Freedom and Community by Yves Simon, and: Freedom by Mortimer Adler (review)

564 BOOK REVIEWS Freedom and Community. By YVEs SIMON. Edited by CHARLES P. O'DoNNELL. New York: Fordham University Press, 1968. Pp. ~01. $5.50. Freedom. By MoRTIMER ADLER. Albany: Magi Books, Overview Studies, 1968. Pp. 47. $.50. Freedom and Community, an anthology of several published articles, manuscripts and notes of Yves Simon, presents a synthesis of the late philosopher's views on the nature of freedom. As such it is a welcome complement to his numerous publications on authority and government, from his Marquette University lecture, The Nature and Functions of Authority (1940), to his posthumous work, A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame, 1962) . In the preface to the latter work, A. Robert Caponigri wrote that Simon " is fascinated by authority precisely because he is so intensely devoted to freedom, to liberty." In that work and others Simon's concentration was on authority and its relation to freedom in a sound political community. In these newly published essays it is freedom which receives the primary emphasis. The first essay, entitled "Freedom in Daily Life" (originally Chapter I of Community of the Free, 1947) , asks how so many ordinary people could have been seduced into forfeiting their own freedom in the pre-World War II decades. Simon finds the explanation in the general indifference to truth inherited from nineteenth-century European liberalism, and he sees the resulting tragedy as an object lesson that freedom radically depends on adherence to truth: "All of our real freedom is contained within the limits of our knowledge of truth. . . . The spirit of freedom has no worse enemy than falsehood." (p. 4) Simon then expands on the responsibility of citizens to search out the truth about current events amid the formidable propaganda of governments and communications media. Toward the conclusion of the first essay Simon sets forth his central thesis on the true character of liberty, a thesis which thoroughly reflects the insights of Thomas Aquinas. The freedom of indetermination in choosing is only the fundamental presupposition to human liberty and not, as popularly misconceived, the essence or perfection of that liberty. The initial indetermination of man's will, involving the possibility of making wrong choices, is an imperfection which renders true freedom precarious. A man is really free when he so completely adheres to his true good that he can choose among a variety of acceptable means without the risk of choosing bad or illusory means that would make the attainment of his end impossible. This is the freedom for which Simon reserves the name "autonomy," a freedom wherein the moral law has become so interiorized that the human person's spontaneous inclinations coincide with it; and this interiorization involves " an ever better understanding of what it is BOOK REVIEWS 565 needful to know in order to act rightly, ... [and] an ever-deepening, spontaneous, and voluntary adherence to the necessary ends of our activity." (p. 18) It is when a person is thus determined to the good that he is most completely the master of his activity and, hence, most free. Freedom, therefore, is not the antithesis of order but is itself " the most ordered thing in the world; it causes order to descend into the depths of the human will." (p. 19) This is why both despotism and anarchy are enemies of freedom, since each in its own way is characterized by arbitrariness as opposed to order. The foregoing analysis reappears, with varieties in terminology and development, throughout the subsequent essays in Freedom and Community . The second article, "Liberty and Authority" (from the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1940), applies Simon's concept of freedom more explicitly to political society: just as personal freedom is perfected by overcoming the will's potentiality for disorderly or illusory choices, " so the freedom of the group is exalted by the suppression of the disorderly forces that tend to make impossible a resolute course of common action." (p. 46) It is precisely the essential function of authority to secure order in a community by assuring " the unity of action of a plurality of men in the pursuit of their common good." (p. 51) Besides this essential role, Simon ascribes other functions to authority, some...