Mourning and the death of freedom

The criteria by which society and the environment facilitate and guide our habits of survival, pleasure, and duty, places our free will within the confines of empowerment. "There is freedom within limits" the maxim goes.

This is a central problem of the concept of free will, because the expression of freedom may be maladaptive to life in society, bringing survival and freedom into direct conflict, and so the will is bent to another purpose, which we declare free ad hoc to maintain our dignity. We are speaking of civic freedom, for what we have subjectively experienced was already invested in an approved activity. Its enjoyment is little comfort, because of the suspicion that it was inadequate - and perhaps not even our own.

Suicide can seem like the last expression of freedom, an act of defiance that sacrifices the subject in order to escape subjugation. Camus asked "Why should we live?", declaring suicide the only serious philosophical queston. Life, he said, is essentially meaningless and absurd, we yearn and we long and the universe is indifferent. And yet to acknowledge the futility, to carry on knowing hopelessness and still transform each moment into a treasure is to exercise freedom and be victorious. To commit suicide, he would say, is to have the problem backwards.

But methinks that there is an all-important phase missing, because it is memory that enhances the moment. Conscious of the freedom we've lost (even as Sisyphus must have been) there must still be a mourning process for the loss, the death, that we cannot regain - for a passing moment - without dying. And considering the surprising but possible link between beauty and freedom, we may well agree with Poe: the death of a beautiful woman is the saddest thing in the whole of the universe. Especially in an indifferent one.