There are benefits to philosophical misreadings. Ayn Rand made a career out of misreading Kant, building an entire philosophical universe to refute something Kant never said nor implied. Now, whenever I happen to glimpse aspiring John Galts pop up from time to time like so many underground revolutionaries, I am left with the amusing image of Ayn Rand as some giant Samuel Johnson monster kicking synthetic a-priori pink unicorns in the ass. I refute thee thus! This too is comedy.

The largest benefit, by far, is inversion, or if you like, comedic inversion. Why? Or better still, why not?  Inversion allows one to traverse the flowing currents of thought left untravelled by the great minds, of possibilities unexplored, territories unclaimed, to reach beyond the tyranny of settled ideas and expert consensus.

For present purposes, I am interested in Herbert Spencer and his notion of a liberal or rational utilitarianism. Spencer’s (willful?) misreading of Kant opens up the amusing possibility of an inverted reading of Spencer qua Kant. Allow me the indulgence, for it is an idea not so clear in my own head, and therefore entirely valid as an exercise in constraint. I mean philosophical constraint.

“Every man is free to do as he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of another man.” Spencer’s maxim extols the virtues of “Negative Liberty” – the absence of constraint, state interference, a zero sum game between equality and Liberty. But it also involves a sleight of hand. Negative Liberty subsumes the entirety of Liberty itself if it is to be instructive (read: moral). All Liberty is negative. Positive Liberty, that hypothetical other serving as mere intellectual abstraction, is effaced, banished into the rhelm of pink unicorns in order to turn Spencer’s maxim into a categorical imperative.  And rational too! These are the indefensible moral rules created for perfect moral human beings. Utilitarianism (teleological) becomes concrete and objective (deontological) as soon as all moral choices are willed into either/or forms of the universal law. Choose or die.

Wait? Did I just imply two competing ethical systems are one and the same? It seems I did.

I push this joke no further. There is a danger in subjecting everything to inversion. Push things too far, and philosophy become mere rhetoric.  And objectivism is actually supernaturalism, and empiricism is idealism, and communism is fascism, and capitalism is socialism, and enough. That joke isn’t funny anymore.

Hopefully, my amusing exercise was not entirely in vain. Spencer’s ambiguity is ours, a tension between essential choices and accidental exigencies glossing over a confusion about the trade offs between Liberty and equality. Think of what informs our contemporary moral debates. What is the right way to eat? To think? To act? To seek pleasure? To behave? To dress? To look?  As the number of potential freedoms increases, so to the individual becomes the subject of increased doubt and debate. The individual is not a problem for modern society, but the problem. Quintessential.

From this ground, a thousand ethical formulas now spring to life. The ancient problem “What is the good life?” becomes “What is the good life for me?”. “What is the essence of man?” now becomes “Who am I?” We no longer seek a universal ethic but rather inhabit an ethical universe. Why then do we not simply apply some much needed liberal tolerance to account for such diversity of taste, creed, belief, expression, sexuality, etc.? Surely the principle of negative liberty should apply to the level of personal expression as well, and we should simply accept this diversity and relativism with a healthy bit of liberal tolerance? And yet we do not, for else how does we explain the increasing splintering, factionalism and tribalism of our day.

So it would seem that negative liberty is not so deeply cherished, and survives more as a kind of moral reprove masking a deeper mistrust of our fellow citizens. We suspect that ethical diversity threatens that older, more entrenched morality that demands that the individual conform to a uniformity of type. It is Aristotelian throughout, the idea that a person must become what they are by nature compelled to be. In truth, the liberal ethic only penetrates the surface, while the deeper currents of Western morality do not allow such a tolerant stance. It is our inability to rid ourselves once and for all of this belief in “essences”, that prevents us from adressing a true Liberty, free from the burden of formalism.