LIFESTYLE | PHILOSOPHY | BUDDHISM

What I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh about two kinds of freedom

(two kinds of truth, two kinds of freedom)

We Live in an Ocean of Air — an installation by Marshmallow Laser Feast, with Mileece l’ Anson and Natan Sinigaglia, at the Singapore ArtScience Museum — photo by flaleman, 2022

Thinking back of my school years, I remember that John Locke, the great English philosopher and physician of the 17th century CE, taught that all of us, humans, are born into perfect freedom. We are naturally free, he wrote — free to do what we want, how we want, and when we want. The only constraint is that we need to stay within the bounds of what Locke called the Law of Nature.

Meanwhile, in France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was just a bit younger than Locke, replaced the rather vague (and therefore infamous) constraint of the Law of Nature with freedom as personal autonomy — and obedience only to whatever law that one has prescribed to oneself.

Immanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher and one of the central thinkers of the movement that later came to be called “the Enlightenment,” formulated freedom as a positive concept, going somewhat further than Rousseau. Freedom, Kant asserted, is nothing else than the free capacity for choice. It is the unconditional and undeniable right of the individual to set one’s own ends. And he also said that autonomy of the will is the supreme principle of morality and a necessary condition of moral…