The paradox of freedom

This is the terrible thing about force: that it appears to us as something we cannot resist, the law of an inescapable necessity. And what is disturbing is that it does not belong solely to nature, which dominates us from without, or to the rule of a political regime, but is also a constitutive factor of our very nature. Herein also lies the drama of force: in the fact that it inevitably imposes itself in the face of, and often against, human freedom. And this holds true even for those who regard our freedom as an illusion, yet cannot help but feel it or seek it within themselves. And if we then consider that this freedom, too, is in its own way a ‘force’ that springs from within, the picture becomes terribly complicated, yet ultimately it also comes full circle: what else would our life be if not a ‘force field’ in search of its own possible – or impossible – equilibrium? And what happens when that equilibrium is disrupted – and is constantly being disrupted?

This ambiguity of power – the fact that it is something which necessarily determines us, even if we do not want it to, and at the same time something we go along with because it sets us free – is never an either/or situation or a Manichaean alternative, as both determinists and moralists would have us believe, but rather a tension that is a permanent feature of our lives, one that profoundly shapes our existence in the world.

The problem arises when we discover – and we discover it all too soon, the hard way – that there are forces from which we cannot escape, and this impossibility of escape accompanies the very sense of our existence like a muffled basso continuo, determining the ‘quality’ and ‘tone’ of our self-awareness. This is an existential realisation, one that affects us personally, but which can lead to the metaphysical suspicion that the whole of human life depends on factors which people illusorily believe they can control, yet by which they are in fact completely dominated.

Simone Weil demonstrates this with poignant clarity in her essay on “L’Iliade poema della forza”, written between 1939 and 1941. The great Homeric poem is said to express, with an intensity of vision that remains unrivalled, a definitive truth: that ‘force turns anyone who is subject to it into a thing […], in the most literal sense of the word, because it transforms them into a corpse’. This effect of petrification that force produces on a man who is subject to it – that is, on all men, not only those defeated in battle, but also the victors – does not necessarily coincide with physical death, for it also affects those who continue to live, but no longer as ‘living flesh’, rather as a dead thing.

This dominion of force ‘extends as far as that of nature’: as in the case of the maternal love nurtured by Niobe, who, exhausted after the death of her twelve sons—left unburied at the behest of the gods— ‘thought of eating when she was weary of tears’, having been rendered ‘incapable even of feeling her own misery’, subject to a command ‘just as cold [...] and harsh as if it were exerted by inert matter’. That same force “crushes just as mercilessly” those who fall under its yoke as it “mercilessly intoxicates those who possess it or believe they possess it”. Not only Hector, but Achilles too; not only Achilles, but Priam as well; not only the Trojans, but the Achaeans too: “by virtue of being blind, fate establishes a sort of justice, blind itself”, and those who kill will in turn be killed with equal measure. It is called Nemesis. That in which ‘executioners and victims are equally innocent’, like brothers in the same misery.

For the protagonists of the Iliad, being aware of death as the sole destiny – as the very ‘future’ of life – means something quite different from the mere acceptance of the natural finitude of existence: rather, it means living ‘subjugated to the yoke of war’, driven by a genuine ‘need for death’, like the need for a terrible fulfilment, in which only destruction can bring liberation from the constant fear that petrifies the passage of life. Thus, although they are still alive, these men belong to ‘a race distinct from that of the living’, having fallen, as they have, to the level of inert matter, pure passivity driven by the impetus of blind forces.

And yet – and here Weil’s perspective becomes poignantly delicate – in the Iliad there resounds, almost imperceptibly, a ‘note’ of pure and touching regret for what force will lead to destruction. The note of love ‘of the son for his parents and of the father and mother for their son’, or that of conjugal love; the note of friendship between comrades-in-arms and – ‘an even greater miracle’ – that of the friendship which can bind even mortal enemies together. This ‘bitterness that springs from tenderness’, this profound regret for what is lost but might have been lived, is what makes one feel the rare ‘moments of grace’ in the poem, and even more so in the fate of force. Everything that ‘escapes the dominion of force’ in the soul and in human relationships is ‘loved, but loved painfully, because of that ever-present danger of destruction’.

This supreme ‘Greek genius’, first encountered in the Iliad, will, for Weil, be inherited solely by Attic tragedy (particularly Aeschylus and Sophocles) and will find its ultimate expression in none other than the Gospel. In particular, in his Passion, Christ “trembles before suffering and death”; he feels separated from mankind and even abandoned by God, thereby revealing the most acute understanding and expression of the dominion of force—that is, of the common destiny of human misery. To look this fate in the face, without illusions or justifications, means ‘to suffer force’ by allowing oneself to be struck by it ‘to the very soul’. And whilst grace – purely human in Homer’s poem, even divine in the Gospels – may prevent one from being corrupted and destroyed by the ‘blow’ of force, ‘it cannot, however, prevent the wound’.

It is this wound that enables a man ‘objectified’ by force to become a living man once more, a being of flesh and blood. Free once more, or perhaps free for the first time. Here, the true stakes become clear in the unstoppable dominion of force – more radical than the necessary laws of physical and biological nature, and yet, within them, even more profound than the ideological disputes surrounding force as the domain of political power. What is at stake is the possibility that that touch of tenderness and love, that extreme, dramatic sharing of human misery, might ultimately arise and act as a true ‘force’ in their own right.

This is clearly not a matter of ‘masking’ the invincibility of this force – as we have outlined it so far – with edifying narratives, nor of taming and making more bearable the tragic consequences it brings about in human existence, which is, as such, forever bent under its yoke. Rather, it is a matter of navigating its dominion, sensing – even more than the inescapable tragedy arising from the fate of death – the drama it provokes when it intersects and intertwines with that other force: the irreducible desire of the human soul, the desire to exist and to fulfil oneself, that is, to be happy.

This desire has often been interpreted as a mere biological force, a physiological impulse falling within the realm of the ‘psychic’, yet always on the verge of turning into a pathological experience. As if it were the individual manifestation, within the conscious self, of an unconscious power: what Freud, drawing on Georg Groddeck, had termed the impersonal, necessary ‘Id’. We still find ourselves in the full grip of the dark, blind force of nature, which now, however, evolves almost seamlessly into ‘culture’ and ‘history’. Yet it remains the relentless force we know, merely managed and processed, perhaps, in bourgeois drawing rooms. Or, in what is only an apparent contrast, it unfolds as a revolutionary and/or reactionary force in the history of classes and states, of capital and labour, of markets and finance.

All these forms, despite their radical differences, are manifestations of the great force – both natural and political – which we delude ourselves into believing we can control and manage on our own, whether as individuals or as a collective, but which ultimately and inevitably plays us all. The force-necessity whose canon was established with geometric rigour once and for all by Spinozian rationalism, which pursues the ‘scientific’ claim to finally resolve the most burning problem of the human condition – that of the freedom of the self – simply by dissolving it into the inevitable acceptance of the necessity of force. The truly fulfilled—that is, happy—man is he who, through intellectual exercise, has learnt to free himself from compulsion, even from that extreme form represented by death, and to no longer fear it, because he intuits that even destruction forms part, ‘divinely’, of the homeostasis of man’s natural forces.

Here is the verdict of the insurmountable force: the desire of the self that becomes the simple ‘conatus’ (Spinoza again) through which human beings tend to preserve their vital force, as a survival instinct. But perhaps not everything is ‘held’ by this force, and homeostasis is ultimately always at risk. It is that happy instability in which the system of tendencies and counter-tendencies leaves room for an asymmetry within the cycle of actions and reactions.

This asymmetry has revealed itself with particular force in the Judeo-Christian experience of the self and the world. The decisive principle – and in this case a truly revolutionary one – is that all the forces of the universe encounter a point of incredible resistance at the heart of the human being, and in their decision – seemingly of no consequence in relation to the cosmic and political order – to ‘will’ the good or to reject it; that is, to open themselves up to grace or, conversely, to close themselves off from it. And the latter is a strange force, for although it is radically ‘other’ than human decisions or merits, it calls upon – and I would almost say awaits – the assent of mortals. It is distinct from our freedom, yet it can be given and manifested only to a free being. Its order is no longer that of mere imposition from above, but of a call from the heart itself. This is what Paul of Tarsus (Letter to the Romans) identified in the conflict between the Law—closely bound to the slavery of sin—and the Spirit of God, which leads us to realise that we are no longer slaves but ‘children’. This means we are capable of welcoming another force that acts in a personal—and responsible—way within our own hearts.

This is clearly evident in Augustine’s discovery of the decisive and, until then, previously unrecognised role of the human will in relation to evil. Significantly, in contrast to the Manichaean view – for whom evil is a metaphysical ‘force’ opposed to good on a cosmic level, and against which the individual is powerless and for which they bear no blame – Augustine insists on attributing responsibility for evil to the ‘perverse’ use of the human will, in which also lies the possibility of changing course and ‘converting’ the orientation of the will itself towards being and the good.

From that moment on, the true centre of power shifts its location, taking root in the heart of man. And not because it is capable of halting or nullifying the forces that inexorably determine the course of nature and the events of history, but because it is capable of questioning their meaning. Indeed, because it discovers that it is in need of meaning. This need is its true power. It is no cheap solution; indeed, ever since then we have been constantly tempted – and sometimes compelled – to say that there is nothing we can do in the face of the fate that looms over us, even when we misnomerously refer to this mortal fate as the ‘will of God’. Yet every time we think this, we reaffirm, through that very thought, a strength within us that does not yield. This strength of resistance always coincides with the intuition – often a simple suggestion, in some cases merely a fleeting suspicion born of the very fabric of experience – that we are children rather than slaves. The hallmark of sonship is a generation that does not predetermine existence, but rather gives it the vital space to unfold in its own way.

In Paul’s Christian paradox – ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ (2 Corinthians) – one hears not only, as Weil maintained, the Greek principle of the Iliad, but also a new emphasis which would be too much for the Greek genius, and which is rightly too much, indeed far too much, given its absolute gratuitousness, the most fitting image of which remains that of a wholly unpredictable encounter, such as that with a loved one or a friend who suddenly makes us see the balance of strength in a different light.

This is not a difference between doctrines or between different interpretations, but a difference in experience. It is not a matter of explaining things better, but of paying closer attention to what can make our very weakness a source of strength. Indeed, one might say that weakness, which inevitably marks us all, is precisely the way in which each person lives out and experiences their own specific strength. And what if we were to reflect once more on what the great Leibniz said about "vis" – the force or dynamic energy that acts from within every individual (monad), reflecting – in each person in their own specific way – the forces that sustain and move the entire universe? A point, however tiny, of thought and therefore of freedom – the most astonishing force in the world.