Thoughts on freedom

How hollow an ideal, freedom; utterly devoid of content. It tells us nothing for life. To be free is not to be virtuous. It means nothing more than the absence of constraint. Free to do what? Free from what? The uses of the word are revealing. It expresses potential, but is itself insubstantial.
A common understanding of freedom is that strange perversion of the golden rule: not to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but to do as you will so long as your will does not conflict with another's. Here freedom is alienating. The will of others is a constraint on your own will; alone, you are more free than you are with someone else. If freedom is the end towards which our social, political, and cultural institutions work, we are truly lost, for we have admitted that community devalues us.
Perhaps a new ideal: "Affect one another." Be the change you want in the world. Parrhesia, self-disclosure. We are most reliably answerable to our own experience of the world, and our experience of the world is shaped by our interactions with our communities. Thus, the way one life brings itself to bear on another is more meaningful than the moral criteria we have thus far contented ourselves with.
I agree with Nietzsche that morality is not transcendentally guaranteed. It is not natural, neutral, or objective, nor should it be. Our experiences do not yield answers to moral questions in any systemic fashion. Everything we understand about nature suggests that it is amoral. Survival of the fittest rests ill on the moral mind.
The order of things is trounced at every turn.
Begin instead with beauty; that which speaks to feeling and experience and life. It is in our apprehension of the world. To hold a moral ideal must first be to experience it as beautify; worthy of further experience.
Sublimity in particular: the beauty of boundlessness! To be overwhelmed by grandeur even as your own insignificance comes into harsh focus. And to experience this powerlessness positively; indeed, to crave it! It is our most honest insight into reality. How limited we are, and how much we will never know.
And so I return to freedom--empty of value and wanting for guidance--wondering if the craving for freedom is somehow bound up in the desire for the sublime. To we not value freedom precisely for its infinite possibilities?
Bear with me when I call this freedom-yet-to-be, for freedom as we now understand it misconstrues the encounter of the sublime. Freedom dares us to dive into that abyss we stare so long into.
The sublime reflects the balance between finitude and terror. As we speak it, freedom holds no such prudence. Freedom demands actualization; it cannot see how opening one door closes another. All its promises arrive at once and, overburdened, we mourn its collapse through internal failure.

Aphorism #1

The Daimon: Pour your soul out. Bleed words. Every entry something vital, as though to mark something deep and personal and vivid on a blank page. Feel the satisfaction as you pour out and the page fills up, no longer blank and intimidating, but an undeniable marker that there was indeed an author.

How long should it take to learn that writing doesn't work that way? No doubt my postmodern friends are in a lather to remind me that the author is dead. Well, Nietzsche said the same of God, but you'd never catch him getting all giddy about it. As it is with gods, so too is it with authors--though they die, they also linger.