This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Freedom

Whether we consider freedom to be absolute free will, or circumscribed by heritage, nature, inevitability, or chance, the mere mention of the word is already an act of hope. Perhaps those who lack freedom understand its value better than anyone. Those who take it for granted are those who risk losing it. And those who fight for it must be aware of the dangers implicit in the struggle to obtain it. In the midst of the French Revolution, Saint-Just had this to say about the battles for revolutionary freedom: fighting for freedom against tyranny is an epic struggle; fighting between revolutionaries is tragic. The battle for freedom has often spawned the most extreme forms of oppression that nevertheless manage to claim legitimacy by invoking their revolutionary origins. Revolutions legitimize. But once freedom is attained — call it revolution, call it independence — how can it be preserved, sustained, improved? The most pragmatic and precise formula for answering this question may very well be the one suggested by James Madison in The Federalist:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. [But] In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men. . you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Elections, revocations, impeachments, administrative trials, weights and balances, division of powers, fiscal accountability of the executive branch: the democratic governments of the world have discovered multiple ways of expanding upon Madison’s formula so that citizens and institutions may hold governments responsible for controlling themselves and thus, among other things, maintain control over the populace.

Political freedom takes these goals into account and recognizes their limitations. But freedom is both a private and a public issue. Moreover, freedom conceives of itself as an institution in the first person singular. Preserving intrinsic personal values is a kind of freedom that falls within the rubric of the individual. Yet, the moment it steps outside the domain of the individual, freedom understands that no man is free on his own. And so we may say that freedom initially exercises itself in the first person singular, but can only be sustained in the three conditions of the plural. My freedom is “I,” plus “we,” plus the plural “you,” plus “them.” Tensions will inevitably arise between my free “I” and the world around me: they can be antagonistic but are always creative, for if freedom is a possibility for me, it is only true freedom if it is also a possibility for others.

I underscore the word possibility because the obstacles facing liberty are far too numerous and complicated to assure us that “being free” will be immediately accessible to us. For example, people can act freely though against their own best interests, out of masochism perhaps, but more often than not out of ignorance or flawed judgment. Freedom can be freedom for evil. Necessity fuels it but also limits and thwarts it. Nature invokes it but also expels it. It often comes wrapped in the cloak of the unpredictable. And the sum total of all these obstacles and contradictions may lead us, not without good reason, to look upon freedom as nothing more than a moral fact or an obligation. Manuel Azaña expressed this very well: freedom may not necessarily make men happy, but at the very least it will make them men.

Voltaire’s Pangloss tells us that we live in the best of all possible worlds, Beckett’s Winnie, that we live in the worst of all possible worlds.

In between these two visions, Socrates proposes that we live the life of the city and that we seek freedom in the city and in dialogue even if the city will ultimately deny us both dialogue and life itself, as was the case with Socrates himself. True critical wisdom consists of mending the rift between the creative interior life and the mundane exterior life both through personal knowledge (know thyself) and urban knowledge (know others), because that breach between interior and exterior freedom is altogether real and tangible, even if it does occasionally manifest itself as a precipice, a kind of void. Albert O. Hirschman, in a marvelous book, Exits and Entrances, observes this process of “entrances and exits” with stunning clarity.

We constantly enter and exit freedom. The extreme dilemma is twofold: on the one hand we don’t want to remain locked away in our individual freedoms, for they can become a solipsistic seclusion that transforms the outside world into mere illusion. Yet on the other hand, we cannot abide the dire absence of liberty that is represented by life under a dictatorship. Freedom, in reality, is the freedom to move, not without conflicts but rather in a creative sense, between the individual and the world, between the “I” and the “Other.” Freedom consistently fills the gap between interior and exterior action, the abyss between interior and exterior reality, the void between determinism and free will.

An endless task; not that of Camus’s Sisyphus but of Milton’s unfinished man. Can man not “finish” but rather advance, and create himself with freedom? St. Augustine, in his celebrated dispute with Pelagius, denies any freedom that does not occur through the Church — that is, the Institution. Pelagius, a millennium before Martin Luther, grants the individual the freedom to save himself outside of the ecclesiastic institutions. But that kind of freedom also implies that one must work creatively within the institutional framework, not out of inevitability or obligation but out of one’s own free will. That this will, like a kind of DNA in serpentine mutation, comprises heritage, biology, education, culture, language, religion, politics, and morality only makes the notion of freedom more human, and also more complex. There is no such thing as simple freedom.

How is freedom to be measured? By the margin of free will that existing institutions grant the individual? Or is it the reverse, by the margin of authority that our free will grants existing institutions? Whatever, freedom consists of believing in it, fighting for it. Freedom is the quest for freedom. We will never fully achieve it. Death warns us that there are limits to all personal freedoms. History warns us that the institutions that, at some moment or other in time, take it upon themselves to define freedom, eventually wane and transform into something else themselves. But between life and death, between the beauty and the horror of the world, the quest for freedom is what makes us, no matter what the circumstance, free.