. (2024) '244 Freedom Essay Topics & Examples'. 18 November.
Beyond the beautiful outcomes, I find that art is a tool which one can use to explore their inner imagination, emotions, and thoughts. The product of creation reflects the internal state of an artist or how they view the world around them. Some of us are naturally inclined to create with our hands, or our minds, to reflect and make sense of our ‘inner world’. In our societies, particularly in the Levant and the MENA region, we’re conditioned as kids to focus on grades, logic, and rational thinking. A child is expected to grow up and become a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. However what the traditional education system lacks, is properly teaching children to express themselves creatively. The system is heavily concentrated on teaching the language of math and science, even within the one-period-a-week of art class in Lebanon, where students are sometimes graded on their ability to replicate their teachers’ art without room for personal creative freedom.
What MacCallum is doing is arguing that there is a simpler and more useful concept of freedom available than the two concepts set out by Berlin. This simpler concept embodies aspects of both the negative and the positive concepts of freedom described by Berlin. However, Berlin has responded to this criticism by pointing out that there are important cases in which freedom is at issue which cannot be fitted into this three part concept of freedom. Here is Berlin's response:
the distinction between them has never been made sufficiently clear, is based in part upon a serious confusion, and has drawn attention away from precisely what needs examining if the differences separating philosophers, ideologies, and social movements concerned with freedom are to be understood. The corrective advised is to regard freedom as always one and the same triadic relation, but recognise that various contending parties disagree with each other in what they understand to be the ranges of the term variables. To view the matter in this way is to release oneself from a prevalent but unrewarding concentration on ‘kinds’ of freedom, and to turn attention toward the truly important issues in this area of social and political philosophy.
Freedom Essay For Students and Children - 500+ Words Essay
Unless we understand the origins and ends of our liberty, we as Americans may learn what it is to lose freedom in a fit of absence of mind. If the nature of freedom is misunderstood in the universities, it will be misunderstood everywhere.
I've already mentioned that the most important feature of Berlin's article for our purposes is his distinction between negative and positive concepts of freedom: freedom from constraint, and the freedom that results from self-mastery or self-realisation. Most discussion of Berlin's article has also focused on this distinction. Now I want to consider a criticism of the distinction between two types of freedom.
If Berlin is right that it is a fundamental and inescapable feature of being human that we have to choose between incompatible alternatives (both as individuals and as members of a society), in a sense creating ourselves through our choices, then this helps to explain why freedom is so important to us. It is through our freely made choices that we make ourselves what we are, whether as individuals or societies. If there were some true ‘final solution’, then it wouldn't matter whether we made the choices, or someone else made the right ones for us: one simple concept of positive freedom would be sufficient, and coercion might be justified on the basis of it. But, since, as Berlin believes, no final solution is in principle ever going to harmonise the different aims that human beings have, and since there are numerous incompatible, worthwhile ways of living (a view sometimes known as pluralism), a combination of negative and positive freedom is a precondition of a satisfactory life. Take away the guarantee of some basic negative freedoms for all adults, and the result will be misery for those whose aims in life do not conveniently harmonise with the dominant view in that society.
When you have finished this course, try reading through the long extract from Berlin's ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. It concentrates on the distinction between negative and positive liberty and doesn't cover the issues raised in the second half of this course. Don't worry if you can't follow every point: Berlin refers to a wide range of thinkers in passing, most of whose work you probably won't know. Also, like many philosophers, he writes at quite an abstract level. However, much of this essay should already be familiar to you from the long quotations included in this course.
Freedom Essay For Students and Children - 500+ Words Essay
Originally delivered as a lecture at Pepperdine University in 1982, this essay considers the degree to which order and freedom in universities and in society are linked, and the role religion plays in maintaining a healthy balance between them. “If the great troubles of our time teach mankind anything,” Kirk writes, “surely we ought now to recognize that true freedom cannot endure in a society that denies a transcendent order. A university that ridicules the claims of the transcendent must end without intellectual coherence—and without genuine intellectual freedom.”
Freedom Essay for Students and Children | 500+ Words Essay
But if we are not armed with an guarantee of the proposition that a total harmony of true values is somewhere to be found – perhaps in some ideal realm the characteristics of which we can, in our finite state, not so much as conceive – we must fall back on the ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge. And these certainly give us no warrant for supposing (or even understanding what would be meant by saying) that all good things, or all bad things for that matter, are reconcilable with each other. The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon the freedom to choose; for if they had assurance that in some perfect state, realisable by men on earth, no ends pursued by them would ever be in conflict, the necessity and agony of choice would disappear, and with it the central importance of the freedom to choose. Any method of bringing this final state nearer would then seem fully justified, no matter how much freedom were sacrificed to forward its advance. It is, I have no doubt some such dogmatic certainty that has been responsible for the deep, serene, unshakeable conviction in the minds of some of the most merciless tyrants and persecutors in history that what they did was fully justified by its purpose. I do not say that the ideal of self-perfection – whether for individuals or nations or churches or classes – is to be condemned in itself, or that the language which was used in its defence was in all cases the result of a confused or fraudulent use of words, or of moral or intellectual perversity. Indeed, I have tried to show that it is the notion of freedom in its ‘positive’ sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and that not to recognise this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age. But equally it seems to me that the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realised is demonstrably false. If, as I believe, the ends of men are many and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict – and of tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.
Freedom Essay - by Marc Brenman - American Diversity Report
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is proud to announce the 12 winners and six honorable mentions of the 2024 Kenneth L. Proulx Memorial Essay Contest for Ongoing College Students. FFRF has paid out a total of $19,400 in award money to this year’s college contest winners.