One must first of all liberate this “phantom” of freedom, to rethink the concrete exercise of the authentic forms of freedom. Freedom would be all-round , if a human being could actually decide with power over everything. Instead, there are a number of things about which we cannot decide (over which we do not have any power). For example, we cannot choose to live without some of our bodily organs, we cannot decide to do away with our relations to the environment (light, air, water, for example), we cannot live without relationships with other human beings , etc..

Our freedom is ultimately limited by this: that a human being can never withdraw completely from their material conditions of life. They have been relentlessly “bound” by them and “conditioned” even in the face of attempts to reject them. In other words, there is in our being free, a factuality and incompressible inevitable, although we are not always able to trace the boundaries or even to describe their specficities. Once, to indicate it, the figure of “nature” was used. Natural things were the constants of individual and collective life. Then the notion of culture to “dissolve” intervened, almost to the total liquefaction of these ancient beliefs. Now few have the courage to say that the total liquidation of this legacy is impossible.

 

The total liquidation of “nature” (intention) is actually the primary source of our bewilderment , because the constants in liquidation are ties between us. In a relational fabric in which nothing can count as ties to be honoured, all must be brought back to a “pact of parties ,” always resolvable in principle (this is the only form of link that is said, not infrequently, today practical), the surprises are continuous and indeed the surprise is the new norm. It should say: the new standard has, in the last instance, occurred by chance 

So, freedom from the chains. The remedy should be – suggested by several parties – the shared neutral formal rules (ethical and political). Yet the remedy works just as it is difficult to ascertain, only that you have a little experience of forms of everyday life. Lost the sense of the chains, you gradually fall into a life full of emotional debris, a fragmented life. It is this, after all the drama of the younger generation, who volunteer one day and another day steal other forms of pleasure, using the others lightly (sex, money, showmanship, etc.). When you aren’t popping pills.