Some Reflection Ideas From the Ancient Roots About the Link Between Creativity and Freedom for Modern Societies

This chapter reflects on the ancient roots of two crucial and literally “decisive” themes for modern societies, such as freedom and creativity, considered in their mutual intertwining. In the contemporary context, both on the individual and the collective level, freedom is too often confused with license, with “doing what we please,” in the belief that we need not be hindered, by anything or anyone, in the unrestrained indulging of all our desires. It is, first and foremost, a matter of disambiguating the notion of freedom, and showing the dangers of incorrectly identifying freedom with anarchy or anomie, as already denounced more than 2.500 years ago by the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. To better understand this conceptual knot, it is enough to consider the Greek word ἐλευθερία (eleutheria), which precisely means “freedom,” “independence,” “autonomy,” but which has nothing to do with that “unregulated freedom—with which, as Chomsky puts it—the doors are opened to those who can act as they wish.” Freedom, therefore, in its ancient roots, is configured not only as a right in progress (never earned once and for all), but also as a good to be consolidated, regained, and confirmed every day, as a becoming free with others and for others, through the overcoming of various forms of subjugation, internal and external, but starting from a fundamental awareness already very clear to the ancients: one’s own freedom must not and can never limit the good of others. It is no accident that the Greek word for freedom itself expresses from the very beginning care and responsibility for others: the affective ἐλευθέριος (eleutherios) in fact means both “free” and “generous.” But a freedom so understood, that is, a “healthy freedom,” innervated with good practices and never divorced from the dimension of responsibility, is also called to be intertwined with the fundamental dimension of creativity. Freedom is also, in conclusion, space for free debate, which—as Chomsky always reminds us—is more urgent than ever to recover, since today we are witnessing “the collapse of a space for rational discussion” In this, too, it would be more useful than ever to recover, in practice, the Aristotelian lesson that “truth is built together.”