So, here are the beginnings of the things I’m putting together for myself and collecting into a (semi) systematic worldview. I’m going to start here (again) with Dennett as a launching point. Let’s being in earnest and talk about the will.
I’m almost sick to death now of the quest for free will. This is mostly because I’m much more concerned with being ethical than being free. I can credit my incessant need (perhaps addiction) to constantly question morality and uncover Ethics to one particular influence: Emmanuel Levinas. As those of you who read my papers and these blog entries will no doubt know already, Levinas continually astounds me with his cleverness at avoiding a metaphysical projects. Instead of saying that Ethics is a kind of system, he turns his thoughts outward and takes Ethics really seriously in saying that it is founded on things (Others, with a capital ‘O’) that we literally cannot think about. He cuts through all the nonsense and bull crap and beating around the bush that usually goes along with doing philosophy and brings us right to the very edges of our imaginations; to the unknown, the hard places. If “moral” means “confidence” in its French etymology, then this is not a place in which we can have any confidence at all. I continue to be impressed by the courageousness expressed in this thinking.
I say I’m sick of the quest for “free” will because it seems like everyone I meet, layperson or scholar, needs to somehow come up with a justification for it, as if it’s a vital organ that might blink out of existence if we stop believing in it. Perhaps it’s a deep-seated psychological need to be independent or perhaps it’s the leftover memetic traces of the Enlighenment period that gave us “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” but whatever it is, it seems that the desire to be free, above all else, has gotten quite stuck into us, especially in the western world where we’re all considered as individuals. Now, for the purposes of this little manifesto, let me completely cut through all of that and just come out with my position: The free will is an illusion. “Free will” is a contradiction of terms.
Why do I say that? Well, I don’t mean to step on any toes here, I just don’t understand the paradox. Remember Levinas? Well, he was largely the philosophical heir to another guy named Edmund Husserl. Husserl was a minor revolutionary figure because he treated knowledge, not as the result of observations, but as a phenomenon by itself. The question of how knowledge is formed quickly leads one to ask how consciousness is formed. (How do you know that you know something, anyway?) Well, the major conclusion here is that consciousness cannot exist by itself. Go ahead, try it. Try to just be conscious. What this exercise ought to demonstrate is that, in order to be conscious, you need to be conscious of something. Heidegger and Levinas both expand this realization to the level of Being. You can’t just “be,” you have to be about something. Imagine trying to sense without having intention. You’ve got a sense of smell, you’ve got a sense of sound, you’ve got a sense of sight, but what you don’t have is a completely objective “sense” that just hangs out in space, unaffected by particulars. Rather than being unaffected by particulars, your senses have been shaped by particulars.
Let’s define some terms before we go any further. I’m using a definition of the term “free” here that essentially means “unbound.” Freed birds, for example, become untied, freed prisoners become unshackled, etc. Now, “responsibility” here simply means “the ability to respond.” If a friend speaks to me and I turn away so that I can’t listen, then we’d say that such an action isn’t fair. It’s just not responsible, because I’m not responding. What about a definition of will? What makes a will? Well, if consciousness can’t exist by itself and being can’t exist by itself, then certainly it must hold (as an aspect of both Being and consciousness) that will cannot exist by itself either. In other words, just as you have to be conscious of something, so too you cannot simply have will, but must will something. Will must be a desire toward some end. You will goodness. You will love. You will peace. You will toward a better world and a better life and those desires are completely acceptable and understandable.
So here’s the paradox I don’t understand: If the will must be about something, if it must be tied to some goal or striving (intention), then it cannot also be free (unbound) at the same time. Free will is like a free slave: there’s no such thing.
Now, having said that, I can understand why we would want to be free. It seems easy to be free, with nothing to tie us down. Freedom means no worries and no waste. We want to have more choices and more options in answering the questions of our lives. We believe that freer people have more choices and more options to make these choices. But are those with more options also freer? Do democratic voters have more degrees of freedom than their counterparts in totalitarian regimes? On the contrary! Democracies are not freer than Autocracies. An autocratic system need only be responsible to the desires of one, but a democracy needs to be responsible to the desires of all. That’s not more freedom, it’s less freedom. Why? Because it ties this new gestalt being of society down by so many more chains; it must respond to so many more intentions. Instead of being a servant with only one master, as its autocratic peer is, a democratic system is a servant with millions of masters.
Then why do we say that democracy is a good way to go? Why do we want to replace fascism with civic participation? What’s all the fuss about? I, for one, posit that we naturally desire civic participation over mindless, autocratic droning precisely because it makes us more responsible. We want to be responsible, because we want to have intentions. We want a will. Indeed, if we did not intend then we simply wouldn’t be.
(To draw upon my own Christian tradition for a moment: If God is the ultimate collective of the cosmos, then isn’t it better to have a God who “comes to be a servant” as the Gospel of John says? It seems only natural that a God who is ultimately responsible morally would also utter the words, “I have come to serve, not to be served.” This sentiment rings true for me now in so many ways because it deeply reflects the outlook of Jean Vanier and L’Arche. Rather than seeking to win and have victories, we begin down the “descent into littleness.”)
Why do we want to be more responsible if having a will also restricts our freedom? Let’s take a society’s-eye view of the situation. Pretend, for a moment, that you are a total society. “You” have become the collective of desires that make up a whole human social system; you are that servant with either one or millions of masters. We’ll compare the two variations in a second. Now, since you’re alive (people “made” you, you exist), let’s also apply the principles of evolution to you as an entity: You, as a society, want to survive, regardless of the survival of any one individual citizen. You’re like the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The individual people (think of them as “cells”) who constitute you can come and go, but you must carry on somehow as a whole.
If you’re an autocratic society, then you’re going to experience a very hard and probably very short life. If your autocrat goes, so do you. And, as opposed to the democratic society, you’re much more likely to die or become seriously injured. In the event of a coup or invasion, you’re history. Even without a complete death, with regime handovers, you’re going to be experiencing a lot of mood swings and unnecessary pains. What about the democratic society? Well, in that case, you’ve got a much longer life ahead of you. Social problems can be noticed through civic participation and they no longer need to fester until blowing up into a full-on regime turnover or coup. Change can happen more gradually. You’ll feel much more in tune with your desires and needs. And it’s all because you’re simply more responsible. Of course any servant with so many masters must be clever in order to survive. After all, they all want different and often competing things from you. As a democracy, you’ll have to strike deals and compromise constantly, but you’ll be smarter for the efforts; much better adapted for survival than your autocratic cousin.
At least part of the reason why Dennett and others go down the track of making free will and determinism compatible is because they want to explain the phenomenon of human morality: our shaming, praising, and blaming. Because, before answering questions concerning morality of whether or not we should shame, praise, or blame, we’ve got to understand why these things happen in the first place. Dennett figures we can get there by having more freedom. But, in order to achieve and reasonably explain human blaming and shaming, we needn’t come up with a good sense of “free,” we need only achieve a good sense of “responsible.” Indeed, this is the very thing that blaming, rewarding, and shaming work toward. They are ways in which we become able to respond to the Others that surround us (other people, other cultures, other species, our environment, etc.).
I’ve heard the argument too that substituting in responsibility for freedom takes away our human capabilities of agency. But, just as with consciousness, what makes a person into an agent is intention. There is no such thing as a plain, purely objective agent. Again, a person would have to be an agent of something. Consciousness is not by itself, we must be conscious of something. Reponsibility is not by itself, it must be responsible to something. Agency is not by itself, we must be an agent of something.
So, let’s just do away with this desire for freedom. Why worry about increasing our freedom when what we really want is just more responsibility? Dennett’s big claim in Freedom Evolves is that the whole can be freer than its parts. At first, I agreed wholeheartedly, but now I understand that any whole is not necessarily more free. The one thing a whole is, however, is much more responsible. Personally, I can’t understand the experience of a person who lives in poor, rural Uganda. If, however, that person has the right to vote and participate in the same society as I do, then “I” don’t have to be responsible because my society can pick up the slack merely by having a vote tied to that person’s intentions. In being more vulnerable, a gestalt whole can be more responsible; more vulnerable than I could ever be as a single person. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to be personally responsible to that other person, only that I don’t have to be in order to achieve agency.
Presumably, we must be agents of something “larger” than our “selves.” These larger levels of being (biosphere, society, cosmos) make agents of the smaller. What we would not want is to be agents of this or lower levels of being. I would not want to be an agent of another human individual or a hermit crab, for instance. That would be ridiculous and harmful. But it’s perfectly alright if that hermit crab, that other person, and I are all agents of our society. We should not make the easy mistake (as Dennett and Kane, among others) do of conflating the concepts of flexibility and freedom. A simple increase in our flexibility does not necessarily stem from an increase in our freedom. Freedom is not required to increase a being’s flexibility. All that is required is an increase in its responsibility. The free will is an illusion. A free will isn’t because a will isn’t free and freedom doesn’t have a will. Even if that wasn’t that case, free will is not worth wanting since an unbound and invulnerable will cannot give us the responsibility we crave as moral beings.
Personally, I believe that God is the most ultimately responsible kind of being imaginable; the most ultimately vulnerable. I also believe that this sort of ultimate responsibility is what we long for most in all of our human striving. More on this topic to come, however.
My experience in L’Arche confirms and guides me in these conclusions. If I weren’t here while thinking this, I might still have come to the conclusion that a free will is worth wanting. Being here, however, I can see that it is certainly not. Who is free? Certainly not I and not anyone else I have ever met. Our world is a determined world, full of casual connections and correlations. We can observe patterns and create knowledge from them. Those are the “facts” of our lives. We’re not supernaturally special beings, even if we are spiritual ones. We’re made from the same stuff as the stars and planets and the scrub brush and the nematodes and corals. It’s all determined. It’s all bound up in influences, chemical, physical, biological, cultural, etc. Likewise, you and I are determined as well because, as members of creation, we’re bound up right in there with everything else. Your body is determined, your brain is determined, you are determined. Because you exist and because you have intentions, you can’t be free, not truly free, anyway. But why would you want to be when all you really need is to be responsible? You don’t need to be free to participate in the cosmic project of creativity. In fact, if you were free, then that would take you out of the game entirely and I’ve never heard of anyone who likes being lonely.
L’Arche has shown and is showing me that I am bound in so many ways, that I must be responsible; be vulnerable in a myriad of interwoven and complex matrices of existence. You don’t have to look very far to discover all the things that influence you and who you are and how you are. The concept of disability, for instance, is a great bind. In L’Arche, as I’ve said before, people learn to discover their own disabilities. There are things that hold me back, things about my character that I’ll probably never be able to change or compensate for. If it were possible to know and love my friend Julie without her William’s Syndrome, then we would want that, of course. We don’t want people to be disabled, because that would be a kind of abuse to use another person for our own desires. The point however is that there is no way for me to meet Julie without the William’s Syndrome. It’s just a part of who she is. By the same token, I imagine that there are lots of folks who would rather that my cynicism and negativity and selfishness just weren’t there. But, hey, they are there. Whether lodged into me genetically or learned as behaviors, a lot of my disabling character traits are just here to stay. Does that mean I don’t feel loved? Does that mean that I can’t find a place in the world (or in the Body of Christ)? Of course not, because, in addition to our shortcomings of ability, we all have something important to reveal. We all have this amazing feature known as Gift. I’ve explained it somewhat before, using what I know from Jean Luc Marion, but I’ll try to articulate exactly what I mean more in my next post. So, now that we’ve taken care of free will and replaced it with responsible will, the next part will be on the phenomenon of ability and gift.
