File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 202


Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 23:43:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: abortion


On Sat, 7 Feb 1998, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> My hypothesis is that the free will problematic of either metaphysical
> freedom or determinism is a false and useless one that can only cause a
> problem of infinite regress, and that is why it is intractable. I don't
> know if you agree with me, but your post here makes me think that you might.

Maybe I do. But if the free will problem is a specious one, it's hard to
know exactly why, since one can generate the worries without very much
effort or apparatus. It would be nice to have a diagnosis of where these
very simple arguments go wrong.

> I also venture to propose that the reduction (and mystification) of the
> questions of freedom to the matter of 'free will' is imbued with a
> particular kind of religious ethos, dressed as it may have been in a
> secular garb. Infinite regress tends to smuggle the Infinite (that is, God)
> back into discourse.

You don't have to reduce problems of freedom to the problem of free will.
And actually I think that the modern problem of free will derives from a
scientific ethos. There is no discussion of the problem in the classical
philosophers of which I am aware and whie medievals were very concerned
with God's foreknowledge and predestination, they were not exercised by
cuasal determinism, the root of our problem, because they didn't worry
much about what they called, with Aristotle, efficient causation. As for
the regress, Hegel's bad infinite, that can't smuggle God back in, or at
least if it does it doesn't do so in a helpful way. A regress is normally
thought of as a conclusive refutation of a position that generates it.

> 
> In my opinion, one of many virtues of Marx is that he ditched this free
> will problematic and posed questions of freedom as matters of praxis
> (social relations and what we do with them).

A Rousseauean solution, and my own second-best one. But I'd like to know
where we went wrong with the free will problem.

--jks




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