Conclusion

The philosophical problem of ‘freedom and determinism’ is in reality a cluster of problems with different sources.

Early Greek thinkers were impressed by the extent to which human beings are caught up in forms of compulsion whereby they behave in ways that are natural to human beings – greed, selfishness, jealousy, the thirst for power, the desire for revenge for a humiliation or injury they have suffered. They were impressed by the way feuds, wars and injustices perpetuate themselves as human beings become the vehicle of these natural tendencies. They referred to this phenomenon as ananke or necessity. They thought of men in their subjection to such natural necessities as like particles of water in the sea during a storm going up and down with the waves. Men are subject to these in their very will and on account of their nature. Hence they are not aware of their lack of autonomy until they come to grief and wake up to it in their affliction. They make choices, as it seems to them, but their choices are determined not by themselves as individuals but by the nature they share with other human beings. They are thus unfree by virtue of what they are like in their nature – they are owned by it. They act in bondage to patterns into which they fall naturally and from which they cannot extricate themselves.

The difficulty then is to see how men can avoid falling into such patterns and what it takes for them to do so: how is it possible for human beings to resist those natural tendencies in which they are tempted into patterns of action and reaction in which they come to be entrenched? Plato argued that once entrenched in them people cannot see what is outside. He identified those tendencies which feed these patterns with evil and argued that those actions and reactions in which they perpetuate these patterns are involuntary because men who are caught up in them know nothing better and see no alternative to them. They lack moral knowledge: knowledge of good and evil.

256This problem acquired a new dimension with the coming of age of Christianity and its theology or system of concepts. If God is omniscient, that is He knows everything, He must know everything that will take place in the future, including our future actions. He must see our future in the way we know the past in our memories, in which case the future must be fixed much in the way that the past is. But then the idea that we ourselves determine what we shall do in the decisions we make must be an illusion. Even if our future is genuinely tied up to our choices, so that our future actions follow from our choices, the two must be fixed together in advance for God to know them ahead of time. So how could He have created us free? There seems to be a contradiction within Christian theology which cries out to be resolved. This was one of the questions which preoccupied both St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.

With the rise of the sciences the question of causality came to the fore and the universality of causation became what threatens the kind of agency that is distinctive of man – the kind of agency bound up with man’s capacity to take decisions, make choices, and be guided by considerations of reason. This is what is usually referred to as man’s ‘free will’. Now it seems to be excluded not so much by God’s foreknowledge, for that idea has lost its currency, but by causal determination which in its universality seems to by-pass human agency. For if what a man does is the end result of a chain of causes, then it is not he who does what he does; it is the causal conditions operating in his life that bring it about. They make him what he is and thus move him into action through choices as links in the chain that are mere epiphenomena. He is like a puppet on a string that has been granted consciousness, as in the case of Spinoza’s stone which imagined it was moving of its own volition.

So if human beings are intentional agents and, in that sense, have free will, how can causality be universal? This was certainly Kant’s problem. Descartes by-passed it in according man ‘activity of mind’ over and above consciousness. This activity consists in the will’s capacity, as Descartes conceived it, to initiate actions without a cause. Both Hume and Schopenhauer rightly rejected this conception. Having done so Hume reconciled free will with causality by arguing that freedom does not stand opposed to causality but to compulsion. Causality, he argued, is not a form of compulsion. Kant did not find Hume’s answer to be any more satisfactory than Descartes’ answer.

Descartes was at least right in according a unique status to man’s agency even if his conception of the will and its activity left much to be desired. This was something which both Aquinas before Descartes and Kant and Schopenhauer after him appreciated. Two questions which need to be asked and which are discussed in the book are: (i) What does it mean for a person to decide things for himself, act on his own behalf, in contrast with doing so in 257subjection to something external to him – e.g. in subjection to public opinion or, at an extreme, to hypnotic suggestion? (ii) What place does causality occupy in human life and actions?

Often ‘causal determination’ incorporates various forms of compulsion and constraint rooted in people’s character and affective life. As the perception of their scope widens no room seems to be left for the kind of freedom with which we are familiar in human life and mark in our language. The very distinctions which its marking presupposes come to be lost sight of and, indeed, forgotten or denied, as noted by Wittgenstein in his lecture considered in this book.