Freedom, generally, is having the ability to act or change
without constraint. Something is "free" if it can change easily and is
not constrained in its present state. In philosophy and religion, it is
associated with having free will and being without undue or unjust constraints, or enslavement, and is an idea closely related to the concept of liberty.
A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in
practice, be prevented by other forces. Outside of the human realm,
freedom generally does not have this political or psychological
dimension. A rusty lock might be oiled so that the key has the freedom
to turn, undergrowth may be hacked away to give a newly planted sapling
freedom to grow, or a mathematician may study an equation having many degrees of freedom.
In physics or engineering, the mathematical concept may also be applied
to a body or system constrained by a set of equations, whose degrees of
freedom describe the number of independent motions that are allowed to
it.
Free will
In philosophical discourse, freedom is discussed in the context of free will and self-determination, balanced by moral responsibility.
Advocates of free will regard freedom of thought as innate to the
human mind, while opponents regard the mind as thinking only the
thoughts that a purely deterministic brain happens to be engaged in at
the time.
Personal and social freedom or liberty
Four Freedoms, a series of paintings meant to describe the freedoms for which allied nations fought in World War II.
In political discourse, political freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving oneself their own laws", and with having rights and the civil liberties with which to exercise them without undue interference by the state. Frequently discussed kinds of political freedom include freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of choice, and freedom of speech.
In some circumstances, particularly when discussion is limited to
political freedoms, the terms "freedom" and "liberty" tend to be used
interchangeably. Elsewhere, however, subtle distinctions between freedom and liberty have been noted. John Stuart Mill,
differentiated liberty from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if
not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the
power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary
restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such,
the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the
rights of others.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explains the differences in terms of their relation to institutions:
Liberty is linked to human subjectivity; freedom is not. The Declaration of Independence, for example, describes men as having liberty and the nation as being free. Free will—the quality of being free from the control of fate or necessity—may first have been attributed to human will, but Newtonian physics attributes freedom—degrees of freedom, free bodies—to objects.
Freedom differs from liberty as control differs from discipline. Liberty, like discipline, is linked to institutions and political parties, whether liberal or libertarian; freedom is not. Although freedom can work for or against institutions, it is not bound to them—it travels through unofficial networks. To have liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be self-determining, autonomous. Freedom can or cannot exist within a state of liberty: one can be liberated yet unfree, or free yet enslaved (Orlando Patterson has argued in Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture that freedom arose from the yearnings of slaves).
Another distinction that some political theorists have deemed important is that people may aspire to have freedom from limiting forces (such as freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from discrimination), but descriptions of freedom and liberty generally do not invoke having liberty from anything. To the contrary, the concept of negative liberty refers to the liberty one person may have to restrict the rights of others.
Other important fields in which freedom is an issue include economic freedom, academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and scientific freedom.
Freedom as a physical concept
In
purely physical terms, freedom is used much more broadly to describe
the limits to which physical movement or other physical processes are
possible. This relates to the philosophical concept to the extent that
people may be considered to have as much freedom as they are physically
able to exercise. The number of independent variables or parameters for a system is described as its number of degrees of freedom.
For example the movement of a vehicle along a road has two degrees of
freedom; to go fast or slow, or to change direction by turning left or
right. The movement of a ship sailing on the waves has four degrees of
freedom since it can also pitch nose-to-tail and roll side-to-side. An
aeroplane can also climb and sideslip, giving it six degrees of freedom.
Degrees of freedom in mechanics describes the number of independent motions that are allowed to a body, or, in case of a mechanism
made of several bodies, the number of possible independent relative
motions between the pieces of the mechanism. In the study of complex motor control,
there may be so many degrees of freedom that a given action can be
achieved in different ways by combining movements with different degrees
of freedom. This issue is sometimes called the degrees of freedom problem.
"Freedom of Gait" in Dressage Theory (a concept in horse
training) refers to the horse's ability to reach his natural range of
motion (seen at liberty) under the rider. This can only be accomplished
if the rider has an independent seat. It must be established and
maintained in basic training and refers mostly to the biomechanical
articulation of the rear and front legs.
Freedom in mathematical theory
In mathematics freedom is the ability of a variable to change in value.
Some equations have many such variables. This notion is formalized as the dimension of a manifold or an algebraic variety. When degrees of freedom is used instead of dimension,
this usually means that the manifold or variety that models the system
is only implicitly defined. Such degrees of freedom appear in many
mathematical and related disciplines, including degrees of freedom as used in physics and chemistry to explain dependence on parameters, or the dimensions of a phase space; and degrees of freedom in statistics, the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary.
