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Freedom

Welcome to the ninth module of this course, Philosophy of Man

with Logic! At the end of the course you will be able to investigate
the differing notions of freedom.

AUGUSTINE THE CONVERTED CONVERTER (354 – 430)

"Understanding through faith"

 Recognized as one of the greatest Christian philosophers of

antiquity, Augustine brought classical pagan philosophy together
with Christian thought to create a theology which has had a
profound and lasting influence on Western Christianity.

 His career in the Catholic Church was dominated by controversy

and debate as he struggled to promote unity within the church
against the heretical groups which threatened to divide it,
particularly the Donatists and the Pelagians.

 His lasting influence in Christian theology however is in his

scripture commentaries and in his masterpiece, "De civitate Dei"
(The City of God), in which he espoused a doctrine of divine
predestination, derived from the original sin.

KNOWING GOD

 He was introduced by Ambrose, the eminent bishop of Milan, to

Neo-platonism through which he found solutions to his questions
about the nature of God.

 He was converted to Christianity in 386 and baptized the following

year, after which he left Milan to return to Africa. In Hippo, he
lived in a small religious community.

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 In 391, Augustine was forced to accept ordination as assistant

priest to the old bishop, upon whose death 5 years later, he entered
the episcopate in which he would remain until his death.

CONVERSION

"I made strenuous efforts on behalf of the preservation of the free

choice of the human will, but the grace of God defeated me."
(Confessions Bk 8)

Augustine's search for truth was long and took him down many
paths. When he found truth, it came as revelation.

 In Milan, he was introduced by Bishop Ambrose to certain

Platonic works.

 Deep meditation on the dialectic method led to his first truly

spiritual experience, a vision of eternal and unchanging beauty.

 Disappointed at the transience of the experience and his inability to

avoid earthly distractions, he turned to St Paul. He opened the
letters at random and the phrase that caught his eye was "put on
Christ" (Romans 13). He abandoned his marriage plans, resigned
his teaching post and was baptized.

"At long last I came to love you, beauty so ancient, yet ever new."
(Confessions x.37) With these words, Augustine proclaims his
conversion to Christianity, an event that was to shape the thinking
of the church in later generations.

MAN OF HIS TIMES

 Augustine described himself as a "man who writes as he progresses

and progresses as he writes". He addressed the many issues
dividing the Church and Empire of his time.

 Some of his works are aimed specifically at the Manichaeism he

had for a time followed. At least he knew what he was fighting - in
this case, the idea of evil as an equal and opposite force to good.

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 Elsewhere, he attacked the various Christian sects, by promoting

the "catholic" or universal church.

 His magnum opus, "The City of God" was occasioned by the sack
of Rome 410 when pagan critics blamed weakness of Empire on
Christianity. It is one of most detailed, comprehensive and
definitive apologies ever written. It aims to provide a total world
view from a Christian perspective. (Epistulae 143)

COSMIC PLAN

 Augustine tried to outline the position of Christians in the less than

the Holy Roman Empire. He did so by postulating two cities - one
earthly, one heavenly.

 Augustine uses his metaphor of the two cities to reveal God's plan
for his creation. For him, history is linear and works toward a
predestined end.

 It has as its beginning, the Creation, as its centre point, the

redemptive act in Christ, and continues in the spirit towards the
consummation, the judgment and transformation of all into a new
heaven and a new earth.

 The Christian was not just involved in his own personal salvation,
but was part of the Creator's master plan. The earthly and heavenly
cities have their respective culminations in Hell and Heaven.

PLATO REINTERPRETED

 Perhaps Augustine's greatest contribution to thought was his

interpretation of Platonic thought into a Christian framework.

 Augustine was convinced that from Plato to Christ was but a small
step, and the teaching of the church was in effect "Platonism for
the multitude."

 Platonism had given him the "hint" to "search for the incorporeal."
The only thing he found missing was "the Logos made flesh," that
is Christ.

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 His writing provided Christianity with its first coherent system of

thought, but as he lay dying during the long Vandal siege of Hippo,
his last recorded words were not from the Bible but from Plotinus.
(Confessions 7.20)

 Coming to his divine revelation via Neo-platonism, Augustine

combines the neo-Platonic impersonal ideal of the One or the
Absolute and the biblical concept God as love, power, justice and
forgiveness.

 The new vision of God expanded Christian thought beyond the

biblical limits and ensured the survival of Platonic thought.

 He was a conduit between the pagan world of classical philosophy

and the new Christian world view, "the first modern man".

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

 Augustine's emphasis on will was a response to the dualism of

Manichaeism which saw evil as a potent force, equal and opposite
to good. According to this, by his very nature, man was
predestined to sin.

 To Augustine, nothing created by God is evil by nature. Only the

will, not one's nature, is the source of evil. Sinning was man's
choice, an act of will.

 The source of sin is the result of the soul's weakness and this is due
to its being created out of nothing. Even its immortality is not due
to its own nature but to the gift and grace of the Creator.

 Evil is simply misdirected love; evil is just a lack of good, a

privation of the good. As man becomes insubordinate to God, so
the flesh becomes insubordinate to the will.

ORIGINAL SIN

 Augustine always maintained the idea of man's free will. For

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some, this was inconsistent with God's omnipotence. God must

have foreknowledge to be God, so sin must in some way be
predetermined.

 But Augustine believed that God can know things without

undermining free will. God's knowledge of a person is not that he
will be forced to sin, but that he will sin.

 Augustine traces the inevitability of man's sinning, not to God, but

to Adam. Adam's sin so altered man's nature, transmitted to his
posterity, that human will is now incapable of redirecting itself
from its centre.

 Now it is only through God's grace that man can come to eternal
goodness, beauty and truth.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY UNITED

 The essential nature of man is not reason but will. No man believes
in the true God, the God of moral demand, unless he wills to do so.
Only from the rightly oriented will, with the mind turned towards
the redeeming God, can man discover truth and achieve happiness
(beatitude).

 But man tends to will something other than the true God, create
God in his own image, unless touched by Divine Grace.

 There can be no reasoning to faith, to truth, only reasoning from

faith. Faith precedes understanding. There can be no severance of
theology and philosophy.

 Theology is faith seeking understanding.

THE PROBLEM OF SEX

 Christians should consider themselves as travellers passing through

the earthly city, following the pilgrim's path, keeping their eye on
their heavenly destination, undistracted by earthly pleasures.

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 Within this scheme of things, sex posed a particular problem.

Augustine could never bring himself to reject sex as an evil.
Manichaeism saw the lower part of the body as entirely evil. Yet,
while a follower, Augustine maintained a mistress.

 Once he converted to Christianity he promoted the idea of the

beauty of all God's creation. He insisted that in marriage, the carnal
act was "put to a good and right use" and that the physical delight
of the act should be distinguished from the libido which is the
wrong use of the impulse. Yet he himself renounced sex and
became celibate.

ILLUMINATION

 For Augustine, all true knowledge proceeds from God.

 Influenced by the Neo-platonists, he regarded the soul as having an

inherent power of self-knowledge.

 Moreover, he accepted that this was best realized when the senses
were abandoned and the mind underwent purification through the
process of dialectic.

 For Plato, the Form of the Good, or the One, was superior to all
others.

 For Augustine, the One is God, and all the other Forms are ideas in
God's mind.

 Understanding comes, only when God illuminates the soul, which

has been suitably prepared and purified, making the Forms visible
to the inner eye of intelligence. To know, is to know God.

SARTRE, THE EXISTENTIALIST (1905 – 1980)

"Man is condemned forever to be free."

EXISTENTIALISM

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 Sartre's philosophy of freedom derives from the

existentialist claim that existence precedes essence.
 There is no such thing as a given "human nature",
determining how we act and behave. Rather it is our
everyday acts and choices that make up our identity. Man
first of all exists and defines himself afterwards.
 We can choose to abandon ourselves passively to the
prevailing state of affairs, conform to status quo - thus
reducing ourselves to a mere object among objects. Or we
can choose to transcend what is given, by projecting
ourselves authentically towards a new horizon of
possibility. Either way, we are what we make of ourselves.

FREEDOM
 Sartre siezed on the need to view everyday objects as
phenomena - to examine them from different perspectives,
to identify their very essence.
 His first philosophical works explored the importance of
the imagination.
 Therein lay a major aspect of human freedom - the mind
unfettered by rules could recreate the world.

PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM

 As a nation with a history of revolution, the French placed

great importance on the idea of Freedom. "Freedom or
death" was a catchcry of the Revolution.
 Sartre interpreted freedom in a far different manner from
his nationalistic forebears.
 Ironically, Sartre's philosophy of freedom was crystallized
during the Nazi occupation of France. He had been a
soldier; he was active in the French Writers' Resistance
Movement. The war saw him change from an academic and
avant-garde intellectual to a committed activist. But his was

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no ordinary cry for political freedom from tyranny; no

eulogizing of the joys of freedom.
 To Sartre, freedom is not something man must strive for.
Rather it is a condition of his very being which he must
confront and accept. The hero in Sartre's novel, "Age of
Reason", comes to this bitter conclusion:

"He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like
a machine... He could do what he wanted to do, nobody had the
right to advise him... He was alone in a monstrous silence, free and
alone, without an excuse, condemned to decide without any
possible recourse, condemned forever to be free."(de Beauvoir
"Prime of Life" 135)

BEING-IN-THE-WORLD
 With Sartre, philosophy left the hallowed halls of academia
and became public domain.
 Much of his writing was done in cafes. He wrote novels
and plays. Philosophical issues are not abstract.
 Man is a being-in-the-world and Sartre presents him as
such.
 His heroes and anti-heroes suffer existential anguish as they
confront the absurdity of their existence, explore the
implications of their freedom and its associated burden of
personal responsibility.
 It was through these rather than through his philosophical
treatise, "Being and Nothingness", that most people became
familiar with existentialism.

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

 Sartre's central concern is the conscious subject (being-for-
itself), which he distinguishes clearly from objects (being-
in-itself). Objects are massif/solid; they are what they are.
Conscious subjects are always in a state of aspiring to be
something other than what they are; they are what they are
not yet.
 It is this peculiar kind of "nothingness" - this state of not
being yet, this openness to further possibilities is
characteristic of consciousness. Negation, nothingness, is
not a thing-in-itself, but a product of consciousness.
 There is no such thing as the self, if by that we mean some
permanent already constituted identity or essence. My ego
exists only through my actions and I am constantly

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remaking, reaffirming myself.

PHENOMENOLOGY

 Sartre is quoted as saying that anyone who wished, as he

did, to arrange the world in a personal pattern "must do
something more than observe and react; he must grasp the
meaning of phenomena, and pin them down in words."
 He was fascinated by the phenomenological movement and
its determination to describe human consciousness as it
exploded into the world, intentionally relating to the
everyday things around it and dynamically projecting new
meanings for its future.
 Sartre himself records that when he first read
phenomenology: "I was filled with hope ... Our generation
no longer had anything to do with the culture which created
us, a hackneyed positivism which was tired of itself... This
discipline brought us everything." (Sartre, Memorial essay
on Merleau-Ponty, 1961)

 For Sartre, there are two regions of being within

consciousness.
o In one realm, the being of "in-itself" ("en soi"), the
objects of consciousness simply exist, independent
and unaware of the consciousness that interacts with
them.
o The being of "for-itself" ("pour soi"), what most
would consider the conscious being, is conscious of
both itself and of objects in the realm of the "in-
itself". But since this level of consciousness is
simply an awareness of other objects, it is
essentially empty, transparent - a nothingness.
"The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a
perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunts
our being."

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"Being is what it is... the being of for itself is defined, on the

contrary, as being what it is not and not being what it is." ("Being
and Nothingness")

 So, not only does Nothingness exist, but it enters the

world through the human consciousness.
 To be a conscious being is to be aware of the gap between
my consciousness and its intended objects. It is to be in the
world and yet to be aware of not being one of the causally
determined objects of the world.
 My conscious being is ever aware of a distance, a void,
separating me from the realm of things.
 The thing that makes us human also makes the human
condition one of isolation from the "real world", so to
speak.
Man

 In a very real sense, existentialism sees man as creating

himself. Existence precedes essence.
 You exist - what you do with that existence, what you
actually become as a conscious individual, as a "being-in-
itself", is up to you.
 The individual must accept total responsibility for all
thoughts and actions.

ANGUISH AND BAD FAITH

 The constant need to define and remake ourselves is a

source of anguish.
 We totter on the brink of nothingness, experience dizziness,
nausea. The emptiness has to be filled. It will be filled by
whatever we plan to do, or think, or be. But often we seek
to escape from our freedom and responsibility, the painful
truth about ourselves.
 We pretend that affairs are unavoidable, that we have no
control over them. We pretend that we are not conscious
subjects, but objects. This is "bad faith"; this is self-
deception.
 We must have the courage always to seek moral
authenticity.

RELATIONSHIPS

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 Each of us is both subject - the me that is me, and object -

the me that others perceive.
 Therein lies a source of inevitable conflict. When the Other
looks at me, I know that he organizes me into the pattern of
his own consciousness. Each, by existing, limits the other's
freedom. And so it is that conflict is the meaning of all
human relations - conflict and hopelessness. "Hell is other
people." (Sartre, No Exit)
 Of all human relationships, love is the most hopeless and
contradictory. Love seems to offer us a foundation, an
answer to our emptiness, a justification for our existence.
But as in all relationships, individual freedoms are in
conflict. I can either assume the role of master and make
the loved one an object to be manipulated, or allow myself
to be an object, enslaved, possessed by the lover. In Sartre's
terms, in love relationships one tends to adopt either a
sadistic or a masochistic stance, to be a manipulating
subject or a manipulated object.

THE OTHER
 As an individual conscious subject, I can only know others
as objects.
 Likewise, my "being-for-others" is that of object. I am a
"being-for-itself", a conscious subject, surrounded by
others who share my world but who can never truly know
me as subjective being.
 I need these others; therein lies my "looking-glass self". To
understand myself in all my dimensions, I depend on the
perception of others.

HEGEL, THE ABSOLUTE IDEALIST (1770 – 1831)

"The history of the world is nothing but the development of the
idea of freedom."

 A German absolute idealist philosopher, Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel saw reality in terms of a universal Absolute
Mind which manifests itself in both natural and human history.
 Hegel posits what he calls Universal Mind or Spirit (Geist) in
order to construct a system of thought that explains all of

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reality in terms of such an Absolute Mind, a unified totality of

all rational truth.
 History is the embodiment of Mind's dialectic, with the great
epochs of history serving as the theses, antitheses and
syntheses in the movement towards the wholly rational
condition.

 For Hegel, the modern Nation State, as exemplified by Prussia,

embodied in its culture and institutions, the current stage of
Mind's progress towards unity with Reason, towards
consciousness of freedom.
 The choice to follow its moral system thus corresponds with
reason and is a greater freedom than choice making based on
individual whim. Thus Man finds his greatest happiness and
freedom when he becomes conscious that his personal ideals
match those of the state.

CAUGHT UP IN HISTORY

 Hegel is said to have finished the last page of his first great
philosophical work, "The Phenomenology of Mind", just as
Napoleon's troops occupied Jena. A week later, his house was
looted. He could no longer lecture at the university. Where lay
reason and freedom in such a world?
 Yet Hegel always remained committed to the concept that
"Reason is the Sovereign of the World... and the history of the
world, therefore, presents us with a rational process."
 This is because, Hegel views history as a totality not just a
series of events and individuals. He looks beyond "the
slaughter-bench of history" to identify an Absolute Mind, using
"the cunning of Reason" to steer mankind inexorably towards
the consciousness of freedom.
("Philosophy of History")

ORGANICISM
 Hegel thinks of various aspects of nature and reality as organic
in character, a functional interdependence of parts as in the
case of a living organism.
 The history of philosophy, he says, may be compared to the
stages of growth of the bud, the blossom and the fruit. The bud
gives way to the flower, the flower to the fruit.
 None of these stages has less reality or truth than the other.
They are all a part of the process of development.

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 Human communities too are seen as interdependent. Each

individual plays a role, contributing to the good of the whole,
and benefiting by the association.
 The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE
 For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the history of the
developing self-consciousness of Mind.
 Over time, conflicting philosophical theories have each laid
claim to their own exclusive truth, but in this, we see dialectic
in action.
 We should not focus on the conflicting views of the different
philosophic systems but view each as "elements of an organic
unity".
 The history of philosophy reveals the mind developing greater
self-awareness. Reality is constituted by the mind but at first
the mind does not realize this. It sees reality as outside itself.
 Only when mind awakens to reality as its own creation and
stops reaching for something beyond itself will the dialectic
end.
 Absolute knowledge is "mind knowing itself in the shape of
mind".

 HISTORY AND THE NATION STATE

History is the embodiment of Mind's dialectic, with the great
epochs of history serving as the theses, antitheses and
syntheses in the movement towards the wholly rational
condition.
 Hegel divides world history into three phases, each allowing
for increased freedom of rational choice making.
o In the first, the Oriental, only the ruler is considered
free;
o in the second, Greece and Rome, some are free;
o in the modern world, all are considered free, at least in
principle.
 For Hegel, the modern Nation State, embodies in its culture
and institutions, the current stage of Mind's progress towards
unity with Reason, towards consciousness of freedom

HEGELIANS - THESIS / ANTITHESIS

 There is perhaps some irony in the fact that after Hegel's death,
his philosophy should lead to two opposing schools of thought,
both claiming their origins in his philosophy.

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 Those who became known as the Old Hegelians were

conservative and their influence was powerful for a time,
especially in Berlin.
 They came to regard the Prussian state as the exemplification
and culmination of the Hegelian dialectic.

 The Young Hegelians adopted a radical stance and became the

basis of a strong student movement. They believed that Hegel's
system provided a blueprint for the practical and inevitable
realization of a better world. They did not accept that the
Prussian state represented the ultimate synthesis.
 The Young Hegelians rejected Hegel's Absolute Idealism. They
could not accept Mind as the ultimate reality. They argued
instead that it is the physical and material life of human beings
that determines consciousness and thought.
 It was this materialistic stance that was later adopted by Marx
and from which he developed his theory of alienation.
 Marx claimed that Hegel had stood man on his head, as if spirit
and ideas were fundamental, while, he had turned Hegel right
side up again by pointing out that material factors are basic.

A PATTERN IN HISTORY

 Before Hegel, others had tried to see a pattern in history. Most

saw such patterns as cyclic. Here, for instance, is history as The
Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortuna).
 This sees history progressing from peace to wealth, from
wealth to pride, from pride to war, from war to poverty, from
poverty to humility, from humility to peace.
 Hegel also saw history as progressing through a series of
phases, but not in eternal circles.
 To Hegel, history had a sense of direction, with the Universal
Mind progressing towards a total consciousness of freedom
through the process of the dialectic.

"The history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of
freedom."

("Philosophy of History")

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DIALECTIC

 The term dialectic was not new. The Greeks too had regarded
dialectic as the pathway to the highest form of knowledge.
 Hegel, however, gives the word new meaning. For him,
dialectic is more than a method for understanding reality. It is
an essential characteristic of reality itself. It is both the
rhythmic pattern of human thought and history, and a way of
understanding them. This rhythmic pattern is generally
characterized as thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
 It is a system of thought based on the resolution and
reconciliation of conflicting opposites.
 Through the dialectic method, Hegel is able to construct an all-
embracing philosophy incorporating all aspects of reality into a
meaningful totality.

THE MIND OF THE PEOPLE

"All value that a man has, all spiritual reality, he has only through the
state... No individual can step beyond it; he can separate himself
certainly from other individuals but not from the Spirit of the People."

 For Hegel, the Nation State is a great organic totality. Through

family and education, a man becomes inculcated with the
ethical ideals and fundamental beliefs that find expression in
the Mind or Spirit of the People. They are internalized, an
essential part of him.
 The Mind or Spirit of the People is expressed through the
nation's language, culture and institutions. Thus Man finds his
greatest happiness and freedom when he becomes conscious
that his personal ideals match those of the state.
("Reason in History")
 While to the modern mind, the concept of the nation state may
seem divorced from the ideals of revolution and freedom, this
was not so to the 18th century mind. In the aftermath of the
French Revolution, Robespierre created a cult of the Supreme
Being, a republican deity that embodied civic virtue and
opposition to tyranny.
 This contemporary engraving depicts choirs of citizens singing
hymns of praise to the Supreme Being.

ABSOLUTE MIND

 Absolute Mind is a unified totality of all rational truth.

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 It is a unity-in-diversity, organising all areas of knowledge and

experience into a coherent whole.
 Study of the diverse areas of human knowledge reveals aspects
of reality.
 Full understanding of reality will involve uncovering the
underlying rational structure, the totality of Mind.
 This is Absolute Idealism.

THE INDIVIDUAL WILL

 For Hegel, the state is the only true individual

 The state "has supreme right over the individual whose supreme
duty it is to be a member of the state". Those individuals whose
will fails to identify with the larger will of the state become
alienated and alienation of individuals breaks up the organic
unity of the state.
 There are individuals who appear to have imposed their
individuality on the course of history. They have been able to do
so only because their will to personal liberty has been consonant
with the larger historical movements of the time.

FREEDOM

 Hegel distinguishes between what he terms formal freedom and

substantial freedom.
o Formal freedom, the sort of freedom of the individual
which inspired the Revolution, is negative. It merely
expresses the will of rebellious individuals against
oppressive authority.
o What is needed is a positive sense of freedom. This is
only possible within a social context and when the
individual is part of the larger life of the Mind or Spirit
of the People.
 The moral system of the state is rational because Mind's
dialectic has led history to this point.
 The choice to follow this moral system thus corresponds with
reason and is a greater freedom than choice making based on
individual whim.

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References:
Honer, S 1996. Invitation to Philosophy, 7TH Edition. . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing
Company

Montemayor, Felix M. (2005). Introduction to Philosophy through the Philosophy of

man. Revised edition. National Bookstore.

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