Psychological Aspect of Freedom

Abstract

One of the principal traits of the psychological aspect of freedom is the feeling of a free choice among different possibilities for an individual, quite personal, realization of man in life. This freedom of choice does not mean that this personal choice has no reason or cause. Every free personal choice has its reason and its cause, but they lie in man himself, in his bio-psychical structure and not outside of man, not in his social and cosmic environment. The difference between a free and an unfree choice consists in that the determiners of a free choice lie in man himself, and the determiners of an unfree choice lie outside of man. In other words, the difference between a free and an unfree choice is not that a free choice lies outside every determination, outside every law of causation, but in the character of determination. All in the universe is determined, and the term “indeterminism” indicates only that the realization of the given phenomenon or event was on the ground of a free choice among different existential possibilities, i.e. that the existence of the given phenomenon or event was not absolutely necessary but only relatively; not a result of the so-called “choiceless — blind — cause,” but a result of a deliberate choice among different existential possibilities.