Inner freedom or outer freedom?
On the axis: Freedom of the will · the social order
What weighs most in our freedom: our inner dispositions, or the outer constraints of power and society? And does one make the other possible: can one be free in spirit under oppression, or free outwardly without being free within?
Justification
A former slave, Epictetus relocates the whole question of freedom outside chains and masters: my body may be fettered, I may be jailed or exiled, but no one, not even Zeus, can compel my . Real freedom lodges in the one place nothing external can reach, the , the faculty of judging and willing. Hence a sharp stance: the course of the world obeys fate, yet the use I make of my impressions stays inalienably mine. Against the common notion that measures freedom by the absence of obstacles, he holds that a man in chains can be free and a tyrant a slave to his desires.
Discourses, I.1 · Discourses, I.17
Anchors: Epictetus · Berlin
leads to: Political liberty