Love is the only conception of free will worth having

At the end of the Divine Comedy, a fourteenth century epic poem by the Italian Dante Alighieri, the poet, having described a journey through the harrowing scenes of hell, the rigours of purgatory, stands before the divine light. The journey ends with the admittance that nothing could be said to transcribe the beatific vision into words only that, in the last line of the poem: “…my desire and will were moved already, like a wheel revolving uniformly — by the Love that moves the sun and other stars.”

This idea, that the highest possible state of being equites to a kind of union with divine love describes a possibility of seeing the will that is entirely unlike current iterations of what it means to be a chooser in the world. From the perspective of determinism and materialism there is not strictly speaking such a thing as free will. If your brain is entirely composed of interacting molecules following fundamental laws then everything that happens or appears to happen on a ‘higher level’ is determined by those laws. It gets complicated when we introduce the idea of compatibilism, which involves a variety of suggestions as to how kinds of will can exist within this framework and go back to the stoics or even to religious thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas who articulated a kind of compatibilism. Sometimes compatibilism is framed in the context of ‘motivations’ rather than absolute will, as Arthur Schopenhauer is quoted to say: “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

But what is the will? At least framing definitions is important. The will can be seen as requiring two things, firstly the actual fact of a ‘fork in the road’ in time, where the possibility exists for you to do one thing rather than another, and secondly the perception of your own inner agency, the relation of your feeling of self or personhood to the outcome of what you do. The former involves questions of the laws of reality, whether two possibilities can exist, the second involve questions of the self, the actual existence of a chooser inside the mind.

Many attempts to use the mysteries of quantum physics to justify the former freedom of the will have been tenuously made but the peculiarities of quantum mechanics are just that, and they do not provide us with the kind of this or that answers to these problems we might wish. Not only that but it’s possible they never will. Part of that is due to what we are going to define here as a ‘level problem’. That is, how do events on a small scale meaningfully relate to events on a large scale? This might seem obvious in some areas, we can analyse the molecule-level structure of a virus for example and understand how it causes at a large level things that we call ‘symptoms’. But when it comes to the mind things are more complicated. If you are reading this article the chances are you believe in rational thought, the ability to think logically, sequentially and reach conclusions that can be in some way relied upon, even if they are not absolute. But to believe that you have to have an a priori belief in firstly the possibility of truth, and secondly the ability of thoughts to relate to thoughts on a non-reducible level. When we use a word like ‘spoon’ it is a symbol referring to an object, but the contents of that thought have an actual reference, it can’t be one bundle of atoms making reference to another bundle of atoms — something actually exists on the level of thought that is not reducible to underlying mechanism. You cannot say that the meaning is there on the level of reference but not there on the level of mechanism or material. Being conscious seems to produce a kind of being not the same in likeness to what we might ‘think of’ as inanimate reality, or ‘stuff’. This is why the metaphor of a computer for the brain seems to break down when it comes to consciousness, no reference point in a computer is actually a reference point, in the sense that because there is no ‘perceiver’ within the system things are not actually things to the computer, it is us who perceive them as so. ‘Data’ and ‘algorithm’ are both reducible in our ‘level problem.’ This is the difference between ‘information’ and ‘data’. It seems the actual meanings of words are like trees falling in a forest, it may be there or it may not, but it is us who need to be there to make it so. Consciousness is meaning. Reality is more than just stuff.

The second arm of freedom involves the concept of the ‘self’. Initially there is no question that whatever the ‘self’ is, we have to yield to the fact that we are contingent. One argument against the truth of religion is called the ‘postcode lottery’, the idea that if you were born in England in the seventeenth century you’d probably be a Christian, in India a Hindu, in the modern West a kind of apathetic individualist and so on. Even though those choices feel authentic to those people, the simple observation of their distribution tells you that we are contingent beings. We are bounded by what we can’t choose, even our personalities are a combination of genetics and environment. The thought becomes more difficult when you delve beyond this to the centre. What actually could ‘choose’? How could a choice not be preconditioned? No choices exist in a vacuum, it seems to us from the level of cause that any sequential event has to have either some kind of cause, probability or be random. Agency would constitute a kind of cause we can’t conceive of. It can’t fit in our categories, and returns us to our ‘level problem’. Do thoughts exist at a level of meaning or a level of mechanism? If there is meaningful choice then who is the chooser who chooses? This is the question of the self. The question many of us has asked in reflective moments of our lives. Who am I really? What is really there in this feeling of you-ness, the feeling of agency, the sense of a centre.

In the twentieth century psychoanalysts developed the idea that the mind consists of something like a subset of competing personalities, as well as archetypal narratives that seem to represent or abstract how we think and act. They psychologist and mystic Carl Jung spent much time cataloguing and attempting to correlate the myths and stories of religion and culture into reflections of what he called the unconscious mind. These analysts have a strange relation to modern thought, many of their ideas have been put aside as too strange or mystical for the scientific field while some terms have become assimilated into our vocabulary (e.g Jung’s introvert/extrovert). But the great revelation they brought was the sheer scale of what is going on in the unconscious mind, the fact that things can be represented or abstracted into personalities or narratives that have a real relation to the complex construction of our mind. Meaning, is not just conscious, but unconscious.

So we are a mysterious feeling of agency, a surface sense of centre, and a well of structure beneath that forms us, contingent, material, particular and constructed not just of stuff but of consciousness and meaning, things that it seems impossible to reduce to the former. How can a meaningful, serious concept of the will be constructed from this?

A strange idea that seems to occur in some form throughout religious and introspective traditions is that the spirit, or substance, or consciousness, or animating principle of things is fundamentally moral. In Hinduism, for example, while the world of objects is itself illusory (Maya), the law that governs the transmigrations of souls is a kind of moral inventory (Karma), and the ultimate source of deliverance is in the realisation that the self (atman) is identical with the total ground of being (brahman). This ground of being consisting of absolute freedom and absolute morality. Three words describe this as ‘satcitananda’, consisting of ‘sat’ — being or existence, ‘cit’ — consciousness or spirit and ‘ananda’ — bliss or joy. A quote from the Chandogya Upanishad says this:

“The Spirit who is in the body does not grow old and does not die, and no one can ever kill the Spirit who is everlasting. This is the real castle of Brahman wherein dwells all the love of the universe. It is Atman, pure Spirit, beyond sorrow, old age, and death; beyond evil and hunger and thirst. It is Atman whose love is Truth, whose thoughts are Truth. Even as here on earth the attendants of a king obey their king wherever he goes, so all love which is Truth and all thoughts of Truth obey the Atman, the Spirit. And even as here on earth all work done in time ends in time, so in the worlds to come even the good works of the past pass away. Therefore those who leave this world and have not found their soul, and that love which is not Truth, find not their freedom in other worlds. But those who leave this world and have found their soul and that love which is Truth, for them there is the liberty of the Spirit, in this world and in the worlds to come.”

The importance here and the turning point in our discussion is the identifying of truth, love and freedom. How could we understand the possibility that will, our relation to our feeling of agency and choice might be set free by a recognition of the world as moral reality?

This idea is not just in Vedanta, even in Christianity the idea of Christ’s death is what ‘sets Christian’s free’ — in the New Testament book of Galatians Paul’s fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control are that for which Christ has set you free — “against these things there is no law”. In other words to sin is to be bound within law, to love is to be free from it.

We return again to the image of Dante, who’s highest moment in the Comedy is to equate love and will. The extraordinary moment in Dante’s vision, when Dante draws on the Jewish idea of the Imago Dei, that we are ‘made in the image of God’, and says that as he looks upon the centre of the divine light, inexplicably he sees our own image. I am going to quote the finale in full:

How incomplete is speech, how weak, when set
Against my thought! And this, to what I saw
Is such — to call it little is too much.
Eternal Light, You only dwell within
Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing,
That circle — which, begotten so, appeared
In You as light reflected — when my eyes
Had watched it with attention for some time,
Within itself and coloured like itself,
To me seemed painted with our effigy,
So that my sight was set on it completely.
As the geometer intently seeks
To square the circle, but he cannot reach
Through thought on thought, the principle he needs,
So I searched that strange sight: I wished to see
The way in which our human effigy
Suited the circle and found place in it-
And my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.
Here forced failed my high fantasy; but my
Desire and will were moved already — like
A wheel revolving uniformly — by
The love that moves the sun and other stars.

For Dante, as for the writer of the Chandogya Upanishad, freedom constitutes identification with love, not just arbitrary identification, but the realisation of a likeness, that at the centre of us, is this love. Another way of considering it is that we can think of ourselves not as physical worlds, but as moral worlds. What the psychoanalysts represented as subconscious personalities are not just this but actual representations of moral reality; figures in Dante’s hell represents forms of the self, things we can become if we identify with anger, lust, greed, violence. Dante’s schema is not just a metaphor for the psyche but for the universe, an ancient idea represented by the mandala pattern, that the self and the entire of reality are identified and at the centre is God.

Let’s try to bring this down to the level of our earlier developments of argument. If the fundamental constituent of consciousness is moral — that is if the ‘level’ problem is resolved by not the subordination of the higher to the lower but rather the subordination of the physical to the level of meaning, then freedom constitutes movement away from the level of material, towards the level of meaning, consciousness and morality. That means to become more free is to become more conscious and to become more conscious is to become more moral. Anger, lust, violence, what old language calls ‘sin’, are forms of slavery — forms of becoming mired in the world of lower cause, base reaction, emotional physical reflexivity. And when what animates you is the highest moral order, you are the most you you can be, it is your proper centre. Love, joy and goodness are forms of total freedom, deliverance, being beyond the self.

Either way, we know how little we know. Literal language is inadequate. Even the thoroughly atheist and determinist and non-believer in free will Sam Harris admits this in a podcast essay about a psychedelic experience:

“Now, the first revelation is with respect to the absolute insufficiency of language to capture the experience. I mean, you are wading into a roiling ocean of meaning with the proverbial thimble. What you bring back in that thimble just can’t begin to indicate the immensity of the experience, or it’s beauty or it’s terror, depending. Even to one’s self as an aid to memory language is next to useless and the fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous. I mean how could that make any sense? The scale of the thing is all wrong. It violates every intuition you have about what it is to have a mind and a body in a world. It’s as though we’ve lived in a universe where if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pull out your wallet you’d pull out the Andromeda galaxy. So the experience is altogether too much, it’s like a reductio ad absurdum of one’s desire for experience itself. It’s as though the cosmos were saying “oh it’s experience you want, you want to see and feel and think? Ok how’s this”. And then what follows is a vision so blinding in it’s beauty and intensity that it shatters your mind. It just unmakes you. Again I have to admit the poverty of words here. We have a word for love, for instance, but what’s the word for all the love you can possibly feel, and all the love you recognise you have failed to feel at every moment in your life up until this moment. What do we call the experience of having that ocean of feeling invade you, and fill every empty space in your mind? There really are no words to describe this experience.”

It seems Dante and Sam have something in common. Somewhere, words fail.

All this requires an entire world view shift. We are thoroughly material centred. While intuition tells us in our knee-jerk outrage reactions to social injustice that a moral reality constitutes us, we remain centred in every way around scientism, objectivism and literalism. What is called for here is a concept of will that sees the moral as primary in reality, that recognises that because consciousness is constituted of meaning, and the you-ness of self that we know as consciousness is at it’s centre moral, the source of freedom is absolute love. We can learn more about reality from the kindness of a stranger, than from the constitution of a handful of earth, and maybe find the only freedom worth having: love.

References for quotes:

Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy (Allen Mandlebaum’s translation). Everyman, 1995

Mascaro, Juan: The Upanishads, Penguin, 1965

Sam Harris: “Sam’s Mushroom Trip”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKGddvmU0fA

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Bless you, Matthew.