I don't know if it's due to the dog days of this overwhelmed summer, which has plagued us since June, but I see more and more surprising and worrying behavior on the part of public and private representatives. Since the COVID pandemic has abated, an insolent carpe diem has emerged that threatens to destroy everything without limit or measure in the name of freedom, which precisely because of the lack of limit questions the very concept. We owe the expression carpe diem to Horacio, in the sense of seizing the day and not wasting your time. Little to do with the vulgarization of its current meaning.
A brief review takes us to Plato. There is a broad consensus in considering Plato as representative of a positive conception of freedom understood as rational self-control. According to this approach, a person is free if his rational desires dominate over his irrational desires and determine his actions. For Spinoza, human freedom consists in the effort to understand the infinite connection of causes of the universe, including the human body and mind. Kant gave full scope to the rationalism of freedom: action is free when consciousness is determined "against" sensible desires, according to a rational principle. Descartes argues: the freedom of our will knows itself without evidence, by the only experience we have.
For the political thinker Hannah Arendt, freedom is something that underlies reality, what is tangible, what she classifies as politics. Freedom is the faculty to transform the political, destroy it and generate a new beginning. Freedom is characteristic of human beings and is only activated when a conscious action is made to come to the surface. For Arendt, freedom manifests itself as small "miracles", alluding to the Christian term. Her argument focuses on the human capacity to create something new and disruptive to reality. She describes each act, seen not from the agent's perspective, but from the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts and which she describes as a "miracle" because it constitutes something unexpected. Humans have received the double gift of freedom and action, which can establish their own reality. Thanks to the gift of being able to alter the reality of creating these little "miracles" that are infinite improbabilities that end up being fulfilled and becoming a reality. Beautiful explanation that empowers the human capacity to break established automatic processes and their static character, creating something different, a new beginning as the maximum milestone of the exercise of freedom that has been given to us.
This introduction leads me to ratify the success of Lou Marinoff's book: More Plato and less Prozac. Less euphoria and less emptiness and practice a bit of charterhouse daily, to review the decisions to be made and evaluate their effects and consequences. Without wishing to go into detail, those responsible for the Vilassar de Mar City Council would probably have approached the so-called porn gymkhana differently if they had taken into account the age of the participants, the teacher's unpreparedness for said activity, not having spoken with a representation of fathers and mothers… Affective relationships and their culmination are an impressive gift to human beings that must be treated normally and with the respect they deserve, due to the value they have in themselves and the good they provide. They need, for their full enjoyment, a treatment that is not frivolous but that values the affective charge that it entails if you want to touch the sky: reach the maximum and achieve ecstasy. It is the most intense and complete exchange that can take place between two people, the closest we can be to each other, where gestures, looks and caresses can provide a value that is difficult to address from the banality of a gymkhana who intended to entertain with a summer activity, but without addressing the breadth of the subject and the litmus that it hosts. To become in the end a circus of apprentices without skills. All freedom, much more rationality.
