Freedom: What is Freedom?

Freedom is also bound to man’s understanding of his will in relation to his freedom. Freud vastly influenced man’s reliance on determinism. In other worlds we are what we are now due to what happened to us in the past. Nowadays, human behaviour is strongly influenced by conditioning and our unconscious thoughts. The story cannot end here, though, because if we are only left with a token of freedom after the influence of deterministic factors or conditioning, life becomes, to put it mildly, a childish game of absurdities. If our freedom is just about a marginal option after we have accepted all our limitation and succumbed to all the deterministic factors of our existence like, then what will happen when computers are able to do that little bit as well? Freedom cannot be dependent on suspending all necessity, of God, science or anything else. We have the freedom to live in relations to all of these aspects of life. A child is not free to do whatever it likes as it develops its autonomy and consciousness, but at some point the child has the freedom of choice. Will and freedom consist not in the rejection of determinism, but the relationship we have towards what determines us.

We are beings with the capacity for intentional thought, reflection and action, which comes from our freedom, sense of responsibility, will, capacity to choose or give up which is also a choice. Our freedom is about being able to choose our destiny and live an authentic life that is peculiar to every human being. Nietzsche so aptly defines it as ‘loving fate’, Rollo May explain this in terms of facing our fate directly in that we can know it, dare it, challenge it, quarrel with it or love it. The reality is we are invariable co-creators of our fate. This quandary can be elaborate on forever and in concurrence with philosophical questions the answers is in just living and experiencing. William James adds, “The first act of real freedom is to choose it!”

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