ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ada Agada, emergent Nigerian existentio-consolationist thinker, holds the Master of Arts degree in Western Metaphysics. He has published in reputable journals in Nigeria and Africa and is currently systematizing the philosophy of consolationism, Africa’s 21st century response to the challenge of Western rationalism. He is a member of the Nigeria-based International Research and Development Institute.

Abstract

The question of freedom, sometimes called the philosophical problem of free will, is one of the enduring questions of philosophy, having been debated for centuries by virtually all the notable philosophical thinkers of all ages. So rich is this question in content that it seems inexhaustible before the penetrating analysis of thinkers. Philosophers of all traditions – rationalists, empiricists, existentialists, analytic philosophers, etc – have made their varied and revealing contributions to this age-old debate. Yet this most engaging question touching on human responsibility, morality, and jurisprudence is not about to be exhausted. The emergence of consolationism as a 21st century African philosophical synthesis seeks to further deepen our understanding of freedom. In this paper I present the history of the problem of this magnificent question. I highlight the contributions of Spinoza, Kant, and James – three philosophers who I consider typical representatives of the determinist, libertarian, and reconciliation schools. I critically examine Sartre’s idea of an unlimited freedom. I conclude by providing a sketch of the consolationist solution to the problem of freedom adequate to the scope of this paper and assert after an incisive analysis of the consolationist doctrine of mood that freedom is a mirage while liberty as flowing from man’s moral constitution remains eternally valid.

1.  Introduction

Meditating on the ever fascinating and enduring question of freedom, Mondin writes: “The indisputable data is that man is free, and that the free act is the result of a close cooperation between the intellect (knowledge) and the will.”¹ But can the audacity of this declaration – no doubt traceable to the intriguing phenomenon of agency – survive the confrontation with the withering cynicism of determinism? If we hide behind the apparent independence of the sphere of human action to proclaim human freedom as absolute or even as decisive as Mondin seems to think, we will have to deny that man is a part of a whole to which he stands in solidarity or assert like Kant that man belongs to two worlds at once opposed to each other, yet influencing each other, the delicate duality of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds.²

This dualism that seeks to downplay man’s intimacy with nature cannot explain the anthropic coincidence the universe exemplifies which points at a world whose parts are in solidarity.³ This tendency will lead us to assert that man the thinking being is not man the feeling being. While it is quite obvious that we can explain physical events in terms of the universal rule of causality (never mind some of the more radical findings of quantum physics such as the observation that some things seem to have no causes!), while it is true that we cannot extend this kind of rigid rule to the human sphere of deliberation and action, the fact remains that our understanding of freedom renders this very fascinating concept a paradox. For in the human sphere freedom and determinism coalesce. This is not a particularly radical declaration. James announced his notion of soft determinism in his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” over a hundred years ago. Since then a compatibilist view of the freedom-determinism question has remained a viable solution to the problem of human freedom.

      An action is free if and only if it is caused  by the person concerned, the substantial agent whose spontaneous act of creation lies outside the sphere of scientific predictability and external causality.⁴ Free choice then carries the burden of a free will, the will being the faculty in man that desires an outcome and purposes to bring it about.⁵ If we assume that the will is rational, whether wholly or partly, then we can agree that free will is the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.⁶ We see at once that the phenomenon of freedom is threatened on all sides by deterministic complexities, be the latter of a physical, psychological, moral, or theological character.

            This paper will take another look at the solutions to the problem of free will and determinism proffered by the brilliant trio of Spinoza, Kant, and James. We will reconsider Sartre’s dilemma in the face of the mighty question mark the phenomenon of freedom represents in his existentialist phenomenology. Our arguments will develop in the perspective of the consolationist philosophy which is our late African synthesis for the 21st century. Admittedly, this is a synthesis still in its infancy. Yet it is one in solidarity with Western philosophy, particularly the Western tradition celebrated as existentialism. In presenting an ironically compatibilist solution to the enduring question of freedom, we intend to show that freedom and determinism must cancel each other out in our conception of fatalism so that the concept of liberty can emerge as man’s consolation in view of the impossibility of freedom.

2. The Evolution of the Problem

            Ancient Greek fatalism which reached a remarkable level of coherence in the determinism of Democritus was never really challenged by a coherent formulation of a theory of human freedom. In the Nicomachean Ethics and a good many of the Platonic dialogues, in particular the Timaeus and the Laws, we come across strong notions of moral responsibility and even free choice, but the idea of freedom as we understand it today to mean the absence of an absolute universal necessity was quite strange to the ancient Greeks. Even Plato the philosophical “spectator of all times and all existence” acknowledged the absolutism of necessity in his notion of an eternal fixed order.

            The concept of free will took its pride of place in medieval philosophy which was dominated essentially by Christian thought. Indeed, the concept of free will is rooted in Christian teachings on monotheism and creationism. God acts freely. Man as the image of God can also act freely. The fact that some radical Protestant reformers rejected the concept of free will on the grounds that theological determinism reigns supreme,⁷ does not take away our indebtedness to the Christian tradition for elucidating the concept of free will early.

            To remove the contradiction in the coexistence of free will and predestination (theological determinism) in the Christian solution to the freedom question, Boethius brilliantly asserted that God, operating at the level of eternity, foresees all future events without predetermining them. Hence, foreknowledge is no longer predetermination, with the removal of the overwhelming necessity implied by theological determinism.⁸ While we agree with Smith and Oaklander that Boethius’ solution leads us to a detensed present since God perceives all of time, creating the absurdity of all events in the history of the universe existing in a permanent present, we must add quickly that a more significant problem with this solution is that it is in fact no solution as Boethius thought since the removal of predetermination merely affirms the coexistence of freedom and determinism or their compatibility.. Thus Boethius was defending a compatibilist view of the problem rather than a libertarian view.

            Spinoza’s rigid determinism inspired by a mathematical view of existence as a perfect mechanical unity, as rationally uniform, marked the beginning of the secularization of the enduring question of freedom. According to Spinoza, the human mind is a fixed mode of existence within a timeless unity sustained by God who is in fact this unity. Causality understood is necessity. Spinoza proclaimed the will a general idea with which we explain all individual volitions.¹⁰ The will cannot be free since it has no special existence outside the mind, nor does it enjoy any special privilege. If Spinoza remained a consistent determinist to a large extent and if he accepted the truth of the existence of the external world, Hume’s brand of scepticism emboldened by his epistemology declared the external world unknowable. The author of Treatise on Human Nature believed causal connections and necessities are mere fictions, even if useful, of a rather passive mind.¹¹ Having grudgingly accepted necessity as a useful fiction, Hume saw that necessity is indispensable to causality. He therefore rejected the question of freedom as metaphysically posed (which pits it against necessity). For him freedom makes sense if it is pitted against constraint, not necessity. Opposing freedom with necessity gives rise to chance (which he surprisingly dismisses as non-existent given his epistemological scepticism), according to Hume whose indifference to the great question is consistent with his scepticism.

            Yet it is either we are free or we are not free. If we are not free, then a better term than ‘freedom’ is required to capture the existential condition. Therefore Kant is right in wrinkling his nose at Hume’s kind of freedom and insisting on an independent will, of a “spontaneity which can begin to act of itself, without requiring to be determined to action by an antecedent cause in accordance with the law of causality.”¹²

            James opted for what he called soft determinism when he realized that determinism of one kind or the other could not be entirely avoided just as human freedom could not be completely denied without moral responsibility becoming meaningless. In contemporary times philosophers have continued to pontificate over the matter, surely one of philosophy’s most fundamental questions. The outstanding existentialist Sartre announced with aplomb that man is condemned to be free.¹³ ‘Analytical’ philosophers have divided themselves into libertarian and necessitarian camps. High-sounding labels have been given to diverse compatibilist and incompatibilist theories.¹⁴ These theories have failed to check the menace of determinism (and even indeterminism). Wood a stern determinist cannot see how the idea of physical indeterminism, sometimes championed by quantum physics, can synchronize with physiological and, finally, psychological indeterminism upon which the will’s freedom is founded. He writes:

The physical theory of indeterminacy merely express an observational difficulty encountered in the attempt to determine both the position and the velocity of an electron … consequently it posits a methodological and not the physical or ontological indeterminacy which is requisite for the purpose of the free will doctrine.¹⁵

He believes that determinism remains valid at the everyday macro level of mass objects. He does not think that sub-atomic indeterminacy shows itself in the neural processes that are said to underpin the free will act. He writes:

The psychological correlation of  a neural indeterminacy with its psychological counterpart , could be effected only by the introspective observation of the volitional indeterminacy along with the underlying physical indeterminacy … the evidence of introspection is an essential link in the argument from physical indeterminacy … the freedom of indeterminacy remains , even in the background of physical indeterminacy, a mere speculative possibility.¹⁶

Consequently, it is a philosophical absurdity to have a free will that acts capriciously, independent of psychological and physiological conditions.

            Dennet responds to the threat and terror posed by the deterministic view (a terror not mitigated in a free universe) of the unbranching and unyielding course of the universe thus:

Perhaps the libertarian is right that there is no way to allay these feelings short of a brute denial of determinism. Perhaps … only such a denial … would permit us to make sense of the notion that our actual lives are created by us over time out of possibilities that exists in virtue of our earlier decisions; that we trace a path through a branching maze that both defines who we are , and why, to some extent (if we are fortunate enough to maintain against all vicissitudes the integrity of our deliberational machinery) we are responsible for being who we are.¹⁷

But Flew thinks the question has finally been answered with the clear separation of the spheres of necessitated physical behaviour and human action. He writes:

The nerve of the distinction between the movings involved in an action and the motions that constitute necessitated behavior is that the latter behavior is physically necessitated, whereas the sense, the direction, and the character of actions as such are that, as a matter of logic, they necessarily cannot be physically necessitated (and as a matter of brute fact, they are not). It therefore becomes impossible to maintain the doctrine of universal physically necessitating determinism, the doctrine that says all movements in the universe … are determined by physically necessitating physical causes.¹⁸

As eloquent as Flew sounds we must always remember that terms like ‘necessity’, ‘necessary’, ‘necessarily’, ‘necessitating’,  which are so well loved by philosophers directly and indirectly imply fatalism. The attempt to escape determinism while using these terms simply begs the question. We will now proceed to take a look at Spinoza’s case for determinism, Kant’s defence of freedom, and James’ reconciliation move.

3. Spinoza’s Case for Rigid Determinism

            The formulation of the idea of determinism stands as one of the three greatest discoveries of the human intellect. The other two discoveries are the notions of freedom and teleology. Each discovery represents an emotional outburst of intelligence. The supreme goal of Spinoza’s determinism is a teleological vision of God as the one true consolation of man. But in sternly rejecting the idea of human freedom Spinoza puts determinism in a dilemma.

            Spinoza uses the famous term ‘necessary’ to describe the nature of God’s existence. God as Substance is a totality of a logical and timeless nature. The behaviour of all things whose natures do not involve necessary existence can be accounted for in God. The necessity of the cosmic conditions of the universe means that everything that happens in this infinite causal system of nature is in accordance with fixed laws of nature. Hence, Spinoza is uncompromising in his demand that things be understood within the overall deductive context which preserves the fundamental uniformity and intelligibility of the universe, and to allow freedom of the will would be to violate his commitment to a fundamental and inviolable uniformity and to the idea that the universe is strictly intelligible.¹⁹

            But what does Spinoza say about freedom? What is his direct opinion? Spinoza asserts that:

I do not place freedom in free decision [italics mine] but in free necessity [italics mine]. However, let us descend to created things which are all determined by external causes to exist and operate in a given determinate manner. For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone’s motion is constrained [italics mine], not necessary [italics mine], because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause.²⁰

What this lucid statement underlines is that what holds true for the moving stone holds true for the acting man. Spinoza asserts that if the stone were to be a thinking thing it would proclaim its freedom because it would then be conscious of its effort and not the force behind the effort. For Spinoza this consciousness of freedom is an illusion. “This is the human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consist solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but they are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”²¹ To make sure we are not in any doubt about what he means when he refers to our ignorance of ultimate causation, Spinoza insists: “The mind is a fixed and determined mode of thinking and therefore cannot be the free cause of its action, or it cannot have the absolute faculty of willing and unwilling: but for willing this or that it must be determined by a cause which is determined by another, and this again by another, etc.”²²

            We are not concerned with refuting Spinoza’s rigid determinism by calling on findings in quantum mechanics. As we move towards our own solution to the freedom question, we are intrigued by Spinoza’s declaration of freedom as an illusion. We think that if freedom is an illusion determinism cannot escape from this same charge. In any case, Spinoza’s determinism is not altogether a rigid determinism. We said earlier that the three greatest intellectual victories of humanity – determinism, freedom, and teleology – are also the greatest outpouring of emotion in human history. Spinoza was a philosopher, but philosophers, like the ordinary man in the street, also seeks the Consolation. The consolation is God. Determinism and freedom are illusions of a perfection for ever denied man. Spinoza was demanding not mere freedom of action which has absolute freedom as its foundation; like Kant he was demanding for a transcendental freedom. Like Kant he did not find it in the immanent sphere. While Kant thought he could find an absolute free causality in human reason relative to the moral law, Spinoza was wiser, and in his wisdom he rooted the mother of all necessities in God.

4. Kant and the Tenacity of an Elusive Freedom

            Just as Spinoza was the most eloquent champion of determinism, so was Kant the most eloquent defender of freedom. Campbell, impatient with ‘traditional’ metaphysics, declares the freedom question a pseudo-problem if stated in the traditional sense to mean exemption from causal laws on the assumption that causal laws involve compulsion.²² Thus he can conclude in a Humean manner that freedom from compulsion is the only freedom required for the recognition of moral responsibility. But Kant had responded well to this objection. The demand of and for freedom is absolute. The notion of freedom from compulsion is subsumed in the idea of freedom from external causality. Spinoza took note and completely rejected the idea of human freedom. Kant also took note and sought a transcendental basis for freedom, which, defying discovery, found a causal expression in the moral consciousness, in a causality of reason.

            Freedom of the will may be an impossibility (and we think this is the case), but it is an absolute requirement if freedom is to be asserted at all. Freedom of action, the horizontal demand of Campbell, is only a consolation for the impossibility of freedom of the will. This freedom of action is what we consolationist thinkers call liberty.

            It is therefore no mystery that Kant fought hard to restrict determinism, to eliminate the freedom-determinism paradox by shifting the question of freedom from the antinomy-generating sphere of theoretical reason to the affirmative sphere of practical reason where freedom remains a tenacious even if elusive phenomenon. Here we are mainly interested in Kant’s insight rather than his failure to resolve the third antinomy of the transcendental ideas.²⁴ Kant writes:

The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational, and freedom would be this property of such causality that it can be efficient independently on foreign causes determining it just as physical necessity is the property the causality of all irrational beings has [sic] of being determined to activity by the influence of foreign causes … What then can freedom of the will be but autonomy … so that a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same.²⁵

            Kant is not blind to the absurdity of a freedom that recognizes no cause or a will that is lawless. He sees the threat posed by an effective determinism all the time, yet in recognition of the agency factor in human affairs he works with frenetic energy to save human freedom from a seemingly all-pervading determinism. Since causality is a necessity, freedom in its own right is a causality of reason. Announcing freedom as a moral necessity is the preoccupation of the second Critique. If determinism is a natural causality freedom is a moral causality. How can this make sense? For Kant this makes sense if we always have the categorical imperative on our mind and if we recognize man the rational being as an agent belonging at once to the world of the understanding (noumenon) and the world of sense (phenomenon). Yet the two-world proposition certainly renders freedom passive. The noumenal world lies beyond the boundaries of human experience.²⁶

            Human quest for absolutes in a Supreme Absolute , the hope and burden of consciousness characterized as yearning, empowers us to see fixed things whereas these things that are remain promises of permanence. Determinism is a necessity. The idea of perfection demands it. Freedom is a necessity. The idea of perfection also demands it. But neither determinism nor perfection is an absolute. If they are essentially subjective requirements, then they are compatible. Kant was not in any doubt about the emotional character of the demand for causal explanations. He writes: “There remains then nothing but the value which we ourselves give our life, through what we can not only do, but do purposively in such independence of nature that the existence of nature itself can only be a purpose under this codition.”²⁷

            How can the reconciliation of determinism and freedom be effected, or, at least, the antagonism be removed? We will take a look at how James attempted to remove the antagonism before presenting our early and yet late solution to the problem of freedom and determinism in the consolationist perspective. The solution is early for Africa and late for the world.

5. James and the Quest for Reconciliation

            The main factor that led James to deny rigid determinism is the same ethical consideration that led Kant to fight most passionately to preserve freedom in its spontaneity. James’ secularizing, yet pro-religion ethics takes off with his concept of meliorism, the belief that the universe is not necessarily getting better or worse but that it can be better if we cooperate with the finite God freely to make it better.²⁸ For James there is room for novelty since the future cannot be determined either positively or negatively. Human effort contributes to the making of a moral order. Man has free will. Human freedom is underlined by what James calls our judgement of regret. We feel remorse over evil deeds committed by us even as we regret the occurrence of other people’s evil deeds. We are persuaded that something else, something good and noble, should have been instead of evil. Some of our regrets are undoubtedly trivial while a good many of them are persistent and hard to stifle. With Spinoza’s emotive determinism at the back of James’ mind, the American philosopher notes the impossibility of a brutal murder fitting into any moral universe even though it can well be a perfect mechanical fit. Thus deterministic optimism in the Spinozistic sense must be diminished as deterministic pessimism (the passive acknowledgement of the inevitability of evil in the world). James writes:

The judgement of regret calls the murder bad. Calling a thing bad means … that the thing ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead. Determinism, in denying that anything can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place where what ought to be is impossible … regret for the murder must transcend itself, if we are determinists … into a larger regret … that whole frame of things of which the murder is one member.²⁸      

            Deterministic pessimism may become deterministic optimism only at the cost of eliminating our judgements of regret. This elimination is impossible. While determinism explains away evil in terms of necessity (the word again!) it cannot explain away a murder and our regret at its occurrence. This is the dilemma of determinism. The dilemma can only be removed if we embrace some notion of indeterminism, which claims that:

The parts [of the universe] have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be … possibilities may be in excess of actualities … Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one becomes impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself … Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood.³⁰

                James recognizes that the search for absolutes is basically an emotional demand of the human existential condition. Thus if the idea of determinism (an emotional outburst of intelligence) clashes with the notion of freedom (another remarkable emotional outburst of intelligence) we can discard the former in righteous indignation. For James the principle of causality may after all be subjective and devoid of real content which is another way of saying it is basically unanalyzable.

            Having concluded that necessity is nothing sacrosanct and that chance means plurality in an ethical universe, James asserts:

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way … a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way … unless the right way was open to us as well? … I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world.³¹

            Our universe seems to be one subject to probabilities and possibilities in the physical and moral spheres as James has noted rather than a uniform and strictly intelligible universe as Spinoza asserted. About the so-called laws of nature always invoked in favour of determinism, Flew says it is merely a claim that “an occurrence of one particular sort physically necessitates the occurrence of another sort such that it makes its nonoccurrence physically impossible. This is clearly not the case with free choice.”³² And scientific theories are in fact “idealizations of experience, resulting from deductive unification by means of their logic or mathematical framework and from their deductive abstraction … science in its present form, is consistent with the assumption that chosen bodily conduct is on occasions not wholly predetermined.”³³ Consequently, it follows that “empirical propositions about chosen bodily conduct may in some cases not be identifiable with corresponding theoretical propositions of physical, chemical, neurological and other scientific theories which imply universal predetermination of the (idealized) Events which are their immediate subject matter.”³⁴

            Having come this far, we are ready to endorse a limited determinism in the sphere of physically necessitated behaviour. Since there is an absolute demand for complete freedom at the foundation of rationality which is emotion and since this absolute demand cannot be met at the level of practice, we will identify the term liberty as that concept proper to the human condition. Freedom is too useful a term, too noble a concept, to be completely discarded. Yet it is an illusion. By illusion we do not mean falsehood but incompleteness. As illusion freedom is the shadow of truth. In the absence of freedom a consolation is announced to man. We call this consolation liberty in the consolationist perspective. Man stands witness to liberty.

6. Early Consolationist Solution to the Enduring Question of Freedom

            Sartre the believer in absolute human freedom cannot see how freedom can ever be divorced from the fundamental conditions of all the actions of the acting being. For Sartre “causes and motives have meaning only inside a projected ensemble … an ensemble of non-existents … this ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence … Me in so far as I have to be myself outside of myself.”³⁵ Sartre emphasizes human consciousness as nihilation or negativity, ultimately as nothingness. But the identification of freedom with nothingness and the resulting famous proclamation that man is condemned to be free cannot escape from the province of illusion. The so-called nothingness is not so thin as to escape illusion. If illusion is the shadow of truth, then nothingness has its own character or being, as Western thinkers from Plato to Heidegger have noted. Sartre is able to proclaim an unlimited freedom because he makes man the end of his own transcendence, thus limiting the very concept of transcendence. In other words, Sartre is running away from the metaphysics his brilliant phenomenology keeps pointing to. Thus the horizontal investigation of Sartre is obscured by the shadow of the being-in-itself which remains blind yet all-seeing.

            We intend to go beyond ontology to wrestle with metaphysics. But how much can we say in a paper that can enable the reader see the direction in which we are going?³⁶ In the first volume of Mystery and Being Marcel reports how awkward it felt to be asked to condense his philosophy in two sentences. Yet the attentive reader will know by now that we intend to provide a solution to the problem of freedom from a non-Western perspective.

            When people try to distinguish fatalism from determinism it is fashionable for them to regard the former as primitive and the latter as scientific. Fatalistic causality in this sense is tied to belief in gods, fate, and other otherworldly powers while deterministic causality is natural causality (in accordance with laws of nature). But why should there be laws of nature in the first place and how can these laws account for their own occurrence in the universe? The denigration of fatalism as primitive and superstitious is unfounded. Determinism receives its causative potency from the primal notion of fatalism. I do not use the term fatalism to mean the inexorable path of determinations or occurrences that follow from a given initial condition or conditions. I am talking about philosophical fatalism, the attitude that something happened and because of this primal occurrence other things happened, continue to happen, and will happen. The link between other occurrences and the primal occurrence is not one of absolute necessity as a cosmic burden; it is rather a link of causal similarity. Something happened which we have been unable to understand. Its occurrence is fatalistic not because it could not have occurred differently than it did but simply because its occurrence in the realized form could not have been prevented. What happens happen because it could not have avoided its occurrence which is its fate. Fate then is not destiny predetermined but the very phenomenon of destiny.

            Given the primacy of fatalism with regard to determinism, the latter as a necessity demanded by the human intellect can only carry a meaning for human life to the extent that it is dependent on fatalism, the mother of all necessities. Necessity itself is a term for existential yearning under which universal existence is to be understood. Fatalism is the yearning to be and become. The aim of this process of yearning is happiness or freedom. If necessity is an emotional demand of the intellect as we assert, then emotion is prior to reason and what we call rationality is in fact emotional intelligence. Properly speaking man, is an emotional being. His ability to think is an expression of a basic emotional yearning for order, or what James called uniformity, and language merely serves to emphasize this purpose. If fatalism is yearning, then both in animate and inanimate existence, in rational and irrational life, we see the elements of joy and sadness working with varying degrees of success to realize some sort of consolation. Here lies the source of our fascination with panpsychic doctrines in spite of our reluctance to believe. Thus existence itself is a consolation, not a perfection. Since it is in human beings that yearning has reached its height of awareness any solution to the problem of freedom must take into account the two elements of mood: joy and sadness. To do otherwise is to stubbornly insist on building castles in the air.

            These two elements of mood constitute everything that a consolatory existence has to offer rational beings. Human agency plays a dominant role in our understanding of the question of freedom. Yet agency takes its bearing in the environment of mood (which has joy and sadness as its constituents). It is in knowing himself as a being who makes meaning of his life out of the elements of joy and sadness that man stands a witness to liberty. Freedom the absolute demand is beyond the reach of man. For the notion of freedom to be practically meaningful it must be put forward in a transcendental format. That is, man must be able to boast of a power that confers on him complete independence of nature or the world outside him and the complete mastery of himself and everything in his own isolated life. For man to be free he must be able not only to choose but to choose one and only one option which must turn out an ultimate good without having to nurse what James calls judgement of regret. For man to be free man must be an omnipotent God. It is man’s fate never to be free. This incapacity is rooted in the elements of mood which constitute man. Every choice man makes shuts other options, and the choice made at one point or the other reveals its capacity to frustrate and irritate mood. Let us use a practical example. A man has just been offered a good job after working so hard to get it. On the morning he is to report for duty he hires a car to drives himself to his new place of work. On the way he has a flat tyre. After fixing the problem he drives into a vicious traffic jam and spends hours sweating and cursing other motorists. This man is not free because mood is constantly being irritated. But he is a witness to liberty because he can decide not to swear at the other motorists caught up in the same maddening situation. The fatality of his being stuck in the traffic jam is simply inevitability, not predetermination.

            The hypothesis that man may become so knowledgeable at a future time that he may be able to choose perfect ends is an idle hypothesis. Man can never know himself and his environment well enough to approach anything close to omniscience. His choices will always be meaningful relative to his joy in which his sadness seeks completion. In a lifetime a man is bound to make thousands of choices. The choices he will never regret making will be very few indeed, that is, if there will be any at all.

            If our choices cannot guarantee everlasting happiness which is what freedom truly means, then the question of freedom cannot be put transcendently. This is so not because it is a pseudo-problem as some philosophers impishly assert but because it is an illusion. If we turn away from the promise of happiness realizable only in a state of freedom we are confronted with the shadow of freedom in the notion of freedom of action in the sphere of agency. The appeal to freedom is an emotional appeal which, imbued with the urgency of a necessity, becomes a valid demand of reason – reason understood as mood becoming conscious of itself, joy recognizing its inseparability from sadness: therefore reason understood as the refinement of the emotion. We cannot deceive ourselves about being free. Yet just as we laugh mirthlessly at this tragic existential condition, the delusion of an improvised necessity answering to a higher necessity (fatalism) to which the idea of universal predetermination is not essential, just as we are giving in to pessimism we see the shadow of a seemingly non-existent entity (freedom) in human agency.

            The tenacity of an elusive freedom ceases to be a mystery if we see the phenomenon of freedom not as a delusion outright but an illusion. A delusion is intimate with falsehood. An illusion is intimate with promise and truth. It may yet be. But now it is not. As a transcendental promise not yet realized at the temporal level freedom is an ideal whose shadow we see in the sphere of human action as liberty. Liberty is man’s consolation as a being fit for joy but not yet destined for happiness. In the concept of liberty is to be found everything sublime man is capable of. Liberty, rather than freedom, makes man responsible for the choices he makes, which when made are defined as fatalistic occurrences and not deterministic occurrences. It is in recognizing the difference between liberty and freedom that we can talk about tampering justice with mercy when an offender is going to receive a deserved punishment.

Aquinas noted, correctly I think, that choice is not an end but a means and therefore it is not of the perfect good (happiness) but of particular goods, the result being that we choose not of necessity but freely.³⁷ Even if no necessity is imposed on human choice the fact remains that happiness (freedom) eludes this choice. Only the appeal to morality can save for us the illusion of freedom. Human choice far from being bounded by nothingness is assailed on all sides by the fatalities of existence that frustrate and irritate mood, now enriching human joy, now deflating it, now refining human sadness, now embittering it. The appeal to the will begs the question. For the will cannot be free if the human phenomenon exists fatalistically. The will is a thick concoction of the primal emotions of joy and sadness. Sartre’s celebrated proclamation that man is condemned to be free is not true. Man is rather fated to despair. He is doomed to yearn for a freedom he might never find without the intervention of some extraordinary being. Yearning which is what man is (as Sartre himself testified, though gloomily, dismissing man as useless passion) cannot realize freedom. The trinity of deliberation, judgement, and election magnified by medieval Christian philosophers cannot give us freedom. To deliberate is to contemplate, to judge is to decide, and to elect is to choose. These mental processes are dimensions of liberty, not freedom. Freedom of choice here is not freedom of the will. By its very structure the human will cannot be free. It can only be free if yearning does not constitute it. The desires of the will are emotive impulses. Rationality which we deem fit to confer on the will remains solidly in the sphere of emotion, for rationality is in fact the inwardness of mood, the awareness of yearning, man’s consciousness of his existing simply as joy and sadness. The will as a thick concoction of emotion is bound to mood and the form of mood is a fatalistic form, an occurrence requiring a total explanation, yet is incapable of explaining itself: a state of existence that promises a perfection that will never be realized. That which is characterized as a perpetual seeking cannot be free.

            Yet that which yearns is sure to find. But what yearning finds is consolation. In the sphere of human action liberty is the consolation which the freedom-seeking will finds. The proclamation of liberty is the outstanding achievement of human rationality, which itself evolves from emotionality. Liberty is the recognition of the intimacy of morality with universal existence. It is the awareness that man can choose after reflecting on the fatality of his existence as he pursues the remote ideal of freedom. The act of liberty is the ethical act. The reflection that precedes the final act of choosing is the meditation on life and death. With the paradox of life and death before his eyes the reflecting and acting man will know he is not free; he will also know that he can choose what seems beautiful, right, or correct in the pursuit of the sublime, whatever the psychological or physical obstacles that oppose his desires. This was one point Spinoza tried to make when he talked about the infinite causal system that man can contemplate sub specie aeternitatis.

            Human liberty (what has sometimes been called freedom of action) is fully accounted for in fatalism, in the phenomenon of human joy and sadness. Any attempt to confine the concept of an efficient liberty exclusively to the sphere of reason as Kant tried to do unsuccessfully is self-deceit. It remains something of a puzzle to me that Sartre asserted an unlimited freedom after recognizing the fluidity of the character of the for-itself (consciousness), its facticity which embraces anguish. Human anxiety is undoubtedly a moral indicator, but it does not indicate the ethical because of the existence of an awful, unlimited freedom. In the first place when a freedom is described as awful (which is how freedom bounded by nothing is to be described), it is no longer freedom. It is an outcry of mood. Anxiety indicates morality because it turns us in the direction of freedom which retreats faster than we approach it. Man’s anxiety is located in the desire not just to be free, but to be completely free, to be happy. We yearn for everything good and perfect; yet the primordial yearning which makes us who we are is a fatality. Our existence even with reference to God remains a puzzle. The inexplicable is a fatality. Fatality is the necessity of an occurrence, whether mysterious or not, inexplicable or not. Fatalism is not a difficult concept. It is not predetermination. Fatalism is simply occurrence as yearning.

            As emotional constructs of the mind, determinism and freedom are instruments for dealing with the overwhelming demand of mood, the demand for consolation where happiness is an impossibility. Necessity is not synonymous with determinism, nor is it predetermination. Necessity is fatalism. And properly understood fatalism is a proclamation of liberty, the truth of the basic moral character of a seemingly gratuitous universe. Determinism can be dispensed with since it cannot stand before futility (the meaning of existence). Freedom too can be dispensed with at the human level since it too cannot stand before futility. However, liberty is indispensable because it is a consolation for that which seeks the impossible. Liberty is fully accounted for in mood as the ethical act of the being that contemplates its own fatalistic existence. Morality is an emotional demand which reason endorses. Reason only endorses morality because it sees its own nature in the morality-projecting emotion. Morality is not in itself a demand of reason (after all mother hen knows it is right for her to take care of her chicks). Emotion is basic at the level of yearning. All things ethical have implications for only two phenomena: joy and sadness.

            Perhaps an outline of consolationist metaphysics is necessary here. But I think an outline needed for the understanding of our early solution has already been provided. To go further in this paper will mean going beyond the scope of our topic. We saw that it is either we can meaningfully talk about freedom or we cannot. Any meaningful talk about freedom presents it as an illusion while yielding the notion of liberty as the consolation for this illusion. It is within man’s power to recognize what is right and correct, for man is a being of joy and sadness, a melancholy man. By the very definition of man as such a being man stands a witness to liberty.

7. Concluding Reflection on the Early Solution to the Enduring Question of Freedom

            Revisiting the question of freedom from the concrete angle gives us the concept of liberty. The joy of action constitutes our liberty. The joy dimension of the human act is ethical. Thus we see that no human being in a state of joy wishes to do harm or commit a crime. In the state of joy man is at last reconciled with nature, not as a determined being but as a fatalistic being. Sadness, a state of mood that recognizes the ontological limitation of the unfree man, seeks to complete human joy by reinforcing the ethical demand of our existential condition. Morality is as basic as the existence of the universe. That which yearns is moral; therefore the emotion at the root of universal existence is an intelligent emotion. Emotion is prior to intelligence; yet both are unified in mood. We must not talk about an emotion blind to intelligence and an intelligence blind to emotion. To violate this rule is to deceive ourselves.

            The concept of freedom we have seen is not a false concept. It is merely an illusion because the freedom question cannot be transcendently posed. The radical rejection of freedom is similar to the position of eliminative materialists who deny that there is anything like the mind. What do we replace freedom with? Liberty? Yes. But this solution is horizontal, not vertical. The question of freedom has to be posed transcendently. While we hold fast to liberty we must not forget that it is a consolation and that freedom is the ideal of this consolation.

            When we hear physicists talk about the wave-particle structure of matter, the uncertainty principle, indeterminacy at the micro level of existence, they are actually repeating what we are saying. However, there can be no room for indeterminism in our ethical universe. Mood knows what it seeks which is freedom. The problem is not whether there is a purpose before mood but how mood can realize the purpose of freedom. This is the challenge of cosmic history. Recognizing the intimacy of morality with existence like Plato and Kant before him, Sartre writes that the “reflective consciousness can be properly called a moral consciousness since it cannot arise without at the same time disclosing values.”³⁸ Disclosure is a revealing of a certain quality, character. Morality is latent in mood and prior to joy’s self-awareness. So, then, man acts as a being who has realized his liberty. There is a cause for some optimism in a night of pessimism because in the absence of freedom man stands a witness to liberty.

Notes

¹ Battista Mondin, Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Myroslaw A. Cizdyn (Bangalore:             Theological Publications in India, 1985), 119.

² See Immanuel Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, 10th ed, trans. T. K. Abbott (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1946). In this book as in the first Critique and the second Critique Kant argues with forceful eloquence for his double-world solution to the problem of freedom. Some scholars have pointed out that Kant’s introduction of the noumenon-phenomenon dichotomy is no solution at all. For instance, Bennett argues that Kant’s dual world explanation renders freedom idle. Freedom affects the empirical world although it is expressed by the will in accordance with reason. Yet the course of nature is such that it ignores the presence of freedom, that is to say “what happens in the world is just what would have happened if there had been only natural causality.” Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Dialectic, (Cambridge, 1974), 200. Korner  seems to concur, saying the noumenal world is one we do not experience. See Stephan Korner, Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (Sussex, 1979), 235 – 238. However Kant’s declaration of the will as autonomy in homage to the tenacity of the moral consciousness is noteworthy.

³ For a deeper exploration of the concept of anthropic coincidence  see Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also W. L. Craig and Q. Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: The Claredon Press, 1993).

⁴ Quentin Smith and L. Nathan Oaklander, Time, Change and Freedom (London: Routledge,             1995), 118.

⁵ Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press,   2005), 388.

⁶ Timothy O’Connor, “Free Will,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005), accessed Nov             15, 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/board.html.

⁷ Martin Luther, for instance, celebrated the bondage of the will. See The Bondage of the Will,             trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (London: James Clarke & Co Ltd, 1957).

⁸ Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Bk             XXXVI – XL, accessed April 19,       2011,             http://oll.libertyfund.org?index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ft            itle=1178&layout=html.

⁹ Smith and Oaklander, Time, Change and Freedom, 137.

¹⁰ Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Andrew Boyle, with an introduction by T. S. Gregory             (London: Dent, 1910), Part Two, Prop XLIX, 75 – 76.

¹¹ For more details on Hume’s epistemology which is the foundation of his scepticism see his Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888), Bk 1, Part II – IV.

¹² Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan,             1929), Transcendental Dialectic, Bk II, Ch II, Sect 9, III, 465.

 ¹³ See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans., with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), Part Four, Ch One.

¹⁴ For more information about current incompatibilist view of free will and determinism see Robert Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), Timothy O’Connor (ed), Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

¹⁵ Ledger Wood, “The Free Will Controversy,”  in Philosophic Problems, ed. Maurice             Mandelbaum, F. W. Gramlich, A. R. Anderson, and J. B. Schneewind (New York:             Macmillan, 1967), 423 – 432.

¹⁶ Wood, “Free Will,” 423 – 432.

¹⁷ Daniel C. Dennet, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Sussex: The             Harvester Press Limited, 1981), 299.

¹⁸ Antony Flew, There is a God (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 63 – 64.

¹⁹ Bruce W. Hauptli, “Lecture Supplement Introducing Spinoza,” accessed March 30, 2010,             http://www.fiu.edu/~hauptli/Spimoza’sEthicsLectureSupplement.htm.

²⁰ R. H. M Elwes, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (New York: Dover, 1955), Vol 2,             Letter 62, 390.

²¹ Elwes, Chief Works, 390.

²² Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, trans., Andrew Boyle, with an introduction by T. S. Gregory             (London: Dent, 1910),             Part Two, Prop XLVIII, 74 – 75.

 ²³ See C. A. Campbell, “Is ‘Free Will’ a Pseudo-Problem,” in Contemporary Ethical Theory, ed.             Joseph Margolis (New York: Random House, 1966), 371 – 399.

²⁴ The third antinomy has as its thesis the claim that natural causality alone cannot and will not explain the appearance of the world; hence the causality of freedom must be assumed. The antithesis recognizes only natural causality. See the 1970 reprint of Norman Kemp Smith’s 1929 first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for Kant’s elaborate argument. Pp 409 – 414.

²⁵ Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, 10th ed, trans. T .K.              Abbott (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1946), Sect 3, 78 – 79.

²⁶ Stephan Korner, Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1979),             235 – 238.

²⁷ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (Mineola, New York: Dover             Publications, 2005), Appendix, Sect 84, 212.

²⁸ Frederick Copleston, S. J., A History of Philosophy, Vol VIII (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 343 – 344.

²⁹ William James, “How Can We Explain Judgments of Regret?” in Philosophy: History and             Problems,  ed. Samuel Enoch Stumpf  5th ed (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc, 1994), 749.

³⁰ James, “How Can We Explain Judgments of Regret?” 745 – 746.

³¹ James, “How Can We Explain Judgments of Regret?” 750.

³² Antony Flew, There is a God (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 60.

³³ Stephan Korner, Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1979),             241.

³⁴ Korner, Fundamental Questions, 241.

³⁵ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans., with an introduction by Hazel E.Barnes (New   York: Pocket Books,1966), Part Four, Ch One, Sect 1, 564.

³⁶ For the benefit of the diligent reader a rough outline of consolationist philosophy is available online at http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/agada_consolationist_manifesto.htm in an essay entitled “The Consolationist Manifesto and the New Testament from Africa.”

³⁷ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd             revised edotion (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1920), Vol 1, Q13, A6,             accessed Oct 15, 2010,             http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?opyion=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=            1980&layout=html.

³⁸ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans., with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes (New             York: Pocket Books, 1966), Part Two, Ch 1, Sect III, 146.