[Pythagorean]

I believe that freedom for man consists in a particular type of triumph and victory. It consists of the expressions of individual mastery in the midst of chaos, tragedy and brutality. Freedom is a sort of purified assertion of the will of a people or a person within a world rife with chaos and brutality. To say that freedom is survival is only partly correct because true freedom is mastery that has already met its challenges.


People who are free or have been free in the past are known by their names: Greeks, Persian, Florentines and also Americans, Germans, Japanese etc. all of the renowned groups have triumphed over great difficulties and become famous within our history books. History is silent however upon the majority of mankind who lived anonymously and briefly, and who left behind no enduring legacy or cultural achievement. The successful races of people are known and the failures are obscured. Those races who have achieved have gained their measure of freedom and success beyond mere survival; their spirits have soared in the world. Sucess and triumph transcends time and is recognizable because it is particular and unified. It is unified and particular because through the human will it has overcome chaos and formlessness. Free people have beaten the odds!

The Greeks found purpose in nature whereas the modern Europeans found purpose in history. The Greeks revered nature and saw history as mundane. The Europeans did not revere the natural world as did the Greeks; the ancient Greeks, in my opinion, were more primitive and backward in this regard than were the Europeans from the 18th Century to the middle of the 20th Century.

The Europeans used history as a guide for humans to achieve freedom in the world. History was, for them, a better guide toward self-perfection and freedom than was nature. For the Europeans nature was lower and nature was also something to be made use of and not worshiped.



The Greeks who lived in nature would not understand the philosophy of history which is a philosophy which states that there is meaning for man within history itself. There was no purpose in history for the Greeks; history for them was not considered to be progressive in nature. The Greeks knew no philosophy of history.

The type of greatness that Plato the Greek espoused was aristocratic rationalism, an endless discourse upon the purpose of man and nature. Whereas the type of greatness that some modern European philosophies of freedom espoused did not involve nature. For them man was free even from nature, man was to pursue his authenticity using his own psychological powers without any hinderance from within nature. Modern man was radically free to create himself within a cosmos that was lower and more mundane. Man was to erect his psychological masterpiece, which was the creation of himself as a unified and free individual, upon the stage of history.

For the Greeks the power to move the world dwelled in natural forces. Whereas for Nietzsche, for example, the power to move the world lay in man's psychological force called the will to power. Some may argue that the will to power is tantamount to the superstitions of the Greeks with their nature worship and their gods. And I would agree to the extent that Nietzsche's psychological will powers point to an explosive transmutable psychological 'substance' or bio-chemical element that is empirical and 'this' worldly although not fully known and therefore mysterious to us. But if Nietzsche and the moderns are correct then through the achievement of freedom and authenticity through the will to power the true individual will be actually capable of controlling the machinery of world-history. Because the authentically free man is so profound as to literally move the world.

True freedom may just lie in this mystery of psychological profundity and the authentic powers of the will as the will of man conquers nature and forces himself upon world-history as a particular set of psychological states and power-moves.

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