In the last chapter I discussed the impetus to pass from the temporal to the timeless, while supposing that one and the same entity can survive the change. There is a parallel impetus to pass from the contingent to the necessary, while holding all other things constant. This is illustrated in one of the five arguments for God’s existence (the ‘Five Ways’) with which St Thomas Aquinas begins his great Summa Theologica. We find ourselves, Aquinas argues, in a world of contingent things: things which might not have existed. It is possible for such things both to be and not to be. But that which might not be, at some time is not. If everything exists contingently, therefore, there must be a time at which there is nothing. But if that is ever true, nothing would exist thereafter, since nothing comes of nothing. So there would be nothing now. But there is something now. Therefore not everything that exists exists contingently. Something exists necessarily. And this thing with ‘necessary being’ is God.
This ‘argument from contingent being’ has the same dry and abstract flavour as the ontological argument, with which it is often compared. As stated by St Anselm, the ontological argument runs as follows: we understand by God a being greater than which nothing can be thought. This idea clearly exists in our minds: it is the idea of a being endowed with every positive attribute and every perfection. But if the object of this idea were to exist solely in our mind, and not in reality, there would be an idea of something superior to it, namely of the being that possessed not only all the perfections already conceived, but also the additional perfection of real existence. Which is contrary to hypothesis. Hence the idea of a most perfect being must correspond to reality. Existence belongs to the nature of the most perfect being: it follows from his nature that he exists. In other words, he exists necessarily and not contingently.
Kant responded to this argument by saying that existence is not a predicate: and modern logic agrees with him. (In saying that something with predicates F, G, and H exists, you do not add to the list of its properties: you say that F, G, and H are instantiated in a single instance.) But nobody has been able to prove that the argument assumes that existence is a predicate. In fact nobody has been able to prove very much about the argument at all. Ingenious versions continue to issue from the pens of half-crazed logicians, and while none of them is wholly believable, they serve the useful purpose of showing the rumours of God’s death to be greatly exaggerated.
But ‘necessary being’ lands us again in the timeless realm: indeed, it is the same idea. Timeless beings cannot go out of existence, since they cannot come into existence either. Their existence follows from their concept. And the same is true of God. But how in that case does God relate to the world? Numbers have necessary being - if the number 2 exists at all, then it exists in all possible worlds. But it purchases its necessary existence at the expense of its causal power. Numbers have no ability to act or be acted upon. (Imagine being told one morning that the number 2 had suffered a dreadful calamity during the night.) And the same ought to be true of all things with necessary being: if something exists by necessity, then it should have all its properties by necessity too. Maybe there is such a thing, and maybe it has all ‘perfections’ - or at least, all perfections which are not bound up with the idea of change. But there’s the rub. The perfection of a person is linked inextricably with action, emotion, change, and mutability. And God, we are told, is a person.
We could accept the God of the philosophers, therefore, only if we could solve the problem that has already confronted us, of identifying one and the same individual in the timeless and the temporal sphere. The Christian doctrine of incarnation claims to do just that; but that doctrine is the greatest of mysteries, and certainly not a proof. (Consider how Milton has to amend it, in order to make the Christ of Paradise Lost intelligible.) We seem to have reached an impasse. God answers to our need, only if he is a person like us. But that possibility seems to be ruled out by his necessary and timeless being. In which case, of what conceivable use could he be?
It was Max Stirner who announced to the world in 1845 that God is dead. Nietzsche, repeating the obituary in Thus Spake Zarathustra, was acutely aware that mankind would find it hard to live with the news, and therefore that something should be offered as a consolation. If there is no transcendental being, he suggested, then our aspirations can be met only by self-transcendence, by the overcoming of human nature, in that higher and stronger version of it, which is the Ubermensch. A few disciples tried to follow Nietzsche’s advice, with results as a rule so disagreeable to others, as to discredit the attempt. The least that can be said is that, if you are an Übermensch, then it is better to keep quiet about it. In fact Nietzsche’s morality of self-transcendence shows the meaning of religion for beings like us: faith is a supreme overcoming of our transcendental loneliness; without it, either we make a virtue of that loneliness, as Nietzsche did, or we live at some less exalted level. The announcement of the death of God is less a statement about God, than a statement about us. Even if the abstruse arguments for a ‘necessary being’ proved to be valid, and even if we could attach to that being some of the features of personality, as these are known to us, this would not revive the religious attitude. For it would not revive the mystic communion of the faithful, through which the face of the world is revealed. The death of God really means the death of an old form of human community — a community founded on holiness.
The concepts of the holy and the sacred are, or ought to be, of considerable interest to the philosopher. For they show how great the disparity can be, between the concepts through which we perceive the world, and those which we use to explain it. In Chapter 1 I considered a familiar example of this disparity: the human smile. Milton tells us that ‘Smiles from Reason flow,/ And are of love the food’. He means that only self-conscious, reasoning beings smile, since only they have the peculiar intentionality which is expressed in smiling. (Mercifully, Milton didn’t express himself in those terms.) Yet smiles would not appear in the scientist’s ‘book of the world’. All that you would find there is an account of the face and its muscles, and of the response of the face to electro-chemical signals originating in the brain. We classify facial movements as smiles, because that is how we perceive and respond to them, as components in the dialogue of persons. There is an attitude that we direct towards the human person, and which leads us to see in the human form a perspective on the world that reaches from a point outside it. That is what we see in a smile. And the experience of the holy, the sacred and the miraculous arises in a similar way, when we direct this attitude not to other human beings, but to places, times, and objects, so that they are lifted from their mute contingency into the dialogue of reason. A sacred place is one in which personality shines from mere objects: from a piece of stone, a tree, or a patch of water. Such things have no subjectivity of their own: which is why they convey the sense of God’s presence. The experience of the sacred is therefore a revelation, a direct encounter with the divine, which eludes all explanation in natural terms, and stands isolated and apart.
This ability to see the world in personal terms overcomes human estrangement. It arises from a superfluity of social feeling, when the experience of membership overflows into nature, and fills it with a human animation. It confirms our freedom, by providing the mirror in which freedom can be seen. Nature then ceases to be a prison; its doors stand open, and no shadow falls between the intention and the act.
We have lost that image. The old forms of community have disappeared, and science has laid a stern interdiction over any view of nature but its own. In place of a natural world made in the image of humanity, we find a humanity redescribed, as part of the natural world. The scientific picture of the human being has replaced the theological; indeed, it has demoralized the world, by scrubbing out the mark of human freedom. But the demoralized world is not the real one, and it is the task of philosophy to show that this is so.
8
FREEDOM
Can this be done? Can philosophy restore the f
aith in human freedom, when science seems so entirely to dispense with it? I believe that the answer is yes. But there is no greater proof of human freedom, than the vested interest in denying it; and philosophy, which persuades only by speaking softly, is unlikely to win by a show of hands.
We make choices, and carry them out; we praise and blame one another for our acts and omissions; we deliberate about the future and make up our minds. Like the animals, we have desires; but, unlike the animals, we also make choices - we can choose to do what we do not want to do, and want to do what we do not choose. All these facts seem to imply that we are free to do more than one thing, and that what we actually do is our choice, and our responsibility.
The belief in freedom seems at first sight to conflict with scientific determinism, which is the view that every event has a cause, and that every event is also determined by its cause. A determines B if B has to happen, given A. The usual argument given for determinism is that the relation between cause and effect is ‘law-like’: one event causes another only if there is a law connecting them. And laws have no exceptions. In which case, given the sum of true scientific laws, and a complete description of the universe at any one time, a complete description of the universe at any other time may be deduced. Hence the way the world is at any future time is fully determined by the way the world is now. This goes for my actions too. What I shall do at any future moment is therefore inexorable, given present (and past) conditions. So how can I be free?
A very old-fashioned view of science is supposed in that account. Scientific laws do have exceptions. They tell us, as a rule, what is probable, given certain conditions. Quantum mechanics holds that even the ultimate laws of the universe must be phrased in terms of probabilities. It is therefore never true that the effect must follow, given the cause; only, at best, that it is very likely to follow.
This does not remove the problem, however. For even if the law connecting cause and effect is expressed in terms of probability, it is still the case that the effect was produced by the cause, which was produced by its cause, and so on ad infinitum. Hence an action is the result of causes which stretch back in time, to some point before the agent’s own existence. His wielding the dagger was caused by movements in the muscles which were caused by impulses in the nerves which were ... Eventually we emerge from the series of causes at the other side of the human person, in a place where he is not. So what part did he play in the action, given that the conditions were in place before his birth which were to lead to it? And in what sense was he free to do otherwise?
The problem with such an argument is that it is essentially rhetorical: it is an attempt to shift the burden of proof onto those who believe in freedom. Instead of proving that we are not free, it asks us to prove that we are. But why should we do that, when it is obvious that we are free, and when we have yet to be given an argument for thinking otherwise? Hume argued that the idea of freedom arises when we attribute the consequences of an action to the agent, by way of praise and blame. There is nothing in this idea that either affirms or denies determinism, and its grounds are unaffected by the advance of science. Our problem arises because we neglect to ask what we are doing, in describing an action as free. Only if we know what we are doing, will we really understand the concept: and the belief that an action, to be free, must be free from the chain of causes, results either from intellectual indolence, or from a misguided will to believe.
But what exactly are we doing, in describing an action as free? The problem of free-will is easily run together with another - the problem of the subject, and its relation to the world of objects. In a magnificent work of synthesis, Kant argued that only a ‘transcendental subject’ could be free, that such a subject is essentially outside nature, and that its freedom is also a form of obedience - obedience not to causal laws, but to the necessary and eternal laws of reason. He then had the task of showing how this transcendental subject could act in the realm of nature, and manifest its freedom here and now. In other words, he stumbled across another ‘point of intersection of the timeless with time’. In the end, he was inclined to say, we know that we are free, since freedom is the pre-condition of all decision-making, including the decision to worry about freedom; at the same time we cannot understand this thing that we know, since the understanding stops at the threshold of the transcendental. Whatever lies beyond the threshold cannot be brought under concepts, and therefore cannot be thought. To which there is an obvious response: have you not brought it under concepts, in explaining the problem? If not, perhaps you should heed the last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus - ‘That whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence’.
Like all attempts to say what cannot be said, Kant’s takes up many pages. Its point is revealed, not in the unsayable conclusions, but in the intelligible approach to them. The first step in that approach is to put aside the word ‘freedom’, and look instead at the practice in which it occurs: the practice of holding people to account for what they do. Imagine walking down a street, minding your own business, when suddenly confronted by a mugger. Without regard for your desires or feelings in the matter, he strikes you to the ground, removes your wallet, and walks calmly away as you nurse your wounds. If there is such a thing as a free action, then this was it. Not only do you condemn the mugger; you and others will seek to punish him, and feel anger and resentment so long as he goes free. He is responsible for your loss, for your wounds, and for your damaged peace of mind: he acted deliberately in causing your suffering, and cared for nothing but his own advantage.
Imagine a slightly different case. You have entrusted your child to your friend for the day, being called away on urgent business, and the child being too young to look after itself. Your friend, intending no harm, but drinking more than he should, leaves the child to its own devices, with the result that it strays into the road and is injured by a passing car. Nobody in this situation acted deliberately so as to cause the child’s injury. But your friend was nevertheless responsible. His negligence was the key factor in the catastrophe, since by neglecting his duty, he made the accident more likely. To say that he neglected his duty is to say that there are things which he ought to have done which he left undone. You are angry and resentful; you reproach him; and lay the blame for the accident at his door.
Imagine yet another case. You have asked someone to look after your child, and he does so scrupulously, until suddenly called away by a cry of distress from the house next door. While he is absent, helping his neighbour, who would have died without his assistance, your child wanders into the roadway and is injured. You hold your friend responsible at first, are angry and reproachful; but on learning all the facts, you acknowledge that he acted rightly, in the circumstances, and is therefore not to blame.
The three cases illustrate the idea, fundamental to all human relations, of responsibility. They show that a person can be held to account, not only for what he does deliberately, but also for the consequences of what he does not do. And they show that responsibility is mitigated by excuses, and enhanced by negligence or self-centred disregard. If you study the law of negligence, or the legal concept of ‘diminished responsibility’, you will see that the absolute distinction that we may be tempted to draw, between free and unfree actions, is no more than a philosophical gloss on a distinction which is not absolute at all, but a distinction of degree. Persons are the subject of a constant moral accounting, and our attitudes towards them are shaped by this. This is the heart of the social practice which gives the concept of freedom its sense.
Let us look first at ordinary personal relations: relations of familiarity, friendship and co-operation, on which our daily lives depend. If someone deliberately injures another, or negligently causes injury, the victim will feel resentment, and perhaps a desire for retribution or revenge. The first step in normal relations, however, is to reproach the person who has wronged you. He may then recognize his fault, and ask to be forgiven. Perhaps he shows a willingness to atone for it, th
rough deliberately depriving himself for your benefit. And perhaps, at the end of this process, you are prepared to forgive him and, having done so, discover that your original feelings towards him are restored. This process is familiar to us in many guises: wrongdoing, reproach, confession, atonement and forgiveness form the stages away from and back to equilibrium in relations of friendship, co-operation and love. The Christian religion recognizes these stages as fundamental, too, in our relation to God. Only if the wrongdoer refuses to recognize his fault, do the original feelings of resentment and desire for revenge continue. For now the wrongdoer is setting aside the norms of peaceful conduct, and throwing down a challenge.
To take up this challenge is to act in the name not of friendship, but of justice. Where friendship desires reconciliation, and therefore atonement, justice demands retribution, and therefore punishment: one and the same process may be viewed as either — but what makes it atonement or punishment is the intention with which it is inflicted or assumed.
Both these processes show a search for equilibrium. And both are possible only between persons, whose actions are shaped and opposed through reasoned dialogue. It is always true that I could relate to other persons as I do to objects, studying the laws of motion that govern them, and adjusting their behaviour through the application of medical and biological science. But this would be to step outside the moral dialogue, to treat the other as a mere object, and to circumvent the normal paths to equilibrium. When human beings treat others in this way, it strikes us as sinister, uncanny, even devilish. On the other hand, with certain people, moral dialogue is useless: it makes no difference to them that they inspire resentment, anger or outrage. However we treat them, they will never mend their ways - either because they do not understand the need for this, or because they are driven by impulses which they cannot control. In such cases we begin to renounce the moral dialogue; we feel entitled to treat the other as an object; entitled to apply to him our store of scientific knowledge; entitled to bypass his consent, when seeking a remedy for his bad behaviour.
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy Page 9