ONFREEDOM
ON FREEDOM: AN INTRODUCTION
Prologue
The purpose of this short course is to acquire a basic understanding of human freedom and its limits so as to grow in our respect for this primary means of realizing the human vocation to love and be loved. It will become clear why certain popular views of freedom in today’s culture proceed from an inadequate grasp of the truth about the human condition and its destiny.
Outline
Freedom is now and always has been one of the greatest treasures of the human being. No other human good is comparable to it, short of life itself. The main reason is that we were created to give and receive love, and this would be impossible if we were not free. Ultimately, it is the best way we reflect the image and likeness of God.
So greatly is freedom valued, that we often lose sight of its limits. But without taking them into account, we could not grasp its real nature. Simply because it is a characteristic of limited human beings, freedom, too, has limits.
One can look at freedom on several levels: ontological, psychological, and moral.
1) Ontologically, freedom is an unrestricted opening of the objective horizon of our minds and wills. What makes it possible is the transcendence of the human spirit, which enables us to know the truth and to love the good. These human capacities are potentially infinite, but when we put them into practice, our acts are always limited by the specific circumstances of our lives. This means that every human person can continue to grow indefinitely, but our actual growth is contingent upon what we do about it within a limited range of possibilities.
It is this unrestricted openness of our nature as human beings that makes it possible for us to get beyond ourselves and to use our minds and our wills to make contact with the highest Being, God. Contrary to modernist ideological thinking (immanentism), human beings are not self-enclosed and bound within their own narrow world. We have the capacity to get in direct touch with the transcendent reality beyond and outside that world. This openness is the foundation of all other expressions of human freedom.
2) Psychologically, freedom of choice is a property of the will, which gives us the power of self-determination and enables us to move toward whatever the mind recognizes as good. As ontological freedom gives the mind a certain “infinitude,” freedom of the will introduces a multitude of finite limits. Some of these are extrinsic (biological, genetic, social, cultural, political, economic, etc.); others are intrinsic (those that are proper to our nature as human beings).
We are free beings, then, within the scope of the kind of being our human nature makes us to be. We are free to choose among many goods that are within our natural capacity, but not beyond it. We have not chosen to be humans, but our humanity requires us to choose what kind of human we want to be. And our free will provides the means. What principally moves us to make certain choices is our own will, and not some set of external conditions. We choose this or that because we want to. What we want is naturally conditioned by many factors within and beyond us. Here, too, our self-determination is limited by surrounding circumstances in our life—some within our control, but mostly outside it.
3) Morally, freedom is the means of acquiring whatever we perceive will make us good at being human. Whatever it is that we choose must have the appearance of a good. Our will is free only to choose goodness. This elective limitation is again, a consequence of our nature, which was created for the purpose of moving toward human perfection.
The will instinctively shuns whatever has the appearance of evil. Concretely in human life, good and evil always present themselves in finite objects of choice. Freedom of choice is the indispensable means to fulfill the first commandment of the law of human nature: do good and avoid evil.
We can also look at freedom with respect to its exercise. In much popular thinking, freedom is mistaken for pure spontaneity or indetermination. The great pagan idol of our times is “the autonomous man.” Many of its cultural expressions reach us as an unlimited ability to do “whatever I want”—a caricature of true freedom. The superficiality of this common error becomes evident if we distinguish between freedom of exercise and freedom of specification.
Freedom of exercise implies the absence of constraints, whether internal or external. Conditions must be present for us to exercise our freedom of choice. One or more objects must be present to us as distinct possibilities for choice. And before we can exercise our free will, we must be conscious of possessing the means to choose among them.
Freedom of specification is the power to choose this or that object according to its position on a scale of relative goodness, as determined both by the intrinsic nature of the object and by extrinsic circumstances of time and place. Besides certain conditions, previous experience is implied so that we are able to recognize the presence of a situation that demands or permits choices.
To become “good” at exercising our freedom requires a certain human maturity and the “good fortune” to be in circumstances which actually permit it. (For example we are not constrained by fear, passion, or force.) To become “good” at specifying the objects of free choice requires a certain formation, which has opened us to the acquisition of virtue and provided us with the experience of making proper and improper choices in the past. As we get “better” at understanding and respecting this great power, we become “good” at achieving an excellent human character.
John A. Gueguen, 2003
Readings
St. Josemaría Escrivá, “Freedom, a Gift of God” (1956). Scepter booklet no. 52
(1976); in Friends of God.
Msgr. Cormac Burke, “Freedom: From What? For What?” (Catholic Truth Socie-
ty, 1973). Scepter booklet no. 8 (1973).
Frank Sheed, “Freedom to Love” in Society and Sanity (1953). Scepter booklet
no. 134 (1982)
Rev. Joseph de Torre, “Freedom,” chap. 30 in Christian Philosophy (1980).
Sinag-Tala.
Russell Shaw, “Freedom and Freedoms,” chap. 1 in Choosing Well (1982).
Univ. of Notre Dame Press.
Pope John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth (Veritatis Splendor) (1993).