Art - By Eliza Veretilo

This weeks artist was Eliza Veretilo: http://neonsuitcase.blogspot.co.uk/

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 48 'Freedom'

Freedom, are you free? - By Eliza Veretilo

Freedom, are you free?

My heart yearns for a promise,

That is not an actuality.

Inside of me,

There is a point that doesn’t break...

Wants to observe it all. I want to be myself.

Freedom is the promise,

Time is the price.

The clock reminds me that this dimension has its ties.

Freedom Lite - By St.Zagarus

Freedom Lite

Freedom is the most highly vaunted thing there is. Material gain and the social status attached to it are close competitors, but the people who get those things like to think they have done so by their own free effort.

Yet when confronted with the ultimate freedom, that feeling of being a living-feeling-thinking individual (a place we often end up in existentialist philosophy), you cannot gloss over the hole-filled road of life with easy answers.  Eventually, you must stare death itself in the face. You must come to grips with the very fact of your mortality and fully comprehend that you will someday cease to exist, becoming nothing. All of your personality ends at that terminus point, scattered into the winds. The body is broken down into tiny fragments and devoured back into  nature. In the eye of cosmic time, you were not even the batting of a lid - you were a slight twitch! What then confronts you is the sheer scale of this existence, and the grand context we human beings are thrown into. Just to continue breathing becomes a choice; each inhalation, each exhalation, is passed through a valve of thought and feeling. Why, breath in, why, breath out.

Understanding Freedom - By Sean Ash

Understanding Freedom

Freedom cannot truly be explained or put into place without a better understanding of what it actually is. For any individual trying to grasp the concept of freedom, it is always best to begin by overcoming fear so that one can find the courage to question, “Is this my prison? Is this my cell? Are these my chains?”

If freedom is to become more tangible, where it is completely felt and understood, then one must first experience and undergo the greatest extents of captivity to appreciate and better understand it. That is why most people never experiencing certain hardships will have no genuine understanding of the freedoms they have themselves. Instead, they will either abuse them or take them for granted. But this works both ways. Take an individual begging on the streets for example. You may have encountered someone experiencing severe hardships and they will beg for change and then use this money to buy alcohol, drugs or often, both. No matter what way you put it, freedoms have been abused.

When freedoms are abused, fear is created. We see the most unfortunate in society and we do not want to end up the same. We begin to blame others for their own misfortunes. We create scapegoats and the fear we harbour, which then evolves into ignorance. Unfortunately, being in a place of ignorance closes many doors that enable us to think critically -- doors that enable us to see what is behind them. We are easily duped because our fears are played on.

We become divided and placed into separate classes. We start to see the world in duality rather than oneness. We are constantly being mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) – I am sure many of you have been buggered by these guys! We are coerced into giving up certain parts of our freedoms in exchange for better security. Well, so we are told. Instead, they beat us with their batons and do with us whatever they will. A war kicks off 5,000 miles somewhere else and we are being fed a security story of why we must go there and deprive these people of their freedom.

The more this starts to happen, the greater the chance that you either fall so deep into fear that you become entirely dependent on the state and others; leaving you closed off, distrusting of human nature and buying into abstract things that govern your everyday life because you have consented.  Or, you start to question the prison you are in. You start to see the bars before your eyes and all these thoughts you've been having, are the thoughts you have been engraving on the wall the entire time. Everything is now starting to come together so you can see the map – You can see the way out. You become enlightened, so much by truth, that you pick yourself up and stand firmly on your own two feet and consent to autonomy – You consent to the right to self-govern.  Now, when we are presented with the options of:

a) The Free market

or

b) Government Intervention

Already, we crave freedom but paradoxically fear it at the same time. We start to fall back into our shells, like a snail finding cover. We live our entire lives with our heads in the sand because we are scared to hold our heads up and to see the world. We fear abuse rather than challenge it. We fear action rather than taking it. Because we fear, we make rash decisions.

We always tend to think from our own perspectives. We see the other as the enemy because we have formed profound relationships with our chains. We have built safety nets that are held in place by the ideologies we have been taught and so we say, “Oh yes, that is why! That is why it must be!”. We build up pride that is instilled along the way. A pride that is instilled by fear. The fear to challenge, the fear to think critically, the fear to question.

Our greatest enemy is ourselves and unless we can step out of our own bodies, out of our own chains and out of our own prison cells, we can never understand what it truly means to be free.

Sean Ash

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 48 'Freedom'

Freedom

Determinism - By Rudy Mcnair

A number of Ancient Greek philosophers from various different schools once concluded that, for everything that happens, there are inescapable conditions that determine its occurrence.  Diodorus arrived at logical determinism, I think, as a consequence of belief in signs, omens and portents from which can be discovered what is going to happen and why.  However, in the development of Western philosophy, “antecedent causes” and “initial conditions” are still useful clues to the workings of “reality” and what is logically necessary.  Materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment maintained that men are stranded in nature and can govern neither themselves nor anything else.  Even Schopenhauer accepted that irrational forces influence human events.  A.J. Ayer  decided that all significant statements are “scientific”, or are nonsense. This means that value statements (socially meaningful, ethical terms, like “good” or “wrong”) are thought to violate this philosophy. Logical positivism has consequently sought to distinguish between ‘logical’ concepts (which are true or false) termed “nonmodal” and problems of what might and might not be possible or “fulfilled”.

Freedom

Only “God” is free - By Samuel Mack-Poole

“None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free.” -- Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

What a topic! Freedom is something that I’ve thought about in quite a lot of detail. I’ve really considered it; the implications it has, its definition, whether humans can be truly free. However, I think it is my duty to define what freedom is:

1.    the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint

2.    exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.

3.    the power to determine action without restraint.

4.    political or national independence.

5.    personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery: a slave who bought his freedom.