Embracing Liberation.

When the human being acquires language it is gradually but surely freed from the imprisonment of being locked inside its own mind, unable to communicate the contents of its consciousness to others. This freedom is usually accompanied by a freeing of movement in that bipedalism generally emerges in close temporal proximity to the emergence of language.  

Both of these freedoms – the freedom of movement and the freedom of language – are certainly both very rudimentary to begin with. They evolve only gradually and they lie at the root of all other forms of freedom. We might even say that, at least in the West, one of them soon becomes predominant. Great athletes are usually not very impressive thinkers and great thinkers are usually not known for their proficiency in athletic ability.

They are not complete forms of freedom to be sure, neither to begin with or when they have reached a certain degree of maturity, for we are never totally free to move as we please without aids from outside of us (flying and deep water diving requires technology for example), and it is anything but certain that the freeing of the mind due to the emergence of language, will continue its trajectory of liberation, for the child might have its mind ensnared by what is communicated to it by others through the medium of language.

Both of these freedoms are accompanied by an extension of our embrace. When language is acquired we may embrace the world in the sphere of our consciousness in that it allows us to embrace the thoughts of others and to make sense of the world in which we are embedded. When we acquire the skill of bipedalism this is done by embracing inanimate objects in our world and the legs of those who have already acquired that skill. Both forms of early personal liberation are therefore grounded in an embrace of the world around us.

It is only later in life that the embrace of the parent becomes antithetical to freedom for us. In early adolescence we thus become uncomfortable when our parents embrace us in front of our peers (“please stop hugging and kissing me mom, it's embarrassing”). This is likely to be because the embrace of the parent is experienced as a blockade against an even wider embrace of the world and it is thus felt as an inhibition – the antithesis of freedom.

The adolescent liberation from the parents can unfortunately become quite pathological if it is extended into the future and to others in general, in that we may become afraid of losing our liberty by embracing others and therefore cannot fully love and be intimate with others, for intimacy and love requires embrace. The inability to love others is rooted in fear, that is, rooted in the fear of losing oneself in the act of loving the other. So what may seem as a bulwark against lesser liberty (losing one's control in the act of loving) is actually rooted in the greatest of inhibitions – the inhibition of fear - and it is thus actually the exact opposite of liberty, for liberty should broadly be defined as a state in which the least possible degree of inhibition (inner as well as outer) is present.

The purpose of a good education is therefore simultaneously to give us greater liberty and to teach us how to embrace the world with ever-greater hugs, as it were. Seen in this way, acquiring language and attaining the ability of bipedalism are the most rudimentary forms of education, in which all others forms of later education are rooted. Here, I think, it is necessary to differentiate between schooling and education, for whereas the purpose of an education worth its salt, is to widen both our liberation and our embrace, the result (if not the purpose) of schooling the young mind, is often the exact opposite.