Investigation I: On Free Will, Part 1 - An Introduction to the Investigation

On Free Will, Part 1 – An Introduction to the Investigation

For the first investigation, we will be looking into the question of ‘free will’.

The philosophical study of free will is one that has been with me for quite some time. First introduced to it formally in undergraduate, I then wound up writing my M.A. thesis comparing the approaches used by St. Thomas Aquinas and Bl. John Duns Scotus to characterize this phenomenon of human existence. However, reflecting upon the nature of free will and its implications has occupied me since long before that – and, I think, similar reflections have occupied most other people at some point or another. After all, our own powers of freedom are something we encounter every day and in every moment.

Freedom is perhaps the crucial defining aspect of the human experience, since without freedom the “human experience” can ultimately be reduced to any number of other factors that actually have nothing to do with “man” at all. What I mean is this: if one is not truly free in the way human freedom is generally conceive of, then no one truly acts or does anything of their own accord and volition is merely an illusion. Anything a person does can be chalked up to the laws of physics acting on particles moving through space. These particles may interact in incomprehensibly sophisticated ways, yes, but without a robust notion of freedom including a power of choice that is free from any prior determination, then anything you or I or anyone else does is not truly up to us but is the sophisticated result of a material chain of cause and effect set in motion billions of year ago.

In the above paradigm, any significance assigned to “man” vanishes. For what is “man” except one peculiar constellation of particles moving through space? And is he even that peculiar at all if he can ultimately be reduced to the dust that makes his body? It seems to me that there is no reason man should be privileged at all on the basis of his material make up any more than one would privilege a whale, or a tree. The point here is not to disparage whales or trees, or even to arouse some kind of wounded anthropological pride. Rather, it is to point out that apart from whatever myths or traditions we inherit our anthropological bias from, there seems to be at least one factor that confirms the primacy of man amongst all creation – that to consider man higher than the rest of the world is not bias at all but established and grounded in certain objective facts about his mode of existence.

The philosophical ground for man’s superior dignity is in fact found in human freedom. Freedom accounts for the primary difference in his mode of acting from other animals. Freedom is also the necessary precondition for all else that sets man apart from other animals and non-sentient beings. For instance: love, morality, and artistic creation all depend on freedom and the capacity for undetermined choice. Without undetermined choice love is reduced to the affective passion since what qualifies true love is unreserved and selfless giving. Similarly, morality is meaningless without freedom and the capacity to choose, since how can a man be blamed for an act he was incapable of not doing? Lastly, artistic creation depends on freedom since art moves from an intellectual conception to physical realization in a medium, i.e., it is the reduction of the abstract to the concrete and such requires choice as to how the abstract is best represented. This motion defies a one-to-one correspondence and requires the ability to act for contraries from a single starting principle. Thus, some of the most importance facets of human existence (indeed, those which set us most apart from lower animals) depend on and flow from freedom.

As I stated above, I think most people occupy themselves at some point of another with ruminations about their freedom. It should be obvious to everyone that the implications of whether and how we are free are far-ranging – if not in the universal sense of what is means to be man as such, then at least in the very particular and personal sense of what it means to be this man. Indeed, it is perhaps on the existential horizon that the investigation of free will becomes the most poignant and also the most interesting. For what I am free to do predicates who I am free to be and become (such an understanding was, no doubt, in the mind of the writers of the U.S. Constitution when they listed their inalienable rights to consist in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”).

The investigation into free will thus bears two aspects: the universal aspect and the existential. Both of these aspects will be investigated in the following weeks, and various positions attempting to account for the phenomenon of freedom will be explored. Ultimately, the investigation will veer towards the materials I am most familiar with, i.e., the thought of Aquinas and Scotus, and why these two thinkers present free will in a way that still works today and are helpful in light of one another.

In the next part of this investigation, I will present some basic questions about free will, a few contemporary perspectives on the topic, and give a sketch of the overall thesis plus the plan for the investigation. I will also go into greater detail about what I believe to be the importance of this topic especially from a theological perspective.

Pax et bonum,

M.S.