On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Havel was concerned with the power of the state to make us predictable. But what is such a state working against? How does our human unpredictability arise? The choices of each sovereign person will be in a unique combination, grounded in a unique set of commitments. But uniqueness at a given moment is only the beginning of unpredictability. No choice is ever final, not just because the world changes around us, but because different values will suggest themselves to us at different points. A sovereign person, in making choices, is acting not only within the physical world, but in a realm of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. That zone, which Stein called “the world of values,” is not an extension of the world of things. It is a kind of fifth dimension, with its own rules, and as such a reservoir of unpredictability for our own world of four dimensions, of space and time. The virtues do not interact with one another, or with objects, as objects do with other objects. The fifth dimension, so to speak, has its own physics, its own geometry. When we make choices and affirm values, that different geometry of the fifth dimension seeps into our world, making us and it less predictable.