Do we undestand Freedom?

Today is Indonesia Independence day! What It's normally acknowledge as the day of freedom, most notably is the idea of free from colonizers. Moreover, celebrating Independence day becoming a great momentum of remembering the past and be grateful for what God has given to us freely. His mighty hands work closely in the history of all nations, including our beloved Indonesia. Psalm 22:28 clearly says, "For the kingdom is the Lord’s And He rules over the nations." Also, Psalm 66:7, "He rules by His might forever; His eyes keep watch on the nations..."

Independence day is also a good day to reflect about the notion of freedom. The fundamental question is this, do we understand freedom? in philosophy the more familiar question is this, are we really free? When we are talking about freedom, especially in the independence milieu, generally is all about external freedom, as I said earlier. Now, we would like to dig deeper from the other dimension of freedom that hopefully, will enrich and enlarge our thought on freedom. 

From philosopher like Spinoza, we can get the answer that we are actually not free. The Spinoza understanding of freedom fundamentally about the necessity of existence. God is the only can be said as free and own freedom because His existence only through the necessity of His own nature whereas the cosmos, including us are existed from God. We are all determined and caused by external factor and hence, we are not free in the ultimate sense of Spinoza's philosophy. Spinoza concludes, in a corollary to Proposition 17, "God is a free cause – indeed that God is the only truly free cause."

There is also another aspect of freedom that we can say the inner freedom, in spiritual sense. Rudolf Steiner in his writing, The Philosophy of Freedom (1894) whereby he translated freedom as spiritual activity of man and analyze the necessary condition of what does it mean to be free. In his work, Steiner ground the idea of freedom from the idea of inner spirit as he say freedom is "a view of a world based on spiritual activity, on action, on thinking and feeling that arise from the individual human spirit."

Distinctively of Steiner, for him, whenever person do not know "why" he act in certain action, for Steiner its not the true definition of freedom. To be aware of the motive of our action and to be an active conscious being whereby feeling and thinking is being activated, that's the sign that a man is free. Thus, he understand freedom in the sense of conscious action and not auto-pilot action. His view is interesting and could explain to us why people who do not know why they do what they do and what on earth they are living, are feeling senseless in life for fundamentally, they are not free and have not own a freedom in Steiner's philosophical scheme of thinking. 

The other aspect of freedom that also interesting to think about is about the idea of the freedom of speech. In fact we are living in a free speech century, nonetheless not every country has similar understanding whenever we utter the word "free" in free speech. Free in the sense we can say about "anything" or free speech in the sense we can say anything with certain restrictions, that is to say, not to hurt other people feeling. Many people think that free speech in the first sense of the word, therefore, we often found in social media the complaint such us this, "They violated my right to free speech." In a more conservative countries, Free speech always have been understood in the second sense of the word. Even practically speaking, in the most liberal country, there is even no ultimate form of free speech. 

In first amendment to the United States Constitution, free speech is not a right to say anything but only about how government has no right to interfere with the right of speech, not the output. When somebody say "fire" in the cinema whereby there is no fire, and everyone run out panic. The one who shout cannot be set free from trouble through this kind of reason, "I thought I have my freedom of speech!" There is always hidden rule and restriction on something like this for word is powerful it can build or it can create harm. Regarding this issue, people like Andrew Doyle in his recent work plead for the first sense of the word that free speech is in the sense of unlimited speech actually create more good and harm. Limited freedom of speech will destroy the freedom of expression and also diminish the space of marginalized to speak out for themselves. He also diminished "hate-speech" as relative concept. However, this matter or the extend/limit of free-speech is still being debated today. No final consensus yet ever achieved. Yet, I will agree with Stanley Fish who has argued in the past that there is no such thing as free-speech. However, we need to against all kind of tyranny or authoritarianism.  

Actually there is lot more ideas when we are dealing with freedom. The literature that try to discuss this idea of freedom is really countless. There is an idea of free-will, there is an idea of freedom in relation to society and politics. Return again to our first conversation on the independence. Let me ask a question, when we celebrate our independence day, do we do it because everyone else do it, or do we really know the reason why we celebrate it in the first place, and hence, we are really excited and happy because of it? I venture to bring another dimension of freedom here and that is to say, we are truly free in our context of independence, only when we really know that we are part of the history, part of the story of this beautiful and amazing nation. That is why, the founding father of this nation remind us today who are living in Indonesia, "Never, ever forget History!"