About Freedom

I read, I listen, and I myself remember someone’s lamentation: there is so much talk about freedom and so few free people. It seems that “freedom will meet us joyfully at the entrance” and everyone will be happy, because, as E. Hemingway noted: “The bull in the arena is also a neurasthenic. And in the meadow he is a healthy guy … “And in response to S. Kierkegaard:” People never use the freedom that they have, but demand the one that they do not have.

There are three definitions that form what I call the triangle of freedom.

First: “realized necessity” (K. Marx). But not compulsion, compulsion by something or someone, but an internal necessity – something without which I cannot be myself. An external need may or may not become internal. It can create a pushing force that helps to float when it is already pressed to the bottom of unfreedom. But she herself is not freedom.

The second belongs to F. Niering: “the ability to be and to become.” It is also not purely external. Quite often we see examples of how, with all the opportunities provided by life, a person could not be and become. This facet of freedom is born and exists in the dialogue of external and internal.

The third belongs to M. Mamardashvili: “… this is what rests on the freedom of another and has this latter as its condition.” Freedom that infringes on the freedom of another ceases to be freedom and falls into the slavery of power over another, possession, satisfaction of the unconscious in oneself …

To summarize, freedom is a perceived need to be and become oneself, at least not obstructing, but as a maximum contributing to the realization of the same need for another person. In this understanding, freedom is always a probabilistic thing, and not a causal one, and universal. And in general, as Vladimir Ilyich wrote: “A reason is not at all a reason until it acts.” To slip on the oil spilled by Annushka is not at all necessary to fall, especially under a tram, especially so that he cuts off his head.

Hence, by definition, the assumption of responsibility for the ambiguity of the results. This does not interfere with predicting the consequences of one’s own actions and weighing the risks. I would even say that responsibility presupposes, requires them, and at the same time accepts the non-guaranteed results. Having scratched my head in front of a stone at a crossroads and going to the right, I take responsibility for how and what I will do on this path, and for the fact that, having avoided the troubles and dangers of the path to the left, I will not get the good that is on it there is. Freedom always poses a choice, and the refusal to choose is also a choice. Is this why freedom suddenly begins to seem like an excess burden? It’s much easier to live in an organized flow, without fooling yourself with elections – let the flow carry you.

Internal lack of freedom frees from the acceptance of personal, internal, psychological responsibility, blocking the possibility of such acceptance, but at the same time does not exempt from responsibility for the results. The neurotic fear of frogs does not relieve a person who knows how to swim from responsibility and reproaches of conscience for not trying to save a drowning man out of fear of frogs perched on the shore. The degree of freedom and acceptance of its responsibility in essence forms the main measure and condition of psychological well-being. If you dance from Virchow’s definition of illness – “a life bound in its freedom”, then a person comes to me when he feels alone in the face of this constraint, from which he wants to free himself and chooses to do so. And together we untwist hundreds of threads, with which his life is entangled hand and foot, like Gulliver by Lilliputians.