To Be Free

Brian YS Wong September 30, 2024 22:57

I have long been fascinated by the question – “What does it to be free?”

Freedom is something both coveted and feared at once – much as absolute authority. To be free, and to be a maximal authority, share this paradoxical quality as a point of commonality. To be the most powerful, influential, and decisive force within a polity, requires a special kind of courage – the courage to look up and see the Damocles’ Sword and remain unfazed; the courage to remain constantly vigilant over how and for what ends one is exercising one’s power, and the courage to remember the humanistic roots of government – that all governments must serve the citizens who inhabit their territories, as opposed to advancing the narrowly defined self-interests of the even more narrow-minded leaders of the state.

Similarly, freedom is not always a blessing. Whilst the term has long been bandied around in opposition to and critique of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in challenging and subverting conservative orthodoxy on sex, gender, and ethnic issues, and – above all – in serving as a clarion call for generations to wake up to their inner callings, freedom is hard to pin down, and even harder to harness.

Prior to delving into the effects – both virtuous and vicious – of freedom, it behooves us to define it. As fellow Wolfsonian Isaiah Berlin famously remarked, those who champion the ‘negative’ conception of freedom would equate it with the absence of constraints, interference, and attempts to alter and shape one’s will. Per this definition, freedom could well be maximized by an individual’s living on an island, free from arbitrary manipulation, unwanted attention, physical coercion or violence from all other individuals.

Yet this appears rather absurd. After all, no man is an island. And our craving to thrive extends beyond the desire to not be interfered with by strangers. Indeed, many are happy to trade off a modicum of freedom from interference, in order to receive the resources, networks, and knowledge required for them to lead sufficiently flourishing lives. As a professor, I am regularly interfered with by my students, by readers, by members of the public who find my research of palatable or unpalatable interest. Yet such interference with my freedoms is a price well worth paying, as I derive a genuine sense of satisfaction from the work we do. Philosophers dub this ‘self-actualisation’.

This is where the ‘positive’ conception of freedom kicks in: freedom, as Berlin suggests, is more than merely the absence of interference by others; it is also about a deeper form of permission to self-actualise – more precisely, that individuals are given the resources, wherewithal, know-how, and understanding to live out their selves to the fullest. Seize the day, as Robin Williams famously remarked in Dead Poets Society – Mr. Keating remains one of my favourite characters of all time.

Freedom arises only when we can discover and embrace ourselves through our actions, when we can actively choose to live well, and succeed in doing so. Fundamentally, freedom must come in both positive and negative variants.

Yet such sophisticated philosophisation aside, what I find fundamentrally dissatisfactory with all this chatter – is that it appears to miss a fundamental component of freedom: the sense of exhilaration that a school child feels on the last day of the school term; the feeling that there is nothing to be done, or that nothing needs to be done, at the end of a work year and the commencement of the winter holidays. A sense of closure – and the sense that whilst one is free to take on more engagements, exercises, activities, and even responsibilities, one is, for once, unencumbered. Unencumbered in virtue of being liberated from demands on one’s time. Unencumbered in the sense that one can respond to one’s true calling, as opposed to doing things for the sake of others, to please, to placate, and to serve without being served.

Freedom, as such, is not about inertia. It is not about doing enough. Freedom done right should not give rise to unbridled ennui and existential angst. Instead, freedom is a sensation that courses through one’s veins, freeing one from unproductive and self-destructive worries, emancipating one from the need to unduly commit.

Yet make no mistake. To be free does not imply being licentious. Licentiousness – the ultra-permissiveness of doing anything and everything one wants to do – is by no means freeing. In fact, it binds one to the perilous whims and arbitrary volitions of oneself, which could blow like the changing winds. The worry here isn’t that one is interfered with by others, or that one isn’t living life as fullest as possible – but that one loses sight of the very faculty that makes all of us special, as human beings: our ability to critically reason, and to act in accordance with such reasons. So freedom comes with a price, and that price is well worth paying.

Brian YS Wong

Assistant Professor, HKU