John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“I’m a scribe, Thaletes,” I said earnestly. (It’s even possible that I meant to be kind.) “I could write for you.”

He laughed again, until his mouth stretched open against his will, exactly like the muscle spasm of something dying. “I don’t need you,” he whispered. “I’m free.”

I looked, noncommittally, at the bars. He laughed again.

“Mere facticity,” he said, and laughed again. But suddenly he frowned. “No, perhaps I’m mixed up.” He wet his lips, straining to think. Then he laughed, startled. “Free!” he said.

I patted the bars with my fingertips. “Perhaps in a certain sense,” I began.

“Not in a certain sense! Free!” He was enraged, his whole frail body shaking like a mountainside in an earthquake. He tried to drag himself toward me, snatching at straw and pulling on it, but the straw came to him and his body lay as it was. “What am I?” he hissed. “Am I the It that walks and talks, or am I the Not-It that watches what walks and talks? I am the Not-It! Not-It!”

“That’s true,” I said, as soberly as possible.

“Precisely, precisely! And what is the world? The world is the It that my Not-It’s It is not!”

“That probably follows,” I said.

“Precisely! Since my Not-It is not It, I am free of It, true? Hopelessly, joyfully abandoned to my freedom! Is that not so?”

I rubbed my chin. “It may well be.”

“Precisely.” He laughed. “Let us say that my body — my everything-except-what-thinks-about-itself — as it functions in the world, is It-within-Itness. Let us say that.”

“Good.”

“Then what is the nature of my freedom? I cannot choose my Itness itself: it is prior to me. I can choose only the goals of my It, and thus I create my It-as- What-It-Is. I choose to build a house, for example, and I define my It as That-Which-Will-Build-a-House. Excellent! We’re progressing! But am I free to build a house? I’m in prison! Ha ha!” He laughed and laughed. I waited. “My freedom,” he said softly, slyly, “is contingent: I am free to choose ways of manipulating what I might possibly manipulate, the Itness of the World.”

“Of course.” I believed I more or less understood, in a certain sense.

“Let us say that I am not in prison, and I choose to ride an elephant which exists. I have chosen a goal, the riding of the elephant, and simultaneously I have chosen a means — an attempt to ride. I now face two problems: First, my free choice indicates that other free choices are possible, for instance the choice not to ride the elephant after all: hence, my freedom eats away my freedom. Second, my free choice of a goal may be of one beyond my power: the elephant may be too mean or, if not that, too bumpy for me to stay on!”

“That’s true.” I did not feel I was contributing much.

“Nevertheless, my Not-It has, we discover, defined more than just my It. It has also defined the elephant. This particular elephant, which manifests a profound resistance if I wish to ride it, will on the contrary be a valuable aid if I want to kill my enemy by making him ride it. In itself, you see, the elephant is neutral; that is, it waits to be illuminated by an end in order to manifest itself as adverse or helpful. It is, we might say, a brute existent. Now pay close attention! We are free when the final term by which we make known to ourselves what we are is an end: that is, not a real existent like that which in the supposition which we have made could fulfill our wish, but an object which does not yet exist. Only an ensemble of real existents can separate us from this end — in the same way that this end can be conceived only as a state-to-come of the real existents which separate me from it. The resistance which freedom reveals in the existent, far from being a danger to freedom, results only in enabling it to arise as freedom! There can be a free Not-It only as engaged in a resisting world! Outside this engagement, the notions of freedom, determinism, and necessity lose all meaning!”

“I see,” I said.

He dropped his head into the straw and panted. At last, with enormous difficulty, he said, “You don’t see. Nobody does.”

“Perhaps that’s so.”

A terrible shaking came over him, and I looked away.

“Nevertheless,” he said at last, “to be free does not mean to obtain what one has wished, but only to determine one’s wish oneself. Success is wholly irrelevant. If I wish to be free of this stinking cell and I cannot achieve it, I illustrate the common case. The history of a man’s life is the history of a failure. That is my happiness.”

Years later, after I’d reread his writings, it came to me that he was not exactly wrong. At the time, however, I was more interested in his politics. Why had he first supported Lykourgos, taking delight in his inhumanity, then turned on him, stirring up the Helots? I said, “Is it possible that it was your love of failure that attracted you to Lykourgos’s scheme — and then, when, against all reason, the scheme began to work, turned you against Lykourgos?”

He lay still. More still, it seemed to me, than the stone walls of his cell. At last — horribly — horribly! — he sighed. “You’ve understood nothing,” he whispered.

“Perhaps that’s so.”

With a look of terrible sorrow, for all his talk of joy, he raised his head two inches, enough to look at me by rolling his eyes up to almost under the lids. “Freedom is individual,” he said. “Lykourgos’s antimaterialism established the possibility of personal freedom. But antimateralism is a metaphor, a myth.”

I sighed. He was a very difficult person.

“Pay attention!” he hissed. “Lykourgos denies the value of substance, but he exploits. He’s a hypocrite! A despot! All government is imposition except the government freely chosen for the moment by one man. Who knows which government a free man would choose? Values leap up before our acts like partridges!”

“But that’s absurd!” I broke in. “If every man in Sparta is to choose his own form of government—”

“Never mind,” he said, petulant, crabby. “We all fail. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Thaletes,” I said, “is there anything practical I can do for you?”

He lay quiet as a fallen column. Perhaps he was dead. When I visited, the next day, he’d been dead for several hours.

I was not impressed by Thaletes’s opinions, I admit. Even after I had reread his work and discovered that his ideas made a kind of sense, I was not particularly impressed. But at least one person in Sparta was deeply moved by all he said. When reading became relatively easy for her — not so much through my influence as through my high-minded (or anyway high- toned) staying away from her, abandoning her, as Thaletes would have said, to her freedom — Iona read all Thaletes wrote in the underground days at Amyklai. Things she’d said clumsily before, she said now with the dangerous conviction one gets from new big words.

I sat with her in the garden once, and after a good deal of talk about nothing, murders and suicides, fires and secret messages, she handed me, timidly, a letter she’d been working on — a letter on ridiculous cheap pink parchment, which she intended to send to sympathizers throughout Lakonia. The writing was crude, each stroke violent, and I was embarrassed for her. But the ideas were interesting. It went something like this:

One can no more judge the means without the end which gives it meaning than he can detach the end from the means which defines it. Murdering a Helot or suppressing a hundred members of the Opposition are two analogous acts. Murdering a Helot is an absolute evil — it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear! Suppressing a hundred opponents may be an outrage, but it can have meaning and a reason. It is a matter of maintaining or saving a Power which prevents the absolute evils of bigots and despots.