WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE FREE?

This essay proposes that some of the reasons which render ‘What is it like to be X?’ kinds of questions recalcitrant to scientific naturalism lie at the heart of widespread vexations over ‘free will’ but that phenomenology provides a unique method with which to address this matter. Others also share this intuition. In the conclusion to his rightly famous essay ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’, Thomas Nagel calls for an ‘objective phenomenology’. Galen Strawson argues that anyone interested in free will ‘must be concerned with the cognitive phenomenology of freedom’ (1995: 29). While one frequently finds casual use of the word ‘phenomenology’ in recent discussions of free will, only a few serious efforts employ the term (Holton 2009; Nahmias et al. 2004), yet these do so in a way hardly recognizable to the tradition established by Edmund Husserl. Of those serious efforts, one of them finds ‘surprisingly few’ sustained phenomenological treatments in this field of inquiry (Nahmias et al. 2004: 164), only mentioning Alexander Pfänder’s The Phenomenology of Willing and Motivation, but entirely overlooking the works of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Max Scheler in this area. While Jean-Paul Sartre’s early phenomenological ontology may seem an implausible candidate to address this perceived lack, I will argue that the spirit of Being and Nothingness (but not always its letter) offers largely unappreciated yet helpful phenomenological resources with which to approach the question ‘What is it like to be free?’ By ‘phenomenology’ it will here be meant a first-person reflective method

at least recognizable, if not agreeable, to Husserl, who would have recognized and likely agreed with Sartre’s method only in his earliest philosophical works, up to but not including Being and Nothingness where Sartre employs a hybridized version of phenomenology tied to ontology. Sartre here frequently arrives at ontological claims (that Husserl was at pains to avoid) via transcendental arguments based on phenomenological descriptions (which Husserl would sometimes have endorsed). These arguments begin with a phenomenologically rigorous description of various features of consciousness, like its abilities to imagine (IPPI: 179), raise indeterminate

questions (B&N: 47), form negative judgements (B&N: 51), and deceive itself (B&N: 69), and then work in reverse (regressively) to derive the necessary conditions required by the truth of those descriptions. In three important instances Sartre offers variations of this transcendental argument, which concludes that consciousness cannot be wholly determined (by being in the mode of in-itself ) and consequently cannot be necessitated by any factual states of affairs. The first and most elaborated instance of this argument occurs in the conclusion of Sartre’s most extensive work on imagination (IPPI: 179-88), the second is a rather fragmented version (B&N: 45-58), and the last instance (that I know of ) draws out its concrete implications (B&N: 457-8). One finds frequent mention of one or more of these arguments in the secondary literature (e.g. Detmer 1986: 25-6, 2008: 66), but with few extended treatments, which is surprising, since these arguments play a fundamental role in Sartre’s early ontology.1 Unfortunately, this will not change here, for the following three reasons which, along the way, offer a few preliminary remarks on Sartre’s analyses of causation, explain why this essay judiciously avoids them, and then sketch the two separate but related problems concerning freedom (randomness and luck) that provide this essay’s central focus.