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I V . F r e e d o m
N o n - e x i s t e n t i a l i s t T h e o r i e s
To judge by the use to which the word “freedom” is most often put in ordinary discourse, a man is free in the measure that he can achieve chosen goals with a minimum of effort. Conversely, in the measure that he discovers obstacles in his way he is not free. If one has chosen to become a doctor, then one is free to do so on condition that one has been accepted by a medical school, has the money to pay the tuition, possesses the native endowment required to pass the courses, and so on. If, however, one does not have the mental equipment to pass the courses, cannot pay the tuition, or cannot find a medical school that will accept one, then one is not free to become a doctor.
In political discussion this sense of the term “freedom” is also the one which most often comes to the fore. If a man has freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, this means that if he chooses to speak or to assemble with others for political purposes he will encounter no legal obstacles. He will not be clubbed by the police or thrown in jail. When the socialist criticizes capitalistic societies by declaring that in these societies the rich man is as free as the poor man since both could starve to death in a public park if they so chose, he is at one and the same time implying that the laws of capitalistic societies place no obstacles in the way of the person who chooses to starve to death and that in a truly free society no
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one would ever encounter serious obstacles in the effort to acquire a decent subsistence.
Despite the fact that the most common meaning of freedom both in ordinary discourse and in political discussion is ability to achieve chosen goals, traditional philosophers rarely used the term that way. The most common meanings of the term in traditional philosophizing are known technically as “freedom of self-realization” and “freedom of indeterminism” or “freedom of the will.” The common source of both of these concepts of freedom is Christian doctrine. And although they are apparently antithetical it is not uncommon to find them linked together in a single philosophical system. It would not be wholly correct to say that ancient philosophers knew no problem of freedom, but the problem of freedom which most Western philosophers claim to have discovered among the ancients is undoubtedly their own.
One arrived at the notion of freedom of self-realization in roughly the following way. Since God is both omniscient and omnipotent, God both foreknew and foreordained that whatever happens would happen. What a man does may thus have as its immediate cause the man’s own individual choice, but its ultimate and only true cause is the will of God. It is as if a man’s individual history were originally an idea in God’s mind, to which God gave physical reality by an act of creation. Man, of course, cannot and ought not attempt to tinker with God’s handiwork. Freedom, therefore, cannot in fact and ought not by right consist in an active effort to achieve individually chosen goals. This is impossible and impious. True freedom can only exist for the man who humbly acknowledges the individual history or nature which
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God gave him and who observes with wholehearted approval the temporal realization of God’s eternal idea of him.
The theory of freedom of self-realization has many different versions, some of them secular. The existentialists would probably argue that the secular versions, most of which were developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are merely hangovers from an earlier day, a result of the fact that after God’s death men tried to go on living as if nothing had happened. Be that as it may, only one specific version of the theory need be considered here. It is that of Leibniz.
First, however, it should be noted that when with the birth of the Christian God Platonic Ideas and Aristotelian essences were absorbed in the divine intellect, the concept of essence was gradually enlarged. For the ancient world essences were always and only of universals; individuals could not be known in the strict sense of the term precisely because there were no individual essences. Christian philosophers, however, were bit by bit led to the concept of individual essences. The Christian God is after all a personal god who supposedly sees into each individual’s mind and heart.
Let us then assume that at the moment of creation God has present to mind a complete catalogue of all possible individual essences, and let us further assume that of the many possible individual essences only certain combinations can logically coexist. Which of these combinations will God allow to pass into concrete existence? Obviously the best of all possible combinations! This, in brief, is Leibniz’s doctrine that the physically existing world is the “best of all possible worlds.” But of interest in connection with the problem of freedom is the fact that the individual essences which God chose for physical incarnation must have that history and only
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that history which God foresaw for them. If after creation individuals decided to alter the course of their divinely appointed history, they would completely upset God’s calculations. God has to know down to the last detail what each of these individuals will do in order to be sure that they are logically “compossible” and also to be sure that he has chosen the best possible combination of compossibles. God knew in advance, to use two of Leibniz’s own examples, that Adam would eat the apple and that Caesar would cross the Rubicon. He even knew the exact moment at which these events would occur.
It follows that the serf who complains he is unfree because he cannot realize his personally chosen goal of enjoying privileges reserved by his master is simply attempting to upset God’s plan. It is for him to accept his status by recognizing that there is no other logically possible role for him than that of a serf and that he is a part of the best of all possible worlds. His individual history, harsh though it may be, is merely a temporal unfolding or historical realization of his very own individual essence. To wish that his life had a different pattern would be like wishing for the logically impossible. It would be as if Adam wanted to be Eve without ceasing to be Adam.
Some philosophers have argued that if God had to choose for creation from a limited set of uncreated individual essences and that if furthermore God was limited to choosing one or another set of compossibles from within the larger set, he would not be omnipotent. The answer was in part that a limitation upon any being’s power is by definition an external obstacle and that since uncreated essences are ideas in God’s own mind he cannot be limited by them. The other part of the
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answer is that so-called logical limitations are not genuine limitations. Who, for instance, would lament the impossibility of believing that the product of one plus one is three or feel that his power had thereby been diminished? God’s power is no more limited by the fact that he must observe the principles of logic than by the fact that he cannot through an arbitrary act of will make virtues out of wanton murder and incest. If God’s will were not subordinate to his intellect, he would not be God. He would be a monster.
One arrived at the notion of freedom of indeterminism or freedom of the will by arguing from the premise that if God foreordained that we would sin then we are not responsible for our sin and that if we are not responsible for our sin, then it is unjust of God to punish us eternally in hell. God, however, does punish many of us with eternal torment in hell, and God is not unjust. Our sin cannot, therefore, have been foreordained. Our sin must be the result of individual volition. It is we as individuals who by our own undetermined choices sin.
The problem for Christian defenders of the freedom of indeterminism was to explain how free will is compatible with God’s omniscience or foreknowledge. The answer is owed to St. Augustine, who declared that God does not literally foreknow. God is outside time; for him there is only one ever-present moment. He sees all things—past, present, and future—non-discursively and sub specie aeternitatis in a single glance. To foreknow he need not therefore foreordain. That St. Augustine should have argued in this way is somewhat surprising, since he is the most famous of all defenders of the dogma of predestination, which seems to imply complete foreordination. But as remarked at the outset,
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it is not unusual for a philosopher to hold both to a doctrine of freedom through self-realization and a doctrine of free will. Christian philosophers like St. Augustine who wish simultaneously to uphold the omnipotence of God through the doctrine of predestination and to uphold the justice of God by regarding man as the true cause of his sin are almost compelled to adopt some version of both theories of freedom.
Despite the enormous importance which they attribute to human freedom, Sartre alone among the existentialists has elaborated a systematic and detailed theory of freedom. Fortunately, the brilliance and originality of his theory compensates for the relative neglect of the problem by others. There is some question as to whether other existentialists would accept Sartre’s views on freedom. This much, however, can be said with certainty. There is little in Sartre’s theory which contradicts anything said on the subject by other existentialists, and there is nothing in it incompatible with the major premises of existentialist thinking. Moreover, as with all existentialists, Sartre’s position is closer to that upheld by defenders of freedom of indeterminism than to either the common-sense position or the position of those who uphold freedom of self-realization, and it is doubtful whether any contemporary philosopher who took the pains to develop a detailed theory of freedom based on the idea of undetermined choice could come up with anything better.
The term “freedom” is as ambiguous as the term “happiness” and the term “rationality.” It does not, however, have a single generic meaning from which the others have been derived, even though the several specific meanings of the term are loosely associated. Nor have the existentialists decided to abandon the word because of its popular and historical
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connotations. All of them use it, and all of them use it to refer to something which they consider to be a genuinely existing and valuable feature of the human condition. In this respect the existentialists are like the rest of us, who consciously or unconsciously select from the several meanings of the term the one which we believe to stand for a reality of great human importance. If we believe that one of the established meanings of the term either does not stand for a reality or does not stand for a reality of great value, we reject that meaning as improper. The best introduction to the existentialist theory will, therefore, be a consideration of the reasons which induced the existentialists to reject non-existentialist concepts of freedom.
The existentialists do not deny that man has the power to achieve chosen goals by his own efforts. Underprivileged workers do sometimes achieve better working conditions, prisoners do sometimes escape from prison, would-be doctors do sometimes become doctors, and so on. What Sartre calls “the coefficient of adversity,” i.e., the resistance presented by the external environment, is not always insuperable. What leads the existentialists to reject or ignore the common-sense conception of freedom is their belief that the power to achieve particular goals is not itself a great value. And that belief rests upon three others.
First, man is a being who exists only by projecting himself beyond the present into the future. To exist is to posit goals and to pursue them. There is no escape from our condition as flight or pursuit toward projected values. This means that if one empirical desire is fulfilled, we will and must replace that desire with another. A state of complete desire fulfillment would be equivalent to death. A part of the tragedy of the
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human condition is that man is a desiring being and that desire is a state of lack or incompletion. “That the human reality is lack,” says Sartre, “the existence of desire as a human fact could suffice as proof.”1;2 This argument derives, of course, from traditional Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. The gods, it will be recalled, cannot desire, because desire is lack, and the gods lack nothing. A state of lack is incompatible with a state of perfection. According to the existentialists the common man has defined freedom on the basis of a mistaken notion that there is a state of happiness, satisfied desire, or absence of frustration which can be achieved by fulfilling empirical desires. But in so far as human consciousness is always characterized by lack, there can be no suspension of the unhappy consciousness. Man must desire in order to exist, and in the act of desiring he constitutes himself as incomplete and unfulfilled.
Moreover, this incompleteness or unfulfillment is necessary if man is to be free even in the sense of being able to overcome obstacles. This point was made effectively by Nietzsche, who asked: “How is freedom measured?—By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it takes to maintain oneself on top.” Sartre expresses the same point in his own language. Freedom, he says, “itself creates the obstacles from which we suffer.” An insignificant public official in Mont-de-Marsan without means may not have the opportunity to go to New York if that be his ambition. But the obstacles which stand in his way would not exist as obstacles were it not for his free choice of values: in this case, his desire to go to New York. It is freedom itself
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which in posing its ends—in choosing them as inaccessible or difficult of access—causes our location to appear as a . . . restriction upon our projects. . . . It is therefore of no avail to say that I am not free to go to New York because of the fact that I am an unimportant functionary in Mont-de-Marsan. It is on the contrary with respect to my project to go to New York that I situate myself at Mont-de-Marsan.2
Sartre makes the same point in still another way:
In order for the act to be able to allow a realization, the simple projection of a possible end must be distinguished a priori from the realization of this end. If conceiving is enough for realizing, then I am plunged in a world like that of a dream in which the possible is no longer in any way distinguished from the real. . . . If the object appears as soon as it is simply conceived, it will no longer be chosen or even wished for. Once the distinction between the simple wish, the representation which I choose, and the choice is abolished, freedom disappears too.3
Second, even if man could succeed in fulfilling all his particular, empirical desires, he would still not achieve happiness; for the desire of particular, empirical objects in the world is always suspended from and merely a specification of an overarching desire for the impossible. This point was
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developed in the chapter on the human condition. Man’s fundamental project to be God, to be an in-itself-for-itself without any duality between the two aspects of his being, can no more be satisfied through empirical desire than a man’s Oedipus complex can be resolved by dreaming that a soldier kills a czar. The argument here is not simply that the satisfaction of one empirical desire requires us to take up a new goal or that we are necessarily committed to a “round of desire.” The argument here is that a satisfied desire in the sense of an achieved desire does not bring satisfaction in the sense of pleasure or happiness.
Third, even if man could escape from the round of desire and could find pleasure or happiness in a state of total desire fulfillment, this could only be at the cost of intensity and the existentialist values. And, of course, the intense life with the existentialist values would be superior to a state of contentment or happiness.
The existentialist argument against freedom through self-realization rests primarily upon the belief that man has no ready-made or prehuman nature, no divine essence which is to be automatically realized. Sartre has even defined existentialism as the view that “existence precedes essence.” In Leibniz’s view, says Sartre, “Adam’s essence is for Adam himself a given; Adam has not chosen it; he could not choose to be Adam. Consequently he does not support the responsibility for his being. . . . For us, on the contrary, Adam is not defined by an essence since for human reality essences come after existence.”4 In other words, man makes his own history by his own choices, and his true life history or individual essence could not conceivably be known or defined until after his death.
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Here, too, however, questions of value as well as questions of fact are involved. Believers in freedom of self-realization belong to the Platonic tradition. Their chief interest is in an eternal object—in the case of Leibniz, God. One of the things they hope to achieve by their theory of freedom is to preserve the dignity of the eternal object: in Leibniz’s case, it was a matter of exalting God by demonstrating his omnipotence. The existentialists, on the contrary, are perfectly willing to let God and other eternal objects take care of themselves. They are interested in the dignity of the individual person; and according to them a being who does not personally support the responsibility for his individual history, who does not choose himself, is without dignity.
The existentialist elaboration of the theory of freedom of indeterminism is and has to be very different from classical versions. But it will be helpful at this point before discussing the differences to indicate how the existentialists meet the chief common-sense objection to any theory of freedom of indeterminism. That objection was stated with great literary skill by Voltaire in Candide. Voltaire maneuvers his hero Candide into a position such that he must choose between thirty-six series of lashings or a dozen bullets in his brain. At this point Voltaire writes: “Although he protested that man’s will is free and that he wanted neither one nor the other, he had to make a choice; by virtue of that gift of God which is called liberty he determined to run the gauntlet thirty-six times.”
Voltaire wrote Candide as a satire on Leibniz’s doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds, and since Leibniz is well known as an advocate of freedom of self-realization it might be thought that this particular attack is misdirected. In
163Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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fact, however, Leibniz shares with St. Augustine a general theory of freedom in which freedom as self-realization and freedom as undetermined choice both figure. It was, therefore, entirely appropriate that Voltaire ridicule the latter concept of freedom in a satire on Leibniz.
The whole point of the quoted passage is to emphasize that what man most wants is, not the power to choose, but rather the power to accomplish chosen goals, and that a theory of freedom which fails to take this into account rests upon a faulty sense of values. The privilege of choosing is as nothing compared to relief from the necessity of choosing between unpalatable options imposed by the environment. The secure and tranquil life is one in which the individual faces no extreme situations requiring that a difficult choice be made.
Although Voltaire himself does not go this far, it could even be argued that in so far as one must choose between various courses of action, it is better that the choice be compelled than free. If every time one tried to figure the sum of two plus two one had to choose an answer, it would be impossible to get anywhere; we should be grateful that we are compelled by the laws of logic to accept four and only four as the correct answer to the problem. Similarly in more important matters of human concern. There is a story of a Greek mother who was obliged to choose which one of three sons held as hostages was to be executed. It would, perhaps, be better for her if she did not have to choose at all. But she must. What makes her problem of choice so terrifying is that nothing apparently compels or determines her to choose one son over the others. Presumably she loves all three sons equally well. If one of them were a black sheep whom she hated with all her heart, the choice would be less terrifying. In fact, given hatred of
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one and love for the others, it is a nice question in what sense she could be said to choose at all. She would probably “have no choice.” It would be impossible for her to select any but the son she hated.
Of course, Voltaire was an Enlightenment thinker, and like the ordinary man, he believed that the route to happiness lies in the elimination of external obstacles to the accomplishment of human desires. If, however, one is an existentialist, if one believes that life is ineradicably tragic, if one believes that the external environment poses nothing but difficult options and that whatever option one chooses one is still unhappy, if one believes that the fundamental problems of life are like those of Candide or the Greek mother, then almost the only value which can be salvaged is dignified choice. And the more difficult the choice, the greater is the opportunity to demonstrate one’s dignity.
It will be remembered that for the existentialists man is free by ontological necessity and that any attempt to escape from freedom is necessarily self-defeating. In one sense, then, freedom is a universal human phenomenon which does not permit of degrees. At the same time, however, the existentialists have an axiological doctrine of freedom. According to this doctrine, one is more or less free depending upon the extent to which one is aware of freedom as an ontological necessity and ceases to project escape from freedom. An individual exposed to a situation which obliges him to become conscious of his freedom is thus more free than the individual not so obliged.
A rather famous Sartrean text, often regarded as incomprehensible or stupid, is merely a logical extension of
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these ideas. Writing of life in France during the war years, Sartre says:
We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. . . . And because of all this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. . . . At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man is mortal.” And the choice that each of us made of his life and his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death than. . . .” All those among us who knew any details concerning the Resistance asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex: it is this limit of his own liberty, his capacity for resisting torture and death.5
The existentialist is thus at the opposite pole from the ordinary man. The ordinary man believes he is most free when he is not obliged to choose or when circumstances
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clearly dictate which choice is best. The existentialist believes that man is most free when he recognizes that he is obliged to choose. The ordinary man says that freedom is valuable because it leads to happiness, security, contentment. The existentialist says that freedom is valuable because through it man may realize his own dignity, and triumph over the unhappiness to which he is irrevocably condemned. The ordinary man tries to ignore the unpleasant facts of life, and if he is exposed to an “impossible situation” where no choice could conceivably be a choice of happiness, he is without recourse. The existentialist refuses to ignore the unpleasant facts of life, and he spends most of his time trying to find some technique by which to triumph over them.
M o d e r n V e r s i o n s o f D e t e r m i n i s m
One difference between existentialists and classical exponents of freedom of indeterminism parallels a difference between existentialists and exponents of freedom of self-determination. Both of these classical positions were inspired by a desire to justify the ways of God to man and to buoy up the authors’ faith in God. In order to accomplish their goals Leibniz and those who adopted his solution tended to reduce the individual to hardly more than a figment in God’s imagination. The exponents of freedom of indeterminism, on the other hand, accomplished the same goals by making man responsible for his sins. Logic, of course, requires that a being responsible for his sins be also responsible for his virtues. But this logical consequence of the theory was rarely drawn. Calvinists expatiate at great length about the individual’s personal responsibility for his sinfulness while at the same time stressing that the good a man does is done by the grace of God. The intent of exalting God and humbling man is as
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apparent in classical statements of the freedom of indeterminism as in classical statements of freedom of self-realization. No such intent will be discovered among the existentialists.
This difference between existentialists and their predecessors in theory of freedom is, however, of little importance so long as the problem at hand is that of determining whether undetermined choice is a genuine feature of the human reality. The differences relative to this problem are of a different order. Since these differences derive from an attempt to revamp the classical theory in order to meet modern objections, they will be most easily grasped after a brief restatement of the classical theory and of the objections to it.
The first thing to observe is that in the classical theory not all of an individual’s choices are free. Ordinarily the individual’s choices are determined by an objective situation together with a subjective motive. To take a prosaic example, if a person chooses one apple over another, it is usually because there are ready at hand a certain number of apples one of which is redder and juicier than the others (objective situation) and because the person likes or enjoys red and juicy apples (subjective motive). The question of free choice arises only when the objective situation and a subjective motive determine or dispose one to act in a manner which one apprehends in some way to be wrong or injurious to one’s own best long-range interests. If, for instance, a starving beggar came along or if the doctor had ordered one not to eat apples, then one might decide to resist the determining influences of the empirical situation and the subjective motive; and it is at this point alone that the question of undetermined choice arises.
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How, then, can one resist the determining influences? The apprehension that an envisaged act is wrong or injurious cannot by itself do the job. This mental apprehension is an item of knowledge; it belongs to the rational faculty of man which in some way participates in the immutability and imperturbability of the eternal objects. Knowledge, being eternal, cannot move us to act in the finite world. Besides, there are cases in which people know that something is bad for them and decide not to do it without having any success at all in executing their decision. Alcoholics and dope addicts know this; and so does anybody who has tried unsuccessfully to quit smoking. Neither can the passions or emotions do the job; these are among the very determining influences which we are trying to resist. There must, then, be a third faculty, which like the passions can move us to act but which unlike the passions is in the service of reason. This faculty is called the will.
An individual’s choice is then free when it is in accordance with a decision by reason and has been executed by the will. It should be noted that the term “choice” as used here denotes, not the decision of the rational faculty, but the act of the reasoning being. Moreover, the choice or act is free only in the sense that it is not determined by external circumstance or by passion; for it is determined by a decision of reason and a movement of the will. This would seem to destroy the case being argued for. But the reasoning is that since man is by definition a rational being with free will, an act determined by reason and will is determined by the actor and is free in the sense that the individual is the author of it. By contrast, an act inspired by external environment or by passion, the latter being merely an accidental feature of the human personality, is not free because the determining factors are not properly
169Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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parts of the individual’s own person. Since the aim of the classical theory was simply to show that the individual may legitimately be held responsible for his behavior and since an individual was assumed to be responsible for behavior of which he is or could be the author, exponents of the theory usually rested their case here.
It is not necessary for an understanding of the existentialist theory to review all the many objections raised against the classical view. Those urged by medieval and early modern thinkers have almost no interest for us, in so far as they are based upon much the same premises as those of the thinkers against whom the criticisms were directed. The so-called faculty psychology or tripartite division of the human psyche into reason, will, and passion was one of these. So was the assumption that reason or the knowing faculty of man is sharply opposed to the passions and could not move man to act without the aid of the will. So, too, was the assumption that man is essentially a reasoning being and that the function of reason is to keep the passions under control.
Since Hume it has become customary to regard reason as “the slave of passion,” its function being to satisfy human desires, not to keep them in check. Since the time of the Romantic movement it has become customary to regard passion as an essential and perhaps even more important attribute of the person than reason. And since the time of Freud the tripartite division of the soul into reason, will, and passion has been replaced by a tripartite division of the psyche into id, ego, and superego. Furthermore, throughout this whole period there has been relatively little interest in proving that man is the ultimate author of his actions, but a great deal of interest in proving that the methods of modern science which
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presuppose determinism can be applied to the area of human behavior.
One popular modern position, closely associated with scientism and epiphenomenalism, may be called the theory of determinism by the passions. On this view there is no free will. The classical argument for freedom of the will was based on the apparently observable fact that decisions of reason do often lead man to resist the solicitation of passion plus the classical premise that reason, the immortal and eternal faculty of mankind, is incapable of participating directly in the finite world of everyday affairs. Those who hold to the theory of determinism by the passions retain the classical philosophical premise involved but deny that decisions of reason influence conduct in any way. The actual causal determinant of behavior is passion. For instance, a man may have a passionate interest in being a doctor and at the same time a passionate interest in being a lawyer. After long deliberation the man may decide to become a doctor and subsequently actually become one. But the decision was not the cause of his behavior. At the very most it will be regarded as a link in a causal chain going back to the passions and ultimately to external circumstances. But more usually it is regarded as an epiphenomenon, that is to say, a reflection or ratification in consciousness of a causal process to which it does not belong at all. What happened according to the theory of determinism by the passions is that the passionate desire to become a doctor was stronger or weightier than the passionate desire to become a lawyer, with the result that the desire to become a doctor finally triumphed. Leibniz once spoke of the uncreated individual essences as if they had certain weights and as if they were all trying to push themselves into existence. Those with the greatest weight were physically
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incarnated. Similarly, the desires or passions have relative weights, and when an individual acts on one rather than another it is because the one adopted has more weight than the one rejected.
In arguing against the classical theory persons who hold to the doctrine of determinism by the passions will often point out that the concept of the will is vague and useless. If reason cannot move man to act by itself and if reason does none the less in some way determine man to act, then the concept is indispensable. But what direct empirical or scientific reason is there for believing that the will exists? Frequently, rational decisions do not result in overt behavior. Frequently, a man decides to do something but finds that he is unable to act on his decision. Consider again the case of the man who decides to quit smoking but fails to do so. Various names exist for such cases: compulsion, incontinence, weakness of the will. Now, the argument is that if the will were an observable or knowable entity, there ought to be some reasonable criterion by which one can decide whether the person who decides to quit smoking but fails is a victim of passion or is simply weak-willed. But no such criterion exists. There is no way of knowing whether a person who fails to execute a rational decision has failed to do so because he is compelled by the passions or because he has not tried hard enough. The concept of the will cannot, therefore, stand for an observable entity or serve any useful purpose in the analysis of human motivation.
Sartre accepts this argument against the classical theory of freedom of the will, pointing out that neither the Stoics nor Descartes nor anyone else who has preached control of the passions by the will has ever explained how this control was to be achieved. But Sartre uses a similar argument against the
172Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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doctrine of determinism by the passions. What, asks Sartre can possibly be meant by saying that one passion is stronger or has more weight than another? Passions are not physical objects, and physical objects alone can be weighed. The only conceivable reason for saying that one passion is stronger than another in any given individual is that the individual actually chooses to act on one rather than the other. If the passions had observable weights, then the individual would know in advance what choices he would make by simple introspection of his passions. The fact, however, is that he does not know what choice he will make by any such method. It is a mistake to talk about passions as having weights in the first place, but if one must use this language then it should be recognized that “passions have only as much weight as we give to them.”6
Freudianism is another modern position which arose as a reaction against the classical theory of indeterminism and with respect to which Sartre defines his own views. According to Freud, the human psyche has three parts. The id consists of congenital drives or instincts such as the libido or love impulse, the instinct of aggression, and the death wish plus repressed desires, i.e., once fully conscious but now forgotten desires. The superego is that dimension of the self which internalizes parental commands and social precepts. The ego is the rational and deliberative level of the human psyche. The id and superego belong to the unconscious; the ego alone is conscious.
The Freudian theory may be called the theory of determinism by the unconscious, since according to it the primary determinants of human behavior are the drives, instincts, or desires residing in the id. Freud does, however, attribute some
173Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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efficacy to the ego, i.e., the conscious and deliberative side of the human personality. In view of the knowledge it possesses about the physical and social environment, the ego, usually with the cooperation of the superego, does often prevent impulses of the id from expressing themselves in overt behavior. In the normal personality the ego acts on the unconscious whenever unconscious desires would lead to the performance of an act which the ego recognizes to be destructive or injurious to the total personality. It is, for instance, the ego which restrains an individual from acting out aggressive impulses against his father in Oedipus-complex rivalry. It does so because it knows that overt expression of that impulse could lead to his own destruction or to some damaging deprivation.
The restraint placed upon damaging unconscious impulses does not, however, result in their disappearance. Either the unconscious impulse is sublimated, that is, directed toward a different object from which the individual has less to fear, as when love for the mother is converted into a love of poetry, or else the unconscious impulse is repressed, in which case the impulse will find expression in dreams or some form of neurotic behavior. Furthermore, Freud was very dubious about the extent to which techniques of sublimation may be employed and also about the degree of satisfaction which the individual could derive from the sublimation of unconscious drives. Like the existentialists, Freud is a part of the anti-Enlightenment.
The major disagreement between Freud and the existentialists has to do with the role of choice as opposed to unconscious impulse in determining human behavior. Despite the qualifications discussed above, unconscious impulse is for
174Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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Freud the original and major determinant of human behavior. For the existentialists the original and ultimately the only determinant of human behavior is free and conscious choice.
Sartre uses two principal arguments against Freudianism. The first of these has to do with the phenomenon of patient resistance. It often happens, according to Freud, that the patient resists the analyst, often even refusing to continue therapy, just as the analyst is on the verge of discovering the true cause of the patient’s neurosis. Sartre does not deny that this phenomenon occurs; on the contrary, he accepts psychoanalytic reports to this effect implicitly. He says, however, that if the human personality were constituted in the manner Freud claims it is, this phenomenon could not occur.
Which part of the self, he asks, does the resisting? It cannot be the unconscious complex or impulse in the id. “The complex as such is rather the collaborator of the psychoanalyst since it aims at expressing itself in clear consciousness.”7 Neither can it be the ego which “by a conscious decision is in pursuit of psychoanalytic therapy.”8
Finally, it cannot be the unconscious superego or, as Freud also calls it, the censor. “The censor in order to apply its activity with discernment must know what it is repressing. . . . The resistance of the patient implies on the level of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are leading, and an act . . . by which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to the psychoanalytic hypothesis which aims at it. These various operations . . . imply that the censor is conscious.”9
The second argument has to do with the fact that psychoanalysts frequently offer as evidence of their analysis
175Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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an intuitive sense of its correctness on the part of the patient. Again, Sartre does not deny the reality of this phenomenon or the evidential value of the patient’s intuitive grasp of his own problem. What Sartre contends is that so long as one holds to the Freudian concept of the human personality one can explain neither the phenomenon itself nor its evidential value. At a certain state in treatment, says Sartre:
the resistance of the subject suddenly collapses and he recognizes the image of himself which is presented to him as if he were seeing himself in a mirror. This involuntary testimony of the subject is precious for the psychoanalyst; he sees there the sign that he has reached his goal; he can pass on from the investigation proper to the cure. But nothing in his principles or in his initial postulates permits him to understand or to utilize this testimony. Where could he get any such right? If the complex is really unconscious—that is, if there is a barrier separating the sign from the thing signified—how could the subject recognize it? Does the unconscious complex recognize itself? But haven’t we been told that it lacks understanding? . . . Shall we say on the other hand that it is the subject as conscious who recognizes the image presented? But how could he compare it with his true state since that is out of reach . . . ? At most he will be able to judge that the psychoanalytic explanation of his case is a probable hypothesis, which derives its probability from the number of behavior patterns which it explains. His
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relation to this interpretation is that of a third party, that of the psychoanalyst himself; he has no privileged position.10
In sum, “the psychoanalyst doubtless has some obscure picture of an abrupt coincidence of conscious and unconscious. But he has removed all methods of conceiving of this coincidence in any positive sense.”11
Still a third position with respect to the issues under consideration has made its appearance since the Western world rejected the fundamental premises in terms of which the classical doctrine of freedom of indeterminism was formulated: Since, however, Sartre has not explicitly dealt with this third position, it will be best to reserve discussion of it until after Sartre’s own theory has been presented.
T h e E x i s t e n t i a l i s t T h e o r y
The chief difference between Sartre’s and classical theories of free choice can be summarized in a single sentence: “Man,” says Sartre, “cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free, or he is not free at all.”12
According to classical theories, human behavior is most often determined by an objective situation and a subjective motive; it is only when reason indicates that behavior so determined is morally wrong or injurious to one’s best long-range interests that free choice comes into play. Sartre, on the contrary, denies that either objective situations or subjective motives ever really move us to act. The objective situation moves us to act only in so far as we apprehend it, and our apprehension
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of an objective situation is itself determined by a free choice of goals. Similarly, passions or subjective motives can be said to move us only in a derivative sense, since passions have only the weight we give them. We are not playthings of our passions; it is we who choose them.
No great harm is done at the level of popular discourse if we say that the conversion of Clovis is to be explained in terms of his subjective passion, that is, his ambition for fame and power, together with an objective situation, that is, the existence of the Church as a powerful political ally. In the same way no great harm is done if we explain that a man joined a socialist party because he believed that in the years to come socialism “will become the principal historical force” (objective situation) and also because he has certain subjective motives such as “a feeling of pity or charity for certain classes of the oppressed, a feeling of shame at being on the ‘good side of the barricade,’ . . . or again an inferiority complex, a desire to shock his relatives.”13
It is obvious that passions or subjective motives do in some sense exist. The mistake consists in regarding them as “little psychical entities inhabiting consciousness”14 and exercising an original causal influence rather than as manifestations of a prior choice. It is also obvious that there are objective, environmental situations. The mistake consists in believing either that these objective situations can move us to act independently of the way in which the reflective or deliberative consciousness apprehends them or that consciousness simply mirrors an already structured reality. It would be nearer the truth to say that the world mirrors consciousness than that consciousness mirrors the world; and
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it is of course our personal apprehension of the world, not the world itself, which effectively determines behavior.
Deliberation, says Sartre, is merely “an evaluation of means in relation to already existing ends.”15 Clovis no doubt had an objective appreciation of the political and religious state of Gaul, the relative strength of the episcopate, the great landowners, the common people, and so forth.
Nevertheless this objective appreciation can be made only in the light of a presupposed end and within the limits of a project of the for-itself towards this end. . . . In a word the world gives counsel only if one questions it, and one can question it only for a well-determined end. Therefore, the objective appreciation, far from determining the action, appears only in and through the project of an action. It is in and through the project of imposing his rule on all of Gaul that the state of the Western Church appears objectively to Clovis as a cause of conversion. In other words the consciousness which carves out the cause in the ensemble of the world has already its own structure; it has given its own ends to itself.16
The true cause, the real motive of human behavior is thus an original project of being freely chosen at the moment one wrenches oneself away from the in-itself to create one’s own world. And it is in terms of this original project of being and it alone that human behavior receives its ultimate explanation. “Heredity, education, environment, physiological
179Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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constitution” are “the great explanatory idols of our time,”17
but they explain nothing. The only genuine cause of human behavior is the individual’s fundamental project of being. And that project is a “choice, not a state”;18 it is not buried in “the shadows of the subconscious.” It is rather a “free and conscious determination”19 of oneself.
Great care must be taken to avoid misinterpretation. Freedom, for Sartre, does not consist, as it did for Dostoyevsky, in mere caprice. The individual’s fundamental and freely chosen project of being expresses the “totality of his movement toward being, his original relationship to himself, the world, and others.” Man, Sartre says, “is a totality, not a collection.”20 An act of caprice by which the individual belies his original choice and renders his behavior inexplicable is totally impossible. On the contrary, given knowledge of an individual’s fundamental project of being, it is possible to understand “the most insignificant and the most superficial aspects of his conduct.”21
For Sartre, as for Leibniz, “the problem of freedom is placed on the level of Adam’s choice of himself,”22 not on the level of Adam’s choosing or not choosing to eat the apple. Given Adam’s choice of himself, he could not but eat the apple. Furthermore, for Sartre, as for Leibniz, a different subsidiary choice of Adam would imply another Adam, which in turn would imply another world. “But by ‘another world’ we do not mean a particular organization of compossibles such that the other possible Adam finds his place there, but rather that the revelation of another face of the world will correspond to another being-in-the-world of Adam.”23 The individual’s choice of himself is, of course, subject to change in moments
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of anguish. None the less Sartre agrees with Leibniz in rejecting a conception of freedom as mere caprice.
Another misinterpretation to be avoided consists in confusing the consciousness which makes the choice of an initial or fundamental project of being with the reflective or deliberative consciousness, which is subsequent to that choice. Sartre does not accept the Freudian division of the self into conscious and unconscious. He does, however, himself distinguish between what he calls the “reflective” and what he calls the “nonreflective” consciousness; and he insists that it is at the level of the nonreflective consciousness that we make our fundamental choice of ourselves. “It is necessary to stress the fact that this [man’s original choice] is in no way a deliberate choice. This is not because it would be less conscious or less explicit than a deliberation, but on the contrary because it is the foundation of all deliberation and because . . . a deliberation requires an interpretation in terms of an original choice.”24
It follows that “a voluntary deliberation is always a deception.” When I deliberate, “the die is already cast.” If I find myself deliberating, “it is simply because one of the features of my original project is to make myself aware of the motives of my conduct by deliberation rather than by some other form of discovery (by passion, for example, or quite simply by action).”25 It will readily be seen that Sartre goes even farther than Freud with respect to the ultimate inefficacy of the reflective consciousness.
Sartre recognizes, however, that the reflective consciousness can decide to set itself up in opposition to the nonreflective consciousness and that sometimes it can succeed in thwarting the aims of the nonreflective consciousness, just as Freud
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recognized that the ego can oppose the id and by so doing alter the individual’s behavior. To explain these facts without compromising his belief in the ultimate inefficacy of reflective consciousness, Sartre reasons as follows: A man, he says,
can make voluntary decisions which are opposed to the fundamental ends which he has chosen. These decisions can be only voluntary—that is, reflective. . . . Thus, for example, . . . I can . . . decide to cure myself of stuttering. I can even succeed in it. . . . In fact I can obtain a result by using merely technical methods. . . . But these results will only displace the infirmity from which I suffer; another will arise in its place and will in its own way express the total end which I pursue. . . . It is the same with these cures as it is with the cure of hysteria by electric shock treatment. We know that this therapy can effect the disappearance of an hysterical contraction of the leg, but as one will see some time later the contraction will appear in the arm. This is because the hysteria can be cured only as a totality, for it is a total project of the for-itself.26
Sartre’s ultimate proof that an individual’s behavior is fully determined by a free, prereflective or nonreflective choice of himself is, of course, the experience of anguish in which the individual finds himself compelled to reconstitute his being in utter isolation and without external help. But he offers three additional arguments. One of these is contained in the statement: “A deliberation requires an interpretation in terms
182Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-24 10:22:51.
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of an original choice.” The point is that if an individual is trying to decide whether to be a doctor or a lawyer, his final decision can be explained only on the assumption that there was an overarching value or desire which guided the process of deliberation. In the pamphlet “Existentialism Is a Humanism” Sartre tells of a young man who came to him during the war for advice. He wanted to know whether he should stay in France with his mother who had no other means of support or to leave France to join Free French forces abroad. Sartre says that he did not advise the man because one person can no more decide for another than the individual can decide for himself at the purely reflective level of consciousness. The man, he says, had already made up his mind; it was in terms of his original choice that he chose an adviser.
The second argument is based upon “the frequent upsurge of ‘conversions’ which cause me totally to metamorphose my original project. These conversions, which have not been studied by philosophers, have often inspired novelists. One may recall the instant at which Gide’s Philoctetes casts off his hate, his fundamental project, his reason for being, and his being. One may recall the instant when Raskoinikoff decides to give himself up.”27 The point of this argument appears to be, as an American philosopher who on this score holds a position similar to Sartre’s has put it, that “when we repudiate our constitutive values altogether and forge an entirely new personality, a naked, empty self must do the choosing.”28 In other words, radical conversions do exist and cannot be explained as a product of rational deliberation, passion, or environmental circumstances.
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The third argument is based upon “the twofold ‘feeling’ of anguish and of responsibility.” For most persons “consciousness” means what Sartre calls “reflective consciousness,” and they might very well argue that if we are not aware of having made a choice of ourselves on the level of the reflective consciousness, we could not be aware of it at all. Moreover, we are not aware of choosing ourselves on the level of the reflective consciousness. To the reflective consciousness our behavior appears to be determined largely by passion and environmental circumstance. Sartre is aware of this possible line of attack. “We are fully conscious of the choice which we are,” he says. “And if someone objects that . . . it would be necessary to be conscious not of our-being-chosen but of choosing ourselves, we reply that this consciousness is expressed by the twofold ‘feeling’ of anguish and responsibility.”29
By the sense of responsibility Sartre means the sense of being “the incontestable author” of one’s being.30 The feeling of anguish is an awareness either “muted or full-strength” that “an abrupt metamorphosis of my initial project is always possible.”31 Now, for the person who has known the full-strength experience of anguish there can be no question, according to Sartre, that one is the free author of one’s actual behavior or that one could by a subsequent free choice totally change one’s initial project. Sartre comes close to defining the experience of anguish as one which brings a realization of these facts to the very surface of consciousness. But how is the person who has not personally had the full-strength experience of anguish to know that it is possible? Sartre’s answer is not as clear as might be wished; but it appears to be as follows. The prereflective or nonreflective awareness of anguish and responsibility is manifested on the surface of
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consciousness in the sense of pride or shame; and it is perfectly clear even to the reflective consciousness that we are often proud or ashamed of features of our behavior which we have not chosen at that level of consciousness.
The homosexual, for instance, often insists that he is compelled to behave as he does, that he is not the author of his homosexuality. On the reflective level of consciousness there is no awareness of having chosen this behavior, and often the reflective consciousness is actively engaged in resisting the homosexual inclinations. At the same time, however, the homosexual experiences a strong and fully conscious sense of shame. Why, however, should he feel ashamed of his behavior if he has not chosen it? And if he has not chosen it on the reflective level of consciousness, must he not have chosen it on the nonreflective level of consciousness? What is his shame but a muted consciousness of anguish and responsibility? Is it not an implicit awareness that he is the incontestable author of his behavior and that it is possible for him, if he so chooses, to abandon his homosexuality? Shame under these circumstances is an indisputable fact; and once the inescapable logical consequences have been made explicit, it is no longer possible to deny the facts which the existentialists claim to be revealed in the full-strength experience of anguish. Speaking of the person subjected to torture, Sartre writes: “No matter how long he has waited before begging for mercy, he would have been able despite all to wait ten minutes, one minute, one second longer. He has determined the moment at which the pain becomes unbearable. The proof of this is the fact that he will later live out his abjuration in remorse and shame. Thus he is entirely responsible for it.”32
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C r i t i c i s m
The third non-existentialist position on the problems under discussion is widely held by Anglo-American philosophers. Most of the theory underlying this position was worked out by the pragmatists, and for lack of a more precise or convenient label it will be referred to here as the pragmatic position.
For the pragmatists, as for the ordinary man, freedom consists in the power to achieve chosen goals. The pragmatists do not deny that there may be some undetermined choices, but this question does not much interest them. What matters is that man be able to achieve the goals he has actually set for himself, regardless of whether his decision to pursue these goals was determined or undetermined. The pragmatists are not interested in God or sin. And, as they see it, human dignity consists not in the anguished sense of total responsibility for one’s being but rather in the full exercise of those faculties by which the individual can hope to achieve well-being for himself and his fellow men. The question of determinism arises in this connection only because in order to achieve general well-being human behavior must be at least partially determined. If it were not, prediction and consequently control over the future course of events would be impossible.
The pragmatists are not the least bit disturbed by the existentialist contention that happiness is impossible of achievement and that freedom even in the sense of power to achieve goals has as its logical condition the existence of external obstacles. If by happiness one means a state of complete desire fulfillment and if by freedom one means a state of being such that the external environment offers not
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the slightest resistance to human effort, then happiness and freedom are impossible of achievement. The existentialist arguments are unassailable. But the pragmatists do not believe in either the desirability or the possibility of happiness and freedom so conceived.
Happiness for the pragmatists is not a state of sated desire. It is a state of being such that a man can look forward to the realization of his desires with relative ease. The existentialists have taken over from the classical tradition the idea that desire as such is a state of lack or imperfection. Perhaps so, say the pragmatists; it depends upon what you mean by lack or imperfection. But it is certain that a state of desire is not necessarily a state of unhappiness, misery, or psychic distress. A man who is only moderately hungry and who can look forward to eating a good meal at no great sacrifice to purse or health is not unhappy. Some people enjoy the anticipation of a good meal more than the actual eating. Similarly, the student who is working for a college degree need not be unhappy because the goal is as yet unachieved; some students deliberately prolong their student days because they find student activities pleasant. Moreover, there is no reason to define happiness so narrowly as to bar the pleasures of pursuit and risk. Some people find happiness in danger; that is their privilege. But it is clear that most men’s well-being would be promoted if the number of obstacles presented by their social and natural environment was considerably reduced.
Dewey was so displeased with the traditional associations of the word “happiness” that he abandoned it altogether. He agrees, none the less, with other pragmatists in holding that the object of human striving is a state of being which permits the satisfaction of desire with relative ease, “relative ease”
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being defined differently for each individual according to the nature of his desires, the nature of his environment, and his own temperamental bias.
The mistake of the existentialists is similar to that of philosophers in the classical tradition. They pushed a concept to its very limits and found themselves with nothing but a meaningless and self-contradictory concept on their hands. Had the existentialists, however, exercised a little more care and had they taken seriously their own strictures against empty abstractions, they would not have found themselves with a concept requiring to be rejected.
On the question of freedom the pragmatists make out a similar case. By freedom they do not mean the possibility of doing anything at all that comes to mind. As Justus Buchler, the most profound of contemporary American thinkers in the pragmatic tradition, has pointed out, the degree of freedom and the degree of restraint are roughly equivalent. To be able to achieve chosen goals, one must first be able to choose. But if the environment is not well structured, i.e., if the range of choice is not limited and determined by external circumstances, then one hardly knows what one wants. One can, of course, wish for anything at all, as a child may wish to jump over the moon. But a wish does not become a want until one has determined that and how the goal may be achieved. In a state of complete anarchy or disorder the environment would be so complex and the result of one’s behavior so unpredictable that one could have little adequate knowledge of means to ends, consequently few well-defined wants, and consequently only a small degree of freedom.
The mistake of the existentialists was once again to push the concept of freedom as ability to achieve chosen goals to its
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furthest limits, only to discover that it was empty. Had they remembered the elementary fact of both private and political life that the desirable state of affairs is one with a maximum of order and a maximum of freedom and were they less disposed to think in terms of rigid antitheses, they would have taken care not to empty the word “freedom” of its concreteness. We are not less but more free because there are laws against murder and because there are police around to enforce them. If we want to kill someone, laws and police are obstacles which limit our freedom. But if, as is more often the case, we want to walk without fear down the streets, these “obstacles” liberate us. Freedom to achieve chosen goals thus implies, not the absence of obstacles, but the existence of the right kinds of obstacles in the right amounts.
The most important pragmatic tenet, however, concerns the role of what Freud called the ego and what Sartre called the reflective consciousness. The pragmatists agree with almost all modern thinkers in regarding man as fundamentally a desiring or passionate being. It would be impossible to understand any major human pursuits or even to define them without taking human affectivity into account. Happiness and freedom are not just abstract concepts, they are states of being toward which men passionately strive; and it is as such that they must be defined. None the less, the pragmatists differ from the existentialists, the Freudians, and the proponents of determinism by the passions in attributing substantial efficacy to rational reflection.
It is not that the pragmatists are under any illusion as to the extent to which men do in fact employ their intelligence; nor are the pragmatists excessively optimistic about the possibility of humankind ever making full use of intelligence.
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Their position is simply that the exercise of intelligence is almost always a necessary condition of general human well-being and that, barring unfavorable environmental conditions it would also be a sufficient condition. If men have not utilized their intelligence to create a substantially better world, it is largely because so few men believe in it. Either in the manner of traditional philosophers and the world’s major religions they seek a short cut to happiness through eternal objects; or else like the Roman plebs and America’s Beats they settle for cheap sensations and kicks rather than more solid satisfactions requiring an expenditure of mental effort; or else again they wallow in the sense of their own helplessness, calling it the tragic sense of life, like the existentialists. It is the flight from intelligence, not the human condition, which is truly tragic.
The first major argument against the efficacy of the reflective consciousness was that the only proper objects of human thinking are eternal and immutable objects and that since like alone knows like, the mind itself must be eternal and immutable, consequently unable to act in the finite world of everyday affairs. This argument has little cogency for twentieth-century man and need not detain us.
The second major argument was based on the fact of compulsion or incontinence. Here the problem is not to explain how man the thinker can relate to the nonthinking world but rather how man the thinker can act upon his passions. It is clear that often he cannot. According to the theory of determinism by the passions he never does. If, however, the classical philosophical premise that the mind cannot move us to act is squarely rejected, what grounds are there for maintaining that conscious human decisions never
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act upon the passions? The empirical fact that they sometimes do not do so proves only that. And if we admit as evidence of a noncausal relationship between conscious decision and passion the fact that a decision to stop smoking is sometimes not successful, then one must also admit as evidence of a causal relationship between conscious decision and passion the fact that a decision to stop smoking is sometimes successful.
To say that A is the cause of B is to assert simply that A and B are two natural types of events which have been observed to be correlated in certain types of circumstances. The only problem then is to find out what types of decisions correlate with what types of affective experience and under what circumstances. There can be no empirical, much less philosophical, barrier to construing the reflective or deliberative consciousness as a genuine cause of human behavior.
Empirically we have nothing to go on but what we actually observe either through introspection or through the physical senses. And what we actually observe, says the pragmatist, is that just as a decision to lift one’s arm is followed by the lifting of the arm except in cases of physical paralysis, so a decision to stop drinking is followed by the execution of the decision unless we are paralyzed by habit or some other empirically describable obstacle. The nonalcoholic who decides not to drink does not drink; it is only the man who has been drinking heavily for a long time and under very special circumstances who cannot act on a decision to stop drinking. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that most actual limits of rational decision have been produced by a past failure to exercise reason and that these limits may someday
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be removed by the future exercise of reason. Had the alcoholic fully reflected upon the possible consequences of his drinking when he first noted the symptoms of alcoholism, he might never have found himself so hopelessly in the grip of the habit. And if modern research into the problem of alcoholism is successful, it may one day be possible to cure even the confirmed alcoholic.
Of course, limits to the power of rational decision are many and varied; habit is only one of them. But if the limits have actually been observed, they are in every case empirical, not a priori. And if it is reasonable on pragmatic grounds to believe that the course of nature will remain constant, it is also reasonable on pragmatic grounds to believe that man can triumph over empirically observed limits of reason by a more persistent application of reason. Both assumptions are required to promote scientific inquiry, and there is not the slightest shred of evidence to the contrary. In fact, the belief that man can triumph over empirically observed limits of reason is not simply an assumption; it is an empirically founded generalization. By the use of reason man has obviously overcome many limits imposed upon him by the natural environment; no less obviously he has learned to control some aspects of human behavior.
It can be plausibly argued that these past triumphs of reason have not brought man happiness; but the pragmatist can plausibly argue that this is not because of an intrinsic defect in reason. On the contrary, there is nothing reasonable about using scientific knowledge to build atomic bombs instead of hospitals or to sell toothpaste instead of books. If reason has failed to benefit us, it is simply because men have misused it.
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No extensive criticism of existentialism from the pragmatic point of view exists, but it is not difficult to see what form that criticism would take. Consider the three arguments for a fundamental choice of oneself which Sartre offers to the person who has not known the full-strength experience of anguish. The first was to the effect that the process of rational deliberation in which the individual attempts to choose between two or more envisaged lines of conduct cannot have a successful issue unless there be an antecedently given overarching desire in the light of which he can evaluate the envisaged lines of conduct. Why, however, the pragmatists would ask, should it not happen that the process of deliberation itself be a means by which the individual shapes his desires? If, for instance, in the process of deliberation the person who is trying to choose between a career as a doctor or a career as a lawyer discovers that there is a third profession which combines most of the advantages he had hoped for in the first two professions, one might be tempted to say that this third profession is the one he had always really wanted to pursue from the beginning. Would it not, however, be more correct to say simply that a new desire had emerged as a result of rational reflection?
In Being and Nothingness Sartre made a concession to the pragmatic point of view. In discussing existential psychoanalysis, the method for discovering an individual’s fundamental project of being, Sartre declared that the “principle of this psychoanalysis is that man is a totality and not a collection; he therefore expresses himself in his totality in the most insignificant and the most superficial aspects of his conduct.” It obviously follows from this principle that all reflective choices as well as all overt acts are rigidly determined by the fundamental choice. Later, however, Sartre
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qualified this principle. There are, he says, certain voluntary choices which he calls “indifferents.” If, for instance, I become fatigued on a camping trip, this is because of my original project of being, but “to relieve my fatigue it is indifferent whether I sit down on the side of the road or whether I take a hundred steps more in order to stop at the inn which I see from a distance. This means that the apprehension of the complex, global form which I have chosen as my ultimate possible does not suffice to account for the choice of one possible rather than another.”33 The example Sartre gives, as also his use of the term “indifferents” to describe choices of this kind, would indicate that the concession is not an important one.
The passage quoted, however, concludes as follows: “There is not here an act deprived of motives and causes but rather a spontaneous invention of motives and causes, which placed within the compass of my fundamental choice thereby enriches it.”34 Now, if one grants that a reflective decision can enrich one’s fundamental project, there is no reason to deny that it can also alter it. The example of the young man who had to choose between remaining in France or joining the French forces abroad was introduced earlier to illustrate Sartre’s contention that when one begins to deliberate the die is already cast. The man could not, said Sartre, even decide whom to consult for advice unless he had already made his choice. Significantly, however, Sartre also uses this example to illustrate the necessity we are under to “invent.” And indeed why not? If the man had already decided, why was it so difficult for him to decide? If there was an overarching choice which demanded that he choose one possibility rather than another, why did he not know it? And certainly in this case the choice is not aptly described as an “indifferent.”
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The second argument was based on radical conversions. But are there radical conversions? Does it ever happen that an individual rejects all of the values and desires which had hitherto constituted his being? Unless this can be shown, conversion phenomena can always be explained as the end products of a long struggle between competing scales of value or competing desire systems. Moreover, a choice of oneself made by a naked and empty nothingness in the face of a massive, undifferentiated, meaningless in-itself would appear to be as impossible as lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.
Sartre seems to have come around to this view himself. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where he attempts to reconcile his doctrine of total freedom with his Marxism, Sartre introduces the expression “field of possibilities” and tells us that freedom must operate within this field. “The field of possibilities,” he says, “is the end toward which the agent surpasses his objective situation. And this field, in its turn, is closely linked to historical and social reality. . . . We ought not to regard it as a zone of indetermination but, on the contrary, as a highly structured region, which depends upon the entire historical situation.”35
The third argument was based on the experience of shame, guilt, and pride. The homosexual and the person who yields to torture have no reflective awareness of having chosen their behavior; yet they experience shame because of it. Must it not, therefore, be assumed that they have chosen their behavior on the nonreflective level of consciousness? There is, however, another explanation of feelings of shame. One could say with great plausibility that the homosexual and the person who has yielded to torture feel ashamed not because
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they have a prereflective awareness of being the authors of their behavior, but rather because they are aware that others do or may despise them for it. And the fact of their being an object of contempt for others may very well be something for which they are in no way responsible. Sartre himself offers this alternative explanation of shame. “It is,” he writes, “before the Other that I am guilty. . . . But this guilt is accompanied by helplessness without this helplessness ever succeeding in cleansing me of my guilt.”36
There remains, then, only the most basic of Sartre’s arguments, that founded on the full-strength experience of anguish. On the pragmatic view the ultimate external realities are individual beings presented to the physical senses: mountains, trees, houses, airplanes, dogs, human beings, and so forth. These objects are related to one another in a variety of ways, and although there is much confusion in the external world a number of regularities may be discovered. Man comes into this world as one being among others, but during the course of his existence he discerns causal patterns among natural events and gradually becomes an active, desiring being. These things the pragmatist claims to know by simple observation or common sense. For Sartre, on the other hand, the ultimate external reality is an undifferentiated mass, the in-itself, and man comes into the world as a pure nothingness face to face with the in-itself. This Sartre claims to know through the experience of anguish.
What, then, is the validity of anguish as opposed to daily, common-sense observation? Why should anguish be said to be revelatory of the nature of things? Christian mystics often claim to have had a direct experience of the divine presence in much the same way that other people have a direct experience
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of physical objects. As a rule, pragmatists have not denied the reality of the mystic experience. They have simply denied that the experience had revelatory value. The feeling of a divine presence does not prove the existence of God. It often happens that we have an almost palpable sense of the presence of another person in the same room with us even though that person left unobserved several minutes earlier. Why should the feeling of a divine presence not be a phenomenon of the same order? In like manner, the pragmatists would probably not deny that Sartre and others have had an experience in which the world of ordinary objects and the personal values which they say sustain that world are dissolved. What they would deny is that this experience has weight as evidence of the true nature of man and external reality.
Because it is impossible to observe colors at night, it does not follow that colors have no real existence. Because a person with jaundice sees an object as yellow, it does not follow that the object is in fact yellow. Similarly, because in the experience of anguish the world disappears from view, it does not follow that the world is merely a thin crust of meaning imposed upon an in-itself or that the ultimate external reality is really an undifferentiated mass. When in ordinary discourse we say that something appears to be A but is really B, we confirm our statement by recourse to one of two criteria. A thing, we say, is really what it appears to be to the normal or standard observer under normal or standard conditions. The real color of an object, for instance, is the color the object has for a person with ordinary vision who observes it in ordinary light. Here the criterion is the democratic one of how a thing usually appears to the majority of human beings. Other times we have recourse to a second criterion. We say that the real
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color of an object is the color it has for the person with exceptionally good vision who observes it under a strong, pure white light. Here the criterion of reality is that of the specialist, who wishes to make the maximum number of possible discriminations. By either of these criteria the experience of anguish must be rejected as a means of discovering the nature of reality.
The existentialist would point out in answer that the criteria of reality employed by the pragmatist presuppose his own system of values and his own ontological commitments. It is because pragmatism is essentially a philosophy for the ordinary man that the democratic criterion is employed; and it is because the ordinary man believes in the value of science and has in the modern age entrusted himself to the experts that pragmatism also uses the specialists’ criterion. At the same time, it is because the pragmatist has already decided that physically observable objects are the ultimate realities that he frames his criteria of reality with respect to individual physical objects. His criteria of reality are, therefore, no better than his system of values and his ontology; and to employ these criteria to refute a rival system of values and a rival ontology is merely to beg the question.
One could, as many members of the analytic movement have done, attempt to show that the pragmatic criteria of reality are among the rules governing the usage of terms such as “real” and “reality,” and that it is therefore an abuse of language to employ these terms in any other sense. But again the existentialists would retort that the rules governing ordinary discourse are merely reflections of the ordinary man’s values and unconscious ontological commitments. The person who
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rejects the ordinary man’s values and ontology is, therefore, under no obligation to observe them.
If, of course, the pragmatist must presuppose his own axiology and ontology in order to argue against the existentialists, then the existentialist will have to presuppose his axiology and ontology to argue against the pragmatist. It would appear that we have at this point reached an ultimate impasse. What is certainly clear is that no simple arguments of either a logical or an empirical character will provide an exit. As Buchler has shown, an escape from an impasse of this kind between rival philosophical schemes can only be effected by providing a philosophical framework sufficiently broad and generous to permit thinkers in both schools to incorporate whatever they still consider to be true and valuable after they have traced the full implications of their initial beliefs and value orientations.
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