In defense of freedom

There is a conception of freedom – or rather, a misconception – which makes the pursuit and defense of freedom either unnecessary or impossible, because freedom is thought of as being built into, or excluded from, the very nature of human beings. In this misconception, as David Hume recognized centuries ago, two different things are being confused, which might be called freedom and free will. Freedom is being able to do what we choose, while free will is a supposed absence of causes determining what we choose. Freedom is mistakenly contrasted with determinism, which is incompatible only with free will.1 An ancient and still widely influential species of determinism is theological: human destiny is in the hands of divine agency. At one time, this agency was thought to determine the fortunes only of kings and whole peoples; by the time of early Christianity and Talmudic Judaism, God was perceived as being concerned with every individual soul. Theological determinism sees the individual as acting out a role ineluctably assigned by higher Powers, a life of misery or one blessed by divine grace. Whatever befalls is Fate – anagke, kismet, karma, qoral. Freedom is limited to the expression of a hope which by itself has no purchase on reality – may it be His will, Inshallah, Im yirtze ha-Shem, Deus volte. Religious fatalism often has served to rationalize inequalities, as with Calvanists and with apologists for the Hindu caste system. Whatever the political effectiveness of fatalism, logic sees in it only the tautology that what will be will be, or the patent falsehood that what we do in the present has no effect on what will be in the future. The main thrust of religious teaching, however, in both East and West and in all but a few scattered sects, is that our destinies are our own doing, determined by the actions we ourselves have decided to perform. This is the Hindu law of karma as understood by its teachers, rather than as it is taken in the popular mind; it is the teaching of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism; and the doctrine of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that as you sow, so shall you reap. For all the major religions the doors of enlightenment and repentance are always open – choice remains to the very end. We must abandon hope only at the very gates of Hell; the hopelessness is itself the damnation. Modern social philosophies have perpetuated religious perspectives by couching them in secular idioms. In these formulations, History replaces Providence as the determinant of human destiny. Historicist determinism leaves to human beings no more freedom than that of hastening or delaying the execution of the inexorable decrees of History. Even the revolutionary is only a midwife for a pregnancy which must inevitably run its course, to a birth in whose conception neither the revolutionary nor any other person was free to choose to play a part or not. To our mind, while history undeniably restricts the range of real possibilities, we know of no compelling or even plausible reason for the extraordinary belief that the range is always limited to one possibility only, so that there are never any choices at all to be made. The rise of the scientific worldview, coupled with a persistent confusion between freedom and free will, has been thought by some philosophers to deprive freedom of any empirical ground. If freedom is conceived as incompatible with

determinism (a conception which I take to define, not freedom, but free will), it is indeed dissonant with a scientific outlook. Already in the seventeenth century, Spinoza saw that freedom so conceived is no more than a mask for ignorance. We mistake our ignorance of the causes of our actions for the absence of such causes, and cling to a supposed freedom which the advance of knowledge of human behavior progressively lessens. With the growth of the human sciences, these philosophies compel us to see the human being either as a cog in a machine whose workings are entirely out of our hands, or else as a projection onto the plane of experience of unknowable transcendent realities. The alternatives are cynicism and despair on the one hand, or on the other hand a groping faith deprived of any empirical guidance. In the present century, some philosophers supposed that quantum mechanics, with its Principle of Indeterminacy, provides a way out of the dilemma. Their argument is that since physics no longer promulgates a determinist worldview, freedom – which these philosophers still counterpose to determinism – can continue to be regarded as intrinsic to human nature without conflicting with science. Quantum indeterminacy, however, applies only to sub-atomic events considered in isolation. On the macroscopic level, with the unimaginably vast number of particles involved, determinism remains as before. Human freedom is surely not a matter of obscure phenomena buried deep within the atoms making up neural ganglia. The issue of determinism and indeterminism is irrelevant to the actual problems of attaining, protecting and exercising freedom. The irrelevance is revealed by the circumstance that the resolution of the issue in favor of determinism would affirm the reality of freedom for no human beings, and in favor of indeterminism, for all of them. In fact, however, some people are free spirits and others have slavish mentalities, just as some nations are free and others subjugated, and people are sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Free will, moreover, is an absolute – it either exists or it does not. Freedom, on the contrary, is a matter of degrees. We cannot solve the problems of freedom nor cope with its predicaments by seeking ways to elude causality but, on the contrary, by exercising such control as we have over the operative causes. Among these causes there is a significant difference between the internal factors shaping action and the external ones. The difference is significant because their workings are subject to very different controls – psychological rather than political, in childhood much more than as an adult, through insight and not overt action. The internal factors enter into the definition of freedom in a narrow sense, in which it is contrasted with freedom defined in terms of external factors, which may be called liberty. Freedom and liberty interact; each is dependent on the other in important ways. The two are usefully separated only in analysis. Freedom as an internal condition or process is first of all a matter of autonomy, not subjecting one’s choices to decisions made by someone else. That subjection constitutes a dependency to be distinguished from the realistic dependence we all have on other people. Autonomy is not a negation of the realistic need for others in the pursuit of our ends; it is a negation of the unrealistic

dependence which gives up to others the freedom to decide which ends to pursue. Dependency is not always a giving up of freedom. Autonomy may never have been achieved in the first place, so that freedom is not lost but rather remains unattained. Autonomy is not a matter of the absence of causes for choices, but of the presence of reasons for the choices. If seeing a reason for doing one thing rather than another is what causes us to do it, we are autonomous, but not if we are impelled by someone or something other than our on aspirations and cognitions. As Kant emphasized, morality presupposes the autonomy of the will.2 Neither praise nor blame attaches to what I do except in so far as it is what I myself really choose to do. For autonomy we must be at liberty to choose; “Your money or your life!” does not offer a choice. Dependency is manifested in behavior as conformism. This is more than conformity, doing what is being done by others. Conformism is doing something because it is being done by others – the conformist is dependent on what others choose to do. It is this which negates autonomy, not action in conformity to given norms. Autonomous persons can also conform, but they choose, in accord with their own values, the norms to which they will conform. In that act of choice, the norms become the person’s own. In conformism, on the contrary, the person is sailing downwind no matter which way the wind is blowing. Autonomy is displayed by the young Hassidic rabbi who succeeded his father and was accused shortly thereafter of departing from his father’s ways. “On the contrary!” he exclaimed. “I do exactly as my father did – he did not imitate and I do not imitate!” Rebellion is not emancipation from conformism but its polar equivalent. When A is subject to dependency on B, if B says “Do it!” A does it, and if B says “Don’t do it!” A doesn’t do it. When A is in rebellion against B, if B says “Do it” A doesn’t do it, and if B says “Don’t do it!” A does it. In both cases equally we can predict what A will do if only we know what B has ordered. The mathematician rightly speaks of A’s actions as the dependent variable in both cases, though the dependency is causal rather than only logical. The rebel is as lacking in autonomy as the conformist. The psychological equivalence of rebellion and conformism, Erich Fromm pointed out, allows the escape from freedom to masquerade as emancipation.3 Rebel and conformist are both authoritarian personalities, both with dependency on others to provide what autonomous people provide for themselves. A slave who replaces one master by another remains a slave. On the political scene, a leader who invites and sustains dependency is perceived as having charisma. The belief in the divine right of kings has not been abandoned in modern times but only secularized. Although the charismatic leader leads in the name of freedom, he perpetuates in his followers a worshipful submission, which might still be expressed as “Thy will be done!” A free society is very different from Plato’s republic, in which a small elite, supposedly wiser than the masses, makes all the important decisions for everyone. Jefferson rejected the assumption that the elite knows best what is good for all, unless the elite is tautologically defined as consisting of those who know

best, a definition impossible to apply operationally. A paternalistic government, Jefferson argued, treats its citizens as if they were unwise and unruly children. It has no faith in people. Dostoevsky’s man from the underground and existentialists in our own day go further. Even if the decisions made for us by others are for our own good, they rob us of autonomy, and this, for a lover of freedom, is of such overriding importance that what is being done for us is not for our own good after all. Freedom has its price – responsibility for our own lives. This responsibility may entail anxiety before our decisions and guilt after them. The wish to avoid such anxiety and guilt motivates the escape from freedom, the surrender of one’s autonomy. Freedom is inalienable. Unlike liberty, it cannot be taken away, only given away; those who give it away are already enslaved, in bondage to their fears and self-contempt. But concentration camps, terror and brain-washing can succeed at last in taking what initially the victims did not want to give. Conflicts can break out among desires so dissonant that each can be satisfied only at the cost of frustrating some of the others. No one in the grip of conflicting desires can be said to be free. Whatever one decides to do meets with resistance. There can also be conflicts with one’s norms of behavior. The more determined I am to do my duty, the less free I am when I am caught up in conflicting desires. Especially compelling are conflicts between enjoined ends and the means necessary for their attainment. In our culture these conflicts are formulated in an antithesis of “idealism” and “realism” – brotherly love and Christian charity on the one hand, and competitive success on the other. Inner conflicts are not resolved by taking sides. Authenticity is not a product of self-control. We may master our impulses, but wherever there is a master there is also a slave. Authenticity is the consonance of action with all the impulses reaching out for expression. Confucius, he tells us, was able at last to follow his heart’s desire without straying from the path of duty. That is what defines authenticity: what we really want to do coincides with what we feel we ought to do. This is not to say that freedom is pure spontaneity, unthinking caprice. Conscience does not make cowards of us all; a free spirit is not cowardly but reflective. We are free only when we are not caught between impulse and inhibition but act with deliberation. Free choice is not a final judgment rendered after prosecution and defense have made their case. Neither of them makes a case to start with; no one is taking sides. Neither is freedom the absence of causal determination. It is the presence of a particular sort of cause, the workings of reason. This is the conception of freedom elaborated by philosophers and psychologists from the Stoics and Spinoza to Freud and John Dewey. At issue is not the existence of a mysterious process antecedent to action. Reason is embodied in the action itself. Action is freely chosen when we have our reasons for doing what we do – we are doing it intentionally, not just impelled to it by causes over which we have no control, and of which perhaps we remain unaware. These reasons emerge from deliberation, the weighing of the conditions and consequences of alternative futures. The truth that makes us free is that

embodied in the knowledge of what we are doing, a realization whence we came and to what ends we are moving. Even that knowledge is not enough to make us free unless we use the knowledge to guide our transactions with the reality external to the self as well as the reality within. Action is free, not when it is uncaused, but when among the components of the action are symbols of alternative futures. Freedom is not a state of mind antecedent to action but a quality of the ongoing programming of action by symbolized futures. It is this symbolization which makes freedom, as Spinoza explained, incompatible with ignorance. There has been in our time an explosion of knowledge perhaps as significant in the long run as the nuclear or population explosions. Unfortunately, most of our new knowledge relates to the human environment rather than to human action itself. Moreover, while knowledge as a whole has increased dramatically in extent, it has not increased to anything like the same degree in its dispersal. Ours is more than ever the age of the expert, and of industrial and military secrets. Most people remain alienated from the spirit, methods and even the language of science; they are at home only with the application of science, the buttons to press so as to get the technology running. Freedom is incompatible not only with ignorance but also with unthinking passion, which Spinoza called human bondage.4 Ours is still a time of bigotry, of blind devotion to Causes. We live in a world of true believers, different from the medieval world only in the replacement, for many people, of religious faith by ideology or by a welter of national, ethnic and other special concerns. It is not the concerns themselves that keep us in bondage, but our pursuing them with irrational mindedness. We are enslaved by the magic of symbols and the magic of terror and violence, and by the subjectivism for which neither facts nor values objectively command belief. Even truer today than when he wrote them over a half-century ago, are the lines of W.B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”5