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The Values of Freedom
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18697 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
5,577 Words |
| Author
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Anthony Flew
Anthony Flew is a widely known Hume scholar and a professor at
the University of Reading, England. |
Our hope that freedom is not going to be ultimately destroyed by the joint pressure of totalitarianism and the general bureaucratization of the world, and indeed our very readiness to defend it, depends crucially on our belief that the desire for freedom ... is not an accidental fancy of history, nor a result of peculiar social conditions or a temporary by-product of specific economic life forms ... but that it is rooted in the very quality of being human.
--Leszek Kolakowski (Sometime professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw)
Before discussing the values of freedom it is essential first to distinguish two quite different understandings of both the word freedom and its semantic associates. In order to master fully and exactly what is implied by their application in the more fundamental of these two quite different understandings, it becomes both possible and necessary to bring out the freedom of the more fundamental kind is indeed "rooted in the very quality of being human." (Any study of human behavior which is to deserve the diploma description "science" must, therefore, start by recognizing rather than denying this definitive fact of our nature.) From there we go on to argue that it is the possibilities opened up by this essential feature of our humanity which make freedom in the second understanding so supremely important. Finally we display a brief, vivid illustration to support Kolakowski's contention.
The Natures of Freedom and Agency
First and crucial is the distinction between, on the one hand, what is customarily but misleadingly called free will or the freedom of the will; and, on the other, political freedom or political liberty. In the second of these two understandings people are correctly said to be free or at liberty inasmuch as, and insofar as, they are neither confined as prisoners nor constrained by formidable threats.
Certainly it would be the diametric opposite of the truth to say of anyone who is "a prisoner and in chains" that he or she is free at liberty. But it would also be false to say of people who are not in any way prisoners, much less in chains, that they are free or at liberty to do particular things either when the doing of those particular things is legally forbidden or when it is reasonably feared that their doings would incur serious penalties imposed either nonlegally or even illegally. It is because those who are not prisoners or in chains may still be in many respects unfree, and
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