Faith Venture

Freedom and Responsibility. You cannot truly have one without the other.

When I was in graduate school, I read an analysis of freedom by Isaiah Berlin that examined freedom from positive and negative sides. You can be free to do or free from. It was an extension of an old debate between John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Am I freer independent from everyone or freer when in a community I choose?

But Víktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning–if you have not read it, then read it next) talks of freedom and responsibility. You cannot be truly free if you are not at the same time living responsibly.

“In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”

Sometimes I think that we forget about the responsibility part.

This entry was posted on November 5, 2018 at 6:59 am and is filed under Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.