Freedom as we idealize it is not at all an instrument or an agent to achieve our desires, good or bad. The lesser freedom of the tiger or the grazing deer can do that for us. Freedom as we idealize it is an aspect of the state of personhood, a state in which we are unified, coherent, and complete in our human being. An animal cannot be free in a meaningful sense, not even a human animal who has failed to rise even partially to the higher state of personhood.
Freedom is not a frictionless movement through this world, through the various stories in which we participate, though those who are free might have that air and feeling of such movement.
What is freedom? In The Size of Human Freedom, I dealt with some false ideas which were based upon misunderstandings of the term `random’, misunderstandings which have more to do with ancient pagan superstitions than with hardheaded scientific attitudes or even scientific materialism of a cleaner sort, let alone with a more sophisticated philosophy whether materialistic or otherwise monistic, whether dualistic or something better recognizing the profound depths and complexity of created being.
I’ll let Henri Bergson speak to the issue, bringing us closer to a good understanding of freedom.
It is then right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually. This creation of self by self is the more complete, the more one reasons on what one does. [page 7, “Creative Evolution”, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 1998 reprint]
Bergson got it partly right in the above quotation and got some of the other parts right in other ideas he expressed in the small amount of his writings I’ve been able to read. In fact, he came a bit closer to a more complete version of the truth when he said:
[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work. [page 172, “Time and Free Will”, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint.]
Bergson has a reputation for holding a view of organisms which verges on vitalism. Perhaps he deserved that reputation. He certainly had powerful insights into the relationships between time and particularity—highly relevant to the current discussion, as I discussed five years ago in Creation and Freedom. Bergson also has some very good intuitions about the general nature of freedom and some elegant expressions of the corresponding insights. (I do read him in English translations, so the translators should get at least some credit.)
If Bergson can be justifiably accused of holding a vitalist worldview, he can also be praised for understanding freedom in terms of human being, in terms of our basic human animal selves, instead of introducing a separate agent: free-will or some variant thereof. Being the nominal master, but truly servant, of something called `free-will’ doesn’t seem much more free than being the servant of our environments. If we are to be free, we must be free as complex organisms, as human animals intending (growing toward a state of) moral order, intending personhood—unity and coherence and completeness. Bergson pretty much nailed the description of what we should be intending: “[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.”
The God of Jesus Christ, in His role as Creator and Sustainer of this particular Creation, is not Himself free in the sense of some modern thinkers, free to act in an arbitrary way. In the very act of bringing into existence a specific Creation, God in His transcendence freely accepted the constraints of acting as a Creator of that specific Creation. In ancient Hebraic terms, still valid in their main thrust, God offered a covenant which He accepted. Over the centuries, Jews and then Christians have explored various aspects of divine covenants but it all collapses to God’s willingness to create and sustain a very particular Creation, including a differently particularized concrete world, and that willingness of God means that He’s willing to act in certain ways appropriate to such a Creator of such a Creation. Our freedom is analogous, except that our being, including the raw `pieces’ of our whole personalities in Bergson’s terms, is given to us and our freedom comes when we intend to be, as some say, the best we can be. The best we can be is to be unified and coherent and complete, an artist and his work, not just the artist.
In simple terms, I’m free when I’m a properly rich and complex version of me, when I’ve done what I’ve been called to do in life, having become the sort of man who could carry out my mission or at least made a good try of it.
So, freedom seems to be a simple matter of truly intending to be the sort of man who can carry out the mission I feel called to. In a surprising number of cases, men and women seem to know what they are called to be and, in an age such as ours, are so often frustrated in their life’s mission because of the decay of the imperfect but reasonably well-ordered West including those who are frustrated even in their parental duties by the mainstream redefinition of those duties to being chauffeurs and facilitators as their children participate in programs intended to shape them as proper American consumers, supporters and dependents of centralized powers. But shouldn’t we be able to be what we should be just by a proper amount of planning followed by the necessary effort to reach our goals, to make some headway toward perfection, or at least a state of good-enough? Isn’t it easy enough to turn away from a civilization decaying still more rapidly in moral and cultural realms than in economic realms? Isn’t it easy enough to take that first step toward a better future for ourselves and our descendants?
Unfortunately not. As Kenneth Minogue told us:
One cannot organize a work of art; nor write poetry to rule. The man who sets out quite deliberately to maximize his own happiness [or freedom] is likely to fail. Whilst one may, perhaps, be able to create vast pools of technicians at will, one cannot create political stability or a nation of mystics. There are many things in the world which we cannot attain simply because we want them; and some are beyond our grasp precisely because we want them too much. [page 157, The Liberal Mind, Liberty Fund, 2000, reprint of book published in the early 1960s.]
The humblest of lives is a work of art if properly lived. We may see patterns, the opportunistic grab at means to a life of freedom, when we look at the lives of some judged worthy to be described in the biography sections of our libraries and bookstores, but, in almost all cases, those patterns appear only in the rearview mirror. I will again quote Professor Minogue:
There are no means which serve the precise end of freedom, for freedom, like happiness, is not an end that can be pursued. [page 158, The Liberal Mind, Liberty Fund, 2000, reprint of book published in the early 1960s.]
How can we obtain freedom? Once again, Professor Minogue has wise words for us:
[Freedom] has always been attained because of a spontaneous growth of interest in truth, science, or inventiveness; a spontaneous growth of moral principles appropriate to freedom; a spontaneous construction of the political arrangements which permit of free constitutional government. Spontaneity indicates that free behavior has arisen directly out of the character of the people concerned, and that it is neither a mechanical process, nor a “natural” reaction to an environment nor a means to the attainment of some end. Free behavior, in other words, is its own end. [page 158, The Liberal Mind, Liberty Fund, 2000, reprint of book published in the early 1960s.]
This is very similar to what I’ve been advocating. To become truly free, we must turn toward a deeper understanding of man as he truly exists, a citizen of a universe described in certain ways by Einstein and in other ways by Darwin. We must return to being the sort of man foreshadowed by Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Galileo, Newton, as well as the likes of Cervantes and Bach and a host of early modern historians and literary exegetists and explorers and traders and even bankers. We must become men who pursue the truth for the truth’s sake, because it is the truth of Creation, the truth given to us by God to shape ourselves into His image. In terms I’ve used often: we must pick up our sticks and rocks, pretending they are the tools we see our Heavenly Father using as He goes about His work. We must imitate His actions, learn to take His thoughts manifested in Creation into our own minds and let those thoughts become our minds. We must learn to love what is, just because it is the work of the Creator.
I’ll make one matter more clear: we must turn to understanding ourselves not to control ourselves or to control potential criminals. We turn to such an understanding because the very effort will shape us into human persons, human animals who have become substantially unified, coherent, and complete.
When we do so, when we imitate our Maker in His work, we also imitate our Maker in His freedom. We learn to move freely, to think freely, to love freely.
It might seem odd that we learn to both imitate God and be free by studying the shape of spacetime or the strange nature of matter, by studying bones dug out of the sands and rocks of Africa, by studying the disedifying history of human communities and the often criminal nature of human individuals. It seems less odd to the extent we can recover a truer sense of this world as being part of a greater Creation, a work of the God of Jesus Christ.