About Freedom and Subjection

 

Alexandru Dragomir:

The first thing that we come up against when we want to talk about freedom is that in fact we do not know what it is. Is it a given? Are we ‘free by nature’? And if so, what exactly does this mean? Or, factually speaking, does being free mean not having a programme, not having an ‘agenda’?

We know very well, however, the meaning of subjection, since we are, so to speak, born into it and live in it. From earliest childhood we live in a perpetual totalitarian regime: we are told what to do about everything important. The first 7 years, from the playpen to the beginning of school, are the years of primary subjection. We submit strictly to the programme made for us by parents at home, teachers at kindergarten, etc. From 7 years of age until we finish university, we sit at desks while teachers talk to us from above, in terms of both physical and symbolic space. God talks to Moses, who listens ‘piously’ and submits. And pupils ‘sit at their desks’. Finally, after finishing university, there is the choice of a job, which is a sort of ‘choice of whom to be subject to’. It follows, from this outline, that we are subject until we retire: we are unfree.

Three conclusions may be drawn from this:

1. All our lives we are subject and this seems so natural that we no longer realize how much submission there is in us.

2. Things being as they are, we do not think of freedom in itself, but in relation to subjection, which means, in fact, that we do not think of freedom, but of liberation. All our efforts are for liberation, not freedom.

3. Freedom is not a fundamental metaphysical given, but rather a sentiment, the ‘sentiment of freedom’, one which you obtain after liberation, and which is based on the confusion between freedom and liberation.

However it would be a mistake to understand from the phases of subjection that they are something negative, and that in better or ideal world they would no longer exist. These phases are a normal part of human life, and in the economy of life on earth there is no other way to proceed. It is good, all the same, to be aware of this, and to know that subjection is completely justified both on the individual and on the social level. It is also good to be aware that alongside this unwilled subjection, there is also subjection that is willed, assumed: joining a political party, becoming a free-mason, conversion to a religious faith, recognizing the laws, listening to an master.

But in all these cases, it is not so much a matter of subjection as of a spiritual submission, a submission that comes from within and that we have freely chosen.

From what I have said so far, one thing is clear: there is a confusion between freedom and liberation. We believe that once we have liberated ourselves we are, ipso facto, also free. However in fact we remain in the negative of liberation, in the obtaining of a state which has appeared by the negation of subjection, without knowing, positively, what it means to be free. Is freedom a miraculously innate property, on which the constraints of subjection later settle like bricks on a foundation? What is certain is that we bear within ourselves the sentiment of freedom, fi rmly tied to liberation, and that in thinking all the time within the subjection in which we live, we associate liberation with the sentiment of freedom.

How then can we make freedom something other than a sentiment associated with liberation? How can we make it a state in which we can install ourselves and from which something permanent will emerge? For the majority of people, freedom is liberation, followed generally by idleness and ‘I do as I please’. Can freedom become a good, as long as, living in a world, people live in subjection and aspire, at the most, to liberation?