Paradoks slobode – Što je sloboda i gdje ju tražiti?
The paradox of freedom What is freedom and where to look for it?

Summary/Abstract: The subtitle of the essay “The paradox of freedom”, means to say: “What is freedom, and where to search for it?” That subtitle actually speaks about the content of the essay. The title, however, speaks about freedom – being looked at from a deeper, philosophical sense - revealing itself as paradoxical. Freedom is conceived of as agency in accordance with freedom of will, and that means that the field of freedom can only be that domain which man may find at the very limits of natural determinism. The only domain in which things depend on it is the domain of morality. Only in that domain, the human, is the one who establishes the chain of cause and effect, the human is the cause of moral good and moral evil. As a subject, he is not the cause according to natural determinism, but according to freedom of will. Man’s freedom is a freedom that chooses to be a cause for good or a cause for evil. The paradoxicality of that freedom lays in the fact that it governs the human, and that the human must comply to it. The best example is Socrates, who, complying to freedom in the sphere of morality, decided to go against his own life. Exactly because of this, Thomas Aquinas calls freedom dominium supra se ipsum, i.e., submission (dominium supra) of the self (se ipsum) - because of something. That something to which we must submit ourselves, is always an ideal: Socrates taught that in order for man to be the bearer of virtue, he must primarily recognize virtue for what it is, in its highest – ideal – aspect. Man’s freedom, therefore, finds its foundation in the moral law so much so that man may choose to comply to that law, or to not comply to it. Since moral law, like every other legislative means is a type of coercion, in action we always have the inseparable couple of freedom and necessity.

• Details
• Contents