I have already referred, in some previous Posts, to this one I am publishing; for example, in Post WALKING ALONG 2 IMPREGNABLE SUMMIT OF FREEDOM, I mentioned that: “It is one thing to approach the concept of freedom by certain complicated paths [1st scenario] and another to approach freedom itself, to discover it, feel it and exercise it [2nd scenario], proposing in that Post a scheme to achieve it. Perhaps the latter is more difficult”.
I have decided to carry out the first scenario – that of approaching this point of understanding the concept – by means of this post, which I have divided into several parts, which I will present as I analyze different authors. It will be an important and intense effort, and I will have to carry it out with caution, since it will be necessary to become clearly aware of what the thinkers I have selected have written about the concept of freedom and their inclinations towards the practice of walking, in an indirect way.
One of the aims of this attempt is to find out where Freedom now stands at a fork or crossroads? At some point in its historical journey, perhaps it shows a reasoned walk up to these moments. From these indirect views to have the prospective of where it will – or should – go in the future. In future Post THE WALK OF LAW, FREEDOM, HISTORY, JUSTICE AND OTHER VALUES I mention the way Freedom walks, as I observe it: “The walk of ‘FREEDOM’ is swift and energetic, like the flight of a free bird in the sky. Each of its steps is expansive, always seeking new horizons and opportunities”.
There are a few concepts about which we need to be quite studious and very analytical, and freedom is perhaps the most important of these and, moreover, truly inextricable.
To walk towards that point of understanding the concept of freedom and to know its bifurcations is our purpose.
Many, many thinkers throughout history have devoted their intellectual efforts to study, analyze and evaluate these two scenarios. All their views on the subject are acceptable and worthy of consideration. But, very few have written and given their opinions on the natural, innate and spontaneous activity of “walking”; I have no doubt that a high percentage of them liked to walk and did it, consciously or unconsciously, as an exercise to “liberate” their ideas: thinking and writing.
Also in the field of art, the concept of Freedom is involved in an essential way.
There is a potential controversy regarding creation itself, especially in the context of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recreate new versions of masterpieces by great painters. The introduction of AI into the artistic world has raised important questions about originality, authorship and aesthetic value.
On the one hand, AI technology makes it possible to recreate works of art that mimic the style and technique of famous painters, which can be a form of homage and a way of experimenting with classical styles in a modern context, but it also presents a disruption and “pseudo-homage” by multiplying the works of those creators who produced an original and limited body of work in terms of the number of their works, which could now be greatly expanded.
From a positive angle, it is argued that these recreations can be a way of revitalizing and reinterpreting fine art.
There is no doubt that from now on, some artists will embrace AI as another tool in their creative arsenal, as it is demonstrative that these new technological means catapult creativity in human beings.
The freedom of creation in art in this age of the onset of AI reflects the constant evolution of the very definition of art and its purpose in society. It is essential to explore new forms of expression and reinterpretation of masterpieces through technology and to observe their cultural impact (1).
I propose in this Post, divided into several parts, to make a discursive-conceptual disruption or discharge by pouring out the most important ideas (conceptions) of a number of thinkers – 20 or less – that they had about freedom and try to focus on relating them allegorically to walking. An analysis of their thoughts in order to approach them methodically and reasonably, giving them a certain plasticity (flexibility) and thus involve them with an activity that they obviously performed but never mentioned, walking, but which – with reasoned intuition and sensitivity – we can incorporate into their conceptions. It is an exercise on my part that will allow me to refocus their thoughts and gain additional insight from them about freedom, and with imagination, their inferential relationship to walking.
There are approximately 20 thinkers and from each I will set out their thinking, in a very concise way, on freedom by analyzing some of their own books that they wrote on this subject. In addition I will have to make a great effort to research what walking might have meant in their lives. The latter could be likened to an essayistic exercise, if I may use the term; a challenge that kept me engrossed (busy) for a couple of months as to what would be the procedure and formula that could lead me to such an illustrative essay.
Throughout this study on freedom, I kept the formula in mind: To walk is to move forward and to feel free.
To approach – metaphorically walking – what has been thought, analyzed and expressed about the concept of freedom, may perhaps be a motivating invitation to confront ourselves with what freedom means for the human race. It could also guide us to delve deeper into the thinking of one or more of them, which would lead us to read and, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you, to do so by walking. With this idealized sequence, a new circle of Freedom-Reading-Walking could be fulfilled; a forced but achievable analytical process, and perhaps we will find in this formula some stimulation (motivation, invigoration) to carry it out. Most probably, we will discover a gap and want to fill it; however, the ideal means is the binomial “reading-walking”, with which a basis of functional approach between freedom and walking could be achieved, and reading would be the functional (analytical) bridge required to achieve that approach.
Some time ago, I once asked the following question: “Freedom: Existential longing, mental mirage or metaphysical reality?” Apart from going through some answers and opinions, analyzed and reasoned, trying to define what it consists of, I also tried some mechanisms to make it “felt” in some of its most elementary forms, just by walking (Post WALKING ALONG 2 IMPREGNABLE SUMMIT OF FREEDOM).
Freedom gains strength in function of its absence; the more we feel we don’t have it, the more we long for it. I have already mentioned on other occasions that it is easier to talk about that which impedes, hinders or is incorrectly called freedom – that is, the forms of “non-freedom” in society – than about that which really is freedom.
Walking allows us to feel and live “sensorially” that full force of our interiority, regardless of the types of our emotional chains. It allows us to move away from the mass fervor of consumerism (commercial hedonism), from the mass advertising envelope, as we are constantly being told that freedom is “a bonus” to be gained by acquiring things. When we walk along a country pavement, we say: “I breathe fresh air”; and that is nothing more than an allegory of feeling free, free from the things that imprison us, our commitments, obligations, physical things, from everything that makes us feel tied down.
Just to get a little closer to its definition, we can mention a classification of this concept in 2 aspects, which are not the only ones; the first one is constituted by psychological freedom, of a spiritual, psychic, mental and metaphysical type, which is defined with 2 words: inner freedom (Future Post WALKING AND INNER FREEDOM-WALK-RWD SYSTEM AS LIBERATION); and the second is made up of physical, civil, political, economic freedom, with all its rights, of worship, of association, of expression and others, also defined with only 2 words: outer freedom.
Now, the system of reading, writing and drawing, while we walk, is a possibility that we have at hand to move away from these chains. Those 3 fundamental activities that make up the System are linked to freedom, as we walk, we feel free from our bonds.
In a story in my book Evanescent Stories (2), entitled “THE TREE OF EXISTENCE; AND FREEDOM?”, I present a dialogue between the consciousness and the unconscious, -all the stories consist of a dialogue between these two mental entities-, which describes the struggle we engage in with ourselves for not understanding what is happening to us and for not being able to feel free. I quote myself:
“Freedom is the random space where none of the mental functions find a place. Disharmonies that must turn back, searching for the intuition of that reasoned instant that imprisoned generates our own reaction to exist.
It is paradoxical to blame each other.
Healing is the very yearning for freedom, that self-presence in the balance of the source of feeling and reason, of suffocation and subjugation; for the sole purpose of knowing and feeling that we are alone; condemned to hide in the memory of our own being, consuming that strangulation of deep solitude, the product of hopelessness, of being authentically us, and only us.
That is not being.
The vital horizon is observed when freedom is oneself.
And what comes next? My unconscious conditions are confused.
Nothingness. Absolutely nothing. Only hell. Blood flows at 103 degrees when freedom is taken away.
Let us not resist. Every movement is a creator of itself; even if we find ourselves at these limits, we should not aspire to recreate only if the other dies”.
So much for this part of the dialogue between these two entities seeking harmony.
The title of my book, “Freedom 103” (3), comes from this story, because there are 103 authors that I study and analyze their views on the concept of freedom.
The series of dialogues between the consciousness and the unconscious summarises our perennial struggle to be free. When our being is curtailed in its possibilities to act freely or is blocked, at that point of intransigence and despair, our blood begins to overheat (103°F) and boil if we do not manage to emancipate ourselves from our chains, whatever they may be, personal or external.
Walking is not the total solution to remove such chains, but it does help us to mitigate various emotional ailments. Let’s do it by choosing a place outside urban areas and take a book and a notebook with us. Let’s read that book – chosen in whatever way – that brings us release and rescue that aching part of our being. Let us observe the open space (contemplation) and let us unburden our sorrows by writing them down so that they too fly freely out of our being (Future Post WALKING LETTING TRANQUILITY FREELY).
Let us give ourselves permission to walk and make it a privilege that has virtually no monetary cost. Let us do these activities as a fundamental act of freedom.
Back in Post WHAT WOULD THE GREAT THINKERS RESPOND ABOUT WALKING?, I presented a short response from each of the 74 thinkers I chose. I elaborated those answers in a revealing and meaningful way, albeit in a funny way, about what for some reason they had distinguished themselves in their creative work.
I get to thinking that if we had a compilation of their views on walking – if they had made them – we would have an excellent assessment of what the exercise of walking is. Obviously, with this writing I do not pretend to achieve that, or even something close to it. J.J. Rousseau wrote a whole chapter on the subject of walking and it is really very interesting to hear what he thought (Future Post WALKING IN J.J. ROUSSEAU, analysis of his ideas on the subject). But the rest, he wrote almost nothing about this natural practice of the human being.
The first 3 authors I analyze, are the ones I propose below, and in each of them we will walk along the two stretches of the road that I am sure we will be able to know where we are standing and where we are going:
1. Eliade, Mircea, “The myth of the eternal return”, Ed. Alianza-Emecé, Spain, 1951.
Although it is not a book devoted to the subject of freedom, it contains a small section on this concept that is very interesting, as it deals with two aspects that make it essential to include it. The article is called “Freedom and History”.
The first issue is about the creation made by the human being (pp. 148-149) who attributes his creative impotence -of modern man- to the part of the being that has been captive to a mythical horizon governed by archetypes, and sometimes reduced by them. He has long been disabled – for a long time – to take the risks that lead him to the same creative acts, and he is limited – immersed in history – by his own way of conceiving freedom. The archetype is his actual model of freedom. According to my approach, this first aspect has much to do with walking: Creation, Creative Powerlessness, Archetypes: Post WALKING AND THE ARCHETYPE “MAGIC”. PART I; Future Post WALKING AND THE ARCHETYPES-THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, scheduled for publication July 1, 2024.
The second aspect that Mircea studies places the human being as the maker of history. To the extent that man advances towards modernity and becomes embedded in it, to the same extent his incapacity to create it increases; either because of his own impulse of several centuries, even millennia – says Eliade – that he achieves it alone, or because his leadership has been deposited in a few characters who lead the masses towards historical tasks exclusive to them, forcing them to carry out harmful actions and prohibiting them from acting naturally. It is thus an apparent freedom for the majority of mankind.
It is a freedom that is philosophically deterministic or indeterministic but defined by an elite, and ultimately a fictitious and non-existent freedom.
In a synthetic way, M. Eliade proposes a disposition of actions of modern man governed by archetypes that restrict him, on the one hand, in his creativity or creative activity, and on the other hand, in the worst case, defined by a small number of people who tell him what he must do and when he must carry it out. This development becomes increasingly difficult and complicated as our actions become more historical.
The author compares modern man with archaic man, the latter being a free and creative being, unlike the former who has been bound in his creative behavior. “The man who aspires to be historical cannot aspire in any way to the freedom of the archaic man with respect to his own ‘history’, because for the modern man his is not only irreversible, but also constitutive of human existence”. He makes this confrontation without reaching a definitive conclusion about his historical conditioning and about his relative freedom; however, he does foresee a future where historical man must seek and find the new man, who is the creator of his own freedom; to this end, and with the purpose of overcoming this archetypal cyclical – infinite – archetypal horizon, he proposes a philosophy of freedom, without excluding the supreme divinity and under the new condition of spirituality of the Faith-God binomial.
Modern man has been restricting himself in his creative work, limiting himself to creating only history. The archaic permanently recreated his cosmic traces and infinitely repeated his cosmogony, which transformed him into a free and creative being (a creator). The modern man has not transcended his historical state and has not been able to achieve the creation of a new man, a challenge that will have to be resolved in the future.
Its conceptual and functional linkage (relationship) with walking: We can say that Mircea Eliade, being a historian of religions, focused on “hierophany” and the manifestation of the sacred in the world, which led him to consider that freedom could be related to transcending worldly limits and connecting with the divine. In this context, walking for Eliade could be interpreted as a means of seeking that spiritual connection and escaping earthly limitations; a natural practice – like all those of archaic humans who were free and creative – and one that we should engage in intensively as in its origins. Modern man is limited by his own cultural conditionings and in order to place himself on the path of freedom he will have to walk, which is a “costless” practice, and as he continues walking he will encounter some forks and difficulties on the way, but at least he would have started with a natural archaic action of freedom.
Simmel, Georg, “The individual and freedom”, Ensayos de crítica de la cultura, Península, Spain, 1986.
Georg Simmel (1858-1918), who has been considered the self-consciousness of modernity, presents in this work a diversity of analyses on vital issues -religious, historical, aesthetic, philosophical and social- among which is freedom, and from whose final chapter “The Individual and Freedom” derives the title of this book. The twenty-six chapters that make up the book are critical essays on culture, which give us an insight into the thinking of this German sociologist and philosopher. The author criticizes all those scientific and technological instruments that can be detrimental to what we intuitively understand as life.
His analysis of freedom is embedded in the socio-historical study of the development of individualism as a longing of the citizen “to feel the autonomy of his person” (p. 272).
Like many historians, he locates the Italian Renaissance as the starting point of this individualistic movement, through which the formerly anonymous subject strives to be recognized, differentiated and admired by being able to “develop his forces, to freely unfold” his potentialities and his life.
In order to understand the approach of Simmel’s analysis of these two concepts in the essay “The individual and freedom”, where the author tries to vindicate them as the essence -internal/external- of the human being, it is convenient, if not necessary, to read also the previous essay entitled “The great cities and the life of the spirit” -in this same book- where he exposes the human evolution from the most closed social nuclei to the great metropolises of the beginning of the 20th century. In it, he describes the multiple apparent contradictions that arise in this development and which Simmel uses to explain the paradox of freedom in modern times.
In the essay “The Individual and Freedom” his analysis begins in Europe in the Middle Ages, where he investigates the incipient tendency towards individuation that was curbed at that time.
Individualism as a sign of freedom tried to be accentuated in that period, seeking differentiation through productive activities as a form of fulfilment in society.
In the 18th century, individualism evolved and came to have a meaning that corresponded more to the interiority of being; freedom was sought as a yearning that would allow the citizen to transform his various external limitations, concealing them in his ontological interiority.
Free competition was at its peak as the only way to move forward in that society in the process of rebirth (Posts PLAY AND WALK-PART I. NO TO COMPETITION, YES TO FUN; THE GAME AND THE WALK-RWD SYSTEM. PART II. NO TO COMPETITION, YES TO FUN).
The division of labor coupled with competitiveness are the ontological projection of its inability to find its essence (being).
An insurmountable struggle between economic – physiocratic – forces and a renewed striving for spiritual liberation are characteristics of this cultural development. The defends of freedom, sustained by a natural equality, brings man face to face with history, an arbitrary and artificial becoming for the human condition of which he was beginning to become aware.
The author argues that “the deepest problems of modern life stem” from the individual’s claim to preserve his autonomy and uniqueness in the face of the arrogance of society and its constraints, of what has been historically inherited by the culture and technology that proliferates in the cities and suffocates life, within each individual.
But just as the big city suffocates and constricts individual freedom, it also offers a kind of refuge or shelter from their reserved and isolationist behavior, towards which the vast majority of the population tends, by ceasing to have contact – even visual contact – with their fellow human beings; in this anonymity, a certain greater personal freedom is breathed. It can easily be observed that the urban individual, whom Simmel calls the “urbanite”, is freer in comparison with the close, guarded and prejudiced relations of small towns or rural villages, which socially compress the inhabitant only because of their proximity and lower density.
Curiously, it is in the big cities where Simmel finds that the freedom from prejudice enjoyed by the urbanite becomes a refuge to solitude (Post WALKING AND THE ELECTION OF LONELINESS. PART I, Post WALK IN SOLITUDE, AN ANALOGY OF LIFE) and freedom ceases to be linked to the vital feeling of happiness, as a synonym of well-being. In other words, greater freedom will not always guarantee a higher level or degree of well-being.
It is therefore necessary to search for a new category that reduces the being to what it truly is in itself, freed from everything that is not akin to its nature and that is not essential to it. Practicing Laissez faire as a doctrine that will allow him to become “free” in the economic and social aspect, by leaving all forces – economic and social – in full freedom for the human being to reach his natural harmony and happiness.
In short, Simmel sees freedom as the goal and longing of a personal ideal expressed in the movement – or phenomenon – of individuation that re-emerges in the 18th-19th centuries as a massive demand of the population for a life of personal freedom without ties or oppressions imposed by a cosmopolitan society dominated by a few.
This ideal – sought in the armed movement of the French Revolution – also poses since then a (practical-theoretical) antagonism between two of its main objectives: freedom and equality; for freedom cannot occur naturally in an environment of complete equality and undifferentiating.
Freedom is complementary to diversity and tolerance of differences, hence it is wrongly placed in hostile and oppressive environments. Equality cannot be realized in capitalism either, because this system implies the levelling of all things, including the human being – because of its exchange value – and money, which trivializes the inner-external life of individuals and prevents a harmonious and satisfactory existence.
Freedom is not only the positive part of the phenomenon, equality is its indispensable condition, but the human being is affirmed in his free acting and feeling when he accepts that he is different before others, and this will be the premise that will give meaning to his being, to his existence within his human condition.
Its conceptual and functional link (relationship) with walking: We can say that for Georg Simmel, a sociologist who examined the interaction between the individual and society, freedom lies in the ability to distance oneself from social norms and conventional structures. Walking could be seen as a solitary activity that allows the individual to escape momentarily from social expectations, experiencing a sense of freedom by being on the move and breaking away from the usual constraints. For the same reason, we should walk as it is akin to our human nature and therefore essential. To achieve freedom, we would have to follow the laws of nature itself, i.e. by walking we could make it visible and also feel it, because its manifestation is synonymous with walking. To walk daily is to make freedom perpetual. Our existence will not be imposed on us by others.
3. Schopenhauer, Arthur, “La Libertad”, Premia Editora, Mexico, 1981.
Freedom, according to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), is a state sought by the human being as an ontological entity and response, that is, required by the very essence of being. Achieving it implies the non-existence of impediments of all kinds and the lack of needs or the satisfaction of needs.
Depending on the type of needs and difficulties in satisfying them, the author defines three categories of freedom: physical, intellectual and moral.
Physical freedom is achieved voluntarily in the absence of material impediments. Political freedom is a derivation – or section – that belongs to the whole of physical freedom.
The author defines physical freedom as the power to act in the face of impediments, and moral freedom as the power to will. Moral freedom is free will.
Any category could be achieved by the absence of any “needy” force.
All needs present themselves to the being in terms of levels or degrees of being able to fulfil them. Thus the degree of a need determines the ontological will in the being’s acts to satisfy it.
As Schopenhauer demonstrates, every fact or phenomenon is governed by the universal principle of causality, no thing or circumstance escapes this law, which presents itself under three aspects, corresponding strictly to inorganic, vegetable and animal bodies, respectively: causation, excitation and motivation.
In causation, bodies are subjected to physical, chemical and mechanical transformations.
Excitation is the most representative form in the plant kingdom, as the changes or modifications that plants undergo are generated by this function.
Motivation is the form of causation unique to animals, including humans. It is the response that originates through understanding (depending on the level of intelligence on the animal scale), as it responds in addition to the other two categories to a requirement for understanding in order to analyze, appreciate and make deliberate choices to satisfy their needs.
In this category, arousal is complemented by a higher faculty that manifests itself as a response to motives (in exclusively sentient animals; in the sentient, abstract-thinking human being). Each response is provoked by a motive, which – in the human being – is transformed or converted into a will when it becomes conscious.
In this will, in this ability to choose, the power of free will is established, but for Schopenhauer it is a relative freedom. As there is no absolute power of the conscious self over the will, there can be no absolute freedom.
The author views the human character as individual, empirical, unchanging and innate, and thereby makes it clear that this dissimilarity is irreconcilable with the existence or the position of free will, in which a man can act in two equally opposite ways. The unborn being who, not having a conscience, might be thought to have no need and therefore: is he free or not? It can be argued that he is free insofar as he does not know his needs, but he is the most dependent and most constrained being insofar as he is absolutely dependent on the mother.
Schopenhauer describes some thoughts of philosophers before him and of other pseudo-thinkers on the doctrine of free will and likewise takes into account the positions of certain theologians on the subject. He focuses on these arguments of his predecessors and analyses them against the reasoning that if God created everything, including man, then any attitude (or decision) of man – considering the relation of causality and necessity-effect – is not responsible for it and therefore there is no free will, since the will would have no freedom of power to desire or not to desire. Schopenhauer mentions that this situation led the church to take hold of this problem and to determine that God had granted – by his divine grace – the human being free will, by means of which man can act freely for or against himself.
Schopenhauer, acknowledging the Kantian doctrine on the coexistence of freedom and necessity, concludes that the empirical need for action of the human being coexists with transcendental freedom, with that freedom that is not part of experience. It has been a mistake to attribute freedom to action, since the human being carries out his activities acting under a necessity that conditions him.
Man seeks to be what he desires and wants, and what he does depends on what he is. For Schopenhauer, freedom exists in man but outside the domain of his individual actions and can only be understood in its transcendental essence.
Its conceptual and functional link (relationship) with walking: We can say that Arthur Schopenhauer, as a philosopher, considered freedom as an unattainable ideal due to the impulsive and instinctive nature of human beings. For him, true freedom consisted in freedom from desires and passions: man can act freely for or against himself. To speak of freedom is to speak of the essence of being. Achieving freedom implies overcoming impediments of all kinds and satisfying the natural needs of the individual. Walking is a natural practice, therefore, walking is freedom. How well do we know that need to walk in ourselves? Knowing that need would put us on our feet immediately, its practice could be seen as a way to temporarily free the mind from worldly concerns, allowing a respite from the desires and ties that Schopenhauer considered limited true freedom.
EPILOGUE
There are 2 existential paths: one that leads us towards freedom and the other that opposes it. Let’s walk the first path and orient ourselves towards our natural freedom.
(1) Loya Pinera, Rodrigo & Loya Lopategui, Carlos, Visiting Inside the Artworks of Great Painters, EMULISA, Mexico, 2023. Distributed by Amazon, available in Kindle Edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3GMC9KR.
(2) Loya Lopategui, Carlos & Pinera, Edel C. , Evanescent Stories, EMULISA, Mexico, 2021. Distributed by Amazon, available in Kindle Edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B86GMS8W.
(3) Loya Lopategui, Carlos, Libertad 103, EMULISA, México, 2009.