What's Wrong About Freedom

The seventh point begins where the sixth ends, and argues that there is a tendency for materialist thinkers to consider the freedom associated with anything gregarious, that freedom has to be understood in a complex or thick way, always dependent on anything external to itself or the action it triggers - whether society, sexual impulses, financial capacity, the unconscious ... Now it is history itself - namely the history of art - that reveals to us precisely the On the contrary, not only have the highest demonstrations of human intelligence emerged in a relatively isolated way (or individually - I recall that true creation (or what I call the point of creation) - is necessarily a solitary, unique process). and often), as we often see that many great works of art emerge early in the lives of their creators, "clinging" to the world around them. which are not alienated from God insofar as they originate from Him - the great works of art, I insist, are the sensitive reflection of divine consciousness - and this is not reducible to the work of art, only insofar as it - art. - which is in parallel only important in that it reminds us that we are of a timeless level because we are in this and / but also out of this world - this is why great art does not really have empirical, concrete or vulgar reference and I think we should all think about this - the insistence on taste subjectivism on artistic issues, which does not, on the contrary, lead to the elevation of the human spirit, is to be regretted. We must be tolerant and curious, realize that creation involves local and temporal feelings, passions (as, of course, experimentalism), but we must also know that great art touches everyone precisely by extolling the metaphysical spirit of all. human beings. I insist: as far as great art is concerned, we should not insist on the tonic of subjectivity, empiricism or subjectivism if we are not to appear intellectually underdeveloped and / or morally displaced from the essential. There is, I believe, a subjective judgment, yes, but at the same time it is universal. This was, decisively, the great theoretical contribution of Immanuel Kant, especially shaped in his third and final critique: the idea of ​​a common sense that is in no way different from the observation of a religious conscience. It is thus history itself that tells us that error is essentially in the uncritical masses and in the mass man (I need not recall the historical condemnation of Christ) and that, on the contrary, the virtue much more associated with the person relatively isolated or theistic, to the visionary, the saint, the thinker, the artist, the critic or / and the "creator", the one who dialogues internally and critically with his tradition; and while this same story shows us the figure of the bloodthirsty dictator, we are already talking about psychopathology and not a 'divine' reason. Divine (or blessed) reason does not offend, disrespect and annihilate, but rather - and only - our animality. When I refer to the mass man, I mean the unbelieving man in his rational ability to ascertain good and truth, and in parallel I mean a group of thinkers who, albeit involuntarily - I want to believe - have in the end. contribute to this dangerous annulment of the subject or moral self independent of an outside world. A self that is not divine exists to recognize the divine - it is in this sense that holiness is the ultimate goal of the human being. It is thus a philosophical self that only loves and seeks wisdom because it knows that wisdom exists; a reflective self that has one existence in this but another in the true world; a religious self that never ceases to see in the other a child of God - who sees in the other human an end and not a means; a religious self that knows that truth (and especially moral truth or absolute ethics) exists and that, in its thinking, has sufficient evidence that truth is inseparable from the existence of an external observer, that is, of God. I refer especially to the field of ethics or the idea of ​​conscience. There is a religious self that recognizes the importance of the sacraments for the continual examination of human conscience and salvation; it does so by individual reflection and historical knowledge. This awareness, however, is inseparable from the notion that we are being watched by God. There is no other possibility of speaking in moral conscience without being necessarily superficial: "In conscience and before God I have done whatever I have done."