Freedom and Truth
By Margaret Fuller
To a Friend.
The shrine is vowed to freedom, but, my friend,
Freedom is but a means to gain an end.
Freedom should build the temple, but the shrine
Be consecrate to thought still more divine.
The human bliss which angel hopes foresaw
Is liberty to comprehend the law.
Give, then, thy book a larger scope and frame,
Comprising means and end in Truth’s great name.
About the Poem
Margaret Fuller’s poem Freedom and Truth offers a meditation on what freedom really means. She insists that freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to something higher — to truth, to comprehension of moral law, to the divine. Freedom without truth, she suggests, is an empty shrine: a structure without a god inside. For her, true human happiness comes from using liberty not merely for self-indulgence, but to understand and live within universal truths.
Reading Fuller’s lines, I couldn’t help but think of the chorus of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” (made immortal by Janis Joplin):
“Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose…
And feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues.”
Though written more than a century later, these lyrics capture a strikingly similar tension. For Kristofferson and Joplin, freedom stripped of attachments is both exhilarating and hollow. It means release, but also loss. Like Fuller, the song suggests that freedom alone is not enough; its meaning is found when it leads to something more — in this case, authentic connection, soulful music, and the raw honesty of experience.
This resonates deeply with the American Transcendentalist movement, of which Fuller was a central voice. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” — reminding us that liberty matters only in so far as it sustains deeper purposes. Henry David Thoreau sharpened the point in Walden: “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Both Emerson and Thoreau, like Fuller, argued that freedom was valuable only when it brought us closer to truth, authenticity, and the divine.
And yet, we see in our own age how this lesson is often forgotten. Freedom of speech, one of the most cherished liberties, is frequently used as a cover for spreading hatred, division, and outright lies. But freedom of speech divorced from truth is no freedom at all — it becomes the empty shrine Fuller warned against, a hollow liberty that erodes rather than sustains the human spirit.
Fuller’s 19th-century vision, Kristofferson’s 20th-century lyric, and our 21st-century struggles meet on common ground. All remind us that freedom cannot be idolized on its own. Whether in the pursuit of higher laws, in the fleeting transcendence of music and love, or in defending speech that is rooted in truth and justice, freedom gains its true meaning only when it opens into truth.
May we never forget that freedom without truth is a shell. Truth gives freedom its soul.
About the Poet
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was one of the great voices of the American Transcendentalist movement, though her life and legacy often stand in the shadow of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve always been inspired by the Transcendentalists, but I find myself especially drawn to Fuller — not only her writings but also the way she lived her life, ahead of her time and unwilling to conform to society’s expectations.
Fuller was the first editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal, and the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), one of the earliest works of American feminism. In that book she declared, “Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.” That call to self-examination and truth resonates as much today as it did in her century. She also wrote, “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” For Fuller, freedom was always tied to growth, to becoming more fully human, more fully alive.
Her life took her far beyond Concord. I’ve long had a fascination with American expatriates of the 19th century, and Fuller became one herself. In 1846, she traveled to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. It was there that she found herself drawn into the currents of Italian nationalism — what would later grow into the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification.
Fuller fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, a young Italian revolutionary, and bore his child. Their relationship had to be kept secret, both because of politics and because of society’s judgment. At one point she even entrusted her baby to the care of another family, only to find he was treated poorly — a decision that haunted her. Eventually, Fuller, Ossoli, and their child decided to leave Italy for America, carrying with them her manuscript history of the Roman Republic.
Tragically, they never reached American shores. In July 1850, their ship struck a storm and sank off Fire Island, just short of New York Harbor. Fuller, her husband, and her child all drowned. Their bodies were recovered, but her manuscript — the culmination of years of thought and observation — was lost forever.
Her life was brief and often tragic, yet Margaret Fuller remains one of the most remarkable American thinkers of the 19th century. She lived with passion, intellect, and conviction, and her words — as in Freedom and Truth — continue to remind us that liberty without truth is empty.
