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What if true freedom is to accept ourselves and be fully ourselves where we have no choice? Philosophical view of self-will and freedom.
You probably know this yourself: the one who screams the loudest is often wrong. Moreover, this is what their cries testify to, but they do not hear it. If this truth is applied to the question of freedom, it becomes even more merciless. What is the drunkard bawling at the bar counter, categorically unable to stop drinking? Of course, he yells that he has every right to drink another glass, that he is a free man, damn it! What does the retrograde repeat over and over again in captivity of its own bitterness? That he has every right to think what he thinks, and that he is free to dislike our time. What do those proclaim who are ruled by their own vicious passions, hatred and envy? That they are free people and have the right to think the way they think.
Spinoza noted this in the Ethics: “A drunken man is convinced that, according to the free determination of his soul, he says what a sober person would later wish to take back. In the same way, madmen, talkers, children, and many others of the same kind are convinced that they speak according to the free definition of the soul, while they are unable to restrain the impulse of talkativeness that overcomes them.1. If they can’t contain him, it’s because he’s stronger than them. One gets the impression that the appeal to freedom points precisely to its absence, as if a dependent being, determined by his social environment, his sad passions or his unconscious, could not do otherwise than refer to precisely what he lacks. Conversely, when we experience the fullness of freedom, it does not occur to us to remind others how free we are at that moment.
Pass the tests
- What kind of freedom do you need?
The feeling we experience is completely self-sufficient: we therefore have not the slightest desire to shout about our freedom at all corners. Of course, nothing proves that this impression of freedom is real freedom. But, if we do not feel the need to shout about it or insist on it, this already means that we have met something real, something that is enough for us. There can be joy in meeting this present, and that joy is more due to our lack of self-will than our free will… Yes, we are basically the children of our childhood, our parents, our environment, our language, our genes and biography. We didn’t choose them and we can’t change that. But maybe we are free in a different way. What if our main freedom – and we were told this by the Stoics and psychoanalysis, Spinoza, Nietzsche and even Bergson – lies in the ability to accept what we cannot change? What if true freedom is to be fully who we are, and what is so little of our choice? Then it would be clear that there is no point in shouting about freedom in this sense; but it has everything so that we can feel it.
Read more:
- How do we understand freedom?
- Viktor Frankl on love and freedom
- How to give children and teenagers freedom?
1 B. Spinoza “Ethics” (Azbuka, Azbuka-Atticus, 2015)