At an experiential level, free will will always be easy to argue for. Then people start reflecting, they see the world as cause and effect and realise that determinism is easier to argue for. Then they realise also that the way they experience life can not so easily be discounted. Free will still exists, but not as true freedom; it is subordinated into a happy illusion that hides our dark chains to causality.
I here present no argument for existence as truly free. In another post I have even discussed some impossibility around imagining this. But work with this assumption here for a moment. If freedom is just a shadow of some deeper truth in a determined world (where we don’t actually exist, but are just an expression of the existing whole), what if this deeper truth of everything being already determined is just a shadow of something even more eternal, something yet more foundational, an existence that is truly free? I’m not qualified to qualify my speculation with any spectacular argument. I can only examine the operative value of each view.
If free will is an illusion then it’s not one that we’re not happy to live with. How many people choose, after becoming aware of their determined existence, to live accordingly? You cannot live accordingly. You live as you have always lived, and revel in it, because your false freedom is the consolation of your true unfreedom. Free will as an experiential illusion is a friendly gesture from existence to deal with your true bondage.
If, however, we accept the inevitability of our every action and begin to live a life more conscious of this bondage then our days quickly become shorter and our nights longer. The illusion of causality greedily hides from us our true freedom. Check out this quote I recently came across:
If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization — the fact that it takes place — which retroactively creates its necessity.
(Jean-Pierre Dupuy, cited by Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ, p.77).
To paraphrase, as we approach events that are ahead of us in time, there are infinite possibilities concerning how the event could pan out. But if we reflect on events already past then all possibility disappears. There is no “I could have saved some extra money for the bus ride home”. No, you couldn’t have. You couldn’t have because you didn’t. And now you have to walk home. As soon as you do something, the doing of that thing, its actualisation, means there is no fantasy ‘otherwise’. The only reason you couldn’t have not spent your money is because there is now no possibility for you to go back in time and choose differently; the passing of time fully consolidates your actions and makes any other possibility impossible. The only possibility now is ahead of now, in future.
Yet causality does not stop there. It creeps also into present and future. Once you make the same mistake more than once, you face the possibility that your lack of freedom exists not only behind you but also ahead of you. This is a passing thought. Then one day you come face to face with your unfreedom in the present. Now is the time when you will need those coins for the bus ride home. You know this. You will not make the same mistake again. Yet you choose to make this mistake again. You squander your last silver on whatever it is that forfeits your ride home. The logic of past necessity has crept into your present, and it has not long to take your future also. If I have done this in the past, if I choose to do it also now, though I could choose otherwise but do not choose because I also cannot, then it is likely that I will choose to do so likewise in the future.
I’m pretty sure I started this post with some conclusion in mind, but I’ll finish on that depressing note until something returns…
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