Free Will and Continental Philosophy

The Death without Meaning

David Edward Rose

• Éditeur: Continuum
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441114013
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophie
• Sous-sujet: Freier Wille & Determinismus in der Philosophie

Free Will and Continental Philosophy explores the concepts of free-will and self-determination in the Continental philosophical tradition. David Rose examines the ways in which Continental philosophy offers a viable alternative to the hegemonic scientistic approach taken by analytic philosophy. Rose claims that the problem of free-will is only a problem if one makes an unnecessary assumption consistent with scientific rationalism.
In the sphere of human action we assume that, since action is a physical event, it must be reducible to the laws and concepts of science. Hence, the problematic nature of free will raises its head, since the concept of free will is intrinsically contradictory to such a reductionist outlook.
This book suggests that the Continental thinkers offer a compelling alternative by concentrating on the phenomena of human action and self-determination in order to offer the truth of freedom in different terms. Thus Rose offers a revealing investigation into the appropriate concepts and categories of human freedom and action.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The following pages contain a rather brief discussion of freedom and the nature of freewill. Such a statement, or the adverbial phrase at least, will surprise many readers simply because the problem – if there is one – has vexed philosophers and thinkers since the first attempts to cast a conceptual web of intelligibility over the events of the world. So to claim that such a short discussion has anything original to offer is hubris-tic to say the least. It is also a claim compounded by the reliance on the thought of one of the most obtuse thinkers of our tradition as evidenced by the paraphrased subtitle of the present work; that is, Hegel. Yet, there is something still to be said about freewill and an urgency implicit in the saying of it.

Let us first, though, make a few remarks about the other main component of the title. If one is to talk about freewill within the context of a ‘continental tradition’, one does of course need to define that tradition. One rather lazy possibility, prevalent in much English-language philosophy, is to characterize it in terms of a contrast with analytic philosophy, as though a geographical identifier could be opposed to a methodological one.¹ Such a contrast is as illogical as it is inappropriate, starting from the political prejudices contained in the word continental (since as most continentals will tell you, the correct non-anglocentric adjective would more properly be ‘mainlandic’ philosophy and many Scots and North Americans would perhaps find it offensive to learn they are nothing but an offshoot of the Anglo-Saxon race, if such a thing exists). Nor does the methodological resonance offer any real purchase on the difference since many non-Anglo-European philosophers use the analytical method and many Anglo-Saxon philosophers reject it.² Neither does the history of ideas afford any clearer understanding of the distinction, since up until German Idealism the curriculum of established ideas and thinkers is almost identical in both traditions and from that temporal point on, about the middle of the nineteenth century, we exist too close to history to decide which of the many contemporary thinkers and texts may well find a place in the canon or be future examples of ‘what has been best thought and best said’ (Quinton, 2004: 37).

Fortunately it is not my task – nor do I think it would be a fruitful via of research – to identify a distinction that is already perhaps irrelevant and erroneous. There is, however, an interesting bifurcation of ideas that correspond with the loose geographic and methodological commitments of the terms continental and analytic philosophy centring on the nebulous concept(s) of freewill, and it is that bifurcation which can stand in for any robust need to identify and separate two otherwise putative traditions. In other words, the present work endorses a distinction between analytic and continental philosophy only within the narrow domain of the succeeding discussion and its immediate commitments. The bifurcation which is of interest occurs between the publication of Hobbes’s radical and innovative Leviathan in 1651 and Rousseau’s reworking and reformulation of the contractarian tradition in 1762. The aporia which defines any discussion of the concept of freewill is whether to pursue the scientific rationalism of Hobbes and the tradition of reductionism and materialism that seeks to explain freewill in a way coherent and congruent with the findings and central tenets of modern science, or to embrace the Romantic humanism of Rousseau and the utopian ideal of social reconciliation. The overriding aim of the former approach is to make the concept of free-will compatible with our scientific understanding of the universe, and compatibility requires, at best, the redefinition of the concept with the consequence that notions of responsibility, accountability and rightness become problematic or different in kind from how we immediately and, so such advocates would hold, erroneously understand them; or, in the most extreme analysis, the concepts are mere chimeras, illusions and false conceptions of the unregulated human mind. The latter approach, which – for want of a better term – we now may want to identify as continental, seeks to identify freedom as self-determination, as it is the subject who determines for himself or herself the motivations on which he or she should act and, therefore, is responsible through and through. Two things ought to be noted in these brief introductory remarks: one, the domains of analytic and continental philosophy no longer neatly map on to the unexamined acceptance of these two markers; and, two, there is a very real need to reserve judgement about the meaning of freewill because, although the concept freewill is being discussed in both the scientific and romantic approaches, they may well be using the same word to describe very different phenomena. Such a claim is actually more complex than it first appears as evidenced, I earnestly hope, in the pages that follow. The truly pertinent claim of Berlin’s famous essay is that the negative and positive understandings of liberty are not, as their articulation would seemingly suggest, in opposition, but rather they are based on putative commitments to deeper metaphysical conception of human nature that are sometimes (but not always!) akin to a discussion between an aesthetician and a housing officer on the worth and value of a particular urban building (Berlin, 1958). They may be using the same words, but speaking different languages. The conceptual, metaphysical difference is best captured in the previous characterization of the bifurcation: science versus humanism. Such contentious statements are offered once more only to whet one’s appetite, not to proffer substantial claims. Substantial claims must await the discussion proper which follows.

And, then, the sharp-eyed readers among you will have noticed the discrepancy between the conventional spelling of ‘free will’ as two words in the title of the work and the pseudo-neologistical spelling of the concept, unhyphenated as ‘freewill’ which will be the convention that I shall continue to use throughout the text. The reasons for doing so are not yet explicit, but I hope that they will be when the reader arrives at the beginning of the fourth chapter. By way of a brief justification, I would say that to use the terms separately begs the question in terms of conceiving of a thing which has a specific property, as though that property is contingent to the thing itself: there are subjects, these subjects may or may not possess a will and this will may or may not be free. It is akin to saying that a Paul’s chair is blue; one is merely stating that a will (Paul’s!) is free. This would open up any argument to Hobbes’s challenge of absurdity: a will that is free is like a speech that is free. The real distinction must be between ‘Paul has a free will’ (a noun conditioned by an adjective), which makes it sound as though he could have a will which is not free or has a collection of wills of which one is free and ‘Paul has freewill’. The latter should not be confused with unquantifiable nouns such as ‘Paul has blond hair’ (hence my reason for combining the words into one). Again the will is not a collection of elements too numerous, or too liquid, to quantify. What I hope the work justifies is that to be free is a way to be, to exist, and not the possession of a property that distinguishes one particular thing from others. For this reason, I have opted for the non-conventional ‘freewill’ in order to highlight its identification with the statement ‘Paul is free’ and, hence, to talk of Paul as possessing a will with the further property of being free is to misrepresent what is metaphysically the case. Paul is, if he is a human being, freewill. The proper way to talk would be to say ‘Paul is freewill’, but that is one conventional break too far. Hopefully, talk of ‘freewill’ is enough to alert the reader to be reflective and to suspend immediate intuitions gained from their past philosophical education until such time as they bear on the argument that follows.

So, we proceed from the main title to the subtitle. The quotation from Hegel which supplies the subtitle perhaps ought to be cited in full in order to further flavour the preceding comments, even if a discussion of its full import must wait till later in the argument:

The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel, 1977: §590)

Hegel is succinctly reiterating one of his recurring criticisms of the peculiarly modern understanding of freedom which arises from the deterministic understanding of the universe. Here, Hegel’s attack is against metaphysical libertarians who pit the self-consciousness against the laws of nature as existing in spite of and transcendent to material reality. As such, through the negation of determinism as the starting point, these thinkers, too, are intimately bound to it simply because they find it impossible to articulate freewill in any way except as the negation of materialism and its commitment to causality. The continental or romantic tradition, on the other hand, seeks to offer an alternative understanding of freedom but, for it to be convincing, it must be understood as belonging to a very different discourse and existing apart from the domain of science narrowly understood. If not, then it seems implausible and metaphysically unappealing. Immediately, for example, there exists a huge chasm between what may be called the commonsensical use of freedom – the freedom to satisfy one’s desires – and the Hegelian use, and if we believe we are in competition with a view of freewill as the satisfaction of desires then all we can seemingly offer is a desire for an arbitrary, spontaneous and above all meaningless death as the negation par excellence of the laws of nature acting necessarily and inevitably on a human being.

Yet, for Hegel, such freedom is one-sided and incomplete. Not because, perhaps oddly, that it aims at death, but because it aims at a meaningless, arbitrary and futile death: the death without meaning. In its historical context, the resonance of such rhetoric also reveals that, with its nod towards the events that superseded the French Revolution, any discussion of freedom cannot be isolated from ethical and political commitments. All of which is anathema to the empirical, reductive and scientific approach of the majority of contemporary and later British thinkers who wished to isolate the problem of free-will to a specific discourse of philosophy, be it mind, metaphysics, personal identity or ethics.

Much to think about in so few pages. So, let me begin with something more concrete and briefly describe what the reader will find in the following pages, as one should in introductions, in order to keep sight of both what is at stake and how what is at stake shall be pursued. The following chapter will explain better, through a brief consideration of the standard discussions of freewill, the error I believe obstructs much thinking of freewill in contemporary debate taking its impetus from the prevalent and dominant discourse of our time, viz. scientific rationalism. I should stress, and I shall again and again, that I in no way subscribe to anti-scientism, relativism or anti-rationalism. Science offers the best method and norms for a proper understanding of many of the objects of knowledge and phenomena we encounter in the world. The domain of objects which is best explained by science is far broader and the phenomena which are best explained by science more numerous than any other discourse, but – and here I am cautiously humble – there are limits to scientific explanation in that it deliberately (and rightly) represses the role of human interests in its method and, also, there do exist domains of objects and phenomena to which scientific method would be inappropriately applied. I believe one of these to be the discourses which depend upon the concept of freewill, or ethics broadly construed. What I have to say about reason and science is, I believe, eminently sensible and perhaps even persuasive. It is above all, a humble and non-radical claim if taken in the right spirit.

The significance of examining Sartre’s engagement with Freud in the third chapter is to lay bare the modern drive to a scientific explanation of all phenomena and simultaneously to demonstrate that it is inappropriate to subscribe to reductionism if one is concerned with explaining human beings, their interests and the reasons for their actions. Hence the contemporaneous rise of materialism in psychology and existentialism in philosophy, as though they were replaying the ideal positions of Hegel’s opposition alluded to earlier. The existence of a normative agenda in Freud’s science is puzzling because it hangs uneasily with his descriptive aims and, although he attempts to reduce it to questions of health and well-being, the psychoanalytic cure consists in the patient being aware of and taking responsibility for his or her own neuroses. Freud, however, finds it impossible to reduce the concept of responsibility to a scientific explanation and also to admit that the superego is a shared, cultural unconscious that determines not only normal behaviour, but also deviant behaviour. Human action, we shall see, is about control and power conceived of as responsibility for oneself, concepts which are non-reductive and so – in some sense – primitive. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method, on the other hand, involves a commitment of care for oneself as a fundamental structure of human being, but his inability to offer a description of authentic human attitudes is grounded in an ethical misplacement of authenticity and inauthenticity due to the exaggeration of social atomism implicit in his work. Rather the authentic and inauthentic distinction is mapped on to self-forming actions and actions consistent with oneself respectively.

Chapter 4 offers us an alternative to social atomism taking its cue from Hegel’s already cited offhand remark in the heart of the Phenomenology of Spirit about the Terror of the French Revolution and the meaningless deaths of subjects who are at the whim of a more powerful subjectivity. The meaninglessness of these deaths is in stark contrast to his famous master-slave dialectic where one risks death for meaning and it is this meaningfulness as opposed to pure, animalistic, instinctiveness which is the mark of human action. This is the signature chapter which shows that freewill comprehended as self-determination is best characterized through Hegel’s theory of action which, in turn, relies on authentic recognition by an other. I shall attempt to show how an authentic attitude may be possible through the reconciliation between subjective freedom, the wants, needs, desires and projects which I have freely chosen, and objective freedom, the social structures, institutions and fabric which maintain and promote the successful attainment of the goals of subjective freedom.

The alienation of one’s being is, according to Hegel, a necessary step to being free: one must share the categories and concepts appropriate to human action with one’s peers. Yet, as his critique of Kantian moral philosophy and also his commitment to immanent standards of right and good make clear, the appropriateness and reasonableness of these categories can only be judged with reference to a cultural storehouse of possible norms and meanings and not externally by putative transcendental standards. Freedom is, according to Hegel, necessarily related to the agent’s social and historical luck which is constituted by the moral fabric and institutions he or she just happens to be thrown into.

However, Hegel’s theory seemingly makes it difficult to distinguish between cases of free action and cases of false consciousness. If there are no external standards of justice and right, to distinguish rational action from culturally relative action, then how can one describe one culture as better or progressive over another? In a state of advanced capitalism, such social blindness may in fact lead to the agent willing his or her own unfreedom, that is an agent who suffers from false consciousness. The fifth chapter will investigate one aspect of our own social fabric, its material ideality, and follow the neo-Marxist critique of Marcuse to see whether there is a solution to the problems of social alienation within the modern state in order to bring about the reconciliation required at the heart of Hegel’s (and Marx’s) ethics. The real heart of the debate between Hegel and Marx does not lie in the choice of method (dialectical reason versus historical materialism), but over the substantial claim whether or not capitalism is a means to overcome social alienation or the underlying cause of it.

The sixth chapter will revisit the claim that advanced capitalism hinders human freedom by switching attention from the material ideality to the intellectual ideality it makes possible. Moving away from the negative appraisal of capitalism, we shall enquire whether, in fact, an advanced state of capitalism maintains and promotes human freedom since it makes possible a proliferation of perspectives and value systems, undermining the hegemony of the liberal world view, or whether (as Marcuse held) the proliferation of lifestyles and choice is a mere chimera and freedom is no longer possible.

Chapter 2
Science, Explanation and Dogma

2.1 The Problem of the Problem of Freewill

The problem of free-will is not a problem.

Such a puzzling claim needs, of course, to be unwrapped and better articulated, but the sentence embodies the tenor and timbre of this work. Let us think of it as a refrain. To explain better what I mean, I will put it differently: the problem of free-will is only a problem if one makes an assumption that, although familiar and commonsensical to us all, need not be made. It is difficult not to hold such an assumption because it is so central to the dominant thinking of our time, that is scientific rationalism and its underlying monism. But once we disclose this assumption, we shall see that the ‘problem’ is generated by a dogma that, if suspended, dissipates the central confusions, obfuscations and paradoxes. Of course, there must be cogent reasons offered to suspend the assumption. To offer such reasons, though, we must first assume that there is a problem.

So, let us begin by stating quite clearly how the problem should be understood before tentatively attempting to dissipate it. First, let us ask a necessary question: why do we care about whether people are free or determined? Why, in short, does it matter? Intuitively we divide the world into agents and things: the former are to be held responsible and merit praise or blame for their existence, whereas the latter do not. And this distinction is based on freewill: agents have it and objects do not. So, the concept of freewill needs to be investigated in order to ascertain whether our cutting reality the way we do is an actual description or merely a metaphysical error (in the same way we believe the sun to set in the West is). In the following discussion, it is pertinent not to lose sight of the reason why one needs a concept of freewill: to distinguish agents from objects. Free-will, freedom and liberty are all central and necessary concepts in the discourses of ethics, politics, punishment and even in the realm of art and social relations. However, the concept of free-will is, on the surface and without theoretical manipulation, incompatible with the basic concept of explanation, that is causality. It is, after all, the modern dream to offer one theory, one language, to explain everything and, if there exists more than one explanation, then the aim is to reduce one of the explanations to terms of reference of the other, to reject one explanation in preference of another, or to reveal one of the positions to be the product of immature, superstitious and undeveloped thinking.

So, let us begin by putting the assumption of our time in as clear a manner as possible: there is but one reality and one proper description of that reality, for which there is an appropriate language into which all knowledge statements can be translated, otherwise such statements are false or meaningless (Berlin, 1997: 80–81). Such an assumption generates the problem of free-will because it asserts that free-will and causality are incompatible and so one or the other must be rejected as false or meaningless. And since it is the latter concept of causality which is most efficacious in those sciences which generate pragmatic results, it is the former which is to be understood as problematic. Simply put, thinking on the subject of free-will and responsibility is dominated by what is best framed as the incompatibility thesis.¹

2.2 The Incompatibility Thesis

The incompatibility thesis is seductive for those of us with a logical and scientific bent of mind because it encapsulates so perfectly the virtues of modern explanation. First, it is simple, clear and seemingly incorrigible. Second, it is itself an expression of the prevalent mode of contemporary explanation. Simply put, it is this argument: one, if determinism is true, then no agent acts freely; two, determinism is true; therefore, three, no agent acts freely. The burden of proof of the argument rests on the second premise. Determinism is a metaphysical doctrine, that is a theory about reality, and its central tenet is that all events and states in the universe are the result of prior conditions and immutable laws, and that these events and states necessarily cause future events and states. It is the basis of all our scientific explanation: if you present me with a phenomenon in need of explanation, I will have satisfied your request when I can identify the cause that brought it about and the general law that relates the cause to its effect. Therefore, when you ask me why the water boils and I point to the heat under the pan and tell you that energy breaks molecular bonds so that liquids will become gas, you will be appeased in your search for understanding (more or less, if you are under five years old or a student of the humanities). And causality, for us in the modern age, is intimately related with another dogma of the modern age: determinis...