Freedom is the capacity to begin, which logic cannot compel.

Evidence

Totalitarian rulers rely on the compulsion with which we can compel ourselves, for the limited mobilization of people which even they still need; this inner compulsion is the tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new. The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind’s submission to logic as a never-ending process, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men. Over the beginning, no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power, because its chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning. As terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking—which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of deduction. Totalitarian government can be safe only to the extent that it can mobilize man’s own will power in order to force him into that gigantic movement of History or Nature which supposedly uses mankind as its material and knows neither birth nor death. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1072

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines freedom as the capacity to begin (natality), distinguishing inner freedom from political freedom as a space of movement.
• XREF: Directly anticipates later Arendt on action/the vita activa in The Human Condition; also connects to Foucault’s biopolitics — History using mankind as material that knows neither birth nor death. — connects to: The brute facticity underlying freedom is ungraspable yet indispensable to it.; Freedom cannot choose itself and thus creates things and situation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1205; Giving birth cannot confer existential meaning because freedom must found itself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1450 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the sacrifice article: totalitarianism mobilizing people into an impersonal History that ‘knows neither birth nor death’ parallels sacrificial logics effacing individual life.
• DEEPTHINKING: Paradigm-level: the pairing of terror-as-birth-suppression with logicality-as-thought-suppression is a dense, beautiful compression of the whole theory of action.