Immanuel Kant was concerned to be a scientific thinker, whose views were fully compatible with the latest Newtonian learning of his day and also to insulate belief in human freedom and morality, in God and immortality, from the encroachments of science. This leads me to wonder whether he wanted to have it both ways, like most dualistic thinkers, so that even this greatest of all philosophical intellects ultimately came up against the general limits of philosophical thinking.
Does Kant want to have his cake and eat it too? Sure he does. So do all of us. Human beings are paradoxical. We know that we, like rocks and shoes, exist in a world of material objects now governed by post-Newtonian scientific laws. We are subject to the same natural laws that tell us precisely, say, how far my shoe will travel if thrown by me across the room. The relevant factors are considered: the weight of the shoe, the wind resistance, and the amount of strength that I can muster for the throw. The shoe has no say in the matter and neither do I. I cannot suspend the laws of physics and (in that sense) I am not free.
At the same time, whether I choose to throw the shoe across the room or to put it on and go out to get the newspaper is up to me. It is exclusively my totally arbitrary decision. I often do not know which I will do on any given occasion. Neither does my shoe. The difference between myself and my shoe is the “free will†that determines that choice in me which is not found in the material realm, but rather in the part of me that is in the noumenal realm – and which is not subject to material determination, according to Kant. Some recent findings by cognitive neurologists raise doubts about this, but for now this general picture will do. “People will do what they want to do and no one knows why,†as my grandmother (who was a Kantian without knowing it!) used to say. On Kant’s theory of freedom, see Henry E. Allison, “Kant’s Theory of Freedom” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Determinists and some materialists claim that I am a material object exactly like my shoe, in the sense that all of me is material. There is no Kantian noumenal part of me. No part of me is beyond the reach of the material or mechanical causation which operates in the empirical world. Yet for reasons of biology alone, it is useless to think in such terms. In light of current theories of the inherent uncertainties of psychological and even physical reality, it may make no sense to think in such outdated Newtonian terms at all. See Bryan Appleyard, “Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man” (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 158-187.
Paul Davies writes:
“Most physicists would claim that the conflict between determinism and free will is irrelevant because we know that the quantum factor disproves determinism anyway.”
“God and the New Physics” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp. 139-140. Do we?
By the same token, Marxist theories of the determining forces of history and the primacy of material reality, understood in nineteenth century terms, are rendered absurd in the light of contemporary scientific knowledge:
“In contrast to the mechanistic … view of the world, the world view emerging from modern physics can be characterized by words like organic, holistic, and ecological. It might also be called a systems view, in the sense of general systems theory. The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of multiple objects, but has to be pictured as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process.”
Fritjof Capra, “The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture” (New York: Bantam, 1982), pp. 77-78.
An organism is a much more dynamic “thing†or entity than a static physical object. No one disputes that the “meaning†or explanation of an organism‘s actions, why it does what it does or why we have the brains that we do, for instance, is only “determined†as part of a “story†of life unfolding and adapting to an environment, which need not mean exclusively Darwinian reductivism. This involves ambiguities and changes, uncertainties and complexities, a never-ending “dance†of a sort. Perhaps the key insight of psychoanalysis is that, in this dance, both partners – the subject and the interpreted environment – are within the psyche.
Yet this story that explains my aptitudes and capacities, possibly my “freedom,†is not itself a material object that is causally determined, nor is it a “force†exactly. If freedom may be thought of as explicable in terms of something like the “plot†of that story which the organism creates, then this can not be captured in simplistic causal or determinate explanations, especially when it is far from clear to anyone what is meant in saying that a cause “determines” an effect. It may help to recall my earlier discussion of the tendency of characters to rebel and create their own plot twists in literature.
Gregory Bateson states:
“[There is] a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and a difference can be a cause) and the world of non-living billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the “causes†of events). These are the two worlds that Jung (following the Gnostics) calls creature (the living) and pleroma (the non-living). [There is] a difference between the physical world of pleroma, where forces and impacts provide a sufficient basis of explanation, and the creatura, where nothing can be understood until differences and distinctions can be invoked.”
“Mind and Nature,” pp. 7-8.
With regard to the mysteries of human motivation, the literary artists – and this is superlatively the case with the greatest of them all, William Shakespeare – have taught us that the “truth is an image fragmented in a hall of mirrors.†In his philosophical work, Paul Ricoeur has written of “enplotment” as part of the process by which the paradox that says “stories are recounted whereas life is lived” is resolved in terms of a unity between recounting and living. Living a life and understanding that life is a kind of “recounting” or narrating of that life’s story, a process in which therapy may be important. It may be also that the best way to understand freedom is in such literary terms, as a form of narrative creation within the constraints provided by the empirical reality revealed by science. (See my essay entitled “The Galatea Scenario.”)
Come to think of it, this sounds like a very Kantian solution after all.
