How to choose between freedom and happiness? Both seem equally important, as important. They are not necessarily compatible. Freedom implies that I make choices, that I take responsibility, with what it implies the possibility of failure, regrets and therefore suffering ... In this sense, do not we say other than "simple-minded" or children are happy in their carelessness? But this carelessness is, however, what prevents them from being free. The child is carefree because under the tutelage of his parents. But if liberty is incompatible with happiness, do we have the right to allow ourselves to renounce freedom in order to satisfy our only happiness? Is it not possible to reconcile the two?
We can see here at first in what happiness and freedom are incompatible. We can not be happy and free at the same time because freedom hinders our happiness. So we can be happy without being free, it even seems that we can not do both at once. Freedom presupposes that we make choices that we must take full responsibility for. This is doubly a hindrance to happiness.
If I make choices independently, and in the uncertain world of ours, then do I run the risk of making bad choices, of not getting the desired effects, and therefore of being disappointed? Then, and this is in continuity with the above, I will have to bear the responsibility of wrong choice. Freedom is thus doubly a source of suffering: it leads us to situations we did not want and it forces us to assume responsibility for it, precisely in the name of our freedom. Thus, Sartre, who advocates in Existentialism is a humanism our total freedom and our total responsibility, defines freedom as a burden, a source of anxiety, because of the enormous responsibility that it implies.
Freedom therefore seems to hinder our happiness if we define it as a state of total and lasting satisfaction, in which we would have eradicated all suffering. Only, as Callicles shows in Plato's Gorgias, he who is powerful can be free and happy because he is the only one able to give free rein to his desires and satisfy them all since he commands other men. But apart from this powerful minority, men seem doomed to choose between happiness and freedom.
So we can be happy without being free since freedom seems to hinder happiness. It even seems that it can not be otherwise. But then does this mean that we can allow ourselves to choose happiness rather than freedom? Do we have the right to be happy at the cost of our freedom?
