2015年10月14日 星期三

What Freedom Is?

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. Freedom is the other side of consciousness of self; if we were not able to aware of ourselves, we would be pushed along by instinct or the automatic march of history, like bees or mastodons…

Consciousness of self gives us the power to stand outside the rigid chain of stimulus and response, to pause, and by this pause to throw some weight on either side, to cast some decision about what the response will be…

As the person gains more consciousness of self, his range of choice and his freedom proportionately increase. Freedom is cumulative; one choice made with an element of freedom makes greater freedom possible for the next choice. Each exercise of freedom enlarges the circumference of the circle of one’s self…

Freedom is shown in how we relate to the deterministic realities of life…Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by blind necessity but by choice. This means that the acceptance of limitations need not all be a “giving up,” but can and should be a constructive act of freedom; and it may well be that such a choice will have more creative results for the person than if he had not had to struggle against any limitation whatever. The man who is devoted to freedom does not waste time fighting reality; instead as Kierkegaard remarked, he “extols reality.”

Whether one has tuberculosis or is a slave like the Roman philosopher Epictetus or a prisoner condemned to death, he can still in his freedom choose how he will relate to these facts…Freedom is most dramatically illustrated in the ‘heroic’ actions, like Socrates’ decision to drink the hemlock rather than compromise; but even more significant is the undramatic, steady day-to-day exercise of freedom on the part of any person developing toward psychological and spiritual integration in a distraught society like our own.

Thus freedom is not just the matter of saying “” or “” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “to become what we truly are.”

Rollo May, “Man’s Search for Himself”, (New York: Dell Publishing, 1953), p.160-173.

Ideal Society

We simply propose that our social and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize himself, to develop and use his potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from his fellow men. The good society is, thus, the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people – freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but positively, as the opportunity to realize ever greater human values. It follows that collectivism, as in fascism and communism, is the denial of these values, and must be opposed at all costs. But we shall successfully overcome them only as we are devoted to positive ideals which are better, chiefly the building of society based on a genuine respect for persons and their freedom.


Rollo May, “Man’s Search for Himself”, (New York: Dell Publishing, 1953), p.160.