It is important to note that I am proposing a very radical understanding of our freedom, which is not that of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre understands freedom as the ability of the Being-for-itself to actualize its own possibilities. I on the other hand see freedom of an individual to act as an independent will. For Sartre, it is impossible for humans to be under the control of another will. I come to the conclusion that humans are not free but studying the facticity of humans, something we cannot transcend.
Let us look at the human. The human is a social animal who from a young age learns language. This language is shared by many humans and is not limited to words but also expressions of emotions. For example, people learn the appropriate situations and expressions for their emotions. When a person acts outside social norms, it is not uncommon to imagine what others think. A person is so socialize that they think in the language of society. How can you be free if your very thinking is determined by social construction?
How can you say that you chose this or that emotion if either natural or social circumstances cause you to act that way? Well, one chooses to follow social norms because one could always not behave against them. If it is possible to act outside social norms, why is it sometimes difficult, why can we not escape our social thinking, our they-thoughts? It is because we can think only with simultaneous They-thoughts and I-thoughts. While we our existentially aware of ourselves, we are simultaneously aware of the They, and furthermore our consciousness is filled with the They.
While I admit that a human will have I-thoughts, there is always a They-thought that underlies it. We must understand ourselves in terms given to us by the They, and because of that, we must act within a They-dominated mind. If we are to rebel, we must act as They understand rebelling.
Since I am determinist, I will define freedom compatibly as acting as oneself for oneself beyond the control of others. This definition is not useless even though humans are not free because of their social dependence. This freedom applies to non-social animals for whom acting independently is in their nature. These non-social animals are the true Beings-for-themselves.
One detects a somewhat curious definition of freedom whereby humans are denied it on account of their social conditioning but any other creature can be called free. If one wishes to play along with a definition of freedom compatible with a purely mechanistic physical determinism, it might be said that the social forces that help shape human behavior are hardly any more profound than the purely biological and instinctual laws and tendencies which are a part of the makeup both of ourselves and the solitary beasts you imagine. That social pressures are constant throughout the conscious life of the individual, few would deny. Yet these social forces cannot be defined in such a way as to dictate any particular set of actions; rather, individuals of virtually identical social millieux may vary dramatically in their respective thoughts and actions. From a determinist perspective, this variance may be explained in terms of the physical and psychological peculiarities (perhaps dictated by genetics) of these individuals.
ReplyDeleteBut even when the straitjacket of determinism is granted, this genetic birthright is not inert matter to be worked upon by the tyranny of socialization. These inborn processeces are instead dynamic elements of life of a human being: acted upon and constrained by social forces, no doubt, but these social factors are reciprocally constrained by the nature of the individuals that give rise to them and on whom they operate. Consequently, even within the impoverished definition of freedom given here, the most that can be said of humans in relation to non-social animals is that we are less free than they (if by freedom we mean the ability to act without a necessity directly imposed by some outside cause).
If our conception of freedom is more muscular, then the tables ate turned. Inescapably socialized though humankind may be, our freedom far surpasses that of the unreasoning animal, social or otherwise, precisely because we are capable of abstracting these forces (as well as all our various inclinations and drives), of standing outside ourselves to critique the bases for our own behavior, just as you have done above. Is such freedom ever entirely free from the forces that have composed us such a we are? Of course not. We are still creatures of facticity, in Sarte's terms, and the situation with which we are confronted may constrain us far more than we prefer to believe. But they act nonetheless as constraints, not as motors. Any other interpretation may be internally consistent but is inconsistent with a fundamental condition of human experience, that of choice.
Just so you know, I argued this theory of freedom as an experiment of thought, and I know many flaws with this account of freedom; however, your point on our ability to see ourselves and think abstractly is irrelevant in the discussion of freedom. Freedom depends on the mode in which one being acts, not the quality of their mental content. This theory of freedom asks if one can be said to be free if the motivations for the action come from outside the being. In other worlds, if one acts as a component of a larger social structure, this person is not a being-for-itself.
ReplyDeleteYour point on degrees of freedom is well-taken, and I agree with you actually. When I wrote this, I had a postmodernist account of culture in mind not to different than Judith Butler's, in which culture is inescapable and infinitely pervasive in the human condition. My account on the the social determination of emotions was to reveal this pervasiveness. That being said, against this world view, I point to acts of creativity (not in Colins' naive sense in which he tries to show we are not determined). Creativity or ingenuity imply an individual specific act of freedom. Since I would not be a very good philosopher if I did not have a egotistical overestimation of my own genius, I must accept that according to this definition of freedom humans are free. In relation to the broader themes of this course, the artist or the creative person is identified with human freedom by some existentialists.
Your point on seeing social structure as being restrictive rather than deterministic is interesting to say the least. Assuming you are correct, then humans are free even if they are in a cage. Is limited freedom still freedom? Sartre would say that even the prisoner is free because they still can choose something. I guess you could attribute a gray freedom to humans, according to my definition, but I would still say it is qualitatively different kind of freedom than that of the non-social animal.
I think you hit the nail on the coffin with your essentialist response saying that looking strictly at social forces denies the reality of the nature of the person these forces affect. Like other forces, the being and the environment have a give-and-take and more importantly there is an important factor of what a being is that factors into this equation. You could say that what we are is the function between input and output, but I go deeper saying that our material structure determines that function, hence my materialistic determinism. In conclusion, I do erecognize the importance of the individual in cause and effect, which undermines my argument of the determinism of socialization.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your responses to my comment; suffice to say I conflated somewhat my objection to the manner in which you posited socialization as determinitve within the framework of freedom you offered with a broader objection to materialistic determinism itself, when the latter point was perhaps extraneous to the former (and certainly, grounds for a much grander debate which I doubt would admit as easily of resolution). Even if my own inclinations are quite different, you do give a compelling materialist definition of freedom that is useful enough to serve as the basis for the above discussion, for which I offer kudos (Or mad props, as Heraclitus used to say).
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