Breeze At My Back (Tacit Freedom)
In reflecting on how I often experience freedom, I find that it can be blowing gently on my back. This sense of freedom is subtly pushing me forward and upward. Michael Polanyi (2009) the Nobel-prize winning scientist (turned philosopher) might consider this form of freedom to be Tacitly held knowledge, motivation and insight. In a different context, Polanyi (1969) distinguishes between that which we are attending to (what we focus on) and that which we are attending from (the position we are taking when pointing to and focusing on something else). Typically, we are aware of that to which we are attending but are unaware (or at least care little about) that from which we are attending.
For Polanyi, the attending from dimension is critical to our understanding of the true nature of knowledge. Specially, we can never study the source of our attention—for at that point it becomes the focus of our attention. We are now attending from somewhere else and this somewhere else itself can never be objectively studied. In other words, there is ultimately no such thing as objectivity and dispassionate analysis. There is always the passion, bias and purpose to be found in the position from which we are attending. The tidy distinction between science and art is shattered.
I would suggest that I am often attending from freedom when I am making choices, when I am expressing my opinion about something, and when I am seeking fully to understand how another person is seeing and living in the world. Put succinctly, I believe that I am attending from freedom whenever I am seeking to be conscious and intentional in my thinking and decision-making.
Choice and Slow Thinking
When I am making choices about what I believe and how I subsequently act on this belief (e.g. when I purchase something) then I can attend from an assumption of and aspiration regarding being free in arriving at the belief. Behavioral scientists such as Danial Kahneman (2011) speak of the deliberative process that must accompany this reflective process if I am truly to be free. Kahneman describes this as Slow Thinking. By contrast, there is something that Kahneman calls Fast Thinking. This is the often habitual and bias-laden thinking that takes very little time or energy. It borrows uncritically from the heuristics (quickly accessed human “soft-ware”) that dominate our society (such as assumptions about people who possess different skin color or religious beliefs).
Instead of the heuristics being imposed by others who are in authority (have power) I am responsible for ensuring that I don’t impose my own heuristics on myself. I can escape from freedom (Fromm, 1941) by either complying with the externally imposed heuristics or quickly and uncritically grabbing on to my own favorite, energy-saving and thought-saving heuristic. It is indeed tempting to stay with the presumptive heuristic. However, at the moment when we resort to this heuristic and to fast thinking, we have forfeited the opportunity to feel the breeze on our back and to elevate our self a bit with the assistance of this breeze of freedom. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) might suggest that moments of breezy freedom elicit the experience of “flow.” These are compelling moments when we are being challenged yet not overwhelmed by the setting in which we find ourselves. While freedom is hard to engage, it does come with the potential of finding flow—which, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is hard to beat!
