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Freedom (Joseph Epstein, Summer 2003, Notre Dame Magazine)

Personal freedom pivots on two prepositions: freedom for and freedom from. Thirty or 40 years ago one might have said that women were most concerned about freedom from: from loneliness, economic worry, anxiety generally. Men wanted freedom for: travel, pleasure, adventure generally. Men may have been the greater fantasts. [...]

I recently read a biography of Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the German cultural impresario who, along with being an important patron of modernist art during its difficult early years, was also a figure on the edge of German politics. A man born to great wealth, Kessler, toward the end of his life, realized he had spread himself too thin. His explanation of why he did so is, I think, instructive in the light of the kind of personal freedom our own age so highly values without ever quite being able to achieve.

"But no one can live out all the personalities he contains," Kessler wrote in his diary, "which is why no person (aside from quite primitive ones) is entirely happy. The more complicated he is, the more souls he contains, the more personalities he can and must be in order to live out his life fully, the more unhappy he is, at least relatively. Only for the very superficial or very primitive is it possible to exhaust all the contents of one's soul in a short life span; for one must necessarily neglect a part of one's potential fulfillment."

For all his wealth, talent, connections, Kessler could not achieve the fulfillment for which he longed. Like so many other worshippers of freedom, before and after him, Kessler finally "drowned," in the phrase of Soren Kierkegaard, "in the sea of possibilities." The desire for fulfillment, for seeking an outlet for all one's potentialities, in the end comes to little more than another version of the search for personal freedom -- in this case, the freedom for complete self-development.

Personal freedom may, alas, ultimately be a fantasy. As soon as one thinks about one's happiness or one's freedom, one senses that one is neither happy nor free. Freedom may even be one of those words, happiness is another, that one has only to think about in a concentrated way and -- poof! -- it disappears.

My own lately arrived at, rather dour view is that there is no genuine freedom without constraint. Freedom is available, I have come to believe, only after one has lived through and conquered constraint.

More important than the personal aspect, a general freedom from constraint must soon lead to a clamp down precisely because the "freedom for" is counterbalanced by the at least equally compelling desire for "freedom from" and as href=http://transfinitum.net/brothersjudd/archives/week_2003_04_06.html#005250>liberty declines into little more than license folks will
inevitably and justifiably seek a return to order--nearly any kind of order--just to be protected from the arbitrary and capricious behavior of their
fellow men. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 16, 2003 7:45 AM