Inflation and economic anxiety, political polarization, climate change, and threats to democracy are some of the issues that weigh heavily on the American people. These challenges have led to fierce debates over policies and rights—but despite the hackneyed claim that Americans are a freedom-loving people, one fundamental question goes strangely unasked: What is freedom?
Very few languages make a clear, consistent distinction between two separate words equivalent to “freedom” and “liberty.” English inherited these terms through its hybrid Latinate and Germanic heritage, enriching our vocabulary. Most languages make do with a single term comprising the range of connotations that English speakers can differentiate, and our own usage overlaps, often to the point of interchangeability.
Liberty denotes having freedoms within a legal system. It implies granted or inherent rights defined and safeguarded by constitutions, charters, or social contracts. Freedom is a broader concept and encompasses liberty: the general state of being free from constraints, oppression, or interference, from physical movement to political acts, thought and expression. Liberty is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for freedom, which is embodied not only in politics but in myriad social interactions and other everyday acts that define us.
Freedom cannot be unfettered. In any organized society, individuals live in the context of overlapping and often competing interests, values, and actions. To imagine freedom as wholly unbound is to mistake it for libertinism. Such a dangerous, unmoored condition would be chaos, the soil from which either anarchy or tyranny inevitably sprouts. The freedom that sustains a civic order must be guided, channeled, and harmonized with responsibility. It is not the right to do whatever one wishes, but, as Roshi Kapleau once said about Zen, the cultivated ability to do one’s best, here and now, under the circumstances, with regard for the common good.
This vision of freedom demands an ethical foundation—one rooted not in personal preference or whimsical autonomy, but in virtue, character, and inner harmony. It models a thread that runs across cultures and centuries: that true happiness arises not from indulgence, but from the perfect satisfaction of duty, rendered spontaneously and with grace. Those nations and their inhabitants with this view promote happiness for themselves and others in the world. Those who pursue self-cherishing and the exploitation of others cause and experience suffering across the board.
Confucius (Kongzi), the earliest to articulate this vision, argued that happiness comes from fulfilling one’s role—whether as parent, child, or ruler—with sincerity and alignment to li, the rituals that encode social and moral order. In The Analects, he emphasizes that when li is internalized so completely that one acts without conscious deliberation, virtue becomes second nature. Morality is no longer imposed from without but flows from within, like a musician playing a familiar melody by heart. This is the spontaneity of moral clarity.
Zen Buddhism pushes this line, dissolving the dualities of duty and desire, self and other. Dōgen taught that the sacred is not elsewhere—it is in the act of sweeping the floor, preparing a meal, bowing in silence. Enlightenment is not an escape from life but an immersion in its most ordinary rhythms. When one is fully present and responsive to the moment, even the most mundane duties shine with the light of Buddha nature. This is the purest form of spontaneous responsibility: not driven by obligation but by awakened awareness.
Dōgen wrote, “To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.” In this view, liberation––the release or freedom from dukkha and the cycle of rebirth––is not self-assertion, but self-transcendence. It is essentially the end of bondage, and we can see the same overarching message in other Buddhist writings. The Jātaka Tales, for example, convey a vision of spiritual evolution grounded in ethical living and mindful intention whereby Buddhahood is attained through countless acts of selfless virtue across many lifetimes. And according to the Dhammapada, if a person speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness will follow, “unshakeable, like a shadow.”
Aristotle’s eudaimonia offers a similar resonance. For him, happiness is not a feeling, but an activity of the soul following virtue over a complete life. We do not become happy by seeking pleasure, but by aligning reason and desire in the pursuit of the good. Through habituation, virtuous action becomes a kind of practiced self; it arises spontaneously yet is the fruit of discipline, like the Samurai’s adroit unsheathing of his sword. Here, again, liberty is not the shedding of limits, but the perfection of one’s character such that right action emerges effortlessly, as a practiced craft of the self.
Even Immanuel Kant, so often set against traditions of moral sentiment, offers a complementary insight in his Critique of Practical Reason and other works. Kant gave us a picture of dignity rooted in duty: the moral law within, acting not from desire but from principle. This is where his “categorical imperative” arises: an action is morally worthy only if it could be universalized as a law that respects the dignity of all rational beings. The self-respect and calm that results from doing one’s duty “for the sake of duty” reflects a kind of fulfillment, an austere joy found in fidelity to conscience.
Simone Weil’s mystical moral vision strikes the same chord. For her, attention is the purest form of love—an act of grace offered to the afflicted. Responsibility, in this sense, becomes the very medium of spiritual life. Happiness is the inward light that emerges when one becomes transparent to obligation. When our duties become our joy, the split between the dutiful and the spontaneous dissolves. Despite her physical frailty, Weil threw herself into the suffering of others. She worked in factories, labored alongside Spanish anarchists during the civil war, and taught philosophy with a rare moral intensity. Her life was a continual effort to close the gap between theory and action, between thinking and compassion.
Albert Schweitzer offered an ecumenical synthesis: “Reverence for life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben) as the foundation of ethics. Schweitzer coined the phrase as he was wrestling with the moral emptiness he saw in both Western theology and secular rationalism, particularly after the horrors of World War I. He realized that ethics needed a universal, living foundation, not merely doctrinal or utilitarian, but existentially rooted. His insight was simple and radical: “I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.”
This view of freedom also resonates in the sphere of law. Wesley Hohfeld, the early 20th-century legal theorist, clarified it with precision: if I have a right, someone else must have a duty to honor it. Rights are not absolute but relational; they bind us together in a web of reciprocal obligations. Liberty, then, is not merely an individual possession, it is a shared structure of possibility, governed by mutual restraint. Lord Acton put it plainly: “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”
Finally, while Sartre might not have said “I was never so free as when I was in jail,” the idea that one can be “most free” under conditions of extreme constraint does align with his central thesis in Being and Nothingness (1943): freedom is not the absence of constraint but the ability to choose how one relates to one’s circumstances. In other words, even in prison—or under torture, in despair, in poverty—a person still chooses how to think, how to interpret, how to act.
All these thinkers, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, converge on a profound insight: we are most free not when we escape responsibility, but when we embrace it so deeply that it flows from us naturally, joyfully, as the expression of our true selves. Therefore, it is the responsibility of “freedom loving” societies to offer their citizens a foundation for right action within the bounds of liberty, with laws and democratic institutions as well as the material needs of the people. This is what freedom is for.
The moral implications of this insight are as profound as the legal ones. Liberty must be more than negative freedom, the absence of interference. It must aspire to positive freedom: facilitating the capacity to do what is right, to act according to one’s higher self. This is not a modern notion, but one with deep roots in Christian, Eastern, and classical traditions.
In this light, the freest person is not the one who follows every whim, but the one whose desires have been educated by virtue, who finds joy in doing good, not by force but by nature. This is the kind of person democracy depends on, and the kind of freedom it was meant to protect. We do well, then, to recover this vision of freedom as the power to do the right thing. That power sustains our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness.
A longer version of this essay appeared in the Autumn 2025 issue of Zen Bow.