Autor: Ormerod, Neil

Buch: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Titel: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Stichwort: Geist - Freiheit; Freiheit der Wahl

Kurzinhalt: Although the desire is an intrinsic element of our existence, our response to that desire is not automatic. It engages us as free beings, ...

Textausschnitt: Spirit and Freedom

33b Human freedom is an important element of our spiritual nature. The search for meaning, truth, and value is not blind or random; rather it is intelligent and responsible. Although the desire is an intrinsic element of our existence, our response to that desire is not automatic. It engages us as free beings, and so we become accountable for the quality of our response to this intrinsic desire. We can engage with energy, dedication, and drive, or we can disengage, lose ourselves in trivialities, or just despair of the possibility of finding meaning, truth, and vlaue. (Fs)

33c To conceive of human freedom in this way requires that we question the dominant conception of freedom as "freedom of choice." In our consumer-driven world we tend to think of freedom in terms of the multiple choices that we have, the range of options we can exercise. But when we examine these choices, most of them concern trivialities. Having twenty different types of breakfast cereal does not make us more free. In fact, a multiplicity of trivial choices can distract us from the real task of our freedom, to seek direction in the movement of life. For the object of our decision making is not just the things "out there" that we choose; a more important object of our decision making is ourselves. Freedom is an act of self-constitution, the self as constituting itself through the decisions that it makes. The direction that I seek is one on which I take myself-shall I become more generous, more open, more loving, more responsible? Do I embrace virtue or succumb to vice? Every decision I make shapes me, constitutes me in some way, for better or worse. (Fs)

33d Finally, our search for direction, and the freedom that it generates, is never absolute or unconditioned. We live in a world that sets the basic parameters of our search, that structures the options we can choose, prior to anything we might do or hope for. There are a variety of limits and constraints that render the effective reach of our freedom much less than its essentially unlimited intentionality.1 Our search for direction is always located within a history of other searches from which we can learn, to which we adhere, or which we explicitly reject. We are not just isolated individuals; we are constituted as social and historical beings. (Fs)