For Descartes, the real question is not what is “the good”, but rather whether we can possibly ever find out about it. But we will have a look on the exact comparison in the second part of the paper.
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René Descartes' understanding of human freedom: free will as a precondition to philosophical thinking:Ĭontrary to Plato, René Descartes does not see freedom as the achievement of philosophers, but rather as the necessary prerequisite to doing philosophy in the first place. Philosophical freedom can only exist when true philosophers (those who know what is good) rule a society and prevent everybody else from making false decisions and enslaving themselves to what they believe is good, but what is in reality only their lowest desires.
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Well, in the first place, aren't they free? And isn't the city full of freedom and freedom of speech? And isn't there license in it to do whatever one wants? And it would, it seems, be a pleasant constitution – lacking rulers but not complexity, and assigning a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. This becomes clear when we have a quick concluding look at Plato's thoughts on democracy: does not know what is good for him 11, a society relies on philosophers to lead it towards the good (or to make good decisions for it): the philosopher's job is to determine what is good for everybody. But because the ordinary farmer or shoemaker or soldier, etc. According to Plato, these 'free' decisions are all motivated by the desire to get “the good” 10. This definition of the good is so important, because it shows us what Plato thinks about freedom: In theory, everybody is free to chose a profession, to vote for one party or another, to do one thing or another, etc. He compares it to the sun that sheds light on the world, making it possible to see everything that is important 7: “Furthermore, you also know that the masses believe pleasure to be the good, while the more refined believe it to be knowledge.” 8 Knowing everything that is good is knowing the good itself 9, and vice versa. But what is the good? This question is probably too complex to answer in barely one page, but regarding our main question, we can work with the following explanation: Plato argues that there is a fundamentally good principle in the universe that gives sense and an order to life. According to Plato's statement, not every citizen, but precisely only those who are fit to ruling, are capable of leading the society, and thus every individual, towards “the good” 6.
4 This logically leads him to the conclusion that there can only be certain people that are capable of ruling 5. Plato starts with the assertion (that sounds logical, even to modern thinkers) that every human being has a specified talent and should therefore be assigned to a specific job. In Plato's philosophy, humans are not equally well equipped in terms of their mental capacity to make morally and practically sound decisions. Plato's understanding of human freedom: political freedom as the enemy of a good individual and a good society However, the goal of this paper is not to determine, who was the “best” philosopher, but rather to show how different their conceptions of human freedom and the human capacity to ask questions truly were. That will be determining which thinker was most thoroughly committed to the radical questioning of things, that we nowadays hold to be the core value of philosophy. This is crucial to completing the third and last part of this paper. The goal of this analysis is to examine how the conception of human freedom changed from Plato over Descartes to Camus. After that, we can have a look at the key differences that are – or maybe are not – findable when comparing Plato's “Republic” 1 and Descartes' “Meditations on First Philosophy” 2, as well as when comparing Descartes' work and Camus' “The Myth of Sisyphus” 3. In doing so, it is very important to, first of all, define how Plato, Descartes, and Camus saw human freedom. Over the course of history, especially the art of philosophy has seen many great thinkers reflecting on the nature of human freedom: Three of them – Plato, René Descartes, and Albert Camus – are the material on which this paper will retrace the development of the interpretation of human freedom. The human freedom and the human capability to reflect about the circumstances of our existence are phenomenons that have puzzled philosophers, anthropologists and other scientists alike, since we can think. The concepts of human freedom and radical questioning in the works of Plato, René Descartes, and Albert Camus
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