.

Thinking more deeply, I realised that any social activist and, particularly, one who wrote influential books on contentious subjects concerning the future of our society and our world should be concerned about questions of morals. An even more important topic for the social activist is the philosophical basis of morals. Why do anything concerning the state of the world, one might ask, if morality is merely relative, if any set of principles is as good as any other.

In The Freedom Paradox, Professor Hamilton2 sets out to provide a sound philosophical basis for what he calls a post-secular ethics. In a society where religion, no longer, plays a dominant role, Professor Hamilton must eschew reliance on the authority of the divine or the revelation of scripture. He must find an anchor for a set of ethical principles which will avoid the potential despair of moral relativism.

The freedom paradox of the title draws upon the failure of many, especially in the developed world, to find happiness despite the absence of material want and the absence of constraints either from legal restriction or societal taboos. Professor Hamilton concludes that modern life evidences a failure of long sought after freedoms to deliver happiness. He also notes that the ability to make choices has not led to individuals making well thought out choices to live very individual lifestyles. Rather, people tend to live conformist lifestyles, making choices encouraged, indeed, dictated by corporate marketing. Unparalleled freedom has led to unsatisfying, conformist, unfree lifestyles. This is the “freedom paradox”.

In this way, the pursuit of a new ethical theory is a pursuit of true freedom.

Professor Hamilton pursues his new ethics via a new metaphysics. First, the nature of experience and knowledge must be explained. This pursuit returns, in the first instance, to Immanuel Kant, the great German rationalist and philosopher of the Enlightenment.

Through Kant, Hamilton explains that the world is only known to us through the product of our senses and our rational thought. The world as we thus perceive it is called the “phenomenon”. We can know very little about the underlying or real world on which our senses and consciousness acts. Borrowing from different cultures, Professor Hamilton describes this other world as “the thing as it is” or the “noumenon”.

Professor Hamilton then turns to another German philosopher (and follower of Kant), Arthur Schopenhauer, to unlock the secrets of the noumenon. By postulating that concepts such as space and time and causality are products of human consciousness and, thereby, part of the phenomenon, Hamilton infers that the noumenon is unified and unchanging and beyond space and time.

Professor Hamilton also attacks the nature of the noumenon through the eyes of poets and mystics. Although unable to be experienced by rational thought, the noumenon may be glimpsed, momentarily, when conscious thought is suspended. This may occur through forms of meditation; through certain religious experiences; and in moments of communion with natural vistas.

Having solved the problem of the nature of the world, Professor Hamilton then turns to apply the new metaphysical understanding to derivation of the new ethics. Since everything is part is the noumenon, we also come from the noumenon. As such, we are connected to all nature and to each other. However, our conscious thought also separates us from the noumenon and we can only have limited understanding of the whole and we are most conscious of our individual existence and our separation from the whole.

However, we can access the noumenon by looking within to our moral self. When we look to our inner conscience, untainted by self interest or rationalisation, we can know that part of ourselves which remains most connected to the noumenon, that is, the whole of existence from which we have come and to which we shall return.

The essential principle that can be derived from this process of looking within was formulated by Schopenhauer: “Injure no one; on the contrary, help everyone as much as we can.”

Professor Hamilton tests himself and his theory looking at issues of moral complexity such as suicide; free love; treatment of nature and bestiality. The workability of the ethical theory is judged by the extent to which it can be applied and result in answers that make sense when measured against our instinctive approach to such issues. For example, bestiality seems wrong even though no animal or person is necessarily harmed. Hamilton suggests that this may well be because such sexual activity offends against the noumenon through the fact that different species have been differentiated and separated from the whole of existence in separate ways.

On the whole, the application of the ethical theory provides satisfying results. Professor Hamilton also manages to incorporate many aspects of the wisdom of both Christian and various Eastern religions without needing to draw on the theistic dogma which underpins most of those religions.

On the other hand, I remained unconvinced by the metaphysics through which the ethical theory was derived. While the separation of the phenomenon and noumenon seems an appropriate division, the attempt to describe so much of the unknowable noumenon, partly through logic and partly through mysticism, fails to convince this reviewer. The principle of Ockham’s Razor,3 that the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct, suggests that the noumenon is likely, at least on certain scales, to resemble our perception of reality. I also have difficulty with the proposition that space and time and, particularly, causality are concepts that we impose on reality.

These doubts, however, should take nothing from Professor Hamilton’s excellent work.

As a society, we need explanations for the malaise that affects us: we who have everything but cannot find true happiness. We also need reasons, in a post religious era, to explain why good works are good. Those of us who are social activists need explanations for the importance of what we try to achieve. Perhaps, most important of all, a world which teeters on the edge of religious fanaticism of various brands needs explanations, alternative to those offered by such fanaticism, to strive for the well lived life.

The book is beautifully written and the argument, at the same time both simple and complex, is built up brick by brick in forty-five short and very accessible chapters. Each chapter provides, on its own, a valuable stimulus to reflection upon the nature of this short and puzzling existence with which we have been lumbered.  

I highly recommend this work4 by one of Australia’s leading thinkers.5

Stephen Keim SC

Footnotes

1. Formerly a British based publishing house, Allen & Unwin, since 1990, has been an independent publisher based in Australia. Its Australian operations were purchased by the Australian directors when the parent company was sold off to Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_%26_Unwin. The publisher’s website is http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=96.
2. In June 2008, Clive Hamilton was appointed Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne.
3. William of Ockham, regarded as one of the greatest medieval thinkers, was born in Ockham in Surrey; became a Franciscan friar; and lived from 1288 to about 1348.
4. The book is a steal at $35 from the publisher and slightly higher in the book shops. The webpage for the book is http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781741755077.
5. Professor Hamilton has his own author’s website at http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/index.php?page=home.