Aporias of courage and the freedom of expression

Abstract

In this article we will suggest that the traditional account of the freedom of expression needs revision. The emergence of Internet media has shown that the traditional ideal of a plurality of voices does not in itself lead to fruitful public spheres. Inspired by Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek concept parrhesia we suggest that the plurality of voices should be supplemented with an ideal of courageous truth-telling. We will furthermore argue that the notion of courage has two dimensions that should be taken into account. On the one hand a Derridean reading of courage brings out a disruptive and aporetic feature of courage. On the other hand, courage also needs to be articulated through some kind of goal, which in a public setting calls for a deliberative dimension. We conclude by suggesting that public spheres with courageous truth-telling will facilitate societies in which strong voices and opinions are continuously challenged by less strong voices.

Keywords

aporias courage freedom of expression public sphere

I

With the gradual emergence of democratic governance in parts of the transatlantic world in the 17th and 18th centuries, political philosophers, jurists and policy-makers wrestled with the limits to freedom of expression. The emergence of democracy was tied through numerous conceptual threads to the system of Enlightenment critique, which rejected the notion that any idea could be immune to questioning. The Enlightenment fostered an approach that understood knowledge and views as essentially fallible (Foucault, 1994[1984]). It was therefore important, some thinkers pointed out, to approach any problem or challenge through a diversity of views and voices, because then the democratic decisional conclusions had to be as qualified as possible to actually gain consensus and work. In 1859 J. S. Mill thus summarizes his defence of the freedom of expression by stating that restrictions in the freedom of speech ‘assume our own infallibility’ (Mill, 1977[1859]).

In tandem with these political and intellectual developments, mass media were emerging as a social power. As a communicational technology, mass media are structurally characterized by relatively few distributors who distribute information to a vast amount of receivers. Increasingly so as the printing press was industrialized in the 19th century, radio and TV networks were implemented on a national and global scale in the 20th century. The structure of the mass media makes it fairly easy for power holders to close down selected sources if they are dissatisfied with the kind of critical discourses the sources may be associated with and want to minimize them in the public spheres, because the distributive level is so easily located.

The tension that we are sketching here can be simply expressed. On the one hand there is from early on recognition that democratic processes should be supported by an open public sphere with as many voices as possible. On the other hand, the available communication technologies facilitated effective censorship.

In this situation it was obvious that reflections on the freedom of expression often would be articulated against the limits imposed by censorship (e.g. in Milton, 1643; Hume, 1987[1742]; Voltaire, 1901[1764]). It is thus no surprise that the resulting legal treatises often are articulated in negative terms – freedom of expression being conceived as a freedom from external restrictions. A paradigmatic formulation is found in the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…(1791)

The same understanding is found in more recent articulations like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference. (1948)

and in the European Convention on Human Rights, § 10:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority…(1953)

The historic importance of the ideals that underlie these statements is difficult to overestimate: the development of democratic societies was decisively conditioned by a plural public sphere in which opinions are articulated and challenged. Partly this was due to the desire to facilitate qualified stands on crucial problems, and partly this was due to the recognition of the value of every citizen (Habermas, 1992: ch. 8.3).

Today, however, we have gone beyond the epoch in which the mass-media structure could be considered the paradigmatic communication technology in the public spheres. With the development of the Internet protocols we have acquired communication media that have a global reach that has broken away from the one-to-many, unidirectional structure of traditional mass media as a simple matter of technology. The Internet protocols facilitate, at least on the technological level, a communication structure in which there are no clear centres (Galloway, 2004).

While one might expect this transformation of communication technology to give rise to more plural and diversified public spheres, this has not necessarily actually been the case. Even though the Internet gives the user the ability to raise his or her voice in the public spheres, the very enormity of the Internet makes it uncertain that that voice will attract any more attention than it would have in the previous, press-centric epoch of mass media.

One can say, uncontroversially, that the Internet has dramatically lowered the threshold of entry to the public sphere. The course of history of the Internet bears out the pluralist orientation. In the early Internet days, software packages were created to help people making their own html-sites. Later on, CMS-systems facilitate the creation of website systems with weblogs, news, shopping and discussion. And social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn facilitate public engagements without any kind of coding skills.

For the purpose of the argument we are pursuing in this article, it is immaterial whether one thinks that the Internet has either improved or worsened the public spheres. The claim we start out with is that the shift in the technological basis of the public spheres should raise new questions as to what the aim of our fight for freedom of expression should be. This is not to say that traditional censorship is no longer a problem. Cases like China, Iran and Cuba show that it is possible for very determined regimes to enact powerful censorship even on the Internet. However, these cases also demonstrate that it takes quite an effort.

Censorship is simply not the most obvious strategy when trying to control the public sphere in the current technological setting. In Hansen (2015a) we thus suggested that we turn our attention from the negative understanding of freedom of expression (freedom as not restricted by external forces) to a positive understanding (what are we able to do, what is possible?).

Against the background of these historical factors, we are going to argue for a way of unpacking ‘positive’ freedom of expression. First (II), we will through a reading of Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek concept parrhesia suggest that public spheres should be assessed not merely against their plurality of voices, but also against the amount of courageous truth-telling. Then we will (III) turn to Derrida’s account of aporia in order to be able (IV) to bring out the ways in which courage breaks with urges towards a unifying coherence in public life. Courage (V) turns out to be a disruptive impulse in public cultures. We risk our public life (or at least: our reputation) by challenging the common sense of the public. Before closing the argument, however, it is important to point out (VI) limitations in the disruptive impulses. For the disruptive impulses to be courageous they need to be based on some account of goal and with some idea of possible success. In a public setting disruptive impulses thus need some amount of deliberative basis – otherwise the furthering of courageous voices might very well develop into public spheres unfruitfully occupied by minority voices with no willingness of generalizing their views. We will conclude (VII) by suggesting that public spheres with courageous truth-telling will facilitate a society in which strong voices and opinions are continuously challenged by less strong voices.

II

To sum up the previous section one can arguably claim that, in spite of the attempt of some states to restrict the Internet, the plurality of voices in the public sphere is no longer as threatened with foreclosure as it used to be, due to the new structure of the communication technologies. With the availability of so many voices it has been argued that attention becomes the main value in online public spheres (Simon, 1971; Dahlberg, 2005). The mere diversity of voices in the public sphere is not enough to guarantee the fruitful interplay of different public spheres, because the public spheres can be dominated by contributions that prevent an actual democratic dialogue. The negatively conceived freedom of expression should thus be supplemented by a positive freedom of expression in which we focus upon what we are going to use the negative freedom for.¹

In his lectures on parrhesia (Foucault, 2001a, 2001b, 2008, 2009) Foucault revealed a possible predecessor to the modern notion of freedom of expression: the Greek term parrhesia can be translated as ‘free speech’ with the strong implication of telling the truth – especially in cases where the truth is in a certain sense inconvenient.

According to Foucault, the pre-Enlightenment approach to parrhesia differs from the Enlightenment tradition by accentuating an intimate relation between truth and courage (Foucault, 2001a: 15). The parrhesiastic person ultimately risks death by telling the truth and thus has to be courageous.

To characterize an act as courageous entails, at a minimum, that the agent could have done otherwise. The act of parrhesia thus entails some sense of freedom of action (Foucault, 2001a: 19; 2001b: 255). However, with Foucault this freedom immediately confronts the question: ‘On est libre, mais libre de quoi?’ [‘One is free, but free for what?’] (Foucault, 2001b: 260) – the question of the positive side of freedom.

In Hansen (2015a) we argued that a first step towards answering this question could be to translate the position into a distinction between affirmative and liberating truth-telling. As a first step this tends to translate the claim into a truism: we should be free from external restrictions in order to free ourselves. However, the claim also entails the point that we should use our negative freedom to stay free (in a continuous struggle between freedom and restrictions), to liberate each other (even though the speaker is free, it is not certain that the addressees or other agents are), and to point out new aspects of restriction (one thing is freedom from external restrictions, but what about internal restrictions in our minds – discursive outlooks – and our bodies – hidden power structures)?

In the following we will pursue the idea that current discussions of the (negative) freedom of expression should be supplemented with discussions of how we achieve making the public spheres more open to courageous truth-tellers. The main argument for going this way is a worry that with the enormous growth in the number of those projecting their expressions into the public spheres, without a similar growth in the span of attention, we may end in a situation in which the public exchanges become as ineffectual as in the pre-Enlightenment times. It is thus necessary that we evaluate the public spheres not only in terms of their permission for an unlimited number of voices, but also in terms of the mechanisms in place that allow attention to be attached to courageous expressions.

The relationship between the number of active participants in public sphere discourses and the span of our attention entails that a certain screening of information and expressions will happen whether we do it actively or not. The traditional idea of the freedom of expression as just the absence of external constraints is thus in a certain sense a naïve approach to achieve diverse public spheres inasmuch as expression does not necessarily translate into discussion or any larger social focus.

The same applies to our suggestion based on both negative and positive notions of freedom. Even though we argue that public spheres that favour courageous truth-telling are democratically preferable to those that do not, to think of our argument as a framework to articulate some clearly defined criteria that must be met by discourse participants misunderstands its nature. Such scenarios, as we know, put the political order on a path that does not evoke pleasant historical memories. On the one hand, our proposal is mainly a suggestion of how to assess the democratic worth of expressions – certainly there are other legitimate reasons to participate in public discussions. Second, even for the evaluation of the democratic value, we will argue that the quest for courageous truth-telling functions as a critical, counterfactual ideal – an ideal that is itself open for public discussions.

This is not to say that a counterfactual ideal is without actual relevance in society. If the suggested account of a positive freedom of expression is credible, it can serve as an implicit reference or standard from which to judge, on the one hand, deliberative discussions of actual expressions in the public spheres and, second, deliberations of the relationship between concrete, prevailing interpretations of the ideal and the actual society.

The main aim with the ideal is thus not to suggest a norm that unequivocally determines whether or not actual expressions are of democratic worth in the public sphere. In order to have practical worth the ideal must, admittedly, be able to serve as a paradigm for the articulation of rules and values against which actual expressions can be evaluated. More importantly, however, the ideal is something that we can, and should, argue about. If a speaker is criticized for not being a courageous truth-teller, she or he can either respond to the critique by showing that the expression is actually courageous according to the existing norms for courage, or can challenge the norms as being inadequate.

This definitely opens the way to a certain amount of unavoidable relativism, since the articulated ideals could otherwise serve repressive interests by preventing expressions of views. The relativism is, however, conditional. In the challenge of existing norms of courage it will still be necessary, in order to be counted as a relevant voice in the democratic public sphere, to substantiate an alternative suggestion as to how the notion of courage should be conceived. In doing this, one will partake in a democracy-enhancing discussion.

We will return to this discussion in section VI in which we argue that on this aspect the deliberative understanding of communication and democratic will formation (as articulated in Cohen, 1989, 1997; Habermas, 1992, 1996; Rawls, 1999[1971]) bears some important insights. Our account of deliberative reasoning is, however, furthermore inspired by poststructuralist accounts in which it is taken seriously that deliberative exchanges to a large extent have to focus on issues that are by their very nature impossible to agree upon – because the crucial social challenges are aporetic in nature and thus any articulated account will be inadequate. This is where ideals of courage come in, courageous truth-telling being the practice of risking our lives in order to attain some higher goal. The ideals of deliberation and courage indeed carry some tensions (aporias), but these tensions should not lead us to reject the ideals – the tension is, as it were, a product of two mutually dependent and opposing ideals. In our case this will be a tension between the quest both for deliberative consensus and courageous challenging. However, in order to understand the structure of such paradoxes, we must turn our attention to Derrida’s notion of aporia.

III

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Derrida introduced a focus on aporias in his philosophical reflections. On the one hand this focus was introduced as a reflection upon death (Derrida, 1996a). In this article, however, we will mainly bring out the way aporias shaped Derrida’s reflections on justice (Derrida, 1993, 1994). In the subsequent section we will transpose motifs from these reflections to the field of courage.

In his analyses Derrida discusses the relationship between prescriptions (laws prescribing that there are some things that we should do) and the force of these prescriptions – the ‘How come that we feel obligated to follow the prescriptions?’ In order to understand how the laws gain their force, we can certainly refer to the backing of the laws: if we do not adhere to the laws the police will put us to prison. It is, however, always also possible to discuss whether the laws are actually just themselves.

In order to do that we need to refer to something that is not the laws themselves, but rather the world the laws aim to regulate. Does the existing legal body facilitate something that we consider to be good (Derrida, 1994: 18–20)? This is, according to Derrida, where justice comes in as a key notion. Even if we reference the notion of physical force to explain one factor in the actuality of certain laws and rights, we still have to account for the legitimacy of the legal force, which makes the prevailing body of laws and rights necessary.

This, however, does not take us very far in gaining a definite picture of justice. Derrida does articulate some general descriptions of justice, but unlike the positivist strain in ethical philosophy, he finds that a clear and definite picture is necessarily impossible. Justice plays an aporetic role in society and these aporetic features can never be eliminated:

How are we to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form…? (Derrida 1994: 39²)

The point here is that in order to evaluate existing legal bodies, we cannot go all the distance using general rules, norms or values. Laws are, for example, often evaluated against certain (human) rights. However, at some point these rights must be of some value in concrete societies. Laws and rights are instantiated in order to achieve just societies, and when we evaluate the laws and rights we thus evaluate the extent to which they achieve that goal – and this has to happen in a reflection upon the relationship between the general rules and concrete societies. How well do the general rules operate in the context of concrete societies?

We should thus be cautious about claiming that we have articulated the imperatives of justice when we have articulated the general rules, because justice on the contrary is what challenges our rules of law and right. So, when we try to articulate justice in discursive terms,

…a silence is walled up in the violent structure of the founding act. (Derrida, 1994: 33³)

On the other hand, however, even though justice, as it were, escapes discursive articulation, the only way justice can challenge existing normative bodies is through the articulation of the inadequacies in the existing bodies. On the one hand, total discursive articulation is impossible, whereas on the other hand, articulation is necessary. We have thus reached the aporetic structure of justice:

The experience finds its way, its passage, it is possible. And in this sense it is impossible to have a full experience of aporia, that is, of something that does not allow passage. An aporia is a non-road. From this point of view, justice would be the experience that we are not able to experience…I think that there is no justice without this experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia. Justice is an experience of the impossible. (Derrida, 1994: 37–8⁴)

It is important to notice that even though an aporia is a ‘non-road’ it is not something that paralyses us. Derrida’s notion of the experience of the impossible takes us beyond paralysis, because the experience of impossibility opens new horizons. The experience of impossibility shows that there is something in our cultures, practices, languages that we cannot come to grips with. But in this very experience of the limits of our experience, here, we become aware of this inability, and justice (as such an experience) thus challenges us to reconfigure our prevailing outlooks.

Thus, the experience of the impossible actually carries a possibility of change in the prevailing outlooks. Given the aporetic structure we cannot once and for all solve the sketched paradoxes, but the aporetic structure in itself reminds us that any current solution is provisional and open to revision – to alternative suggestions as to how one handles the paradoxes. Practical, theoretical and social aporias continuously disturb our pragmatic horizons, and hereby they force us to remain open to alternative solutions.

So far justice has mainly been described as the aim and disturbance of legal bodies. Derrida goes further in elaborating three senses of the aporetic character of justice.

First, justice is said to carry the aporetic ‘épokhè of the rule’ (Derrida, 1994: 50–2). This aporia is freighted with the tension in justice between freedom and rule. On the one hand, one must be free in order to be able to exercise justice – if we are not free, it does not make sense to evaluate our decisions and actions in terms of responsibility. On the other hand, the decision or enactment must also follow a rule or prescription. Without the regularity of the rule, justice becomes random and accidental. Furthermore, it is not enough that we actually follow the rule. The just action or decision assumes that we also voluntarily approve of the rule. This aporia thus carries the tension between justice being ‘both regulated and without regulation’ (Derrida, 1994: 51⁵) – i.e. a free subscription to regulation.

Second, justice carries the aporetic ‘ghost of the undecidable’ (Derrida, 1994: 52–7). For decisions to be free they must cut through other possible alternatives, alternatives that are essentially viable and valid. The just decision (based on a free approval) cannot be given in advance (calculable):

A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. (Derrida, 1994: 53⁶)

Justice thus brings into confrontation the fact that we have to choose, and thereby de-select alternatives, but we have to do it without decisive criteria to help us. We cannot justify the de-selection of alternatives – but still we have to choose.

Third, justice is said to carry the aporetic ‘urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge’ (Derrida, 1994: 57–63). This aporia is a consequence of the previous aporias: given that just decisions must be free and incalculable they cannot rely on knowledge either. This is not to say that knowledge does not play any role in reflections upon what to do, but in the moment of decision we do not possess the kind of knowledge that would allow us to decide unequivocally what is best – because then we would avoid the moment of the undecidable, and the decision would rather be a product of calculation.

Our argument does not require that we accept Derrida’s typology of the aporias in detail. What is important is the aporetic situation within justice. The decisive step in relation to the following reflections upon courage is first that the aporetic articulations bring out the tension between freedom (decision) on the one hand, and existing rules, knowledge and systems on the other; second that the aporias are not products of external criticism, but are instead tensions or paradoxes that exist within existing practices. They are what we are trying to come to grips with in our everyday practices, and they ground an important Enlightenment insight: truths, dogmas or institutions of our culture are always potentially up for critique, reflection and discussion (as stated famously in Kant, 1784).

It is at this juncture that we connect up again with our thesis concerning the place of courage in the discourse of the political order.

IV

What is courage? Looking through the western history of ideas gives an impression of the complexity we are dealing with. In Homer’s works courage was decisive in judging (male) character. Plato showed that we should be cautious not to conflate courage with endurance or a special kind of knowledge (Plato, 1997). Aristotle also warned us against clear-cut definitions, because it is important to navigate between extremes: courage is the right attitude towards feelings of confidence and fear in which we navigate between excessive fearlessness, rashness and cowardice. In order to be courageous we should fear and face things that are rightly considered to be evil or dangerous (Aristotle, 1976: ch. 3.6–9).

A common theme to many of these approaches is that they understand courage as a virtue. This theme has been taken up, as well, in contemporary virtue ethics associated with Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom courage is a virtue in relation to sociability, even though it may have different practical and normative implications within differing social contexts (MacIntyre, 1981: 192–3). The following quote summarizes the position:

Traditional Bantu parents brought up their children not to tell the truth to unknown strangers, since they believed that this could render the family vulnerable to witchcraft. In our culture many of us have been brought up not to tell the truth to elderly great-aunts who invite us to admire their new hats. But each of these codes embodies an acknowledgement of the virtue of truthfulness. So it is also with varying codes of justice and of courage. Practices then might flourish in societies with very different codes. (MacIntyre, 1981: 193)

MacIntyre thus claims on the one hand that virtues like truthfulness, justice and courage play a decisive role in any social context (see also 1981: 192), but that they express themselves variously depending on the situational and cultural context.

Structurally this argument resembles Derrida’s analysis of the relationship between justice and right: societies generally seek to make space for courage and justice, but they differ in their ‘codes’. However, despite the resemblance there is also a crucial difference. In MacIntyre’s account a virtue is

…an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods. (1981: 191; original emphases)

Virtues are thought of as dispositions that produce obedience to certain rules (1981: 244) and this obedience facilitates a narrative unity of human life (ibid.: 243):

To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion…It is in looking…for a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life, that we initially define the kind of life which is a quest for the good. (1981: 218 + 219; original emphasis)

According to MacIntyre virtues like justice and courage thus bring narrative unity and coherence into our lives – they become historically evolving life-stories. According to Derrida, on the contrary, the aporetic constitution of justice is what challenges the rules and challenges the persistent coherent constitutions of our cultures and narratives. While the codes, according to MacIntyre, embody the virtues (cf. the quote from 1981: 193 above), according to Derrida the codes (the laws and the rights) always essentially fail to embody justice. The codes are essentially fallible because they are suggested solutions to impassable challenges.

It is not the purpose of this article to adjudicate this dispute. In the following argument we will mainly rely on Derrida’s approach, because we want to bring out the urge of challenging existing rules. We will argue that freedom of expression mainly becomes democratically valuable insofar as expressions challenge existing power structures. Certainly the courageous agents must abide by some normative expectations (existing rules) in order to be taken seriously (more on this in section VI), but expressions with no challenging of existing expectations may hardly be labelled as courageous.

V

What is courage in a public context? One of the most famous expressions of this relationship is the Kantian

Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment…For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the least harmful of anything that could even be called freedom: namely, freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. (Kant, 1784: 35–6⁷)

According to Kant courage is essential if we are to have a public sphere governed by reason. This is so because courage is needed in order to escape from the self-inflicted immaturity or minority that is ‘zur Natur geworden’ (1784: 36). Courage is needed in order to break with the norms and standards that have become the unquestioned horizon of our thinking.

The idea is affiliated with Derrida’s account of responsibility and courage as presented in Donner la Mort (1992a). Derrida discusses the concept of responsibility as a gift of death in which the agent sacrifices the comfortable and daily life for something else (Derrida, 1992a: 23–6 + 44 [UK: Derrida, 1996b: 15–19 + 40]). The concept of responsibility rises out of the idea that we are not beings who labour under some predetermined way to live our lives. There are several paths, some of which lead outside the normal comfort zones. And outside these comfort zones we may risk our lives.

However, to risk our lives in order to live in certain ways is paradoxical, because if we die on this path, there is certainly no value in living that way. The question thus becomes: How can we justify risking our lives for something if we do not actually gain anything through it? Derrida’s answer is that we cannot legitimate this risk, but neither can we avoid the quest if we want to live like true human beings that are not condemned by pre-given structures.

With these reflections we are back at the paradoxical structures mentioned in the above analysis of justice (ibid.: 31–4 + 68 [UK:: 24–7 + 68]). As in the reflections on justice, Derrida now argues that the true responsible act is the act that breaks with prevailing rules and norms, the responsible agent is the agent that risks her or his reputation in the confrontation with existing morality. As when he describes Abraham on the mountain with Isaac:

…you had the courage to behave like a murderer in the eyes of the world and of your loved ones, in the eyes of morality, politics, and of the generality of the general or of your kind. And you had even renounced hope. Abraham is thus at the same time the most moral and the most immoral, the most responsible and the most irresponsible of men…(Derrida, 1992a: 72)⁸

Abraham is, according to Derrida, courageous because he dares behave like a monster in the eyes of the surrounding world. Certainly he does this through a request from God, but in Derrida’s interpretation this is translated into an ‘absolute duty towards the unique’ (1992a: 72). Responsibility and courage are thus in Derrida’s interpretation, just like justice, understood as the revolt of the concrete and particular (the unique) against the general. The example demonstrates how our abstract and general rules and norms always inevitably fail against the plurality of the real world.

Donner la Mort is admittedly more about responsibility than courage. However, the above quote makes it clear that Derrida thinks of the two in close connection: in order to live a responsible life, it is necessary that we courageously face death. To act courageously means to act according to the requests of the unique, even though we realize that we might die in so doing. But the death that we face is not necessarily corporeal. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, it is not primarily the death of Isaac that worries Derrida. It is the public death of Abraham that is the prime concern.

We can now return to the field of public exchanges. According to Derrida, courage carries the aporia of death: we are courageous if we risk life in order to be able to live – but a life lost is not worth living. In the field of public exchanges this can be translated into: expressions are courageous if the speaker risks his or her public life – i.e. if he or she brings out views that radically challenge existing horizons of exchange. In doing so the speaker will risk losing his or her public reputation. If this is all that happens, the speaker ‘dies’ (and so does the message – ‘Isaac’) without having achieved his or her goal (a life lost is not worth living). Thus the paradox at the moral limit is that we need radical courage at the same time as courage needs to be moderated by the consideration of survival. It is not enough that we are courageous – we need to be courageous in ways that actually achieve our goals.

In a certain sense this aporia embodies a common experience that communicative exchanges are best if they carry a certain amount of disagreement between the participants (otherwise they cannot challenge each other), but without the disagreements becoming overwhelming (because then exchanges turn into quarrels – elaborated in Hansen, 2009, 2011, 2015b). When we analyse or assess actual public spheres it is thus important not only to focus upon the plurality of voices (because of our limited bandwidth of attention). Plurality needs to be supplemented with quests for radical courage that is moderated. We will return to this in sections VI and VII.

However, Derrida’s point is opposite to Aristotle’s: the mean challenge is not the right solution to the aporia. In some cases we may have to settle on some kind of mean between radicality and moderation; however, at other points compromise-communication may in itself have become part of the established normativity. In such cases courage calls for more radical expressions.

To take an example: discussions of the freedom of expressions are often summarized with the quote attributed to Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ (actually it was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in Tallentyre, 1906: 199 – however, as a summary of Voltaire’s general attitude at a certain moment). Articulated as a statement in France in the 18th century it is fair to consider it as a radical moderation: to allow a public existence of unethical, dangerous or false statements was quite radical at the peak of Enlightenment cultures in which censorship was not all that uncommon. In some situations it probably still is.

At the same time, however, in other situations the quest for tolerance can itself become a public dogma used to de-legitimize or at least reduce voices of critique. Hardt and Negri have argued that power-holders in modern societies increasingly use the ability of cultures to contain critique as a mechanism to fortify the existing power structures (Hardt and Negri, 2000: ch. 2.4; Hardt and Negri, 2009: ch. 2.3). So, even though the saying attributed to Voltaire at first sight makes room for disagreement and critique, in a second step it actually also reduces the relevance of the other: ‘I disagree with you, but I don’t have to respond to your critique, because our culture is strong enough to be able to carry and contain differences.’

Furthermore, it may be argued that certain interpretations of the quest for tolerance, on the other hand, leave room open for recent public developments of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ (which means the use of expressions with very vague, alternative or even false references to truth claims are used to de-rail public discussions) because they need to be tolerated too. In Hansen (2015a) I thus argue that it is important that public expressions too are evaluated as to their commitment to some shareable account of truth.

To summarize: even though we grant that the Voltaire/Hall statement in a previous historical situation was an important radical challenge (if we cannot reach an agreement, then we must settle on agreeing to disagree) tolerance in historical situations coming after it and influenced by it may become a way to escape challenges put forward in the public sphere by shifting the focus to the issue of tolerance instead of the content of the disagreement. The saying embodies a compromise – but a compromise that should itself continuously be challenged by new radical challenges in order not to lose its public relevance.

VI

Derrida’s voice in the previous section certainly embodies a disruptive impulse in public cultures. In his reading, the aporia of courage calls for continuous challenges of existing structures. He is, however, on the other hand quite aware that this impulse leads to both responsibility and irresponsibility (cf. the quote above), and according to the deconstructive approach no destruction is possible without a construction. Justice is not possible without the laws and norms of right; challenges to existing rules and norms are not courageous in themselves. In the public spheres there are numerous examples of expressions that challenge prevailing norms and rules, trolls that obstruct ongoing communicative expressions without necessarily being courageous. We will in this section seek to explain the moral status of the notion of courage by looking at two ways courage can be said to operate in the public spheres. On the one hand, the mere challenge is not enough to establish the courageousness of the interlocutor. Second, the aims or goals of the acts are constituent of the degree to which a gesture is courageous.

In order to see that the mere challenge is not enough for an act to be courageous we can think of the recent emergence of trolls in Internet communication (Hardaker, 2010; Binns, 2012). Trolls specialize in disruptive and non-constructive interferences in discussions through expressions of outrageous views. Their practices should not, however, be called courageous because they do not actually risk any reputational capital (at least to the extent that the anonymity measures are effective).

Second, however, the notion of courage, as Aristotle noticed, is more than mere challenge and the risking of life – the notion of courage also carries an implication of fighting for something. Aristotle distinguished foolhardiness from courage. For instance, to go to war unarmed against an armed enemy is foolhardy. There are many instances where lack of preparation or foresight, or emotional acting out, vitiate the bravery of the action.

In order for a practice to be courageous there needs to be some kind of goal, and, furthermore, some kind of connection between the goal and the practice. This is admittedly still pretty vague. Insofar as we define courage as a challenging practice in which we risk our lives in order to reasonably further some kind of goal, we have reached a definition with elements (‘risk’, ‘lives’, ‘reasonably’ ‘further’, ‘some kind of goal’) that are very open to differing views.

On the one hand, this is certainly as it has to be. If we are to articulate a positive supplement to the negative definitions of the freedom of expression, it must be very open, because it should be open to the improvisational and disruptive impulses of courage. As soon as we start to define the goals and the ways of reaching them too strictly, these very definitions might themselves become objects of challenge through the aporias of courage.

On the other hand, even though the positive freedom we are seeking to instantiate is open to differing views, this does not mean that we might as well do without it – especially not when we are talking about communicative expressions. It draws on the intuition that life at the outset is the prime value, and if you risk your life you are thus expected to be able to say something about why this sacrifice is necessary. The agent who risks her or his life always has the burden of proof.

Certainly, what is taken to be necessary may vary almost endlessly. That cannot be determined in advance, once and for all. But an agent who risks her or his life without being able to give some account of why, is foolhardy – and the chances that she or he in some sense will be taken seriously is minimal.

With this last move, we are, as premised above, closing in on a deliberative approach (as articulated in Cohen, 1989, 1997; Habermas, 1981, 1992, 1996; Rawls, 1999[1971]), something that may seem surprising given the French inspiration of the previous sections. Knowing Habermas’ hostility towards the anti-rational impulses in these positions (Habermas, 1985) on the one hand, and Derrida’s hesitation on linguistic generality (cf. the previous sections) on the other hand, this calls for some comments.

We are not going to claim that the Habermasian and Derridean approaches could be reconciled. In previous writings we have, however, argued that Habermas’ deliberative approach and the world-disclosing approaches (in this article: Foucault and Derrida) articulate two different (and to some extent opposing) impulses in our social, political and communicative practices: the impulses of systematicity (attempting to bring together seemingly disparate phenomena) and the quest for adequacy (attempting to understand phenomena in their entire diversity) (e.g. in Hansen, 2005a, 2005b, 2013).

As shown above, Derrida’s deconstructive approach can certainly be seen as an attempt to reveal the necessary gaps and aporias embodied in the generalizing aspects in argumentative deliberation. At the same time, however, the findings of his analyses do not lead to a refusal of the generalizing approaches as such:

The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged – it is of obligation that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. (Derrida, 1994: 53⁹; emphases added)

Even though Derrida in the above quote is reflecting upon the undecidable and the moment of freedom he still acknowledges that the resulting decision needs to take account of laws and rules. Derrida is very clear that true decisions are not determined by existing rules and laws, but at the same time, however, neither are they entirely independent of rules and laws.

Habermas and Derrida certainly disagree in their analyses of how rules and laws are (should be) established – Derrida focusing on emergence through continuous challenges, Habermas focusing on the deliberative and argumentative trying to overcome mutual disagreements. Habermas’ account has its limits when it comes to articulating reasonable resentments towards existing discursive structures (this is an often raised criticism of Habermas’ approach – see, for example, in Thomassen, 2007), Derrida’s approach is lacking in reflections on the forces or mechanisms that bring back new accounts of the general: how and why do new rules, laws and accounts of courage come about?

Both positions are (if not in their full articulations then at least in their founding intuitions) in fact right. In order for deconstruction not to become merely destructive, we need to understand how reason in communication plays the role of helping agents to reach reasonably towards each other. Otherwise public discussions will tend to dissolve into an infinite ocean of unconnected conversations; any point of view will appear as equally valid; any decision will be prevented by the persistent possibility of raising counter-voices by minority groups. Deliberation is the responsibility of trying to reach common understandings in spite of initial disagreements. This is where Habermas is right. On the other hand, in order for such reasonable accounts not to freeze into dogma, we need (courageous) challenges of the very accounts of reasonability. This is where world-disclosing approaches as suggested by Foucault and Derrida are at their strongest.

However, having seen that every human practice is embedded in aporetic paradoxes, it should not come as a surprise that even reason is aporetically structured: seeking deliberative consensus is a legitimate aim only insofar as the exchanged arguments seek to include courageous challenges (possible disturbances of consensus) of the discursive horizons, just as we have seen that notions of courage make sense only through some deliberative reflections of our means and goals.

VII

The quest for a reasonable account of the necessity of change does not imply that (1) an act without such accounts is by itself illegitimate – sometimes we do things without any reason or clear ideas of what we try to accomplish that turn out to be of value nevertheless. But in public exchanges where we want to affect others, the others should in some way come to understand why change is necessary.

Neither do we want to imply that (2) changes may never come about without agents being able themselves to give an account of why this is necessary. Quite often actions and events are conceived in ways that the initiators did not foresee.

What we are trying to argue here is thus not that the suggested reflections on positive freedom of expression should replace prevailing accounts of negative freedom. It may be argued that a freedom of expression that is only thought through negative accounts of freedom is problematic, but that is quite another argument and it is not implied by the above reflections. The reflections merely suggest that in evaluations of actual public spheres it is inadequate merely to consider the plurality of voices (as suggested in the negatively conceived accounts of the freedom of expression).

This is where we suggest turning our attention towards notions of courage. If our bandwidth of attention is limited, it is important that we in our engagements in the public spheres are not overwhelmed by insignificant utterances that merely affirm existing states of affairs. For public deliberation to become democratically fruitful it is important that we are attentive to courageously challenging statements; challenges that are, certainly, made comprehensible to us by the speakers’ attempts to convince us of the underlying goals and means.

Certainly, if these reflections are to gain any real relevance they will need to be further articulated, and in such articulations it will be necessary to substantiate notions of ‘life’, ‘reasonably’, ‘some kind of goal’, etc. And these substantiations might narrow the plurality of voices heard in the public.

As demonstrated in the previous sections the alternative to doing this is, however, not to make every voice visible in the public spheres. Even though they may exist in the public sphere, it is not certain that the limited bandwidth of attention leaves room for their actually being heard by any critical mass.

Insofar as we consider the public spheres not merely as spheres in which voices should be uttered but also as spheres in which voices should be heard, we need some way to select out those voices from the chorus that are significant in relation to some given context. Unlimited plurality is not an option. The question thus becomes how plurality should be limited. Should plurality be limited according to explicitly articulated rules and norms, rules and norms that can, due to their explicit articulations, themselves become subjects of dispute? Or should plurality be limited according to unconscious power structures, the rules of the strongest?

Certainly we cannot avoid the latter alternative entirely – and probably we should not. The voices of the strong should be heard. However, the reflections in this article are meant to suggest the democratic benefits that would derive from moderating the self-given prevailing power structures by focusing attention on courageous voices in which agents risk their public lives in order to challenge existing power structures. It is not at all certain that such challenging voices will actually succeed. However, in order for our societies and cultures to stay alive, it is essential that we are continuously reminded that the prevailing rules and norms are only one solution to insoluble problems (aporias) that must be solved.

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