David Bentley Hart says, “Modernity’s highest ideal—its special understanding of personal autonomy—requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose.”
So are we free only because we can choose, or only when we have chosen well? Freedom without order is one hot mess. I've got too many examples to mention, especially when I see my crazy mind at work. If I acted on every thought impression, it wouldn't be pretty.
The problem today is what does it mean to choose well? The demarcation between the ancients and the moderns is that we moderns are lost in our buffered selves (as noted by Charles Taylor). We have no connection to something transcendent, nor are we enchanted by the cosmos. We have come to believe that, “Neither God, then, nor nature, nor reason provides the measure of an act’s true liberty, for an act is free only because it might be done in defiance of all three.” It is our wills that captivate us, or have become our new masters.
But our wills must be informed by some moral center that goes beyond us. The idea that we choose well because we have an inner goodness is just folly. For instance, “There is no such thing as “enlightened” morality, if by that one means an ethics written on the fabric of our nature, which anyone can discover simply by the light of disinterested reason. There are, rather, moral traditions, shaped by events, ideas, inspirations, and experiences; and no morality is devoid of the contingencies of particular cultural histories.” To think we can author our own story by ourselves is missing the epic narrative we are all part of. Aristotle brought in the notion of telos to acknowledge that everything has an impulse towards its formal and final cause. “Both the primordial artistic impulses in a people and the most refined expressions of those impulses have always been indissolubly united to visions of eternal order.”
But most moderns (see Nietzsche) believe such an order can be manifested spontaneously by the individual, personal will. Yet, “As a matter purely of logic, absolute spontaneity is an illusion; all acts of the will are acts toward some real or imagined end, which prompts volition into motion.”
It seems like we've come full circle, doesn't it? Or maybe it's more like full sphere.
So to be truly free, that is to say, is realize one’s proper essence (informed by our idiom, beauty, truth, virtue, love, creativity, and Being) and to flourish as the kind of being one ultimately is. Or in other words, freedom is to align our existence with God, and in that, our essence is freed to be made manifest.
(All quotes by David Bentley Hart.)