Defining "Freedom", Without Evident Success

FREEDOM, explained Goethe, is nothing other than the opportunity to do what is reasonable under all circumstances. Since Goethe is widely considered to have been the most intelligent person ever, the undisputed prince of European literature, we can safely assume that we finally know what freedom is. Its "nothing other" than what Goethe said it is - maybe. "It is what it is", is what we like to say today, but we aren't quite as intelligent as Goethe, and it shows. If Goethe had ever told us what truth is, which he seems not to have done, he could have taken Pontius Pilate off the hook for turning his back on Jesus too soon. The only remaining problem is defining the word "reasonable", and you're "good to go", as we like to say, while still lacking Goethe's princely brilliance. Amid all the noise we Americans, past and present, have made about freedom, all the curious incarnations of the venerated ideal, amid all the demagoguery and abuse meted out in the name of freedom in freedom's land, Goethe, if nothing else, tried to define it on a scientific basis, thus giving us the opportunity to settle the issue, conclusively. We seem to have passed on his generous offer of definitive finality. Again, freedom is a concept, meaningless without context and qualification, like all words. Noam Chomsky, the undisputed prince of linguistic theory, still humming right along after over sixty years at M.I.T., might agree. We Americans have always overrated and abused freedom, it says here. They have used, and still use this venerated but vague concept to justify all manner of atrocities against anyone and anything vulnerable to exploitation: workers, resources, animals, and a certain planet's biosphere, to name but a few. They have locked women in garment district sweatshops, and allowed the building to burn. They have given too many coal miners the opportunity to breathe too much dust. In these disUnited States of Armaments, a tenuous national matrix of blurred cultural contradictions, they have given the freedom to bear arms, because they said so, even if the constitution does not. (Our marvelously, curiously, deliberately vague founding document renders unto us the freedom to justify and sanctify the freedom to do almost anything we so wish.) In many states, we have misread the constitution so as to give us the freedom to bear arms under nearly all circumstances. Daily, we exercise that freedom, sometimes with predictably disastrous results. Is it reasonable to legislate a citizenry renowned for its arrogance, anger and willful disregard for the welfare of others into an amorphous mob which not even remotely resembles a well regulated militia? Evidently, if we cling to the sacred alter of satisfying Goethe's scientific criteria, according to which any declared freedom is reasonable, or it would not be declared and exist as a freedom. Or maybe Goethe got it wrong, which he was not known for doing often. Perhaps freedom is nothing other than the opportunity to do whatever one pleases, reasonable or not, and the more circumstances providing opportunity, the greater the freedom. the only thing we know about freedom for sure is that we'll talking about it, abusing it, and failing to adequately define it.