We often think of freedom as the
capacity to make unrestrained choices. We can choose to wear a black shirt or
instead choose a green one. We make hundreds of these small kinds of choices
daily. Some choices are made with not so much as a ripple of significance in
our daily existence, while others are life changing events. Such as the choice
to marry, the choice to harm, the choice to go to Uni, and what job we want.
While the above analysis seems to
capture to a great extent the sense of what freedom is all about in our society,
it is fundamentally lacking in any real direction or result in the big picture.
Let’s consider an example. Let’s assume that I am eighteen and have just
learned to drive a car, and have just gotten my license. I could without any
doubt drive on a main road and begin to run people off the road and hurt and
possibly kill pedestrians on the footpath. Now I certainly can do it in the
sense that I have the capability of doing so with the car, but such use of the
car is clearly an abuse of the car’s purpose. How do we know this? We know this
because cars are made for the purpose of transportation and not as a weapon. So
what we see is that the authentic use of a car is not found in what the car is
capable of, but rather, in the original purpose of the car. The car seems to have
more purpose than us.
Now let us apply this example of the car to the notion of freedom. To make any determination about freedom we must first find out what the purpose of freedom is. Such a purpose is not found in the capabilities of freedom but in its subject. What does that mean? It means that to understand true freedom we must first acknowledge that there is no such thing as freedom in abstract. It is human beings that are the subject of freedom, i.e., it is humans who exercise freedom. We never see freedom walking down the street and deciding to stop at a certain restaurant for lunch. It’s on the contrary, we see human beings exercising the ability of freedom and making a free choice to take or refrain from a particular action. For this reason and to understand the purpose of freedom we must first understand the purpose of the subject or human being that possesses freedom.
So what is the purpose of the
human being? Freedom is understood not by what it is capable of doing, but
rather for what purpose it exists. Freedom’s capability; the fact that we can
make choices, even far reaching choices such as the decision to love or hate, is
best understood as the means by which freedom fulfils its purpose, but not the
purpose itself.
Take time to be on your own to evaluate your life
So in making our choices, we always have to ask if we are acting in accordance with what is the right choice in relation to having our freedom.
