The Life of the Mind (64 page)

 

Very early in these deliberations I warned of an inevitable flaw in all critical examinations of the willing faculty. It is a rather obvious one but easy to overlook in discussing the particular arguments and counter-arguments: simply that every
philosophy
of the Will is conceived and articulated not by men of action but by philosophers, Kant's "professional thinkers," who in one way or another are committed to the
bios theōrētikos
and therefore by nature more inclined to "interpret the world" than to "change it."

Of all the philosophers and theologians we have consulted, only Duns Scotus, we found, was ready to pay the price of contingency for the gift of freedom—the mental endowment we have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well not be. No doubt the philosophers have always been more "pleased" with necessity than with freedom because for their business they needed a
tranquillitas animae
(Leibniz), a peace of mind, which—relying on Spinoza's
acquiescentia sibi,
one's agreement with oneself—could be effectively guaranteed only by an acquiescence in the arrangement of the world. The same self that the thinking activity disregards in its withdrawal from the world of appearances is asserted and ensured by the Will's reflexivity. Just as thinking prepares the self for the role of spectator, willing fashions it into an "enduring I" that directs all particular acts of volition. It creates the self's
character
and therefore was sometimes understood as the
principium individuationis,
the source of the person's specific identity.

Yet it is precisely this individuation brought about by the Will that breeds new and serious trouble for the notion of freedom. The individual, fashioned by the will and aware that it could be different from what it is (character, unlike bodily appearance or talents and abilities, is not given to the self at birth) always tends to assert an "I-myself" against an indefinite "they"—all the others that I, as an individual, am
not.
Nothing indeed can be more frightening than the notion of solipsistic freedom—the "feeling" that my standing apart, isolated from everyone else, is due to free will, that nothing and nobody can be held responsible for it but me myself. The will with its projects for the future challenges the belief in necessity, the acquiescence in the arrangement of the world which it calls complacency. Yet isn't it clear to everyone that the world is not, and has never been, what it
ought
to be? And who knows, or has ever known, what this "ought" should be? The "ought" is Utopian; it has no proper
topos
or place in the world. Isn't trust in necessity, the conviction that everything is as "it was to be," infinitely preferable to freedom bought at the price of contingency? Under these circumstances, doesn't freedom look like a euphemism for the burnt-over area marked by the "forsakenness with which [human existence, the
Dasein]
has been abandoned to itself'
("die Verlassenheit in der überlassenheit an es selbst")?
"
¹¹⁶

These difficulties and anxieties are caused by the Will insofar as it is a mental faculty, hence reflexive, recoiling upon itself—
volo me velle, cogito me cogitare—
or, to put it in Heideggerian terms, by the fact that, existentially speaking, human existence has been "abandoned to itself." Nothing of the sort disturbs our intellect, the mind's capability of cognition and its trust in truth. The cognitive abilities, like our senses, do not recoil upon themselves; they are totally intentional, namely, totally absorbed by the intended object. Hence at first glance it is surprising to find a similar bias against freedom in the great scientists of our century. As we know, they became greatly disturbed when their demonstrable discoveries in astrophysics, as well as in nuclear physics, gave rise to the suspicion that we five in a universe which, in Einstein's words, is ruled by a God who "plays dice" with it or, as Heisenberg suggested, that what we regard as the "outer world [may be] only our inner world turned inside out" (Lewis Mumford).

Such thoughts and after-thoughts are, of course, not scientific statements; they do not claim to deliver demonstrable truths or tentative theorems that their authors can hope to translate eventually into propositions susceptible of proof. They are reflections inspired by a quest for meaning and therefore no less speculative than other products of the thinking ego. Einstein himself, in a much quoted remark, very clearly drew the line between cognitive statements and speculative propositions: "The most incomprehensible fact of nature is the fact that nature is comprehensible." Here we can almost watch how the thinking ego intrudes on the cognitive activity, interrupts and halts it by its reflections. It puts itself "out of order" with the scientist's ordinary activity by recoiling upon itself and musing on the fundamental incomprehensibility of what he is doing—an incomprehensibility that remains a riddle worth thinking about even though it cannot be solved.

Such reflections may yield various "hypotheses," and some may even turn out to yield knowledge when tested; in any case, their quality and weight will depend on the cognitive achievements of their authors. Still, it is hardly deniable that the reflections of the great founders of modern science—Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger—have brought about a "crisis in the foundations of modern science" (
Grund-lagenkrise),
"and their central question" (What must the world be like in order that man may know it?) "is as old as science itself and it remains unanswered."
¹¹⁷

It seems only natural that this generation of founders, on whose discoveries modern science was based and whose reflections on what they were doing have brought about the "crisis in the foundations," should have been followed by several generations of less distinguished epigones who find it easier to answer unanswerable questions because they are less aware of the line separating their ordinary activities from their reflections on them. I have spoken of the orgy of speculative thinking that succeeded Kant's liberation of reason's need to think beyond the intellect's cognitive capacity, the games played by German Idealists with personified concepts and the claims made for scientific validity—a far remove from Kant's "critique."

From the point of view of scientific truth, the Idealists' speculations were pseudo-scientific; now, at the opposite end of the spectrum, something similar seems to be going on. Materialists play the game of speculation with the help of computers, cybernetics, and automation; their extrapolations produce, not ghosts like the game of the Idealists, but materi-alizations like those of spiritualist séances. What is so very striking in these materialist games is that their results resemble the concepts of the Idealists. Thus Hegel's "World Spirit" has recently found materialization in the construction of a "nervous system" fashioned on the model of a Giant Computer: Lewis Thomas
¹¹⁸
proposes to understand the world-wide community of human beings in the form of a Giant Brain, exchanging thoughts so rapidly "that the brains of mankind often appear functionally to be undergoing fusion." With mankind as its "nervous system," the whole earth thus "becomes ... a breathing organism of finely meshed parts," all growing under the "protective membrane" of the planet's atmosphere.
¹¹⁹

Such notions are neither science nor philosophy, but science fiction; they are widespread and demonstrate that the extravagances of materialist speculation are quite equal to the follies of Idealist metaphysics. The common denominator of all these fallacies, materialist or Idealist, apart from being historically derived from the notion of Progress and its concomitant, the undemonstrable entity called Mankind, is that they fulfill the same emotional function. In Lewis Thomas' words, they do away with "the whole dear notion of one's own self—the marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self," which is "a myth."
¹²⁰
The proper name of this myth, which we are admonished from all sides to get rid of, is Freedom.

Professional thinkers, whether philosophers or scientists, have not been "pleased with freedom" and its ineluctable randomness; they have been unwilling to pay the price of contingency for the questionable gift of spontaneity, of being able to do what could also be left undone. Let us put them aside therefore and fasten our attention on men of action, who ought to be committed to freedom because of the very nature of their activity, which consists in "changing the world," and not in interpreting or knowing it.

Conceptually speaking, we turn from the notion of philosophical freedom to political liberty, an obvious difference which, as far as I know, only Montesquieu spoke of, and that in passing, when he used philosophical freedom as a backdrop against which political liberty could be more sharply oudined. In a chapter entitled "
De la liberté du citoyen
" ("Of the citizen's liberty") he said: "
La liberté philosophique consiste dans l'exercise de sa volonté, ou du moins (s'il faut parler dans tous les systèmes) dans Vopinion où l'on est que Von exerce sa volonté. La liberté politique consiste dans la'sûreté, ou du moins dans l'opinion que l'on a de sa sûreté"—
"Philosophie liberty consists in the exercise of the will, or at least (if we must take account of all systems) in the opinion that we exert our will. Political liberty consists in safety, or at least in the opinion of being safe."
¹²¹
The citizen's political liberty is "that tranquillity of mind that comes from the opinion that everybody has of his safety; and in order to be in possession of this liberty the government must be such that one citizen could not be afraid of another."
¹²²

Philosophic freedom, the freedom of the will, is relevant only to people who live outside political communities, as solitary individuals. Political communities, in which men become citizens, are produced and preserved by laws, and these laws, made by men, can be very different and can shape various forms of government, all of which in one way or another constrain the free will of their citizens. Still, with the exception of tyranny, where one arbitrary will rules the liveS of all, they nevertheless open up some space of freedom for action that actually sets the constituted body of citizens in motion. The principles inspiring the actions of the citizens vary in accordance with the different forms of government, but they are all, as Jefferson rightly called them, "energetic principles";
¹²³
and political freedom "
ne peut consister qu'à pouvoir faire ce que l'on doit vouloir et à n'être point contraint de faire ce que l'on ne doit pas vouloir"—"can
consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will."
¹²⁴

The emphasis here is clearly on Power in the sense of the I-can; for Montesquieu, as for the ancients, it was obvious that an agent could no longer be called free when he lacked the capacity to do what he wanted to do, whether this was due to exterior or interior circumstances. Moreover, the Laws which, according to Montesquieu, transform free and lawless individuals into citizens are not God's Ten Commandments or the voice of conscience or reason's
lumen rationale
enlightening all men alike, but man-made
rapports,
"relations," which, since they concern the changeable affairs of mortal men—as distinguished from God's eternity or the immortality of the cosmos—must be "subject to all the accidents that can happen and vary in proportion as the will of man changes."
¹²⁵
For Montesquieu, as for pre-Christian antiquity and for the men who at the end of the century founded the American Republic, the words "power" and "liberty" were almost synonymous. Freedom of movement, the power of moving about unchecked by disease or master, was originally the most elementary of all liberties, their very prerequisite.

Thus political freedom is distinct from philosophic freedom in being clearly a quality of the I-can and not of the I-will. Since it is possessed by the citizen rather than by man in general, it can manifest itself only in communities, where the many who live together have their intercourse both in word and in deed regulated by a great number of
rapports—
laws, customs, habits, and the like. In other words, political freedom is possible only in the sphere of human plurality, and on the premise that this sphere is not simply an extension of the dual I-and-myself to a plural We. Action, in which a We is always engaged in changing our common world, stands in the sharpest possible opposition to the solitary business of thought, which operates in a dialogue between me and myself. Under exceptionally propitious circumstances that dialogue, we have seen, can be extended to another insofar as a friend is, as Aristotle said, "another self." But it can never reach the We, the true plural of action. (An error rather prevalent among modern philosophers who insist on the importance of communication as a guarantee of truth—chiefly Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber, with his I-thou philosophy—is to believe that the intimacy of the dialogue, the "inner action" in which I "appeal" to myself or to the "other self," Aristotle's friend, Jaspers' beloved, Buber's Thou, can be extended and become paradigmatic for the political sphere.)

This We arises wherever men live together; its primal form is the family; and it can be constituted in many different ways, all of which rest ultimately on some form of consent, of which obedience is only the most common mode, just as disobedience is the most common and least harmful mode of dissent. Consent entails the recognition that no man can act alone, that men if they wish to achieve something in the world must act in concert, which would be a platitude if there were not always some members of the community determined to disregard it and who in arrogance or in despair try to act alone. These are tyrants or criminals, depending on the final goal they aim at; what they have in common and what sets them apart from the rest of the community is that they put their trust in the use of the instruments of violence as a substitute for power. This is a tactic that only works for the short-range goals of the criminal, who after completing his crime can and must return to membership in the community; the tyrant, on the other hand, always a sheep in wolf's clothing, can last only by usurping the rightful seat of leadership, which makes him dependent on helpers to see his self-willed projects through. Unlike the mind's will power to affirm or negate, whose ultimate practical guarantee is suicide, political power, even if the tyrant's supporters consent to terror-that is, the use of violence-is always limited power, and since power and freedom in the sphere of human plurality are in fact synonyms, this means also that political freedom is always limited freedom.