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Asher
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 477
| Posted 4/11/2008 1:39 AM (GMT -6) |   | How about looking at a different conception of where the faculty of free will is located? I don’t remember who wrote it, but someone on the board has written something to the effect that we probably only rarely ever use our free will. And when we locate our use of free will primarily in our choice of actions, we can readily see why that impression would be had.
For the past year and a half or so, I have been studying the philosophy of Ayn Rand, Objectivism. And whatever you think of her, she was a unique thinker and has many valuable insights. I am a theist, an open one, and have had to do some modifications of Rand’s philosophy to make it tenable to me. Computer operating systems have patches and service packs to fix flaws and I have found that at least two major service packs are needed to make Objectivism functional for me…one right at the beginning of her philosophy in the realm of metaphysics (the formulation of a functional equivalent to some of her concepts), and another the use of Martin Buber’s I-Thou to act as a governor throughout her philosophy.
Here’s what Rand says about free will:
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Man’s…consciousness is volitional.
that which you call "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.
When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not conscious.
Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death
A process of thought is not automatic nor "instinctive" nor involuntary—nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind
The faculty of volition operates in regard to the two fundamental aspects of man's life: consciousness and existence, i.e., his psychological action and his existential action, i.e., the formation of his own character and the course of action he pursues in the physical world.
A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one's rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa.
A man's volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity "man." Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.
Man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific identity. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of identity, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man's consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the identity) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man's choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.)
From Leonard Peikoff, a leading objectivist:
Volition subsumes different kinds of choices. The primary choice, according to Objectivism, the one that makes conceptual activity possible, is the choice to focus one’s consciousness.
Let me introduce the concept of “focus” with a visual analogy. A man cannot do much with his faculty of vision until his eyes are in focus. Otherwise, his eyesight gives him only a blur or haze, a kind of visual fog, in which he can only discriminate relatively little. Although the power of visual focus is not possessed by newborn infants, they acquire it very early and soon automatize its use. As adults, therefore, our eyes are automatically focused; it takes a special effort for us to unfocus them and dissolve the world into a blur.
A similar concept applies to the mind. In regard to thought, as to vision, the same alternative exists: clear awareness or a state of blur, haze, fog, in which relatively little can be discriminated. On the conceptual level, however, one must choose between these alternatives. Intellectual clarity is not given to man automatically.
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If this is the case then we do make use of our free will every day, and even possibly from moment to moment in any given day. Our free will can be said to expand in growth as our consciousness expands, or maybe the potential for an expansive free will is latent in us all along and we actualize it in greater and greater growth.
When we are making a choice of action that is unique or rare, we are more closely attuned to our volitional consciousness and so that choice of action has the smell and flavor of free will to it; but when we are presented with a choice of action that we have made many times before or that is common to us in some other way, then we have automatized the action and it is a step removed from the act of volition that originated it and led to it’s automization, but it is the product of the exercise of our free will.
We decide to focus or not to focus. We decide what to focus on. We can be overwhelmed with concerns in a certain direction and yet we do have the power to think of something totally unrelated to what the concern is. Yes, there is the distraction of that concern, but we can tell ourselves to focus on this other thing, and we can actually focus on that other thing. We can change the way we think about things. This underlies the whole program of Neural Linguistic Programming. We have the power to direct our volitional consciousness, and our volitional consciousness tells the servants in it’s command (our other powers and abilities) what to do and when to do it.
The locus of free will being found in our consciousness, we also can ask about the locus of consciousness, or rather in what certain ways a consciousness functions. It is found in an individual. No one else shares my consciousness and I do not partake of theirs save through the intermediary of communication. And that leads to an endorsement of individualism. This is an area in which I have left step with Greg Boyd and the sermons from Woodland Hills over the past few months. Individualistic outlook, and concepts associated with it (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness), has seemed to become a curse word.
And why not? We look at some people who can only be described as individualistic, and we see some pretty ugly things coming from them. And we want to flee from that outlook. So, we turn to some form of collectivism, whether political, economic, social, or even a spiritual collectivism. And we seek the greatest good for the greatest number, because seeking the greatest good only for ourselves, looking out for Number One is just so apparently a dead end. But yet, collectivism fails every time it is tried. Why? Because the locus of our free will, our thinking, our spark plug, our power is in an individualistic consciousness, and we are messing with the spark plug gap. We may get some sparkage, but it is way less…way less…than what we know is there. And there is some sense in which we have to know that we are standing before God as Kierkegaard’s “Single One” not joined to a Borg collective. We have experiences of cooperating with others and achieving great things, but it is more like being a member of the Federation and bringing our unique strengths as components of a corporate whole, but our individualistic consciousness is the locus of our strength. So, we can act corporately, but not collectively.
And Martin Buber navigates us through the Scylla and Charybdis. We crash on the rocks of collectivism and we crash on the rocks of individualism. But Buber shows us the correct way through. Using his concepts of I-It and I-Thou, I put forward that what we stare at in dismay is not individualism in toto, but at an I-It individualism that doesn’t recognize the Thouness of others. And that the answer is an I-Thou individualism, that stands at the helm of it’s own power, but recognizes the realm of the interhuman.
This can be fleshed out much further, especially if one is familiar with Buber’s works:
I and Thou, Between Man and Man, The Knowledge of Man
RobPost Edited (Asher) : 4/11/2008 1:43:10 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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