On the Freedom of Will: Why the Illusion?

BY Dr. H. D. Goonetilleke
(dguna2@gmail.com)

Several readers of my article published in the Midweek Review of ‘The Island’ on Sep 2nd, 2020 under the caption “Prof. Carlo Fonseka and freedom of will” raised queries about the true nature of illusion present in our acts of willing. In order to help the readers comprehend this, I wish to elaborate on the conceptual nature of illusion and make the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s views on freedom of will as clear as possible.

We know ourselves as willing creatures and become aware of our ‘will’ subjectively when we experience ourselves motivated by objects of desire, or aversion. By virtue of self-consciousness, will is seen as the vital force that brings about all our voluntary actions. It is to this will that we need to appeal for all causal explanations of our motives, just as we appeal to forces of electromagnetism and gravity to explain physical interactions in non-living things. To understand why the will is not a thing-in-itself but caused by other fundamental forces, let us first examine Schopenhauer’s philosophy on human cognition.

Our cognitive structure consists of two faculties of cognition, namely (1) understanding and (2) reason. All animals, including humans, understand the world by classifying reality into particulars as representations in space and time, and recognizing cause and effect relationships among these representations. For example, a predatory animal is able to make mental representations of its prey as a moving target in space-time that can react to its advance. In the evolution of mind, this basic cognitive ability of understanding must have come into existence prior to any linguistic thought developed by humans. Thus, understanding happens to be the only faculty humans share with all other animals.

Reason is a ‘higher’ faculty of cognition possessed only by humans, which deals with abstract concepts and language. Because humans can reason in addition to understanding, we are capable of ascending to a higher-level and see that space, time and causality are forms of appearance imposed on reality by the mind. We can make abstract representations of these forms themselves as objects of thought and then visualize classes of these objects of thought as more complex objects of thought. For example, given a specific task we are able to make mental representations of anticipated outcome, past experience, benefits to be gained, loses to be incurred etc. Accordingly, there are many more kinds of objects-for-the-understanding in humans than in non-human animals.

Having considered human cognition it is now possible for us to deliberate on the subject of ‘will’. Will is the self-consciousness that remains in consciousness after we subtract consciousness of outer things.  As explained above, consciousness of outer things includes everything that comes with understanding and reason, which occupy the majority of human consciousness. The only thing left in consciousness when we subtract this dual faculty of cognition is the awareness of our own desires, anxieties and emotions – all aspects of what Schopenhauer calls the will. The content of this limited consciousness of our will, which is closely tied up with outer things only tells us that “I can do what I will.”  The body obeys appropriately as soon as I will, provided there is no physical obstacle to impede my action. Schopenhauer acknowledges this as the physical freedom to act in accordance with our will, and not as a freedom to will.

As for freedom to will, self-consciousness tells us nothing about whether, in a given set of circumstances, the same person with the same character can will any other act. As Schopenhauer puts it, “…self-consciousness cannot even understand the question, much less answer it.” He was certain that nothing in the world occurs without sufficient ground.  All physical occurrences, including human actions, are necessary given their causes and antecedent conditions.  In the case of a human will, the cause is confrontation with a motive, and the precursor condition is the person’s character. Any divergence of will from this ‘necessity’ would not be determined by causes or sufficient ground in general. Thus, free will would be one that would be determined by nothing at all.

Going back to the example I gave in my previous article of picking an item for dessert, the combination of your motive to have a dessert and your innermost desire to stay healthy made you choose a fruit rather than an ice cream. Could you have instead chosen an ice cream for dessert, given who you are, and given the situation in which you found yourself? The answer to this is a firm ‘No’ – you did not have the freedom to will anything else. In order for you to have chosen the ice cream, or do something else, either some feature of the situation needs to be different – like seeing the fruits as rotten – or you would have to be a different person who cares less about your personal health.

But then, why are we always compelled to believe that we have the ability to choose our own actions and be the sole creators of our own behavior? One reason is that we always confuse willing with wishing. A person with a given character, in a given motivational situation, can wish any number of things before, during, or after an act, but can will only one thing at the moment of executing the act. It is the hypothetical nature of the person’s belief that any one of these wishes could have come true that makes him have faith in the freedom of will.

A more fundamental reason for believing that we have the freedom to will lies in the differences in cognitive structures of living organisms. As we know, plants do not have cognitive systems in the way animals do, and thus not having a will to act, they only respond to external stimuli of its environment as dictated by their genes. Animals excluding humans on the other hand, do possess a cognitive system of understanding the world via representations of external objects and thus able to respond to these mental stimuli as dictated by their genetics. In both cases, we can easily see the external stimuli accountable for their observed behavior. For instance, your pet dog attacking the neighbor’s cat can be explained by the circumstances that preceded the event and genetic programming of your dog. You will certainly not hold the dog fully responsible for its behavior as you believe that it could not have acted differently under the given circumstances.

Then why do we think only humans can act in a way that gives them a free choice in their response to external stimuli, with an unexplained freedom of will, and be responsible for all their acts? This is because our cognitive system with the addition of ‘reason’ to the faculty of understanding generates a host of abstract representations as stimuli which cannot be observed by anyone from outside. Therefore it is not possible to identify the associated causal connections directly explaining a particular behaviour in a clear-cut manner. Accordingly, it may look as if the human being’s actions are inexplicable and uncaused. That we can choose freely is just a strong illusion stemming from the complexity of the cognitive system in human beings.

Schopenhauer saw this very clearly when he said “I cannot will what I will”.