Valuing Freedom

            Often I ask, why I behave like this, why I decide to do things like that and how come I commit mistake? Am I obliged to commit such in order for me to know how to become right someday and eventually decipher that truly life is a union of opposites wherein we cannot know the reality of a something unless we experience the opposite? If so, how embarrassing life should be? In fact sometimes these experiences lead me to the point of blaming my Creator who is the Ultimate Source of my existence (i.e. The Supreme Being-God). If I were not given freedom as one of His greatest gifts to humankind, I may not act the way I act as I am today because ‘agere sequitor esse’ for action defines to be who and what I am.

            Martin Heidegger points it out that man is Dasein (i.e. being in the world) yet while fully immersed in the world, he is not fully ‘of the world’. He does not drift into the trivialities the world offers for such will just make him preoccupied with these things, but instead he keeps on withdrawing in order to reflect and remind himself of his ultimate purpose. However, it remains a challenge on how he becomes able to define his existence inasmuch as the circumstance he is to participate with is limited to the situation where he exists corporeally. Example if he lives in America, then subsequently he will have an orientation and life style akin to that of the Americans. If he were in the Philippines, then it will follow that he is immersed to the Filipino culture unlike to those of Chinese, Russians or Europeans leading to a subjective conviction if what we can define to be human ‘per se’. In addition, by the fact that we exist as finite, quantified, flawed and problematic beings, then it becomes inevitable to commit wrong acts.

            Yet after a deep introspection, I come to the point of comprehending that the option I can do is to accept these realities of being human while thinking that these are merely challenges to overcome. To expound, those are just spices for me whether I am already mature enough to face the reality of life ‘per se’. Besides freedom should not be cognised to be something negative but instead we take its implication as positive. Indeed, Richard Gula states that freedom denotes an obligation. It enables us to subordinate our self-interests in order to give a greater degree of preference to serving the needs of others over our own. This is the kind of freedom that makes our gifts as instruments of God’s love. In discerning, we have Jesus Christ, our Lord as a model of the free and faithful response to God, and we have the Holy Spirit to empower us to make such a response. Hence, I must accept that I am not totally dependent of my own free will however there is God who serves as an antecedent who influences me in every endeavour I may take.