Is a king free if he can’t control his own passions? This question has puzzled philosophers for thousands of years. In an age when most people in the West have standards of living markedly higher than the kings of ancient times, it’s worth returning to this puzzle to try to get to the heart of what freedom really is.

Today, we often define freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to, so long as we aren’t harming someone else. If that is true, an all-powerful king would be about as free as anyone ever could be—even if he remained a slave to his passions. Clearly, then, this modern view of freedom is missing something.

In an important sense, a king who spends his days trying to fulfill his every desire has no more of an ability to do what he thinks is best than an ordinary peasant. All the wealth and power that he has at his disposal are only fuel on the flames of his uncontrolled emotional life.

Today, we can see this thought experiment take shape in the form of those who are addicted to pornography. Like the king, they are not threatened by starvation, and no army lies poised to attack them. They enjoy all sorts of legal protections on their rights to speech, to contract, and to property. Yet even so, they remain deeply unfree.

Many of the great philosophers of ancient and medieval times took an important lesson from this paradox: Freedom is not fundamentally about doing what you want to do. Rather than being encapsulated by an assortment of political rights, freedom is the mature capacity to do what is good for oneself and one’s neighbors.

This idea is so radically different from our modern interpretation of freedom that it’s worth looking at a few more examples:

• To speak German freely, you must learn the rules of German grammar (good luck).
• To converse freely with your neighbors, you have to tolerate their opinions.
• To play the violin freely, you have to learn to read musical notation.

Our modern understanding of freedom makes it seem as though we are most free when we do whatever we want to do. Yet each of these examples shows that freedom is not something that magically appears when the right set of laws are put in place. Rather, freedom is something that must be achieved.

In order to achieve freedom, you have to align yourself with the order of the universe. This is a point made eloquently by the philosopher Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft. And as he explains, that alignment does not come easily.

As you grapple with German grammar, your head aches; as you listen to your neighbor’s conspiracy theories, your eyes start to roll. It’s only through a concerted effort that you can fit your behavior to the rules of the world. Yet once you achieve that self-mastery, you move through the world as a free being.

The fact is that humans are not the sort of beings that will ever be free from constraint. We live in a world bound by laws that are not of our own making: The universe we were born into is governed by physical laws; the societies that raised us are ordered by natural laws. No piece of legislation can ever change that. Yet when we live in accordance with the fundamental laws that structure reality, we live well.

The Greeks had a term for the order they perceived in the universe: cosmos. Importantly, this word does not merely refer to a system bound by law. It also signifies harmony. To the Greeks’ greatest thinkers, a free being was one who successfully aligned himself with the beautifully ordered universe.

That is an idea worth reviving.

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