Two Concept on Liberty - Essay Example

Similarly, positive liberty may entail what a person would do in order to withdraw from the world around him or her and the injustices of the tyranny of the many and tyrant. This paper therefore seeks to explain how the concern for positive freedom and autonomy can lead to tyranny ultimately according to Isaiah Berlin and also evaluate his arguments critically. The notion of the positive liberty is derived from an aspiration on the side of a person to his or her own master. It is actually the freedom to live as one sees fit and not freedom from the same.

The freedoms may seem not to be apart, but according to Berlin, the ideas of freedom are historically developed in the different directions which ended up getting into direct conflict with each other. This may be illustrated by analyzing the question of what it is to be your own master. In his view, Berlin asserts that we can be spiritual slaves or slaves to the nature as well as we can be physical slaves. He also says we can justify coercion through claiming that we act in the interest of those we are coercing, and if only they could have self awareness, they would realize the probity of those our actions.

Isaiah Berlin states that the conceptions of the freedom and liberty are directly derived from the conceptions that constitute a person. If one manipulates the definition of a man, the definition of freedom as one deems fit. These give one authorities which might lead to tyranny in the end. Due to the fact that positive liberty is the freedom to realize the best good in history, Berlin was indomitable to apply political power to set human beings free to realize some end of history. That determination that Berlin argued led to repression inevitably.

This could possibly result into tyranny as individuals would do what they deem fit in their own eyes. It is the same positive liberty according to Berlin that brings a notion that any enslaved man cannot be able to make decisions that encompass his freedom. This is due to the loss of ability to choose as a wish; hence one cannot say rightly that he or she can choose to make a decision if that particular decision has intrinsic weight on it from the authoritarian slaveholder. Isaiah Berlin derived positive liberty from the theories that focused on the capacity of an individual to rule himself or herself, autonomy of the agent.

In his account, he realized that Rousseau equated freedom to self rule and obedience to self rule which he considered dangerous. With this equation, he alleged that Rousseau meant that a public or common interest, that which is best for all citizens. The general will of people would be at odds with the individual’s selfish wills. This would ultimately lead to tyranny if critically looked into as everyone would be doing only what interest them. Other theorists of the positive freedom gnaw the bullet and assert that the satisfied slave is free indeed and that in order to gain freedom, an individual must first learn not to dominate so much certain empirical desires and get rid of them, in other words, one must remove as many of his or her desires as possible in order to be free.

As Berlin states it, if I got a wounded leg “there are two ways of freeing myself from pain. One is to heal the wound. Another is to get rid of the wound by cutting off my leg”