From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: preterite freedom
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 06:01:47 -0500


Anonymous,

OK, now I'm really confused. Is Paul your friend, your roommate, your
doppelganger or your alter ego?  In addition to being paranoid, are you
now implying you are really just a paranoid schizophrenic out for a
virtual walk, just begging for a Good Samaritan to perform
schizoanalysis?

I don't want to duck this issue of science and free will so easily,
however. Certainly, you are aware science deals with functional concepts
that are very specific and a leap must always be made in order for it to
cross over into more philosophical issues like free will, cosmology and
'the meaning of it all'. It is a border-crossing of genres, another
language game, and to assume science is capable of making such
monolithic pronouncements in earnest is simply bad philosophy. 

There is also not really much unanimous agreement, even at the level of
neuroscience, about how to interpret this data. Furthermore, in an epoch
of quantum physics and chaos theory, there is much less of a presumption
that this data can be interpreted contextually in such a deterministic
fashion in the way you seem to want. 

Even if the body is a megalopolis composed of a hundred trillion cells,
this resolves neither the issues of will nor those of the subject. As
far back as Plato and the early Christians, the soul has often been seen
as composite. The ancients argued that the same laws that bring about
justice within the city also lead to the proper governance of the
well-ordered soul, in an analogous fashion. The body politic begins at
home.  

In the classic terminology of modern philosophy, you also come up
against the aporias Kant laid out in his own philosophical works. From
the standpoint of pure reason, the world seems to operate in a
deterministic fashion. From the standpoint of practical reason, however,
we must assume an agent who becomes his or her own causality, pursuing
rational ends that simply do not arise from nature alone.  

This issue has remained unresolved up until the present day.  Even a
contemporary philosopher such as Donald Davidson, who unfortunately just
recently passed away, developed a theory he called anomalous monism to
deal with precisely this kind of paradox. He would have argued that your
unmitigated monism is flawed, even from the standpoint of radical
interpretation.

You can make up all the deterministic theories you want, but in the end,
you still need to make a choice in the morning when you wake up either
to get up or go back to sleep. As Sartre once succinctly put, you are
condemned to freedom. Not to recognize this as your implicit situation
is simply to show "bad-faith".

The other issue I am trying to present is the ethical one. 

Once we get away from the whole ethical charade of normative behavior
based upon abstractly defined 'rights of man', we still need to take
responsibility at the margins for our impossible future. This transcends
the whole issue of agency and free will, which deal with capability and
not with obligation. As Lyotard has pointed out, the category of 'must'
is very different from that of 'necessity'.

It is interesting you quote Beckett because I see him as being very
distant from the usual existential pessimistic cell in which critics
tend to cage him up in like a wild beast. In certain respects, his art
is very much involved with exactly these same ethical themes.  In fact,
when I quoted Pynchon's line - "across the snow's footprints and tire
tracks finally to the path you must create yourself, alone in the dark."
- I certainly heard echoes of Beckett in that. Didn't you?  

Even though (as I am doing now) the statement from Three Dialogues is
often taken out of context, these great words of Beckett have always
been a touchstone for me:

"The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to
express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire
to express, together with the obligation to express."

Doesn't this very sense of obligation that Beckett describes make us the
hostage to an impossible freedom?  In the end, I act because I must -
even though science, the media, religion, and the state tell me I should
do otherwise. 

eric 
 

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