What Freedom Is and Isn’t

Where phenomenology meets spirituality

Contrary to conceptions of a sense of becoming that are reducible to a mere ontological response or a supposedly standalone state, the effort here is to demonstrate that what allows one to go beyond constraints has to do with an orientation that is developed in each moment of its progression. To be clear, this isn’t a presumption that once the appearances and perceptions are dissolved, some kind of grand synthesis occurs. Instead, the evolution here is part of subjective experience in a way that anchors the context without doing away with its potentials.

So, let’s begin with Husserl. What he aimed at vis-a-vis other phenomenologists, was to flesh out how the immediate experience of perception entails a kind of beyond that doesn’t need to be grasped in the typical metaphysical sense. My impression as to why he had such an influence on Heidegger, is basically that being can’t be qualified without a movement. In his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, the point is to capture what goes into the process of extracting the possibility of substance from this immediacy—Heideggarian ontology here paves the way for positioning the subject amidst this flux, in a renewed orientation. As Husserl put it:

“To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.”

Without dwelling too much on Heidegger, the point to bear in mind is that there is no pure becoming: a subject is qualified/punctuated within the context that defines what he/she is. Husserl fleshed out what it means to experience a philosophical consciousness; later thinkers imbued it with meaning.

However, this isn’t to be taken to mean that this kind of phenomenology is just some baseline that allows individuals to simply craft freely. The parallel I see lies more in the fact that if one can apprehend themselves within a moment, then paradigms pertaining to things like personal meaning, existential resolution and the like become clearer. And this is because, once one is situated in this way, meaning becomes a formative boundary instead of a projection.

This is where I agree with Zizek when he claims that “One is free to make the choice they can’t not make.” While the implications for how events are formed vary, the point is that one doesn’t just ‘posit’ freedom; instead, in a kind of The Matrix-esque sense, true freedom lies in understanding how one is constituted, and shifting their moment therein. The constraints are part of the awareness of one’s subjectivity, so going beyond them is less an act of rebellion than just realizing the blind spot at the heart of the relation between them and oneself.

And this is where the more spiritual approach enters. While I don’t espouse a pure nothingness in the new agey sense where one can infinitely float, the parallel is that part of the unconscious entails a certain negativity—whether posited in a Freudian/Lacanian or Jungian sense. But for our purposes, what is important is that the way the unconscious mirrors or feeds into the conscious mind has a kind of non-local connectivity to it. This means that in any given moment, one can access a sense of a gestalt that can’t quite be apprehended—the whole is a possibility instantiated in each particular. So, finding higher meaning is less a matter of attaining some grand universality than simply seeing what is being reflected through oneself and the situation in one’s own way. And in this sense, the process is analogous to the aforementioned phenomenological method.

However, accessing the unconscious from this vantage point goes beyond simple awareness in the conventional sense. Whether somebody in a psychedelic experience, meditation or simply introspective state, it is never a matter of directly ‘seeing’ what is going on. As many thinkers have pointed out, choice is a retroactive phenomenon. The choice one can make in a given moment is never an answer, but instead reveals its meaning through the process of being experienced. One doesn’t see the reflection until they’ve moved through it. The access to the unconscious is a reflexive way of determining a subject that is never quite complete, and yet through this process can undergo transformations that, literally, awaken dreams.

Freedom lies on the edges of this liminal space.