Cage of freedom

None is more hopelessly enslaved than he who falsely believes he is free. – Goethe

If you insist on freedom, you can become a prisoner to it as incorruptible principle. This is also the character of fanaticism; you are a prisoner to those principles you will not compromise. Calling them “red lines” is quite revealing. 

Is this the character of human existence? A religious man submits to God. A spiritual woman submits to Love. A corporate creature submits to The Company. A political beast submits to The Party. A rugged individualist submits to The Wild. 

The ego casts submission as slavery. It tempts us away from the slavery it fears to ‘freedom’ from interference, ‘freedom’ from constraint. But this also becomes that to which you then submit, and you begin your journey as a prisoner of that particular story. 

One way or another, we will face the endless tensions that must arise between the group/environment and the individual. In response to this, Jung wrote, “Free will is doing gladly that which one must do.”

What is love (“gladly”), and what is free will?

I can’t define pornography, but “I know it when I see it” (Potter Stewart). I believe the same is true of free will, love, wisdom, health, grace… The academic process teases out clear distinctions in an attempt to produce watertight definitions of some phenomenon. This also applies to the legal world, and to science of course, but much escapes such definition, pornography being but one infamous example from a very large set. 

Furthermore, there is no escaping the fact that any definition, no matter how rigorously established, buckles when it meets the mess of Reality Out There. Even the constant of light’s speed gets tweaked. But more important than tiny wiggle-room uncertainties is how such constants, consensus pronouncements and verifiable results are wielded and turned into policy, or into machinery, or how they influence parenting or educational systems. As soon as something seemingly neat and tidy leaves the desk, laboratory or think tank, the rubber meets the road of unintended consequences.

Yes, control is an integral part of life. So is grace. 

Walking is a matter of control, but in cooperative balance with gravity and other physical forces. Free will is like this, like a dance. It is not solipsistic, is not completely free, is impossible in an infinite void. It is only meaningful in some constraining context that has structure, which is thus useful. What is the meaning of ‘individual’ (will) if there is no group (structure)? It is precisely the constraints of the specific context (group, culture, setting, situation) that give the individual something to do, something to react to, a ‘backdrop’ against which to discern and experience self. Reliable, discernible contrast to self is required for free will to be able to make choices. Free will is thus ‘free’ only in the sense of being unpredictable at some very fine granularity, and is ‘will’ in the sense of experienced preference.

None is more hopelessly enslaved than he who misunderstands freedom. I think we Westerners misunderstand. And I believe we owe this subject matter, this humanist/ontological topography ruthless reexamination. For that, we need freedom to discuss (o sweet irony!). For discussion to be richly valuable, we need to be mature – another undefinable – about listening to each other and taking the uniqueness of each perspective into account. 

Love is the fruit of the maturity we must earn before we can respond with grace to that which constrains us into ever-evolving being. And it holds free will sacred.