Freedom

 Some points from Ploughshare's review of Maggie Nelson’s Complication of Freedom I think eorth considering:

Here is a way that Nelson comes to identify and appreciate freedom’s paradox—that true freedom comes with an understanding of limits, or an appreciation of the idea of constraint. In terms of art—explored in her first chapter—understanding the limits of what art can do, how well we express ourselves, and the knowledge that deeper engagement occurs with an understanding of other people’s situations and points of view helps us communicate. She quotes the philosopher Brian Massumi: “Freedom always arises from constraint—it’s a creative conversion of it, not some utopian escape from it.”

That is an idea I first came to through Orthodox Christianity - that the constraints of Christianity are true freedom, not the pleasures of the world. Too many choices are not freedom but restrictions.

I have seen addicts up close. I did drugs with them. Drugs were how they coped with a universe they found inhospitable. So agree in part with the following with the caveat there was knowledge they were indulging in a slow suicide.

Nelson says that it is a mistake to think of addiction as a substitute for human connection; rather, addiction “reveals our porousness to nonhuman people—our appetite for and vulnerability to them”; sobriety ends up becoming “a form of mourning, insofar as it requires letting go of forms of coping that one previously felt unable to go on without.” There is a value in discerning between “forms of abandonment that vitalize and those that thwart,” Nelson believes, and we aren’t in a place to assume that one who pursues pleasure, chemically or otherwise, is not living purely in doing so. A purer freedom is found not by detaching oneself from a dependency but by living fully through it—the creative conversion of restraint that Massumi preached.

Again, like Camus snd Nietzsche, creativity is the way out of nihilism. 

Think on this.

4/26/22