Pure Freedom
#freedom #resistance #constraints #friction
In the introduction to Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes about the seductive illusion of complete freedom—a life with “no bounds,” where you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. He compares the longing for unbounded autonomy to a dove “cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels,” imagining that “it could do even better in airless space.” Reflecting on a similar illusion—that artists need to be totally free of restrictions and limitations—the 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning novelist André Gide wrote, “Art is always the result of constraint. To believe that it rises higher as it becomes freer is to believe that what keeps a kite from rising is its string. Kant’s dove, which thought it could fly better without the air to trouble its wings, did not realize that in order to fly, it had to have the air’s resistance to support its wings. Likewise art must be supported by resistance in order to rise.”