On Free Will
By Tom Amarque
The question of free will is a mock debate. Let me show you why.
1) Logically speaking, you can’t have determinism without indeterminism, causality without acausality. Each is only conceivable through and with the other – each implicitly references the other. Of course, no one disputes that a multitude of causal factors shape and determine the human will: environmental, neurological, social, intra-psychological. Most events and phenomenons in life and in the universe have root causes. But the modern scientific rationale for determinism rests on shaky metaphysical ground. This becomes obvious the moment you ask a reductionist scientist like Robert Sapolsky how he thinks the universe began. So something suddenly emerged out of nothing? Really? Really?
2) Exercised will is experienced as free. Likewise, as any good biologist or neurologist will tell you, play is a behaviour found across most species, especially those with complex nervous systems. Yes, you can claim that all this play is determined by other factors – and it certainly is. But play – and the subjective experience of freedom in play – is what makes life meaningful, fun, sensible, engaging. Will, if not a form of play itself, exhibits similar traits. Its jouissance rests on its playfulness, on its felt freedom. Without that feeling, without that lust-for-life, life would be meaningless. Play – and will – are the only bulwarks, the only medicine, the only inoculation against the meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence. Or, in laymans terms: Even if sexual lovemaking is entirely dependent on causal factors, it´s still experienced as free and meaningful.
3) One could even argue that Sapolsky has it exactly backwards. For Schopenhauer, the laws of physics, the gravitational drift of stars and planets, even the inner desire-machine – all of these are effects of an underlying world-will, a principle of movement, not its cause. This Will is the single, blind, irrational force and the true reality of the cosmos. Neural firings are not the source of will; they are expressions of it. All laws are simply patterned expressions of this primordial play of free Will. So whether you view Will as deterministic or indeterministic is ultimately a metaphysical choice, not an empirical conclusion.
4) Would you want to live in a world where free will is impossible? Who possesses the Abrahamic-like objectivity to survey human existence in its totality and conclude that there has never been one – not even one – instance in which a will emerged out of, or in spite of, everything else? I don’t want to be mean here, but when Nietzsche said, “Every great philosophy so far has been the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir,” you have to ask whether Sapolsky really looks like a man with a lot of play and jouissance in his life – or whether, like the Saturn or Abraham, he is really trying to kill his son. So choose your heroes wisely.
5) Speaking of Schopenhauer and his rhetoric manouvres, the following provide authoritative counter-examples:
Meister Eckhart: “We are vessels into which God pours Himself.”
Martin Heidegger: “The poet names the holy.”
Clarice Lispector: “I do not write — something writes through me.”
Niels Bohr: “Every valuable idea seems to come from some unknown source.”
Nikola Tesla: “My brain is only a receiver… In the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration.”
Paul Klee: “I am not leading the line, it is the line that leads me.”
Bob Dylan: “The songs are already there. They exist in the air. You just have to tune into them.”
Each testifies to something beyond the purely causal chain – a will, force, intelligence or inspiration flowing through the individual.
6) There may be a Unique Will that is not reducible to environmental influences or the psyche itself, something that stands in productive opposition to them. As the quotes above show, this possibility has been documented throughout history by artists, philosophers, and scientists. There is no way to scientifically prove that such a will exists – just as you cannot scientifically prove that you love your dear one. If we want a complete map of reality, we must accept that most wills we enact in this world are not particularly original – especially those that pretend to be. Travelling, spirituality, the many gestures that claim to break free from bourgeois life are often the most conformist of all. They posture as acts of rebellion, but in practice they are mass-copied forms of will, endlessly replicated, endlessly advertised, endlessly validated. The very acts meant to signal uniqueness usually reveal how profoundly unoriginal most of our “choices” really are.
7) But: If experience has shown anything, than it seems to be that a Unique Will only happens a few times in a lifetime, if at all. Meaning, it is an ethical and moral requirement and necessity to leave the door open for a Unique Will even if there is an tremendous amount of data that contradicts its existence. Even more, exactly it´s improbability and impossibility makes it necessary. This very existential protest, this anti-thesis to the entropy of the universe, is like the lighthouse and beacon that can and must counterweight the darkness of existence.
8) What would be the trait of such a Unique Will?
It stands in stark contrast and opposition to the will to power, which is the automatic drive of the desire-machine toward self-efficacy and the urge to climb to the top of one’s preferred power hierarchy. A Unique Will, by contrast, succeeds in harmonising the disparate facets and sub-wills of life into a coherent whole, spawning new information for psyche and culture. Novelty is the key issue. This emergent novelty — arising out of what is given — is experienced as meaningful. What means, while the will to power seems pre-personal while our daily life is composed out of more personal or egoic forms of will, a Unique will is both post-/transpersonal as well as the integration of both pre- and post.
9) Since will is such a messy and disorderly subjective phenomenon, the first task in modelling it would be to find a methodology capable of justifying it. Indeed, the route taken in the ‘Phenomenology of Will’ — where the entire discussion rests on the self-creating autopoiesis of a cognitive observer — may seem useless or at least unfruitful here. Likewise, the path taken by spiritual literature cannot serve as justification for an exploration of a Unique Will, since it rests only on intuition and authoritative argument. There has to emerge a new way of thinking about it ….