The 2 Kinds of Freedom: Aesthetic and Ethical
Human history and the human psyche reveal two conditions that we describe using the word freedom. They are, however, very different conditions.
The first is what I will call, borrowing the word from Kierkegaard, “aesthetic freedom.” This is the freedom of the adolescent and is characterized by the right to avoid making choices.
For example, the unmarried man is free to let his eyes and mind wander among the unattached females of the species, the uncommitted quasi-philosopher is free to wander among schools of thought, pretending to “not want to narrow himself to one position,” the undecided music critic is free to say, “I like all kinds of music.”
In each case, what the person is saying is that he is guided by his emotions or immediate needs, which, in turn are guided by his appetites. He is functioning slightly above the powers of an animal, but, in a way, not very far. Neither his will nor his reason have been decisively engaged.
To summarize, aesthetic freedom is the freedom of the adolescent and is characterized by the absence of willful decisions.
The second kind of freedom, and here again I borrow the word from Kierkegaard, is ethical freedom and is characterized the act of choosing.
Any time I make a choice, I am choosing more than just one of many options. For example, if I choose to go to a football game instead of a drinking party, I haven’t only chosen football over the party. I’ve also chosen a self that would go to a football game instead of the party.
In this sense, because we are created persons with a will, we are continually choosing ourselves in every decision we make.
These choices can lead to ethical slavery, in which our decisions bind us to the appetite we indulge, or ethical freedom, in which our decisions create of us a free person who governs himself and walks the path of wisdom.
Perhaps most significantly, each choice we make can be a choice for the finite or the infinite. The aesthete tries to maintain an infinite variety of choices and in so doing limits his choices to only the finite options.
The ethical person chooses limits and commitments, and in so doing he chooses the infinite, for concrete love is the infinite act of an eternal being. Love gives life to the faculty by which we can love, and that faculty is not earthly, worldly, selfish, cynical.
Indulgence destroys that faculty, thus destroying the soul of the self-indulgent.
Ethical freedom is the act of choosing oneself. Aesthetic freedom is the act of indulging oneself. The former leads to finite but real life. In the act of an infinite choice to love another one is connected to the infinite. The latter is the negation of the self by virtue of the disempowerment of the will and reason.
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Borrowing a cue from the late Philip Rieff, I have couched the two conditions that we describe for using the word freedom in different terminology: the freedom of culture versus the freedom of anti-culture. I have outlined it in an article written in the Southern idiom at the following site:
http://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-principles.html
I also note that rooted in the very word “freedom” has as its PIE root “pri” which is “love.” Love suggests another person, not the isolated autonomous individual. It seems to get at what Genesis hints at in 1:27 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Man is complete as male and female. This is reenforced in Genesis 2:24 “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Freedom for those who live creaturely and Christianly begins in the blinding love to another; not in the assertion of self: be that other our Lord, our spouse or our neighbor. One is truly free when one submits in humility, i.e. become meek. The wild stallion thinks himself to be free; yet, he has purpose and it truly free when he submits to the will of his master and becomes a trained (meek) warhorse, a draft horse and a quarter horse. True freedom is exists only in the context of submission, working within the limitations of the created order, and seeking others rather than self.
“Ethical freedom is the act of choosing oneself. Aesthetic freedom is the act of indulging oneself. The former leads to finite but real life. In the act of an infinite choice to love another one is connected to the infinite. The latter is the negation of the self by virtue of the disempowerment of the will and reason.”
It is always risky to use the Western philosophical language of the “self.” I cannot choose my “self,” at all. When I choose my self, apart from God, I choose a figment, something that does not, ultimately, have existence except in the presence of God. This figment of the self is a lie of Satan’s, and it rules this world, for in the Fall Adam and Eve made that choice, and we all now participate in it and know that it tastes of death.
The only way out of our predicament is through the love of Christ. We cannot love Creation or any aspect of it first, for then we are only idolators, who really just want to control and dominate, to rule in God’s place, like Satan. We cannot even know philosophically speaking for sure how we come to love Christ. If we think we intentionally choose that love ourselves, then we have not the love of Christ, for our will itself is poisoned. The love of Christ must come into us from Him. Only He has access to your, my true nature, for we are His creatures. Hence our submission must be total, even to giving up our wills. We must be baptized in the Spirit, transformed at the very root of our will.
Do we turn ourselves, or are we turned by Someone else? We cannot even say, and only fell the need to ask until we know the love of Christ, because the self is a heteronomous, dependent thing. We have our being in an Other and in others.
Once we know, which is to say, experience, not know in the philosophical sense, the mystery and transforming power of Christ’s love, we can return in some measure in this world to the ground of being which is our only ground of being: God’s presence. It seems to me that no one will need to speak of the “self” in Heaven, though we will recognize one another in our created distinctness. My self will be my name, and the particular and peculiar story which goes with it, much as Tom Bombadil answers Frodo’s question. “Who are you, Master?… Eh, what?… Don’t you know my name yet? … Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?” “Your self” is a feeble contradiction. Instead we have and will have names, such as Adam and Eve.
In the Garden we chose our selves, and God let us taste the consequences. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ shows the way, saying, “Not my will, but thine.” As Robert Peters implies above, in the Garden God pitied the poor solitary human, Adam alone and without others of his kind, and gave him another to love, and with whom to procreate. This other, the woman Eve, came out of his own very essence, is of the same essence, and so he, and she, have no selves, in their selves, alone. Our true nature is not free will, but love.