The 20th century was a hecatomb at the expense of freedom, under totalitarian idealisms that swore prosperity and brought its antinomy. After a breakthrough in freedom, we retreat towards security. This is a folly and an attack against the human spirit. Jünger, in The AmbushHe clarifies: "a great majority does not want freedom and is even afraid of it (...) -freedom is above all the conscious agreement with existence and is the pleasure, felt as destiny, of making it a reality". A dangerous freedom is more praiseworthy than quiet submission and servitude, in the light of Zambrano. Frankl knew that everything could be taken away from him except his individuality: the ultimate consciousness.
Man acts in order to feel someone -free- and not to dissolve in a "whole", where dignity is dehumanized in the crowd. Frankl believes in an immanent transcendental freedom, where the will shines beyond the dynamism of desire. For this reason, freedom is an antidote to fear, because the one who grants this stage of "conscious agreement with existence" is the Truth: "The truth will set you free" (John 8, 31-42).
Frankl draws from Kierkegaard's existentialism (individuality and leap of faith in the face of anguish) and German idealism and its "consciousness of necessity" (Kant and Hegel). For Frankl, "to live means to take responsibility for finding the right answer to the questions that life poses"; man is "The being who always decides what he is". As in Rousseau: "Freedom is the capacity to begin anew at every instant", and in Ratzinger: "Freedom means to accept of one's own free will the possibilities of my existence". He conceives freedom as an affirmation of reality; even if possibilities are limited or suffered, they are still possibilities. "Man does not invent his meaning in life, but discovers it.Alétheiaas the unveiling of the truth.
Transcendence
We are all called inwardly to transcendence. "Amor veritas, amor rei": he who loves truth, loves reality, where the human being manifests himself. Frankl accepts suffering, for the inevitable should not grieve the spirit of a free soul. The messianic Lenin asked "Freedom for what?"; many followers of the path of servitude -in Hayek's terms-, culminate in iniquity and misery, without knowing that freedom is the only way.
Man in search of meaning love transcends the physical person of the beloved and finds its deepest meaning in the spiritual being, the intimate self. Without truth there is no freedom, without freedom there is no love, but without love there is no truth, for love is the greatest of truths; and if love is truth, and truth is love, love is free. Now we can say that truth has made us free, for love has made us free to love.
Chesterton, like Frankl, feels infinite gratitude for beauty and affirms that "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. Mad is the man who has lost everything but reason". Vicissitudes open the way to sanctification: suffering is the vehicle by which we exercise virtue and humanize ourselves. Faced with absolute reason, in the leap of faith we find the Grace of God, against the decay of morality.
Freedom, Truth and Love: the triad against fear. The ephemeral can plunge us into absurdity, for is it not an aporia that things are born to die? But Spinoza, in the last scholium of his Ethics, affirmed that the sublime is as difficult as it is rare, and its value lies in freedom as concordance with necessity: love. Is it not sublime that inert matter and life converge, and from nothingness emerges being, like freedom from a prison? Life, in its fickleness, wanted to contemplate itself, like a pupil recognizing itself in the reflection of another. The meaning of life is to live it in Truth; for we were made to live, free in it.
And in gratitude to the Maker, I return His love in the following poem: Lumen gloriae
The essence is coherence and concord,
courage in the face of apostasy, fear and hatred,
freedom and love, defense and honor,
Praise for action, shame for anxiety.
I do not fear death, that is why I love life,
I discover myself and dissolve in the truth,
and if I am part of it, what else but not to feel it,
for you cannot deny it once you have diluted it.
We are conscious of finitude, lost,
suffocating our deepest longings,
for a new world, without veils or screams,
that begins at the moment we die.
And there is no greater conquest than love,
than a metaphysics of human pride,
of our being, beyond its comprehension,
of freedom, understanding and heart.
