TABLE OF
CONTENTS
TITLE … … … … … … … … … i
CERTIFICATION … … … … … ii
DEDICATION … … … … … … iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT … … … … iv
TABLE OF CONTENT … … … … vi
GENERAL INTRODUCTION … … … … 1
Statement of the problem … … … … 1
Purpose of study … … … … … 4
Scope of study … … … … … … 4
Method of study … … … … … … 5
Division of work … … … … … … 5
CHAPTER ONE
NOTION OF
FREEDOM
1.0
General notion of freedom … … … 6
1.1 The definition of the term
freedom… … 9
1.2
Kinds of freedom … … … … 10
1.3
St Thomas notion of freedom … … … 16
1.4
Limits of freedom. … … … … 17
1.5
Social Structure of freedom … … … 19
CHAPTER TWO
NOTION OF LAW
2.0
The general notion of law … … … 21
2.1 The nature of law … … … … … 22
2.2 Definition of the term law … … … 24
2.2
Aquinas notion of law … … … … 26
2.3
Characteristics of law … … … … 29
2.3.1 Immutability of law … … … … 30
2.3.2
Universality of law … … … … 31
2.3.3
Know ability of law … … … … 31
2.3.4
Indispensability of law … … … … 32
2.3.5
Indelibility of law … … … … … 33
2.4 Kinds of law … … … … … 33
2.4.1
Eternal law … … … … … … 34
2.4.2
Natural law … … … … … … 35
2.4.3
Human Positive law … … … … 36
2.4.4
Positive Divine law … … … … 37
2.5 Functions of law … … … … … 38
CHAPTER THREE
THE NOTIONS
OF FREEDOM, LAW AND MORALITY
3.0
Freedom, law and morality … … … 42
3.1 Morality … … … … … … 43
3.2 Freedom and law … … … … … 44
3.2
Law and morality … … … … 45
3.3
Freedom and morality … … … … 47
CHAPTER FOUR
CRITICAL EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION
4.1 Critical
Evaluation … … … … … 50
4.2 Conclusion … … … … … 54
BIBLIOGRAPHY … … … … … 57
GENERAL
INTRODUCTION
Statement Of The
Problem
Nobody in this world would claim that he/she
was born free, because as an infant you never really knew who you were or what
you were until later one attains the stage of self-consciousness. We are not
born free rather we gain freedom. The struggle for freedom is
in essence people’s struggle to be able to satisfy their own needs. Mankind
continually advances on the road of the realization of freedom, which leads to
the end of man in society.
The stages of evolution of freedom are
equally the stages in the evolution of morality. Freedom! everybody pursues it;
it makes man a human person. Poets write about freedom, government officials
promise or proclaim it; some people nearly loose their precious lives to win
this freedom for themselves and for others. But what actually is this freedom?
This work considered in
the light of St Thomas Aquinas deals absolutely on freedom per se. It is
neither a deterministic nor purely indeterministic solution to the problem of
freedom and law; it is a compatibilist solution, arrived by reconciling the
positions of freedom and law. As regards Aquinas’ proximate ends, man enjoys
freedom of judgment and of choice, that is, of judging freely of the things to
be done and not to be done.
Man’s experience of his
own behaviors and decisions includes an awareness of his own freedom, of
his own ability to decide for himself, to deliberate about what to do in
various situations and to come to his own conclusion about what to believe and
what to do.
But, turning to the other
side of the work (Law) by Thomas, it is quite pertinent to understand fully
what freedom is before delving into law. This is because they are almost two
sides of the same coin, as we shall see. That is why in this work, I treated
freedom first before law. In order for us to act well as human beings, our
actions should proceed from knowledge of what we are about to do. According to
Mary Clark:
Man, if perfect in virtue is
the best of animals, but if he becomes separated from law and morality, he is
the worst of animals. For man, unlike other animals, has the weapons of reason
with which to exploit his best desire and cruelty!
Man is by nature a social
animal, and every rational being would testify to the fact that a society of
whatever level which does not establish and apply freedom and law to its
subjects, is comparatively similar to a train full of people, heading towards
the Atlantic ocean. Law connotes some sort of regulations that govern our actions
and affairs. It involves something more than mere reprobation.
Just as all men see that
there are good acts and bad acts so also they acknowledge some kind of
compulsion to do the good and avoid the evil. In the same manner, having
observed certain development caused by man in many societies, a medieval
theologian and philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, took it upon himself and deemed
it necessary to render a good example by stressing the significance of, and as
well advocating the existence of freedom and law.
Purpose Of Study
In the face of the
contemporary clamour for true freedom, this work could be said to be both
necessary and timely. This is corroborated by the fact that the natural law
makes it intrinsic for every person to seek after freedom. This work is,
therefore, a thought-pattern, which seeks to unravel the authenticity and
credibility of this claim that the search for freedom is ontological to man.
Taking the Thomistic viewpoint as a case study, this work will criticize every
argument for and against the law and freedom, after making a historical survey
of the meaning and notion of freedom.
Scope Of Study
In this thesis, we shall
unveil the Thomistic notion of law and freedom as outlined in the four
chapters. We shall also try to consult other authorities who have written or
spoken on this very issue. However, this thesis may not exhaust the whole
notion of freedom and law as Aquinas understood it, but can suffice as a mere
appraisal of the notion
Method Of Study
Because of the nature and
the purpose of this work, its major methodology will be critical analysis.
However, I will also employ exposition, history and interpretation in order to
give this work a reasonable approach.
Division
Of Work
In the
first chapter, we shall in detail examine the general and Thomistic notion of
freedom. The second chapter deals with the term ‘law’ in general and equally
the Thomistic notion of the same. Chapter three deals with the two major
sub-headings of this thesis, that is, freedom and law and justifies them with
morality. Finally, chapter four deals with the appraisal of the whole work
through evaluation and conclusion.
CHAPTER
ONE
1.0
THE GENERAL NOTION OF FREEDOM
The concept of freedom is an
analogous one, predicated in different ways to beings of very different types.
The various forms of attribution depend, to a certain extent, not by defining
the same specific content, but by indicating formal relation, which remains the
same. This relation can be put negatively or positively.
Negatively, freedom means being free
from the relation of not being bound to a given being or law, of being
independent from something and of not being determined by a given principle of determination.
This negative concept is also a relative one because every finite being belongs
to a world and is related to the other being in the world. It may be free from
this direct relationship to this or that, but only because their place are
taken by others.
A being fully free in the negative sense could not be
a being in the world, without relationship fully isolated, it would be based on
nothing and be nothing.
Thus in contrast to the
negative, relative concept, there is a positive absolute concept of freedom. A
being is positively free in so far as it is in possession of itself and
possesses in this relationship the sufficient condition for all its being and
relations. Here, freedom means self-possession being completely present to
oneself, completely self-sufficient.
According to Maslaw
Freedom is the basic acknowledgment
that the individual is more important
than his society.
However, human freedom is
clearly neither merely negative and relative nor fully positive and absolute.
Man has dominion over himself and so also over parts of the world. But he is
non-the-less inserted into the world and dependent on the beings he finds
himself. The basic mode of human freedom may be called transcendental freedom,
which is the fundamental propriety of man by which he alone can say he is.
It follows that man can
never be deprived of this transcendental freedom, which is part and parcel of
his existence. But its emptiness and importance point on to another mode of
freedom. Man is not simply there, he does not simply grow, he has to be, he is
a task absolutely imposed on himself he has to decide to be himself or what he
will be and there is no way in which he can evade this decision.
This mode is called the
freedom of decision or existential freedom. This directly implies freedom of
choice since an arbitrary freedom would be no freedom, a man free in this
sense, will leave his actions at the mercy of mood whim or chance.
Freedom in general may be
defined as
the absence of obstacles to
the realization
of desires.
1.1 THE MEANING OF FREEDOM
Freedom! Everybody wants
it, it makes a man a human being, poets praise it, and politicians promise or
proclaim it. Some people have given their lives to win it for themselves or for
others, but what actually is it? St Thomas Aquinas sees it as absence of coercion.
Coercion or compulsion bears on the external action and corresponds to the
absence of external coercion. This is variously named according to the kind of
activity involved.
Thus we have physical
freedom, civil freedom, political freedom, freedom of self-realization, freedom
of choice, and freedom for self-perfection. Psychological freedom or freedom of
choice corresponds to absence of internal coercion, that is the power of the
will to will something or not. External is contingent on internal freedom,
since the former has no meaning without the latter, but the converse is not
necessarily true.
A Survey of Yves R.
Simons book ‘Freedom of Choice,’ contrasts to some extent the St Thomas Aquinas
notion of freedom. For example he investigated on freedom and voluntariness,
and said that “there is unqualified
voluntariness without freedom”
1.2 KINDS OF FREEDOM
Man is
full of dynamism, and his activities are equally the same. Hence his conception
of freedom differs according to their different activities. Man’s activities
are not just determined by external factors like a piece of stone that is moved
or a computer game that is moved by the pads. It sometimes comes from his
awareness of his own freedom and ability to decide for himself. Among all
these, freedom still remain verse to comprehend at each moment, but for better
apprehension, I will examine briefly the kinds of freedom in the following
sequence.
Human Freedom
This is
simply a matter of accepting the Universe because you understand its
mathematical necessity. This done, you will gain peace of mind, be free from
passions and be able to return good for evil. This human freedom implies that
man has the natural ability to act at length without being injurious to others.
Freedom Of Religion
Freedom of religion could
be identified as the right of a person to have free exercise of religion
without compulsion or coercion. He is allowed to worship anything, anywhere,
anytime according to the dictates of his conscience. Murray said on his own
part that religious freedom is ‘…an immunity from Coercion in what concerns
personal relation with God’
For
the authenticity of religion to be realized, many societies adopt freedom of
religion.
Freedom Of Choice
This is the principle of action by which man
judges freely. Apart from this, Aquinas maintained that freedom of choice is
not a habit but a power since it proceeds from man. He called it an election.
He compared ‘man’ and ‘animal’ and stated that man acts out of comparism in the
reason, while animals acts from natural instinct. Since man acts out of
comparism, he acts by free Judgment and equally retains the power of being
inclined to many things. Thus man has free choice.
Freedom
of choice refers either to the act of the will, or to the object of the will.
In the first instance, there is freedom of exercise, in the second, freedom of
specification. Freedom of exercise means that the will is at liberty to choose
or not to choose, to operate or not to operate. The point to emphasize here is
that one is not compelled to act.
Freedom Of Self-Perfection
Here St. Thomas believed
and taught that man ought to tamper and train his Soul, and the dignity of man
lies in self-mastery. Now, man’s nature is constituted in such a way that
reason and will must always guide and direct his actions. In so doing man has self-control,
since that makes him a person. Any man who allows passion, money, power etc to
overtake him, is not free, since he feels free outwardly, but inwardly remain
enslaved to vice, greed, power, pride, and ambition.
Fulton Sheen in his book
‘On Being Human’ maintained that freedom is not gained at once, but a gradual
process, which continues until one reaches the peak. Man is not expected to
become an angel, but man, which is his ontological vocation, man cannot be
perfect in an imperfect world.
Freedom of Self
Realization
Each man is a microcosm, in other
words, said to be represented in a small scale. He occupies an important and
irreplaceable position in the entire universe. He is a being who has a mission
in the world. And the achievement of this mission is the realization of
himself. Each man is a bundle of potentialities. These potentialities when
realized or actualized become the individual’s contribution to development of
the entire human family.
Self-realization, according to
Anthony Storr is said to be:
The fullest possible expression in
life of
the innate potentialities of
the individual, the realization of
this uniqueness as a personality.
It consists in
productiveness, spontaneous activity as opposed to compulsion, love and active solidarity
with human beings. It consists in accepting oneself as the bearer of human
potentialities and being ready to grow through creative activity. It is the man
who uses his powers that answers the fundamental question of his individual
existence. Freedom of self-realization is only possible in and through the
facticity, which surround each person, it cannot be more than this. They
include, height, colour, strength, intelligence, sex, race etc.
Karl Rahner held that:
Freedom is only freedom in
the
concrete sense, when all
those
freedoms are combined.
Aquinas on his own part
noted that,
Freedom is seen not as independence
from an absolute but as independence
From the relatives.
In the history of
philosophy and social thought, freedom has a specific use as a moral and social
concept to refer either to circumstance which arise in the relations of man to
man to specific conditions of social life. Philosophical argument about the
meaning or the nature of freedom is concerned with the legitimacy or
convenience of particular application of the term. Bertrand Russels often held
that freedom in general is that absence of obstacles to the realization of
one’s desires.
1.3 AQUINAS
NOTION OF FREEDOM
This medieval
theologian understood freedom to be the harmony of the will and the act. And
the consideration is the divine influence and the will. Implicitly, the
relation of harmony, the divine influence and the will is freedom. Hence, a
free act is constituted by the assent of the will rather than by the decision
of the will. It implies then that this cannot be freedom as self-determination.
The term in Aquinas closest in meaning and usage to
the contemporary term freedom, is perhaps liberty
But for John Locke;
It is to be free from constraint and violence from
others, which cannot be, where there are no law
Freedom may mean absence
of constraint and this is what is proper to man. There is no right minded
individual who would applaud constraints. Being free from constraint means
being free from choice imprisonment.
1.4 LIMITS OF FREEDOM
While we reject the view that man is not
free, or that freedom is an illusion, we must not accept the Sartrean
exaggerated notion of freedom. According to Sartre in his book ‘Being and
Nothingness’, man is absolutely free. Man he said, is condemned to be free
and man’s authentic existence is realized to the extent that he makes use of
his freedom.
Man
is free, yes, but his freedom has to be limited by certain things such as his
body, will, environment, desires and passion, pressures from heredity, society
etc.
Walter Farrel in his book
‘A Companion to Summa’ vol. iii supported this when he used the
analogy of a wild bird beating out its life against the windows of a desolate
house into which it has wondered, to awaken pity on us. Also in man, who is
confined to a space and who is imperfect and limited, struggling day in and out
to be unlimited and free. We find such a situation in the incessant discoveries
by science to know if it can give meaning to human life, but what happens, we
still experience some sort of imperfection in all these.
Also as a social being,
man is limited by his very nature of being forced to be social by nature, he is
compulsorily limited to stay where his body permits him to be. The
existentialists emphasized this when they said that man as a social being in
the world is subjected to the laws of nature.
We should not say that
limitation is the essence of human freedom because man’s insatiable tension
towards the absolute and good is limitless, rather as an incarnate being, a
being in the world, his body which situates him in the world limits his
freedom. It then follows that man is not absolutely free, since there are some
limitations.
1.5
SOCIAL
STRUCTURE OF FREEDOM.
Since freedom is
transcendental distance and transcendental spontaneity, it is essentially part
of man. But this primordial freedom is still only the basis for existential
freedom, the realization of man as person, it is not yet this personal being in
actual reality, transcendental and transcendental freedom are actuated only in
the decision of the existential freedom for its own essence – as basic form.
But R.S. Peters held that:
Freedom means not doing what
one wills
without restraints but accepting
the law or the real will of the
community.
It follows that human
freedom can never be a simple state of man or a specialized propriety, but
neither is it simply the actuation of selfhood, nor pure act without the history
like the divine freedom. But on the contrary, human freedom is history by its
very nature. Man is wholly claimed by the works to be done and the states to be
achieved. He becomes truly a person by going freely out of himself- to throw
himself into the work to be done.
Thus human freedom is not
a state, as it is in things, freedom from this or that compulsion nor is it as
in God a pure act of self-consciousness. Freedom is the history of a person’s
coming to himself, which culminates in fully conscious self-possession. In the
strict sense, only the individual is with himself, self-possession can be
predicted only analogously of a community or a people.
All these principles
recur in the principle which regulates the mode of realization of freedom, the
freedom of subsidiary. Freedom in act is identical with the personality of the
person. It is the person’s mode of being. This mode of being is at once
individual and supra individual condition and uncondition. Conscious selfhood,
as an act feasible only to the self,
makes the individual unique as a person.
These common works are
modes of self-realization, of the reality of freedom and the person. But as
such modes, there are forms taken by freedom and they retain their meaning and
purpose only by being referred back to the person and its reality.
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