Skip to main content

freedom of indifference, freedom of achievement, creation, and sin

Freedom of achievement: my own expression for freedom as the ability to achieve your goal.  If you have the parts to a radio, then getting assembly instructions will give you to make that which you desire to make.  This notion of freedom shows up in Augustine and Aquinas, but gets replaced in the popular mind later on with...

freedom of indifference: not being predetermined to act or to act this way rather than another: this freedom is a negative freedom, at least as described.  It may also be incoherent.  The point in the ramblings below is that I replace freedom of indifference with something that at a superficial level LOOKS like it, but is fundamentally positive.

We see this positivity if we consider the two following freedoms that can be attributed to God:

1. God's freedom in being able to love and enjoy God's own Being.
2. God's freedom in creating rather than not creating and in creating this world rather than another.
Craftsman's analogous freedom


Way back when I was teaching a brilliant seminarian at St. Mary's (named Ross, I think), I was cornered in a discussion about how human freedom is involved in sin.... I wish I could remember how the discussion went, but I ended up making two or three points that satisfied him.

The first was (if I'm not glossing over the past with my present speculations a bit too much) the distinction between God's eminent freedom in being completely happy, and God's freedom as the Creator (both in originally making the world begin to be and in continually sustaining it in existence.  Obviously the two are related to each other and eminent freedom is in a sense prior to creative freedom.  Furthermore, creative freedom refers back to the other.  God creates ultimately to enjoy what has been created, and that enjoyment can't really be teased apart from the God's eminent freedom.


Again, I regret that I forget exactly how the argument went, but the second point was, roughly speaking, that human freedom has the same two-fold distinction.

The third point was, then, that human sin can best be understood as a faulty exercise of our creative freedom: is making a mess of things in the way a craftsman might do with the materials that have been given.  Now I can see how dangerous it is to instrumentalize human behavior, as if our mission were to produce  some stuff.   But I don't think my original point made that mistake.

In any case, I recall that I in some way made (or thought to myself) the final point that when we sin there is a disorder in the way we relate TWO created things to each other, as if they were like two points that determine a line, but in the case of sin, it points in the wrong direction.  When our actions are God-like, then the way in which we relate creatures to each other is likewise analogous to putting a line through two points, but in this case the direction is correct.

This is all fuzzy in my head: I remember thinking it was worth remembering... I only wish I was blogging a lot back then.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more