What Is Freedom?

Extract

Freedom is variability within a system. I venture to give this definition as a natural extension of a series of discussions dealing with what I call materialistic analysis and insight. Objects and such, as I portrayed them, may be analyzed or comprehended as wholes (insighted). The questions were always lurking in my discussion, however, whether an analysis or an insight must be unique, whether it is sharply determined or not, whether it is fixed or variable, whether there are alternative analyses and insights, and whether in some sense one is “free” to choose his analysis or insight. In suggesting these questions, I was not referring to the possible lack of talent of the thinker, who might have a hopelessly single-track mind, but to the objective limitations set by the object being thought about and the observer doing the thinking. I was referring to an emphatically comprehensive freedom, persistently objective although it embraces a so-called “subject.” This freedom I would call materialistic or concrete freedom, and it is this freedom that I wish to discuss. What I call objective includes many things described—carelessly, I believe—as subjective. For better or for worse, I propose to limit the term subjective in connection with freedom to what would be specifically described as purely subjective. The purely subjective notion of freedom would make it absolute, completely arbitrary, infinitely variable, independent of matter as a pure phenomenon of mind, and empirically unverifiable in the sense of being most private. Such freedom I would be unable to discuss were I rash enough to want to do so. Such freedom is personal and mystical and hence not subject to the finite prison of discussion with its bars of language, its narrow bed of fact and its threat of the strait jacket for the prisoner who imagines words to be what they are not to all others. Otherwise, there is no objection to retaining the term “subjective” for the objective behavior of a “subject.” The blend of such subjective factors (arising in subjects) with factors we habitually call objective (arising in objects) I call materialistic. I have no more affection for the purely objective than for the purely subjective. The blend is the thing.