Human Nature: Life, Society, and Freedom
Homo Sapiens Sapiens: A Living Being of Rational Nature
Here is the first thing we are. Aristotle said that for the living, life is your being. Everything we are, we feel, think, do or suffer, everything, is because we are alive.
A) What is it to be alive?
Life is what differentiates the living from the inert. Life is very difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize. Not within a term. At best, we can determine some characteristics such as these:
- To live is to “Autonomously Move” from within. Living beings do not move merely by inertia. The term is related to inertia; inert is the movement of the dead. A stone moves because it is attracted by another larger body, by gravity, or because it is pushed, but the movement invariably comes from outside. A sunflower, an ant, a living being, moves from the inside. The living develops three main types of movement: growth, nutrition, and reproduction. These three types of movements not only have their origin in the living but also their end (reproduction would require some additional explanation, but we would extend too much).
- Living is to “Autonomously Move” from within. Living beings do not move merely by inertia. The term is related to inertia; inert is the movement of the dead. A stone moves because it is attracted by another larger body, by gravity, or because it is pushed, but the movement always comes from outside. A sunflower, an ant, a living being, moves from the inside. The living develops three main types of movement: growth, nutrition, and reproduction. These three types of movements not only have their origin in the living but also their purpose (reproduction would require some additional explanation, but we would extend too much).
- “Unity” is another central feature of the living. Every living being is one, and it is so in a different way than non-living things are. When a stone or a mirror is broken into several pieces, each of which is again a stone or a mirror. Obviously, we could not say the same for a living being that we cut into pieces. Life cannot lose its unity without losing itself.
- Another is “Immanence.” Immanent is what is saved and stays inside. In-manere comes from Latin, meaning “to stay inside.” The movements that we cited earlier are immanent. All living things take actions whose effect is within the subject. Nutrition, reading, mourning, sleeping, etc., are activities that fall upon the one who performs them, although they may be seen from outside. Every living thing has an inner world.
The diversity of life allows us to see different levels or degrees of life: plants, animals, or humans. One of the criteria for grading these different levels is that of immanence: the greater the ability of a living being to keep within it, the more it can enjoy that inner world, the greater the degree of life. It is not the same movement in a plant that breaks a cat to its prey or the movement of a hand from the train saying goodbye to someone he loves. Each one comes from and reveals a different inner world, the greater the more perfect or higher is living, up to the man who has intimacy.
- And the “Self”: no living thing is finished at birth. Quite the contrary: its life is like a pop-up after its own end. In plants and animals, the end of individual development is the survival of the species because every individual is subject to it. In humans, this is not true (that’s why we call them persons) because each person seeks the perfection of themselves freely through the ends that are proposed to them. In all cases, to live is, in an analogous way, to create oneself as one lives. And what is self-created insofar as it has served its purpose, which is not guaranteed in the case of man: so we walk in search of meaning.
- Another note, perhaps holding the key to the arch of the living, is the soul or life principle.
If the Puerta de Alcalá fell on the floor, the same stones would be there—some made rubble—now held in place. But it would not be the Puerta de Alcalá. After all, the stones are not enough for this monument to exist as such. It’s obvious. And what is that extra element that is out of the rocks, but allowing them to become a point in the Puerta de Alcalá? This is something intangible: the idea of Francisco Sabatini, the architect. He put the order in the materials with which it was built. This applies to any work or human construction.
The same can be said about the difference between the inert and the living: the set of elements that are present in a living being could meet in the same proportions in a laboratory. However, in the laboratory, it would continue to form the same inert mixture. What’s missing in this mix?
In the same vein, we might ask for the difference between me and my own body a second before and one second after my death. What is the key whose disappearance caused the downfall of an entire biological complex structure? If the Puerta de Alcalá crumbles, the idea of Sabatini would not be in the middle of the Plaza de la Independencia de Madrid, although it will be in your mind or in his office along with the other plans and projects. When I die, where will the principle that integrated well with my body and I used to love freely to know?
There is a law that science does not get trapped between its formulas, a program that it cannot hack. It is the program of life. Aristotle said that since we cannot define what life is, we must be content to detect its effects: we feel, we move, we understand. But in the case of life, it becomes more complex; we follow the outline of the causes of the visible invisible. Nature still keeps the secret program that gives life to its creatures. For the reality that most concerns us, we still collect its effects and our experiences and insights under the name of “soul.”
B) From Vegetative Life to Rational Life (Via Sensory Life)
Life, the living, are grouped in degrees of a scale for the intensity of the features that occur in them. The lowest level is taken up again at the next higher level but this time under the orders of the highest. And so on in the three classic levels: vegetative, sensitive, and rational.
Vegetative Life
It is that of plants but, as said, is contained also in animals and men. Its tasks are described in the three basic types of movement in all living beings: nutrition, growth, and reproduction. The functions have a biochemical basis that lacks any level of consciousness. In turn, the jump is infinite, ranging from zero to one between the inert and the living. These three functions or movements start and end in their own living being. Living is a kind of struggle or activity for which the living being transforms what is within its scope, incorporates it to develop, and finally multiplies to give continuity to the species. Thus, the fate of the rainwater that falls under a rock is not the same as that which goes to the foot of a rose bush. For the first drops, the destination is quite boring: they evaporate or seep into the ground if it is permeable. Period. For the latter, it may be absorbed by the plant root, transformed into sap, and become useful and beautiful to the senses, and perhaps end up in a gesture of love. The difference is life.
Sensitive Life
It is that which distinguishes animals from plants. For men, in turn, it is contained in his rational nature. Life is in a sensitive perceptual system that helps and raises the vegetative functions by attracting various stimuli. When these are taken, they trigger different responses. The uptake of these stimuli is sensitive knowledge.
There is an instinctive response to stimuli, an openness to the world around that understanding is an improvement over mere nutrition. Knowledge triggers the behavior of animals but does not cause it. The behavior of animals is preset to its kind; knowledge is only the trigger for an explosive that was already contained. Instincts cannot be overcome or circumvented. Their behavior is hard-coded because no individual is above the animal’s own species. There are no particular purposes of this or that dog that can be quoted over the end of the entire species. In man, however, although he also possesses sensitive knowledge and instincts, things change. From this new level from which to run their own lives and their purposes, they may be proposed to control their craving instincts and create their own history, personal and communal. Honey bees make great honeycombs because that is their aim. But after centuries, little progress has been made in their confectioneries.
The animal knows by its senses, and there is knowledge. And it acts on instinct, and that is its behavior. Both of them are serving the survival of the species.
Rational Life
It is proper to man. It breaks the need for a stimulus-response relationship. As Aquinas says, man is the only animal that sets its own purposes, and that’s because he has intellect and free will. The purposes of the species are there—it is important that the human race survive—but none of the men are in compliance with the meaning to our lives. We are quite short.
Neither does the species tell us what our goals are to be or provide us with the means to achieve them either. We find ourselves. This separation between means and ends means that our responses to stimuli are not automatic but deliberative.
Man knows through his intelligence, and knowledge can be transmitted. And he acts on his will, and his behavior becomes history, the world, and people. Over and over in the service of its own perfection, which is the end for them, although they have to choose it freely.
By not taking the leadership role, instincts in human behavior take a major role in learning and education. The offspring of the birds learn to fly from his parents. But learning is not only an instinctive, inevitable step. Learning logarithms, whether or not our parents teach us, is nothing instinctive, as it is easy to remember.
We learn to eat, walk, talk… Our children are disproportionately long compared with that of any other animal species: there is much to learn. In man, learning is much more important than instinct. Man must learn to live.
And living life is not automatically responding to what goes out (or should be): we face the task of “resolving,” and success is not assured. Man is the only being able to wreck his life voluntarily, just as it only takes her to his best so if you give well please do so. As already mentioned, the properly human is giving himself his own ends and choosing the means to achieve them: and this is freedom.
It is as if the development of human biology was suddenly interrupted by intellective life. Man is above the dictatorship of instinct. Between the call of instinct and response, I mediate with reason: I’m hungry, what do I do, eat now or wait until the end of the table to serve the Prime Minister, who has come to my restaurant? I decide; that is to use reason and will. But if man does not behave according to reason, his instincts, having no measure with which they act in animals, are bolted. And so there ends up exaggerated angry men, eaters to grieve, or dominated and destroyed by sex. The wise man is not worse than the worst of animals. Freedom is not a game for children.
Man’s body is at the service of his intelligence. It is not specialized in a climate or specific conditions. You can live anywhere in the globe through his intellect. For him, it is open to infinite possibilities. He uses his hands—freed by standing—to build and use instruments. And the main instrument, language, serves as a vehicle for his intelligence, enabling history and literature, art communication, information, and education. Man is composed of something material and something intangible that shapes the material, which manifests itself in your body. There is a body without a soul, without a soul over the body. It is an animated body (profit) or a soul that is not exhausted by encouraging your body. “The eyes are the mirror of the soul,” we have heard many times. What child would try to see the soul as a part of the body and pretend it does not exist because we do not see it? It would be very blind.
Man did not evolve because he has to adapt to the environment. All evolutionary strategy of the rest of living beings has no other purpose than adaptation to the medium. Man moves to another level. Minor adaptations fit residuals (becoming darker where there is more sun or more ruddy where there is less), but they did not reach the level of evolution. Man has a history and progresses because he does not have to evolve. The animal is not progressing because it is always evolving.
C) From Hominids to Humans
This is a very vivid and expressive figure that José Antonio Marina uses to take us through what might be the passage of hominid to man. The creature pauses to think. In doing so, it is released. He was born—”sharply”—subjectivity, self-awareness, and intelligent freedom that makes possible the self.
Marina tells us when we see the change that one suffered. It would still be even more exciting to see the film of the prior acts, the emergence of the first man (who surely was not changed because it was in full career). The moment that, as a cut in the developmental sequence, marked the before and after awareness, the entry “to sack” in the world of freedom: the origin of man.
Matter did not give rise to consciousness. We follow the “tracking” of different functional adaptations to the environment to better survive: the giraffe’s long neck to reach higher leaves of trees in the savanna stretched, or the elephant’s trunk, which frees them from bending down after such a mass of kilos. But to put in the most developed of hominids that principle is going to transmute itself not only into a new species but all that exists; to put in him the human soul requires something more radical of an event and again, totally distinct from the mere extension of the body part. In the same way as the Puerta de Alcalá was not decided by a series of stones being better prepared than others.
Scientific knowledge would be short if it were to explain this development. Suddenly, a creature had a conscience, and with it, an unexpected and delicious world opened.
First, self-awareness: knowing the companion that travels with us in our lives as a side-car:
I am not only I who see acting, but he who sees the act. I’m also my conscience, is telling the poet.
Then comes another important novel feature that has emerged with man: intentionality. It is the ability to stand outside yourself and project intelligence and will, knowledge and love for objects other than himself. But not as they had been doing our ancestors and other animals, we leave ourselves to get things in themselves, not to appropriate it as food or as an instrument of our survival. We can see a person and ask, “What are you doing?” without more.
The third would be subjectivity. In the privacy of thought and love, we call subjectivity. These new capabilities created man in an inner world of his own, intimate, which is subjectivity. It is a particular treasure, unavailable to others and only shared in friendship or in love when joined voluntarily vital projects.
Again the man behind her biological face, an intimacy that is not a continuity of the exterior body. “Although the force of gravity binds us to the land, we are unleashed by intelligence constantly. Pascal puts it this way: we hardly know what a living body is, much less what a spirit is, and we have no idea how the two unknowns can join to form a single being, but that is what we men are.”
It seems that the difference between the human genome and the closest hominid, such as chimpanzees, is less than 2%. And in that small genomic gap fit the greatest worlds that go from the first gene of the first living being to make up the 98-odd percent of the sympathetic chimpanzee. New worlds and worlds to create in each biography. Saint John of the Cross said that “one man’s thought is worth more than all the world.” There is a physical organ for this new capacity as the wings could be the novelty of flying to the birds. Now we talk about something as real as immaterial intelligent freedom. So we are a new species, and non-animal and other animals: the Homo sapiens sapiens, redoubled knowing, for themselves and what is outside himself: the world, others, and their Creator. “The furnace is a kind of living which ends when there is humanization, that is when the living being is master of his conduct.”
Who can doubt it? Do we not live much better than our great-grandparents? Without running water, no electricity, no means of locomotion, without TV!, without moving!, what a scandal. And what in the Middle Ages? Well come on, when we were in the caves…
Has evolution gone on since the Stone Age? Let’s do a simple exercise: imagine—God forbid—that there has been a third world war, deadlier than none, and that it has ravaged the Earth, in the style of “Planet of the Apes.” Only a few have survived. If it is true that we evolved, evolution will have been with us, the survivors; we would be less, the scenery more damaged, but otherwise, nothing would be happening, right? Not really. Any answer would be inevitable that a return to the loincloth, the cave, and the daily walk to the stream for water. That is, technological progress has not made us smarter. And we would be elated if we thought that early humans were dumber than us. If primitive man did not reach the current progress, it was a lack of time, not intelligence. Be primitive but not stupid.
Progress takes time. Gutenberg invented the printing press because before someone invented writing. Was Gutenberg smarter than that anonymous citizen? About 3,500 years ago in the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, today Iraq so punished, first appeared pictograms, immediate antecedents of cuneiform. We do not know if that peasant knew what the scope of what we did: systematically plotted and language. There began globalization. That unleashed an infinite source of universal communication, comprehensive and accelerated a push progress and its dissemination. Without her, technical and cultural findings would have been isolated.
First speech and writing later showed the species sapiens sapiens had definitively abandoned adaptive strategy and was fully able to colonize and dominate the earth.
A Social Being
Whether it is a misfortune or not, the fact is that indeed it is not enough. And in all honesty, I must say that the author of these verses, Becquer, later corrected this rhyme and replaced the word “disgrace” with “fortune.” And it is that however much someone got her a life, they would miss being able to speak with other people and something else more.
The other person needs to develop into that person and reach their full potential: no me without you. Relationships between people are not something accidental, of what we can do without. Man is, since he is a man, a being with others, a being who coexists with others and with nature. This openness to the other and the other is constitutive of nature; it belongs to its essence. A human life is impossible except in society.
At birth, we are the most exposed beings on earth. We need care, feeding, and learning at a very early stage than the other higher mammals. And that is only possible in the family, the first social institution. Without education, we cannot survive: education has replaced instinct. Man needs to learn what is proper to man: he needs to learn to speak and write, to treat others and behave in coexistence, and a thousand other things. If you are not educated, you do not develop your capabilities. If there is an environment in which they speak, you learn to talk; if not taught to walk upright, you will walk on all fours; if not living in a culturally stimulating environment, you will not display any cultural competence: no artistic taste and musical sensitivity, even culinary refinement. Therefore, if you first have the skills, then education, and finally the deployment of these capabilities, it is clear that in the pack of our natural endowment originally came also the need for education, family, and society. Man is born with a growing human environment sufficiently rich and stimulating.
The capabilities of man come with their nature, but their development requires education: family and society. Society has an obligation to educate man, to give knowledge, to learn to use their capacities as befits man. You have a duty to contribute to the full realization of man himself.
The person, without the other, is totally frustrated because it would stifle their ability to dialogue and share, of receiving and giving. Nobody was born to be alone. First is the initial socialization within the family, then the effective integration into society.
A) The Family
No individual can obtain for yourself everything you need. The family is the basic unit of society, its first major institution, without which men would not have lasted a generation on earth. The development of individuals and society are mutually conditioned, and there is no institution like the family to offer this integration. The family offers a person the first society, and offers society the best in people.
Only the family can effectively convey fundamental values that give meaning to life, which is especially important in a world devoted to pragmatism. This is possible because only in the family are we welcomed, and we want people so that they are, without any useful means.
In the words of G. K. Chesterton, “the place where children are born and men die, where freedom and love reign, is not a flower or a business office or a factory. There I see the importance of the family.”
As we learn and teach in the family to live and die, and this, done for love, is a first-rate social work and essential, but impossible to be done for money. Virtues as important as obedience or the idea of just authority, tolerance, and respect for others are learned primarily in its midst. If we break the natural family and admit that the definition can be set by any human desires (as much) to accommodate children, we will separate the plant from its root, and all we can expect is for it to dry up. Children need more than desire to get to develop as individuals.
Moreover, civil society, the better it will develop its goals for the good of its members, the more you are able to accommodate the family institution and even to imitate it.
B) The Common Good
Our existence in society has a common purpose for all. It is mutual aid, which we call the common good. It is society as a whole imitating the family. In this, its members are all over without fear of what they are without losing their individuality, which is further reinforced. The family spreads to the rest of society its main obligations with respect to the person. And the first is the common good.
“Okay,” Plato said, “that we were not born for ourselves alone, but much of what we are we owe to our parents and other friends. And according to the Stoics say, everything occurs on earth was created for use by men, and men for men, so you can learn from each other and benefit others. Therefore, we must promote the common good with the mutual exchange of obligations, giving and receiving the fruits of our work and our faculties.”
Society has an obligation to assist the most needy by promoting the common good. Some have proposed that the State deal with all tasks of social redistribution. But this idea is deeply damaging to the company itself because, with the excuse that delegation loses the sense of solidarity, it is placed in the hands of a state that guarantees its ability to impose more than the sense of justice. However, they have always been alive, especially in certain social sectors, effective concern and solidarity to those who pass it worse.
The first conquest to be the common good is material well-being, not so much to obtain a sufficient pool of resources as fair to all citizens in them. This is what we also call the right to equality of opportunity.
The second obligation of society in relation to the common good is peace. Not so much the individual—it is the task of each—but social peace. And it must be the result of fear of repression, but the balance of the whole society so that, without violence or excessive stress, it is possible for each citizen to pursue the aims and the community. In the twentieth century, unfortunately, there were examples of societies—among the most advanced—subject without large internal rejection of fear, oppression, and horror.
There are many testimonies that can be found on Nazi Germany and the general passivity of their society during the Third Reich. Nor can we now be sure that our own society is healthy enough to react to a defection of its leaders in the defense of freedoms. The situation of citizens who keep intact its free spirit is a tremendous weakness in these situations, but their courage is so essential. [COMIC]
Fear is the first form of violence, a crime against peace. Where fear reigns, life shrinks. Sadly in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century, we still have the ominous example of a good part of society overwhelmed by fear, especially in the Basque Country. Allowed all the comforts and privileges of the first-world western society provided that dropping the expression of personal political freedom. In these circumstances, to be free, one must be a hero, and this significantly reduces the number of women and men who dare to be free. Citizens no longer ask then “what can I do?” but “what can I do?”.
A society is self-movement is alive, and marks its own ends—when you consider his duty to intervene, according to the possibilities of each, in different spheres of public life. And if not, there is the lack of interest, electoral absenteeism, tax evasion, labor, and social standing is only the selfish defense of the privileges of the affluent society.
According to article 29.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” This opens up the vast field of cultural activities, welfare, charitable, charities, sports, etc., aimed at directly, the common good and which are promoted by the initiative of private citizens.
In addition to these direct-focused tasks to the common good, any human job, from simple household cleaners to the management of a large company, they must contribute to the common good. In this way, it will be aligned with the sense of transcendence that spreads goodness in the world and infinitely dignifies the person.
Man lives only in society. It gives him an obligation of justice to collaborate in shaping a more just society, contributing their own personal capabilities undoubtedly will in turn acquired and developed in the family, the former company.
A Being Free: Freedom and Privacy
Christopher Columbus might not have discovered America. Perhaps the afternoon when, walking in the sun in the gardens of the court, made the decision to seek help from Queen Isabella came into her mind another option, perhaps another expedition to another site, some variant of the same route to the East… Why not?
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to all as Lenin, was in Switzerland during World War I until 1917 when it went on to lead the October Revolution. He lived happily in Zurich and joined the local Communist Party. He came to dream of doing the proletarian revolution in Switzerland, which would have made not the little tired of the Swiss revolutionary ferocity. In addition, Nadia, his wife, was sick of the smell of the sausage factory next door… If the great Communist revolution had taken place in Switzerland instead of in Russia, things probably would have stayed in a story of history.
Adolf Hitler, just after the First World War, is in the position to leave the army, where he has achieved the respect of his superiors and is “someone”—or returning to their sad civilian life, where economic misery was coming and had faced with the distress dedicated solely to try to get ahead. He was about to do so. But finally, I decided to stay in the army, awaiting a mission. Now it’s your chance, on being offered a job as a spy and propagandist of the army. Its mission consists in entering the political circles and detecting any possible outbreak of an uprising. Following surprised by their leadership to leaders of the DPA, the German Workers Party, on October 19, 1919, began his political career. Soon highlighted in meetings and assemblies, saying what his audience wants to hear. Too bad he had not been discharged from the army…
History is the braid of circumstances and the free decisions of men: the story of freedom. What I saw back in the perspective of history seems unshakable in what was once an ace of being otherwise. It depended on the freedom of its protagonists. And these were rejected because they chose to be.
Man makes decisions and sets the direction in your life: he has history and makes history. The biological development of every man is contained in their genes. But, as mentioned above, there is no freedom gene. Deciphering the human genome, we anticipate the color of the eyes, skin tone, height and complexion, hereditary predisposition to certain diseases, blood group, and a thousand other qualities. But we never say anything about their projects, their dreams, thoughts, or decisions; what friends they will make, what they will study, in what they will work, what or where family will live. To be human is to be free, and freedom is unpredictable. Not in the genes: not inherited from our parents because we come from the biological species to which we belong. And yet, since we are endowed at conception with that unexpected gift that is freedom.
We explain what it is saying that freedom is the power to direct and dominate one’s actions, the ability of proposed aims and deciding to meet them; the self with which we govern our existence and our actions.
In free action, the two highest powers of man’s will and intelligence come into play. The will choose from among what had previously been known for intelligence. Before you choose, you must deliberate, circulate through the mind the various possibilities. The decision is the court that mental rotation possibilities. I decide when I choose one of the possibilities discussed, but it is she who forces me to take it, but I who do leave the field of possibilities, giving it a conclusive value. Selecting is also to say no.
The kind of freedom is easier to see freedom of movement, physical freedom. I can move and go where they choose. But before this freedom of movement is the voluntary act by which I decide to do so. It is important to realize this distinction: to say of a man imprisoned, strictly speaking, it is still free. A man can take away everything but that intimate and ultimate freedom by which it can overcome his executioners when they execute the sentence. But you do not arrive at a juncture so radical to become aware of this prerogative. The choice of our own inner spirit, our view of life, our values. The violence and tyranny be destroyed throughout history many peoples minds are imprisoned and crushed the hopes of living in freedom for many people. But those desires and that freedom will always survive.
A) Freedom is Not Absolute
Man is not an absolute being, nor is any of its powers. Their free will can love God, and his intelligence is capable of contemplating his Creator and his work. They say the classics that are like a spark of Himself. But that does not make them, far from absolute. Our limitations are obvious. If your heart stopped just a few moments, we would die. And what about the fragility of an infant of days or weeks lying on his small cot. Or so many experiences of powerlessness. Or when the misfortune of a loved one has broken his heart. Our finiteness draws us with a strong line, defines us, and shapes everything we want to be great.
Our limitations are physical, psychological, moral, and intellectual. They are ours, and also limit our freedom. For a limited being, rightful limited freedom, but it becomes infinite when choosing what it is.
Just as knowledge in animals is a tool for survival, freedom is instrumental to the achievement of human perfection and order. The difference is that the end of the animal, maintaining the species, is not collected or the individual or animal knowledge. Here, as the wave breaks in the dike, end to come to an end, which is like their finishing. The end of man, however, is free and personal: it comes with the fullness of their intellects and wills finite and free. But their freedom is not the end but the truth, goodness, and beauty. Will you miss that limits free falls and ends up losing, for taking a slave.
“Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely or slave. Has outlined, is indeed a deadly circle that can not leave, but within broad limits their man is powerful and free, like the people.” (Alexis de Tocqueville).
We can distinguish four separate plans for consideration by us can be very useful to move with greater ease in this topic about which our opinion and sometimes are so confused. These are:
- Inner freedom
- Freedom of choice
- Freedom as a vital project
- Social freedom
B) Inner Freedom
“We have had the opportunity to meet the man perhaps better than any other generation. What, really, man? It’s the being who always decides what it is. It’s the being who has invented the gas chambers, but also is the being who has entered them steadily whispering a prayer.”
Inner freedom is the foundation of human rights. From it arise the rights to freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of conscience, and the right to live according to their own convictions and even the right to life itself. So called because the house is like our privacy. Having so much freedom is not something we like something we are. Rather than having freedom, we are free.
Therefore, we cannot be deprived of this inner freedom. The totalitarians who have tried to snatch man never succeeded. And to reach the inevitable conclusion of his failure, often have decided to end the free man, killing him, motivated perhaps more by its own impotence to attain its terrible purpose.
Inner freedom is man’s basic openness to all things man is not focused on their instincts or interests, but is free to steal all along the hierarchy itself from reality. It is also active, proprietary design their own behavior, tendency toward personal self.
But it is also situated freedom: that is free is this man here and now, in a moment—”their” time—and place. Freedom is not independence or simple pure spontaneity. Not realizing that endangers human freedom itself. Man is born free about his or concerning his death. One brand, yes, the milestones of his own life and choose their life projects. But even for that, we need help, and we realize that much of the best of our lives—friends, love, skills, “luck”—is a gift we receive an achievement that we reach.
Our body, our history, our birth are part of our own being. “I am myself and my circumstances,” said Ortega y Gasset. Our freedom of our situation, which is our condition. And never can be to free ourselves of that fact because that would kill us. But this is not a hindrance, of a tie, but the condition of my freedom. It would be something like what I have to deliver. I’m
already not a problem of my freedom, but precisely what has to be free, which makes it possible to practice my freedom.
c) Freedom of choice: We all have the experience of feeling free to be able to choose among several options presented to us. When our freedom is located, the number of options before us is limited to our particular situation. But that limitation does not cancel but reduces our choice. Moreover, our freedom does not lie in the fact that I can choose anything, no matter what you choose, but choose what you choose, have chosen me, and I’ve done well or done badly because I wanted to. The mere freedom to choose is before it is especiallyI you choose.
It is a rather common nowadays to think that freedom means freedom of choice mainly. The mistake is in believing that the election is over who chooses and what he chooses, and that freedom is a tool for achieving our goal. According to this view, the only limit to freedom is to respect the freedom of others.
Of course we must respect the freedom of others, it was already invented. Not long ago we said that no one can enter the sanctuary of the conscience of each and seize his own inner freedom. The problem is in thinking that the freedom to choose is above the values that can then choose. Because if the value of the truth or not imposed upon my freedom of choice is difficult for that respect for others is more than mere convenience. Be reduced to a simple transaction: “I respect you if you respect me,” a balance too easy to break as soon as you have the necessary strength and enough greed.
Goodness and truth are values in themselves, regardless of whether or not the point. That’s why my freedom is worth something. If it were she who was invoked, not really worth nothing.
The opposite is to reduce the value of freedom of spontaneity: “What comes from within me,” what springs to me, “etc.. It is said many times that is the only way to be “authentic.” According to this way of seeing things, man can not aspire to any improvement and everything to do with his intellect and will police itself is not to interrupt the sprouting so natural. But spontaneity does not ensure that we choose well. José Antonio Marina said in an interview to a newspaper that “spontaneity is often confused with freedom which is indicative of illiteracy. All I know are donkeys, of course, very spontaneous, but I have my doubts about their freedom. ”
Against this we can say that human decisions are the result of free choice, which we can choose good or evil and that depending on what wefreely chosen to improve or worsen our condition. We need criteria to choose wisely. We need a project that is realized in certain securities and to guide our choice. These values have to be chosen and learned by the equation and applied through prudence. Barriers to freedom is ignorance and weakness, not our limitations. He who does not know what to do, just have the freedom to make mistakes, but not to hit. And he who is weak snatch freedom left by the turmoil of their feelings or external coercion what they say.
Consider now two exaggerated but sympathetic and graphic examples of what would be put choice above all
Our choices, as seen in these texts, have consequences also for the wrongdoer, since being repeated patterns occur and these are like a second nature, a new way of being. Produce a personal enrichment or impoverishment. You can freely choose a behavior that is ruining his life or freedom you can maximize your making his life a beautiful life.
“The nature responds well to what is good and bad response to what does not suit you. It is logical and can be used to detect what is good and what is bad. This happens in all fields, but not equally. He who eats a food that does not suit you will notice. Even what we perceive externally: see his evil face, his spasms or perhaps we will see you rolling on the floor. The mistakes and successes in the physical plane (…) physically noticeable errors and successes in the use of freedom (…) can not physically feel [we do not get green or our nose grows every time we lie] but somehow sense. So we say it feels good when you play well and he feels bad when he does wrong. The good work always leaves a trail of happiness while doing wrong, it leaves a trail of dissatisfaction or annoyance. “