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Notion Of Freedom And Law In St. Thomas Aquinas
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Self-realization, according to Anthony Storr is said to be:
The fullest possible expression in
life of the innate potentialities of
the individual, the realization of
this uniqueness as a personality.6
It
consists in productiveness, spontaneous activity as opposed to
compulsion, love and active solidarity with human beings. It consists in
accepting oneself as the bearer of human potentialities and being ready
to grow through creative activity. It is the man who uses his powers
that answers the fundamental question of his individual existence.
Freedom of self-realization is only possible in and through the
facticity, which surround each person, it cannot be more than this. They
include, height, colour, strength, intelligence, sex, race etc.
Karl Rahner held that:
Freedom is only freedom in the
concrete sense, when all those
freedoms are combined.7
Aquinas on his own part noted that,
Freedom is seen not as independence
from an absolute but as independence
From the relatives.8
In
the history of philosophy and social thought, freedom has a specific
use as a moral and social concept to refer either to circumstance which
arise in the relations of man to man to specific conditions of social
life. Philosophical argument about the meaning or the nature of freedom
is concerned with the legitimacy or convenience of particular
application of the term. Bertrand Russels often held that freedom in
general is that absence of obstacles to the realization of one’s
desires.
1.3 AQUINAS NOTION OF FREEDOM
This medieval
theologian understood freedom to be the harmony of the will and the act.
And the consideration is the divine influence and the will. Implicitly,
the relation of harmony, the divine influence and the will is freedom.
Hence, a free act is constituted by the assent of the will rather than
by the decision of the will. It implies then that this cannot be freedom
as self-determination.
The term in Aquinas closest in meaning and usage to the contemporary term freedom, is perhaps liberty9
But for John Locke;
It is to be free from constraint and violence from others, which cannot be, where there are no law10
Freedom
may mean absence of constraint and this is what is proper to man. There
is no right minded individual who would applaud constraints. Being free
from constraint means being free from choice imprisonment.
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