Are Humans Embodied Slaves? Free Will vs Determinism.
Am I free or is my will determined?
Usually, we mean by ‘freedom’ the possibility for an individual to express his nature without constraints or obstacles (external freedom). Similarly, by ‘free will’ we mean the possibility for the individual (and responsibility) to act according to the dictates of his conscience, without constraints or obstacles (inner freedom). However, this does not solve the problem of freedom, neither external nor internal.
Being able to act according to one’s natural inclinations does not yet mean being free: in fact, who or what established the inclinations that appear to me to be my own, that is, natural? If I take up poetry because I like poetry rather than physics, I should ask who or what dictated that I should like poetry rather than physics or any other discipline; in other words, when I say that my will wants something rather than something else, who or what made my will want that something and not anything else?
There are three possible solutions to the problem. My natural inclinations can be:
a) fruit of my free choice;
b) determined by my birth and by the laws of nature;
c) fruit of chance.
In the first alternative, it is immediately clear that one runs into a tautology (free will is the unconditional expression of a consciousness that has established itself with an act of free choice…), or into an infinite regression (the expression “I wanted to do this” presupposes “I wanted the will to do this” which in turn presupposes “I wanted the will of the will to do this” and so on). This solution, therefore, should be discarded because it is logically unsustainable.
In the second alternative, the discussion ends immediately with the denial of free will: what appears to be the fruit of my free choice is actually the deterministic outcome of a process that takes place according to natural laws, like any other physical phenomenon. In other words, the intuition of being free would be nothing more than an illusion, fueled by ignorance of the causes that condition and determine consciousness.
In the third alternative — and only in this one — can one still speak of free action; but at what price? At the price of my total irresponsibility; as indeed also in the second alternative. Indeed, both in the case that my action is mechanistically determined, and in the case that it is indeterminate and indeterminable like the outcome of a roll of the dice, how can one still speak of my ethical? And without responsibility, what remains of the principle of free will?
Nothing.
Note:
Johann Fichte posits free will as an axiomatic truth, an unproven and undemonstrable first principle: something like a dogma of faith.
