Intervals

Like the gaps between frames in a filmstrip

we overlook the gaps

in our moment-to-moment thinking,

choosing, doing, living.

Yet all the freedom we have

lives deep-down the intervals.

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Political rights are only as strong as the inner liberty that sustains them. Lose the second, and the first will crumble—even if the laws stay the same.

Political freedom is derivative. It rests on something more fundamental: our individual freedom. Individual freedom is the ability to step back from what presses on us and choose as we prefer. Everything else we call “freedom” depends on this ability. Without it, we cannot create anything, nor can there be such things as rights or political liberties.

It is fashionable today to dismiss free will as an illusion. This fashion follows in the wake of science, which often clings to hard determinism despite the evidence that probabilities—not certainties—govern the smallest elements of matter. Reductive theories are quick to explain away counter‑examples as “mere appearances.” But we should ask this of “mere appearances”: If reality contained nothing of what the illusion shows, how could it take on that appearance at all? A mirage is only possible because there is an oasis.

So here: if freedom did not exist in reality, how could the appearance of freedom arise? Is it credible that the lived experience of freedom, shared by every human being, has no referent in reality?

Kant gives a simple answer. If you have ever resisted even a trivial impulse—refrained from a cruel remark, kept your seat when provoked to stand, chosen temperance over indulgence—you have demonstrated free will. The idea that such experiences are tricks of perception (tricks that are never fully explained) is far less believable than the fact itself.

But if the universe gives us freedom, why does it frustrate us so often?

One of Plato’s myths touches on the frustration and incompleteness we feel. In the Symposium, Aristophanes tells how humans were once two fused beings—round, powerful, complete. Our self‑sufficiency offended the gods, and Zeus split us in two. Since then we have wandered in search of our other half. We call this longing “love.”

The story is comic, but it speaks to our strivings. Our incompleteness is not a defect to be erased but the source of life’s motion. It preserves desire, reverence, and, most of all, the gap in which choice can occur.

Freedom depends on such gaps. Without separation, there is no distance from which to judge. Without lack, there is no longing to guide us. The wish to abolish all distance—to merge completely with another person, with society, or with a technological system—is also the wish to extinguish the intervals in which freedom arises.

Plato’s Phaedrus offers another image, on a different subject but pointing to the same truth. Socrates warns that writing is a crutch: it stores knowledge outside the self, weakening memory. The more we depend on it, the less we truly know. Knowledge carried in the mind is alive; knowledge stored externally is inert.

Freedom works the same way. Choices made in the interior space of our own minds are alive and vital. Choices made for us by external authorities weaken our capacity to choose. In extreme cases, this dependency atrophies the will until people function like automatons.

True freedom is self‑possession: the ability to carry our own knowledge, hold our own counsel, and govern our own impulses. This cannot be outsourced. No constitution, no leader, no external powers can grant freedom. At best, they can leave us room to practice it. At worst, we will have to defy them to keep it. The work of inner freedom is always our own.

This has political consequences. A society of dependent people is easy to rule by flattery, fear, and distraction. Such a society can keep its elections and lose its liberty if its citizens no longer have the habits of self‑possession. If we trade the work of inner freedom for the laziness of following others, we may remain busy, even passionate—but we will no longer be free.

The practices begin small. Try to remember without checking your notes. Pause before responding automatically. Withhold consent from what is vile. These are small gestures, but they are the daily sustenance of liberty.

We use, or fail to use, our freedom from one moment to the next. The more we use it, the more we can use it—and the freer we become.