Who Am I and If So How Many? (13 page)

This chapter will be on the long side, for two good reasons. One is that we will be meeting a man who was quite a character, and certainly one of the most inventive figures in philosophy. He himself once said: ‘The time will come when those who do not know what I have said on a given subject will be revealed as ignoramuses.’ Modesty was not his forte. And the other reason is that the chapter will address a very vital issue, one of the most hotly debated philosophical questions of his day.

Let us begin with our philosopher. Arthur Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy merchant in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). In 1793, when little Arthur was five years old, the family moved to Hamburg. His ambitious father had big plans for him, and when he turned fifteen, his father sent him off to a series of day schools and boarding schools in Holland, France, Switzerland, Austria, Silesia, Prussia, and England. No sooner had Schopenhauer settled in somewhere than he had to leave again, which took a tremendous toll on him. He spoke fluent English and French, but he was withdrawn and distrustful of others and always felt like an outsider. When he was seventeen, his father made him enter the world of business. Then tragedy struck: his father died quite
unexpectedly, likely by suicide. Schopenhauer suffered terribly from the death of his father, whom he feared but also respected and admired. Schopenhauer moved to Weimar with his mother, who was finally able to realize her dream of establishing a literary salon, which was a brilliant success. Weimar was only a small town in Thuringia, but all the major literary figures of the time – Goethe, Schiler, Wieland, Herder – lived and worked there.

The young Schopenhauer was aghast at the sight of Goethe and the other stars of the literary scene sprawled on his father’s chairs and sofas. While his mother was entranced by her distinguished visitors, Schopenhauer reserved his most cutting remarks for the new salon. Despite his intelligence and good looks, he felt misunderstood. When he turned twenty-one, his mother asked him to move out. He was given part of his inheritance and he moved to Göttingen, and later to Berlin and Jena, to study medicine, science, and philosophy.

At the age of twenty-five, he wrote a skeptical,
uncompromising
, and radical dissertation explaining that man is incapable of gaining any objective knowledge of the world. Perception, he argued, is limited to what our mammalian brains allow us to see. He went well beyond Kant, who had assumed that human cognition was a highly refined and useful instrument.
Schopenhauer
, in contrast, did not give consciousness much credit. Schopenhauer’s mother considered the book unrefined and boring and thought its title (
The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient
Reason
) made it sound like ‘something for pharmacists.’ As luck would have it, Goethe, whom Schopenhauer did not hold in especially high regard, was impressed by the young man’s clever reasoning, and he prophesied that this brilliant young man would have a distinguished literary career. Goethe sent Schopenhauer a copy of his
Theory of Colors
, of which he was quite proud. Schopenhauer, who knew quite a bit about the natural sciences, considered Goethe’s book worthless prattle, and he had an unfortunate tendency to announce his opinions for all the world to hear. To add insult to injury, he proceeded to write his own theory
of colors, whereupon Goethe broke off all contact with him. From then on, no one made the mistake of offering support to the arrogant young upstart.

In 1820, Schopenhauer held a series of philosophy lectures at the University of Berlin. To upstage the great star of the university, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Schopenhauer set the time of his lectures for the same hour as Hegel’s; but his plan backfired. Hundreds of students flocked to Hegel, and only four or five to Schopenhauer. But he continued to regard himself as a genius, even as others were turned off by his arrogance. When the university chided him for his near-empty classroom, he left in a huff and moved to Frankfurt, where he churned out one book after another. His neighbors were intrigued by his habit of talking to himself on the street, his abiding love for his poodles but dislike of his fellow man, and his constant fear of being poisoned. Later in life he finally achieved some degree of renown, but he did not bask in his fame. His view of man had become quite grim,
notwithstanding
his smug satisfaction in the knowledge that ‘the world has learned something from me that it will never forget.’

Schopenhauer’s proudest achievement came very early on: at the age of thirty, he published his magnum opus,
The World as Will and
Representation
. It did not attract much attention at first, but it focused on an issue that Kant, Hegel, and many other philosophers had disregarded. Nearly all of them worked on the assumption that the mind or reason guides human actions and that man’s sole mission in life is to adhere to the dictates of reason. Schopenhauer was deeply mistrustful of that assumption, and he posed one of the most challenging questions in philosophy: ‘Can I will what I will?’

It was a provocative question that had enormous implications. If it is not true that we can really will what we will – that our intentions are
not
really formed freely and rationally – then our will is not free and the faculty of reason is rendered superfluous. And what becomes of the categorical imperative, the ‘moral law’ underlying the faculty of reason? It becomes immaterial, because the laws governing my actions are determined not by rationality
but by the irrational will. Schopenhauer went on to assert that the command headquarters in the brain is not reason but the will. It is the unconscious that determines our existence and our character. The will is the master and the mind is its servant. The mind is excluded from the actual decisions and hidden resolutions of the will, and it has no idea what is going on behind the scenes. The will says what to do, and the mind follows suit. The operative point, Schopenhauer tells us, is this: ‘What opposes the heart is not admitted by the head.’

Is that true? Let’s try an example. Think back to your childhood and imagine a day when you didn’t feel like going to sixth-period math class and thought about skipping it. You struggled with the decision for a bit. You were bad at math, and that’s why you didn’t want to go, but if you didn’t go, you could fall even further behind; still, the idea of sitting in that classroom was loathsome. So you dithered, unaware of just how determined you were not to go, even with all your misgivings about staying away. Your conscious mind didn’t realize that your will had already made its decision. Then you learned that a couple of classmates didn’t want to go to sixth period either. Regardless of their actions, your decision to stay away would likely compromise your performance in math. But when you heard that your friends planned to cut class, an inescapable feeling of joy arose within you, almost to your own astonishment, and any remaining desire to go to math class vanished. Only then did your mind notice how committed your will already was to skipping class, even while your mind was still wavering and grappling with misgivings. So were you exercising free will? Not really. Your will knew in advance what it wanted, and it tacked on a specious argument to ease your mind. You told yourself that the others weren’t going either, as though that mattered. Your will had done as it wished, and your mind just gave it the suitable justification.

Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the will was a pointed attack on ‘thousands of years of philosophizing’ that had assumed reason to be man’s guiding principle. He claimed to have recognized the
‘fundamental error of all philosophers’ and the ‘greatest of all illusions’ to which they clung, namely, that knowing what constitutes goodness is all that is needed to lead a good life. Immanuel Kant had contended that reason dictates the will. But wasn’t it really just the other way around: that reason
follows
the dictates of the will?

Doubt had crept into the citadel of reason, and this doubt would continue to grow. Let us now jump ahead to 1964, about a hundred years after Schopenhauer’s death. Pope Paul VI enters the great hall, clad in formal robes for an official reception; the cardinals kneel down in their red robes and kiss his ring. Only the biologists, physicists, and neuroscientists remain seated and shake hands with Christ’s representative on earth. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences has invited a group of the world’s leading experts to the grand Renaissance edifice, the residence of Paul VI, to ponder the brain, a topic of great fascination to the scientists of the day. One new discovery in particular holds the attention of the researchers and bishops alike. A hitherto unknown neuroscientist from San Francisco has conducted a pioneering experiment that is amazing the leading brain researchers of the era, among them three Nobel Prize winners.

Benjamin Libet was born in 1916 in Chicago and earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in physiology (rather than in neuroscience, which was rarely part of college curricula back in the 1930s). Libet’s interest in whether the events that take place in our consciousness could be measured scientifically began when he was a young man. In the late 1950s, he experimented on several patients who had received only local anesthesia at the neurosurgical unit of Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. The patients were in the operating room with their brains partially exposed. Libet attached cables to their brains and applied weak electrical impulses, observing how and when the patients reacted. The result was spectacular: more than half a second elapsed from the time the cortex was stimulated to when the patients responded. When Libet’s experiments came to the attention of the Vatican in 1964,
he was unaware of two of his colleagues’ similar achievement: they, too, had noted a time lag. Libet was astonished to find that nearly a second had elapsed between the intention to make a hand movement and the actual movement, a delay that defied common sense. Someone who intends to reach for a cup of tea does so right away, so how could this time lag be explained?

Libet concluded that there is always such a lag but it goes unnoticed. In 1979, he began a new experiment that became associated with his name and brought him international renown. Libet sat a test subject in an easy chair facing a large clocklike disk with a green dot that circled rapidly around it. Then he attached two cables, one reaching from the subject’s wrist to an electric measuring device, and the other leading from a helmet on her head to another measuring device. He gave the subject the following instructions:
Look at the green dot on the clock. At a time that you
select
yourself, decide to flex your wrist. Notice where the green dot is when you
decide to do it
. The subject did as she was told. She decided to flex her wrist and noted the position of the green dot. Libet asked her where the green dot was when she made her decision, and he wrote it down. His excitement mounted as he looked at his two instruments. The change in voltage of the electrodes on her wrist showed him the exact time of the movement, and the electrodes on her head indicated the brain’s readiness to act. What was the chronological succession? First the electrodes on her head
registered
activity, then – a half-second later – came the moment of the test subject’s decision, and about 0.2 seconds later the hand movement followed. Libet could not believe his eyes: the subject had decided to act a half-second
before
she was aware of her own decision! The preconscious reflex of wanting or doing something is quicker than conscious action. Did this mean that the brain introduces processes involving the will
before
the person is in any way aware of this will? And didn’t this also spell the end of the philosophical idea of free will in humans?

Let us travel through time and have Arthur Schopenhauer and Benjamin Libet settle the issue together. We’ll go back to, say,
1850, and head to Schopenhauer’s apartment in Frankfurt, at Schöne Aussicht 17. It is early in the morning. Hold on! He is unavailable at that hour. We’ll have to wait a bit. Schopenhauer always got up between 7 and 8 a.m. and washed the upper part of his body with cold water and a huge sponge, then bathed his eyes, which he regarded as the most valuable sense organ, by dunking them underwater repeatedly so as to strengthen the optic nerves. Then he sat down for coffee, which he brewed himself. His housekeeper was not allowed to show her face in the early morning; Schopenhauer considered it vital to direct his full attention to thinking at that time of day, when the brain is like a freshly tuned instrument. So, let’s wait one more hour and then ring the bell. Libet, who is sympathetic to Schopenhauer’s ideas, gets a fairly cordial reception, at least by Schopenhauer’s standards. Schopenhauer hates small talk, so the men come straight to the point:

‘So, Mr Libet, what’s the verdict? Can I will what I will?’

‘To put it bluntly: no. I cannot will what I will.’

‘So it is just as I said? The will is the master, and the mind is his servant?’

‘More or less.’

‘What?’

‘Just as I said, “more or less.”’

‘What are you saying? What does it mean to say “more or less”?’

“‘More or less” means that one can never be quite sure.’

‘Why? The case is clear as day. You showed that the will precedes the conscious mind chronologically, by … ?’

‘Roughly half a second.’

‘Exactly, Mr Libet, half a second. And that means that the will dictates and the conscious mind lags behind. Isn’t that so? And if the mind lags behind, there is no free will, because the will is not steered, but only registered and remarked upon. And all moral philosophy is down the drain.’

‘Well …’

‘The conscious or reasonable view of things is not the essence
of man, but only a decorative frill added after the fact, a rhetorical justification or a belated commentary.’

‘May I say something?’

‘Please do.’

‘A half-second elapses between the impulse of the will and the conscious decision – that is correct. But an additional half-second elapses before the patient moves his wrist, which is to say, until he acts …’