JJ Rousseau wrote in social contract that man is born free but everywhere he walks in chains.
Okot P’bitek on the other hand wrote man is not born free because even at birth he is physically attached to the mother. And man can’t be free. It is in these chains that he becomes human- societal chains( brother, sister, father, mother, uncle and all).
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Random thoughts 
“Freedom” of the ultimate kind would mean not dependent on anything, including the basics, like oxygen.
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That’s a freedom that is not even possible, nor desirable unless you want to be Buddha
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My favorite loony toon movement is the BREATHARIANS, who claim they are so (woo-woo) evolved that they can subsist on sunline and sacred PRANA energy. Freedom from Food!
Of course, when caught with a cooler of junk food, they claim they just “enjoy an occasional snack for the taste”. LOL
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haha.
freedom from food. those are loonies
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I think JJ got it wrong, though as a pronouncement it has a fine ring to it. In fact it was one of my favourites in my formative years. There was a Russian quote I liked at the time too: ‘our prison is all the world.’ I don’t remember ever trying to resolve the obvious contradictions between the two positions.
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the two are difficult to resolve
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question with no definitive solution, but lots of opinions, depending on your definition of free. Free of what? Free from what?
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you are right and most of the time the problem is that what people mean when they talk about freedom
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The freest man is he who can carry all he owns, on his back….read this somewhere..
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But such a man would not be free of discomfort from the elements,
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True…
Maybe ultimate freedom is death, but you wouldn’t know it. I don’t prefer to be that free😊
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this is where i would say give me freedom but spare me death 🙂
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is he free of relationships?
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One could be born freer than normal if parents allowed it. Beliefs tend to dismantle even the best attempts.
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i doubt it. one still has filial obligations that wouldn’t allow much freedom. but whether we want to be free of such obligations is a different matter
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Political theorists like Rousseau, Locke, and others are describing freedom in the context of government. People are born free from law; the social contract creates such obligations. Other restrictions on human freedom (logical necessity, dependancy, nature) are typically irrelevant to their discussions.
Rousseau is discussing artificial restrictions on human behavior, not natural ones. There’s nothing anything that can be done about the latter.
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But I think this distinction is not obviously a hard line. The political/social realm directly impinges on the “natural”. Is it OK to beat one’s child or wife :() Natural law is silent on this. It is social/political law that governs how a society handles these natural law issues.
Humans are social animals, even without a formal state. How can there be natural restrictions that are not social restrictions?
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Natural law refers to things that are possible/impossible. There’s no ethical question. For example, a person can’t travel faster than light. That’s a natural law. There’s no social restriction on doing it.
Looking at it from the other side, there’s no natural law against homicide. Homicide is something we’ve made up informally in social taboos all the way to legal statutes. While killing people has an effect on nature, it cannot be said to be a natural law.
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is it possible to be without a government or some form of political organization?
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It’s possible, at least in theory. An anarchist could give you a more thorough answer. I personally think that government is to human social organization that apartments are to human habitation. You can live without an apartment, but life is often easier than if you lived in something more primitive.
But then again, some apartments get an infestation of cockroaches, and they become unlivable. So there’s that, too.
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I don’t believe there is such a thing as true freedom. We all have restrictions placed by society or even ourselves.
A man living alone in the wilderness would be as free as I could imagine, but even he is not free to wrestle the bear or go over the falls…
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i think you are right. there are always restrictions to one’s freedom
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The “freedom” is a very profound and also very confusing state of being. In believe, for whatever it is worth, that none of us are truly born free because our state of being depends on our family as well as our society and culture. Good question, my Kenyan brother! 🙂 Naked hugs!
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why do we desire freedom? why is our language littered with it when it is not possible? i know some freedom is possible- like free from coercion and all
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I think we all like the freedom of making our own decisions.
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But…but…but…our “will” is “free”, right? 🙂
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Except for the wills we are selling at $7.59
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