Here’s my thesis:  A living being is a free being because he moves himself.  Even more fundamental, he’s free because he pays attention to the things of his choice, and he gives value to them.  A living being directs his own consciousness into the world, and he makes his own values for the world, and no one else can make him do it… hence freedom. 

 

Consider Mr. Amoeba.  He doesn’t just see a morsel of food floating by in the muck, rather, he directs his attention to the morsel as against other things floating by.  He looks at what he wants to look at, and he values it-- values like relevant, irrelevant, good and bad.  Now imagine the many things that might obstruct him from getting to the morsel.  Mr. Amoeba is alive today because, over billions of years, he’s developed a way-of-being that works in an ever-changing world to get what he wants.  I expect that Mr. Amoeba’s way-of-being encompasses many means to achieve his ends.  He has a degree of agency that’s appropriate for amoeba.  I’m not saying that Mr. Amoeba stops and ratiocinates on methodization; I’m saying that Mr. Amoeba’s way-of-being gives him options, and he knows in his jelly-bones what option to use.  All this is free-will.

 

Freedom comes from the whole living being.  I am many things at once, like DNA, instincts, habits, will, emotion, thinking, beliefs, but it’s me who drives the car.  Sometimes one part of me takes precedence, sometimes another, but all of me makes decisions and moves in the world.  That’s why it’s silly to imagine biological drives, selfish genes, wills-to-survive, ids and other such sundry, and visualize said part controlling the whole organism like a puppet.  Yes, each part has causal power, but each is one cause among many others and no one can parse it out.  A living being is a complex interrelationship of many parts and they all have voices, but it’s the whole of him who makes sense of the internal voices and takes action, and it’s the whole of him who’s subject to natural selection on account of said action.  Freedom belongs to the whole organism.

 

Nor is a living being mere biological machinery that is pushed along by a pre-existing code of instructions.  The real world is too complex for push-like instructions to meet every circumstance; no code of instructions can catch up with reality.  Instead, a living being is pulled by his purposes, including survival among other ends, and he has a degree of freedom over the means by which he achieves those ends, including some freedom over what he pays attention to and how he values it.

 

For sure, freedom lives within material constraint-- constraint like the corporeal body, the world that hems in on all sides, the accumulation of history.  But a potted plant is free to grow roots within the constraints of the pot.  Recall Grandma Embodied.  Grandma’s brain is deteriorating, and her thinking deteriorates with the brain, and the scope of her freedom deteriorates in corresponding measure.  But Thou remains within the degeneration of It, and sometimes Grandma ignores me when I tell her to take her meds.  Grandma is free to pay attention to me, or not, as she pleases.  She can look and look away.  Per Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space, is our power to choose our response. …. (it’s) the one thing you cannot take away from me….”

 

Reality is freedom within constraint.  Every living being has a degree of free-will within the boundaries of his nature, for example, Mr. Amoeba isn’t free to choose Coke or Pepsi, and I’m not free to fly like a bird.  But when Mr. Amoeba sees a predator right next to food, he acts accordingly.  His permitted scope of action will be narrow, but Mr. Amoeba will either go or not go, and if he goes, he’ll zig left or zag right, or maybe throw a juke on the predator.  That’s freedom.

 

The heart of our freedom is precisely this: all of us, all living beings, are meaning-makers.  We create the values and meanings on which we act.  Recall that a living being is bombarded with more sensory perceptions than he can handle, and in that buzzing confusion, his act of perception is an act of value creation.  He creates value by discriminating between the relevant, which is the small amount that he pays attention to, and the irrelevant, which is the overwhelming majority that he ignores.  Fish don’t see water and Mr. Amoeba don’t see muck, but they see that tidbit of food floating by and they say, good!  They see predator: bad!  Then they act on these values.

 

In summary, every living being has freedom over what he pays attention to, the meaning he gives to what he pays attention to, and how he acts on it.  Now consider us people.  We live within constraint, yes, but we freely choose the perspective we take on constraint, and since our possible perspectives on a particular constraint will always outnumber the constraint, our freedom is broad indeed.  Why is the past easier to change than the future? because we can reinterpret it.  In Yes to Life, Victor Frankl tells the story of an old woman who heard voices in her head. The voices were nasty and critical but, over the decades, she got used to it.  She remained cheerful and did what she could in life.  Dr. Frankl asked her about it, and she replied, “My God, I just think, Doctor, it’s still better that I hear voices than if I was deaf as a post.”

 

Constraint is real, but the real question is, what’re you gonna do about it?  Dr. Frankl tells another story, this one about a graphic designer who lived for his work until he got incurable spinal cancer, causing paralysis.  So he dove into the world of books and ideas, and had wonderful conversations with his fellow patients.  Eventually the paralysis prevented him from holding a book and made speaking difficult.  One day he called over Dr. Frankl, who was making rounds.  He knew his last hours were near, it’d be painful, and Dr. Frankl would give him morphine as a final good-bye.  He told Dr. Frankl to give him the morphine right now so that the night nurse wouldn’t have to wake Dr. Frankl later.  The graphic designer’s last action was true, utterly and absolutely, and it made meaning of the final constraint in life.

 

A human mind is free in a special way.  We can understand the cause-and-effect of the wheels within wheels, and we can look beyond to understand the meaning of the whole.  To see the meaning of the whole is to step outside the determinism of constraint.  Let me give you some examples.  Sometimes I react to stimuli in an habitual way, like, see potato chip eat potato chip, or become angry and defensive in the face of truthful criticism.  To see the whole is to change it up.  If I look at my life as a whole and the meaning of the potato chip within the whole, I might say No to the chip of potato.  I might say thankyou for the truthful criticism.  Maybe this is the first time in my life that I’ve taken these positive steps.  I see the whole picture and the truth within, and I see who I should become.

 

Or a more personal example.  Most folks have an angry loop, which is a set of negative thoughts that go round in our heads, usually when we’re not paying attention.  Maybe an angry loop is about my spouse, or parent, or the President of the United States.  What if I step back from the angry loop and watch it go round?  Every time I watch it, I get a little more distance.  A few more times and I laugh at the loop; I say, “there you go again.”  Seen from a distance, the loop isn’t true to reality: it’s meaningless. 

 

There it is: I’m free, and I can understand truth and act in a meaningful way.  Dr. Frankl says freedom is responsibility.  I’m free, therefore I’m responsible for what I live for (which is my highest good), and I’m responsible for who I become.  Here’s the best part: I can choose my highest good and then I can live it with zest in my heart.  True freedom feels almost like I don’t have a choice because I know what I want and I just do it.  It’s like when I’ve eaten my fill and the host asks, do I want more? I say, “no Ma’am, I’m good.”  C.S. Lewis said, “the most deeply compelled action is also the freest action.  By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action.  It is a paradox.” 

 

We’ve all felt this.  The deepest freedom is being in the zone, like dance or sports, where my attention and my whole body naturally flow where they should flow.  I’m doing precisely what I was made to do, with love, not thinking about choices.  I once heard Fr. Gregory Pine speak this way of the running back, Alvin Kamara.  To avoid a host of tacklers, Mr. Kamara shimmies in just the right way, and then he’s free of them!  Hemmed in on all sides by constraint, Mr. Kamara knows the good and chooses it instantly, naturally, with zest.  What a feeling!  It’s like letting someone you love choose the movie.  When my son was little, his favorite movie was Rush Hour with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.  My son chose to watch that movie, many times, and I happily watched with him.  I gave my choice of movie over to him because I was made to do that, to enjoy my son’s love for his movie.  That’s freedom.  God made us free because He enjoys us better this way.