Intellectual freedom

Definition: The right to hold or research any thought, belief, or speculation and to express it in any way the holder or researcher considers appropriate

Significance: Intellectual freedom is considered to be the foundation of Western thought and the cornerstone of academic research

The concept of intellectual freedom originated with nineteenth century German thinkers as the right of scholars and scientists to engage in research and speculation without interference from church or state. This notion, however, has evolved to that of academic freedom, with ramifications for scientific, speculative, literary, and even artistic pursuits, including freedom to express or communicate the results in any medium. Without ability and freedom of expression, intellectual freedom is meaningless. Intellectual freedom is arguably the indispensable foundation of Western civilization.

The Greeks were the first to consider the nature and limits of intellectual freedom seriously. It began with their discovery of the powers of reason. They regarded the intellect as divine. True freedom, they believed, emanates from reason and philosophy. The worst oppression was not being able to think for oneself. In their excitement over their discovery, the ancient Greeks applied reason even to aesthetics and ethics. That meant freedom to question and criticize Greek religion and national and mythological heroes.

Socrates’ trial in 399 b.c.e. is a quintessential example of intellectual freedom and its repression. His student Plato believed that the best ruler was one who was intellectually liberated—a philosopher king. The Greeks could not imagine that one who experienced the joys of intellectual freedom would want to return to a life of superstition, narrow-mindedness, and censorship.

When Arabs, Jews, and Christians of the Middle Ages took hold of Greek ideas and tasted the fruits of intellectual and critical freedom, they created imaginative theological and scientific theories that dazzled the mind. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, synthesized Aristotelian metaphysics with Christian theological doctrine. His Summa theologiae (1266–1273), longer than the entire works of Aristotle, is only one of some sixty books Aquinas wrote.

In one way or another, the success of intellectual freedom has always been connected with institutions of higher learning. Aquinas, for example, was a professor of theology. Universities have been breeding grounds for intellectual activities based on the assumption that members must be free to think, deliberate, speculate, and experiment.

Intellectual freedom is at the root of Western liberal, democratic institutions. The First Amendment to the US Constitution is testimony to this aspect of intellectual freedom. Any concept of freedom incorporates freedom of thought and expression. The most eloquent arguments for freedom of thought and expression come from John Locke’s Letters Concerning Toleration (1689) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). Both English philosophers knew that true intellectual freedom can only be experienced by those who can tolerate cognitive and intellectual conflict. People unaccustomed to such challenges tend to resist intellectual analysis.

Intellectual Freedom and Censorship

Seeking truth is said to be inherently subversive. Truth may undermine established religion, aristocracy, political power, and other received ideas, such as the scientific intellectual hierarchy. According to Thomas Kuhne in his Structure of Scientific Revolution (1970), scientists too become intellectually lazy. Kuhne contends that gaining acceptance by a well-established circle in the scientific community is difficult, even if a new discovery or theory is valuable. The history of science is replete with battles between old and new scientific communities. The new wants acceptance; the old wants to retain authority.

In the case of Socrates, some Athenian politicians feared having their prestige and authority undermined by the intellectual gadfly. Socrates was condemned to death for insisting on freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The Athenian politicians condemned him in the name of the common good, a cause that would be cited repeatedly in persecutions, as would national security and the good of the country. Similar rationales were offered by Romans for regulation of morality and by Christian inquisitors for saving souls.

Intellectual freedom, according to many historians, suffered some of its greatest setbacks in the name of Christianity. For example, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, published by the Roman Catholic church from 1559 until discontinued in 1966, eventually contained a list of more than four thousand books forbidden to Catholics around the world. Saving souls and regulating morality are still used as excuses for censorship.

In modern Western societies, however, few constraints are imposed on intellectual freedom. This is also true in some non-Western countries such as India. In many Islamic and communist societies, however, poets, novelists, journalists, artists, and scientists are monitored.

In a series of landmark decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court restricted the ways in which public and private censorship organizations could prosecute publishers and filmmakers, as had been common prior to the 1950s. In Abrams v. United States (1919) Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a dissenting opinion, wrote that the US Constitution justifies the notion that “the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.” The Abrams case involved street-level intellectual freedom: distribution of antiwar pamphlets during wartime. Holmes’s famous dissent was the beginning of a series of deliberations that progressively explicated the connection between an open society and intellectual freedom. Justice Louis Brandeis in a minority opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) wrote: “Those who won our independence . . . knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope, and imagination; that repression breeds hate.”

One certitude of intellectual freedom is that there will always be those who oppose it, usually for a common good. During the 1986–1987 academic year there was a 21 percent jump in intellectual censorship incidents and a 168 percent increase after 1982. According to many analysts, this was attributable to Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s conservative administrations and greater activism of Fundamentalist religious groups headed by such televangelists as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggart.

The 1980’s produced another debate over censorship and intellectual freedom called the battle of canons. The debate began with Allan Bloom’s influential book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), followed by E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987). The canon advocates, such as Bloom and Hirsch, believe that there is a list that contains the universally proven intellectual and artistic masterpieces by such geniuses as William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Plato, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Critics of the canon see no special value for the classics other than that they have withstood the test of time among Europeans.

Bibliography

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Curry, Richard, editor. Freedom at Risk: Secrecy, Censorship, and Repression in the 1980’s. Temple University Press, 1988.

Hirsch, E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

"Intellectual Freedom: Issues and Resources." American Library Association, 2017, www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom. Accessed 4 Aug. 2023.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. "Science and Its Critics." Academe, vol. 81, no. 5, Sept. 1995.