Freedom can be looked at in many different ways but seldom as it is in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Flies”. He describes the tragedy of the human condition, and it is the paradox of freedom. A tragic situation arises between two different and often contradictory courses of action. A strong man is always free to choose, but he is never free not to choose. …Greek tradition bound a man to the avenging of his father’s murder. But the murderer was his mother. In this situation, what must he do? A weak man has three options one of which is to do nothing. The strong man has but two, and they are essentially one choice. If he kills his mother he at the same time avenges his father. Killing his mother is not a moral choice. But the strength of his character, that makes him great (strong) forces him to take a stand. He is not free as his weakling brother to choose to do nothing. …The tragedy described in “The Flies’ is a parable of the human condition- of man condemned to be free. Man is free to choose what he will be; he is solely responsible for what he becomes. But the tragic part of existence for Sartre is that ‘man is not free not to be free.’ I had never looked at freedom through Sartre’s eyes before, and I have to admit that it is a view of freedom more complex than the freedom Paul the Apostle described. “Know the truth and it will make you free.” That thought is very similar to George Matheson’s, “Make me a captive Lord and then I shall be free.”
Carl Rogers, was a famous psychologist. When I was a student 50+ years ago, we studied his teachings. He said that “Though man claims to be free, he is relatively unfree. Freedom to him is a quality of courage which enables a person to step into the uncertainty of the unknown as he chooses for himself. It is the recognition of the person that he is an emerging process, not a static end product.”
Charles Kingsley described two freedoms: “the false, where a man is free to do what he likes, the true, where a man is free to do what he ought.”
Mortimer Adler probably came closest to the truth of truth as he described it in the Great Ideas from the Great Books. He said, “A man is free when he has acquired enough virtue or wisdom to be able and willing to do as he ought, to comply with the moral law, or to live in accordance with an ideal befitting human nature.”
There are a lot more ways to look at freedom than I had ever thought.
John E Hayes has a more folksy way of describing freedom, a way that I like very much; He says, “Freedom is a man at a lathe, or at a desk, doing the job he likes to do, and speaking up for himself. It is a man in the pulpit, or on the corner, speaking his mind. It is a man puttering in his garden in the evening, and swapping talk with his neighbor over the fence. It is the unafraid faces of men and women and children at the beach. …It is a man saying, Howdy, Stranger,” without looking cautiously over his shoulder. It is the people of the country making up their own minds. It is a soprano singing “The Star Spangled Banner” off-key and meaning every word of it. Freedom is the air you breath and the sweat you sweat. It is you, and millions like you, with your chins up daring anybody to take it away from you.” President Ronald Reagan added that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it along to our children in our bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were once free.”
The last thought on freedom is in respect to agency. Agency is defined as: the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
The following is what the great and wise James E. Talmage said about agency; He probably describes freedom most accurately as he describes rewards and/punishments for what we do with our freedom. “The Father of souls (God) has endowed His children with the divine birthright of free agency; (in our day the free has been taken and it is simply referred to as agency) He does not and will not control them (us) by arbitrary force; He impels no man toward sin; He compels none toward righteousness. Unto man has been given freedom to act for himself; and associated with this independence, is the fact of strict responsibility and the assurance of individual accountability. In the judgement with which we will be judged, all the conditions and circumstances of our lives shall be considered.