ABSTRACT
We saw in Chapter Seven that the authentic person has to be free. All existentialist philosophers claim that human beings are free to act in any way they wish. Indeed, freedom is a condition of authentic humanity, whatever the moral constraints imposed on it, such as those suggested by Buber (1961) and Marcel (1976). However, according to Macquarrie (1973, p. 177), when it comes to deciding precisely what freedom is, existentialist writings are evasive. The same charge could be leveled at adult educators, who frequently employ the term self-directedness imprecisely, as many of them recognize (Brookfield, 1988; Caffarella and O’Donnell, 1988; Long, 1988).
