Human perception
Human perception
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Although many of us believe we can do and act how we want, whenever we want to, philosophers have augured that this is not the case. There are various views on the notion of human freedom. Free will is the notion that people make choices and have the capacity to do otherwise than they choose. Determinism is the idea that all actions and events are determined or happen necessarily and that human actions are no different. Humanity is as free as a weather vane—a weather vane moves with the direction of the wind, and humans do too. Or to put it more pre- cisely, humans move and act in accordance with desires, impulses, and causes that are beyond our control. For the determinist, there is no freedom of the will. Indeterminism, on the other hand, claims that not all actions are determined and that humans have some amount of freedom. In other words, people have some amount of free will.
Our perception of reality seems to indicate to each of us that we are free and have free will; upon closer examination, it is not so obvious. Many philosophers argue that there is no way that humans can have such a thing as free will at all. They call this the dilemma of determinism, as the British philosopher, Colin McGinn (b. 1950), states in his Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (1993), that “Either determinism is true or it is not. If it is true, then all our chosen actions are uniquely necessitated by prior states of the world, just like every other event. But then it can- not be the case that we could have acted otherwise, since this would require a possi- bility determinism rules out. Once the initial conditions are set and the laws fixed, causality excludes genuine freedom.”
“On the other hand, if indeterminism is true,” McGinn continues, “then, though things could have happened otherwise, it is not the case that we could have chosen otherwise, since a merely random event is no kind of free choice. That some events occur causelessly, or are not subject to law, or only to probabilistic law, is not sufficient for those events to be free choices.”
“Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in no way depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is
unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for anything in these various states”
—Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach
POWERUL IDEAS: VIEWS ON HUMAN META- PHYSICAL FREEDOM
Free Will—The notion that people make choices and have the capacity to do otherwise than they choose. In other words, not all actions are predetermined.
Determinism—All actions and events are determined or happen neces- sarily. There is no free will. Freedom of the will is an illusion.
Indeterminism—Not all actions are determined. People have freedom of the will.
Soft Determinism or Compatibilism—All actions are determined, and yet humanity has free will. David Hume (1711–1776) argues for this view. Hume seems to redefine what it means to be “free.” “Free” for Hume is doing whatever you are determined to do. This does not sound very “free.”
Fatalism—The view that if something is fated to happen, it will happen no matter what; it doesn’t even need to be a logical sequence of events that makes it happen.
Baruch Spinoza Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) argues that all actions unfold according to the neces- sary laws that govern the universe. If there was no antecedent cause, there could be no effect. He thinks that there is only one substance and that all things are part of it. He holds that this single substance is God, and that all of creation (including people) are part of God as a single unified whole. In regards to determinism, it is his view that all actions and events are unfolding in a necessary and determined way. There is no choice and there is no freedom. He argues that once we realize we are not free, we should “free” ourselves from regret and remorse for past actions or events as all of those actions and events were determined to happen.
POWERUL IDEAS: SPINOZA THE HINDU? Similarities between Spinoza’s philosophy and Eastern philosophy are very interesting. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Theodore Goldstücker was one of the first academics to notice the similarities between Spinoza’s religious conceptions and Hindu traditions of India. Goldstücker said “. . . a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus. . . . We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose very life is a picture of that moral purity and intel- lectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant longing of the true Vedanta philosopher . . . comparing the fun- damental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of the Vedanta philosophy.”—W. H. Allen, 1879, Literary Remains of the Late Professor Theodore Goldstucker
Jean Buridan and His Donkey Jean Buridan (1300–1358) used a hypothetical example of a donkey to argue that humanity is not free. The example commonly known as “Buridan’s ass (donkey)” is a paradox. According to Buridan (with whom Spinoza agrees), an entirely rational donkey, placed between two stacks of hay of equal size and quality, would starve to death since it cannot make any rational decision to start eating one bale of hay rather than the other. Spinoza says we are just like the donkey; without some internal or external influence upon us, we would be unable to act. We, like a donkey, would starve to death since our free will is not sufficient for us to produce an action. According to Spinoza without an antecedent cause, there could be no effect. There is no free will. Our desire is not sufficient to produce action. This example is obviously hypothetical and in principle un-testable. It is not testable because (1) there are no rational donkeys and (2) you cannot remove a person, animal, or object from the causal chain of events in order to place them in perfect “equilibrium” as the example requires.
As we have noted, Spinoza says that once we understand the nature of the world, we can free ourselves from regret or remorse. Everything that happens in life, all of our choices, and the events that unfold as a result of them, happen necessarily. Events could not unfold differently—things could not have been otherwise. As such, feel happy, feel free and be at peace, free from regret and remorse. This, of course, is easy to say and hard to do. Compatibilism Soft determinism, which is also known as Compatibilism, is a theory that states all actions are determined, and yet humanity has free will. David Hume (1711–1776) argues for this view. Hume seems to redefine what it means to be “free.” “Free” for Hume is doing whatever you are determined to do. Whereas when most people dis- cuss freedom, they have the idea that they are free to have done otherwise. In other words, you could keep reading this fascinating discussion on free will, or put down the book and have a snack. After the fact, in hindsight, whatever choice you made, you feel was not determined but rather you were open to have make a different deci- sion. Hume’s notion of being free as so long as we do what we are determined to do does not sound very “free.”
