The freedom in man

An excellent work against freedom; so good, that Doctor Clarke replied to it with insults. Freedom of indifference. Freedom of spontaneity.

Deprivation of freedom, a very common thing. Powerful objections against freedom.

According to Newton and Clarke, the Being infinitely free communicated to man, His creature, a limited portion of that freedom; and here by freedom one does not mean the simple power of applying one’s thought to this or that object, and of beginning motion;

One does not mean merely the faculty of willing, but that of willing very freely, with a full and effective will, and of willing sometimes for no other reason than one’s will itself. There is no man on earth who does not sometimes feel that he possesses this freedom.

Several philosophers think in the opposite way; they believe that all our actions are necessitated, and that we have no other freedom than that of sometimes willingly bearing the chains to which fatality attaches us.

Of all the philosophers who wrote boldly against freedom, the one who, without doubt, did it with the most method, force, and clarity is Collins, a magistrate of London, author of the book On the Liberty of Thinking, and of several other works as daring as they are philosophical.

Clarke, who entirely shared Newton’s sentiment on liberty, and who moreover defended its rights as much as a theologian of a peculiar sect as a philosopher, responded sharply to Collins and mixed so much bitterness into his arguments that he made people believe that at least he felt the full strength of his enemy’s reasoning. He reproaches him for confusing all ideas, because Collins calls man a “necessary agent.”

He says that in that case man is no agent at all; but who does not see that this is mere quibbling? Collins calls a “necessary agent” anything that produces necessary effects. Whether one calls it agent or patient, what does it matter? The point is to know whether it is necessarily determined.

If one can find even a single case where man is truly free by a freedom of indifference, that alone would be enough to decide the question.

Well then, what case shall we take, if not that where one wishes to test our freedom? For example, I am asked to turn right or left, or to perform some other action toward which no pleasure draws me, and from which no distaste turns me away.

I choose then, and I am not following the dictate of my understanding, which represents the better to me: for there is here neither better nor worse. What then am I doing?

I am exercising the right the Creator gave me—to will and to act in certain cases for no other reason than my will itself. I have the right and the power to begin motion, and to begin it in whichever direction I want.

If one cannot assign in this case any other cause for my will, why seek one elsewhere than in my will itself? It thus seems probable that we have the freedom of indifference in indifferent things.

For who can say that God has not given us, or could not have given us, this gift? And if He could, and if we feel in ourselves this power, how can one assert that we do not possess it?

I have often heard this freedom of indifference called a chimera: they say that to determine oneself without reason would be only the share of madmen; but they do not consider that madmen are patients who have no freedom at all.

They are necessarily determined by the defect of their organs; they are not masters of themselves, they choose nothing. He is free who determines himself. Now, why should we not determine ourselves by our will alone in indifferent things?

We possess the freedom that I call spontaneity in all the other cases, that is to say, when we have motives, our will is determined by them, and these motives are always the last result of understanding or instinct: thus, when my understanding represents to me that it is better for me to obey the law than to break it, I obey the law with spontaneous freedom, I voluntarily do what the last dictate of my understanding obliges me to do.

One never feels this kind of freedom better than when our will fights our desires. I have a violent passion, but my understanding concludes that I must resist that passion; it shows me a greater good in victory than in enslavement to my taste.

This latter motive prevails over the other, and I fight my desire by my will; I obey necessarily, but willingly, this command of my reason; I do not do what I desire, but what I will, and in this case I am free with all the freedom such a circumstance can leave me.

Finally, I am not free in any sense when my passion is too strong and my understanding too weak, or when my organs are disordered; and unfortunately this is the case in which men often find themselves: thus it seems to me that spontaneous liberty is to the soul what health is to the body; some people have it entirely and durably; many lose it often, others are sick all their lives;

I see that all the other faculties of man are subject to the same inequalities. Sight, hearing, taste, strength, the gift of thinking, are sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker; our liberty is like everything else—limited, variable, in a word a very small thing, because man is a very small thing.

The difficulty of reconciling the freedom of our actions with God’s eternal foreknowledge did not trouble Newton, because he did not engage in that labyrinth; once freedom is established, it is not for us to determine how God foresees what we will do freely.

We do not know how God currently sees what is happening. We have no idea of His way of seeing—why should we have any of His way of foreseeing? All His attributes must be equally incomprehensible to us.

One must admit that there arise against this idea of liberty objections which are frightening.

First, one sees that this freedom of indifference would be a very frivolous gift if it extended only to spitting to the right or to the left, and to choosing even or odd. What matters is that Cartouche and Sha-Nadir have the freedom not to spill human blood. It matters little that Cartouche and Sha-Nadir are free to advance the left foot or the right.

Next, one finds this freedom of indifference impossible: for how can one determine oneself without reason? You will; but why do you will? They propose even or odd, you choose even, and you see no motive for it; but your motive is that even presents itself to your mind at the instant you must make a choice.

Everything has its cause: therefore your will has one too. One can therefore only will as a consequence of the last idea one has received.

No one can know what idea he will have in a moment: therefore no one is master of his ideas, therefore no one is master of willing or not willing.

If one were master of it, one could do the opposite of what God has arranged in the chain of things of this world. Thus each man could change, and would in fact change at every instant the eternal order.

This is why the wise Locke does not dare pronounce the name of liberty; a free will appears to him only a chimera. He knows no other liberty than the power to do what one wills. The gout-stricken man has not the freedom to walk, the prisoner has not that to leave: the one is free when he is cured; the other, when the door is opened to him.

To shed greater light on these horrible difficulties, I suppose that Cicero wishes to prove to Catiline that he ought not conspire against his country.

Catiline tells him that he is not master of himself; that his last conversations with Cethegus impressed in his mind the idea of conspiracy; that this idea pleases him more than another, and that one can only will in consequence of one’s last judgment. But you could, says Cicero, take with me other ideas, apply your mind to listen to me and to see that one must be a good citizen.

I try in vain, replies Catiline; your ideas revolt me, and the desire to assassinate you prevails. I pity your frenzy, Cicero says to him; try to take some of my remedies. If I am frenzied, replies Catiline, I am not master of trying to heal myself. But, says the consul, men have a reserve of reason which they can consult, and which can remedy that disorder of the organs that makes you a criminal, especially when that disorder is not too strong. Show me, replies Catiline, the point at which this disorder can yield to the remedy.

For myself, I admit that from the first moment I conspired, all my reflections have led me to conspiracy. When did you begin to take this fatal resolution? asks the consul.

When I lost my money gambling. Well! could you not prevent yourself from gambling? No; for the idea of gambling carried the day in me that day over all the other ideas; and if I had not gambled, I would have disturbed the order of the universe, which decreed that Quarsilla would win four hundred thousand sesterces from me, that she would buy with them a house and a lover, that from that lover a son would be born, that Cethegus and Lentulus would come to my home, and that we would conspire against the republic. Fate made me a wolf, and it made you a shepherd’s dog; fate will decide which of the two must slaughter the other.

To that, Cicero could only have replied with a Catilinarian oration; indeed, one must admit that one can hardly respond with anything other than vague eloquence to objections against liberty: a sad subject on which the wisest even fear to dare think.

One single reflection consoles: it is that, whatever system one embraces, to whatever fatality one believes all our actions are tied, one will always act as if one were free.