The Critical Calling: Reflections on Moral Dilemmas Since Vatican II

10. Fundamental Freedom Revisited

Chapter 10 Fundamental Freedom Revisited It was noted in chapter 1 that the notion of fundamental or core freedom has settled pacifically into contemporary moral theology. It was also noted that this notion is under some recent challenges. In this chapter I shall attempt three things: (1) a brief review of the notion of fundamental freedom; (2) some pastoral implications of the notion; (3) recent misunderstandings and objections. My first two points will be preparatory for the third. Fundamental Freedom The notion of fundamental freedom entered systematic theological reflection largely through the writings of Karl Rahner. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his theological thought is quite simply "soaked" in the idea; for it is a key concept of his anthropology. Letting Rahner speak for himself has its risks, the chief one being a nagging headache. It is no secret that Rahner often leaves the impression that he is speakingto himself in a kind of free flow of consciousness. Nonetheless , given the importance—theological and pastoral—of the notion of basic freedom, I will run the risks. Rahner notes: Man's freedom and responsibility belong to the existentials of human existence . Since freedom is situated at the subjective pole of human existence and its experience,and not withinwhat is categorically given,the essential nature of this freedom does not consist in a particular faculty of man alongside of others by means of which he can do or not do this or 172 / Richard A. McCormick, S.J. that through arbitrary choices. It isonlytoo easy to interpret our freedom this way,an interpretation based on a pseudo-empirical understandingof freedom. But in reality freedom is first of all the subject's being responsible for himself, sothat freedom in its fundamental nature has to dowith the subject as such and as a whole. In real freedom the subject alwaysintends himself,understands and posits himself Ultimatelyhe does not do something, but does himself}For Rahner, then, freedom is transcendental, "not an object of experience nor merely the quality of an action, but a basic mode of being."2 He immediately draws two conclusions from this. First, freedom, as the capacity to decide about oneself, does not stand behind the concrete physical , biological, historical dimension of the person, as if it were some unearthly power unrelated to historical life. That would be gnostic, dualistic. Rather it "actualizes itself in and through the temporality that is our way of being. For this reason Rahner regards freedom as "much more nuanced, much more complex and much less unambiguous than the primitive, categorical conception of freedom as a capacity to do this or that arbitrarily."3 The second conclusion Rahner draws is that the actualization of this freedom "is not indeed an immediate, empirical, individual and categorically identifiable datum ofour experience." It is "an element in the subject himself which the subject cannot make conscious and objectify directly in its own self."4 Basic freedom is real in human experience, but is not "immediately and empirically observable in time and space." For this reason the "subject never has an absolute certainty about the subjective and therefore moral quality of these individual actions."5 The object, so to speak, of this core of transcendental freedom is God, absolute mystery, infinite horizon. Although we cannot know with certainty that a "yes" or "no" to God took place at a definite point in our lives, "we know that the entire life of a free subject is inevitably an answer to the question in which God offers himself to us as the source of transcendence."6 Thus, for Rahner there are two levels or dimensions to our concrete (categorical) actions, the level ofcategorical freedom and the level ofcore or transcendental freedom. He puts it as follows: Since in every act of freedom which is concerned on the categorical level with a quite definite object, a quite definite person, there is always present , as the condition ofpossibility for such an act, transcendence towards the absolute term and source of all of our intellectual and spiritual acts, and hence towards God, there can and must be present in every such act an unthematic "yes" or "no" to this God or original, transcendental experience . Subjectivity and freedom imply and entail that this freedom is Fundamental Freedom Revisited / 173 not only freedom with respect to the object of categorical experience within the absolute horizon of God, but it is also...