"Freedom isn't an external set of conditions, but an internal quality of spirit."
I am probably not the best person to articulate the opposing viewpoint here, but I just could not disagree more. There was some quote about this attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer I discovered in the spring of 1995, but I can't recall it verbatim, or find it online. It went something like "Freedom exists not in the thought but in the act [or "the action"].
I'll quote myself instead: "Free your [hindquarters] and your mind will follow --
maybe." I said this in opposition to the common saying, "Free your mind, and [those quarters on which you sit] will follow.
I think I've been on about this before, in a thread titled something like "Everything Comes From Within," and elsewhere. I maintain that external circumstances are not to be discounted or dismissed. There was a scene in one of my all-time favorite movies,
Doctor Zhivago (1965?), where a political prisoner being transported in shackles on a train flourishes his shackles and proclaims "I'm the only free man on this train!" He may have added "I'm free in my mind." Or that may have been a line from some other movie. I'm not quite sure right now.
Anyway, I have never bought into the whole "I'm free in my mind" philosphy.
I can't go along with the idea that true freedom consists only in doing what is right either. If free will is real, then we must be free to do evil as well as good. I was on about this kind of thing in a thread titled "Romans 13," IIRC.
' The East Anglian Puritans who populated New England used the word "liberty" in at least three ways. There was publick liberty, a collective notion perfectly consistent with close restraint on individuals. Then there were liberties a person might be entitled to: "understood as specific exemptions from conditions of prior restraint … The General Court [of Massachusetts], for example, enacted laws which extended 'liberties and privileges of fishing and fowling' to certain inhabitants, and thereby denied them to everyone else." Then there was soul liberty, which seems to have meant "freedom to order one's acts in a godly way — but not in any other." '
And yet, there are limits to even my belief in free will. I am convinced that many people commonly make choices that are by no means free, or at least not entirely free. I mean they are forced choices, making them no choices at all.
Like I said, I'm not the best person to explain or espouse this view. I suppose I must come across as shockingly materialistic, in one sense of the word. I mean it must seem that I am discounting the metaphysical or spiritual and extolling the material. But I can never be satisfied with any merely symbolic or imaginary or figurative or theoretical freedom, only with literal freedom in the crudest sense -- the full, free exercise of it, in deed, not in word, in fact not in theory.
DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)