Pavlikeni – Didactical Path  first year 

 

Philosophy

 

   Through the centuries many poets, writers and revolutionist have been always talking about freedom and have been praising it. Everybody knows Don Quixote‘s speech, from the Cervantes ‘novel: “Freedom, Sancho, is on the top of the lance … “. Also, the slogan “Freedom or Death”, used by our grandparents in fights for liberation. Today everyone can read epistle by the American President, Ronald Reagan, and it is found on the monument of Hellenes’ godness Nicke: “There is no a last battle. Every generation only have to gain its freedom – the most precious and valuable gift “… The Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi says: “I give everything for love. But for freedom, I give even my love.”

   But what exactly is the “freedom”?

  “The possibility, without any force or control, to set our life – present and fortune, leaded mainly by our own autonomous will, which comes from our independence, thinks, convictions, opinions, and soul views.”

   Freedom as a conception is an object of the philosophy and according to it, is the ability of the human to do what he wants.

   There is a problem with the freedom and faith in the antique philosophy. Platoon understood the essence of the freedom, and he entered the Heaven Love taught. A spectacular thing we find in the Socrates speech, who suggested by his unique irony, that the human can not have the heaven love; it is only wish and beauty loving. Afterwards, comes this one for the freedom from the political despot (in Aristotle and Epicure, sitters, and in neoplatinisium.)

   In Medieval, the people thought about sin liberation and judgment from the church; then sprung up the inward contradiction between moral requirement for human’s freedom, and the God’s power, ordered by the religion.

   In the Renaissance and the time after it the people thought that the “freedom” is unconditioned enfoldment of the human’s personality.

   After the Public taught ,appeared the object for “freedom” ,raised by the liberality and philosophy of admittedly right (Altuzy , Hobs , Grocius , Puffendorf , Bill of Rights ,1689 , England) , the borders of this object were laid from the deeper and deeper getting of the science in  domination of the powerful naturally casualty and law.

   The German religion taught and philosophy (from Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe and Schiller, German ideality, to Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche) put the question about freedom as a postulatium about the essential parity and moral-creative enfoldment.

   The Marx study considered the freedom as a fiction; actually human’s reflections and actions are followed by instincts and environment, and the main role in it is assigned to economical relationships and class fights.

   The relation between the freedom as a political and a social demand, and the problems with the will liberty, are settled by O. Fait. According to him, human is ‘free’ only when he can make own decisions. So, the sociological problem accords to the anthropological. We have to note the “freedom flight” phenomenon, diverted from the free will. Fait changed the will freedom theory in the borders of the ethic.

   Existential philosophy of Heidegger teaches us that fundamental availability of here – being, is the fear of the non – being possibility; fear, witch frees the human of any relationships, and in some way leads him to the basis of the “nothing”.

   Jaspers`s existential philosophy  teaches, that every person has a freedom to overcome the way of life of the world of his own choice and to work his way up to the transcendence of the whole spread comprehensiveness. Being free means to be able to prove by deed your goodwill or malevolence. A bearer  of goodwill is the confidence in the unconditional, in the Divine.  It is restricted by the unconscious vital tenacity of the pure existence and self existence /Eigen - Sein/.

   According to J. P. Sartre’s existentialism the freedom is not a property of the people, it is their substance. People cannot get more different than their freedom and the freedom-its deeds. Because they are free, people are able to design themselves on the background of an unspecified chosen aim and with a view to proclaim them who are they. With the setting of the aim arise all the values, the things come out their undifferentiating and they set in an order, depending on the situation, which people have to overcome with and which they belong to. In other words people are always equal to the occasion of this, which happens to them. For them it lacks a reason for an excuse.

   According to Kant: the circumstance for self - determination on the will by your own law, which it begins a new casual line in the world of the phenomenon with.  The possibility of the practical freedom, namely the independence of the arbitrary from the compulsion of the sensuous impulses, is given by the transcendental freedom.

  In his analyses about the self-consciousness, Hegel draws a rich historical material: the stoicism, the skepticism, “the miserable consciousness”. These are historical forms, which the self-consciousness of the slave searches for his freedom by. In his criticism of this forms Hegel points out, that the “real” reality cannot just be reduced to an inner freedom, “freedom of thought”, “indifferent to the natural available way of life”, i.e. to the real slave’s way of life like a slave. It is true. The real freedom is the only on inner or outer, on subjective or objective.

   The Russian philosopher Berdyaev caught the difference between the freedom and the emancipation in the spirit of the Platonism. This striving is most visible in “Phaedrus”. “When people see the beauty down here, then they remember about the real beauty and begin get winged; and their wings raise them, they want to fly but they cannot bring themselves to that. And then, just like a bird, they look upwards and forsake everything on (this) earth…” According to him: “The freedom, which does not have an experience of compassion, gets demonical.”  N. Berdyaev accept for initial contradiction between the liberty of the spirit and the indispensability of the world, the violence, the conformity, in that way it accepts the first of the freedom above the way of life, of the spirit above the nature, of the subject above the object, of the personality above the universality-the generally. 

   “Even the magnificent rose always to die in the merciless blast of the winter, it has implemented its mission, because it has brought joy in the life of hundreds of people; even if tomorrow it occurs to somebody to reject all the stars: would you say that millenniums on end the people do not look upwards with homage. They are perfect not because of one or other processes, happening through out the time, but because of their inner nature.

   What pitiable creatures would be those people, who do not uncover comfort inside their provisional world and for that purpose they need the support of the nature. Where does the divine freedom remain, if the nature, just like our infant children, holds us in its baby - walker. No, it has to refuse us everything, to gain the happiness, to engender it by our free ME. Not to the nature, we want to owe everything to ourselves.

   However, this freedom is just a day-dream. As far as we freely imagine one or other thing, we are under the iron necessity of the nature. Even the most impressive ideas we reach to are just a result of the blindly tempestuous nature in us. And at last you have to comprehend, that creatures, who know themselves, can only be free. We see how the laws lead and this causes the necessity. But in our cognition we possess that power, which we can set free the natural things according to the laws with. Then do we have to stay weak-willed slaves of these laws.

                                      /According to “A Philosophy of the freedom” by Rudolf Steiner/

 

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