Freedom: Fragile Fiction
I am shackled hand and foot spread eagle on the floor of my cell. I ask my jailer everyday to set me free. Finally he compassionately sets me free.
For days I am exhilarated with the ability to freely pace about my cell. After a few weeks I begin to beg my jailer to set me free. After weeks he, being a compassionate man, sets me free from my cell.
For days I am exhilarated at the freedom to wonder about and speak with other inmates. After several weeks I begin to beg my jailer to free me and finally he relents and releases me from jail. I am overwhelmed with the sense of freedom until I, overcome with hunger and basic needs, seek some work so as to feed myself.
I find a job working on an assembly line and am exhilarated at the new found freedom. After a year I begin to seek other less strenuous and repetitive assembly line work. I wish to free myself from this robotic work I do everyday.
What is the ‘telos’ (ultimate end) of this series of ever persistent desire for freedom? Is hunger for freedom similar to hunger for food, never satiated? I don’t think so. I think the search for freedom can culminate in an ultimate and satisfying end.
Freedom, I suspect, is a search for self-determination. When we feel that we are master of our domain, when we are free to determine who we are and what we need to be our self we will have reached that ‘telos’ of freedom. I suspect this end is as unique as a finger print, it is an act of creation and can be made conscious to me only by me.
I think each of us must learn for our self what we need to secure freedom’s ‘telos’. Probably most of us find only a degree of freedom, but if we never stop looking we may continue finding more of it.
“Man’s freedom is a fabricated freedom, and he pays a price for it. He must at all times defend the utter fragility of his constituted fiction, deny its artificiality.
There are four levels of reactivity of an organism to its environment: 1) Simplest response wherein the organism responds directly to stimuli, 2) Conditioned response is best represented by the “Pavalovian Response wherein there is a response by association, 3) Indirect association takes place when a tool is used to acquire desired object (an ape knocking a banana from a tree with a stick), and 4) Symbolic response wherein a symbol becomes the object causing response, which entails the creation of a symbol representative of an object.
These four different responses are evolutionary but are different in kind. Only humans are capable of all four levels of reactivity. Only humans have the capacity for creating a relationship such as “home with an object made of sticks of lumber. We might appropriately state that the evolutionary development of mind is a “progressive freedom of reactivity. “Mind culminates in the organism’s ability to choose what it will react to.
Delayed reactivity is the birth of freedom; this ability, plus the mammalian evolution of long prolonged development of new born growing up into a society that demanded ever increasing norms of behavior, led to the further development of mind.
Freedom: Fragile Fiction
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Freedom: Fragile Fiction
Thank you for this thought-provoking post, coberst. This is a post I can understand. 
I'm no intellectual.
I'm no intellectual.Life is a Highway. Let's share the Commute.
Freedom: Fragile Fiction
along-for-the-ride;956167 wrote: Thank you for this thought-provoking post, coberst. This is a post I can understand. I'm no intellectual.
You are very welcome.
I'm no intellectual.You are very welcome.
Freedom: Fragile Fiction
For one, begging your captor for something and then getting it has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom, because if you could freely choose anything, you woudln't be begging your captor. So the first several steps of your "freedom gaining process" don't actually have anything to do with freedom. It is only when you are let out of prison and no longer have to appeal to your jailor to get things can you actually start thinking of freedom.
Then, to describe getting a repetitive and boring job on an assembly line as somehow having to go "Well, freedom was nice, but now I need to abrogate my freedom once again to meet my needs"? You are still perfectly free at this point. You've made the free choice to spend some of your time doing something specific on a schedule. You didn't -have- to get the job, you could quit at any time. There are a whole host of other free choices you can make with regards to meeting your basic life needs that aren't "working at a factory"
You describe freedom as this long quest of having to try and find ways to get more freedom, to "master our domain" when the course you've laid out sounds like it is more concerned with putting ourselves not in a position of self-determination (We've had that right from when we were let out of your prison) but instead with putting ourselves in a position where we just never have to decide to do anything we don't want to do.
The freedom to never do anything you don't want to isn't "freedom" in the sense that you aren't free until you are there. I've made the choice that the kind of life I want to lead is one where I have to be willing to spend some portion of my time labouring for others in exchange for what I need to fuel the life I desire. I'm still free. At any time I have the ability to decide "I don't want to do that anymore" and simply stop doing that.
The line "man's freedom is a fabricated freedom" just sounds like someone bemoaning the fact that they aren't willing to make the necessary changes to accomplish what they feel they "ought" to have in terms of self-determination.
As for the latter portion of your thread, suddenly jumping tracks from self-determination to methods of reacting to sensory input, the connection you seem to want to draw is tenuous at best. Sure, humans possess the ability to delay the time between stimulus and response, sure we have the ability to interject a thought process instead of simply reacting, but to conclude that this is somehow the hallmark of our freedom and self-determination?
The problem with this is that there is no way to escape the output of any given input. When there is a stimulus, there IS a response, always, no matter what. You have no freedom there. You can take the time to hijack your instinctive response and choose something else, but you always choose something else. There's no such position of "non-reaction" to a stimulus, after all "deciding to ignore it" is itself a response.
Then, to describe getting a repetitive and boring job on an assembly line as somehow having to go "Well, freedom was nice, but now I need to abrogate my freedom once again to meet my needs"? You are still perfectly free at this point. You've made the free choice to spend some of your time doing something specific on a schedule. You didn't -have- to get the job, you could quit at any time. There are a whole host of other free choices you can make with regards to meeting your basic life needs that aren't "working at a factory"
You describe freedom as this long quest of having to try and find ways to get more freedom, to "master our domain" when the course you've laid out sounds like it is more concerned with putting ourselves not in a position of self-determination (We've had that right from when we were let out of your prison) but instead with putting ourselves in a position where we just never have to decide to do anything we don't want to do.
The freedom to never do anything you don't want to isn't "freedom" in the sense that you aren't free until you are there. I've made the choice that the kind of life I want to lead is one where I have to be willing to spend some portion of my time labouring for others in exchange for what I need to fuel the life I desire. I'm still free. At any time I have the ability to decide "I don't want to do that anymore" and simply stop doing that.
The line "man's freedom is a fabricated freedom" just sounds like someone bemoaning the fact that they aren't willing to make the necessary changes to accomplish what they feel they "ought" to have in terms of self-determination.
As for the latter portion of your thread, suddenly jumping tracks from self-determination to methods of reacting to sensory input, the connection you seem to want to draw is tenuous at best. Sure, humans possess the ability to delay the time between stimulus and response, sure we have the ability to interject a thought process instead of simply reacting, but to conclude that this is somehow the hallmark of our freedom and self-determination?
The problem with this is that there is no way to escape the output of any given input. When there is a stimulus, there IS a response, always, no matter what. You have no freedom there. You can take the time to hijack your instinctive response and choose something else, but you always choose something else. There's no such position of "non-reaction" to a stimulus, after all "deciding to ignore it" is itself a response.