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We’ve been toying with a fairly traditional philosophical model of freedom that thinks of it in terms of agency and determination. According to this model, agency is basically free will, which each of us possesses as long as we are in our “right mind,” while determination refers to the forces beyond our control that “determine” the options that actually confront us at any given time. In this model, agency is a given, while determination is a matter of history, chance, social structure, and the like. In this traditional model, agency is internal and determination is external. Free will is “in here,” while determination is “out there.” But guess what? Stories like “Somnambulism” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” — not to mention the theories of Sigmund Freud and neuroscience — suggest that very powerful determining forces are not external at all but are lodged in the deepest levels of the human psyche.

Now consider works like Walden (or Plato’s allegory of the cave, or The Matrix), which suggest that what we think of as reality is not reality at all. As suggested by the analogy with which Thoreau closes Walden, our conception of reality is to real reality as the morning star (aka Venus) is to the sun.

Now consider the possibility that ignorance is one of the determining forces limiting our freedom. If we are actually confronted with a choice between A, B, C, D, and E, but we are only aware of options A and B, is the choice that we go on to make fully free?

If we argue that it’s not — if we argue that freedom is partly a function of knowledge or awareness — then Walden is very much to the point. By suggesting that somewhere beyond our current awareness there lies an almost infinitely greater reality that we have not yet awakened to, Thoreau implies that there is also an almost infinitely greater kind of freedom that we have not yet attained. We might think we are really free, but that’s only because we’re still trapped in the matrix (or still stuck in Plato’s cave, or in the grip of some ideology, or whatever).

Yes? No? If yes — if in fact we are still stuck among the dark shadows of the cave — how can we get out into the bright sunlight?

Bonus questions: Is The Matrix just warmed-over Plato, only with cool sunglasses and Carrie-Anne Moss in black leather, or does it tell us something the Allegory of the Cave does not? Ditto for Walden. Read more!