Reflections on Free Will

This article is motivated by some comments I read on a philosophy post. It seems everybody believes in free will. Has nobody ever read Schopenhauer’s essay on free will? It is a very important question because the belief in free will does have some very perverse effects. But how can the belief in free will have any perverse consequences?

First of all what is it we call free will? Basically, the capacity for one individual to make decisions freely, so that each decision, lets say: “Should I turn left, or right?”, could have been equally one or the other. I decided to turn left freely, but could have decided also to turn right, there is nothing that has made me turn left. The belief in free will is the unbelief of any kind of destiny that you wouldn’t be able to escape from. And because we are so fond of freedom, most of us believe free will exists.

Maybe free will got so popular because it was the negation of the inevitable destiny that many religions exposed as the only truth, leaving man with no hope to escape a difficult life, it was your destiny, you could just accept it. Christianity developed a crumb of comfort: the hope of a better existence in death… But even within the Christian church the question of free will was present because if it didn’t exist it meant that man couldn’t be taken responsible for his bad actions. And the religions of the book quite like to make you feel guilty, it is their best stock-in-trade.

So, apart from having read Schopenhauer’s essay, in which he demonstrates that free will isn’t free, I experienced life, and for as much as I look into it there hasn’t been anything close to free will. I find particularly representative of his essay (and of my experience) a short sentence he wrote: “Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants”.

But after all who cares? Everybody should believe what they want! How can that particular belief in free will have a negative effect?

So now let’s just consider what precisely motivates this article: the example of domestic violence. Haven’t you ever heard someone say that they didn’t understand why a person stayed in a visibly toxic relationship? Because there is no reason a human would freely choose to live in hell, is there? Would you?

In the most recent researches on trauma consequences, namely PTSD and Complex PTSD, what comes to light is that it conditions one’s future choices in life, one’s reaction to different life stimuli. Even neuroscience seems to point out against any possible free will as Donald Hebb theorised in his book: The Organisation of Behaviour: a Neuropsychological Theory.

So here is one of the perverse effects of believing in free will: free will implies that a person living in a toxic relationship chooses to do so, and they do, but was that choice free? Or was it a choice conditioned by past experiences?

And when people judge another based on this belief in free will, they turn a victim into a willing accomplice, when that person was just following the path that their past created. Sometimes a conjecture of events makes it possible for someone to untie the bonds that kept them in the hell they were. And sometimes there is no such conjecture. Does that make one better than the other?

Free will is just another of those nice ideas that people who have had an easier path like to sustain, because it flatters their ego to believe that they made good choices in life. It is perverse because it compromises the idea that we were all born equal, because it prevents a more empathic society. We are what our life made us, and we should be at least empathic with the people that have had a different path.

Alice S. Dransfield

Further reading – A Schopenhauer essay: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/human/chapter3.html

Utopia : a useless dream or the construction of a future? - By Alice S. Dransfield

Utopia : a useless dream or the construction of a future?

The word "utopia" was first used by Thomas More to describe an imaginary island that had an ideal social and political system. He formed the word "utopia" from the greek word "topos" (place) and the negative "ou", so we could translate the word "utopia" into: a non-place, or a place that doesn't exist.

Since then, the word "utopia" has been used to describe fictitious political and social models imagined by various thinkers. It has also taken a connotation, an utopia is somehow like a dream, nice but unreal...

Has utopia a place in today's society ?

The major criticism made towards all the different utopias imagined throughout the centuries is that they don't take into account reality, "nice ideal, but totally disconnected from the real world" many would say. Or that these social and political systems are so different from the ones we live in that it would be impossible to change society so much in one go.

So if these utopias can't be realised, what is the point in writing them down? No more than any other novel, a nice thing to read and to dream about.

But is that really the only contribution utopias can bring to today's society? For even though it is true that it is very difficult to install radical changes into a social and political system, does that mean it is useless to try?

History has proven to us that social and political systems are not static, and that radical changes can occur (not necessarily for good). And here is, I think where utopias take an important dimension because they are, in my opinion, an obstacle to conservatism. They can become the physical support to new and revolutionary ideas, those ideas that have trouble being expressed via other medias. Presented as dreams, they show to humans that human nature isn't static, that changes, even drastic ones, can at least be produced mentally. And what humans conceive can eventually be achieved.

So utopias, far from being merely useless fictions, participated in the construction of possible futures by offering to our minds new perspectives, free from the bounds of our conservative societies. Opening our minds is not an utopic idea!

Alice S. Dransfield 

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 49 'Open Topic'

Why Democracy never existed

The definition of Democracy by Pericles is as follows: "Democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people". In our societies, Democracy is waved into people's faces as a warrant of a just government, the ideal form of government. But the fantasy of a real Democracy unfortunately fades away in the real world. 

I will expose a brief introduction to Athenian Democracy, and in a second part, two examples of today's use of the word Democracy. Since the rediscovery of the Ancient World during the Renaissance, a cult glorifying anything done in classical times has pervaded our occidental (western) societies. After all the Ancients invented everything didn't they? Mathematics, Philosophy, Democracy...                        

But what was the Democracy created in Athens? The sovereignty (kratos) of the people (dêmos); these people being the Athenians citizens, and that of course implies that not everybody had the right to participate in this first Democracy (women being excluded in the first place). To be Athenian, you had to be born of two Athenians parents, so the access to citizenship was more than limited, and the delegates of the Athenian citizens were chosen through drawing lots. Then we have to remember that Athens was a city-state that governed over a rural territory as well. So apart from the Athenians citizens there were farmers, slaves and foreigners (here I mean any other non-Athenian), and that meant quite a lot of "people" lived under the rules of Democracy but were excluded from it. That doesn't seem like a very just government to me but nevertheless it is the role model for us.                          

Yet alone the concept of a Democratic Republic seems an aberration, for here two different ways of choosing the delegates are apposed. For in the Roman Res Publicae (the affairs of the people) the delegates were elected. And even without considering these discrepancies, taking the example of the French Democratic Republic, the ideal of a government of, for and by the people remains a mere illusion. We vote for a couple of persons that then govern the country as they like, and that send the police and army against us if we dare show too much opposition. And again, the misuse of the word democratic is close to schizophrenia when seen in the context of Constitutional Monarchy, where the monarch is considered the guardian of the Constitution and of Democracy. Was he by any chance chosen through drawing lots for a specified amount of time? 

In any case, the word Democracy, apart from losing its primal meaning, has never been more than an ideal, a wonderful ideal that unfortunately only served on innumerable occasions all sorts of governments to legitimate their oligarchies, monarchies or dictatorships.

Alice S.Dransfield

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Democracy' Issue 41