What is freedom is freedom necessarily mean that you can do what you want? Or this ‘want’ is in reality not what you really want it just controls/ conditions your preference?
I mean if our want for food, sex, popularity, power are they really our personal wants? Or just what nature, society or zeitgeist dictates us to ‘want’.
To give examples on my nagging suspicion, I would like to cite commercials. Do you really want to have the newest Ipod or that soap or that car? Or are they just, to put it bluntly, whetting our appetites and brainwashing us to want such things?
If these are just appetites that we pathetically cannot escape, are we really free?
I don’t know about you but TRUE FREEDOM is never a bad thing, and following one’s appetites is never TRUE FREEDOM.
Freedom means being self-sufficient, causa sui ex nihilo, and most importantly being free of becoming to be, i.e. having an essence. Freedom, in that being, is an impossibility.
We don’t know what we want ourselves, because it’s too big of a decision to make. Subconsciously, we yearn for someone else to tell us what we want and what we should live for.
We don’t really want freedom. We just want to want freedom. Once we are free, we are only going to look for another master to serve.
Freedom is a very political concept, I don’t think there is any such thing as “true freedom”. However, there seems to be a few things to take into consideration when discussing freedom, freedom from social/political/governmental oppression, and freedom from being required to spend considerable amounts of time procuring basic necessities.
The maximization of freedom seems to be the maximization of leisure time within a libertarian system that makes basic necessities immediately available and easily obtainable in a equal degree to all participating members.
Yes, but you cannot be truly free. Free to do what?
And what determines the answer to that “what”? And what determines that…ad infinitum. There will always be something you use and follow. As long as you follow something, you will not be truly free; maybe only free to follow (which is not “truly free”).
This doesn’t make sense. You behave like a human no matter what you do, because that’s what you are no matter what you do. How do you define being human?
Aristotle defined man is a “rational animal”,
but I intended to mean the best reaction to human experience.
What is the best reaction? The most truthful and loving one.
EDIT: For the excellent life should be one of the excellence of human nature. Chief among human faculties are intellect and will, the perfections of which are truth and love.
True freedom is not being incarcerated. If you ain’t in jail in a tiny cell you are free.
If you don’t need documentation to leave your city or town, you are free.
If you can afford food on your plate you are free.
If you can hug and kiss your family, laugh and play with them, you are free.
If you can unlock a door and live inside the building without fear, you are free.
If you can get up in the morning and be of sound mind and body, you are free
WTF more do you want? There is always someone worse off than you. You are free compared to them if you are reading this. So rejoice in what you have because, tomorrow you could lose your life.
But I think we are tangled with this scandal, I mean let us talk not of legal freedom, that is very problematic. Let us talk of human freedom, I mean is human freedom really free? Or is this a program, a string if you will, by a puppeteer we might call X that can equate to God or Karma or the current zeitgeist of being human.
To offer my opinion on this, I believe that the will always acts for good, that man always do what is good, no excemptions.
Sadly, his intellect only base itself on what it can know. Given this relationship I must say that man is truly free if his intellect can fully control and fully understand its respective appetites, because understanding and keeping in check these appetites the will will be free to do what is truly good.
Ergo, we are only free if we are doing what is truly good.