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Key Terms (will be on quiz) Baruch Spinoza necessity freely act out of necessity of own nature determined by external causes conscious of striving conscious of desire see the better and pursue the worse conscious of action conscious of cause Eduard von Hartmann motives and character determined from within determined from without free from external influences necessity of character consciousness of motive The Philosophy of Freedom
Conscious Human Action 1.3 Freely Act Out Of Necessity Of Own Nature Others also proceed from the same point of view when they combat the concept of free will. Their arguments can all be found in germinal form as early as Spinoza. What he presented with clarity and simplicity against the idea of freedom has since been repeated countless times, only generally sheathed in the most sophistic theoretical doctrines, so that it becomes difficult to recognize the simple course of thought on which everything depends. In a letter of October or November, 1674, Spinoza writes: "Thus, I call a thing free that exists and acts out of the pure necessity of its nature; and I call it compelled, if its existence and activity are determined in a precise and fixed manner by something else. Thus God, for example, though necessary, is free, because he exists only out of the necessity of his nature. Similarly, God knows himself and everything else freely, because it follows from the necessity of his nature alone that he should know everything. You see, then, that I locate freedom not in free decision, but in free necessity." [3] "Let us, however, descend to created things, which are all determined to exist and to act in fixed and precise ways by outside causes. To see this more clearly, let us imagine a very simple case. A stone, for example, receives a certain momentum from an external cause that comes into contact with it, so that later, when the impact of the external cause has ceased, it necessarily continues to move. This persistence of the stone is compelled, and not necessary, because it had to be established by the impact of an external cause. What applies here to the stone, applies to everything else, no matter how complex and multifaceted; everything is necessarily determined by an outside cause to exist and to act in a fixed and precise manner." [4] "Now please assume that the stone, as it moves, thinks and knows that it is trying, as much as it can, to continue in motion. This stone, which is only conscious of its effort and by no means indifferent, will believe that it is quite free and that it continues in its motion not because of an external cause but only because it wills to do so. But this is that human freedom that all claim to possess and that only consists in people being aware of their desires, but not knowing the causes by which they are determined. Thus the child believes that it freely desires the milk; the angry boy, that he freely demands revenge; and the coward flight. Again, drunkards believe it is a free decision to say what, when sober again, they will wish that they had not said, and since this prejudice is inborn in all humans, it is not easy to free oneself from it. For, although experience teaches us sufficiently that people are least able to moderate their desires and that, moved by contradictory passions, they see what is better and do what is worse, yet they still consider themselves free, and this because they desire some things less intensely and because some desires can be easily inhibited through the recollection of something else that is familiar."3 [5] No one will dispute that a child is unfree when it desires milk, as is a drunkard who says things and later regrets them. Both know nothing of the causes, active in the depths of their organism, that exercise irresistible control over them. But is it justifiable to lump together actions of this kind with those in which humans are conscious not only of their actions but also of the reasons that motivate them? Are the actions of human beings really all of a single kind? Should the acts of a warrior on the battlefield, a scientist in the laboratory, a diplomat involved in complex negotiations, be set scientifically on the same level as that of a child when it desires milk? It is certainly true that the solution to a problem is best sought where it is simplest. But the lack of a capacity to discriminate has often brought about endless confusion. And there is, after all, a profound difference between knowing and not knowing why I do something. This seems self-evident. Yet the opponents of freedom never ask whether a motive that I know, and see through, compels me in the same sense as the organic process that causes a child to cry for milk. 1.4 Free From External Influences (Character) [6] Eduard von Hartmann, in his Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, claims that human willing depends on two main factors: motive and character.4 If we consider all human beings as the same, or at least see their differences as negligible, then their will appears to be determined from without, namely by the circumstances they encounter. But if we consider that different human beings make an idea or mental picture into a motive only when their character is such that the idea in question gives rise to a desire, then human beings appear to be determined from within and not from without. But because we must ourselves make an idea that impinges from without into a motive of action in accordance with our character, we imagine that we are free, that is, independent of external motivation. But, according to Eduard von Hartmann, the truth is that "even though we ourselves first raise ideas into motives, yet we do this not arbitrarily, but according to the necessity of our characterological organization; that is, we are anything but free." Here, too, no consideration is given to the difference between motives that I allow to affect me only after having permeated them with my consciousness, and those that I follow without having a clear knowledge of them. 3. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Marrano-Dutch philosopher of Jewish- Portuguese parentage. Expelled from the Synagogue, he supported himself by grinding lenses and devoted himself to philosophy, especially Cartesianism, deriving a kind of “rational pantheism” from it. See Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy. “Spinozism is a world conception that seeks the ground of all world events in God, and derives all process according to external necessary laws from this ground, just as mathematical truths are derived from axioms (p.161).” Spinoza was important to Goethe and to German Romantic idealism generally. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 4. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), Die Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins [Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness] (1879). Von Hartmann combined the views of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer into a doctrine of evolutionary history based on the conflict of unconscious will with unconscious reason. He was a major figure of the time and influenced many subsequent thinkers, including C. G. Jung. |
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