Facts and Arguments about the Introduction of Initiative and ...

is identical in all humans – as identical as only two voids can
be. In this fact we discover the objective basis for the principle
of equal rights, for equality before the law, regardless
of any differences people possess. People have differences, but
people are equal.
However, the ‘I’ is not a ‘no-thing’. Like the ‘superposition’
of quantum theory, the human ‘I’ is a void full of potential,
of expectancy and creative power; it is the emptiness of the
moral will, before that moral will has yet brought forth a
moral judgement. What lies dormant in the void is the as
yet undifferentiated capacity for involvement. The human ‘I’
is nothing other than the manifestation of involvement in
the world. And it is precisely involvement that distinguishes
freedom from licence.
Without involvement, I am as free as an astronaut who alone,
and with nothing to hold onto, tumbles slowly around his or
her centre of gravity in the weightlessness of space. The astronaut
can perform voluntary movements, but cannot affect
the position of his or her centre of gravity relative to other
objects, because all connection to the surrounding world has
been severed. If I do not get involved with other people, even
the most exalted deed will not touch me internally; it will
leave me ‘disconnected’. Without commitment and involvement,
I am not free to change. Only by virtue of my involvement
do I change myself through what I do.
As human beings, we are only free when we are connected
and involved. One can say that human involvement, or
the moral warmth that the individual person can develop,
is the way in which morality appears in the world. Morality
is nowhere to be found in the world outside individual
involved human beings. And it is precisely through involvement
that humans can rediscover the real essence of their
own being. As subject, we can separate ourselves not only
from the outside world, but also from our own bodies, our
habits and even our character (we can, for instance, try to
lose weight, or change our character, or suppress a rising fit
of anger). But, by definition, we cannot separate ourselves
as subject from our involvement (e.g. with another’s pain).
If we try to objectify our involvement, we cannot help – as
subject – taking our involvement with us. Basically, we cannot
look with complete detachment at our own feelings of
affection for someone else. If we nonetheless try to do so, we
must first create a phantasm of our affection, by making an
abstraction of the essential fact that it is our affection we are
dealing with. If we want to make a real image of the affection
or involvement, including the fact that it is our affection,
we cannot help but be filled by it. We are then our affection.
The same does not occur, if, for instance, we closely examine
one of our habits (including the fact that it is our habit).
Our involvement, or attachment, is something from which
we cannot distance ourselves, but with which we are at one
in our deepest being. We have a body, habits, a character; we
are our involvement.
We can understand this more clearly if we consider the
most basic form of involvement – attention. Attention (paying
attention to, showing interest in, empathising with) is
the capacity of the human spirit to make space within ones
own imagination for another person or object outside of
oneself. By its very nature, attention aims at the truth. Attention
is the precursor to thought. It provides space for both
sensory impressions and for individual thoughts and trains
of thought. We relate to ‘the other’ in the first place by focusing
our attention on it. Because of its very nature, we
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cannot separate our attention from our self. It is true that
we can direct our attention to anything imaginable, including
the characteristics and nature of the attention itself, but
precisely because of this activity, we cannot be simultaneously
detached from the attention. Our attention does have
the capacity for self-reflection (it can be turned upon itself),
but we cannot objectify our attention in the same way as we
do with our character traits. We can, for instance, focus our
attention on our laziness without being actually lazy at the
same time. But we cannot focus our attention on our attention
without being simultaneously attentive. Our laziness is
something that we have; in a deep and fundamental sense,
however, our attention is a manifestation of our very being.
When we are attentive, then effectively we are this attention.
And attention is involvement.
In involvement/attachment, the paradoxical character of
morals is resolved. On the one hand, I am my involvement
– involvement is hyperindividual and can only come from
an individual human being. But, on the other hand, my involvement
is always involvement with ‘the other’. Without
the other, my involvement cannot exist. In this sense, I owe
my existence at every moment to that ‘other’. Involvement
or moral warmth can only exist between people. Real society
is not the state, or the sum of all of the social structures and
organisations. Real society is the fabric of connectedness and
indifference, of moral warmth and coldness between people.
It is not easy to capture the essence of involvement in a single
term, because there is nothing in the material world (from
which we derive most concepts and terms) that has at the
same time the character of both object and relationship.
From this consideration of the dual nature of morals and of
involvement, the following three perspectives on democracy
emerge.
• Anyone who focuses mainly on the suprapersonal aspect of
morals, and disregards the individual aspect, will tend towards
a limited form of democracy in which people’s individual contribution
is minimised. Benjamin Barber (1997) described
these ‘communitarists’ as follows: “Because they assume that
people are embedded in a network of communities and have
ties with each other that take precedence over their individuality
and these conditions, communitarists do not see ‘civil
society’ as a playground for individuals and their voluntary
ties and contractual organisations, but rather as a complex
mixture of inescapable social relationships that bind people
together into families, clans, neighbourhoods, communities
and hierarchies.” Morals are seen in this communitaristic
perspective as something that is decreed from above. People
choose a subsidiary form of state, with, at most, representative
forms of democracy and with the ruling elite having the maximum
room for manoeuvre. This elite must then ‘educate’ the
people. ‘Mid-field organisations’ (clubs, associations etc.) are
mainly considered as instruments by means of which the elite
can subtly control, guide and ‘educate’ the people.
• Anyone who considers only the individual aspect of morals
will ignore the interaction between people or consider it
as of little or no relevance. Barber (1997) characterises the
‘libertarian’ model as follows: “... the social relationships,
both in the private sector and between the private and the
government sector, are contractual relationships entered
into by free individuals, in spite of their interests and goods
and in defence of their freedoms. (…) By concentrating on
the autonomous, solitary, egotist consumers, who have entrenched
themselves in a fortress of rights, [and] only ven-