When one speaks of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation’, an immediate thought might be the idea of the basic human rights, usually composed of aspects that address what a human person needs to survive. It is not uncommon that a rally for ‘freedom’ comes with slogans pertaining to higher wages, or ability to take paid absences from work, or support for healthcare. Now imagine someone who one might say is ‘well-off’: they have enough income for all their daily needs. In the picture are a good living situation, means of transportation, sufficient sustenance, a steady income. In some sense, that person may be considered ‘free’.
However, imagine this same person unable to do anything else but work for a significant amount of every day. Within the hours of their contract at their job, they are ‘under’ the demands of the contract, and so they are not allowed to frolic outside under the sun, or eat lunch for longer than the allotted lunch time, or maybe even think of something that is against the values or principles stated in their contract lest they lose the income that keeps them ‘free’ from having to struggle to survive.
An idea like the Capability Approach might address this by expanding the definition of basic human rights to consider the kinds of lives people end up living outside of the struggle to survive. One definition might be that these lives should be those that have ‘reason’. Part of one’s basic human rights then becomes having the capabilities to ‘live lives one has reason to value’—in other words, a life lived with purpose that is resonant to the person living it.
Yet let us push the idea even further: say someone lives because of such and such reason. How can one not say that they are only alive because of those causes, and so they are ‘kept’ in existence because the causes bind them to life. Is this kind of binding not in its own way a contrast to the idea of freedom? Common ideas of freedom is freedom from death, but is not someone who feels compelled to wake up daily and do all of the things that they are said to need to do also ‘imprisoned’ this time not by death but by its seeming opposite, life? That is not to say that an alluring experience of death is the kind of freedom I am referring to—even that is a bind that when escaped from can be a form of freedom.
I think if we look at the concept of ‘freedom’ with a very essentialist perspective, we might get to a point where any kind of reason or cause is a bind that has the possibility for freedom. It may sound artistic, even inspiring, to have a particular cause, objective, or ideology that motivates one to do something, especially something good, but is such an act truly free? The concept of love might help illustrate the point. One loves for love’s sake. Any kind of reason for love pollutes the very idea of love. One does not love for such and such reason. One simply loves, even when there is cause to not do so. And in such cases, is it not that love can be so liberating that it can free one from those causes?