Tearing Ourselves Free
Are we trapped in our own minds? Or is the proof of our free will all around us...
“I am what I am because this is what I willed to be. I could have let the wheels of necessity carry me away. I could have let my convictions be determined by the impressions received from nature, or by the tendency of my passions and inclinations, or by the opinions my contemporaries wanted to impart to me. But this is not what I willed. I have torn myself free.” - Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1795
If I were to suggest that we are all trapped inside our own minds, that free will is an illusion, and that consciousness is merely an elaborate deception, I’d be unlikely to ruffle many feathers. Yet this is an extraordinary situation: rather bizarre contentions have crystallised into dogmas so commonplace that we are willing to accept an utter denial of the validity to our freedom. How can this be?
Midway between today and the writings of Descartes, who set up ‘modern’ philosophy and steered the development of what would come to be known as ‘science’, lies the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Consciousness for Fichte was something only possible within time, requiring an imagination that hesitates in the face of alternate possibilities. Whatever desires we may possess, we demonstrate our freedom through the possibility of resisting these desires. This further implies that there are always distinct alternatives - and thus that the idea that ‘I could have done otherwise’ is unconditionally true. This is radically opposed to the currently popular view of consciousness as merely a kind of post-hoc rationalisation of actions we undertake for other reasons, which you will find in the psychology of Jonathan Haidt or the speculative neurology of Vilayanur Ramachandran.
But wait... what exactly are such deflationists about consciousness trying to claim? Fichte argued that there is a strict limit as to how far we can attempt to represent all human consciousness as a kind of deception. Those who advance such a view must necessarily exclude from its scope their own judgement that human rationality is merely a post-hoc rationalisation. Otherwise, their claim becomes incoherent! Anyone who asserts access to a royal road to truth then attempts to deflate the credence of the thoughts of others simultaneously undermines their own foundations. If this criticism holds universally, it must hold for itself. On this path, nonsense lies.
The possibility for post-hoc rationalisation cannot, therefore, undermine the claim to freedom, or to rationality. The very fact that decisions ever happen reaffirms rationality and thus, as Fichte suggested, freedom. The deterministic perspective that proposes all actions must follow strict causality or else behaviour devolves into pure randomness sets up a false contrast. Action occurs when we make a transition from indeterminacy (not knowing what we shall do) to determinacy (choosing what to do) - and as long as this ever happens as a result of some kind of conceptual framework for acting, such as a code of honour, a habit of virtue, or an ethical norm (including the norms of practices such as the sciences), the contrast ought to be staged between acting on desire and following a principle. This is neither random, nor strictly necessary: there is an unavoidable role for our freedom in determining whether we apply our norms or not.
Yet Fichte’s perspective on freedom also denied that we can lock up consciousness in the prison of individual minds. In order to think or act, we have to be raised by others who already think and act, and can teach us the habits for doing so. It is this background of other people that provides the context for understanding any kind of rationality. This only feels incoherent when we retreat into the illusionary picture of being ‘trapped within our own minds’. We can no more be imprisoned within our minds than the things we see are ‘trapped in our eyes’. Rather, we must necessarily experience our freedom as part of a community of other rational beings. As Fichte memorably put this: “No thou, no I”.
Choosing freedom means more than being able to make decisions, it means acknowledging a summons from a wider world of other free and rational beings, within which free choice takes upon its meaning. Freedom thus entails acknowledging that we are not mere isolated individuals. The very possibility of tearing ourselves free from our desires is grounded upon a very different kind of necessity to that of the determinists: the necessity that we have never been alone.