Egypt and the Dialectic of Freedom
From the introduction to Maxine Greene’s Dialectic of Freedom:
The aim is to find (or create) an authentic public space, that is, one in which diverse human beings can appear before one another as, to quote Hannah Arendt, “the best they know how to be.” Such a space requires the provision of opportunities for the articulation of multiple perspectives in multiple idioms, out of which something common can be brought into being. It requires, as well, a consciousness of the normative as well as the possible: of what ought to be, from a moral and ethical point of view, and what is in the making, what might be in an always open world.
This, for me, is a piece with the enduring and ongoing lesson out of Egypt today. Mubarak steps down, yes. But he wouldn’t have done so if it were not for the people of Egypt, who never, ever stopped thinking about what ought to be, what might be. They have long imagined a world in which Mubarak no longer plays a role, and now they have it. Congratulations. Today, we are all Egyptians.
