Self and Opposition: A Theory of Self 9781626006102

Table of contents :
Front cover
Half title
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE INDIVIDUATION
CHAPTER TWO WILL
CHAPTER THREE CONTINUITY
CHAPTER FOUR FREEDOM
NOTES
INDEX
Back cover

Citation preview

Self and Opposition The author argues that the individual and continuing self emerges from human interactions and that the interactions at issue are the relations of opposition. The argument then proceeds to show how the same relations of opposition constitute the self as endowed with free will.

Piotr Hoffman studied philosophy in Poland and in France. He taught philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of eight books and many articles in professional journals and anthologies.

Piotr Hoffman Self and Opposition

Piotr Hoffman

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ISBN-13: 978-1-62600-610-2 ISBN-10: 1-62600-610-5

Piotr Hoffman ==

Self and

Opposition

SELF AND OPPOSITION

Piotr Hoffman

SELF AND OPPOSITION A Theory of Self

Marquette Studies in Philosophy No. 90 Andrew Tallon, Series Editor Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hoffman, Piotr, author. Title: Self and opposition : a theory of self / by Piotr Hoffman. Description: first [edition]. | Milwaukee, Wisconsin. : Marquette University Press, 2017. | Series: Marquette studies in philosophy ; No. 90 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017001953 | ISBN 9781626006102 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Self (Philosophy) Classification: LCC BD438.5 .H558 2017 | DDC 126--dc23 LC record available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/ v2/url?u=https-3A__lccn.loc.gov_2017001953&d=DwIFAg&c=S1d2Gs1Y1NQV8Lx35_Qi5FnTH2uYWyh_ OhOS94IqYCo&r=hokKgJ4JxWGN8r507i6qR6wpZ-D_MmlVVO57 591llHQ&m=d9xsN5VxKO91KQdFC0MxU0HN9eMtCZA2tK-lBW g92s8&s=Cr7MXPK6Q2lYKOTOfX1uvnFMSS5sJXLDdUWOdSrnu 3M&e=

© 2017 Piotr Hoffman The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

table of contents Preface.......................................................................7 Chapter One: Individuation...................................9 Chapter Two: Will.................................................19 Chapter Three: Continuity...................................41 Chapter Four: Freedom........................................57 Notes.......................................................................95 Index..................................................................... 111

T

PREFACE

he theory of self put forward and argued for in this book is new, but several of its elements and strands can be traced to the work of other philosophers. I have tried to acknowledge, and to emphasize, these influences as much as I could. The one thing I do not undertake in the book is to engage in any speculation concerning the ultimate metaphysical nature of the self. My concern is with the experienced, phenomenal, aspects of reality, and the results of the present study can be accommodated by just about any metaphysical theory, with the one and obvious exception of eliminative materialism. If somebody subscribes to the proposition that mental experience is only an illusion or a fiction, then any philosophical view—and hence also my own— accepting the reality of such experience will have to be repudiated. This exception aside, the philosophical position formulated and defended in the present study could be incorporated within the framework of a nonreductive materialism or a double aspect theory, or indeed within any other metaphysical theory concerning the ultimate nature of the self. My purpose here was to bring out certain features of the self which were hitherto either unnoticed or not given sufficient weight, for I think these features are indispensable for our understanding of the self in its phenomenal, experiential reality.

CHAPTER ONE

T

INDIVIDUATION

he idea that every human subject (a self, an I) is individual or particular can be supported and had been supported in many different ways. I have argued against them, and in favor of an alternative view, in an earlier work (1). This view, which I will take up in the present study and follow up its consequences as they apply to other aspects of the self, is that individuation, at least in the case of human subjects, emerges only through their interactions, and that these individuating interactions are forms of opposition. Now, the opposition between human agents plays itself out within their foreknowledge of each other as members of the same species. This circumstance, which the philosophers of old were fond of describing as the human agents’ “natural equality”—that is, as the approximate equality of their powers and endowments—infuses their opposition with a rather special quality. Whether we take two skillful gunfighters facing each other on a dusty street of some Old West town, or two popular politicians getting ready to begin their verbal exchange in front of an audience, the general pattern of such and similar encounters is always the same. Exceptions aside, the opponents deploy against each other (whether it be on a purely physical level, as in the case of our gunfighters, or within the context of a political contest, as in the case of our two competitors for an office) approximately equal capacities; or, to be more precise, the various differences in their capacities will cancel out in favor of an overall equality. Thus, the fast hand of one of the gunfighters will

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Self and Opposition

find its match in his adversary’s sharp eyesight; or, again, one of the competing politicians’ advantage in knowledge may well be counterbalanced by his opponent’s charisma or eloquence and so on. To this close approximation of their forces—the opponents are, as it were, “in the same league”—we must still add the usual limitation of the uncertainty concerning their assessment of each other’s strengths and weaknesses; and, as a result, we will find our two opponents in no position to predict the outcome of their conflict, be it even with some very small degree of certainty. Neither of them can know—unless he happens to know something special about some fatal weakness or some decisive advantage of either of them—who the winner and who the loser will be. In confronting each other within this predicament there is literally nothing that the opposing agents can take for granted—for, to use one of our examples again, the fast hand of one of them may find its match in the sharp eye of the other—and this relatively simple and transparent predicament of theirs endows their opposition with some very special features. To begin with, the experience of the agents’ distinctness from each other need not depend now upon their grasp of some determinate differences in their characteristics. Since, as Hobbes once put it so aptly, their “mutuall opposition” “reduce[s] their strength to nothing” (2), and since they still grasp each other as different, they may be able to do so merely by virtue of nothing in particular, i.e. quite independently of their determinate characteristics. Even if, perhaps per impossibile, they would happen to be two perfectly indiscernible twins, they would still be able to grasp their difference by virtue of nothing in particular—merely as this one opposed to that one—that is, in purely numerical terms. Nor is this ability of theirs to establish a purely numerical difference between them due to their different positions in space. The two indiscernible twins viewed as opposing each other will still differ merely on account of their opposition—and not on account of the circumstance that one of them happens to occupy (be it even permanently) the place P and the other one

1 • Individuation 11

happens to occupy (be it even permanently) the place P1. In effect, if we could imagine some non-spatial agents equal in power and opposing each other under the conditions of uncertainty they would still be able to apprehend their numerical difference whether or not they would otherwise differ in their determinate characteristics. What does differentiate such opposing agents— even if they are otherwise indiscernible—is opposition itself, and not the specifically spatial framework (or an equivalent thereof ) within which they oppose each other. And so we are free to conceive two disembodied spirits indiscernible in all of their qualitative make up, but still apprehending each other as numerically different due to their opposition alone. But let us return to the case of two human agents opposing each other. What kind of self would emerge from such an encounter? To make this clear let us switch to the first-person mode. Let us suppose that I am one of these agents apprehending the other merely as my equal in power opposed to me under the conditions of uncertainty. Our difference, we have noted, may now be grasped in purely numerical terms: I may now see myself merely as this agent opposed to that other agent, with no qualitative or spatial difference being here necessary to draw that distinction between myself and the other. Now, while the demonstrative “I” does refer to me and ( in the case we are analyzing) it does refer to me without referring to my determinate features, it is not a purely formal concept of an “I” either. Let us consider the paradigm case of such concepts, Kant’s “analytic unity of consciousness”, which he viewed as reflected in a straightforward “analytic proposition” (3). Kant’s idea is here simple enough: I cannot have any representation without viewing it as being my representation. Suppose I look at the wall in front of me. There are many things that I can wonder about concerning my present representation of the wall, but I cannot wonder whether or not I am having that representation. As Kant sees it, for me to wonder whether any experience I am having is in fact my experience makes no sense. This, for Kant, is a matter of conceptual necessity: any

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Self and Opposition

experience that I have is being experienced as belonging to me. And since for Kant my I (the “pure apperception”) is a thinking I, “[i]t must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and this is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me” (4). But what is this representation “I”—Kant also calls it a “concept”, or even, on account of its paramount function in our having all other concepts, the “vehicle of all concepts” (5)—that must accompany, at least implicitly, all of my representations? We do know that it refers to a thinking I and so Kant speaks of the “I” and of the “I think” as synonymous, at least when the self of the analytic unity of consciousness (or “apperception”) is concerned. This much we can know, but we can know no more. The entire argument of the Paralogisms is meant to prove what the Transcendental Deduction (especially in its second, B version) had already made clear: we are dealing here with a purely analytic truth from which no non-trivial knowledge of the apperceptive self can be fleshed out. In effect, since there can be no knowledge without some (empirical or pure) intuition and since the I of the analytic unity of apperception cannot be given in any intuition, we can not know whether this I we think of as the owner of our experience is a substance (6). More than that, we cannot even know whether the apperceptive I is a substance or an accident (7). Even assuming—though this would contradict the entire argument of the Paralogisms, indeed the entire argument of the Critique of Pure Reason as a whole—that we could know that the apperceptive self is a substance, we could never know whether its nature would be mental or material or of some other kind, unknown to us (8). Even this does not go far enough. Not only do we fail to know whether the I is a substance or an accident and, if it is a substance, what kind of substance it is, but we cannot even know if the I stands for one substance or, perhaps, for many

1 • Individuation 13

substances—as Kant shows with the aid of his famous analogy of several billiard balls transferring motion to each other (9). If I cannot know the nature of the apperceptive self can I at least know its actual existence? Surely, when I entertain that representation of the wall, there may not exist a wall in front of me (I may be having a perceptual illusion, a daydream etc.) but it is at least certain that I who am having that representation (illusory or veridical) enjoy an actual existence; this much we seem to know at least since Descartes’s Second Meditation. But it is by no means clear that I know even this much, according to Kant. The reason is still the same. I cannot help to think of my I as a substance (10), but, we recall, I cannot know my I to be a substance. Similarly, I cannot help to think of my I (as “pure apperception”) as existing, but I do not have any knowledge of its existence (11). This is not a very plausible position to end up with and, as a result, Kant tries out various moves purported to show how (his very own standards notwithstanding) I can still have knowledge at least of the apperceptive I’s existence if not of its nature. But these moves generate even more confusion and had been assessed, by one of the classics of Kant scholarship, as representing here nothing short of a “desperate solution” (12). Kant’s conclusion that no non-trivial knowledge of the self can be derived from the first-person “I” referring to the pure apperception can only be strengthened by the results arrived at by some contemporary theories of self-reference and self-awareness which follow the same path as did Kant’s own teachings (13). As “analytic”, the Kantian apperception is ipso facto “original” (14), that is, primitive and noncriterial. Consequently, it cannot be misidentified. I may mistakenly identify a plane above me as a bird. But, even while I misidentify the plane as a bird I cannot possibly misidentify the subject of my first-person report “I see a bird in the sky”. The first-person use of the term “I” is thus immune to error through misidentification (15). Its use is also very different from the uses of other demonstratives, such as “this”, “here” and so on. In these latter cases it is the speaker’s

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Self and Opposition

intention (perhaps aided with pointing out the object, or with some similar gesture), which determines the reference of those demonstratives when the speaker uses them. But the uses of “I” in the first-person statements are fixed in their reference quite independently of any intention of the speaker: the term can only refer to the speaker himself (16). None of this could be accounted for, the argument proceeds, if, when using the first-person “I”, I were to be cognizant of myself through some form of introspection or inner experience. For I would then have to know that I am doing such inner observing (say, the observing of myself feeling pain) and this self-knowledge, on penalty of regress, could not be acquired by observing myself. Just like the “original” apperception of Kant, this first-person knowledge of my I must underlie all knowledge that I can have and, consequently, it must be immediate, noncriterial and indeed “tautological” (17). We are thus brought back to Kant’s “analytic” unity of apperception. I have devoted some space to this view, for it does have certain similarities with my own. As the reader may recall, in my account too the term “I” does not refer to some qualitative individual “essence” of the person, much less to his or her determinate personality, (to Kant’s “empirical” apperception, or to empiricists’ “perceptions” connected with each other by some type of relations). But the differences are even more important. The capacity for the noncriterial grasp of the I that Kant discovers in his “analytic” or “original” apperception does not attribute any particular (or individual) status to any of the subjects of experience referring to themselves in the first person mode. It is an universal cognitive feature which all subjects of experience share insofar as they rely only upon the “I” of the first-person reference. This is why Kant concluded, in the Prolegomena, that the pure apperception is only a common form, a “consciousness in general” (Bewusstsein űberhaupt) (18). All subjects of experience share this form as the analytic unity of consciousness and, consequently, no difference between subjects of experience can be grounded in that form of consciousness alone, shared as it is by all of them. Were we to try

1 • Individuation 15

to conceive two minds with perfectly indiscernible experiences we would never know whether we are actually conceiving two distinct minds or, as Leibniz put it, “the same thing under two names” (19). For the circumstance that each of them has an “analytic” or “tautological” grasp of his experiences as being his, would be their shared property—and we would still have to establish by some independent means that they are numerically different, their qualitative indiscernibility notwithstanding. But this is not at all the case with the two agents whose mode of opposition I have been analyzing. Certainly, each of them refers to himself as “I” and each of them has the capacity of experiencing: each of them has the capacity to have a sense of “what is it like” to find oneself in some predicament or another. But it is not due to this, or due to this alone that they are capable of apprehending each other as numerically different (i.e. as particular: as this agent opposed to that agent) whether or not they are otherwise indiscernible. For each may now see the other as differing from him by nothing in particular (and not by some mental and physical characteristics, by his equipment and his assets etc.). And insofar as their identification with all those determinate aspects of their existence is undercut, they both emerge, in their opposition, as two “pure negativities” (Hegel) and they are able to distinguish themselves from each other in this purely numerical way (20). Here, however, we seem to encounter a paradox. The two opponents—provided that we understand their opposition the way we have been describing it all along—are individuated (whether or not they are otherwise indiscernible) by that relation of opposition. But, like every relation, the relation of opposition too presupposes its terms. Consequently, these terms must be individuated independently of whatever it is that accrues to them on account of their entering into a relation of opposition. The rule seems to be universal and it can be easily illustrated. If, say, this lake is “to the left” of that mountain or if this tree is “taller” than that house, then the lake and the mountain, and the tree and the

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Self and Opposition

house, have to be individuated independently of how we think of them through the prism of their relations. And why should the case of two agents opposing each other be any different in this respect? Surely, for the agents A and B to enter the relation of opposition they must already exist as the A and the B that they are. This they certainly do, and I have said nothing to the contrary. What I did argue, though, is that the relation of opposition constitutes them as particulars, i.e. irrespectively of whether they are otherwise (as they obviously must be) qualitatively different, similar, or indiscernible. Opposition constitutes them as the particular I’s that they become through it. In this respect, though of course not in other respects, the theory of the I here argued for resembles closely the corresponding account of G.H. Mead. In a special section of Mind, Self and Society, titled The “I” and the “Me” Mead shows how the I emerges in intersubjective relations and encounters through the process of distinguishing itself from, and of reacting to, what Mead calls the “Me”. The latter is, for Mead, the agent’s internalized set of expectations and attitudes displayed towards him by others: “it is the presence of those organized sets of attitudes that constitutes that “me” to which [the self ] as an “I” is responding…and it is that which constitutes the “I” (21). Thus, in both Mead’s and my own account, the I emerges only through the agent’s interactions with others, but the I is also very different from being simply a social role, much less some “social construction” in the sense of the postmodern theories of the self. Quite the contrary, “the “I” is his action over against that social situation” (22)—that is, against the socially constructed “me”—and, in that action, the I acts as free (23). We need not yet address, at least not at this point, the issue of freedom. But it is otherwise with the issue of will. For the experience of opposition involves not only a cognitive component (some sense of “what is it like” to oppose an agent approximately equal in power under the conditions of uncertainty), but it clearly involves a volitional component as well. Whether or not

1 • Individuation 17

the opposing agents’ wills are free, each of them can continue to oppose or can stop opposing (by flight, bargaining, submission etc.) the other. But what kind of will is here at work, at least as long as the agents (through the decision of one of them or of both) do not opt out of their opposition? Obviously, any attempt to answer this question presupposes some clarification of will.

CHAPTER TWO

A

WILL

n analysis of the experienced reality of will can still find illuminating clues in William James’s classical treatment of the subject. According to James, the “essence” of a voluntary act is the element of “resolve” or “consent”—the celebrated Jamesian fiat (“let it be done”)(1). Generally speaking, James writes in a way that leaves no doubt as to what is willed: what is willed is an action. For example, I decide (for “deciding” is also one of the terms James uses to describe an act of will) to get up from the chair and go to the kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee; I do not make a decision to move my limbs and to transfer my body from the living room to the kitchen. However, it must be conceded to James’s critics that there are also passages where he identifies a bodily movement, and not a genuine action, as what is willed in the fiat (2). But this is not the main Jamesian meaning, even though it must be granted that he was not a very careful writer. One thing he did make clear was that not all our acts are voluntary; there is an entire area of human conduct where no fiat is involved, no “decision” or “volitional mandate” is needed (3). And even within the class of voluntary acts the element of fiat is present in different ways. The “express fiat” is issued by the agent only in those situations where he finds himself caught up in a conflict between competing ideas and tendencies. He resolves the conflict by neutralizing the antagonistic idea; and that “resolve” or “decision” of his is precisely an act of “express fiat” (4). But even if no mental conflict is involved, and even if no prior

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Self and Opposition

uncertainty, hesitation and deliberation are at work since the action undertaken is spontaneous and unhesitating, due to a decision made “on the spur of the moment” (as we say in common speech) it still remains the case that the action, being voluntary, was initiated by the fiat (the “resolving”, the “deciding” etc.) present at least at the beginning of the action (5). Such a claim may not seem to be obvious, or even acceptable. For, one may ask, what does this fiat actually do in cases when, prior to action, the agent does not go through a period of conflict or, at the very least, through some uncertainty and hesitation when the fiat is needed to finally settle the issue? Suppose I drive on one of the main thoroughfares of the city, I see a big traffic jam ahead of me and—without any hesitation or uncertainty—I immediately turn right, into the smaller street I was about to pass. If there is nothing here to be settled, then where is the element of resolving or deciding? For here it is not the case that I “finally decided” to turn right (rather than turn around); I simply “turned right” or I “took the right turn”, and this seems to be all that needs to be said about my move, especially since I did not even consider the possibility that I might turn around, or indeed any other possibility. Why not simply say—instead of saying “I decided on the spur of the moment”—that I took the right turn on impulse, or perhaps out of sheer habit? The equally simple answer is that in this case I did not act on impulse or out of habit. I kept my head cool and, with full knowledge of what I am doing, I did decide to turn right because my dislike of traffic jams is intense; and I did decide to turn right even though I did not hesitate for a moment about those other possibilities also open to me. Blocked by the traffic jam, I made a “snap” decision—without any hesitation or uncertainty—to turn right, for it occurred to me that there is a beautiful park in that area and it would be nice to take a walk in it. Very well then, why not simply say that a desire to be in the park arose in me? Yes, I did have that desire, but I also—without prior hesitation and uncertainty—“decided” or “resolved” to gratify that desire, I “consented”

2 • will 21

to it by issuing the Jamesian fiat, the “let it be done”. But when I do such things (“deciding”, “resolving”, “consenting” etc.) without confusion or hesitation then just what do they add to the picture? That is precisely my point: I cannot think of any case of a voluntary action uninitiated by some form of the Jamesian fiat, and this is why I find myself unable to improve upon his understanding of this key feature of will. As for the competing view—willings are strivings, tryings or efforts, which take place without any fiat—I will consider it later in this chapter. It goes without saying that if the fiat is necessary for a voluntary action, then any reductive analysis of voluntary action in terms of some combination of desires and beliefs will have to fail. In fact, I have already hinted at it in my example: I do take the right turn on account of my belief (there is a park there, with beautiful old trees) and my desire (to take a walk in the park), but it is my resolve to gratify that desire by acting on that belief that will induce me to take the right turn. To put it in Leibnizian terms, the belief and the desire may “incline” me to take the right turn, but without my decision to do so they will not induce me to act—or else, if they do so, the action will not be voluntary, but performed on impulse, or under the guidance of habit, or the influence of a pleasant flood of memories and so on. Conversely too—though this topic belongs to the later stage of my argument—both that desire and that belief might continue to linger on, but without my decision to act on them, I will not take the right turn. According to James, the fiat is also needed to maintain the continuing performance of every voluntary action. However smoothly and unhesitatingly the action is being carried out it requires, in the agent, an attention to the idea guiding the action (for example, as I continue to drive to that park, I must continue to stay focused on my goal, otherwise I might just as well stop the car and go to the coffeehouse nearby). And this sustained focusing of my attention on the idea guiding my action is also a “fiat”, a “resolve” and a “consent”(6). Briefly, from the very

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beginning and throughout the performance of every voluntary action, the agent’s resolve remains present. It may be explicit or (as in most cases) implicit, it may be stronger or weaker, but it cannot be lacking altogether unless, once again, the action sinks to the level of one’s acting on impulse, habit or something similar. I have spoken of the “agent”, for volitions are usually the first stages of action—there are even philosophers who reject volitions altogether in favor of actions, though this view is seldom defended today (7)—but it would be more accurate to speak, at this point, of the “decider” so as not to prejudge anything concerning the difficult issue of the relation between volition and action. Still, there cannot be any “deciding” or “resolving” or issuing a “fiat” without someone or something doing all of this— in exactly the same sense and for exactly the same reasons that we find it quite natural to speak of someone who is “calling the shots” in such and such undertaking. Needless to say, none of this implies, all by itself, that such substantival mode of speaking (of the one who decides, who wills, who resolves etc.) is sufficient to prove the reality of some active substance doing here the deciding or the resolving. This may or may not be the case, but our task is to stick to the purely phenomenal features of experience. And here, we are on safe grounds with our claim. After all, volitions or acts of will do not just “happen” to me as some events that “befall” me from within or from without me. I decide to do this or that; I am the one who performs or brings about an act of willing. Of course, I can say—especially, though not exclusively, in hindsight—that such and such decision “was growing in me”. Still, in the end it was I who made the decision. I dotted the i, so to speak, no matter how strongly the decision was growing and gathering steam within me, and quite independently of whether or not my will was “free” not to make that decision. Let us stress this point: with James, we separate the issue of will from the issue of its freedom. It may still prove to be the case that the will is—at least in some situations, if not always—endowed with freedom. But whether or not the will is free, the act of willing

2 • will 23

itself involves some degree of deciding, resolving and so on. For example, if I am sufficiently greedy and if I lack free will or some desire strong enough to counter my greed, I will undoubtedly decide to make that tempting investment I am currently considering. Nevertheless, it is not the “greed in me” that does the deciding. The deciding is my doing, even if, in the present case, I make this decision because I happen to be a greedy person. Now, to say that a decision requires a decider does not prejudge anything concerning his metaphysical status, but it does imply that on a purely phenomenological level we cannot talk of “unowned” decisions. This becomes even clearer if we realize that when I make a decision (when I “resolve”, “consent”, give my fiat and so on) I also take it upon myself, at least at the moment when I actually make it. It is possible that I may “change my mind” in the next moment, and some philosophers have even gone so far as to claim that such instantaneity belongs to the essence of will (8). It is also possible—though rather rare, for the reasons I will explain later—that I can make a decision, and that I can even endure in it for some time, without taking any steps to implement it. None of this, however, affects our main point: I am deciding this or that and in so doing I ipso facto take the decision upon myself. There are no “unowned” decisions; every decision requires a decider. We have moved to analyze will, for we found it involved in any opposition between agents: each of them decides, and continues to decide, in one way or another when their powers come into opposition. But saying only this much amounts to understating the case. For will is itself a source of power and it becomes a particularly important source of power precisely when it operates within the context of an opposition between agents. Interestingly enough, we do not owe this insight to a libertarian, but to a compatibilist; and this allows us once again, at least at this stage of our argument, to circumvent the issue of whether or not the will is free. On the other hand, we may surmise that if the will, even in the compatibilist account of John Locke—for he

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Self and Opposition

is the compatibilist to whom we owe the insights we are about to explore—represents an important element in the power equation between human agents, then the will’s role in that equation would be even greater on the libertarian model, where the very indeterminacy of the will could only increase the element of surprise and unpredictability, and hence the power, which the agents can bring to bear against each other. At the very beginning of the Essay’s celebrated chapter Of the Idea of Power Locke distinguishes, and distinguishes in a fairly standard way, between the “active” and the “passive” powers. A thing has an active power insofar as it is capable of producing changes in another thing; and the latter is then said to have the passive power of receiving these changes. Locke then uses a simple example of two billiard balls to show why our ascriptions of truly active powers to objects are highly dubious, to say the least. I move a “billiard-stick” and, with it, I hit a ball which then hits and sets in motion another ball. My experience tells me only that the first ball “communicates” and “transfers” its motion to the second ball. But this falls short of experiencing that the first ball actually produces the motion of the second ball. The capacity to actually produce motion—that is, to “begin” motion, and not only to “transfer” and “communicate” it, much less to simply “receive” it—I find only in myself. “The idea of the beginning of motion we have only from reflection on what passes in our selves; where we find by Experience, that, by barely willing it, barely by a thought of the Mind, we can move the parts of our Bodies, which were before at rest” (9). Locke speaks here of “willing” but, in point of fact, his account of how the agent can find himself in a position to “begin” motion is somewhat more complicated. As an agent, I have two capacities, which are indispensable to my ability to begin motion. The first is will itself, which Locke defines as the capacity of “preferring” and “commanding” oneself to act or not to act in a certain way; an actual exercise of this capacity is volition (10). The second capacity is our “liberty”, that is the power of implementing

2 • will 25

the preferences and the commands of our will (11). Locke’s talk about “liberty” should not be taken here as any departure from his compatibilism. Once my preference for doing A (rather than for not doing A or for doing B) is established in my mind, the implementation of the command to do A is bound to follow. As for those preferences themselves, they are set up by the motions of the will, which are in turn determined by our mental apprehension of whatever it is that would remove this or that “uneasiness” or “desire” (12). Now, since my own mental life is directly known only to myself, the motions of my will and the actions that follow them—as well as the changes in the world brought about by those actions—may come as surprising and unpredictable from the point of view of others. This element of surprise and unpredictability is only intensified by the power of “suspense” that Locke attributes to us, i.e. by the power of refraining from acting immediately in response to our pressing “uneasinesses” and desires in order to consider our actions’ longrange consequences, their impact upon our lasting happiness and so on (13). For since man is “a Creature, whose thoughts are more than the Sands and wider than the Ocean” (14), and since all of these thoughts—accessible directly to the agent himself, but only indirectly and by inference to others—have their input in determining the will, the formation of the agent’s preferences may elude the others and, consequently, his actions and their impact upon other agents may be quite unexpected and thus particularly damaging to them. For this reason, the agent’s will increases tremendously, and dangerously, his power vis-à-vis the others. We are dealing here with one of the constant threads running through Locke’s political philosophy. Here, the foundational concept is the concept of natural freedom which Locke defines as our capacity and our right (though only on the grounds, and within the bounds, of the law of nature) to “order” our actions and to “dispose” of our possessions and persons as we think fit (15). This concept of freedom, in turn, presupposes the two

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concepts that Locke analyzes in his Essay: the concept of “will” as the faculty of preferring this or that (and issuing commands to act according to these preferences) and the concept of “liberty” as the faculty of implementing the preferences and commands of the will. Clearly, I would be in no position to “order” my actions and to “dispose” of my person and my possessions if I could not set my will on doing this rather than that and of implementing these decisions of my will. Now, in his political philosophy— though not in the Essay itself, where these issues are of secondary importance—my ability to enjoy freedom as defined thus far is itself built on my freedom from the other. P. Laslett, in the Introduction to his edition of Locke’s Two Treatises, put it very well: “we are all free…free of each other that is to say” (16). This is why Locke often describes my freedom as a “fence” against the other (significantly, he never speaks of my freedom as a “fence” against nature for, as he argues consistently in the celebrated Chapter V of the Second Treatise of Government, man’s powers of “work and labour” are quite sufficient to subdue nature) and forbids me to alienate my freedom under any circumstances (17). In effect, to do so would mean to make my very survival vulnerable to the actions of others, to say nothing of the lesser goods that I would be in no position to defend without that “fence” of my freedom. Now if freedom as defined by Locke represents, in his argument, the ultimate “fence” against the other, it’s because freedom’s two components—the Essays’s “will” and “liberty”—make it a source of tremendous power. An agent (if that is still the word) who is deprived of the double capacity of “will” and “liberty” is deprived of the capacity to originate motions—first of all the actions of his own body and, through them, the motions of objects within the world. Consequently, he can be in no position to defend himself against an opponent endowed with precisely such a capacity; for while his other capacities may be left intact, without his freedom (as composed of the Essay’s “will” and “liberty”) he is helpless to put these capacities to any use in

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defending himself. He can neither voluntarily initiate his actions nor, through them, sequences of changes in the objects (say, the motion of the trigger, the firing of the gun, the flight of the bullet towards the aggressor etc.) which “transfer” and “communicate” the motions originating in the preferences and commands (the “will”) and in the actions (the “liberty”, implementing the will’s preferences and commands) of the agent. This is precisely why, for Locke, the agent’s freedom represents a powerful asset as that “fence” against the other. More than that, since the operations of the Lockean “freedom” from the Second Treatise( and not only of the Lockean “liberty” from the Essay) originate in the preferences of the Lockean “will”, and since, as we recall, for Locke the will is determined by a purely mental apprehension of this or that end entertained in the mind of the agent as what is needed to satisfy his desire, and since, furthermore, a subject’s mental life is private and cannot be directly accessible to the knowledge of others, the agent’s actions are often , from the point of view of others, endowed with an element of surprise and unpredictability. And this element, as we have already stressed, only increases the agent’s power vis-à-vis others, for it often changes him—in their experience even if not in his own—into a loose cannon, which becomes even more difficult to handle and, consequently, represents an even greater danger to them. And given the circumstance that the ultimate source of such danger of one agent to another lies here in the will, it comes as no surprise that Locke gives one the unconditional right “not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown Arbitrary Will of another Man” (18). We owe to Locke the insights into how, and to what extent, the agents’ will affects their power standing vis-à-vis each other. But of course, the will’s contribution to the agents’ power in other areas—that is, not only in the domain of human interactions—is also undeniable. Our everyday understanding of will is a sufficient indication of this. We value someone for his “decisiveness” or we criticize someone else for his “indecisiveness” and “procrastination”. This ability to make decisions without

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endless hesitation, the ability to quickly—though of course not blindly and unthinkingly—issue the fiat required by the situation is valued because, obviously, it does increase our power to respond effectively to the requirements of the situation. For the same reason, we value the “strength” but not the “weakness” of the will. Preeminent military thinkers have often emphasized how important—and how difficult to assess—is the opposing party’s strength of will (19). But, again, this remains true even outside the area of human interactions. A weak-willed person is someone who, when confronted with the difficulties of carrying out consistently the required end, will stray from the course or will give up altogether on the undertaking he committed himself to carry out—and this, not unexpectedly, will diminish the power of his agency. The same can be said of the “inconstancy” we detect in someone’s will. To change constantly one’s purposes is almost always tantamount to one’s inability to carry out to the end any purpose; and this makes the person much less likely to achieve anything at all. In all of these vernacular expressions, will is valued as a form of the agent’s power. But do we value it only as a means to an end—that is, as an element contributing to the effectiveness of the person’s actions—or do we value it in its own right? For example, do we value the strength of will only because, in the last analysis, it contributes to the success of our actions, or is the strength of will appreciated for its own worth? Our own conflicting intuitions concerning this matter leave little hope of arriving here at any consensus. On the one hand, it would be rather strange, if at all possible, to admire the strength of will in someone who would always fail to achieve the intended task. On the other hand, in some cases, even if somewhat less extreme, a person’s strength of will could perhaps be valued whether or not it would contribute positively to the person’s actions. It seems highly plausible to assume that the will—the capacity to “resolve” to “decide”, to issue the Jamesian fiat—does confer upon humans some evolutionary advantage; and as it happens so often in such cases, this capacity of ours to issue fiat to our action,

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and to sustain this fiat throughout the action’s performance, may gain certain autonomy and acquire virtues and vices in its own right. With this general background in mind, it is possible to draw some conceptual distinctions, at least to the extent that they are needed to allow us to proceed farther. Let us begin with the obvious: every act of will has a content or, to be more precise, an intentional content. In each and every case of deciding or resolving our will is focused on this rather than that. For example I decide to pick the apple and not the piece of bread from the plate; and I also decide to stretch my left arm rather than my right arm to achieve my purpose. It is clear that these two cases (my deciding to stretch my arm and my deciding to pick the fruit) are very different. Let us look at the situation more carefully. I decide (if we are dealing here with a voluntary action and not with some reflex or quasi-automatic habit) to stretch my left arm to pick the apple. While my stretching my arm and picking the fruit from the plate represent here a totality—in other words my action of stretching my arm towards the plate on the table is incomprehensible unless viewed in terms of such or similar purpose (say, of rearranging the fruits on the plate, or removing the rotten pear etc.)—the two relevant components of this action have a very different status. Even if, for an external observer, it may not be altogether unintelligible to say that my volition caused that horizontal motion of my hand toward the plate, this is certainly not how I experience their relation. For unless I find myself in some unusual situation (my arm “went to sleep” or was tied to a chair etc.) I do not feel that my will causes my arm to move. Rather, I am simply performing the action I decided to perform; the volition and the action are here more like stages of a smoothly unfolding process. In other words, my decision does not cause the motion of my arm, though my arm undoubtedly does cause the motion of the fruit from the plate to my mouth. It needs to be stressed, that all of this is based on our immediate experiential evidence. From a more detached and theoretical

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point of view we may find not only that there is no such smooth and unproblematic process-like flow of volition into action, but we may even conclude, as a result of a philosophical analysis, that we are dealing here with two distinct and separable events without any real connection (but, rather, with a constant conjunction as their only link). We may even go farther and conclude, in addition, that the very concept of a mental act ( of will) influencing a physical motion (of one’s arm) is incomprehensible. But this last metaphysical issue aside, we can at least find sufficiently compelling and relatively simple reasons against viewing the relation between volition and the action that follows it as a case of a Humean constant conjunction. For if such an account were to stand, then—no matter how strong the Humean “habit” and “custom” would be formed by the agent through his observations of how a certain type of volition is followed by a certain type of action—all our knowledge of the workings of our voluntary actions would have to be based on observation of such conjunctions between our volitions and our actions. Now, while this account may or may not apply to some of our complex activities, it certainly does not apply to those of our early and basic actions (of, say, opening the eyes or turning the head) which are necessary for any observation to take place. But let us return to an act of will. Here we are immediately threatened by a regressus. The issue is at least as old as the exchange between Hobbes and Bishop Bramhall, for the bishop found himself the target of precisely such an objection advanced against him by Hobbes. Defending, as he did, the traditional medieval view that the locus of freedom is in the will, Bramhall then found himself confronted with the objection that if one is to will freely, one must certainly will voluntarily, and if one is to will voluntarily one must will to will, and the regressus becomes inevitable. As we shall see in our last chapter, Hobbes’ own remedy was simply to rebaptize will as the last and winning desire terminating the process of deliberation. Hobbes’ solution may not be acceptable, but the problem of regress must be dealt

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with. It has even produced attempts, going back at least as far as Reid, to both avoid the regress and (pace Hobbes) to preserve the truly voluntary character of an act of will by appealing to a special kind of causation by the agent, subsequently called “agent causation”. On account of its numerous difficulties (sooner or later, the theory will force us to accept the proposition that the agent causes his volitions and/or actions without any events, occurrences or changes happening to the agent himself ) this theory has been largely abandoned, for it requires too high a price for putting an end to the regress at issue (my act of will is due to a second-order act of will, which is in turn due to a third-order act of will etc.). But must there be such a regress to begin with? Not at all. There is only an appearance of regress due to a misreading of our experience. In fact, almost any form of experience lends itself to this misreading and, consequently, there is nothing surprising about our volitional experience being interpreted in the same way. Let us first consider some cases other than the experience of willing. Suppose I am focused on my rose bushes and on some flaw in the sprinklers supplying the much needed water. In other words, I am conscious of certain objects I now focus on: the roses, the sprinklers, the hose I may need and so on. Am I also conscious of my being conscious of all of this? Of course I am—otherwise I would not be able to respond immediately, as I do, to my neighbor’s question about what is it that I am focusing upon so attentively. But while my consciousness of the bushes and the sprinklers is the consciousness of objects, my consciousness of that consciousness does not treat it as an object, displayed to some second-order mental focus. I am conscious of my mental activity (or state) of focusing upon all those objects in my front yard, but I am conscious of it in a non-focal, implicit, prereflective way: and this non-focal and implicit awareness is part and parcel of the total package deal consisting here of my conscious experience of the objects I am now inspecting. There is no need to posit the first-order consciousness of objects, then

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the second-order consciousness of the first-order consciousness, then, again, the third-order consciousness of the second-order consciousness and so on ad infinitum. The data of conscious experience (in this case: of perceptual experience) render such regress unnecessary. It is not otherwise with an emotional experience. Suppose I focus on a stunning mountain landscape and this fills me immediately with the feeling of joy. But I do not need a second-order emotional experience (be it of joy or of some other emotion) in order to feel that I feel joy. Nor can it be said—though this may happen to be the case when I turn my reflective and purely cognitive attention to my feeling of joy—that I am “cognizant” of my feeling joy. Rather, my feeling of joy involves a self-feeling: “I feel great” not only about the beauty of the mountains, but also on account of feeling myself caught up in that uplifting emotion. Why should it be otherwise in the case of a volitional experience? Let us return to the Jamesian terminology: I “resolve” or “decide” to stretch my arm in order to pick up the apple from the table. Do I need to make a second-order decision to make my first-order decision or else my first-order decision will not be voluntary? The very fact that James—perhaps because he was so attentive to all forms of implicit or fringe awareness—did not even deem it useful, much less necessary, to raise the issue should serve as an indication that there is no such issue to be raised. I do not issue a second-order fiat for issuing the fiat to pick up that red apple by stretching my arm; nor do I need to “resolve” to “resolve” to move my arm. Experience itself renders the regress unnecessary. An act of will, we have already noted, has an intentional content: I decide to do or to accomplish this or that. But in willing to do or to accomplish A (to pick up the fruit from the table) or B (to water my rose bushes with a hose) I do not also will to do or to accomplish C, where C would be the act of willing (to do A or B), viewed in the same manner as I view A or B. My willing of A or B ipso facto wills itself as well—this is what makes it voluntary—but there is no second-order willing

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needed to initiate the first-order willing and, consequently, there is no threat of a regress of willings. Once again, there may be some situations where I do treat my act of willing as an object of another, and higher, act of willing (just as there are situations where I become—reflectively, focally and explicitly—aware of my perceptive consciousness of objects as of an object in its own right). For example, I may “resolve” to gradually vanquish my laziness in order to be able to “resolve” to go for a walk. But who can fail to see that this is not a case of typical and ordinary willing? Another, and more genuine, issue needs to be raised. As we noted repeatedly, every act of will has an intentional content, for to will implies logically to will this or that; and the same can be said of deciding, resolving and so on. The differences, if there are any, are purely verbal and do not indicate anything substantive behind them. For example, I can say that I “resolve” upon such or such course of action or undertaking whereas I do not say that I will “upon” something or other. But, in the end, this makes no substantive difference. For I can certainly say that I set my will “upon” doing this or that, and the meaning remains the same. Nothing important will change if I then choose to speak of deciding or giving my fiat to do this or that. And this is precisely because every act of will—no matter how we describe it—has an intentional content. Thus, no decision or resolve can be actually made without that decision or resolve involving some intention; consequently, every act of will is tantamount to the agent’s forming an intention (though of course the converse need not be true: there may be all kinds of habitual intentional activities which do not issue from an act of will). Even when I decide that I must “do something” about the water gushing out from that leaking pipe in the garden, there is at least a fairly limited and quite definite range of things I may settle on doing: depending upon how I assess the damage, I may either decide to plug the hole in the pipe, or to turn the water off in order to replace the pipe, and this pretty much covers the range of concrete options at my disposal.

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I will still have to decide which one of these options I should pursue and this will represent a more specific decision involving a more specific intention. But whether a decision is more general or more specific it entails logically the presence of some intention and—with it—the presence of a purpose or end to be pursued. Does it also entail—and if so, how?—that the intention be executed or that, at the very least, the agent trie to execute his intention? It is certainly tempting to respond in the affirmative. For what kind of intention would this be if it were not translated into action (now or later, depending upon the agent’s plan) or at least into an attempt to act? It seems that it would then sink to the level of a mere wish or phantasy; it would cease to be a real intention. If we were to follow this intuition it would not even make sense to speak of two decisions—the decision to form an intention and the decision to implement it—for the decision to (genuinely) form an intention would be ipso facto the decision to implement it. On the other hand, perhaps there may be two such decisions after all: first the decision to form the intention to do this or that (or, if one prefers, the intention to do this rather than that) and then also, subsequently (though necessarily subsequently in the temporal sense) the second decision to execute or at least to try to execute the intention already formed. In this case, we would really have to speak of two acts of will (for we are using here the term deciding as synonymous with performing an act of will): our first act of will would set up the intention to act in some way or another, and then an additional act of will would be needed to implement that intention. There does seem to be something strained and unnatural about this last way of looking at the relation between forming an intention and implementing it; and it does seem to be the case that if I “resolve” to do A , but I do absolutely nothing to implement this resolution, my resolve evaporates into a mere wish. Thus there is certainly a very strong and natural link between forming an intention and implementing it. But what kind of link is it? Must the lack of it mean that there was no real intention

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to begin with? The case for this claim, though undoubtedly very strong, does not seem to be altogether compelling. I may form a serious intention to water the flowers—and to do so not in the next few minutes, but right now—but I may fail to, as it were, “mobilize” myself to do this and I may continue to sit in my armchair. Does this mean that I am held back by my laziness or by some counteracting intention? Not necessarily. I simply don’t exert the effort that is required to implement my intention. Admittedly, such cases seem strained and unnatural. But this is precisely the point I am driving at: there is something strained and unnatural in forming a real intention to do A and not doing (or at least not trying to do) A, but such far-fetched possibility is not entirely out of the question; and this, perhaps, explains Locke’s hesitations on some fine points of his theory (20). But these hesitations of Locke are themselves indicative of what is here at stake. For, we recall, when the Lockean “will” (i.e. the capacity to prefer and to mentally command oneself to do what one prefers) works hand in hand with the Lockean “liberty” (i.e. with the power of acting and not acting in conformity with the mental commands of the will) then the overall power of the agent is hugely increased. The same point, and for exactly the same reasons, can be made about the relation between the agent’s intention and his execution or implementation of it. An intention which remains—however seldom this may take place, and however strained and unnatural this may be—unimplemented by the agent may not be impossible, and it may not even be quite the same thing as a mere wish, but, clearly, it brings no power to the agent, at least not in the same sense and to the same degree. I have put in here this last caveat, for it is quite legitimate to consider the mental forming of intentions as a power in its own right, at least a power of a certain kind. Clearly, an individual who has the capacity to form more diverse and sophisticated intentions, and to form them more precisely and more rapidly, will have this additional advantage over an individual who lacks such a capacity. And this will remain the case quite independently of

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all the advantages accruing to both agents due to a successful implementation of their intentions. But this is not the issue we are now grappling with. The issue is simply whether a “real” or “serious” intention entails at least the agent’s effort to implement it if not (as is typically the case) the implementing itself. Locke’s hesitations show that “entailment”—even causal, much less logical—may be too strong a word. Nevertheless, it does remain the case that the agent’s forming a real intention (as opposed to a mere wish) to do A and doing absolutely nothing to implement it, does strike us as strained, unnatural and atypical. We now know why this is so: an unimplemented intention does not bring the desired power to the agent and, consequently, any such case remains at odds with the will’s function to increase the power of the agent. None of this implies some Nietzschean idea of the will as the will to power. The preferences and the intentions of the agent may be much broader than that. Still, without implementing or executing them, his power is severely diminished. One may even take this point one step farther and identify willings (as opposed to mere wishings) with the strivings and the tryings of the agent (21). On this theory, the traditional concept of acts of will or volitions is untenable and useless, and the voluntariness of strivings is their necessary and intrinsic feature (22). Now it is certainly one meaning and one important aspect of willing that willing manifests itself in various strivings and tryings of the agent. I will have to say more about this below. On the other hand, given my earlier arguments, I cannot accept the proposition that a striving or a trying, which is not initiated by something like a Jamesian fiat could still count as voluntary. Why speak of strivings or tryings as strivings and tryings of the will—rather than as simple tendencies or drives—if they are not initiated by some “resolve”, or approved by some “consent”? What is more important is, rather, the opposite case: the case we have already explored, albeit in a different context and under a different wording. The issue is simply this: could there be a volition (a fiat) which does not result in some form of striving and trying?

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Let us first note the following: the connection between a volition and the corresponding trying is so strong and so natural that in most cases we do not even notice it. Usually, we only notice it in some situations of a breakdown in our smooth performance of our voluntary activity of one kind or another. Suppose I am now listening attentively to a piece of music and suppose somebody interferes with this. I may then respond by saying “please, I am trying to listen to that symphony now”, or something to that effect. But the element of “trying” did not stand out against the overall flow of my voluntary activity until that moment of interference. And yet it seems almost absurd to say that my—real and serious—resolve to concentrate on the unfolding symphony did not express itself all the time in my trying to listen to the sounds of music filling the room. It seems almost absurd to say this, but—to recall our earlier conclusions—this absurdity is not a logical absurdity; rather— to use our earlier expressions again—it is the kind of absurdity we face when we try to perform some strained and unnatural experiment in imagination. We recall the example: to talk about a preference or an intention which I (really and seriously) form even while I take no steps to implement it is to talk about a rather unusual phenomenon and, for this reason, this kind of talk seems strained and unnatural, even though the lack of any effort to implement our preference or intention does not necessarily relegate them to the category of a mere wish. We have also discovered—following up on the clues left us by Locke—just why such a disconnect (between a genuine, real preference of the will on the one hand and the implementation of this preference on the other hand) is most unusual and why, consequently , our talk about a (genuine, real) preference of the will joined with a lack of any effort to implement it is so strained and unnatural. The issue is power. Going mentally over a range of preferences (or possible intentions) and settling on one of them as the most appropriate to the situation is itself a source of power, a power which inanimate agents obviously lack. At the same time, leaving this

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preferred intention unimplemented leaves the agent with a considerably lesser power than the power he would be able to deploy by executing that intention (if I intend to pick up the apple but I don’t do anything about it, the apple remains on the plate and I continue to be hungry). And, obviously and uncontroversially, the first stage of implementing one’s selected preference or intention is to at least try to implement it. For this reason, any attempt to sever the connection between the act of will selecting our intention and the ensuing “trying” or “attempting” or “striving” to realize it, must indeed be viewed as rather unnatural: it is simply an attempt to artificially chop off one stage of a process from another. How far can this “trying” extend? What is the range of ends it can aim at? Here the judgment of the classics (corroborated by common sense) is nearly unanimous. I cannot—not truly and seriously in any case—try to achieve what I know to be beyond my capacity; and this truth applies especially, though not exclusively, to actions preceded by deliberation (23). A simple example will suffice to illustrate how compelling this claim is. If I know (and not necessarily in a way involving some specialized scientific knowledge) that gravity continues to reign in my environment, and if I have no wings or no balloon (and no equivalent thereof either) then I cannot, in all seriousness, engage in an effort of “trying” to fly over the street below the building I happen to be in at that moment. This does seem obvious and uncontroversial, but at least one contempory philosopher decided to challenge (in theory, though fortunately not in practice) this proposition. According to this philosopher I can—genuinely and seriously— try to do precisely such things, that is, the things that I know to be impossible for me to do (24). Can “trying” extend itself that far? Can it represent such a daring extension of what the French call défi à l’impossible? As I have just noted, the judgment of the classics is quite unanimous in this matter. Even so, one of them—Descartes—made at least some gestures in a different direction. As we are about

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to see, Descartes will first argue that our will can depart (with our full knowledge of what we are doing) from the true and the good and he will then explain how and why this may happen. Descartes’ first claim goes against the core of his usual teachings concerning the relation between will and truth. In effect, according to Descartes, as a rule our will does conform—and this conformity in no way diminishes the freedom of the will—to the good and the true (25). And yet I may also choose to turn away from the true and the good. In other words, Descartes allows my will, at least as a decision and a “trying” (of implementing that decision) to extend beyond what I know to be within my power. Once again, our simple example will suffice: I know all the relevant truths about gravity and my subjection to it, but I may nevertheless decide to jump off that building and to try to fly over the street. And in this I will not only be “trying” to turn away from what I know to be the true, but I will also be “trying” to knowingly follow the worse ( the inevitable fall which will change me into a cripple or a corpse) even while seeing the better. Why would anybody’s will exert itself in this way against his own better judgment (concerning both the true and the good)? Descartes’s answer: “a greater freedom consists either in a greater facility of determining oneself or in a greater use of the positive power which we have of following the worse although we see the better. If we follow the course which appears to have the most reasons in its favor, we determine ourselves more easily; but if we follow the opposite, we make more use of that positive power” (26). Once again—and once again just like in all these other aspects of the will we have already considered—the issue is power. I may will the impossible; my will, as a decision and a “trying” (to implement my decision), may strive to achieve ends that go against my knowledge of the true and the good and yet, in exerting such an effort, I do increase the use of one of my powers ( and of a “positive power” at that) in some not altogether absurd sense of the word. Of course many people would disagree. It is not my purpose here to decide the issue in one way or the other.

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I only wanted to bring out that if—and this is not just a big, but a huge if indeed—such an extension of willing were to be possible it would amount to one more testimony that will is power. With this conclusion we can now tie up the loose end we have left in the last paragraph of our Chapter One. It is no accident, we now see, that the opposition of two conscious agents involves the element of will—as is obviously the case, since each of these agents is not only the subject of the experienced reality (of the “what is it like”) of opposition, but, as part of this experienced reality, he always apprehends some option (to continue, to bargain, to flee etc.) open to his will. The will is not an element foreign to opposition itself, for the latter is nothing other than the opposition of the agents’ powers, with the will itself being a power and playing its own role in the opposition. Furthermore, in an opposition of two agents approximately equal in power and opposing each other under the conditions of uncertainty, the performance of the will rises to a new level. In making the fiat to oppose the other, each agent puts himself in a position where, as we have explained in Chapter One, he can take nothing for granted. If he wills, and continues to will, in such a situation, his immediate bond with his inclinations, appetites and desires is put under a question mark, perhaps even broken. Could such a will still fail to be free? We will try to answer this question in our last chapter.

CHAPTER THREE CONTINUITY

W

ithout prejudging anything about the metaphysical nature of the self, we have spoken of it, repeatedly, in substantival terms. In our last chapter we have already indicated why this seems to be unavoidable on the phenomenal, experiential level. For, after all, acts of will, volitions, decisions, and so on demand a “willer” or a “decider”: somebody calls the shots or dots the i. Even if we could doubt the presence of an I in some other experiences—we will take up this issue in a moment—there is always an I that wills. Schopenhauer already had seen this clearly when he wrote: “it is the will that is spoken of whenever “I” occurs in a judgment” (1). Schopenhauer’s conception of the will (much less his metaphysics of it) is not our own. But on this particular point our argument is in line with his views, and we have already covered some of this ground. Separated from the will, the Kantian “I” (or “I think”) would turn out to be—as in the end it did turn out to be in Kant’s own assessment—an impersonal and anonymous form of “consciousness in general” shared by all subjects of experience and, like all such shared properties, unable to individuate these subjects. We have shown this in detail in our Chapter One. We have argued too, that what does individuate such subjects— whether or not they may otherwise be indiscernible—is their opposition, which sets them apart as this I and that (other) I. For this reason the term “I” does refer to a particular self, although it need not pick out, in such a self, anything other than

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its purely numerical—though by all means actual, and not merely logical—difference from other selves. Furthermore, the very emergence of an “I” can only be accounted for in terms of some intersubjective framework and some interactions taking place within it. There is no I without another I, which does not imply that any level and form of mental life would be inconceivable without being “owned” by an I. But doesn’t this last statement open the door to the acceptance of the so-called “no-ownership” theory of experience? Not necessarily, provided that certain caveats are firmly kept in mind. The first such caveat is here McTaggart’s honest confession: “the ownership of experience by a self seems to me evident, not as a part of the meaning of the term experience, but as a synthetic truth about experience. This truth is, I think, ultimate. I do not know how to defend it against attacks” (2). But then what does make this proposition so compelling and “ultimate” if it is not—unlike in Kant—an analytic truth? Let us first state the obvious. If the tenets of the no-ownership theory were to be logically impossible, then the following state of affairs would be just as impossible as, say, a “square circle”: “since all our perceptions are different from each other, and from everything else in the universe, they are also distinct and separable, and may be considered as separately existent, and may exist separately, and have no need of anything else to support their existence” (3). But the state of affairs that Hume envisions in this passage is not logically impossible. While we may find it hard to believe in such a possibility, and while we may even find ourselves under a compulsion to disbelieve it, we cannot go so far as to claim, pace Kant, that Hume and his followers could not possibly understand what the philosopher is here talking about, in exactly the same sense and for exactly the same reason that would prevent them from understanding someone’s talk about “square circles” or “triangular squares”. But there is more, at least as far as Hume is concerned. In the Treatise passage Hume speaks of “perceptions”, but these are divided into “ideas” and “impressions”,

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where ideas (or thoughts) are derived from impressions (sensations, passions and emotions) (4). Consequently, when Hume entertains the possibility—even as an “idea”—of some perceptions existing per se, on their own (i.e. without being owned by a self ), he is undoubtedly considering the concept of a perception, but according to the principles of his own philosophy, such a concept of perception must have at least some continuity with our “impressions”, i.e. with the ways in which we ordinarily experience our sensations, feelings, and so on; briefly, the concept (or the “idea”, the “thought”) of such a perception must have its origin in our experience in the usual sense of the term. There must exist some features of our experience which suggest, and suggest strongly, that a “perception” might very well achieve the status Hume is willing to attribute to it in the Treatise passage. We would then be dealing with an idea (of such a self-subsistent perception) which is not only free of any logical absurdity, but which might even be suggested by some aspects of our impressions. It has by now become a piece of worn out Philosophy 101 wisdom that when Mrs. Gradgrind, in Dickens’s Hard Times responds to her daughter’s query by saying “I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room…but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it” (5), her reply is simply logically unintelligible. But it is not—not unless Hume and his followers are also logically unintelligible. We may find Mrs. Gradgrind’s reply most unusual (Dickens himself calls it “strange” in the next sentence), we may find ourselves compelled to view the pain Mrs. Gradgrind spoke of as being her pain (and certainly as being the pain of someone) but, once again, all of this falls short of acknowledging a purely logical foundation for the ownership theory of experiences. Would it be of any help to appeal, at this point, to consciousness’s capacity for reflection? Suppose someone were to grant the proposition that is possible for an experience to be unowned only to suggest, in the second step, that such an experience would acquire ownership—i.e. it would change into an experience of

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someone—by reflecting upon itself. But if there is no ownership on the first level of experience, why should we expect it to emerge on the second, reflective, level of experience? Suppose there is an experience of a and then there occurs the second level thought “there is an experience of a going on”. Why should this reflective second level thought produce the ownership that was missing in the first level experience of a? But then the question remains and returns: just why are we so strongly compelled, especially in the first-person case, to think that all experiences belong to a self? Why do we so easily take for granted that there cannot be an experience without an experiencer? If Schopenhauer is right (and if I was right in my earlier chapters without even presupposing the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of will) then that experiencer I have just mentioned could not fail to be a willer. On the other hand, while there cannot exist an unowned act of will, there do exist cases of experience where our will, and with it a sense of our self, come vey close to being extinguished. For example, we “lose ourselves” in contemplating an immense expanse of the ocean, or a huge mountain range, we are “overwhelmed” by a violent pain or intense pleasure, or by a flood of memories and so on. But while such and similar experiences (we need not go as far as the Schopenhauerian “suspension of the will” or the Buddhist “nirvana”) endure, our self-assertion shrinks dramatically, perhaps even disappears altogether, and we might then come very close to living through an unowned experience. Of course, even in such experiences our self continues to exist, even if only in the background. But they allow us to catch a glimpse of what might have happened if an experience, or a string of them, had always been purely contemplative, without any volitional component being present in it. In such a case, we may surmise, not only our awareness of the self, but the self itself would not have emerged and we would have been confronted with an unowned experienced reality. In the case of our experience, however, the I will endure for, as we are about to see, our I is a genuine continuant. Let us return

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to the circumstances where the I first emerges. As I have argued, the I emerges through an agent’s opposition to another agent, where the two opposing agents leave each other with nothing to be taken for granted. However, just like any other human experience, the experience of opposition too cannot take place in a punctual instant, but, at the very least, in a “specious present” ( James) or a “living present” (Husserl) endowed with a certain length. But to say even this much is to still understate the case. After all—and here the experience of opposition will no doubt differ from, say, seeing a very brief flash of color or hearing a fleeting sound—the experience of opposition has, as a rule, a much longer duration than some minimal “specious” or “living” present. The experience of opposition is more like a process, gathering steam through its initial stages, then evolving into an actual conflict between the agents and outlining, for them, some possible forms of resolution. Now in opposition, I have argued, the two agents emerge as the two I’s which would differ even if they were qualitatively indiscernible—for even in such a case they would differ merely as this I and that other I. In other words, their identity is not to be understood or defined in terms of some properties or parts and their relations. It is thus basic and primitive and, therefore, it needs no criteria of identity which would, inevitably, rely upon some such properties or parts and their relations. And since opposition is a process, this noncriterial identity of the I continues to persist throughout the process, whether the process itself be long or short or even (though it is hard to see how this could happen) taking place in some minimal specious present. Now if the I—basic, primitive and noncriterially known— would be continuing during the time of the agents’ opposition, there is no intrinsic reason why such an I could not be and could not be experienced, as continuing much longer than the time of the opposition itself, and indeed beyond the limits of any opposition—in, and throughout, all of our experiences and activities.

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However, someone could object at this point, isn’t it logically possible that at each and every moment (t’, t”, t’’’…)—whether we see such a moment as punctual or as a specious present endowed with some duration—I might not be one and the same numerically identical I for, at every moment, I might be a numerically different I and, consequently, my supposedly enduring numerically identical I might very well be made up of an entire series (I’, I”, I”’…) of numerically different, momentary I’s? I agree that this is logically possible—so are all kinds of other “cases” that one’s fertile imagination can come up with. Since indulging in this practice subsumes one’s intellectual work under what T. Nagel once called the “delusions of conceptual power” (6), I will try to avoid it as much as I can. Certainly, the far-fetched case I have just imagined may safely be ignored. On the other hand, there does exist a way of putting the aforementioned objection in a serious and non-frivolous way. Only, as we shall see, this way of putting the objection will void it of any threatening potential. I am thinking here of one of the lines of Descartes’s “causal” proof of the existence of God explored in his Third Meditation. According to Descartes’s conception of any existence in time, the continuity of such an existence needs an explanation for, due to the very “nature of time” (7), from the existence of a temporal entity at, say, the moment t’, the existence of the same entity at t” does not follow; consequently, if any such entity continues to exist for any period of time, some power is required to preserve its continued existence. But preserving it from moment to moment amounts to actually recreating it from moment to moment: “the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence…the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one” (8); that is, continued preservation and continued creation are really the same (there is a distinctio rationis between them, but not a distinctio realis). Now, as a temporal being I, who continue to exist (if only as the thinker, the res

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cogitans) must also rely on such a power that recreates me at each and every moment. Do I have such a power? No I don’t, because we are speaking here of constant creation sensu stricto, that is, of the creation ex nihilo (and not of rearranging some already preexistent materials and forms). I can’t be endowed with such a power, for in order to create myself ex nihilo I would have to be omnipotent and I would then be able to give myself all the other perfections (omniscience, infinity etc.) which I obviously lack (9). Consequently, I do not have such a power nor am I aware of having it (10). It follows from this (assuming, as Descartes does, that the principle of causality is given to me by the “light of nature”) that some power other than my own needs to continually recreate me ex nihilo; and this can only be—we need not go into details of Descartes’s argument to this effect—the power of God. It could then be concluded that if God actually recreates me ex nihilo at every moment of my continued existence, then at each of these moments I am a numerically different being; and such an argument had in fact been constructed (11). But this is not Descartes’s own conclusion and there is nothing, in his theories, that forces it upon us. He does not hold—nor does he need to hold on the basis of his own argument or on any other basis— that at each moment of its duration my I is numerically different (much less that it is some “person-stage” of contemporary perdurantists). His view is only that the numerically identical I slips from one moment to another due to the operation of a power—of the divine power, to be more precise—which the I itself does not possess. But the I is numerically the same, and this is why Descartes has no compunction about speaking of “himself ” as he endures through his process of meditation, or through the process of observing the changing “piece of wax” and so on. We need the divine power only to explain the enduring existence of the I (given the powerlessness of every temporal existence to maintain itself in being); but each thinking I can say, as Descartes says about himself, “I am, I exist—this is certain

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but how long? For as long as I am thinking” (12). He means, of course, his numerically identical I enduring throughout his thinking; he does not mean a string of numerically different I’s connected by some relation or another. If, as I argued before, the I is basic and primitive, then its identity cannot be a matter of degree; it cannot be what is sometimes called “vague” identity. Who hasn’t heard that old saying that you can’t step twice into the same river? Suppose, in addition, that the river’s bed changes dramatically due to the human activity of mining or due to some volcanic eruption. Is it or is it not the same river? Is there a determinate answer to this question? If the river is viewed as “the same”, then, presumably, the cartographers will still give it the same name. But the changes may be so great as to leave this point debatable even if the source of the river were to remain the same. In this case the cartographers might well decide to name it differently. In fact, if our lives lasted long enough we might very well come to wonder if any of the objects we are surrounded with have anything other than such a “vague” identity, without there being a clear-cut (i.e. determinate) yes or no answer. But that is because the identity of such objects does not appear to us as basic and primitive if only because it depends, to one degree or another, upon these objects’ parts and properties and their relations. It is otherwise with the identity of the I, since the I—we have considered the issue earlier—does not draw its identity from some parts and properties and some relations between them. And so the biblical Methuselah might have lived several hundred years, and yet he would have remained one and the same self, for the continuing identity of his I would have been just as basic and primitive at the beginning as at the end of his long life. It follows from this, that the presence, much less the continuity and the connectedness, of our memories is not the necessary condition of the continuity of the self, including its own awareness of this continuity. In Greek mythology, a drink from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, was said to erase all of the individual’s

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memories as a preparation for his existence in the afterlife. This is, of course, a piece of mythology. But it also conveys a truth which will withstand, and gain an endorsement from, a careful philosophical scrutiny (13). Exactly the same point can be made about lesser challenges to our idea of a continuing self. If such a self is basic and primitive, then its identity will not be adversely affected by some “gaps” or “bridges” in experience—say, by a period of a “dreamless sleep”, the example which has had a live presence among philosophers ever since Descartes first raised it as a challenge to his theory that the I always thinks. But whether or not the I “always thinks”, if the I is basic and primitive its identification and reidentification can only be noncriterial and my recognition of it after a period of slumber does not represent any special challenge. Several philosophers have already made this point (14). And even some features of our daily experience point in the same direction. If I may be permitted to appeal to my own experience it did occur to me—and I have no reason to believe that others did not have or could not have such a simple experience—to fall into a dreamless sleep for a very brief moment of time. When I woke up I did not have to fall back upon my memories—or even to focus upon “the same” feeling of sitting on “the same” comfortable armchair, much less to look at “the same” painting in front of me—to reidentify myself as the same good old I that I was before I fell asleep. But if this can take place after a short period of slumber, why couldn’t we allow this for a longer period of slumber? After all, the principle is the same: if my I is basic and primitive, then I can identify and reidentify it immediately and without any criteria. What is the relation between this continuing self and the continuity of our experiences? At least since James, an argument has been afoot that the continuing “stream of consciousness” can unify itself, without requiring any unifying activity of some enduring (“transcendental” or any other) Ego. In recent decades this argument had clearly come out on top due to the work of several important authors. We will need to consider some of this work

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later on. But in order to see clearly the problems involved, we must begin with James himself, who dealt with them mainly in The Stream of Thought and The Consciousness of Self chapters of his Principles of Psychology. We need to find out how does James view the relation between the continuing subject (the “I” or the “self ” as he himself calls it) of experience and the experienced stream itself. Is the continuity of the first identical with the continuity of the second? Or is there a relation of dependence between them and, if so, in which direction? In other words, is the continuity of the I dependent upon the continuity of the stream or vice versa? Or perhaps these two phenomena—the continuing stream and the continuing I—are parallel but independent of each other? James himself did not seem to have any doubt in this matter. According to him, when we focus upon our thinking, we cannot simply say (pace Lichtenberg, the archetypal proponent of this view) that “thought goes on” (15), since “every thought is being owned” (16). Thus each consciousness is a “personal consciousness”, or a “personal self ”; and in each case—mine, yours, his— the subject of experience is always an “I think” or “I feel” (17). There are only “personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s” (18). Moreover, these personal selves are intrinsically private; each of them experiences—at least directly—in “absolute isolation”, and this “irreducible pluralism”, these breaches between different I’s are “the most absolute breaches in nature” (19). On what grounds does James accept such a view? He was thoroughly familiar with the doctrine of Hume, but he did not think the no-ownership theory corresponds to anything we actually experience and, for this reason, he rejected it at least as a datum for psychology (20). On the other hand, what James does not say is that the ownership of experiences by an I is logically necessary. To be sure, he does say that the “thought itself is the thinker” (21), but this connection (if not the identity) of the “thought” and the “thinker” is, once again, only what “the facts require” (22).

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Thus, however pervasive and compelling that connection may be, its assertion is certainly not an analytic judgment, such as the logically necessary Kant’s “analytic unity of consciousness”. The conception of unowned experiences is not logically absurd or self-contradictory, however unacceptable James himself might have judged it as the basis for the work conducted in psychology—at least in psychology as he saw it. So far, we have spoken only of a single slice of conscious experience—this is the famous Jamesian “single pulse of subjectivity” (23)—but we have not yet spoken of the stream of consciousness. How is the stream built out of these slices? After all, each such “pulse…dies away and is replaced by another” (24). How is the unified stream of consciousness to be constructed out of the original succession of such pulses? It would be tempting to posit here a permanent and enduring Ego, which would preserve and unify these experiences as they slip into the past. But this is quite unnecessary, since these experiences—James calls them “thoughts” even more often than “pulses”—unify themselves. Each of my present thoughts accepts and integrates all of my past thoughts as belonging, with it, to one and the same whole (25). This is why, James points out, consciousness “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits”, but represents a “stream” (26). As for the gaps in conscious experience created by the period of deep sleep, the identity of the self after waking up is secured precisely by that integrated unity of the stream: I see the remembered past experiences as the past parts of a “common whole” with the presently experienced stage; and, James tells us, the “natural name “for this whole is “myself, I, or me” (27). With this last statement we rediscover our initial issue on the level of the stream as a whole. It may very well be that the “natural name” for this stream is what James says it is. But is there some reality corresponding to this name? If there is no logical necessity compelling us to consider a single experience as belonging to an I, why should such necessity force us to consider the whole stream as belonging to an I? Why would a series of succeeding

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and integrating themselves experiences—without the help of any Ego, as James stresses (28)—need to be endowed with an I? In fact, a strikingly similar conception of self-unifying consciousness had been put forward with the explicit aim to refute the view that any “self ” or “I” or “Ego” can be found in such a stream (29). Without some philosophical account of the involvement of the I in our experience—let us recall Schopenhauer’s view that the I accompanying our experiences is really the “I will”—the stream of consciousness could very well come close to resembling an unfolding film with the spectator all but extinguished by an impersonal contemplation. In recent years, various parts of James’s theory of consciousness have reemerged in some important philosophical works. For example, James’s idea of conscious “pulses”, each of which occupies its “specious present”, is at the foundation of G. Strawson’s “string of pearls” theory of self (30). In his view, the stream of consciousness is composed of such short-lived selves, or “sesmets”, as he calls them. They are not just subjects of experience, but are also “mental things”, each of them numerically distinct, and separated from the others. The stream as a whole is then viewed as a string of these short-lived selves connected with each other only on account of their relations. However, postulating such a radical discontinuity in what we ordinarily take to be our one continuing self is not only at odds with James but is too farfetched; and Strawson’s theory has been subjected to a conclusive criticism by B. Dainton (31). Dainton’s own theory avoids any such commitment to a plurality of discrete and short-lasting selves, quite the contrary. The theory itself is presented to the reader as “neoLockean” (32), but it soon becomes clear that in the relevant respect it goes much farther. Unlike Locke himself and unlike Parfit, the leading neoLockean of our age, Dainton envisions a total rupture in psychological continuity, a rupture which results in an irretrievable loss of one’s beliefs, memories and personality traits (33). What does remain is one and the same “stream of consciousness” (34); and,

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with the endorsement of this concept, we find ourselves again on the Jamesian territory although, as will become clear, the differences with James’s own account of the stream are also striking. For Dainton, the stream is unified by a primitive feature of experience which he and many others today call “co-consciousness”. For example, two sounds in my specious present appear as co-conscious in my experience; and in the same way, the stream can be said to unify itself (whether by direct or indirect, transitive, co-consciousness) without any entity or agency doing the unifying (35). This also rules out any necessity for a subject doing the unifying: “experiences are…unified…without subjects.” (36). So the various “syntheses” performed by some enduring transcendental Ego, as indeed by any other form of a subject, are unnecessary at least as far as the task of the unification of the stream is concerned. But still, “streams and subjects are inseparable” (37). The question is: why? This is the very same question we needed to raise in connection with James’s own view of the stream, since we are trying to find out, in the present chapter, how the I connects with experiences. And this is why Dainton’s theory is directly relevant to our own investigations in the present chapter. Why would streams and subjects be “inseparable” if no subject is needed to unify the stream? Quite in line with McTaggart—and quite in line with the view I too have argued for earlier in the chapter— Dainton rules out the possibility that the connection might be purely logical. It is quite possible to think of experiences as not being modes, or features or properties of anything, much less of a “self ” or an “I” or “myself ”, to recall James’s terms as he used them (synonymously) in a key passage. This is why, for Dainton, “the concept ‘co-conscious’ is quite distinct from concepts such as ‘consubjective’ or ‘belonging to the same self ’…to say that two experiences are co-conscious, and to say that two experiences belong to the same subject is to say two quite different things” (38). This, I think, is correct. It is also to Dainton’s credit that he does not go on a wild goose chase for some alleged unique

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quality of the stream as experienced in the first-person mode. Some philosophers do just that and identify this quality as the “mineness” of each and every stage of an unified experience (39). Aside from lack of evidence supporting the existence of such and similar qualities allegedly omnipresent in our experience, there is no need to appeal to them anyway, for our experiences may be viewed, in Dainton’s apt phrase, as “self-intimating” (40). But then the main issue returns with an even greater force. If the connection of the stream with the self that accompanies it is not logically necessary, then how can we explain it in some other way? Dainton’s own answer is to be found in his theory of C-systems or C-capacities which are defined as “collections of experiential powers that can produce experiences that are co-conscious” (41). These C-capacities may be dormant (when one finds oneself in a fully unconscious sleep) or active, but they explain both the actual experiences we are having and our potential (even when we are unconscious) for having them. Our selves are precisely such C-systems (42), and since C-systems are the capacities for producing experiences and their streams (though not, we recall, for unifying them; here co-consciousness is quite sufficient to do the job), it is not puzzling anymore that streams of consciousness are “inseparable” from selves even though, to rephrase Dainton’s earlier claim, this “C-thesis” is not an “analytic truth” (43). At this point, a key question arises: just what is the status of the C-capacities themselves? As Dainton himself points out, it is natural for us to think of them as properties (44). The difficulty with this is obvious: quite aside from the fact that the self now turns out to be a mere collection (or “bundle” to use the more current term) of properties, we find it difficult to admit that a property, be it even a C-capacity, could exist on its own, i.e. without being the property of a self. Let us recall McTaggart’s lesson: we can agree (as does Dainton) that the ownership theory is not logically necessary, but it is still compelling. On this point, however, Dainton disagrees. In his view, both token-experiences and

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token-experiential powers (the C-capacities) can exist and be individuated on their own (45). To explain this, Dainton compares them with such things as a “bolt of lighting” (a bang or a flash, we may add, would do just as well in this respect) which he thinks ought not to be viewed as modes, properties or features of anything (46). Such phenomena are currently called “tropes”, but the tropes ontology has its own serious difficulties and it would certainly be preferable to avoid it at least in our account of the self. Within my own theory, such ontology would certainly be unnecessary to account for the connection between a continuing self and the stream of consciousness. For, as I have argued, this continuing self (basic, primitive and accessible to noncriterial knowledge) is volitional and experiences—whether discrete or streamal—are the experiences of such a self.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

FREEDOM

f language is unthinkable outside of a community of speakers, why should the case of freedom be any different? Of course we know today that the dispositions for the acquisition and development of language are innate. We also observe, in plain experience, that language, once acquired and mastered by an individual, can then be used by him in isolation and solitude. Still, we become language users only due to our interactions with others. But for some reasons very few philosophers even considered the possibility that freedom too could emerge only through an individual’s interactions with others (1). As a matter of common practice, the unending and ever more sophisticated discussions between libertarians and compatibilists (for compatibilism, we shall see, is the form of determinism most frequently defended by philosophers even though some compatibilists try to avoid being labeled determinists) assume from the very beginning that a human agent’s freedom can be studied in isolation from others, and from their mutual interactions, and that, somehow, a more careful observation or a more sophisticated conceptual argument can then decide the issue whether or not a human agent is endowed with free will. My own approach to the issue—as I have already hinted at earlier—will be entirely different. Like language, freedom too emerges in response to others, i.e. to what is outside of the agent. That there must also exist some disposition, or potential, to achieve freedom is a matter of course. But, I will argue throughout

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the chapter, to actually become free (in the sense of having a will that is free), an agent must be shaped by interactions with other agents; and, once again like in the case of language, though freedom originates, and is sustained, by the agent’s interactions with others, it can then be extended well beyond that area. For the same reason, freedom will turn out to have degrees: on the one hand, the exercise of freedom may at times reach the extreme of what is called “radical” freedom, on the other hand, there will be a series of gradations through which freedom approximates, perhaps even reaches, the level articulated by various compatibilist theories. In developing my argument for this conception of freedom I will come to deal with a number of important technical issues which had accumulated under the general heading “free will vs. determinism”. Let us begin with the beginning. In a relation of opposition between two agents acting under the conditions of uncertainty and endowed with approximately equal powers, both of them find themselves in a position where nothing can be taken for granted. This is the original indeterminacy, the original lack that each of them confronts, and confronts due to the other. This lack is, in the first place, outside of the agent: he is facing an obstacle which may have a countermove to each of his moves. But this lack is also internalized and it becomes internal to the agent as he finds himself in a position where none of his strengths, skills, or assets can be taken for granted. Responding thus to an indeterminacy outside and inside him, the agent’s decision to act in one way or another cannot itself be determined by the already existing conditions. In deciding to act in one way or another the agent literally makes himself as the agent who decided this way rather than that way. The decision, when it comes—but then avoiding or postponing a decision is also a way of deciding—will be an exercise in (however modest and limited) self-forming of the agent. Necessity is the mother of invention: in a situation where the two opponents find themselves unable to take anything for granted, they are forced to be creative, as much as they can, and often in

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ways which they cannot predict in advance. This last statement exposes me at once to a well known objection against freedom: if the exercise of freedom may not allow me to anticipate and to control what I will do in a situation S, then such freedom “is not worth having”. I will deal with this objection—and with many others—in due course; at this point, I am simply outlining the general framework within which the issue of free will needs to be situated. But even this framework is not yet complete. Already in our chapter on Will we have concluded that will itself (whether or not it is otherwise free) is a source of power, if only because (let us recall Locke’s insights) it injects the element of surprise and unpredictability into the actions of agents towards each other. How much greater, and more pronounced, would this element become if the agent’s will, and the actions that issue from it, would turn out to be—to one degree or another—self-forming? But, one could object immediately, this is nothing short of introducing here the chicken-and-egg paradox. I have just said that the human agents’ equality of powers joined with the uncertainty surrounding their opposition, is at the root of their freedom, for it brings them face to face with the original indeterminacy and lack, to which they need to respond by taking nothing for granted and, in effect, self-forming their responses. These acts of self-formation—the truly free acts, as I will be arguing—come here as the results of interactions between agents endowed with equal powers and opposing each other under the conditions of uncertainty. Consequently, to say that such agents are already endowed with freedom (which explains why the element of surprise and unpredictability is injected into their opposition to an even greater degree that would have been the case due to their mere wills, devoid of any freedom) is to put the cart before the horse. Clearly, freedom can not first emerge due to opposition and yet (as the source of the significant part of the element of surprise and unpredictability in the volitions and actions of the opponents) belong to opposition from the very beginning.

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I do not claim that it does. I claim that freedom—not as a mere potential, but as an actually developed and exercised capacity—emerges from opposition as the agent responds, and continues to respond, to other agents equal to him in power and opposing him under the conditions of uncertainty. This is the original indeterminacy he encounters, and freedom emerges in response to this indeterminacy. Once freedom is developed and exercised, a new quality is added to opposition—or, if one prefers, the agents’ opposition is raised to a new level—for that key element of surprise and unpredictability is increased significantly due to the agents’ ability to form and shape their very wills in new ways and directions. Thus the indeterminacy finds its way into the will itself. We can then talk about a will that is genuinely free, that is—we shall be returning to this theme again and again in the course of the present chapter—we can talk about a will which not only determines the actions we take, but which is capable of forming and shaping itself in some new ways. It is now time to get a grip upon the basic concepts involved. On the general map titled “freedom and determinism”, libertarianism is opposed to determinism—various attempts at reconciliation known as “compatibilism” need to be considered separately—and so some working definition of determinism is in order. It will be sufficient, for our purposes, to define it as follows: if an event E or an action A was necessitated by the antecedent state of the world and the actually existing laws of nature, then such an event or action was determined by that prior state of the world and those laws of nature. It goes without saying that this definition of determinism does not speak of “necessitating” merely in the sense of a logical necessity. There may exist forms of determinism—the determinism of Spinoza is the most striking example—where logical necessity and real necessity are the same, but this need not be a precondition of a philosophical position counting as determinism. It is conceivable (and many determinists thought it to be conceivable) that both the state of the world and the laws of nature might have been entirely different

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from what they actually are, and yet if the occurrence of E or A is necessitated by the actual state of the world and the laws of nature such as they actually are, then the occurrence of E and A should still be viewed as determined. So the “necessitation” at issue need not be a logical one and, for most determinists, it is not. Even with this restriction, a wide variety of views is possible. Instead of laws of nature one may want to talk about the decrees of God, or of the march of Reason in History, or of the more ancient concepts such as the Greek fate or the Roman fortuna and so on. And even the actual but still nomic necessity does not characterize all varieties of determinism. It is quite possible to maintain that the prior state of the world determines necessarily the occurrence of A and E, but it does not do so in a law-like way (Nietzsche, it seems, professed some such view: laws of nature are only our interpretations, but in the primordial Becoming everything takes place with necessity). Nevertheless, the working definition of determinism that I have introduced does cover most of the forms of determinism defended today and it is worth keeping for that reason alone. It follows from this definition that at each and every step of his biography as an agent, the individual has only one decision and one course of action open to him, whether or not he himself might think or imagine otherwise. Given the state of the world and the laws of nature at the moment t, the agent can decide and act in one way and one way only at the moment t’; indeed his decision and action at t’ will be necessitated by that prior state of the world and the actually existing laws of nature. The conceptual difficulties involved in the doctrine of free will combined with the influence of modern science have worked jointly to produce what is called “compatibilism”—a philosophical attempt to show that (and how) “freedom and necessity [are] consistent” to quote a much telling title of a section in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes was, in effect, the founder of modern compatibilism. Imbued with the Galilean science of motion—which he employed skillfully to mock Bishop Bramhall’s view that an

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agent can, without any cause acting upon him, initiate his own volition—Hobbes laid down the basic elements of the compatibilist position. In his exchange with Bishop Bramhall and in the key Chapter 21 of Leviathan, Hobbes defined the framework within which all future improvements upon his own brand of compatibilism were subsequently made by those who followed in his footsteps. The definition of “Freedom” or “Liberty” that Hobbes offers is rather simple and remains the same even if it is at times given different wording under Hobbes’s pen. Freedom is simply the absence of external impediments to whatever it is that the agent has the power and the will (i.e. a desire, an inclination) to do. Let us take these terms one by one. What Hobbes means by absence of external impediments or obstacles needs no extended explanation. If, say , I happen to be in a good physical condition, and I have a desire to climb to the top of the mountain but I find myself unable to do so due to a huge ravine which I can neither cross nor circumvent, then I am not free in the Hobbesian sense of the word, for I am being stopped in my tracks by an external obstacle to my motion—the motion I otherwise desire and have the capacity (my good physical condition) to carry out. What about my power itself? How are we to understand that element in the Hobbesian definitions? It is nothing other than what is usually called ability or capacity, and the example that Hobbes gives in Leviathan is clear enough: “a man fastened to his bed by sicknesse” (2) may find no external impediments to his desired motion of getting out of bed, but he cannot undertake such a motion due to the constraints imposed upon his power by the sickness. I speak here of a man’s actions as “motions”, for this is how Hobbes wants us to view human actions. The only difference between the water that flows “freely” (the example is Hobbes’s and Bramhall uses it mockingly to make Hobbes see the errors of his ways) and the man who acts freely by getting out of his bed is that the water cannot have a prior will (desire, inclination

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and so on) to undertake such a motion. As for the will, Hobbes defines it as the last and the strongest desire (in the broadest sense of either an appetite or an aversion) in the process of deliberation preceding the action or the refraining from it by the agent (3). The process of deliberation need not be very sophisticated (“Beasts also Deliberate”, Hobbes tells his readers) and it certainly need not be very long; but even in the case of actions which we perform (or refrain from performing) unhesitatingly and spontaneously there is always some competing desire or inclination, however weak and marginal and, consequently, Hobbes applies this definition of will to all actions undertaken (as they must be) out of our last desire or inclination. All such actions are voluntary. It is now clear why, equipped with this definition of freedom, Hobbes can “reconcile” freedom and necessity. If my action “proceeds” from my will (from my will as understood by Hobbes), for there are no internal constraints on my power and no external impediments to the action, the action proceeds from my “liberty” (4). The path to determinism is now cleared. My will is the last desire or inclination that moves me to act (or to refrain from acting). But all of my desires have their causes and proceed from those causes necessarily (5). It follows, that freedom is not incompatible with (causal) necessity; as for the libertarian account of freedom, Hobbes rejects it repeatedly as unintelligible and at odds with common sense and with modern science of motion, though we need not, at this point, assess the strength of his antilibertarian arguments. What does need to be considered is Hobbes’s own unwillingness to make the seemingly coerced action incompatible with freedom. “Covenants extorted by feare are valide”, we read in the title of another section of Leviathan (6); and in the examples given in this section Hobbes makes it abundantly clear just how far he is prepared to go with his claim. If, out of fear, a prisoner promises his captor to deliver a ransom, or if I promise money to an armed highway thief, these promises are valid, since in

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both cases fear was the last desire in the process of deliberation (say, the aversion to losing my life proved to be much stronger than the weak stirrings of my pride) and, therefore, the promise was given voluntarily and hence freely. Locke was soon to correct Hobbes on this point: in all of these Hobbesian cases, Locke argued, there was no valid promise given, since there was no free consent of the agent (7). The will remains moved by the “desires” and “uneasinessess” Locke speaks of in the Essay; but these motions of the will cannot be coerced. This lack of coercion became part and parcel of the standard “compatibilist” understanding of freedom, and it was to be strengthened by the further requirement that the agent be free of compulsion as well. With these two qualifications, the compatibilist picture of freedom is just about complete. If, at a certain moment t I want to do A, then I will do A; and if, at the same moment t, I would have wanted to do B then I would have done B. According to the compatibilists, for the term “wanting” we may here substitute an entire family of related terms including “choosing”. We then save freedom in the only intelligible sense of the term (at least as far as the compatibilist is concerned). For if, at the moment t I would have chosen (in the compatibilist sense, equivalent with wanting) to do A, I would have done A even though it remains true that if, at the same moment t I had chosen (i.e. wanted) to do B I would have done B. We thus save the possibility that “I could have done otherwise” (had I “chosen”, i.e. “wanted” to do otherwise); and this is what our everyday understanding of freedom requires. This may very well represent the end of the discussion for the compatibilist, but it represents only its beginning for the libertarian. Let us apply our working definition of determinism to the case at hand: if my “wanting” or “choosing” to do A was necessitated by the antecedent state of the world and the actually existing laws of nature, then my “wanting” or “choosing” A was determined, or rendered inevitable, by that past and by those laws. Given their joint operation I could not have “wanted” or “chosen” otherwise than I actually did; and, conversely, had I wanted or

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chosen otherwise than I actually did, then some past conditions (if not the laws of nature, for such a supposition, though perhaps logically possible, is too fanciful to entertain) must have been different. For all practical purposes, we don’t even need to speak of “the past”. It would have been sufficient if my character (a product of my heredity and my environment) would have been appropriately different and I would have “wanted” or “chosen” B rather than A. It is still possible to block the deterministic conclusion (though many libertarians would here disagree) by advancing the view that my character itself is a product of my earlier choices and actions (8). But if those earlier choices and actions are to escape the grip of determinism—if they are not necessitated by the past—then we only push the problem to that earlier stage of the agent’s biography; for we must then show how the past at that earlier moment did not necessitate his choices and practices leading to the formation of the character he now has and which now determines his present choices. Without this move—which goes beyond the limits of compatibilism—the grip of determinism cannot be broken. Is it then to be wondered that Kant called the entire compatibilist project a “wretched subterfuge” while James described it as a “quagmire of evasion” (9)? The distance between a compatibilist and a determinist turns out to rest on a distinction without a difference. This remains true even in the case of sophisticated “hierarchical” theories of contemporary compatibilism, which otherwise represent a great improvement upon its earlier and more simplistic versions (10). As for the libertarian understanding of freedom, its two main components had been clearly identified—defined, distinguished and connected—by Kant; and, at least since Kant, we can find them in practically every version of libertarianism. These two main components of the libertarian freedom are freedom as choice and freedom as origination. Let us consider them one by one. Freedom as choice. In an important passage of his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone Kant sets out to define the

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“concept of the freedom of the will” and he ends up defining it as the “freedom, according to which the act as well as its opposite must be within the power of the subject at the moment of its taking place” (11). This “freedom of the will”, then, is nothing other than my capacity to choose among some options or alternatives open to me “at the moment” of choosing. In most cases, I have several different options open to me: I can choose to do A or B or C or something still other. But even if I find myself in a situation—but how frequent are such situations?—with only the option A available to me I can at least refrain from taking it. And so whether I choose to do A or choose to refrain from doing A I can still say “I could have done otherwise”, for the choice was entirely “up to me”. In this sense the freedom of choice, if it exists, is the agent’s ability to choose among some alternatives open to him at the moment of the choice. Assuming that such freedom does in fact exist—according to Kant himself, we do not have a theoretical proof of its reality, but we must presuppose it (as a “postulate”) in our moral life—it is clear that determinism loses its grip upon us. For at the moment of choice the future is, as it were, “open” to us—it is open not only in the simple sense that it has not yet occurred, but in the strong sense that several alternative futures lie ahead of us and it is only “up to us” to realize one of these alternative futures. Contrary to the deterministic position, the entire past (including my established character, the heredity, the environment, my past biography and so on) will be inoperative in explaining why, at the moment of choice, I have decided to do A rather than refrain from doing A. It is true that in the same work Kant also speaks of a “disposition of the will” to which all particular volitions will conform; but he also explains, in the same work, that the disposition itself is not only freely chosen, but can be changed, by a free choice, at any moment (12). In the end, then, the freedom of the will turns out to be just what Kant said it must be in his definition of it: “at the moment” of choosing, both my doing A or my refraining from doing A (or doing B or C instead) must remain available to me

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no matter what the disposition of my will might have been up to that moment. If, say, choosing to do A would be against my established disposition, choosing to do A is still possible, since at any moment I can freely change the disposition itself. If I change it I will change it not in order to be able to choose to do A; but once I do change it—by a free choice undetermined by my past—I will be able to choose doing A rather than refraining from doing A. Briefly, there is no “freedom of the will” without some alternative choices and actions, and the existence of these alternatives at the moment of the choice makes the latter independent of the entire past. Freedom as origination. This is what Kant calls, in his first Critique, the “transcendental” freedom or, better still, freedom as the “transcendental idea”—the latter expression is preferable (though Kant uses both of them), for it shows that this concept of freedom can neither be validated by experience nor even (unlike, say, the concept of causality) does it represent a demonstrable condition of the possibility of experience (13). There is no theoretical proof of the reality of such freedom, and the idea of it is a creation of reason (Vernunft, not Verstand) (14). Kant defines this “idea” in several passages and in several ways which he thinks convey the same meaning. The transcendental freedom is “the power of beginning a state spontaneously (von selbst)”, “the power to begin a series of events entirely of itself ” (15), “the power of originating a series of events” (16). It is clear why “the practical concept of freedom [freedom as choice] is based on this transcendental idea” (17) and why the “denial of transcendental freedom must, therefore, involve the elimination of all practical freedom” (18). For me to make the choice of doing A rather than of doing B, means that my will will be set on doing A rather than on doing B. Each of these choices results in a different series of actions and events that follow from it. Since the choice was “up to me” (I could have chosen the option A rather than the option B) the series that did take place, took place because of my choice; or, to put it differently, my choice, and my choice alone, was the

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ultimate origin or the ultimate source of that series of actions and events. And this requires the break with the past. In effect, to “originate” a series of events means the same as being the “absolute” or the “first” beginning of the series (19). But to be such a beginning means not to be necessitated to be it by anything that took place earlier. If, say, Tom’s decision is such a “first” and “absolute” beginning of a series of events (of the motion of his hand towards the ignition key, of the key being turned over, of the car getting started etc.) then that decision cannot be necessitated by whatever state Tom was in prior to it. If the decision is a genuine first beginning—rather than a simple effect of Tom’s character and desires—then it is “a state which has no causal connection with the preceding state of the cause, that is to say, it nowise follows from it” (20). It is still Tom’s decision, but it is not necessitated by any of the states Tom was in, or might have been in, prior to his making that decision. Within Kant’s own philosophy, this conclusion has profound and far-reaching consequences. According to Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy of Experience, every event (material and mental) that takes place in time is not only the effect of some cause, but is even rendered “inevitable” and “necessary” (21) by this cause and the existing laws of nature. But our experience—actual and possible—is necessarily (on account of the very form of our sensibility) temporal. It follows that a genuinely free act of will cannot take place in the world of our experience. Consequently, Kant relegates freedom to the “noumenal” or “intelligible” realm—void of space and time—and the truly free choices are the “noumenal” choices performed by our “noumenal” self. And since all our knowledge requires some element of spatio-temporal experience (if not of its content than at least of its form) our admission of such a “noumenal” freedom is not a piece of knowledge. The best that we can here theoretically accomplish is to show not the “reality” of [such] freedom”, but only that, were such freedom to be real, it would be “not incompatible with nature” (22), since the province of nature is the world of

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our spatio-temporal experience whereas freedom belongs to the non-spatial and non-temporal “noumenal” world. Although Kant’s concept of freedom (freedom involves the ability to choose among the available alternatives as well as the ability to be the ultimate origin or source of a series of actions and events) can be found in almost all libertarian theories, Kant’s “noumenal” solution to the puzzles generated by this concept is nowadays usually dismissed as “mysterious”. By this standard, however, just about any solution to a fundamental metaphysical problem will have to be dismissed for, on a closer scrutiny, it will also turn out to be “mysterious”. The real problem with Kant’s theory of freedom is not that it is “mysterious”, but that it cannot do the work we expect it to do. As Kant explains in his Observation on the Third Antinomy, according to its Thesis, the “transcendental idea of freedom” is necessary as “the ground of…imputability” of an action to the agent (23). As we recall, Kant endorses this “transcendental” freedom, but locates it (unlike the Thesis of the Third Antinomy and in order to escape that Antinomy) in the noumenal world outside of space and time. But—and here is the gist of the problem—the actions that w impute to the agent do take place in space and time. And so there must be some marks, features and characteristics by which at least some empirically accessible actions (i.e. actions which take place in space and time) could be recognized as originating in that “transcendental” freedom. And if such marks, features and characteristics cannot be found in the mere observation of behavior (in “outer” experience) they need to be found at least in introspection (in “inner” experience) where our volitions, as mental acts, are given to us. In his Observation on the Thesis of the Third Antinomy Kant gives precisely such an example: “if, for instance, I at this moment arise from my chair in complete freedom, without being necessarily determined thereto by the influence of natural causes, a new series…has its absolute beginning in this event” (24). Now, the proponent of the Thesis has a perfect right to this view, for he can rely upon his introspection

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to tell the difference between his free decision to get up from the chair and his being made to jump up from the chair by the fire somebody suddenly set to it. But even such introspective evidence is unavailable within the Kantian framework, for all the data of introspection (all mental events, states, and processes accessible to us in “inner” sense) take place in time and are, therefore, subjected to the rule of causality. And so we can never know if this or that action originates in the free choice of the agent or in his inclinations, impulses (such as my impulse to get up from that chair suddenly set on fire), character traits and so on. This, in turn, exposes Kant’s moral philosophy (which presupposes the concept of “imputation”) to a number of contradictions that his immediate successors were quick to point out (25). There is another libertarian way of responding to the very same puzzle that Kant responded to by constructing his theory of “noumenal”, non-temporal choices. In the first Critique’s Second Analogy of Experience Kant took it for granted that causal necessity, if it exists, can only exist between “events”, “happenings” or “alterations” (in the Second Analogy Kant uses all of these terms interchangeably). This is quite in line with our common understanding of causation. When I say “the match set the gasoline on fire” what I really mean is that the event of the match coming in contact with the gasoline caused the event of the gasoline catching fire. Starting with this common understanding, Kant then proceeded to prove that no event which happens in time can occur without having another event as its cause and following it in conformity with some law of nature. The only hope left to admit an occurrence of a free volition—viewed both as a choice and an origination, to recall Kant’s definition—was to place it outside of time, in the “noumenal” realm and to accept all the difficulties implicit in, or implied by, this solution. Instead, a libertarian may simply deny that causation can exist only between events, occurrences, alterations and so on. He may claim—at least as far as the human agency is concerned—that we are warranted in admitting a nonoccurrent causation. This is

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the gist of the so-called “agent causation” theories. Some of these theories use the agent causation concept to explain volitions, others apply it to the explanation of actions (26). But whether we apply this concept to volitions (which can then bring about, or cause, actions through an ordinary occurrent causation) or to actions themselves, the concept of agent causation remains the same. Whereas volitions and actions are occurrences, what causes them are not some other occurrences (events, alterations etc.) taking place within the agent, but the agent himself. The decision (an act of will) to set the gasoline on fire was an event and so too was the action of throwing a burning match on the gasoline. However, what caused that decision and that action was the agent himself, not some other event within, much less outside him. He did it—and this is where the explanation stops. For if we were to say: he did it because such and such thing (event, alteration, change etc.) occurred within him, then—in conformity with our common understanding of causation—we would be quite justified in searching for a cause of that occurrence, then for the cause of that cause (if the latter were to be construed as an occurrence or an event), and so on. The only way to stop this regress of causes is to admit that the agent himself (and not some event, change, alteration or occurrence within the agent) was the cause of the volition or action we are trying to explain. The obvious question is: how could the agent cause any of this without undergoing some change, or without something occurring within him? Here the agent causation theorists find it useful to fall back upon various Aristotelian concepts, such as the idea of a self-moving mover (where the part being the source of movement remains unmoved) or a prime unmoved mover (27). The next step in the agent causation theory is to argue that this nonoccurrent causation by the agent himself avoids the threat of randomness (for, after all, there does exist a cause for all the agent-caused volitions and actions: they are caused by the agent, and in causing them the agent may have reasons to do so) while at the same time it allows us to escape determinism and to

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preserve the key tenets of libertarianism. In effect, when, at the moment t, the agent agent-causes the volition V or the action A, then his causing them to occur is still “up to him” in the two relevant senses: (1) it is up to him in the sense that it is not necessitated by the antecedent state of the world (including his own antecedent state) and (2) it is up to him in the sense that at the very same moment t he could have decided and acted otherwise, i.e. he had other alternative options open to him. It would certainly be preferable to avoid the idea that a particular thing (an agent, a self, a person) can initiate a change without undergoing any change himself. But there is nothing, in my opening moves at the beginning of the present chapter, that would commit me to such an idea or require that it be introduced. The agent acquires and develops a capacity to respond to the original indeterminacy encountered in the other—indeterminacy internalized by the agent himself as he discovers that he can take nothing for granted in his response—and when using this capacity of his, the agent does undergo various processes, changes, and alterations (in recognizing an indeterminacy he has to deal with, preparing a response to it, finalizing the process with a decision forming the appropriate intention to act in some way or another etc.) Partly through these processes and changes, and partly through his undertakings that follow them, the agent forms and changes himself. This concerns, in the first place, the forming and the changing of his will. The Jamesian fiat is still there, but , in the conditions of indeterminacy, this fiat is not a mere willing anymore, but a free willing, that is, a willing formed in some new and—perhaps—hitherto unexplored way. With the will formed in some such new way, the ensuing action will inherit this new element and we may then witness the phenomenon—so often described by libertarians and almost invariably interpreted away by compatibilists—of an individual (in both his willing and his acting) transcending the limits of his established character, with its fixed character traits and the already set patterns of willing and acting.

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Isn’t there a danger, then, that if the agent himself undergoes changes (by those various processes resulting in new forms of willing and acting) he disappears as one and the same continuing self? There is no reason to think so, at least if I was right I my earlier chapters. The agent remains still one and the same decider or willer even though these decisions and volitions (and the ensuing actions) are now taking new forms and setting up new patterns at least vis-à-vis the agent’s past. As I have argued at the beginning of the chapter, the conditions under which such freedom emerges are the agent’s interactions with others and, more particularly, their relations of opposition. Whether this opposition takes place and unfolds on a purely physical level or during some form of, say, economic or political contest, it puts the opponents in a position where— as a general rule, where they are in command of approximately equal means to achieve their ends and they confront each other under the conditions of uncertainty—they can take nothing for granted. But taking nothing for granted severs the bond that ties the agent to his appetites, desires, inclinations and so on. Obviously—to return to our earlier examples—the gunfighter or the politician enter the fight motivated by some such desire (of survival, gain, glory etc.). But this desire is now blocked by his opponent and this opponent—the other—is the original indeterminacy within the circumstances now defining the situation of the agent. Each of his means may be matched by the means of the other, each of his moves may find a countermove in the other. And this indeterminacy injected by the other into the agent’s situation operates here as that proverbial “necessity, the mother of invention”. Whichever desire (appetite, inclination etc.) happens to motivate the agent, it is now insufficient to render his action intelligible, for that action—and, to begin with, the volition, the fiat, that sets it on its course—expresses his creative response to the indeterminacy he has to deal with. His will cannot simply be the compatibilist’s strongest desire— or even the second-order desire with which he “wholeheartedly”

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identifies with his first-order desire—for in responding to an indeterminacy imposed upon him by the situation, the willer and the decider is engaged in re-forming and re-setting his will to meet the challenge of that indeterminacy. Would his character and character traits do a better job at rendering intelligible the decisions he now has to make? There is no reason to think so. For in responding to the indeterminacy encountered in the other, he may have to shape his will in a way that departs from the established pattern of his character and character traits. We see it often in a politician who prevails over his opponent by suddenly making choices and taking actions that go against the grain of his entire past behavior, determined as the latter might have been by his character and his habits. It would be preposterous to claim that these self-forming and self-creating decisions are mere illusions, a mere game of smoke and mirrors. Practice makes the practitioner: by forming his will in some new way and by acting accordingly, our politician actually becomes what he never was before and gives us a vivid example of an individual’s capacity to reinvent himself. Does this imply that the compatibilist account is simply false? It does not. Many great libertarians have given us the tools we need to, as it were, draw a demarcation line between the areas where freedom breaks through in all its clarity and the areas where the compatibilist analysis just might do the job. Concerning freedom James spoke eloquently of “those soul-trying moments when fate’s scales seem to quiver [and] the issue is decided nowhere else then here and now” and, in a similar vein, Jaspers wrote about those “limit-situations” (Grenzsituationen) where the person’s entire identity is at stake (28). Other prominent libertarians were quite prepared to grant that once caught up within our established patterns of life and habit “it is not probable we shall change”, while still others were ready to admit the determination of the agent’s will by his character, unless there takes place some dramatic conflict between duty and the agent’s strongest desire (29). To sum it all up with the aid of a

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simple example: if, say, I have a well-established liking for chocolate ice cream, and if I now experience a desire for it joined with the belief that there is a chocolate ice cream in my refrigerator, the conjunction of this desire and this belief will represent the sufficient reason for my getting up from the armchair and going to the kitchen to get the ice cream from the refrigerator. When we focus on such examples, the compatibilist analysis seems to be eminently plausible, perhaps even to the point where—as some have actually claimed to be the case—these reasons begin to operate as causes. In the context of the present example, the compatibilist analysis seems to be quite appropriate and certainly more plausible than its libertarian competitor. On the other hand it might certainly seem strange that freedom, once awakened and developed as a capacity would become altogether extinguished even in such ordinary, everyday situations, or at least in those of them where we perform our actions voluntarily (as was the case in the example given above). What would it take to produce a successful analysis of even those cases merely with the aid of such concepts as desire, belief and reason? Well, the first thing to do would be to assume that they are all states of the subject: sitting in my armchair I found myself in a state of desiring a chocolate ice cream and of having the belief that the ice cream is in the refrigerator. If this desire and this belief are states in which I find myself and if reason is nothing other (as this kind of analysis takes for granted) than a combination of belief and desire, then reason too is a state. If I then perform my voluntary action of getting up from my armchair, going to the kitchen and getting the ice cream it’s because, and only because, I find myself in precisely such states. This much being granted, we may then go on to describe the relation between my reasons and my actions as being in fact a causal one for, after all, it does not differ in any relevant features (clearly, the fact that we are talking here about mental and not physical states is not relevant) from the ordinary cases where we apply a causal explanation.

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But if we leave it at that, the explanation will fall short even in our simple example of an ordinary voluntary action of going to get the ice cream out of the refrigerator. Let us assume—though this is by no means obvious, for at least some of our desires are often chosen and sustained by choices—that my present desires and beliefs are states, and let us also assume that my being in these states is tantamount to being in a state of having the reason for my action. We have already seen, in Chapter Two, why all of this would still fail to make sense of my present action. For to act voluntarily I must first of all form an intention and my forming an intention is very different from simply having beliefs, desires and reasons, especially on the simplistic view of action we are now probing. This is because intention is not simply a state. I do not find myself in a state of having such and such intention; intentions are formed by me, and they are interposed between beliefs, desires and reasons on the one hand and the action on the other hand. And it is not just that a state is passive while an intention is active, but, above all, the intention is a mental act through which I endorse the reasons composed of my desires and beliefs by positing them as my purposes and ends. None of this can be analyzed away as equivalent to being in a certain state of believing and desiring (and, consequently, in a state of having a reason to act). This was the conclusion we have already reached in our Chapter Two and it was quite sufficient for that chapter’s task of analyzing the will. Now, however, we must go farther, for the issue at hand is not just the issue of will, but of free will. And here, it seems, all the talk about forming one’s intentions is insufficient. For the question now is: why do I form such and such intention? And the simple answer is: because I happen to be in such and such states of desire and belief which act upon me as sufficient reasons for forming that intention (I believe there is a fire in the building, I desire not to be burned by it, and this causes me to form the intention to escape—what could be more simple than that?). So even if these states do not explain the action

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directly (for there must still be an intention formed by me and interposed between these states and the action) they certainly do explain the action indirectly, for they explain how I came to form the intention that I did in fact form, rather than some other intention with some other purposes. It is enough to slightly modify our earlier “ice cream” example (but I shall return to its original version, after this brief detour will have shed more light on the issue) to see why such a simple analysis may not work even in those ordinary, everyday situations. For suppose I am now in two conflicting states of belief and desire and, consequently, I find myself having two reasons to act, R and R’. R is the reason composed of my desire for the ice cream joined with my belief that the ice cream is in the refrigerator. R’ is the desire (also stemming from my established character) to remain in my comfortable armchair, joined with the belief that prolonging the contemplation of the snowy mountain peaks outside my window will be “good for my soul”. R and R’ are not only different, but the kinds of satisfaction they offer are even, pace Bentham, incomparable. What will happen now, as far as the issue of intention formation is concerned? Will it be the case that it is “up to me” to form the intention (thereby endorsing R rather than R’) or will it be the case that R or R’ will cause me to form that intention? Appealing here to the process of deliberation would only amount to shifting the issue. For unless I discover something changing the balance very clearly, perhaps even overwhelmingly, in favor of either R or R’ (and even this may not be sufficient to force the decision) it is still “up to me” to endorse either R or R’. I may weigh them for a long time or for a short time, I may compare and contrast them from any angle I want, but, in the end, the decision is still up to me; and it will be the decision to endorse one of these reasons and to thereby make it into the reason for my intention to act. Thus, what counts as my reason to act is, in fact, a product of my choice: I have decided to endorse R rather than R’, but they did not impose that choice upon me. Or, to put it differently, no amount of sorting out and

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comparing their respective weights could have forced my choice for, in the end, it was I myself who gave a greater weight to R rather to R’. This is the traditional libertarian solution and it has been adopted by some classics of contemporary libertarianism, representing very different philosophical traditions (30). Is this some kind of a knockout argument against the compatibilist’s way of interpreting what happens in the case of the conflict between R and R’? Obviously, it is not. But if the compatibilist replies by simply restating his position (well, what motivated me to assign a greater weight to R rather than to R’ was the strongest desire I have had at that time) this will not do either. He will have to reply on theoretical grounds, and these grounds are not forced by the data themselves. He will, presumably, come up with some general arguments concerning the very nature of belief and desire, arguments meant to prove that beliefs and desires cannot be chosen, even in the small degree that such a choice was involved in assigning a greater weight to R rather than to R’. It is not even very difficult to anticipate what these compatibilistic moves would look like. And since I am pursuing here this back-and-forth dialectic between the libertarian and the compatibilist in order to make a point of my own—a point which I think needs to be made before we proceed further—I will say at least something about their hypothetical exchange. To begin with, it would be easy for the compatibilist to deny that our beliefs could possibly play the role they did play in the libertarian reading of the choice between R and R’. For what does it mean to endorse R rather than R’ not on the basis of a purely objective evidence concerning R and R’, but by my decision? In the end, and however we describe what is taking place, this would mean that I make myself believe that R has greater weight than R’. But beliefs don’t work that way. The cases of wishful thinking aside, beliefs are all about the way things are, not about my ways of deciding how things are. To bring myself to believe that R (rather than R’) has a greater weight while knowing full well that this is not at all about what R is in and of itself, but

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about my mere belief about R is not possible. Nor is it possible that I choose to find R more desirable than R’. In effect, for this to be possible it is necessary that one be able to choose one’s desires as well, and one does not choose one’s desires. Our desires represent our reactions to such and such natural or socio-cultural stimuli, given such and such nature and nurture that made us who we are. If we manage to change some of our desires, it’s only through the influence of some other desires which have the same status as do the desires that they influence: none of them are chosen. It would be pointless to pursue this dialectical exercise any farther, for the picture that has already emerged is clear enough, at least in its relevant respect. Of course the libertarian has a way of answering these criticisms, but if he does have it, it is not on account of a closer scrutiny of such simple ordinary cases as I have constructed in my examples. Am I really exercising my freedom when I decide to go to the kitchen and get the chocolate ice cream rather than to continue to sit in my comfortable armchair gazing at the snowy peaks? Or is it simply that my decision is due to the strength of my desire and my belief? And what about that earlier case, where there is no conflict at all, but I simply decide to go and get the ice cream? On theoretical grounds it is possible, for the libertarian, to argue that even in such ordinary everyday cases the freedom of the will does contribute to the outcome. But I think those libertarians who have warned us not to stretch the theory that far and to look instead for the proper domain of freedom only where some significant stakes and risks are involved are essentially on the right track. When we look with an unprejudiced eye—that is, without bringing to bear upon the data not just an enormously complicated theory, but (as is always the case with philosophical theories) a theory which will not command universal consent—we will probably find out that in most of the everyday situations we do follow our strongest desires and beliefs (or, to be more precise, our decisions are conditioned by our strongest desires and beliefs), and

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we will probably find out that in most of those cases our beliefs are simply our convictions about how things are and our desires stem from our character, with all of its settled traits, dispositions to act and so on. It is quite otherwise in those encounters of opposition where freedom first emerges and then maintains itself, since—to use Rousseau’s celebrated phrase where it applies more than anywhere else—here the agent finds himself “forced to be free”. Whichever of our two examples we take—the politician or the gunfighter confronting their opponents—we find that the indeterminacy they confront is set up outside them, in the other; and the same situation will be found in any circumstances where the agents with approximately equal powers oppose each other under the conditions of uncertainty. Here nothing can be taken for granted, for here an irresistible force confronts—if only for a while—an immovable object. The agents’ response can only consist in being creative and inventive. To simply rely upon one’s established habits, propensities to act, the strongest desires that flow naturally from one’s character, is now inadequate to the task. Here there can be no question that the agent—if he is clear eyed about the situation he finds himself in—cannot afford the luxury of letting his “strongest desire” make him decide in favor of the reason R rather than R’. If he chooses R over R’ it is not that his will was already, prior to his decision, set on endorsing R over R’; but, finding himself burdened with the task of dealing with the indeterminacy outside him, he came to shape his will in a way that might have been out of step with even the strongest propensities of his character and with the direction they were pressing his will to take. To be sure, he might have continued to follow that direction. But if he did so, then that too was his free decision. How is such a re-forming or re-setting of one’s will possible? I have already supplied earlier the elements needed to answer this question. The indeterminacy the agent encounters outside him becomes internalized as the indeterminacy of his will. His will is

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now “to-be-determined”, it is a task that must be taken up and accomplished in one way or another, and none of these possible ways are simply necessitated by the past. But there is no regressus here, as I have already indicated when analyzing willing itself. The reason is still the same. The agent’s will is re-formed and re-set in some new ways not by a second-order will (or an act thereof ) deciding to re-form the first-order will (which would then require a third-order will to re-form the second-order will and so on). In dealing with an indeterminacy outside him—with the other—the agent’s will sets itself on a new course. There does remain the traditional antilibertarian objection that the choices we make turn out to be “random”, “capricious”, “irrational” etc. In the case of our two agents responding creatively to the indeterminacy each of them finds in the other—although, to repeat, this indeterminacy is also internalized by each of them as their inability to take for granted their settled propensities and character traits and whatever strongest desire may spring out of them at the moment of the choice—this element of randomness seems to be present too. Here the choice that I make does constitute R as having greater weight than R’; and here my choice does this constituting without being necessitated by some preexisting conditions. Nor can we say that the choice of R rather than R’ can be justified in terms of some higher and general principles. For then those latter would have to be justified by some still higher principles and we would, inevitably, end up with a regressus or with the randomness of our choosing what we take to be our most fundamental principles; and the entire problem of a random choice would then reemerge. Nor would it help to take the opposite route and to view the particular choices (such as my choice between R and R’) as “self-subsuming”, i.e. as implicating us, at the moment of choice, into adopting some general principles concerning what kind of person we want to be, what are the ultimate values we are committing ourselves to when making the particular choice and so on (31). For though the particular choice may be self-subsuming, those

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more fundamental considerations adopted by us at the moment of making the particular choice would themselves be randomly adopted or would simply represent a rationalization for making this—and not some other—particular choice. It seems, then, that randomness is inevitable: if my choice makes some possible reason to have a greater weight for me than the competing reason(s), then the choice itself can only be random. But, as some philosophers are fond of pointing out, “who would want such a freedom”—a freedom where we have no control over our own choices, a freedom which boils down to the agent’s shot in the dark or a blind throw of the dice? Let us first note the limits of freedom’s original setting. Yes, I respond to the indeterminacy of the other and, in doing so, I am forced not to take for granted my own settled pattern of willing and acting. But, in the first place, I am not responding to some ghostly and otherworldly being: I am responding to an agent set within such and such environment, endowed with such and such mental and physical characteristics, and I am doing so at a particular place and at a particular moment. Briefly, the other is set up within an array of quite determinate (external and internal to him) circumstances. Nor is this link between his indeterminacy vis-à-vis his opponent and the circumstantiality of his condition a matter of contingency. It is of course contingent that he happens to be set within these circumstances rather than within some other circumstances. Our two gunfighters might have confronted each other in some other town of the Old West, perhaps in a desert, or on the bank of a river; and they also might have been endowed with very different characters, dispositions to act, physical characteristics and so on. Nevertheless, by opposing each other as the two approximately equal powers, they do so in terms of their circumstances. It is precisely because I encounter the other as being here and now and in command of such and such abilities and means at his disposal, that I encounter him as opposing me in a way which forces me to acknowledge the approximate equality of our powers and the indeterminacy

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that goes with it. In the second place—though this is really the second side of the same coin—I am thrown back upon myself, i.e. upon my own circumstantiality. It is precisely because I find myself set within such and such circumstances (my own here and now, my own determinate capacities and means etc.) that I find myself forced to cope with the task of opposing the other by taking nothing for granted (as a superman put in my position would certainly not have to do). Of course my choice, when it comes, will have to be made within the limits of these determinate circumstances—my own and the other’s—and his choice, when it comes, will also have to be made within the very same circumstances, even if apprehended form his point of view. But, however we then re-form and re-set our wills and actions neither of us will be causa sui, for we have not created our circumstances; we have only responded to the circumstances we found ourselves set within. And even if some of these circumstances result from our prior choices (the gunfighter might have to come to this particular Old West town of his own choice, and he might have chosen, some time ago, to train himself in gun fighting) these circumstances are now merely given (the gunfighter now finds himself in this particular Old West town as endowed with these particular skills). And, of course, when he was earlier making the decision to move to this town (rather than stay put where he was) and to acquire the skills of a gunfighter (rather than of a shopkeeper) he found himself choosing within some other circumstances which, in the end, (after all of his past choices had been taken into account and subtracted) would stop with the original hand of cards meted out to him in terms of his nature and nurture. So whatever free choices the agents make they are not beings causa sui. The range of randomness is thereby limited by the determinate circumstances of the choice—for however freely I choose, I can only choose within the background of my circumstances—but it does remain. My decision to constitute R as weightier than R’—to say noting of my decision to come up with some still

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other and “creative” solution R”—seems to be just as arbitrary as it was before. And even if there is no hesitation, no struggle of tendencies inclining me now towards R and then towards R’, the threat of randomness remains. For suppose my choice of R is not the final stage of some such struggle where my choice simply “tips the balance” in favor of R; suppose the choice of R is made without any such process preceding it, but, rather, immediately and “on the spur of the moment”. The randomness still remains, for even though I did not struggle and hesitate for a moment in choosing R, other options were open to me too and it is still the case that “I could have chosen otherwise”—or else we would not be dealing with a choice (some philosophers question this last proposition; I will consider their arguments a bit later). Is it then to be wondered that any theory of freedom of choice will expose itself to the traditional objection of promoting “chance”, “unpredictability” or “irrationality”—briefly of promoting the kind of freedom where the agent does not exercise any control? And who would want such a freedom, it will then be asked. I have already indicated, repeatedly, a certain degree of kinship between the theory here defended and the corresponding theories (of the self and of its freedom) of G.H. Mead. On one single page of his Mind, Self and Society Mead addresses the issue at hand in terms which allow us to deal with it as much as it can be dealt with. The I’s “response enters into his experience only when it takes place. If he says he knows what he is going to do, even there he may be mistaken…That action of the “I” is something the nature of which we cannot tell in advance…The “I” gives the sense of freedom, of initiative” (32). Thus, to say that my decision, at the moment t, to give greater weight to R than to R’—or, perhaps, to come up with a truly “creative solution” R”—means only that I cannot predict and control my choice beforehand. This does not mean that I am not in control of my choice when I make it, at that precise moment t. I opt for R rather than R’ even though, until the moment of decision, I did not know how I will decide. And even in that other case—when I decide for R

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without any prior internal struggle and hesitation, but simply “on the spur of the moment”—I could not have known, until the moment of decision, that this is how I will decide when I finally have to “cross that bridge”. To sum it all up: from the fact that I may have no control over my future choices it does not follow that I am not in control of these choices at the moment of making them. When we consider freedom in its statu nascendi and on its proper testing ground—once again, I here rejoin Mead in holding that the area of human interactions is the place to look at— we fid that this lack of a prior control over the choice I will be making at the moment t (and, to repeat, this does not mean that I have no control over my choice at that moment t, when I am actually choosing) proves to be highly functional. For if I were to control in advance all of my future choices and if the other were to find this out—a feat which would not be very difficult to accomplish, given an even modest degree of his familiarity with my settled pattern of choosing—then my choices, and the actions that issue from them, would lose all the element of surprise and unpredictability, and would significantly diminish my power visà-vis the others by making me malleable to their pressure and manipulation. But if they cannot know until the moment of my choice—and they cannot know it not because of their limited knowledge, but because of the indeterminacy intrinsic to my own choosing—just what this choice will be then the crucial element of surprise and unpredictability remains intact, and at my disposal, since I myself, even if only at the moment of the choice, do remain in control of how I choose. Furthermore, we can turn the tables upon the proponent of a freedom which would consist in the agent’s capacity to control in advance his future choices. To see where this would lead us let us take a clear-cut case: let us suppose that an agent commits himself to some definite life-plan and, from then on, he controls in advance all the future choices he will be making in carrying out that life-plan. We are back to determinism, for all

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the future choices are necessitated by his ability to determine beforehand what they will be. It is true that it would no longer be possible to talk about his future choices having being always necessitated by some merely preexistent facts and laws for, after all, at least initially it would have been his choice to select (or even to create) one particular life-plan rather than another. That is certainly true. But, once selected, this life-plan would then become the agent’s second nature—or his self-imposed fate— due to his ability to control in advance each and every choice he would be making down the road in implementing this life-plan. As for that original choice of the life-plan itself, only two possibilities remain. Either that life-plan too was chosen by an agent being able to exercise beforehand his control over that choice as well, or he had to make the decision at the moment of choosing and not before it. In the first case, the entire problem is only shifted one step backwards (for that original choice was not a genuine choice since it was necessitated by a prior control of the agent); in the second case, we are dealing with a genuine choice but then the control is not exercised in advance, but at the moment of the choice. But genuine choices are not made only when choosing our life-plans. True—to recall the arguments of some libertarians—many of our decisions are quite in line with our settled characters, and to that extent they can be predicted and controlled in advance. But in other cases—when genuine free choices are made—the control of the agent is exercised only at the very moment when he is making the choice. Would it be possible to still speak of the agent’s free choice if, at the moment when he is making it, some other alternative choice could also not have been made by him? Could Tom be said to be choosing A if choosing some alternative B or C were also not “up to him” at that particular moment? No such scenario can be acknowledged by a libertarian of any persuasion, but the scenario is conceivable and had in fact been conceived. This was the gist of H. Frankfurt’s original example of a controller having at his disposal a capacity (with the use of some “potion” or

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“hypnosis” or some more direct way of “manipulating” the agent’s brain and nervous system) to prevent the agent from making any decision the controller does not desire him to make. The controller never actually uses this capacity; in other words, he never actually interferes in the agent’s coming to decide to do A (rather than B or C), but he is in a position to use it if need be (that is, if he detects some sign that the agent might be inclined to do B or C rather than A) in order to control the direction of the very will of the agent (33). We can then imagine the following scenario. During his entire life of an agent already endowed with the capacity to make choices, Tom will always be deciding (for his own reasons) to do A even though the controller will otherwise have all the means to prevent Tom from deciding to do B or C or something still other. Tom would thus continue to decide to do A being fully convinced, in his own mind, that those alternative decisions (to do B or C etc.) were also open to him, when in fact they would have been foreclosed by the controller’s readiness and means to prevent these alternative decisions from ever being made by Tom. Tom would thus be deciding of his own will, even though, due to the controller’s presence, Tom could not have decided to do anything other than A. In some sense, then, there are huge limits upon his will, for he cannot, in fact, decide to do anything other than A. But in another sense, his decisions continue to express his own will, for he makes his own decision to prefer A over B or C or something else and he does not have any reason to think of himself as choosing under external coercion or internal compulsion. Cheerfully, he looks over the alternative options he thinks to be open to him (the options of choosing B, C…etc), but he still choses A and does so consistently, and each time for his own reasons, during his entire lifetime of a decider and a chooser. And if—for many have found the original Frankfurt case inapplicable to indeterministic freedom—Tom’s choices would be due to the indeterminacy in his will and would remain unknown even to him until the very last moment of deliberating upon them and making them, it would still be possible

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to imagine a complicated scenario of a controlled brain process which would block all outcomes of deliberation undesirable to the controller (34). No doubt such scenarios will be convincing to some and unconvincing to others. My point is here entirely different. Even in the first, relatively simple case (where no indeterminacy of the will was involved) of our Tom invariably and of his own uncoerced volition choosing A while being fully convinced that he also has the option of choosing B or C (even though these alternative choices were in fact closed to him by the controller), it would make very little sense to call Tom “free” even in the compatibilist, much less in the libertarian sense. Our concepts of freedom, will, choosing, deciding and so on are forged within a form of life where, if an agent is said to choose A over B or C, he must have the ability to actually choose B or C (and not just falsely believe that he can choose B or C) if he decides to do so. Otherwise, he will be living in a fool’s paradise. To say that Tom will continue to “choose” even though (contrary to what he himself believes to be the case) all the alternative choices will always remain closed to him by the controller for his entire life (and not just for some limited period of an experiment after which he recovers his full powers of choosing and rejoins the rest of mankind) would either strain our concepts beyond their breaking point, or it would involve us into a secularized version of the old theological antinomy between predestination and free choice. At least the theologian can appeal to the incomprehensibility of God’s ways. I will conclude this chapter by showing what happens to a theory of freedom—of freedom understood in a sense close enough to my own to serve as an example—when the agent can be said to be free independently of any relations with others and of the indeterminacy he encounters in those others. We do have a clear example of precisely such a theory. It is the theory of freedom put forward by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. As we are about to see he, more than anyone else, deserves to be viewed as a

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philosopher whose theory of freedom turns it into that “freakish demon” R.E. Hobart spoke of long before Sartre’s book saw the light of the day (35). I will then show how the untenable conclusions of Sartre’s theory—including Hobart’s charge—do not apply to the theory I am here defending. At the foundation of Sartre’s central thesis that a human agent (a “human reality”, a “being-for-itself ”) is free lies Sartre’s view of consciousness as a lack of being: unlike a “being-in-itself ” (a rock, a chair, a tree) consciousness lacks a fixed and stable identity. This is the root of freedom. “ Human reality is free because it is not enough” (n’est pas assez) (36); and this lack of being “forces [it] to make itself (à se faire) (37). This is the original “indetermination” (38) at the heart of consciousness and the entire striving of a human agent is to create for himself the determination (i.e. a fixed, stable and settled identity) that he originally lacks. This striving is the “fundamental” or “original” project of consciousness and this project is chosen in a “fundamental” or “original” choice (39). The fundamental project outlines the agent’s entire self-conception, that is, the most general way in which he interprets and strives to realize his being “In-itself-for-itself ” (40), i.e. his desired future status of a conscious being who will have managed to give himself a full and settled identity. This self-conception, or self-interpretation, involves the most fundamental values the agent chooses as his guiding lights in that ontological venture to become a being in-itself-for-itself. Given the original indeterminacy in the structure of consciousness, our choices cannot be necessitated by the past conditions of the world (including our own nature and nurture) whether or not these conditions be joined with some nomic law-like patterns. In each choice that I make, the break with the already given conditions is due to what Sartre calls the “double nihilation (néantisation) “ (41) of these conditions—both external and internal to me—by my very stance of a conscious agent. In effect, my very consciousness of the already given reality amounts to its

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nihilation, and this nihilation of reality is what makes freedom both possible and actual. Let us explain this with the aid of a simple example. Suppose I return from a long trip and I notice that my front yard is in a sorry condition: the grass is all dried up and yellow, the flowers on the rose bushes are withering away, and even some leaves on the trees are beginning to lose their strength and color. Clearly, the front yard had not been watered properly while I was away and I find the front yard falling short, lacking. This is the first “nihilation”, but it implies the second: I have a sense, perhaps I even imagine, what my front yard would look like (with its grass lush and dark green, with the rose bushes full of healthy flowers etc.) and this desirable front yard is also lacking (42). When I decide immediately to start and to increase the work of the sprinklers’ system, my decision and my action take place only on account of the presence, in my experience, of these two lacks. By itself, the front yard is what it is. Somebody else in my place—somebody to whom the state of his front yard does not matter—might not have even noticed, much less reacted to, the condition of the grass and of the plants. Very well, one can easily reply, that’s because I am already motivated in some ways that somebody else might not be. It may simply be greed, for I want to put the house on sale and I believe that a nice front yard will make the house easier to sell. I may be motivated by my ambition to “keep up with the Joneses” and my belief that this cannot be achieved unless I bring my front yard up to standards of the neighborhood. Or, again, I may be motivated by my fear of losing my respectability and the belief that I will keep it if my neighbors approve of my front yard. The list of these possible motives and beliefs can go on and on. But none of them—taken separately or jointly with others—will necessitate my decision to rapidly take care of the front yard. To decide to take action, I must first experience my greed or my ambition as lacking the satisfactory level of gratification; and, simultaneously, I must have some notion of what it would take for me to be in

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such a satisfactory condition, a condition which is also lacking. What about fear, though? But even one’s fear of starvation, Sartre holds, (to say nothing of my fear of the neighbors’ disapproval, or of the simple fear that I may not be able to enjoy my front yard if I don’t water it immediately) will not force any decision unless it is “nihilated” in that “double nihilation”. I must first experience my survival as being “in danger”, i.e. as lacking security, and I must also have some notion of the condition (the living wage, the goods I need being rendered accessible to me, etc.) required for my survival, a condition which is also lacking (43). Clearly, somebody who does not value his survival will not experience his situation as defined by this double lack. No doubt this last example is extreme, for most of us do value our survival. But this is precisely Sartre’s point: we try to secure our survival because we value it, not because of some blind instinct of self-preservation. There are many examples of individuals who do not put survival on the top of their list of priorities and they do so not because of some blind death wish or resignation, but on account of some quite definite values, ends and goals (religious, ideological etc.) which they endorse. But these values, ends and goals are endorsed freely. “ Human reality cannot receive its ends…either from outside or from a so-called inner ‘nature’. It chooses them and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external limit of its projects… human reality through its very upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends” (44). Ultimately, this “decision” is to choose the “fundamental project” we spoke of earlier; and that self-chosen fundamental project will guide the agent in all of his lesser decisions and choices. We now come to the key point—and the key flaw—of Sartre’s theory. I will make that decision to respond quickly to the sorry condition of my front yard since I have chosen to pursue a certain fundamental project P rather than some alternative fundamental project P’ or P”. But what about that choice, in turn, what about the choice of the fundamental project itself? It too

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is a (“fundamental” and “original”) choice and, as such, it cannot be necessitated by any preexistent conditions, both internal and external to the agent; nor can it depend (on penalty of regress) upon some still higher choice of some still higher ends and values. This is why the choice of the fundamental project itself has no foundation on which to rest, and this is why Sartre describes it as “fragile”: “we are perpetually threatened by the nihilation of our actual choice and perpetually threatened with choosing ourselves—and consequently with becoming—other than we are. By the sole fact that our choice is absolute, it is fragile” (45). This threat is the ever-present threat of “an abrupt metamorphosis… this modification is always possible” (46). This goes far beyond the somewhat limited control that an agent conceived on the libertarian model can enjoy over his future choices. The Sartrean agent has no control whatsoever even over his present (and “fundamental”) choice of what kind of person he wants to be. At any moment he may choose—if that is still the word—to become somebody entirely different from what he was up until then. This is the ever-present threat of that radical “metamorphosis” that he constantly lives under. Given such a threat, why would anybody undertake any projects engaging his future? Why would he form any life-plan (be it even in the form of the Sartrean “fundamental project”) and take steps to implement it? At any moment, such projects and plans could be overturned by a “metamorphosis” which would strike out of the blue and render all of them irrelevant and obsolete. Nothing could better qualify for the Hobartian title of the “freakish demon” than the kind of freedom we find on the pages of Being and Nothingness. It is quite otherwise if the original locus of indeterminacy is encountered by the agent outside him, in the other. Recall again our politician: yes, he does undergo a metamorphosis ( he changes radically his political views and behavior and—in conformity with the principle “practice makes the practitioner”—he becomes other than he was in the past) but he does so in response to the

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threat of his competitor for the office. The metamorphosis does not threaten him at any moment, nor does it befall him without any control on his part. He himself makes the decision to re-form and re-set his will—his actions are changed accordingly—and he thus re-invents himself to prevail over his opponent. When seen in the context of some form of opposition—not necessarily political—freedom is not Sartre’s “absurd” freedom (47), but, quite the contrary, a highly functional capacity which allows the agent to be more effective in his interactions with others. But this is so, because the original source of indeterminacy is in the other, and freedom is first constituted as the agent’s way of responding to that indeterminacy. In contrast, the Sartrean agent (the “being-for-itself ”) is free prior to and independently of any encounter with the other. This is so, because freedom is a fundamental ontological structure of consciousness (as a lack of being, in contrast with the non-conscious “being-in-itself ”) and the appearance of the other within the experience of an individual consciousness is only a “contingency” or “facticity” (48)—it is simply one among many other circumstances that a conscious individual, already free by virtue of his ontological structure, must take up and deal with. It goes without saying—and I have already addressed this issue earlier in the chapter—that the capacity for freedom, once developed through the interactions with others, can then be extended over many areas where the agent will decide freely without any reference to the other. How far this capacity for freedom can extend is, we recall, a subject of debate among libertarians themselves.

NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE (1) P. Hoffman, Opposition and Philosophy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 2015), Ch 1 (2) T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988, ed.. R. Tuck), Ch 17, p. 118 (3) I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tran. N.K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1965) pp. B133-135, B138 (4) ibid, pp. B131-132 (5) ibid, pp. A341, B399 (6) ibid, pp. A349-350, B407 (7) ibid, p. B420 (8) ibid, pp. A358-359 (9) ibid, p. A364 (10) ibid, p. A349 (11) “in the…unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thought, not an intuition” (ibid, p. B157). It is not therefore, a piece of knowledge, for which both thought and intuition are required (ibid, p. B158) (12) H.J. de Vleeschauver, La déduction transcendentale dans l’oeuvre de Kant (Paris: Leroux 1934-1935) Vol. II, p. 581. Here are the key steps of Kant’s argument. “My existence cannot...be regarded as an inference from the proposition ‘I think’…but is identical with it. But the ‘I think’ expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition i.e. perception...the ‘I think’ precedes the experience which is required to determine the object of perception in respect of time; and the existence here [referred to] is not a category” (I. Kant, op. cit. p. B423). No amount of mental gymnastics can square these statements

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with the doctrine of the Critique of Pure Reason. The teaching of the Critique is that existence is a category (it is one of the categories of modality), and since any experience possible for the I of pure apperception must fall under the categories (ibid, pp. A111-112) nothing could be known by this I as actually existing without being apprehended through the category of existence. (13) In what follows I shall consider briefly S. Shoemaker’s treatment of these issues in his seminal paper Self-Reference and Self-Awareness, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 19 (Oct 3, 1968, pp. 555-567). Shoemaker fully acknowledges the Kantian roots of his theory. See: S. Shoemaker, The FirstPerson Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996) pp. 18-19 (14) I. Kant. op. cit. p. B132 (15) S. Shoemaker, art. cit. , pp. 556-557 (16) ibid, pp. 558-559 (17) “in being aware that one feels pain one is, tautologically, aware, not simply that the attribute feel(s) pain is instantiated, but that it is instantiated in oneself”. ibid, pp. 563-564 (18) I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics ed. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1950) p. 48 (19) Controversy between Leibniz and Clarke, Leibniz’s Fourth Letter, in: Leibniz. Selections ed. P.P. Weiner, (New York: Charles Sribner’s Sons 1951) p. 229 (20) None of this implies that I am thereby endorsing the Hegelian theory of the “struggle of self-consciousnesses” (see especially Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, pp. 113-114). Hegel’s account is distorted from the very beginning by the overall framework of his philosophical idealism: the two opponents enter the struggle in order to gain recognition as free and independent individuals by displaying their ability to risk their lives for precisely that purpose. It is through this process that

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they distance themselves form their determinate existence and become “pure negativity” (ibid, p. 117). But the motivation of the struggle (for freedom, for glory, for survival, for gain etc.) may be very different and the outcome may still be the same: the two agents may still find themselves in a condition where they can take nothing for granted, whether in their physical (as in the case of our two gunfighters) or in their social (as in the case of our two political opponents) existence. (21) G.H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, ed. C.W. Morris (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1974) p. 175 (22) ibid, p. 175—my emphasis. (23) ibid, pp. 175, 177

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO (1) W. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publication, Inc. 1950) Vol. II, p. 501 (2) To the best of my knowledge, the charge was first raised by H.A. Prichard in his 1945 article Acting, Willing, Desiring (reprinted in: H.A. Prichard, Moral Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002, pp. 272-281, see pp. 274-275). The charge does apply to the passage from The Principles of Psychology quoted by Prichard: “I will to write, and the act follows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that the distant table slide over the floor towards me; and it also does not” (W. James, op. cit., p. 560). Clearly, the sliding of the table (as opposed to my sliding the table) cannot be considered an action. On the other hand, when Prichard asserts, against James, that willing is neither “resolving” nor “consenting” (H.A. Prichard, op. cit. p. 274) he offers nothing better in exchange except to tell us that “the activity of willing is indefinable” (ibid, p. 274) (3) W. James, op. cit., p. 522 (4) ibid, p.526 (5) ibid, p. 519 (6) ibid, pp. 561-564

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(7) This was the view put forward, in the nineteen sixties, by such major writers as A. Melden (A. Melden, Free Action, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1961, pp. 46, 51-55) and R. Taylor (R. Taylor, Action and Purpose, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1966, pp. 68, 72). Their main argument was that we cannot even describe a mental “act of will” independently of its alleged effect. For example, the volition which is supposed to be the cause of my arm being raised is unintelligible except in reference to that action; per se, my act of will involved in making my arm go up has no characteristics of its own and, consequently, it does not exist. Now, I agree—and I will argue for this later in the chapter—that each volition has an intentional content; each volition aims at bringing about this or that action and, in most cases, such and such effects that the action itself is meant to bring about. But this does not mean that volition (the fiat, the resolve) does not have its own phenomenal quality accessible to our experience of ourselves as subjects of willing and acting. (8) “it is contrary to the nature of will, which has no dominion over itself, to engage itself for the future”. J.J. Rousseau, Geneva Manuscript, in: J.J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. R.D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1978), p. 181 (9) J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.C. Fraser (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1959), Vol. II, p. 313 (10) ibid, p. 313 (11) ibid, p. 320 (12) ibid, pp. 330-334 (13) ibid, pp. 345, 349 (14) J. Locke, The First Treatise of Government, in: J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), p. 182 (15) J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. cit. p. 269 (16) J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. cit., p.93 (17) J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. cit., p. 279

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(18) ibid., p. 284 (19) See for example: C. von Clausewitz, On War, trans. O.J.M. Jolles, (New York: Random House, Inc. 1943), p.6 and, especially, pp. 125-126 (20) As we recall, for Locke the preferences and the commands of the will ensue in the agent’s doing (or not doing, if such is the preference and the command of his will) this or that; and the doing (or not doing) itself is said to be the work of the agent’s liberty. Now, although in most passages Locke is a determinist as far as the relation between volition (the actual preferring and commanding oneself to do A) and the corresponding action (the actual doing of A) is concerned, there is at least one passage where Locke, after denying any “indifferency” to be found in the will itself (for once I mentally grasp that the doing of A is good for me, my will must prefer and command me to do A) is nevertheless prepared to acknowledge the reality of such an “indifferency” in our acting on those preferences and commands of the will. “[I]t is an indifferency which remains after the judgment of the understanding, yea, even after the determination of the will…an indifferency of the operative powers of the man, which remaining equally able to operate or to forbear operating after as before the decree of the will, are in a state which, if one pleases, may be called indifferency.” ( J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. cit. vol I, p. 368). This passage, and its meaning, did not escape the attention of an acute scholar, who had concluded that Locke shows himself willing to attribute to “liberty” (as the power of doing or not doing) a certain autonomy vis-à-vis “will”. (A. Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics. Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1987, pp. 135-137). Exactly the same point could be made about the relation between an intention and its execution.

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(21) The insurpassable exposition and defence of this view can still be found in Brian O’Shaughnessy’s The Will. A Dual Aspect Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980. (22) ibid, pp. 160, 269, 286 (23) See, for example, Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. M. Ostwald (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merril Company, Inc. 1962, Book Three) p. 1112a30; T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, (London: Frank Cass and Company 1969), p. 61; W. James, op. cit. vol. II, p. 486 (24) R. Albritton: Freedom of Will and Freedom of Action, from: The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 59/2 (1985). Reprinted in: Free Will, ed. G. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 415-416 (25) R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Fourth Meditation: Truth and Falsity. In: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), vol. II, p. 40 (26) R. Descartes, To Mesland, 9 February 1645, in: The Correspondence, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. cit. vol. III, p. 245—my emphasis.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE (1) A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1966) vol. II, p. 140 (2) J.McT. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988) vol. II, p. 82 (3) D. Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford Uiversity Press 1978), p. 233 (4) ibid, pp. 1-7. See also: D. Hume, En Enquiry Concering Human Understanding, in: Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1972), pp. 17-22

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(5) C. Dickens, Hard Times, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 2001), p. 149 (6) T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), p.35 (7) R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Third Meditation: The existence of God, ed. cit. p. 33 (8) ibid, p. 33 (9) ibid, p. 33 (10) ibid, p.33 (11) R. M. Chisholm finds it in J. Edwards’s Doctrine of Original Sin Defended and develops it in a systematic way. See: R.M. Chisholm, Problems of Identity, in: M.K. Munitz, ed. Identity and Individuation, (New York: New York University Press 1971), pp. 3-18. For Edwards, just like for Descartes, God creates me ex nihilo at every moment of time. (12) R. Descartes, op. cit.: Second Meditation: The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body, p. 19 (13) P. van Inwagen, Material Beings, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1990), pp. 183-184 (14) See, for example: D.H. Lewis, The Elusive Self, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press 1982), p. 90; J. Foster, The Immaterial Self (London and New York: Routledge 1991), p. 260 (15) W. James, op. cit. vol. I, p. 225 (16) ibid, p. 226 (17) ibid, p. 226 (18) ibid, p. 226 (19) ibid, p. 226 (20) ibid, p. 226 (21) ibid, p. 401 (22) ibid, p. 369—my emphasis. (23) ibid, p. 278 (24) ibid, p. 339 (25) ibid, pp. 239, 339 (26) ibid, p. 239 (27) ibid, p. 238

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(28) ibid, p. 339 (29) This is the view of J.P. Sartre in his early (1936) article La transcendence de l’ego ( J.P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick, New York: The Noonday Press 1957). Even so, he asserts boldly that consciousness “is itself given above all as individuated and impersonal spontaneity.” (p. 98). But if it is impersonal because it lacks the Ego, the self, the I and so on (as Sartre argues in his article), then how can it also be “individuated”? No explanation is given. Perhaps for this reason in The Self and the Circuit of Selfness(ipséité) section of Being and Nothingness Sartre repudiates his earlier theory from The Transcendence of the Ego and finds the principle of individuation in consciousness’s “selfness”. We are first told that “what confers personal existence on a being is not the possession of an Ego—which is only the sign of the personality— but it is the fact that the being exists for itself as a presence to itself (presence à soi)” ( J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H.E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, Inc. 1956, p. 103). But we are also told in the next sentence that presence to itself involves selfness: “this first reflective movement [presence to itself ] involves…selfness. In selfness my possible is reflected on my consciousness and determines it as what it is” (ibid, p. 103). But “my possible” is nothing other than what my consciousness pursues in its attempt to rid itself of its internal lack (ibid, p. 101). It is a condition where my inherently unsettled and “nihilating” consciousness would finally reach the firm stability of a non-conscious being without ceasing to be conscious. This is the ontological “project” which each and every consciousness pursues in its own way; and, for Sartre, this ontological project is inherently contradictory and impossible to achieve (ibid, p. 90). Consequently, without buying this theory—lock, stock and barrel—we have no way of accounting for the individuation of consciousness. (30) G. Strawson, Selves. An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009

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(31) B. Dainton, The Phenomenal Self, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), pp. 77-78, 147-148. Perhaps the testimony of a great writer, who had also explored the “stream of consciousness” layer of experience, will give additional weight to these philosophical refutations. This writer is, paradoxically and against the conventional wisdom, Marcel Proust. On the standard interpretation of his theory—and there is ample support for this interpretation in several passages of his masterpiece—Proust views an individual’s continuing experience of himself as composed of a plurality of selves (say, the self of the Swann in love with Odette, superceded by the self of the Swann no longer in love with Odette), where the emergence of a new self is tantamount to the “death” of its predecessor. It is less known that Proust also holds the view that throughout this entire series of selves succeeding and supplanting each other, the individual’s will continues to be the same; and this claim, I may add, is quite in line with the theory of the continuity of the self argued for in the present study. Here, for example, is one crucial passage from A la recherche du temps perdu: “will…is the persevering and unalterable servant of our successive personalities…toiling without intermission and with no thought for the variability of the self.” M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff New York: Random House 1934, vol. I p. 653 (32) B. Dainton, op. cit. p. XIII (33) ibid, p. 20 (34) ibid, p. 20 (35) ibid, p. 48 (36) ibid, p. 49 (37) ibid, p. 420 (38) ibid, p. 416 (39) Although Dainton argues here only against the views of Zahavi (see: D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, Cambridge: MIT Press 2005, pp. 124-127, 132, 144, 235-236) the same

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views can be found in an earlier theory of “mineness” put forward by G. Madell (G. Madell, The Identity of the Self, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1981, pp. 22,25, 137). I need to stress however, that even though I agree with Dainton’s criticism of “mineness”, my own view of the self is, as will appear shortly, different from his. (40) ibid, p. 242 (41) ibid, p. 88 (42) ibid, p. 341 (43) ibid, p. 416 (44) ibid, p. 344 (45) ibid, pp. 351, 355 (46) ibid, p. 355

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR (1) Once again, the most notable exceptions are here Hegel and Mead. See: G.W.F. Hegel, op. cit. pp. 113-114; G.H. Mead, op. cit. pp. 175-177, 196-197. However, as I have already indicated in Chapter One, although my own views fall under the same general category, they are also significantly different from theirs. (2) T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. cit. p. 146 (3) ibid, pp. 44-45 (4) ibid, p. 146 (5) ibid, pp. 146-147 (6) ibid, p. 97 (7) J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. cit. pp. 385, 392 (8) This seems to have been Aristotle’s view. In Book III, Chapter IV of Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle concedes that once the agent acquires a certain character, his actions will flow form it: thus a man who becomes “self-indulgent” or “unjust” can no longer act out of step with his character. But still the same man who is now set in his self-indulgent or unjust ways became

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what he is voluntarily, by making certain choices at an earlier stage of his biography; in this sense he is responsible for having the self-indulgent and unjust character he now has. As for the question of how the agent, at that earlier stage, could have made different choices than the choices he actually did make, Aristotles’s answer is based on his theory of contingency (expounded at length in De Interpretatione). In Chapter VI of Eudemian Ethics Aristotle argues that as long as a man’s action “depends on him” it is up to him (as the “cause” or the “source” of the action, to use Aristotle’s words) whether the action will or will not occur. (9) I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L.W. Beck, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1949, p. 201; W. James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in: The Will to Believe, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1956, p. 149 (10) I am thinking here above all about H. Frankfurt’s groundbreaking paper Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person (Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1, January 1971, pp. 5-20). One of Frankfurt’s aims in that paper was to salvage the concept of free will without abandoning the broad compatibilist framework. To achieve this purpose Frankfurt introduced his distinction between the first-order and the second-order desires and volitions, and he went on to define freedom of the will in these terms. For example, my first-order desire is to “take it easy”, while my second-order desire is to overcome this tendency to laziness and to be a hard worker. In the light of the latter I evaluate the former as unsatisfying. And so if I continue to act guided by my will to be a hard working person, I have the will which I want to have, i.e. I will what I want to will and, in this sense, my will is free. How can we tell whether a person is free in this sense? Here Frankfurt uses an array of closely related terms to explain this point. I have the will that I want to have when I identify myself “decisively” with my first-order desire (in the ideal case, without any “reservation and conflict”). In a later paper, titled The Faintest Passion

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(the paper was originally read as the Presidential Address delivered before the Eighty-Eight Annual Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, December 29, 1991; it was subsequently published in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 5-16) this “decisive” identification with one’s first-order desires is explicated as the agent’s “wholeheartedness” in endorsing and pursuing them; and this, in turn, makes the agent “genuinely satisfied” with his condition and “having no interest” in making any changes in it. For a libertarian, however, the entire problem remains, even if it is now shifted to the second-order desires. For what makes us “wholeheartedly” satisfied with our first-order desires? We cannot fall back—nor does Frankfurt fall back—upon some still higher (third-order) desires, for this would only open us to the charge of a regressus. Instead, Frankfurt asserts in the paper, “we can only be what nature and life make us”; and this means that our wholehearted commitment to a certain type of first-order desire is not itself a matter of free choice, be it even of a prior free choice. No libertarian can accept this position. On the other hand, it should not be supposed that Frankfurt’s notion of a wholehearted commitment cannot be accommodated within the libertarian tradition. For such writers as Kierkegaard or Heidegger our ultimate commitment is not only freely chosen but freely reaffirmed at each and every step of its endorsement by the individual. (11) I. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T.M. Greene and H.H. Hudson, New York: Harper and Row Publishers 1960, p. 45 (12) ibid, p. 20. As J.R. Silber comments in his Introduction to the work, “The disposition is..the indication of our true and full nature freely, though not always consciously, willed in every present moment…a free and hence precarious continuity.” ibid, p. CXVII—my emphasis.

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(13) I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. cit. pp. A533, B561; A534, B562 (14) ibid, pp. A533, B561 (15) ibid, pp. A533, B561 (16) ibid, pp. A554, B582 (17) ibid, pp. A533, B561 (18) ibid, pp. A534, B562 (19) ibid, pp. A446, B474 (20) ibid, pp. A446, B474 (21) ibid, pp. A198, B244 (22) ibid, pp. A558, B586 (23) ibid, pp. A448, B476 (24) ibid, pp. A451, B479 (25) This is what Hegel brought out in his study of the numerous “dissemblences” (Verstellungen) present in Kant’s moral philosophy. See: G.W.F. Hegel, op. cit. pp. 374-383 (26) The classical exposition of the first type of the theory, with the full emphasis being put upon the explanation of volitions is to be found in Essay IV, Chapters I and II of T. Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of Man (see especially: pp. 273-277; my references are to the original 1788 Edinburgh edition as reprinted in 2012 by Forgotten Books, San Bernardino, CA). Reid’s position, however, is not free of a certain ambiguity with which his commentators had to grapple in some way or another. In Chapter II of Essay IV the agent is said not only to cause his volitions and voluntary actions by an “exertion” of his active power, but he is also said to be “conscious” of “making an exertion” (ibid, pp. 276-277). It is all but impossible not to see these “exertions” as occurrences, changes or alterations taking place within the agent himself. We then confront the following dilemma. Either these exertions are caused by other exertions and we end up with a regressus. Or we stop the regressus by holding that the agent agent-causes directly the exertions of his power and only indirectly (through the exertions already in place) his volitions and voluntary actions.

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The explanation of actions by a direct agent-causation was defended, at least during some stages of their philosophical careers, by such important thinkers as R. Taylor, (R. Taylor op. cit., especially pp. 111-115, 127-128, 262-264) and R.M. Chisholm (R.M. Chisholm, Person and Object, Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court 1979, Chapter II, section 5; see also Chisholm’s 1964 Lindley Lecture Human Freedom and the Self reprinted in: Metaphysics: the Big Question, ed. P. van Inwagen and D.W. Zimmerman, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1988, pp. 356-365). However, in Chisholm’s account the agent is said to agent-cause directly a brain event which then causes the action. (27) Both Taylor (R. Taylor, op. cit. p. 13) and Chisholm (R.M. Chisholm, art. cit. p. 362) appeal to these Aristotelian notions. (28) W. James, The Dilemma of Determinism, ed. cit. p. 183; K. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer 1919, pp. 202-204 (29) For the first view see: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans C. Smith, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1962), p.422; for the second view see: A.C. Campbell, Is “Freewill” a Pseudo-Problem, Mind, LX, No 240 (October 1951), pp. 446-465; reprinted in: B. Berofsky, ed. Free Will and Determinism, New York: Harper and Row Publishers 1966, pp. 123-135, see especially pp. 130-133. (30) See for example: R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1981, pp. 294-307; P. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, trans. E.V. Kohak, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1966, pp. 135-143. (31) This is the solution proposed by Nozick. See, R. Nozick, ibid, pp. 299-301. (32) G.H. Mead, op. cit. p. 177—my emphasis. (33) H. Frankfurt, Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility, Journal of Philosophy 66/23 (1969), pp. 829839. The relevant example is given in section IV of the paper.

• Notes 109

Frankfurt’s controller is called Black and the agent whose undesirable choices he is ready to prevent is called Jones. (34) An ingenious example of such a scenario can be found in: A.R. Mele and D. Robb, Rescuing Frankfurt-Style Cases, in: The Philosophical Review, vol. 107, No. 1 ( January 1988), pp. 97-112. Mele and Robb imagine the case (pp. 101-102) where the agent, Bob, indeterministically deliberates and decides, at the moment t2, to steal Ann’s car. Unknowingly to Bob, the controller Black originates a deterministic process P in Bob’s brain with P being intended by Black to deterministically cause Bob’s decision at t2. Black does not even know that at t2 Bob could decide on his own to steal the car, but this is precisely what happens: at t2 Bob decides of his own will to steal Ann’s car and even though (this is the assumption) his decision was indeterministic, there was a deterministic process in place which would have determined Bob to make precisely that decision at t2. In this scenario, then, the agent is deliberating and deciding indeterministically, even though, due to the controller, he could not have decided otherwise than he actually did. (35) R.E. Hobart, Free Will as involving Determination and Inconceivable without It, Mind 63 (1934) pp. 1-27. Reprinted in: Metaphysics: The Big Questions, ed. P. van Inwagen and D.W. Zimmerman, ed. cit. pp. 345-355, see p. 346 (36) J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, ed. cit. p. 440 (37) ibid, p.440 (38) ibid, p. 271 (39) ibid, pp. 456, 466 (40) ibid, p. 456 (41) ibid, p. 435 (42) ibid, p. 434 (43) ibid, p. 435 (44) ibid, p. 443 (45) ibid, p. 465 (46) ibid, p. 464

110

(47) ibid, p. 479-481 (48) ibid, pp. 297, 301, 529



Self and Opposition

Index A action 16, 19–22, 28–30, 33, 46, 60–61, 63, 69, 71–73, 75–76, 84, 90, 97–99, 105, 108 agent 11, 15–16, 19–22, 24, 26, 28, 30–31, 33, 35–36, 38, 40, 45, 57–66, 69, 71–74, 80, 82, 84–86, 88–89, 91–93, 99, 104, 106–109 agent-causation 108 alternatives 66, 69 apperception 12–14, 95–96

B belief 21, 75–79, 90

C capacities 9, 24, 26, 54, 83 capacity 14–15, 24–26, 28, 35, 38, 43, 60, 62, 66, 72, 74–75, 85–86, 93 cause 29, 62, 68, 70–71, 77, 98, 105, 107, 109 choice 65, 67, 70, 77–78, 81, 83–86, 88–89, 91–92, 106 choosing 64, 66, 81, 83–86, 88, 92 chosen 64, 66–67, 76, 78–79, 83–84, 86, 89, 91, 106 circumstances 26, 45, 73, 80, 82–83, 93

compatibilism 25, 57, 60–61, 65 consciousness 11, 14, 31, 33, 41, 43, 49–52, 54–55, 89, 93, 102–103 continuing 21, 45, 48–49, 52, 55, 73, 103 continuity 43, 46, 48–49, 52, 103, 106 control 59, 82, 84–85, 87, 92–93

D deciding 19–20, 22–23, 29, 33, 58, 78, 81, 87–88, 109 decision 17, 19–23, 29, 32–33, 39, 58, 61, 68, 70–72, 77–80, 83–84, 86–87, 90–91, 93, 109 deliberating 87, 109 deliberation 20, 30, 38, 63–64, 77, 88 desire 20–21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 62–64, 73–81, 87, 105 determinism 57–58, 60, 63–64, 66, 71, 85 deterministic 65–66, 109

E effort 35–39 ego 49, 51–53, 102 equality 9, 59, 82 executing 36, 38

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Self and Opposition

experience 7, 10–12, 14, 16, 22, 24, 27, 29, 31–32, 41–44, 49–54, 57, 67–69, 75, 84, 90, 93, 95, 98, 103

F fiat 19–23, 28, 32–33, 36, 40, 72–73, 98 freedom 16, 22, 25–26, 30, 39, 57, 59–61, 63, 65–69, 73–75, 79–80, 82, 84–85, 87–90, 92–93, 97, 105 free will 23, 57–59, 61, 72, 76, 105

I identity 45, 48–51, 74, 89 implementing 24, 26–27, 34, 36, 38–39, 86 indeterminacy 24, 58–60, 72–73, 80–82, 85, 87–89, 92 indeterministic 87, 109 indiscernible 10, 15–16, 41, 45 intention 14, 33–35, 37, 72, 76–77, 99 intentional 29, 32–33, 98

L lack 23, 34, 37, 47, 54, 58–59, 64, 85, 89, 91, 93, 102 lacking 22, 90–91 law 25, 86 laws of nature, 60–70 libertarian 23, 63–65, 69–70, 75, 78–79, 86, 88, 92, 106 libertarianism 60, 65, 72, 78 liberty 24, 26, 35, 63, 99

M moment 20, 23, 37–38, 41, 46–47, 49, 61, 64–66, 69, 72, 81–82, 84–86, 92–93, 101, 106, 109

N necessary 11, 21, 30, 32, 36, 48, 50, 54, 68–69, 79 necessity 11, 51, 53, 60–61, 63, 70, 73 nihilation 89–92 no-ownership 42, 50 numerical difference 10

O opposition 9–10, 15–16, 23, 40–41, 45, 58–60, 73, 80, 93 option 40, 66–67, 88 origin 43, 68–69 origination 65, 67, 70 other 7, 9–17, 20, 23, 25–29, 31–33, 36–37, 39–42, 44–50, 52–54, 58–60, 62, 66, 71–73, 75–77, 79–82, 84–86, 92–93, 97, 102–103, 106–107

R resolve 19, 21, 23, 28, 32–34, 36–37, 98 resolving 20, 22, 29, 33, 97

• index 113

S self 7, 9, 11–13, 16, 41–44, 48–54, 68, 72–73, 84, 102–104 selves 24, 42, 50, 52, 54, 103 situation 16, 28–29, 37, 40, 58, 66, 73, 80, 91 striving 36, 38, 89 struggle 84–85, 96 subject 9, 13, 19, 27, 40, 50, 53, 66, 75, 93 substance 12–13, 22

T trying 35–39, 53, 71

U unified 51, 53–54 unity 11–12, 14, 51, 95 unowned 23, 43–44, 51 unpredictability 24–25, 27, 59–60, 84–85

V volition 22, 24, 29–30, 36–37, 62, 70–73, 88, 98–99 volitional 16, 19, 31–32, 44, 55 voluntary 19, 21, 29–32, 36–37, 63, 75–76, 107

W will 7, 9–10, 16, 19, 21–24, 26–30, 32–33, 35–41, 44, 46, 48–49, 52–53, 57–64, 66–69, 71–74, 76–80,

83–85, 87–91, 93, 97–99, 103–105, 109 willing 23–24, 32, 36, 40, 43, 72–73, 81–82, 97–99

Self and Opposition The author argues that the individual and continuing self emerges from human interactions and that the interactions at issue are the relations of opposition. The argument then proceeds to show how the same relations of opposition constitute the self as endowed with free will.

Piotr Hoffman studied philosophy in Poland and in France. He taught philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of eight books and many articles in professional journals and anthologies.

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