​Chapter 19

Freedom happens in the gap, in the settling. Whether it can be described can be tested against the words used to name it.

The oldest recorded word for freedom is Sumerian, from the twenty-fourth century before this era: ama-gi₄, written 𒂼𒄄. It means return to the mother. In Lagash, peasants who could not repay a loan taken to survive until harvest fell into debt bondage and became the property of creditors, and the reform decrees of Enmetena and Urukagina cancelled such debts and forced the creditors to release those they held, so that people could go back to their families and their land. gi₄ is a verb — to return, to put back. The earliest word for freedom names an act of cancellation. A debt that had hardened into a status is revoked, and the person is no longer a debtor, as what made him so has been withdrawn.

A positing hardened into a nature — you borrowed, therefore you owe, therefore you are a debtor and belong to another — and the reform did not add a property called freedom to him. It removed the deposit. Freedom appears here as the same structure named by Lehavah. The return runs from the execution to the settling: from what is being carried out to the act that closed the question, with no prior condition restored.

The Sumerian act outlived the Sumerian language. Akkadian andurāru — release, exemption — is the technical term of the Mesopotamian debt remissions, and the decrees use it where the Sumerian ones used ama-gi₄, for centuries after Lagash.

Most other words for freedom moved in the opposite direction.

Greek eleutheros comes from a root of growth and belonging, the same root that gives Latin liber and the Germanic word for people. To be free was to belong to those who grow together, members of the stock, as against the captive taken from elsewhere. An older tradition, reported in the Etymologicum Magnum and taken up by Pohlenz and Arendt, connected it instead to going at will, from a verb stem meaning to come or go. In either account, the later word names a status held.

Libertas named a juridical condition: the legal status of a member of the civitas, backed by a matrix of civic and political rights. The goddess who embodied it held the rod used in the ceremony of manumission and the cap placed on the shaved head of a freed slave. Freedom had become a possession granted or taken away — while manumittere, to release from the hand, was the verb naming the gesture, and libertas described the state it left behind.

Free traces to a root meaning dear, beloved, from a base meaning to love. Gothic frijon is to love; Old English freod is affection, friendship, peace; the Sanskrit cognate priyah means dear, beloved. Words of endearment applied to those inside the circle of kin and not to captives, so that being loved and being unowned shared a designation. Then -dom, from a word for judgment or jurisdiction, turned the adjective into a condition, and freodom named a state of being exempt.

Russian svoboda is built on the reflexive svo-, one's own, from the Indo-European swe-. Vasmer reads its early sense as the status of a member of one's own clan. The resemblance to Sanskrit svabhāva is suggestive, but the two should not be presented as the same formation independently assembled in two branches.

Szabadság is built on szabad, free, and the abstract suffix -ság. The resemblance between szabad and szab, to cut, is misleading: szabad is generally treated as a borrowing from a Slavic form related to svoboda. The Hungarian word therefore belongs with the terms of status rather than those of severing.

Where the mistaken Hungarian reading cuts, Nguni genuinely unties. Zulu and Xhosa inkululeko comes from khulula — to release, to undo a knot — and the abstract noun is late scaffolding built over a verb still in use. Sumerian and Nguni arrived at the same grammar without contact, through cancellation and unbinding respectively, and neither produced a status.

Arabic ḥurriyya moves the other way. It derives from ḥurr, freeborn, and the freeborn man is defined against the slave by birth rather than by anything he does — the same figure the Greek and Latin words produce, reached along a Semitic line, which suggests the hardening into status is not peculiar to a language family.

Chinese Ziyou assembles two characters, self and from: what proceeds from itself. The compound is attested in Chinese from at least the Han dynasty and entered Japanese long before the nineteenth century, when jiyū was repurposed to translate European freedom and liberty. It says more than the word it was recruited for — the source is placed in the actor rather than in a permission held. It also states the difficulty, since something proceeding from itself is what the tradition means by causa sui, and a self that must exist to be the source of its own act has been assumed rather than born.

Where these words began in a verb they hardened into a noun, and where they began in a status they were nouns from the start. Their history often runs the same course as anything settled and then left running: a deed or relation becomes a condition that a man has.

The Sanskrit terms come closest, but still fall short. Svātantrya is independence or self-rule, from svatantra, self-dependent or under one's own authority. Tantra can mean a loom, framework, or system, from a root meaning to stretch; holding one's own thread is therefore an image drawn from the word rather than its literal definition. The image is exact for a self that maintains itself and wrong for what happens at the joint, since a thread woven is part of a fabric, and the act cuts rather than holds. Svabhāva is own-being, the self-nature that Nāgārjuna argues nothing has. The second element can be heard as the verb it comes from: √bhū, to become, to come to be. Not own-nature but own-becoming. The absence of svabhāva in the Buddhist sense is what leaves room for freedom, since a thing possessing a fixed nature would answer from it every time.

Even this formulation implies a self prior to the becoming: sva means own, and own implies a Self to whom the becoming belongs — the agent behind the act. The precision required is that "own" is written after the act and not before it. The becoming has no owner until it has occurred.

Description fails here not for lack of vocabulary. A noun demands something that persists through its predicates, something identifiable as the same across occasions, which is to say repeatable, which is to say something with a nature. Naming the joint as a thing describes it as a repetition, which is precisely the form it lacks. The languages knew this before they forgot it: they started with verbs and ended with nouns, and the ending is the sedimentation of what the vocabulary was trying to name.