This is obviously in tune with the point I've found myself obliged to make a few times recently, that ethics begins not when one considers oneself, but when one considers others.When debates are being waged over freedom, we must begin with the acknowledgement that we (as individuals) are only ever as free as the broader communities in which we operate. Our own freedoms are contingent upon the political systems that we exist in, actively engage with, and mutually construct.
If you are free to do your will, — Janus
...the most persuasive arguments for the absolute superiority of inner freedom can still be found in an essay of Epictetus, who begins by stating that free is he who lives as he wishes, a definition which oddly echoes a sentence from Aristotle's Politics in which the statement "Freedom means the doing what a man likes" is put in the mouths of those who do not know what freedom is.
I haven't said that freedom is "living as you wish" or "doing what you like" — Janus
If you are free to do your will, that counts as freedom in my book. — Janus
The first page or so brings out a strange little paradox for those who insist they have free will: Are you free to act against your own will?
Hence the "Oppression of the will". — Banno
If you can't think of anything to counter what I've said, and so have to resort to trying to dismiss it — Janus
Action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will although it needs both for the execution of any particular goal but springs from something altogether different which... I shall call a principle.
Are you free to act against your own will? — Banno
Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure it may still dwell in men's hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact. Freedom as a demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter.
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." ~Arthur SchopenhauerIn true existential style, it is only the act that is free...? — Banno
Are you free to act against your own will? — Banno
The first page or so brings out a strange little paradox for those who insist they have free will: Are you free to act against your own will? — Banno
Are you free to act against your own will? — Banno
This is obviously in tune with the point I've found myself obliged to make a few times recently, that ethics begins not when one considers oneself, but when one considers others. — Banno
As far as acting against your own will, that's begging the question. Your will is your will, for processes still a mystery to us. — Garrett Travers
This freedom which we take for granted in all political theory and which even those who praise tyranny must still take into account is the very opposite of "inner freedom," the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free.
-Hannah ArendtEvery attempt to derive the concept of freedom from experiences in the political realm sounds strange and startling because all our theories in these matters are dominated by the notion that freedom is an attribute of will and thought much rather than of action.
[/quote]When properly exercised, the only logical conclusion that can be draw is that freedom between people, the recognition of sovereign boundaries between individuals, is the only manner in which to induce a society whose ruling polity doesn't violate individual, or interpersonal ethics (rights) — Garrett Travers
As regards the relation of freedom to politics, there is the additional reason that only ancient political communities were founded for the express purpose of serving the free those who were neither slaves, subject to coercion by others, nor laborers, driven and urged on by the necessities of life. If, then, we understand the political in the sense of the polis, its end or reason d'etre would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated
into the great storybook of human history. Whatever occurs in this space of appearances is political by definition, even when it is not a direct product of action. What remains outside it, such as
the great feats of barbarian empires, may be impressive and noteworthy, but it is not political, strictly speaking.
Because of the philosophic shift from action to will-power, from freedom as a state of being
manifest in action to the liberum arbitrium, the ideal of freedom ceased to be virtuosity in the sense we mentioned before and became sovereignty, the ideal of a free will, independent from other and eventually prevailing against them. The philosophic ancestry of our current political notion of freedom is still quite manifest in eighteenth-century political writers, when, for instance, Thomas
Paine insisted that "to be free it is sufficient [for man] that he wills
it," a word which Lafayette applied to the nation-state: "Pour qu'une nation salt libre, il suffit qu'elle veuille Vetre"
My point was just that everything someone does, that is not coerced or forced, can be defined as acting in accordance with will. — Janus
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