On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

We are neither gods nor objects. We are humans who can become sovereign. Freedom is neither the lack nor the acceptance of constraints, but rather the use of them. The mound is sixty feet and six inches from home plate, and it is elevated ten inches above the ground; that both restrains and enables a pitch. We are free to do only the things we can do, which are usually things that others taught us to do and that we practice. What a pitcher does on the mound is a result not only of choices appropriate to a game situation, but of all the repetition that came before. The same holds for any choice we make. Just thinking about the virtues is not enough; as Aristotle said, we have to practice them by working them into the world. “Nature resists,” says Simone Weil, “but it does not defend itself.” You feel that resistance when you pick up a baseball or touch the strings of a guitar. The guitar strings resist the pick but yield the chord. The baseball resists as you lift it but yields as you place a middle finger on a stitch, a forefinger against the middle finger, snap your wrist, and throw a curveball. Nature gives way in beauty. When we know how to play, and that we want to play, the resistance and the yielding are the same thing.