Freedom

Only he deserves freedom, like life itself, who must conquer it anew each day. J.W. Goethe

Goethe's line sounds like praise of freedom, yet it already contains a demand: freedom is nothing one possesses, but something one does. Whoever thinks of it as a fixed state, a security once attained, misses it. This is exactly where an emancipatory and at the same time critical view begins. It takes freedom seriously as a promise and at the same time distrusts the comfortable images in which it is sold to us.

Freedom from, freedom to

The classical distinction, prominently formulated by Isaiah Berlin, separates negative freedom (freedom from) from positive freedom (freedom to).

Negative freedom means the absence of constraints: no one locks me up, no one forces their will on me. But constraints are not only chains and laws. There are natural limits, such as illness or scarcity. We as humans have natural needs (such as food, drink, sleep, security, sociability, sexuality ...), which do not all satisfy themselves. We are forced to expend labour and energy to satisfy them. Or we force others (violence).
There are also social constraints that disguise themselves as normality: economic pressure, expectations, internalized roles. Whoever looks only at the visible fetters overlooks the invisible ones, which are often more effective.

Positive freedom therefore asks further: What am I free for? Which possibilities actually stand open to me? A formal permission is of little use if the means to use it are lacking. Freedom of the press applies to everyone, but not everyone can afford their own newspaper. Here, however, a danger also lurks, against which critical thinking warns: in the name of positive freedom, of true self-realization, paternalism can be justified. Whoever claims to know what really makes people free is often only a step away from forcing them to their happiness. An emancipatory stance holds both poles together: it defends the protected space of the individual and at the same time insists on the material conditions of real agency.

Freedom of the will

Before we speak of political freedom, the uncomfortable philosophical question arises whether we can even will freely at all. Neuroscience and determinism suggest that our decisions have causes we did not choose ourselves. But the conclusion that freedom is an illusion is premature. Even if our willing is shaped by origin, language and experience, the difference remains between acting from insight and acting under coercion.
Freedom means perhaps less to choose out of nothing than to be able to examine and revise one's own reasons. This is exactly the bridge to critical thinking: free is not whoever has no ties, but whoever can see through and question their ties.

Political freedom and freedom of the press

Political freedom is more than the right to make a cross every few years. It means the possibility of participating in the conditions under which one lives, and of changing them if necessary. A democracy that only organizes approval but discourages criticism hollows out freedom from within. That is why freedom of the press is not a luxury but a condition: without independent information no well-founded opinion can be formed, and without a public sphere power remains uncontrolled.

But here too vigilance is required. Formal freedom of the press does not yet guarantee a free press. Where a few corporations dominate the market, where attention becomes a commodity and algorithms decide what we see, there the diversity of voices can grow impoverished, even though no censor intervenes. The subtler unfreedom consists not in the ban but in the steering of what appears sayable and thinkable in the first place.

Freedom is therefore essentially connected with thinking up something new: new solutions, new paths, new ways of living, new ways of thinking.

Freedom and wealth, freedom and poverty

First comes the grub, then the morals. Bertolt Brecht

With this, the social question moves to the centre. Freedom and material situation cannot be separated. Whoever struggles for daily survival is formally as free as the well-off, but in fact trapped in necessities. Wealth widens the room for manoeuvre, creates time, education and protection from risks; poverty narrows it down to the bare essentials. A society that celebrates freedom but accepts inequality distributes it unequally and calls that just.

This does not mean playing freedom off against equality. On the contrary: an emancipatory perspective sees both as intertwined. It is not about making everyone the same, but about securing for everyone the real preconditions for taking their life into their own hands.

So Goethe's word leads back to the beginning. Freedom is neither a possession nor a gift, but a practice that must be won again and again and critically questioned, against external powers and against one's own comforts.