It is something bordering on the deplorable that most of those in my generation, save whatever blown-out quotes we may have spotted in our grade school history textbooks, have never read the speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial some 43 years ago. At best we may have some vague idea of its content: calls for freedom and equal rights, religious symbols mixed with political rhetoric, the famous "I have a dream." But regardless of our lack of knowledge, the speech is revered for its influence if nothing else, and rightly so: much of the current political landscape of the United States, if not the world, comes out of this crowning moment of the March on Washington. Why not give this old talk another look? Why not set aside in brackets for the moment the questions about Dr. King that have become more popular as of late, that is to say, ones regarding his personal life, political connections, and the legitimacy of his authorship, and look at his words? We shall not concern ourselves here with the usual issues of "historical impact" nor with how the speech may have been taken in its own time; rather, we ask, what does King say to us today? What does he say, not to those gathered around the steps in 1963, but to the present state of the world?

The speech begins, "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." Thus Dr. King wastes no time in telling us right off what his speech, and the March on Washington as a whole, is about. But here already we must stop, for already he calls for too much from us.

Let us ask ourselves something: do we who live today have anything more than vague and contradictory understandings of what this word even means? We hear "freedom" used over and over again in rhetoric and advertisements, but even with full knowledge of "framing" and emotional manipulation by the media this word still stirs something. But what? We certainly hate to see it misused, even though we ourselves have only the most distant thought of what it means. This is the sad irony: we who so constantly speak of "free trade," "freedom fighters," and above all the "free world," must begin to admit to the fact that we have lost sight of that word's essential meaning. The current president of the U.S. unproblematically takes freedom to be synonymous with representative government; the usual adolescent sentimentality takes freedom to mean that the subject can "do whatever they want," then takes it as proof that freedom doesn't exist when they can't borrow the car; the militant arm of the neoconservative movement thinks that freedom still holds even as freedom under a well-armed American hegemony; consumers take "free" to mean that they don't have to pay for something. None of these strike us as correct, though we can think of little better. It is that last sense, though, which has perhaps most taken hold in us, thus were we asked to furnish a definition we may say: freedom is to be without cost, without constraint; that is, the ability to act spontaneously and arbitrarily however one wishes, without limitation. (To put it colloquially, this is freedom as bling-bling)

But something about this strikes us as missing the mark. Is this "arbitrariness" truly what is meant in the second term of that old formula from the Declaration, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? We constantly hear people saying that freedom is "limited," e.g. I cannot within the bounds of the law arbitrarily shout "fire" in a crowded theater. Thus our ability to act "freely" at any particular time is always cut away to some degree, in order to "prevent anarchy" or somesuch (Hobbes). Human being, in that sense, is never "free." Isn't this correct? Isn't this "common sense"?

With such a meaning in mind, Dr. King utterly confounds us when he speaks of "standing up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day." Should we take these words not as mere flowery language, but as something speaking to the very heart of freedom, we are completely floored. How can we "stand up for freedom together," if freedom is taken as mere ability to act arbitrarily? What does "together" even have to do with such spontaneity without limits? For if others are as free as I am, then my freedom is always limited by their actions. "We will be free one day," "Thank God Almighty, we are free at last," he says: WE will, WE are, not "I" or even "each one of us as individuals" but a thundering WE who are to be freed. And King does not even speak this we only in the sense of African Americans, but says: "...many of our white brothers... have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom." "We" here is a community that seems to know no bounds, a community where all are free and where, somehow, the freedom of one is tied up into the freedom of all.

At this point it we must be in serious doubt of the definition we may have had before, that is, freedom as the ability to act without constraint. Freedom for King is always a social freedom, the freedom of the community as well as its members. But still the old definition holds on, and asks: how is this possible? If freedom means to be without constraints, then certainly we must consider community and other people as essentially being limitations on our actions, thus antithetical to true freedom.

Some etymological genealogy of the words in question may bring light on our dilemma. In the Proto-Indo-European language, prijos (free) does not have this sense of "acting without constraint" at all, but rather means: friend, beloved, member of the community. This, of course, was in opposition to nonmembers, i.e. slaves (slavery being a state that we constantly forget was the norm a scant century and a half ago). The Latin libertatem says much the same as prijos: libertatem is the state of being a freeman, i.e. a nonslave. I can only speculate that over countless centuries the negative definition of freedom (not enslaved, not constrained) has completely covered over the positive one: someone who is a freeman, far from being "arbitrary," is a citizen, one who can and does fully participate in the community. Freedom is thus not merely freedom from constraint (in the specific sense of slavery), but the freedom that launches one from such a slavery into participation. Freedom is the freedom of a being to be, act, and be recognized as a person.

By saying "person" I do not mean to imply the biological sense of homo sapiens sapiens. Rather, the person is the being that is defined in its being by its freedom of participation in the community. The person participates. The person is thus never just a unit to be counted and calculated, or a means to an end (Kant), or "something in the way" to be shuffled off to a corner, but is always the being that, in its participation, is free. We cannot say that the community somehow "creates" the person, that the person arises from it; neither can we say that the person, or several persons, create community. We can only say: the being of the person is participation. The person is "in" a community that is outside of itself, somehow "prior" to itself, though not by chronologically coming before the person but rather in the sense that the community seems like it "has always" been there and "has always" been participated in. Yet at the same moment the person finds itself in the community, the person "furrows" that community, creates a space for itself (which is nonetheless not impermeable), and from that furrowing finds its participation and its freedom. The community is not the sum total of the persons who participate, though its essence is in their participation; the person finds itself as participating, but its participation is nonexistent if the person is merely "the same" as the community or thought to have been absolutely "created" by it. Participation is only possible on the basis of difference, a difference that is nevertheless not an absolute splitting-off, but a furrowing.

What is frequently ignored in Dr. King's speech is that, despite the common title of "civil rights movement" which King names, he uses the word "rights" only three times: once to speak of "the devotees of civil rights," once in quoting the Declaration of Independence, and finally when he states, "And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights." But from that last he continues: "The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges." Justice, as well as freedom, tellingly appear far more often and far more prominently than "rights." It is striking that today we hear these two words, freedom and justice, and can think little more of them then their frequent use in propaganda. As for why they are so much more common in the speech than mere rights, I offer the following as plausible explanation: if we are to think of rights in terms of a law or a legal claim (which is the traditional Enlightenment sense of the term), then for King the rights have been present ever since the founders of the United States set down the Declaration and Constitution, and have certainly been in force since the Emancipation Proclamation and amendments XIII-XV. For him, the law as such has already been settled: the issue now is one of America "making real the promises of democracy," and thus it is one of justice against injustice, freedom against "the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination."

We have already spoken at some length on the notion of freedom; let us consider justice. King says the following about justice: "Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice." "The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges." "I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi... will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice." Justice is a sunlit path, a bright day, an oasis; it is characterized by relief, by a clearing away of darkness and desolation. What does this mean?

We must be very careful here not to take justice the wrong way, to carry these symbols through to "the cup of bitterness and hatred." There is an extraordinary risk in "justice" in the traditional sense of "doing away with:" by clearing away the dark and the desolate, we risk the marginalization and elimination of those "desolate" beings who are the very victims of injustice, and the exalting of those who are already "in the light." As any student of civil rights knows, the "relief" of such a justice is frequently found in the silencing of those who most bear hearkening to. But this sort of justice is clearly not what King means. By speaking of a bright day, of an oasis, he is certainly not speaking of the cutting away or elimination of anyone, much less the dark or the desolate. Rather, his oasis is a gathering point, a place for reconciliation and community to occur, where "black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." King speaks of a "thirst for freedom," and for him such a thirst can only be sated by this oasis of justice; this is the "rock of brotherhood" upon which freedom as participation can occur. To "exalt every valley" and "make low every hill and mountain" certainly does not mean to arrive at justice through a defeat of all that is high; rather, it is to create a place where justice can occur, where the high and low arrive at participation. Thus King dreams that "one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." This table is not just brotherhood but justice, which must be understood as the ground of community.

To speak of justice is to speak of the fully-flowered realization of a community of persons who, in their freedom, participate. But this is not always the case: there is such a thing as injustice, as King very well knows, which is shown by a passage from Tillich (whom, incidentally, King quotes in his "Letter...") that I return to over and over:

"In many cultures the law has not recognized everyone as a person.... Personal standing has been denied to slaves, children, women. They have not attained full individualization in many cultures because they have been unable to participate fully; and, conversely, they have been unable to participate fully because they have not been fully individualized."

Though perhaps stated too sharply, this "inability to participate," this "non-individualization," speaks to the heart of injustice. There are beings in the world who are still in "the dark and desolate valley," "the valley of despair," who would be persons were they not constantly ignored, marginalized, seen and treated as other than free and fully-participatory. What covers them over? What creates this terrible blanket of obscurement which destroys the freedom of these beings? It cannot be anything other than community itself. Community here roots not within justice but injustice, and thus turns into a thing of exclusion which justifies itself by denying that those beings obscured could ever be persons, could ever be allowed to participate. Thus persons denied their freedom are made prey to brutality and oppression, with the dark absurdity and the naked cruelty of it covered over by a thin sheen of "naturalization." It "can't happen here" and it's "impossible" as we constantly say, or perhaps we rationalize that rather than such cruelty, all we witness is just "how things are." But there must come a time when the person (or what ought to be a person) so oppressed will turn its face to the persons around it and reveal what it is, and in that moment those witnesses must smell the stench of the injustice in which they stand. For the person, in its participation, is the gardener of community and the caretaker of justice. Thus I am called to responsibility and placed on the plane of the ethical; I adventure on this plane, seeking around for justice in the hopes that what I find may be planted and "taken up," and frequently I have too little to guide me and the community in which I participate turns elsewhere.

The call to freedom is always the call not only to my own freedom, but to the freedom of all beings that can participate; in other words, it is the call to a universal justice. To quote this key passage once more, "...many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom." This moment in the speech arrives with the most applause of any save the end, which speaks even more deeply:

"And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

For King, no freedom is a genuine and fully unambiguous freedom unless it is a freedom within a community that comes from justice in the widest sense, that is, a community where all persons are, act, and are recognized as persons.

There is no clearer statement of the meaning of "ought," of what should be but not yet is, than this speech. And yet it is in such a context that King introduces what to us seems perhaps the most strange, the most stretched of his metaphors:

"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.... It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note.... Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"

Coming from a speech that is so utterly high-minded, so poetic, so tinged with Christian religiosity, the sheer everydayness of this metaphor should be instructive. But our sense of justice and injustice, the scents we take in from our garden, are not lofty things that appear only at crucial moments of shattering importance: justice and injustice are sensed every day, in something as simple as a bounced check. We smell them while walking down the street, while at work or in class, while talking to our friends. As gardeners and caretakers, it is in our very being to be attuned to such things; we need only to find the responsibility to bring it to our attention.

We have been trapped in all the recent talk of tactics and strategy, of framing and selling a policy, of "how to win." Words like justice have not only been framed but enframed (to borrow a word from Heidegger), brought to a standing attention as useful "selling points" on the way to a victory which means nothing more than its own advent, even while whatever meaning these words may still have is sneered at as old-fashioned and idealistic. Given such a context, Dr. King's compact, shapely 16-minute speech, currently ignored as something merely "important" rather than meaningful, is more relevant than ever. What does it say, then? It speaks to us of freedom, of justice and the ought, of the dignity of persons and the power of community for good or ill. All of this is perhaps expressed with the most depth of all when, in almost the exact midpoint of his speech, Dr. King says:

"We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

By "cannot" King by no means says that such a turning back is not possible. It isn't, but only in the sense that were the community to re-darken what was already once brought into "the oasis of freedom and justice," the hiding away could not be done in the same manner as before. But re-darkening as such, in the form of a "turning back," is an impossibility that is nonetheless fully possible, though in the light of the participation of those already freed we pledge that it will not and can not happen, that we will not allow the spread of injustice to places once cleared. That which allows such a spreading, or such a re-darkening, is something very different from mere injustice. It cannot here be named, as (without sounding overly dramatic) it seems almost too old to be brought to language. Nevertheless, it is perhaps this which brings us to a new understanding of the being of the person: that is, the person is the being of vigilance.