Freedom can never be complete; it can be understood only in matters of degree. That is to say, an individual's ability to exercise freedom is directly dependent on the degree to which that individual knows he is free; how much, in quantity, is he self-aware? Using metaphor, it is the degree to which the individual can step outside of himself, outside of the object that is human, and move this object like a chess piece. Thus, the person who truly seeks freedom, the person who seeks to apply this chess principle to his own life, must answer this essential question: why does this beast, sometimes called ‘such and such’ by friends and family, do what it does? Why does it think what it thinks?
From this question one can easily see that freedom is also dependent on the amount of courage the individual has. Does he have the courage to ask such questions, to step toward the abyss? Toward the uncertain? To question what is taught or believed? To confront his freedom head on? The individual who has this courage will exercise a great deal of true freedom in his life; and still, even he cannot be entirely free. The facts of his physical state cannot be denied. The beast reminds him of itself every time he excretes. He is a slave to his body, which also makes him a slave to the beast, a beast that will cause him to commit a wide variety of appalling acts, in spite of himself. But not only is he subject to the demands of this beast, he is also confined by the environment in which he lives. Without water, air and sun, provided solely by the external world, he will die. Thus the idea of complete freedom is questionable on these basic levels, since there are things that the individual 'must' do.
It is self-awareness that limits the number of ‘must-dos’ an individual will face. One can even, though difficult, choose to disobey one’s thirst, or to not breathe in air, or to not eat; but again the outcome is death. I suppose, Albert Camus was here when he penned: suicide is the only true philosophical question. Camus had settled upon the fact that the human is a conscious beast; he recognized the absurdity of the fact that we live our lives knowing we will die; he had confronted the random and untimeliness of death, the tremendous lack of control involved with living; there was no God in Camus’ world, the individual’s life was left entirely in his own hands, and thereby, left him with no other choice but to confront the question: why live? Of course, E.O.Wilson pointed out that Camus might have been a bit hasty with his pen; the true philosophical question is whether or not to pass on your genetic material. ‘To concieve or not to concieve, that is the question’; if we are, as Dawkins put it, ‘survival machines’ for our genes, the individual ceases to matter; as long as he passes on his genetic material the beast has completed its task.
In any event, complete freedom is an impossible ideal. And a high level of self awareness must take place before one can even get close. Again, the individual must know he is free, in order to be free. People do not ‘know’ they are free. They do not exercise choice. People cannot stand outside of themselves and move their body like a chess piece. This is absurd to some people. They do not seem the slightest bit interested in reflecting on their own behavior and questioning the validity of their choices and beliefs. This would be questioning the self, putting a magnifying glass on the cloud, only to find that there’s nothing really there but an animal object.
The concept ‘ego’, first developed by Sigmund Freud, is used as if it’s a household word, but I don’t think people really know what the term means. The ego is not a tangible thing. So when you say ‘he has a big ego’, you are not talking about something real that he has in his possession. If you look in the mirror, the ego will not reveal itself; an animate object stares back at you with an awareness of the fact, but that’s it. As Freud put it, the ego is just ‘a sense’ that the individual has of itself. In fact a simple definition for ego would be ‘the sense of self’; because this ‘sense of self’ is not really a tangible thing that one can hold and show to the audience, the ‘I’ who you think you are is just that: who you think you are. If you were to ask yourself: who am I, a very good answer would be some thing like ‘I’ am an organism with a memory of my past behavior, and an awareness of my current behavior, which allows me to predict how I will act in the future. Saying ‘he has a big ego’ is the equivalent of saying ‘his sense of himself is that he’s great’. What is vital to mental health, is that this ‘sense of self’ must run congruent with reality; if it doesn’t, one is thought of as suffering from delusion, among other things. It is much easier to delude oneself into believing he is great, than to actually be great. The truly great, never have ‘big egos’, for their greatness exists in reality.
People tend to think of themselves as fixed beings; they say, ‘I do this because, this is the way I am’. And usually, people are very resistant to changing themselves; they want that ‘sense of self’ to be a real thing and they desperately try to make it so. And still, the self remains nothing but a cloud, an elusive understanding of one’s own being. But since this understanding is like a cloud, it then must have a certain bit of malleability.