An Introduction to Philosophy - George Stuart Fullerton (i can read book club TXT) 📗

He who calls me free only when my acts do violence to my nature or cannot be justified by a reference to anything whatever has strange notions of freedom. Patriots, poets, moralists, have had much to say of freedom; men have lived for it, and have died for it; men love it as they love their own souls. Is the object of all this adoration the metaphysical absurdity indicated above?

To insist that a man is free only in so far as his actions are unaccountable is to do violence to the meaning of a word in very common use, and to mislead men by perverting it to strange and unwholesome uses. Yet this is done by the "free-willist." He keeps insisting that man is free, and then goes on to maintain that he cannot be free unless he is "free." He does not, unfortunately, supply the quotation marks, and he profits by the natural mistake in identity. As he defines freedom it becomes "freedom," which is a very different thing.

What is this "freedom"? It is not freedom from external constraint. It is not freedom from overpowering passion. It is freedom from all the motives, good as well as bad, that we can conceive of as influencing man, and freedom also from oneself.

It is well to get this quite clear. The "free-willist" maintains that, in so far as a man is "free," his actions cannot be accounted for by a reference to the order of causes at all—not by a reference to his character, hereditary or acquired; not by a reference to his surroundings. "Free" actions, in so far as they are "free," have, so to speak, sprung into being out of the void. What follows from such a doctrine? Listen:—

(1) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," I am not the author of what appear to be my acts; who can be the cause of causeless actions?

(2) It follows that no amount of effort on my part can prevent the appearance of "free" acts of the most deplorable kind. If one can condition their appearance or non-appearance, they are not "free" acts.

(3) It follows that there is no reason to believe that there will be any congruity between my character and my "free" acts. I may be a saint by nature, and "freely" act like a scoundrel.

(4) It follows that I can deserve no credit for "free" acts. I am not their author.

(5) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," it is useless to praise me, to blame me, to punish me, to endeavor to persuade me. I must be given over to unaccountable sainthood or to a reprobate mind, as it happens to happen. I am quite beyond the pale of society, for my neighbor cannot influence my "free" acts any more than I can.

(6) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," I am in something very like a state of slavery; and yet, curiously enough, it is a slavery without a master. In the old stories of Fate, men were represented as puppets in the hand of a power outside themselves. Here I am a puppet in no hand; but I am a puppet just the same, for I am the passive spectator of what appear to be my acts. I do not do the things I seem to do. They are done for me or in me—or, rather, they are not done, but just happen.

Such "freedom" is a wretched thing to offer to a man who longs for freedom; for the freedom to act out his own impulses, to guide his life according to his own ideals. It is a mere travesty on freedom, a fiction of the philosophers, which inspires respect only so long as one has not pierced the disguise of its respectable name. True freedom is not a thing to be sought in a disorderly and chaotic world, in a world in which actions are inexplicable and character does not count. Let us rinse our minds free of misleading verbal associations, and let us realize that a "free-will" neighbor would certainly not be to us an object of respect. He would be as offensive an object to have in our vicinity as a "free-will" gun or a "free-will" pocketknife. He would not be a rational creature.

Our only concern need be for freedom, and this is in no danger in an orderly world. We all recognize this truth, in a way. We hold that a man of good character freely chooses the good, and a man of evil character freely chooses evil. Is not this a recognition of the fact that the choice is a thing to be accounted for, and is, nevertheless, a free choice?

I have been considering above the world as it is conceived to be by the parallelist, but, to the reader who may not incline towards parallelism, I wish to point out that these reasonings touching the freedom of the will concern the interactionist just as closely. They have no necessary connection with parallelism. The interactionist, as well as the parallelist, may be a determinist, a believer in freedom, or he may be a "free-willist."

He regards mental phenomena and physical phenomena as links in the one chain of causes and effects. Shall he hold that certain mental links are "free-will" links, that they are wholly unaccountable? If he does, all that has been said above about the "free-willist" applies to him. He believes in a disorderly world, and he should accept the consequences of his doctrine.

47. THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND THE MORAL WORLD.—I have said a little way back that, when we think of bodies as having minds, we are introduced to a world of distinctions which have no place in the realm of the merely physical. One of the objections made to the orderly world of the parallelist was that in it there is no room for the activity of minds. Before we pass judgment on this matter, we should try to get some clear notion of what we may mean by the word "activity." The science of ethics must go by the board, if we cannot think of men as doing anything, as acting rightly or acting wrongly.

Let us conceive a billiard ball in motion to come into collision with one at rest. We commonly speak of the first ball as active, and of the second as the passive subject upon which it exercises its activity. Are we justified in thus speaking?

In one sense, of course, we are. As I have several times had occasion to remark, we are, in common life, justified in using words rather loosely, provided that it is convenient to do so, and that it does not give rise to misunderstandings.

But, in a stricter sense, we are not justified in thus speaking, for in doing so we are carrying over into the sphere of the merely physical a distinction which does not properly belong there, but has its place in another realm. The student of mechanics tells us that the second ball has affected the first quite as much as the first has affected the second. We cannot simply regard the first as cause and the second as effect, nor may we regard the motion of the first as cause and the subsequent motion of the second as its effect alone. The whole situation at the one instant—both balls, their relative positions and their motion and rest—must be taken as the cause of the whole situation at the next instant, and in this whole situation the condition of the second ball has its place as well as that of the first.

If, then, we insist that to have causal efficiency is the same thing as to be active, we should also admit that the second ball was active, and quite as active as the first. It has certainly had as much to do with the total result. But it offends us to speak of it in this way. We prefer to say that the first was active and the second was acted upon. What is the source of this distinction?

Its original source is to be found in the judgments we pass upon conscious beings, bodies with minds; and it could never have been drawn if men had not taken into consideration the relations of minds to the changes in the physical world. As carried over to inanimate things it is a transferred distinction; and its transference to this field is not strictly justifiable, as has been indicated above.

I must make this clear by an illustration. I hurry along a street towards the university, because the hour for my lecture is approaching. I am struck down by a falling tile. In my advance up the street I am regarded as active; in my fall to the ground I am regarded as passive.

Now, looking at both occurrences from the purely physical point of view, we have nothing before us but a series of changes in the space relations of certain masses of matter; and in all those changes both my body and its environment are concerned. As I advance, my body cannot be regarded as the sole cause of the changes which are taking place. My progress would be impossible without the aid of the ground upon which I tread. Nor can I accuse the tile of being the sole cause of my demolition. Had I not been what I was and where I was, the tile would have fallen in vain. I must be regarded as a concurrent cause of my own disaster, and my unhappy state is attributable to me as truly as it is to the tile.

Why, then, am I in the one case regarded as active and in the other as passive? In each case I am a cause of the result. How does it happen that, in the first instance, I seem to most men to be the cause, and in the second to be not a cause at all? The rapidity of my motion in the first instance cannot account for this judgment. He who rides in the police van and he who is thrown from the car of a balloon may move with great rapidity and yet be regarded as passive.

Men speak as they do because they are not content to point out the physical antecedents of this and that occurrence and stop with that. They recognize that, between my advance up the street and my fall to the ground there is one very important difference. In the first case what is happening may be referred to an idea in my mind. Were the idea not there, I should not do what I am doing. In the second case, what has happened cannot be referred to an idea in my mind.

Here we have come to the recognition that there are such things as purposes and ends; that an idea and some change in the external world may be related as plan and accomplishment. In other words, we have been brought face to face with what has been given the somewhat misleading name of final cause. In so far as that in the bringing about of which I have had a share is my end, I am active; in so far as it is not my end, but comes upon me as something not planned, I am passive. The enormous importance of the distinction may readily be seen; it is only in so far as I am a creature who can have purposes, that desire and will, foresight and prudence, right and wrong, can have a significance for me.

I have dwelt upon the meaning of the words "activity" and "passivity," and have been at pains to distinguish them from cause and effect, because the two pairs of terms have often been confounded with each other, and this confusion has given rise to a peculiarly unfortunate error. It is this error that lies at the foundation of the objection referred to at the beginning of this section.

We have seen that certain men of science are inclined to look upon the physical world as a great system, all the changes in which may be accounted for by an appeal to physical causes. And we have