The notion of “freedom” has and will continue to change for individuals and for society “according to the degree of man’s awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being.” Children who have not yet become aware of their independent separateness have no notion of freedom, but they do as they become teenagers. Likewise, societies that are stratified into hard caste systems have a different notion of freedom than societies who have cast off primary ties. “Primary ties,” the author defines as “ties that connect the child with its mother, the member of a primitive community with his clan and nature, or the medieval man with the Church and his social caste.” The author defines, “individuation” as the process of growing up, the emergence of individual identity separate from primary ties which gave a sense of security, unity, orientation, roots, belonging, and identity. Individuation, or the loss or growth away from primary ties brings with it freedom but also aloneness and loss of all that primary ties provided. As the benefits of primary ties are reduced (or lost) the growing individual must find them elsewhere and this process can be all consuming because aloneness is intolerable for people. Everyone (and every society) as they grow up and divest themselves of primary ties feels a temptation to give up the quest for individuality. The wish to return to the primary ties is impossible. “Just as a child can never return to the mother’s womb physically, so it can never reverse, psychically, the process of individuation.”
Two paths are open to the individuating individuals (or societies): 1) submission to some power or authority. This path is compelling because it resembles an earlier time when full dependence was part of life and where security, and all the benefits of primary ties were in one’s life. Sometimes consciously submission may make this the case, “but unconsciously it [a child] realizes that the price it pays is giving up strength and the integrity of its self. Thus the result of submission is the very opposite of what it was to be: submission increases the child’s insecurity and at the same time creates hostility and rebelliousness, which is the more frightening since it is directed against the very persons on whom the child has remained —or become—dependent.” 2) An alternative path that avoids aloneness and anxiety, “the only one which is productive and does not end in an insoluble conflict, is that of spontaneous relationship to man and nature, a relationship that connects the individual with the world without eliminating his individuality. This kind of relationship—the foremost expressions of which are love and productive work—are rooted in the integration and strength of the total personality and are therefore subject to the very limits that exist for the growth of the self.”
Primary ties block development of the individual self in both individuals and societies. As we develop, we become stronger, more reasonable, and more capable both as individuals and as societies. It is through our growth of capabilities that we have the power to love and work on our own terms. If we are still burdened by primary ties we are not developing ourselves rather we are in submission to the powers that determine us from our society; we hobble our individuality. This is unbalanced growth a type of imaturity. When our powers grow but our individuality falters; we become unstable our new powers are controlled by old thinking or we become unhinged and rebellious. We exercise our new powers without having found loving or productive expressions – that is we hurt others with our new powers; societies hurt other societies. For example, just because a child has grown tall enough to drive does not mean the child is ready to drive – a child may physically be tall enough and have the power it takes to drive a car at 12 years of age but our society rightly prevents a child from driving until they have reached the age of 16 because we feel 12 year olds are not mature enough. The nature of this maturity is clearly not physical rather it is an emotional, ethical, intellectual maturity. When we choose to submit to external authority, we may appear to gain some security and belonging, but not only do we give up freedom, we foreclose on balanced growth: our emotional, ethical, and intellectual maturity is stifled because it contracted out maturity to an external agency.
In order to better understand maturity, we need to better understand the particularly modern meaning of freedom. In order to do that we need to look at the foundation of the modern world: the Reformation and the Renaissance. “The Reformation is one root of the idea of human freedom and autonomy as it is represented in modern democracy…its other aspect—its emphasis on the wickedness of human nature, the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual, and the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside of himself—is neglected.”
The medieval world lasted about a thousand years and near the end had a stratified social life that provided psychological security due to everyone knowing their place in society and very little freedom to move or change one’s location or job. The medieval world first started to break up in what we call Italy today. The author gives several reasons, coastal cities’ geographical position offered them easier access to world markets, the perennial struggle between the pope and various kings and emperors gave the Italian costal cities incentive to go out in search of allies and wealth, and the Orient was easier to access for these coastal cities. A newly rich merchant class developed a new individuality based on new values such as initiative, egocentrism, and ambition – the renaissance and capitalism were the products of this class. But it also poisoned all the existing relationships. “The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status”, they felt a new anxiety. Noblesse oblige, which served as a stabilizing and legitimizing force was never taken up by the new class in the same way; they sought to maximizing profit – In their initiative and ambition they squeezed the last bit of value out of everything they touched. For all classes the squeeze was on; all experienced economic and personal pressures linked to the new class. This created resentment in the nobility and envy in the middle and lower classes. This envy and resentment was communicated back to the newly wealthy class in many ways such that the new class felt anxious for their power and wealth in a way that never existed before. This new wealth and power afforded the newly rich access to positive freedom to a degree that was different in degree and kind to what had existed before. The art and culture of the renascence was the outward expression of how the new class tried to deal with their new anxieties, “if one’s relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one’s doubts.”
The old aristocracy, the middle class that did not achieve high levels of wealth and the lower working class and poor needed a new way to deal with their anxieties. The Reformation of Luthor and Calvin did for the rest what the renaissance did for the new rich. “Protestantism and Calvinism, while giving expression to a new feeling of freedom, at the same time constituted an escape from the burden of freedom.” One of the tasks of philosophy is to analyze the psychological effects on a person of holding a particular idea. Luthor, condemning the Catholic practice of buying indulgences to obtain forgiveness of sins, removed the church’s authority and gave it to the individual – the individual was now free on religious matters according to his conscience; but the individual was now judged practically on their own “merits” despite the claim of justification by faith and not by works. Faith can be positive: a sign of trust and an affirmation of life or the opposite “it can be a reaction formation against a fundamental feeling of doubt, rooted in the isolation of the individual and his negative attitude toward life. Luther’s faith had that compensatory quality.” This doubt would cause more anxiety. The doctrine of predestination answered that doubt: nothing you did would change whether you go to heaven or not. This destroyed the basic equality of people for now there are some who are better in God’s eyes than others. It had the effect of creating more anxiety: no one could know if they were truly saved. These doctrines create a deep and hidden irrational fear that was only alleviated by hiding from it in an extreme submission to the Word of God to deal with the merits needed for salvation and/or the obsession with work, success, and fame to hide the fact that we can never know the condition of our salvation. “The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.”