Risk and Freedom

For the aforesaid reasons Agazzi’s invitation to move in the direction of a founda­tion of human freedom intends to go beyond the footprint of the Aristotelian phro- nesis, or rather to reactivate its foundation, that is the contemplative dimension of the intrinsic ends, ‘what is good for a man’.

This may already be an indication of the road to follow: a road that can no longer be con­fined to formal analysis, but must measure itself against the consideration of concrete, var­ied and ever-changing dimensions, which also require due recognition and respect. This seems to indicate clearly that what is needed is to resume the discourse on human beings and discover the full range of values inspiring their actions, by acknowledging that their profound freedom consists in the ability to fulfil those values (Agazzi 1992: 171).

Humans, ‘condemned’ by nature to be free, to quote Sartre, interpret this condition as adherence to what they recognize as valid in itself, as freedom of evaluating the engaging purposes of their life and agency. This sort of dynamics, although origi­nating from an ontological core, is accomplished in the field of experience and presents some recurrent characteristics. One of these is undoubtedly that of risk, which Agazzi analyses in depth. Risk is not simply related to the presence of mar­gins of unpredictability, but it is configured in the first place as a tension inherent in the possibility of human freedom, in a tension which is engrafted in the condi­tion of finiteness, and therefore subject to natural limitation. By risking we take in at once the greatness and uniqueness of the human being, who

alone can act on the basis of genuine choices, make decisions, propose modifications, pro­ject the creation of objects, institutions, and new situations, perfect himself and realize his desires, construct his future and conceive his objectives and the options for realizing them (Agazzi 2004b: 147),

together with the perception of the inherent limitations to his ability to choose, to act, to plan and accomplish.

The category of risk would therefore be quite ambiguous if it did not reveal itself as an anthropological category. In fact, the various attempts to analyse risk in purely probabilistic or quantitative terms presuppose also a clear anthropolog­ical view, which in most cases theorizes the depletion of the human subjects or their mechanization: bodies in space, simply subject to strength and resistance. Paradoxically, the counterpart of this ontological pulverization is, especially in our day, the strong defence of the idea of freedom as a mere ‘freedom of action’. Agazzi takes this contradiction very seriously, when he observes that the active exercise of freedom, in its various expressions (freedom of individual and social choice, civil and political liberties) can only be fulfilled thanks to the intrinsic freedom of the human individual, the freedom of the will:

[T]he common sense of our time accepts as obvious and rightful the claims of the multiple forms of freedom of action, which imply the abovementioned... ‘existence of a free will’, but it widely shares a view of man according to which the latter freedom is very problem­atic, and even tends to fade. In fact, the more you spread the scientific interpretations of the human being, the more this will be interpreted as a ‘mechanism’ whose functioning, although complex, is determined by various factors: physical, chemical, biological, psy­chological, social, environmental, cultural, and so forth (Agazzi 1999: 5-6).

Freedom is rather an inner principle of a spiritual nature, not assimilable to mere spontaneity, that is, to following the inclinations for which the human person is not really responsible (see Agazzi 2000d). Agazzi, however, also rejects the opposite polarization, the absolutization of the will, which focuses exclusively on a concept of freedom as pure autonomy of the will to the detriment of freedom of action. This perspective is lacking both in not admitting the openness to the action as a genuine projection of the freedom of the will, and in strongly defending self-deter­mination of the will with respect to each supra-individual value. He notes that

the very concept of self-determination, while preserving an undoubted validity in saying that it is not worthy of man to submit to something he does not approve inwardly, is vacu­ous unless it is stated ‘in view of what’ he is self-determining, and it is also noted that not all options are equally valid. Otherwise the concept of moral responsibility vanishes again, and every difference between good and evil disappears, if all options are equally legitimate, and so disappears any reason to speak of responsibility (to quote Nietzsche, we are ‘beyond good and evil’) (Agazzi 2000c: 5-6).

Freedom is instead capable of self-restraint in adherence to challenging values and goals, but such self-restraint in reality coincides with its exaltation and not with its mortification, since it retains the prerogative to internalize the alternatives and is committed with an operation of affirmation or exclusion which is not subject to gradations or modulations due to external influences (see Agazzi 2000b). This means that the self is always present in the act of will and, in spite of all the cog­nitive and situational uncertainties implied by the exercise of choice, “our will is free to will, and also to promote the desired actions, in spite of difficulties and deficiencies” (Agazzi 2000a: 5-6).

The traits of Agazzi’s anthropological reflection that will lead to the meta­physical delineation of personal identity, the relationship between mind and body and, ultimately, the dignity of the human person, begin to emerge clearly. This analysis is carried out, however, by attempting to probe human freedom and its unconditionality.

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