Disturbed what does freedom mean

They have been approached from different perspectives. Answers have been offered. No one answer or solution has gained acceptance by an overwhelming majority of thinkers let alone worldwide acceptance. So prepare yourself to explore important matters. This material might cause you to reexamine your beliefs and alter your position. Be prepared to become a little unsettled. For some readers you may be more than just a little disturbed. You may be disturbed that beliefs you have held may need to be reexamined or abandoned.

You may be disturbed that there is no one official correct answer to the questions that you will confront. So it is with many questions in Philosophy, some of which you have already experienced. It could just be that despite the fact that a great many people derive great comfort from these commonly held beliefs, that these beliefs may, nonetheless, be untrue!

What is to be put in their place if you find that you can no longer hold to what you once believed? The questions are basic. The answers are very difficult to explain and defend. What is at stake with this issue of Free Will are notions of responsibility and in particular moral responsibility. The more advances in science present the picture of the universe as being deterministic the more there arises the question of whether or not human actions are in any way exempt from that idea that all physical events are determined by prior events.

How are humans to be considered possessed of free will when their actions might be described as being determined by their prior states of being? VIEW: Freedom: what is it? Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unconstrained by certain factors. Factors of historical concern have included metaphysical constraints for example, logical, nomological, or theological determinism , physical constraints for example, chains or imprisonment , social constraints for example, threat of punishment or censure, or structural constraints , and mental constraints for example, compulsions or phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions.

General Comment I think a whole lot of people miss the point of this song. It's not a power anthem for "individuality" It's a sarcastic slap in the face. The character brags about how "impressive" he is, but his claims gradually becomes more absurd as the song progresses.

I think the band wrote this song to be facetious, but at the same time knew that a lot of their teenage fanbase would embrace it as a form or empowerment, seeing as on the surface it appears to be an full-on endorsement of behavior that generally fails to have any positive influence on society. Based on such songs as "Land of Confusion" however, as well as many of the songs on the "Ten Thousand Fists" album, I think it can be conferred that the band Disturbed has nothing at all against unity, and furthermore fully supports positive social action.

Because of this I believe that the song "Divide" is a humorous satire and not much more. General Comment This song is truly epic, one of the best on the album, and thats saying a lot! The lyrics aren't incredibly cryptic, its obviously about a nonconformist, someone who doesn't want to just blend in and be normal, someone who wants to stand out and be their own person and doesn't want to be ridiculed for not being part of the crowd.

Great song General Comment Agree with Demented and Lakajj. It's funny that a lot of rock music has this type of theme, but it's nowhere to be found in RnB or Hip Hop lol. At least lyrics in here have meaning! Validus on June 04, Link. So agreeing!!!

Greatest 2-liner of the whole song. SimKing on August 29, Artists - D. Divide is found on the album Indestructible. It is not a question of having more, or more significant, opportunities: the opportunity for me to study is there now. Rather it is a question of being able to take advantage of the opportunity by being in control of my life. Positive freedom in this example is a matter of my having the capacity to take the rational option as well as having the opportunity : whereas, according to a concept of negative freedom, the opportunities that I have alone determine the extent of my freedom.

I am free to study in the negative sense since no one is preventing me from doing it; no one has locked away my books, or hidden my pen and paper; no one has dragged me out of the door to go to the pub, or chained me to my armchair in front of the television.

However, I am not free in the positive sense; I am not truly free, because I am a slave to my tendency to be sidetracked. True positive freedom would involve seizing control of my life and making rational choices for myself. Those who defend positive freedom believe that just because no one is preventing you from doing something, it does not follow that you are genuinely free. Positive freedom is a matter of achieving your potential, not just having potential.

Consider another example, a real one this time. James Boswell, the eighteenth-century diarist and biographer of Dr Johnson, included the following in his journal for Sunday 31 March It describes how he spent a night in London following a dinner with friends:. I behaved pretty decently. But when I got into the street, the whoring rage came upon me. I thought I would devote a night to it.

I was weary at the same time that I was tumultuous. I went to Charing Cross Bagnio with a wholesome-looking, bouncing wench, stripped, and went to bed with her. But after my desires were satiated by repeated indulgence, I could not rest; so I parted from her after she had honestly delivered to me my watch and ring and handkerchief, which I should not have missed I was so drunk.

I took a hackney-coach and was set down in Berkeley Square, and went home cold and disturbed and dreary and vexed, with remorse rising like a black cloud without any distinct form; for in truth my moral principle as to chastity was absolutely eclipsed for a time. I was in the miserable state of those whom the Apostle represents as working all uncleanness with greediness.

I thought of my valuable spouse with the highest regard and warmest affection, but had a confused notion that my corporeal connection with whores did not interfere with my love for her. Yet I considered that I might injure my health, which there could be no doubt was an injury to her. This is an exact state of my mind at the time. It shocks me to review it.

Here Boswell's confession reveals clearly the tension between two sides of his character. In his sober reflection he can see the foolishness of his having spent the night with a prostitute. Even soon after the event he is stricken with remorse, which he attempts to dispel by means of the transparent rationalisation that somehow, despite breaking his principle of chastity, his infidelity does not interfere with his love for his wife.

Yet he can't hide behind self-serving justifications for long, when he realises that he has risked catching a venereal disease, something that undoubtedly has the potential to harm her. His higher self endorses a principle of chastity and fidelity; his lower self succumbs to temptations of the flesh.

Otherwise, you are simply a slave to passing emotions and desires; lusts in this case. Sober, Boswell is shocked by his actions of the previous night. This would certainly have infringed his negative liberty in the sense of reducing his opportunities, but it would have allowed him to do what at some level he felt was best for him, and thereby to enjoy positive freedom in this respect.

From this it should be clear that the notion of positive liberty may rely on the belief that the self can be split into a higher and a lower self, and that the higher or rational self's priorities should be encouraged to overcome the lower, less rational self's inclinations: the passing desires that if acted on can so upset a life plan.

The higher self has desires for what will make the individual's life go well; it wishes to pursue worthwhile and noble goals. The lower self is easily led astray, often by irrational appetites. In many cases this can only be achieved by coercing us to behave in ways which seem to go against our desires; in fact this coercion is necessary to allow us to fulfil our rational higher desires, desires which we may even be unaware of having. On this view, the freedom which is self-mastery, or positive freedom, may only be achievable if our lower selves are constrained in their actions.

This is what I would have wanted had I been truly free. If Boswell had been forced to go home straight after dinner rather than given the opportunity to spend the night with a prostitute, his positive freedom might have been significantly extended.

I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.

I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer — deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role — that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. This is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world.

I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realize that it is not. It is important to realise that Berlin's notion of positive liberty doesn't just apply to self-mastery at the individual level; it also encompasses theories of freedom which emphasise collective control over common life.

So, for example, when someone calls a society a free society because its members play an active role in controlling it through their participation in democratic institutions, they are appealing to a notion of positive freedom rather than of negative freedom.

In this example the people as a whole are free because they, collectively, have mastery over the life of their society. A free society based upon the concept of negative freedom would typically be one in which state interference in individual lives is kept to a minimum. This would not necessarily be a democratic society since a benevolent dictator might be concerned to provide an extensive realm of individual negative freedom for each of his or her subjects.

The state intervenes to prevent an alcoholic drinking himself to death on the grounds that this is what, in his sober and rational moments, he would clearly desire and so is a basic condition of his gaining true freedom. The state protects an alcoholic's freedom to consume huge amounts of whisky in the privacy of her own home. I cease to be free when I follow my baser sensual appetites: I am in thrall to mere passing desire. It is an infringement on my freedom to prevent me from engaging in consensual sado-masochism in the privacy of my own dungeon.

I don't need the nanny state forcing me to have fluoride in my drinking water for my own good: that infringes my freedom. You can only really be free in a well-governed state with harsh but well-chosen laws which shape your life in a rational way, thereby encouraging you to flourish. Increasing your opportunities to make a mess of your life doesn't increase your freedom in any meaningful sense. Berlin's distinction between negative and positive freedom remains a useful one, and much of are structured around it.

However, his aim in the paper was not simply to make the distinction, but rather to make a claim about the ways in which theories of positive freedom have been misused.

It is that positive theories of freedom, or perversions of them, have been more frequently used as instruments of oppression than have negative ones. Coercion is justified on the grounds that it leads to a realisation of the aims of the higher or rational self, even if the lower, everyday, empirical self opposes the coercion with all its might. The final humiliation in such a situation is to be told that, despite appearances, what is going on is not coercion, since it actually increases your freedom.

Read the following extract from Berlin's article ibid. Lines 1—2. Which of the following two phrases describes the concept of positive freedom and which the concept of negative freedom?

Lines 8— Put the main point of these lines in your own words. You should not use more than fifty words to do this. Lines 16— Berlin lines 31—41 says that coercing people for their own sake is sometimes justifiable.

A paradox is a situation which yields an apparent contradiction. What is the paradox that Berlin refers to in line 54? Compare your answers with those below. Then re-read the whole extract before reading on. You should find that your understanding of the main points made in the passage has increased significantly. The metaphor of being master over one's own life, no one's slave, still leaves open the possibility of being a slave to one's own passions. The idea of a higher and rational self the master , which should keep in check the lower irrational self the unruly slave , comes from this.

Berlin put these words within inverted commas to indicate that he does not necessarily accept that such a nature is real or that such a self, if it exists, is higher. He is reporting how other people use these words rather than endorsing this way of speaking himself.

Berlin claims that some advocates of positive liberty have gone so far as to insist that other people don't necessarily know what they really want, what their higher selves seek. It is not a case of forcing people to do what would be good for them because they can't appreciate what is good for them; it is a matter of forcing people to do what at a level unavailable to them they, allegedly, wish to do.

The paradox is that people are forced to do what they say they don't want to do on the grounds that they really do want to do it. What they really want to do, on this analysis, is what they really don't want to do. Although Berlin doesn't actually use the term, in the passage you have just read Berlin contrasts paternalism with a particular way in which the concept of positive freedom has frequently been misused.

Paternalism is coercing people for their own sake. An example of paternalism is putting fluoride in drinking water, whether or not the population wants it there, on the grounds that it will significantly reduce the incidence of tooth decay, and thus improve the health of the population.

The fluoride is added for the good of the people who drink the water, whether they realise that it will do them good or not. Though it might not seem like it to them, they are, allegedly, freer as a result of the coercion.

In other words, this misuse of positive freedom rests on the belief that it can be acceptable to force people to be free. It has been the source of much misery and many ruined lives. It is important to realise that Berlin is not saying that only the concept of positive liberty can be misused.

In fact it is obvious that versions of the negative concept can also be used to justify some terrible states of affairs. In some situations, preserving individuals' freedom from interference might be tantamount to encouraging the strong to thrive at the expense of the weak.

The pike might think it an excellent idea to allow fish to go about their business unimpeded by rules or interventions. The minnows, who stand to be his lunch, will no doubt see the limitations of a negative theory of liberty which allowed them to be eaten on the grounds that otherwise the pike's freedom would have been seriously curtailed.

However, although theories based on a concept of negative liberty can lead to unsatisfactory situations, Berlin's point is that historically this is not usually what has happened. It is the theories of positive liberty which have led to human tragedy on a massive scale. Berlin has sometimes been interpreted as saying that all theories of positive freedom are bad, and that the only type of theory worth defending is one based on the concept of negative freedom — freedom from interference.

But this is a misinterpretation which he has been at pains to dispel. For instance, he has written:. I do not know why I should have been held to doubt this… I can only repeat that the perversion of the notion of positive liberty into its opposite — the apotheosis of authority — did occur, and has for a long while been one of the most familiar and depressing phenomena of our time. The first can be turned into its opposite and still exploit the favourable associations of its innocent origins.

The second has, much more frequently, been seen, for better and for worse, for what it was; there has been no lack of emphasis, in the last hundred years, upon its more disastrous implications. Hence, the greater need, it seems to me, to expose the aberrations of positive liberty than those of its negative brother. The only reason for which I have been suspected of defending negative liberty against positive and saying that it is more civilized, is because I do think that the concept of positive liberty, which is of course essential to a decent existence, has been more often abused or perverted than that of negative liberty.

Both are genuine questions; both are inescapable… Both these concepts have been politically and morally twisted into their opposites. George Orwell is excellent on this. You may think that you know what you want, but I, the Fuhrer, we the Party Central Committee, know you better than you know yourself, and provide you with what you would ask for if you recognised your "real" needs.

Of course unlimited liberty for capitalists destroys the liberty of the workers, unlimited liberty for factory-owners or parents will allow children to be employed in the coal-mines. Certainly the weak must be protected against the strong, and liberty to that extent be curtailed.

Negative liberty must be curtailed if positive liberty is to be sufficiently realised; there must be a balance between the two, about which no clear principles can be enunciated. Positive and negative liberty are both perfectly valid concepts, but it seems to me that historically more damage has been done by pseudo-positive than by pseudo-negative liberty in the modern world.

Berlin is making a generalisation about the concept of positive freedom on the basis of his observation of history, some of it first hand as a boy, he witnessed the Russian revolutions of This is a historical thesis rather than a philosophical one: it is a thesis about what has actually happened. In the part of his paper where he puts forward this thesis, Berlin is writing more as a historian of ideas than as a philosopher pure and simple.

In Berlin's case his activity as a historian and as a philosopher are intimately entwined. However, it is important to realise that philosophers don't primarily put forward empirical hypotheses: their main concerns are the analysis of concepts such as Berlin engages in, in his examination of the nature of the two types of freedom ; and the analysis of arguments. The argument Berlin has presented about past perversions of the concept of positive freedom is based on empirical evidence; that is, its truth or falsity depends on facts, facts which are ultimately discovered by observation.

It is not a logically necessary consequence of the intrinsic nature of the concept of positive freedom that it is prone to this sort of misuse. It is a contingent fact: this is just how it is, but it could have been otherwise. This distinction between what is logically necessary and what is contingent is an important one.

If something is logically necessary you can't deny it without contradicting yourself. In contrast contingent facts need not be as they are: as a consequence we usually have to make some sort of observation or conduct some sort of experiment to discover what they are. So, for example, it could have turned out historically that a concept of negative freedom was more often used as an excuse for oppression than a positive one.

It is a contingent fact that, at least according to Berlin, things are the other way round. The way Berlin arrived at his conclusion was by considering the evidence of recent history. Motivating much of Berlin's essay on the two concepts of liberty is a pair of related beliefs. Secondly, he believes that there is not, in principle, any way of resolving the widely different goals that human beings have.

There can, then, be no simple panacea to cure all the problems that arise as a result of conflicting aims. This second belief goes some way to explaining why we place such a high value on negative freedom.

Here is his account of the consequences of attempting a final solution a term which he presumably chose for its emotive force given that it is the term which is usually used for Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people :. One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals — justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society.

This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another….

It is a commonplace that neither political equality nor efficient organisation nor social justice is compatible with more than a modicum of individual liberty, and certainly not with unrestricted laissez-faire ; that justice and generosity, public and private loyalties, the demands of genius and the claims of society, can conflict violently with each other.

And it is no great way from that to the generalisation that not all good things are compatible, still less all the ideals of mankind. But somewhere, we shall be told and in some way, it must be possible for all these values to live together, for unless this is so, the universe is not a cosmos, not a harmony; unless this is so, conflicts of value may be an intrinsic irremovable element in human life.

To admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera.

The central point here, like the argument about past misuses of the notion of positive liberty discussed in Section 3. However, towards the end of this quotation he introduces a different idea, namely that the different goals may in principle be irreconcilable: perhaps there just can't be a way of harmonising all the different goals such as justice, equality and the cultivation of geniuses , that people have and do consider worthwhile.

What this means is that the notion of total human fulfilment embodies an unachievable goal. If it is a necessary feature of human goals that they can't all simultaneously be achieved, then it follows that any theory that says they can is self-contradictory: it will end up implying both that human goals cannot all be fulfilled and that they can, which is a logical absurdity.

In other words, Berlin is suggesting that the notion of human goals carries within it the implication that not all human goals can be fulfilled. But what is his evidence for this pessimistic conclusion? He considers two possibilities: first that there might be some a priori guarantee of the notion that the goals different people have can actually be harmonised. We can, for instance, know that all aardvarks are animals independently of conducting any experiments on actual aardvarks; this is because it is true by definition that all aardvarks are animals.

You can know a priori that if you have in your sack something that isn't an animal, then it certainly isn't an aardvark. So, returning to Berlin's discussion: he suggests that there is no a priori guarantee that human goals can all in fact be achieved. He assumes this, rather than providing any argument to show that it is true. If we accept this point which is reasonable enough since it is unclear how we could know a priori that all human goals could in principle be harmonised , we must fall back on observation.