Tea time

What is freedom? Freedom is the condition where an individual can decide whether to think, to express himself, to act without restraints and to resort to the will to conceive and take action, by means of free choice of the aims and instruments that himself considers useful to achieve freedom.

As regard to the sphere in which free choices are made, it is a matter of freedom if it is: moral, legal, economic, political, thought, metaphysical, religious freedom, and so on. The word "freedom" is formed as an abstract of the adjective "free", which derives from the Indo-European root noun * Per (e) i-"near, a" (= "what is with me", of personal property). The Germanic or Anglo-Saxon terms "Free(dom)" or "Freiheit", according to etymological hypotheses, have their present meaning from Germanic * frī-halsa = "someone who owns his neck", who can therefore dispose of himself.

So from a psychological point of view we can understand freedom as it is perceived by the subject:

either negatively, as the absence of submission, of slavery, of compulsity for which man considers himself independent;

or positively in the sense of the autonomy and spontaneity of the rational subject: with this meaning, voluntary human behaviors are based on freedom and are qualified as free. In Greek civilization, the concept of freedom was mainly reserved for politics and religious matters.

As Hobbes observed, for the Greeks, freedom had to be inherent to the power and autonomy of the state, instead of individuals subjected to restrictive laws of freedom in order to live in an orderly state.

Within this binding authority of the State, however, the ancient Greco-Roman thought left room for the freedom of the citizen who enjoyed the civil rights from which slaves, foreigners and often women were excluded, with the exception for women, for those who were from high lineage.

Roman mythology, which had also got inspired by the many deities and myths of the greek mythology, possessed some deities which belonged only to their rites such as the one of the goddess Liberty who symbolically represented the personal freedom of each and, in the follow-up to their civil history, this right was reserved for those who had Roman citizenship.

To this deity the Romans had built two temples, one in the Forum and the other in the Aventine. The goddess was portrayed as a woman,holding a scepter in one hand and a Phrygian cap in her other hand and with a cat sitting on her feet.

As we can see, freedom is represented in everything,everywhere and everytime we think about the word “freedom” we imagine the clear blue sky or the ocean or maybe the birds when they fly in the air.

But now, a brief question: what makes you think about freedom?

Greetings.