Field Notes - What is Freedom? - Part Two

We pick apart why “freedom” causes so many arguments by comparing the major definitions that shape politics, psychology, and moral philosophy. We end by naming what nearly all of them miss and why that gap pushes us toward a bigger story in part three. 

• inheriting words without checking what we mean by them 
• Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty as non-interference 
• Berlin’s positive liberty as self-governance and formation 
• Carl Rogers on integration, self-awareness, and internal unfreedom 
• Viktor Frankl on choosing your attitude under extreme constraint 
• B.F. Skinner’s challenge that choice may be conditioning 
• Sartre’s claim that we cannot stop choosing 
• Aquinas on virtue, the good, and a will with direction 
• Sen and Nussbaum on capabilities, poverty, and structural unfreedom 
• Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as a political synthesis 
• the missing questions about God, purpose, and a larger story 

So stay tuned for part three.

Transcript

Why Definitions Of Freedom Clash

SPEAKER_00 0:06

This is Field Notes for the Subversive orthodoxy Podcast. Welcome back to part two of Field Note What is Freedom? So, what is freedom part two? Every div every definition we have and what they miss. So, in the last episode, I ended with a feeling and the sense that the versions of freedom I grew up with were describing something real, but it was incomplete. So I started digging into how different disciplines and traditions have actually defined freedom, you know, over the decades and maybe maybe centuries. But not to collect everything just for the fun of it, but to try to see if there was any consensus, if if if anyone was defining it the same way, or if it it just had a broader scope than any one discipline could identify. It made me realize that like usually we do not think too deeply about our words. We just kind of like assume we know what we're talking about, and that's where a lot of disagreements happen because people don't don't think the same thing when they hear a word. So sometimes words need to be revisited and redefined and re-re-upped on how we understand them. So we just kind of inherit definitions sometimes and or absorb it from context, and then we spend our lives using the word without ever asking, like, what does this word mean? So freedom is definitely one probably one of the biggest ones that we use, and we could mean

Berlin: Negative Versus Positive Liberty

SPEAKER_00 1:55

four or five different things with it. So the most influential definition in the Western political tradition comes from Isaiah Berlin, a 20th century philosopher who distinguished between two kinds of liberty. He first called negative liberty, which is simply the absence of interference. And that means nobody's stopping you, nobody's telling you what to do. You can speak, move, believe, and choose without obstruction. So this is the definition that underlies most modern democratic thinking and most American political instinct. It's about clearing the space around a person so they can operate without being impeded. The second kind Berlin called positive liberty, which is the ability to actually govern yourself, to be the author of your own life rather than simply the recipient of someone else's permission. So Jean-Jacques Rousseau was working in this territory when he wrote that obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is freedom. This version opens up harder questions because self-governance requires a self that is actually capable of governing. And that raises the question of formation, which, you know, what kind of people are governing themselves, you know, because there's there's definitely plenty of evil and wicked people in our world doing, have done terrible things throughout history. So, you know, which negative liberty never quite, you know, it never get quite gets to it. This made me think about how most political arguments about freedom are actually arguments between these two versions. Either side naming it, you know, either it's either it's make sure nothing is impeding or make sure you're actually able to just govern yourself. One side focuses on clearing obstacles, and the other side focuses on creating conditions for self-determination. You hear both in American the American concept of freedom for sure. Both are describing something real, something we need to some degree, but they're both kind of they're not, they're kind of talking past each other and answering different questions.

Psychology: Freedom Inside The Self

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Psychology has some some definitions that have been somewhat consens I don't know what the word is, become consensus. Psychology approaches freedom from a completely different angle. Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, described freedom as something that emerges from the process of becoming a person. So that's definitely very different than the first definitions. For him, freedom was tied to integration and self-awareness. A person who is fragmented, who is driven by unconscious compulsions or performing a role rather than living from their actual self is experiencing a kind of internal unfreedom, regardless of their external circumstances. So that's why you know they call Kierkegaard and Dosievsky kind of fathers of psychology, because that's that's what they were saying is that most people are unconsciously and compulsively performing a role, and they don't even know who they actually are, who their actual self is. So it's kind of a psychology perspective. Uh, Viktor Frankel pressed this further in a direction that is very powerful. He survived Nazi concentration camps and came out on the other side. Having discovered something that seems almost like a paradox, he wrote that everything can be taken from a person, and this is kind of that deeper freedom I was I was looking for. He wrote that everything can be taken from a person except the ability to choose one's own attitude toward a given set of circumstances. That's what freedom is. He was describing interior freedom that persists even under conditions of extreme external constraint. The last human freedom, he called it, the freedom to how to choose how you respond to what happens to you. That's that was starting to that was starting to get to the itch that I was looking for. Like, what is that? That's not really what we talk about with American freedom at all. It's very different. So this makes me think of how it inverts the usual assumption. We tend to think of freedom as something that expands when external constraints are removed. And Frankel is describing something that can be fully present even when external constraints are total. Like if you're totally constrained in a Nazi concentration camp, that you have you still have freedom. And that's a very different kind of freedom, and it points somewhere very important.

Skinner And The Illusion Of Choice

SPEAKER_00 6:30

B.F. Skinner was a behaviorist, he would have pushed back hard on all of this. His view was that human behavior is largely shaped by conditioning, environment, and reinforcement. So we're kind of like programmed what to think about freedom. The idea of a free inner self making genuine choices was for him more or less an illusion. We are products of our environment, so totally determined by our environment and our history. And what we call freedom is mostly a story we tell ourselves about processes that are actually determined by external forces. So that's a very sad version of freedom, what B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist, thought. So he thought it was all just determined by our environment. And it was all stories. We just make up stories to make our make ourselves feel free, I guess. I I don't really, you know, I don't really agree with him. But buddy he's he is naming something that was kind of what Kierkegaard was saying, that how much of what I call my free choices are actually conditioned responses that I never even examined, how much of my sense of freedom is is genuine, how much of it is just ab absorbed through the culture, and it's a feeling of doing what I was you know told I was supposed to do. So it's kind of an uncomfortable question, and it it requires us to kind of be honest with ourselves and take a slow look at it. So

Sartre And The Weight Of Responsibility

SPEAKER_00 7:55

then then the philosophers that are called you know existentialists, the existentialist tradition uh takes freedom with a very serious uh an absolute seriousness, perhaps more seriously than any other school of thought. So Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that a man is condemned to be free, which is a similar tone to Dostoevsky. He meant that you cannot step outside of your life and stop choosing. You have to choose. Even refusing to choose is a choice. Even deferring to someone else is a choice you're making. So freedom for Sartre is not a gift or a privilege, it's an inescapable condition that carries with it total responsibility for what you become. So it's a very sober definition of freedom. It's definitely not American Disneyland freedom. This makes me think of how different that feels from the cultural version that I described in part one, where freedom is mostly about having options and feeling unrestricted. Sartre is describing something where you have the weight of being fully responsible for your own existence. And then you get to the classical,

Aquinas: Freedom Through Virtue

SPEAKER_00 9:05

like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and through on to thinkers like Jacques Martin in the 20th century, and they have a different approach. For them, freedom is not neutral. The will is not most free when it is undecided and when all remain options remain open. The will is not most free when it is undecided or when all options remain open. The will is most free when it is rightly ordered toward the good. So here's where a moral, a moral responsibility, or just a genuine that the that the universe has goodness, that there's goodness in our world, that actually the more your will is ordered towards that, the more free you are. Aquinas wrote that the more one is drawn toward the good, the more free one is. Freedom increases as vertue is formed. It deepens as desire becomes aligned with what is actually good for a human being. So it's definitely a more Christian sense of freedom there. Moritane pressed this further by arguing that modern freedom makes a fundamental error in treating choice as the highest value. When freedom is defined as the ability to choose between equally weighted options with no orientation toward the good, it becomes unstable. The will without direction does not become more free. It becomes more vulnerable to whatever force happens to be pulling hardest at any given moment. The will without direction does not become more free, it just becomes more vulnerable to whatever force happens to be pulling hardest at any given moment. So that was very counterintuitive from you know to the modern perspective. We tend to feel that the more options means more freedom. But the classical tradition is saying that more options without formation actually produce a weaker and more manipulable person. That genuine freedom requires knowing what you are for and not just what you're allowed to do.

Capabilities: Rights Need Real Access

SPEAKER_00 11:05

The capabilities approach developed by the economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nossbaum brings freedom back into the practical and political register. Sen argued that development is freedom, by which he meant that a person who technically has rights but lacks health, education, economic opportunity, and security is not actually free in any meaningful sense. Freedom is not just about what you are permitted to do, it is about what you are actually able to do and be. This approach insists that structural conditions matter, that poverty and exclusion are forms of unfreedom, and that a just society takes seriously the real capabilities of actual people rather than just their formal rights. So this is where you have roots from roots that would inform kind of the democratic party sort of sense of freedom, where it's like, no, these people are not free if they have no health care. These people are not free if they have no education, good education. They're not free if they have no security, police won't come to their neighborhoods. What kind of freedom is that? So I think they have a fair argument there. And that these are the philosophers that that that argument would have come from. This made me think of how that connects with political conversation back to something more human. A person living in poverty with no access to education or healthcare is not free in the sense that matters even if no law is restricting them. The capabilities approach names that problem like none of these other theories did or definitions. Roosevelt had

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Framework

SPEAKER_00 12:40

had something called the four freedoms articulated during the Second World War. It was his attempt to hold some of this together at a political level. Called it, he called this four freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. What's interesting about that list is that it includes both negative freedoms and what you might call security freedoms. So freedoms from want and freedom from fear are not about removing restrictions. They're about creating the conditions under which human life can flourish, like creating economic opportunity and creating protection from you know invasion or crime or attacks of any kind. He was intuiting, perhaps without having a big theory about it, that freedom requires more than just permission to do something.

The Missing Question About God

SPEAKER_00 13:30

So here's where what started to emerge when I put all of these versions next to each other. They're all they're all naming and pointing to stuff that's you know real and valuable. The political tradition is right that external coercion is a genuine threat to human life. Psychology is right that internal fragmentation is its own form of captivity. You know, that's not the one we normally think about, but it definitely rings true. And Frankel is right that interior freedom can survive extreme external circumstances. The existentialists are right that responsibility is inescapable. And the classical tradition is right that formation matters and that desire without direction could possibly lead to total destruction. And the capabilities approach is right that structural conditions are not neutral, they have they have an impact. You can you can tell somebody they're free in an extremely you know beat up part of the country with no car. Somebody has no car. You say move, well, they don't have any car, we'll take a bus, or they don't have any money, we'll get a job. Well, they can't get a job. There's a whole bunch of reasons why. There's things like that happening in part pockets of our country that a lot of people don't have any sense about or any compassion for. But almost none of these versions on their own connect anything to God. They don't none none of these have spoken about God. So that's where I'm wondering where these subversive orthodoxy guys are going to come from, come with this. Almost none of them ask what human beings are actually for. Almost none of them are locating freedom within any larger story that's larger than an individual or a particular political community. So isn't that interesting? All of these definitions of freedom do not have a a creator or God connection necessarily, they don't really speak to what human beings' purpose is or what they're what they're even here for. And most of them don't tie to a larger story or anything beyond their particular political entity, like their country. So that's where I

Why Part Three Changes The Frame

SPEAKER_00 15:35

think it gets interesting. So because this podcast is, you know, dealing with a lot of Christian thinkers and such, the biblical and theological traditions are not simply adding a religious layer on top of these other definitions, they're making a different claim altogether. They're saying that freedom has a source, has a shape, and it could it possibly even have a destination or a purpose that none of these other frameworks can speak to. And that without that source and without that shape and that purpose, freedom tends to become something that pretty much consumes for the individual rather than liberates a society or a world. So that's what part three is about. I think it's a part that part a part of this meditation that you know I think surprised me the most that how much all these concepts in part three get left out of these definitions of freedom. So stay tuned for part three.