How free are we? Obviously this question turns on what we mean by free, and what more or less of that would consist in. These two sub-conditions are related: one could think of a certain understanding of freedom that does not permit of degrees, and thus ‘how’ in the ‘how free are we’ drops away and the question becomes ‘are we free?’ Freedom thus becomes an all or nothing property. The determinists, libertarians, and existentialists seem all in agreement here. But since its framing in the ancient world, freedom seems to always have been properly thought of in degrees. Next to ‘heat’ and ‘a fraction of a circle’ it almost could be thought of as one of the original examples for the notion of degree itself. Rank as the archetype of degree, via the medium of ‘order’. Thought of in this way, the question of ‘are we free?’ appears almost as a category mistake, or at least uninteresting next to the question of ‘how much?’ and ‘relative to what?’
So, how free are we? Credit where credit is due; the existentialists may have been right that freedom shares a relation to nothingness, for when we think about how to even begin to grasp its more-or-less, its degree, thought immediately moves over to the enumeration of its obstacles and force multipliers. It’s as though these obstacles and assistances are the only positivities, with freedom being the blank remainder. We’re free as much as there is a lack of obstructions to our acting. A lack of physical or regulative or material constraints. But, also, we’re free as much as we have the knowledge and the systems in place to act in ways that genuinely further our well-being. But isn’t this curious? We look for freedom but only find the cartography that delimits and expands it. A prison cell or a healthy constitution, an accident or an act. This is troubling, because thought then seems resigned to applying freedom as a quality or attribute after the fact insofar as it cannot grasp it but for a map of other things; the question of more or less becomes a qualitative intensity that is spoken of an act, or its restrained absence. An ephemera, where there is only the act or its absence, neither of which permit of the more or less but rather just are or are not. This is troubling precisely because what would freedom really consist in, once the idea of the more-or-less has delivered us to merely seeing it as a quality appended after the fact, if it wasn’t able to intervene in some way, more or less, with greater or lesser degree, prior to an act or its absence, to be not just a quality after the fact, an effect, but an actual cause?
We wake up and choose from the choices we conceive of as available, the ‘live options’, and call this freedom, as we do with our efforts to expand these choices in ways that seem coherent, again the ‘live options’. But shouldn’t it be freedom that, rather, makes of an option that it is ‘live’, that assembles the tables, and breathes life into them? And now that the ‘free act’ is almost indiscernible from the ‘creative act’, what then would it mean for this to be more or less? Knowing that, it seems we have clarified, finally, what ‘how free are we?’ requires us to answer. We might think, then, that it has something to do with some capacity for imagination, as though we can imagine new tables of possible moves through an act of inspiration sitting in our rooms. But we misunderstand both this capacity for freedom and the creative act when we think of it as solipsistic. The old cliche of the artist imagining a work, and then merely reproducing it onto a canvas. No, for it to make any sense at all, a series of moves, whether they be free acts in the living of a life or creative decisions in the production of a work, are constantly and necessarily turned over to this world we find ourselves in. The artist interacts and plays, collaborates – with a canvas and a public and a history. Thus, the capacity for generating coherent tables, for breathing life into options, might fundamentally be a social and distributed faculty. Rather than remove the ‘how’ from the ‘how free are we?’, perhaps instead it turns out that we need to place the proper emphasis on the we. This would point to a second category mistake, or at least the uninterestingness, of the question “how free am I?”