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The Strength of Freedom


In moments when Europe has its fundamental values tested by the recalcitrant narrowness, cruelty and ignorance of religion, I recall Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as recorded by Thucydides, amazed by its relevance: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality..." (Perseus Project translation of Peloponnesian War). The barbarians, those that do not believe in the myths of the human law and impose their nightmares to others, are now forcing us to close our borders, and what is worst, to close our minds, and change our beliefs for a dream of security that could never be fully guaranteed. Thus we are caught in a web of terror and lose our identity to a poor and sad trivialization of our democratic political foundations. In liminal times, basic emotions take control over the neocortical enaryzed symbolic constructions that we made with those basic protocols of survival.

The strength of democracy is based on the ideal of freedom. Freedom has not only a transcendental meaning, but is the possibility for the construction of any human meaning for our life. It is related to ends and goals, but not limited by them, for freedom has an instantaneous dimension, a here and now nature which does not postpone, which escapes from the delays of vacant promises. Freedom is thus inextricably related to creation, to poiesis, of the individual and of the social persona of the group, and for that reason is felt strongly in relation to art. However, the creations of freedom are not related to a this or a that, but are instead the processes of unfoldment of our life awareness, the awareness of its limited span and the need for an instantaneous fulfillment of its potentialities, the extension of our individuation into the complete movement of life on earth.

In this fight, psychological individuation is at stake, together with our ideal of a society founded on human law. We cannot have one without the other. Let’s then hold to our ideal of Liberty (political and juridical freedom) for there lies our strength. Our European wealth is not measured by mere physical standards of living, those are the symptoms of a society involved in the transformation of the material milieu, but by the political liberties which allow the grounds for our personal human freedom, our dearest narrative of identity. This means, as Pericles knew, that we have more to lose than our barbarian enemies, and thus, that our involvement in the fighting will not be small.
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