Because all the lectures in this volume are steps toward the realization of freedom I would like to begin with an excursion through the positions on freedom that we find in classical and contemporary philosophy. I would not want to suggest that these are exclusive paths, though some have tried to make them so. Rather, they are different stages of freedom and we can draw fully upon the contribution of each. We do not need to leave anything out or to fight against anything; rather we need to bring together the full resources, personal and social and with these to develop an adequate vision for the challenge of freedom in our day.

Mortiner Adler can help us to look through the history of this notion of freedom. Earlier he brought together a team of young philosophers and to each assigned a specific section of the history of Western philosophy. One he asked to concentrate on the pre-Socratics, another on Plato and Plotinus, and so on through the history of philosophy. Together they began an investigation of freedom. Each day he would ask a question and then have his team examine their sections of philosophy to find what there was on that particular theme. Gradually they uncovered and charted the many dimensions of freedom explored through the history of Western philosophy.

In this process they discovered that there were three basic levels of freedom and that, not incidentally, they corresponded to the three epistemological dimensions of human consciousness. That is, if there are three ways of looking, seeing and understanding, then it is not surprising that there will be three levels of living the reality of freedom or perhaps better said, three free manners of living. This, in fact, turned out to be the case as his team uncovered a parallel between three epistemologies and the three notions of freedom. That these correspond in part to the three levels of abstraction in Aristotle and to the three levels of doubt in Descartes is not incidental and relates these discussions on freedom to the broad movements of the human spirit.

The first way of thinking is by the senses, that is empirical thinking, to which there corresponds freedom as a choice between external objects. The second way of thinking is that of the intellect as reason, as in Kant’s first two critiques of Pure and Practical Reason, to which there corresponds the freedom to choose as one ought. The third mode of consciousness is the aesthetic which was treated in Kant’s third Critique and to which there corresponds the creative existential freedom of self-construction.

One could say then that there are three sets of eyeglasses and three notions of freedom. The first set of glasses is ground for observing things available to the external senses of sight, namely, color, texture and sound. This was uniquely important for the work on freedom at the beginning of the modern period. It was the time of the transition in England from an absolute, centrist Monarch to a Parliament which spoke for the people. This required that the members of Parliament be able to reason with each other, and hence that they be able to present views in terms equally available to all. To this end John Locke proposed to work exclusively with knowledge of the senses. For example, if I perceive the corner of this lectern to be sharp you need not believe my report but can come, put your finger here and experience the same sensation. Knowledge from the senses is in principle available to everyone. Locke proposed then removing all content of the mind until it became a blank tablet, and then keeping track of which ideas from the senses are written upon it and how they are moved through various permutations by the mind. This process is described and ordered in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Similar positions were held by Hobbes and Hume in those days and by Carnap in ours.

It is important to note what, with such a set of glasses, one does and does not see. One sees the other, but not oneself; and what one sees of the other is their external or surface characteristics such as black or blond hair, but not their self. This is stressed by Carnap who rejects any sense of a whole, an entelechy or purpose; only the surface is available. The knowledge had by the senses is only of things as objects and only of their surface characteristics, enabling us to distinguish sets of contraries — black rather than blond, tall rather short. Hume would call these matters of fact, by which he meant not existence or what it means to be, but simply which of a pair of contraries obtains in this particular case.

In these terms my life would be lived in terms not of a sense of personal dignity or of self — my own or other’s — but of objects or things at which I stare or which, more literally, are thrown over against (ob-ject) me as subject. Further, as known by the external senses these could be only material or physical objects.

This first level of freedom then is a matter of taking possession of objects, and turning them into productive sources or matters of consumption. Thus such freedom is lived in terms of objects to be possessed, or of the economy: its ethics is of things as useful or utilitarian, its goal is (hedonistic) consumption, which some refer to as the consumer society.

Further, because these objects are physical goods, what is possessed or used by one cannot be possessed by another: food or money taken by one is not available for another. The implication then is competition in the exercise of freedom in relation to the available physical goods. In the early United States there was a great concern to promote initiative or competition with the intention of promoting the development of a dynamic society for the production of goods for the whole nation. Thus the political system was organized to promote initiative and the competition implied by this level of freedom.

In fact, such economic competition flows over into political conflict for power and control of the economic goods and productive power. The conflict can be very strong, even violent to such a degree that it destroys competition. The strongest compete best, while the weak are not really competitive. In time only a few are able to compete while the others become progressively incapable of participating in the exercise of freedom in the society. To protect against this a number of systemic mechanisms are built into the democratic system, e.g., in Anglo-Saxon cultures, one is common law that decides conflicts between people and sets precedents which stabilize the future. Another is government regulation which protects competition in an area, or even self-regulation by those in an area in order to preclude the need for government to do so. A third is human rights which protect a minimum level of freedom for an individual.

The problem here is not that there is competition, but that when conceived and exercised simply in terms of empirical or sense knowledge there are a number of negative consequences. First, the basic concern turns to material possessions, that is, to ‘having’ rather than to ‘being’. What is sought is absolute ability to choose physical things. But as this desire is neither shareable nor satiable it generates a state of perpetual conflict or permanent warfare in which man is wolf to man.

Indeed, the focus on things so distracts from human purposes that there is no basis for evaluating in terms of goals what would be humanly and socially appropriate or inappropriate. We lose attention to issues of self-realization or self-fulfillment; ‘to have’ quite replaces ‘to be’.

Two characteristics then of this first level of freedom are that it is concerned with objects and material possessions; it is not concerned with the self. It is an issue of ‘having,’ as Eric Fromm would say, not of ‘being’. Secondly, it does not identify which goals really pertain to the search for human fulfillment and which are destructive thereof. It says simply that everyone must be able to choose as they wish. Of course, it can be said that the issue of life purpose is left to the individual, but then what is most humane is least protected and promoted. It becomes important then to recognize further levels of freedom.

Kant was very interested in the work of Hume in relation to science. Hume could provide a way in which scientific concepts could be grounded through the senses in the actual world. But when it came to ethics Kant considered the first level of freedom described above to be no ethic at all, for it simply opens a chaotic, anarchistic, voluntaristic search for possessions. It does not provide a law for rational coordination for that search. Secondly, it is so concerned about possessing things or objects distinct from ourselves that it is not concerned about the development of the person. Thus there are two things that must be corrected. We must have law, and we must care for the self.

From his first Critique Kant was very conscious that all must be under law as is found in physics or the economy. But these would not originate from me. The work of my imagination would be in ordering data for the intellectual category. This is not a matter of exercising of freedom, but simply of service to the physical or economic order.

Kant’s solution was that for ethics there is needed of laws for the exercise of freedom but that these must remain matters of freedom. That is, they must not be heteronomous or from outside ourselves, but autonomous: they must be laws which we give to ourselves. We must be autonomous in legislating for the exercise of freedom.

This constituted a great personal challenge for it meant that we could not easily compromise our standards or search only for our self-interests. Rather, we need to be great in moral virtue in order to make laws which are worthy of the whole ethical sphere and for the entire human race. We would have to will at a high level if we were not simply to follow laws imposed, but determine our own action according to standards good enough for all of humanity to live by. One could be autonomous or free only if one’s will was of the stature of a supreme lawmaker himself.

It is the creator who effects all things, making them actually to be; humans can imitate this universality only on a formal level. They do so in the theoretical order by constituting universal terms and recognizing principles; in the practical order they do so by acting according to standards fit to be universal laws. This is the lawgiving involved in properly human or ethical action. In these terms Kant set high general standards for the human person who, for instance, must always act as regards both oneself and others as being an end, never a means. This is a standard which must be met.

Two things were missing, however, in that second level of freedom: one was motivation. I can describe and admire a law which would be good for all of humanity, but I must be motivated actually to implement that law in my life. The second is that these universal laws do not take account of the particular, concrete circumstances in which I stand and the particular concrete decisions which I must make. We need common guides, but we must act concretely in the existential order.

Where is this existential dimension to be found in philosophy? In contrast to the Platonic tradition focused upon replicating an ideal order, we might look to the more active sense of reality as a changing life process in the Aristotelian tradition. But the sense of existence itself would seem to have emerged specifically at the time of the Christian Fathers. For them it was no longer an issue mely of the form or type of things, but rather of the existence they received from the creator and whose exercise in a process of self-realization and self-perfection is the fundamental responsibility of human life. Just as for a living being ‘to be’ is ‘to live’, so for a self-conscious being to live is to live in a self-aware manner which entails freedom and in turn responsibility for one’s actions? In time, with the revival of Aristotelian philosophy, this sense was elaborated systematically first by such Islamic philosophers as al-Farabi and then by Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas.

In recent times the conscious character of this thought has been richly explored by the methods of phenomenology and existentialism, making it possible to reorient thought from a merely objective concern of the first and even the second levels of freedom above to awareness of the proper subjectivity of which freedom is the proper human mode.

Along with not having the motivation to apply the universal law, another lack at the second level of freedom is that of attention to the concrete circumstance in which I must act and of appreciation of the at times heroic sacrifices I make or the creative innovative spirit by which I act concretely according to the law in my life. For that Kant needed to develop a third critique, The Critique of Teleological and Aesthetic Judgement.

What this third Critique added was the use of imagination to open the full range of the possibilities in a situation, as does a spectroscope in physics. The imagination can act also is a kaleidoscope in working out creatively the many possible combinations of relations, attitudes and ways of action. Hence the first step is to activate my imagination as spectroscope and creative kaleidoscope.

But at this point we arrive at the crucial issue. Where the many possibilities are before us by the work of our creative imagina-tion, which do we choose and which do we avoid? One could get the answer from the laws of economic or in terms of an ideal utopia, but both of these would be heteronomous, lacking the autonomy required for the exercise of human and hence personal freedom.

In contrast there is a third sense of freedom which is built rather upon our self and our exercise of existence. As we consider the possibilities unfolded by our imagination in our concrete circumstances we see that some are good in the sense that they fit with, and contribute to, our life project or thrust toward self-realization or perfection, while others are destructive. This is not merely a speculative judgement, but the reverberation of a possible way of acting upon our life project as being either deeply fulfilling and hence attractive or the opposite experienced as quite literally revolting. It is this reverberation of the concrete circumstances and possibilities on myself and my community in relation to our goals that grounds our decisions as regards which steps we will want to take as individuals and as peoples.

We have then a set of three notions of freedom which we must review in the light of present circumstances. It is especially the third level of freedom which is the new challenge and opportunity of our day. At the end of the Cold War human sensibilities do not tend to go back to either the very strong central decision-making process, on the one hand, or on the other hand, to the individualism of the consumer society. The first left no room for personal freedom; the second saw freedom as conflict. Today’s concerns are rather how to take account of minorities, of women, of the environment and of cultures. All of this is the quite new agenda for human freedom. The Cold War debates in the Security Council which characterized earlier times, have been replaced by the great conferences on the environment in Rio, on the family in Cairo, on women in Beijing. This is the new agenda for human freedom at this turn of the millennium.

All these require the first sense of freedom in selecting among things and working hard to develop the production needed to support a burgeoning population. They require even more the sense of ideals and goals for the human agenda which is articulated by the second level of freedom. But thirdly, they require above all the creative ability to work with initiative and responsibility in order to see the possibilities and to bring these together in a way that is truly promotive of human life. This is the third dimension of freedom which is receiving special attention in our day and opening new possibilities for the future; indeed one might say that this is what constitutes the new era.

To conclude, beyond this issue of freedom for the individual, we need to think in the next chapter of what freedom is for our concrete people in their place and history, and with their values and virtues. We will need to think then of freedom as it is exercised and develops a culture. That will be the next lecture. As this is an issue not only of values, but also of social structure, this will take us subsequently to civil society, pluralism and finally to globalization in the chapters which follow.