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Notion Of Freedom And Law In St. Thomas Aquinas
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1.4 LIMITS OF FREEDOM
While
we reject the view that man is not free, or that freedom is an
illusion, we must not accept the Sartrean exaggerated notion of freedom.
According to Sartre in his book ‘Being and Nothingness’, man is
absolutely free. Man he said, is condemned to be free and man’s
authentic existence is realized to the extent that he makes use of his
freedom.
Man is free, yes, but his freedom has to be limited by
certain things such as his body, will, environment, desires and passion,
pressures from heredity, society etc.
Walter Farrel in his book ‘A
Companion to Summa’ vol.iii supported this when he used the analogy of a
wild bird beating out its life against the windows of a desolate house
into which it has wondered, to awaken pity on us. Also in man, who is
confined to a space and who is imperfect and limited, struggling day in
and out to be unlimited and free. We find such a situation in the
incessant discoveries by science to know if it can give meaning to human
life, but what happens, we still experience some sort of imperfection
in all these.
Also as a social being, man is limited by his very
nature of being forced to be social by nature, he is compulsorily
limited to stay where his body permits him to be. The existentialists
emphasized this when they said that man as a social being in the world
is subjected to the laws of nature.
We should not say that limitation
is the essence of human freedom because man’s insatiable tension
towards the absolute and good is limitless, rather as an incarnate
being, a being in the world, his body which situates him in the world
limits his freedom. It then follows that man is not absolutely free,
since there are some limitations.
1.5 SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF FREEDOM.
Since
freedom is transcendental distance and transcendental spontaneity, it
is essentially part of man. But this primordial freedom is still only
the basis for existential freedom, the realization of man as person, it
is not yet this personal being in actual reality, transcendental and
transcendental freedom are actuated only in the decision of the
existential freedom for its own essence – as basic form. But R.S. Peters
held that:
Freedom means not doing what one wills
without restraints but accepting
the law or the real will of the community.11
It
follows that human freedom can never be a simple state of man or a
specialized propriety, but neither is it simply the actuation of
selfhood, nor pure act without the history like the divine freedom. But
on the contrary, human freedom is history by its very nature. Man is
wholly claimed by the works to be done and the states to be achieved. He
becomes truly a person by going freely out of himself- to throw himself
into the work to be done.
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