may not be used to destroy freedom. Yet, clearly, people can agree to
become slaves, even if they do so on pain of contradiction with the prin-
ciple of liberty, so Mill’s point is not an existential one, but a logical one.
Any choice that would prevent all future choices is a liberty harming
choice and should not be protected by the principle of liberty that Mill
is developing in his work. Only on pain of contradiction may one use lib-
erty to alienate one’s liberty, that is, to harm liberty itself. In a similar
way, it is only on pain of punishment that one may use one’s liberty to
harm others.
While struggling to free space for the liberty of the individual under
the yoke of what he perceived to be an ever more tyrannical state, Mill
was well aware of the need for some limits on the cultivation of human
liberty. One cannot use liberty to alienate liberty and one cannot use lib-
erty to harm others.
In what ways is this limit issue relevant to an investigation of art?
While Mill’s essay belongs properly in the domain of political thought,
there are aesthetic insights to be gleamed from a careful (and admit-
tedly selective) reading of the Liberty essay. In On Liberty, Mill
describes human life as a work of art, whose perfection and beauty can
only be accomplished within certain limits. Moreover, Mill’s reference
to human life as a kind of work of art is framed by the concepts of
beauty and perfection:It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of
men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is
rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance
surely is man himself. (59)The work of art that is the human life is not a work of art that is created
with nothing to guide it, for there are “limits imposed by the rights and
interests of others.” It is only within those limits that “human beings
become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation” and Mill is ulti-
mately interested in the work of art arising from the binding of each
individual to the other; that is to a humanizing social project.^33 His
emphasis on the perfecting and beautifying project that is part of what a
life of liberty must entail connects us to his insight on the role of art in
granting us ideal conceptions “grander and more beautiful” than life can
provide. To improve, human beings need ideals of beauty and perfection,
and good art can provide these ideals.
Not all experiments in living are successful, human beings are, as
Mill does not tire of reminding us, fallible creatures, but there should be88 Elizabeth Millán