the idea of freedom
a critique of Lieke Asma’s “The relationship between free will and consciousness”
A recent article by Lieke Joske Franci Asma appeared in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences entitled “The relationship between free will and consciousness” that addresses, unsurprisingly, the relationship between conscious states and free will.1 While it is refreshing to find a more-or-less wholesale dismissal of the slew of experiments in the mould of Benjamin Libet’s purported “scientific disproof of free will” from the ‘80s,2 the argument still struggles to take hold of the one thing needful to grasp what freedom of the will could only ever mean. I will reproduce the abstract below with slight commentary before explaining what could seem to be an audacious statement about this.
Reflection on the relationship between free will and consciousness has mainly revolved around Libet-style experiments, for example by criticizing the claim that conscious intentions never cause what we do. Less attention has been paid to whether this response captures the sense in which consciousness is relevant for free will, however. In this paper I argue that scholars seem to accept two assumptions they should reject: (1) that the relationship between free will and consciousness is best characterized in terms of conscious states and/or processes being part of the causal chain leading up to the action, and (2) that the third-person perspective is a suitable means to capturing the relationship between free will and consciousness. I provide an alternative proposal of how free will and consciousness may be related, in which an agent’s self-understanding of what she is doing and why, while acting, takes center stage. In order to capture the relationship between the two, I argue, the first-person perspective should be investigated instead of explained away.
The last author’s final proposition is perhaps the most pregnant and fruitful claim in the entire article and that she does not deliver it unto its full significance can of course be forgiven. After all, academic philosophy seems—uncannily, and almost by design—to place itself in direct antithesis to the self-knowledge—the “knowledge which knows itself”3 that Philosophers since Plato’s day have hailed as the palm of victory, and to eclipse, as it were, the Sun of epiphany and spiritual realization.
Foremost among many reasons for this is the cathexis that virtually all modern academicians seem to hold vis-á-vis the “third-person” conceit set forth and sustained by the lineage of modern natural science. The world science studies does not exist; it is a product of method extrapolated as metaphysic. The conventional scientific method strips phenomena of their all of qualities excepting those which lend themselves to measurement and quantitative modelling and then back-projects the results of the latter into time and causality as though they pre-existed and causally preceded the former. Ordinarily, the resulting imaginary is simply called “the physical world,” and thereby supposed to pre-exist the method that fabricated it by effacing every element of the phenomenal world that fails to ratify the model. To her credit, Asma challenges the expectation that the conventional scientific method could make authoritative pronouncements on the very phenomena that it first established itself, and then advanced, by ignoring. First among these is perhaps free will, or the spiritual agency of the individual. When Asma denies that “the third-person perspective is a suitable means to capturing the relationship between free will and consciousness,” she is tacitly rejecting this presumed hegemony of modern scientific method over any questions of real significance. While Asma is not the first to challenge the post-Libet neuroscientists and their handmaidens who claim that, in her words, “our brain instead of our conscious intentions decide what we do,” she suggests that most dissenting philosophers have nevertheless remained bound in their inquiries to two mistaken criteria of free will, to wit: (1) serial conscious states leading up to an action and (2) the hypothetical ability to have done otherwise.
First, as regards the second point, its unfalsifiability makes it a weak candidate for inclusion in an adequate definition of free will. While falsifiability cannot serve as an ultimate test of scientific legitimacy without resorting to circular reasoning,4 it serves, nevertheless, as an indication that the hypothesis has freed itself from accountability to experiment and must hence be judged in the light of a coherent metaphysical vision instead. Later I will pick up on this thread and attempt to weave it into a comprehensive idea of freedom. For now, let it suffice to have justified suspending it as a criterion of free will because of its utter lack of utility: how could it ever be factually discerned whether I or someone else “could have done otherwise” when any presumptive evidence could only ever by, in principle, counterfactual, if not by appeal to my own intuitive experience of agency? And if I have finally apprehended the latter, why should I need any ulterior justification for the reality of free will?
Concerning the first point, it may be observed that making consciousness of the mental states leading up to an action the measure of freedom is perhaps an improvement over the peremptory dismissal of free will under the proposition that “your brain decides what your next move is going to be,” or again, that an action can only be free if we are conscious of a series of brain states analogous to the chain of mental ones indicated above. Nevertheless, the issue of freedom is still not resolved in principle. What makes the fact that one conscious state precedes another a guarantee that the final issue of this series is a free act without my intuitive sense of agency in bringing them about, and grasped this intentional power, why does it matter that each state is conscious? It would be akin to saying “to prove the existence of the author of the present text, we have to show that he composed the text word-by-word in sequence.” If the text was indeed, composed in this manner, then the author’s existence is entailed. But the author doesn’t need this proof that he exists, and neither do we if we have known him, and moreover, he did not need to compose the text in this manner or at all. The crux of the problem is one that it shares with all science: that its methodological foundation is established on an analytic abyss. Why should we stop at brain states when we can query the states of brain parts, and the parts of parts—the neurons and glial cells, the molecular structure of which they are composed, the atomic and subatomic particles in turn, and do on? An author’s freedom is perhaps most constrained when he is forced to meditate on every mental and physiological state leading up to each pen or keystroke. In fact, its obvious that nothing of moment would ever be written and AI would indeed begin to seem intelligent if anything close to the above scenario were to become commonplace. Instead, the author is most free the less he must concern himself with the means of expression (techne) and the more with the intentional ends (teloi) that he wishes to incarnate in the written word. “The letter killeth,” as the Apostle sayeth, “but the spirit quickeneth to life.”5 Nothing is more inimical to freedom than having failed to master technique: “Schrift ist Gift!”6
Asma has the correct intuition about this. Hence, she argues that freedom cannot be reduced to anything in this flatland of serial concatenations. Instead, she argues, freedom can only be understood through indexing a given action to a higher-order intention or reason of which the action in question, and the entire chain of states leading up to it, is an expression. Obviously, pace the Buddhist and a contingent of contemporary academicians, the free self cannot coherently be conceived as an illusion because, as Descartes observed, it is senseless to acknowledge the activity of something while denying its existence, and the denial of the free self must needs draw, in practice, on the very principle whose reality it professes to reject. Neither, however, can the free self be thought of as an aristocratic witness to phenomena in the manner of Neo-Vedantists, or the philosophers who equate freedom with detached consciousness of mental states. Instead, the free self must be grasped in its dynamism; its intentional activity of envisioning higher ideals and embodying them into manifest action. To grasp freedom as poiesis7 invites a felicitous esoteric gloss to Theseus’s contention that “the lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.”8 “The poet’s eye,” he continues,
…in fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Freedom must be creative, poetic, in the etymological sense, to be at all. And love, in its essence, is the principle of all perception and all existence: “the Amen of the Universe,” in Novalis’ words. For things to be and to be perceived, they must become one of many without their parts ceasing to be many. For a cup to be, its handle, sides, bottom, and interior must become one without ceasing to be many. And for me to perceive the cup, it must become part of me and yet remain itself. Only the lover is free because only the lover perceives things in their oneness and their reality, and through them, to God. “If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things,” as Dostoevsky affirms in The Brothers Karamazov.
Naïve people imagine freedom means having many choices at one’s disposal and hence, presumably “being able to have done otherwise” in the face of any eventual decision. But this is wrong for the same reason that it’s wrong to seek freedom among the series of states leading up to an action. The states are only indications of freedom insofar as they are being informed by a grasp of a higher ideal that seeks to incarnate through them. Similarly, the clearer one’s vision and the more comprehensive understanding, the more all potentialities of decision will converge on the single best one. After all, it would be incoherent to affirm that one had seen the better and chosen what was worse on that account. The will is essentially indexed to “the Idea of the Good,” in Plato’s turn of phrase.9 Whether the will is free is ultimately a misleading question. The will is free insofar as the heart and mind are free from everything that obstructs their vision of the Good. Freedom means being able to will the Good and seeing, or attaining to the Idea of the Good is a condition sine qua non of willing it. Hence, only God can be ultimately free because only God sees everything. But we ca become so by participation. We are provisionally free, and more to the extent that we cleave, with our wills, to God’s. Our unfreedom, then, consists in everything in ourselves and in nature that hinders our willing of the Good: “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.”10 Hence, Aquinas affirms that “a man’s heart is right when he wills what God wills.”11 Why “the lunatic”? Because “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”12 Truth is a stumbling-block to falsehood. If “the wisdom of this world” axiomatically seeks to reduce freedom to serial states of mind or physiology, of course anyone who dissents from it will be thought mad.
Finally, by way of an attempt to bring the end into the beginning, as it were, I wish to pick up on Asma’s suggestion that freedom cannot be grasped outside of the first-person-experience of grasping higher-order intentions and realizing them through instrumental action. She is correct but she does not carry this point to its consummation. A shadow is not free because it does not possess, in itself, the principle of its own being and movement. In the same way, every fact and phenomenon of our experience is the terminus of a spiritual act, which itself is the expression of a spiritual activity that performed it. I cannot be free as long as I only notice the movement of my limbs a posteriori. In the same way, I must take hold of the principle and activity of intention and intentionality that is essentially prior to any of its expressions. And, as noted above, the principle of the principle, so to speak, is God. Like a fountain that overflows its pools, God’s freedom cascades into the souls as potentiality and they must invoke his own power to actualize it.
Asma, L.J.F. The relationship between free will and consciousness. Phenom Cogn Sci (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09859-x
Libet was a neuroscientist, famous for his series of experiments in the 1980s that challenged the concept of free will. Libet’s experiments involved measuring the brain activity of participants while they performed simple actions, such as moving their finger or wrist, and asking them to report the time when they made the decision to perform the action. Libet discovered that brain activity associated with the action occurred before participants reported making the decision to perform the action. This suggested that the decision to perform the action was made unconsciously, before the individual became aware of it, leading some to argue that free will may be an illusion. Of course, the actions had to be trivial ones for which there was not reason to prefer one outcome over the other and over which, hence, “the Idea of the Good” had no bearing. Freedom means being able to act for reasons that one has identified in the light of the Idea of the Good. To say “I did this for no reason” is the maxim of arbitrariness and not freedom.
Plato, Charmides, 169e.
After all, the postulate that falsifiability should serve as a criterion for science is not itself falsifiable.
2 Corinthians 3:6.
“The letter is poison!” Martin Luther, in a letter to his friend Georg Spalatin written in 1520.
The term poiesis comes from the Greek word ποίησις, which means “to make,” “to do,” or “to create.” It is, of course, the origin of the English noun “poetry” and adjective “poetic.”
Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.4-22.
Plato, Republic VII, 517b:
The form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it.
John 8:34
32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
33 They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?
34 Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.
Summa Theologiae, second part of the second part, question 19, article 10.
1 Corinthians 3:19
Pure goodness.... reading ur article felt like sitting with the therapist.
I’m not really being kind. I’m acknowledging that you’re just that good. And you should be thanking yourself. 🙂