Day 3 – FREEDOM OR FREE WILL?
Day 3:
Freedom or Free Will?
Live Like an Existentialist
Background
[The human’s] passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness…It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself…
Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original conditon of all justification of existence.
– Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, Part I
Yesterday, you were invited to consider your own existence: specifically, the ways in which it is underdetermined or open. Beauvoir offers a phenomenology of human existence based around the concept of freedom. And this concept seems to fit quite nicely with the notion of “open” existence. We typically use “freedom” to refer to a power or capacity to choose: to approach an open invitation towards multiple paths and select one of those paths pursue. So if Beauvoir thinks human existence is open––every movement could have been otherwise––it sounds like she also thinks it’s free––we use our power of choice to select which movement to make. And she does think existence is free; but her concept of “freedom” actually bears very little to the liberal concept enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, for example, or trumpeted during the French Revolution. Rather, Beauvoir is trying to use the concept phenomenologically: to describe a particular kind of experience. She does not think we ever choose what our consciousness sees, what we desire or value, what projects we are or want to be taking up. But she also doesn’t think we experience any of those events as things that happen to us; I don’t experience my own desires the same way I experience that of others. I experience them as things I make happen. But these events are also, importantly, open and underdetermined; they could have been otherwise. So we experience ourselves as doing things that we cannot necessarily control but could have been otherwise; and we experience our future as filled with movements we will make but cannot in any way predict.
Today's Exercise
Today you will try to pin down the experience of choosing. When does that event happen? When it happens, what does it feel like? Are you aware that it’s occurring while it’s occurring, or do you only become aware that you chose something after the fact? Today, isolate three moments that seem like choices and three moments in which you simply seem to do something without actively choosing. In your journal, try describing each of those six events using our standard, agential concept of freedom: that is, try to describe each event as a moment in which you (the agent) freely chose to follow one path instead of another. Then, try to describe each using Beauvoir’s concept: that is, try to describe each event as a moment in which you experience yourself as doing something you did not “choose” to do. Which mode of description feels like a better fit for which moments?
After completing the assigned exercise for today, click here to access the prompt for tonight’s reflection and to submit your 1-2 paragraph journal entry.