CHAPTER III
HUMAN FREEDOM: TO THE GREEKS, FOOLISHNESS
Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes. - Matthew 11:25
The impossibility of suppressing value judgments suggests that they are rooted in human nature, the reflection of some important constituent of it. They are m fact the expression of human freedom. Imagine that human freedom is a fiction, and value judgments automatically become meaningless. Conversely, try to deny the distinction between good and evil, and you are ipso facto in a world which knows no freedom. Therefore, if value judgments cannot consistently be denied, neither can the freedom upon which they depend. Consequently, the widespread deprecation of value judgments, described in the preceding chapter, entails an assault upon human freedom itself. The present chapter will show how the attack has often been spear-headed by the fields of science and philosophy.
This is all the more astonishing in view of the fact that science and philosophy represent supreme expressions of human freedom. The explanation, however, is fairly simple. It lies in one single assumption which these disciplines inherit from a common source: the assumption of ancient Greek scientists and philosophers that to every question “Why?” it must be possible to give an answer in causal terms. To the question, “Why did Socrates refuse to escape from prison?” this position is obliged to reply by resolving Socrates’ actions into various causal factors. Human freedom is thereby ruled out in advance. By a subtle transition, as fateful in effect as it is harmless in appearance, the search for causes, in itself so constructive, has thus been converted into a dogma: the assumption that the specialized methods of science and philosophy, instead of being useful tools for the solution of certain kinds of problems, can actually solve them all. The man who subscribes to this article of faith is a determinist. With him the quest for knowledge, which ought properly to be a liberating enterprise, has become authoritarian. When he encounters questions that cannot be answered by the methods of logic or laboratory, he either dismisses them as meaningless or else
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subtly transposes them into other terms. But these are precisely the questions raised by the fact of freedom. If man really is free, then his behavior cannot be exhaustively explained in causal terms. The strong emphasis on human freedom, which is presupposed by almost everything the Bible says, is therefore, to adapt St. Paul’s words, “foolishness to the Greeks.” The following pages will illustrate how the determinist has historically engaged in a fairly constant attempt to deny human freedom. They will also show that he has done so, not so much from a completely disinterested regard for truth, as in the service of his dogma. His prior commitment to causal explanation restricts him to certain limited methods and therefore prescribes in advance the kind of answer he is permitted to discover.
THE DETERMINIST’S REPROACH AGAINST FREEDOM
The first embarrassing question which freedom poses to the open-minded intellectual is that of value judgments. If freedom is a fact, then one inevitably asks, “What is worth doing?” The quest for the good, as distinct from all merely apparent goods, becomes an urgent one. But this question is intractable to the methods of both scientist and philosopher. Their attempts to deal with it have consequently oscillated between the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand they have tried to establish some conception of the good on the basis of an irrefutable rational proof. On the other hand, discovering that all such proof can invariably be refuted by the same rational methods, they have tried the alternative of avoiding the question of values altogether. Experiments of this kind, however, as illustrated in the previous chapter, are foredoomed to futility. The question of values can neither be solved by intellectual means nor consistently suppressed. With a sound instinct intellectuals have realized that the root of their discomfiture is the fact of freedom. If they could only eliminate this troublesome reality, they would thereby abolish the possibility of value judgments as well. Hence the ambiguous status of freedom in some philosophic and scientific world views, and hence the direct attack upon it by many more.
The second reason why freedom is awkward to the intellectual is that it introduces an element of uncertainty and unpredictability into human action, an “x factor” which in principle could never yield to complete rational analysis. For knowledge, in the academic sense, is knowledge of causes, while freedom is irreducible to a completely
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determined sequence of cause and effect. It constitutes an unanalyzable residue which will forever frustrate the aim of abstract knowledge. Hence the attempt of both scientist and philosopher to transpose questions about human behavior into questions answerable in terms of causes, whether “natural” or “logical.”
The third embarrassment with which the fact of freedom confronts the ambitions of “pure reason” has plagued philosophers since the time of Socrates. If man really is free, then it follows that, although he may perceive the right, he may nevertheless will to do wrong. In that case the vaunted knowledge by which both scientist and philosopher hope to solve human problems would by itself be inadequate to the task. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the true good could be rationally established, men would still be quite free to do the opposite. Philosopher and scientist would then be obliged to grant that their respective disciplines, though perhaps indispensable, were insufficient of themselves to solve life’s most serious problems. Knowledge alone would provide no salvation.
Although in principle nothing prevents their recognizing that some problems are too big for syllogism or test tube, in practice it may become a matter of pride to deny it. The classic example is Socrates’ dictum that “no man knowingly does evil.” Although other philosophers, notably Aristotle, have seen that such a statement destroys human responsibility, they likewise have been too committed to “salvation by knowledge” to improve upon it. At this point the Bible agrees with ordinary common sense. The man who has to deal with the immediate, practical situations of everyday life knows intuitively that men frequently fail to act according to what they know to be right. In fact, nearly everybody knows this. Only to the determinist is it hidden.
In a significant magazine article several years ago a scientist recorded his perplexity on pondering the discrepancy between his laboratory theories and his own behavior. He rightly concluded that if the theory of determinism were correct it should be applicable in practice. He therefore devised an experiment by which to test it.
On leaving his laboratory one evening he drove through the first red light he encountered. Stopped by the police, he patiently explained that traffic fines were based upon the obsolete notion of human responsibility, whereas science had established that man’s deeds are all causally determined. On being given an opportunity to repeat his plea to the judge he was asked,
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“Are you then not responsible for what you do?”
“No.”
“Very well,” said the judge, “we are acquainted with cases of this sort. In fact, the state has provided an institution for people like yourself. Officer, take this man to the asylum.” At this point the scientist decided that the theory of determinism had failed to pass the test.1
An equally revealing incident occurred at a recent discussion among members of a college faculty. A professor of psychology declared that the only hope for the solution of the world’s problems was the extension of education and knowledge. Our trouble, he said, is that we still lack sufficient knowledge of how we ought to behave if we are to achieve our common goal. “But,” demurred the professor of religion, “man is that creature who, even though he may know what he ought to do, can still do otherwise.”
“Oh,” retorted the psychologist, “original sin again.”
“No,” was the answer, “simply human freedom.”
This exchange illustrates perfectly the gulf that separates biblical thinking from determinism. For the Bible, the mere capacity to know the right but do the wrong is no sin. Rather, it is the precondition of the greatest good. It places the highest premium on goodness done voluntarily, rather than by compulsion. From within the framework of the determinist’s creed, however, this same freedom, the very image of God, is regarded as sin!
ATTEMPTS TO BANISH FREEDOM
In view of the several ways in which the fact of freedom constitutes an affront to the determinist’s creed, it is no surprise to discover in the history of philosophy and science a persistent campaign against it. The attack is not always obvious. Philosophers like Spinoza or Hegel, for example, make considerable use of the word “freedom.” A second look, however, reveals that they have redefined it beyond recognition. They both regard it as the mere “recognition of necessity.” How far this is from the ordinary meaning of the word is evident from Spinoza’s pronouncement that, if a stone hurtling through the air were endowed with consciousness, it would imagine that it was free.2
1See G. H. Estabrooks, “Tell it to the Traffic Cop,” in Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 157, November 1928, pp. 777-79. I owe this reference to Professor J. Howard Howson, of Vassar College.
2Benedict Spinoza, Epistle 62.
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A philosopher like Henri Bergson, on the other hand, devotes much of his writing to refuting these deterministic theories and championing the cause of freedom. What emerges, however, is still not the faculty for responsible action, but only the spontaneous release of energy. In such a system animals turn out to be more free than man, since their energy can be released without the interference of rational considerations.
In the philosophy of existentialists like Martin Heidegger and Nicolas Berdyaev, both of whom make a great point of freedom, the definition flits from the Hegelian to the Bergsonian usage and back again, only rarely hovering for a moment at the common-sense meaning of the word.
As a possible exception to this philosophical tendency, the name of Immanuel Kant comes to mind. He was both a very great philosopher and also an ardent defender of freedom. There is certainly no doubt that he did believe in freedom as the capacity for responsible choice. But the question remains, is there any room for such freedom within the framework of a philosophical system so completely dedicated to the determinist’s dogma as his? It obliges him to maintain that every event in the visible, material world happens according to a rigid necessity. Nothing could happen otherwise than it does. Such a world has no place for freedom, and he therefore quite consistently banishes it to the so-called “noumenal” realm, completely separated from the everyday world of space and time. A freedom that has no effect within this world remains, not just “noumenal,” but merely nominal. It is quite true that Kant sometimes speaks as though freedom did have effect within the spatiotemporal world. When he does so, however, he sacrifices the consistency of his system. Instead of constituting an exception to the general philosophical tendency, his philosophy therefore only illustrates it more distinctly. He cannot provide for freedom without violating the determinist’s creed.
Upon discovering the life-denying implications of these so-called “idealistic” philosophies, the modem humanist recoils. In search of an ally in his humanitarian concern he turns for help to science. He derives assurance from the fact that, while the philosopher’s antagonism to all external relations drives him to negate the everyday world, the scientist acknowledges no other. His experimental method commits him irrevocably to experience. Bent on fathom-
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ing the secrets of the universe, the scientist has little patience with the other-worldly implications of a great deal of philosophy. He sees that their effect is sometimes to seduce men away from the real business of living and into a world of dreams.
The humanist who looks to science as his champion against the belittling of human concerns is doomed to disappointment. For science, though essentially not antihuman at all, can readily become so. This happens whenever the search for causes is subtly converted into the dogma that all occurrences, human behavior included, must be causally explainable. When this fateful transition is made, human freedom is precluded. And whoever is the enemy of freedom is ultimately the enemy of man. Spokesmen for science in the field of philosophy (that is, the empirical school) are indeed far more outspoken in their denial of freedom than the more traditional philosophers. Their rejection of it is unequivocal. Bertrand Russell, for example, while granting that the case is not susceptible of absolute proof, nevertheless holds that all human actions are predictable links in the series of cause and effect. Man, he says, like any other animal, is completely subject to the laws of nature. This thoroughgoing determinism, he grants, is the working assumption of the scientist.3 C. D. Broad, another philosopher of science, concludes, in his incisive installation lecture at Cambridge, that freedom is a “delusive notion.”4
Although neither of these two philosophers is a declared misanthrope (discounting the cynical tone of Russell’s recent writings), it is only because neither has consistently adhered to the implications of his position. As often happens, the ultimate issue of a particular dogma is less apparent to those who hold it than to those who do not. In our day the warning has been sounded by artists and poets, like the one who wrote:
Truth is a rope.
It runs from the straining hands of man
Up over a beam in the foundations of infinity,
And binds its other end around his neck,
Making of him as he stubbornly climbs from the earth
His own inescapable hangman.5
3Bertrand Russell, op cit., pp. 125, 166, and 167.
4C. D. Broad, Determinism, Indeterminism, and Voluntarism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1934 ), p. 11.
5Quoted without reference by Max Otto, Science and the Moral Life (a Mentor Book published by the New American Library, 1949), p. 103.
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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is one of the best-known prophecies of what the scientific creed could do to man, while T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden have put a similar warning into poetry.
A recent motion picture illustrated beautifully the steps by which a denial of human freedom leads inexorably to the degradation of man: The Thing, in which a military outpost near the North Pole is terrorized by a “thing” from outer space which lives on blood. An eight-foot, ambulatory vegetable in human form, and indifferent to bullets, it manages with diabolical cunning to corner the entire crew in what appears to be a certain deathtrap. The commander’s desperate device for destroying the monster was nearly foiled at the last minute by the sudden intervention of the expedition’s scientist. Drawing a gun on the rest of the company, he announces that, since the most important thing in the world is knowledge, it is their plain duty at all costs to communicate with the adversary and record whatever information it might impart. To this lofty end the sacrifice of their own lives might be regrettable but necessary. “Besides,” he adds in perfect consistency, “it is a far superior creature to us. It has no heart.” Whether intentionally or not the film demonstrated how the man who makes knowledge an end in itself can forget that science was made for man and not vice versa. It added an ironic touch when, in his attempt to communicate with the heartless “thing,” the most effective overture which the scientist could imagine was: “We’re your friends.”
In justifiable alarm at the inhuman implications of determinism, some scientists have hastened back to the laboratory in search of evidence for freedom. Significantly, however, they look for it not in man but in electrons. What they discover is consequently not freedom but merely the scientific version of the kind of “freedom” represented in philosophy by Bergson; that is, purposeless caprice. This is all that can be squeezed out of Heisenberg’s famous principle of indeterminacy. Although this may be distinguishable from determinism, it is equally as remote from freedom. What the scientist is really looking for is self-determinism. He will never find it in electrons.6
Until recently the humanist trusted science to secure the pre-eminence of human concerns against the world-sick yearnings of so much philosophy. But today he is taking a long second look and does not
6An account of the indeterminacy which the scientist does discover in atomic physics is contained in Arthur H. Compton’s The Freedom of Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935).
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like what he sees. He remembers that the inhuman atrocities of Communism are quite consistent with its boast of being the most scientific society in the world, the only one to rid itself completely of “bourgeois sentimentalism.” The contemporary humanist is discovering in alarm that if Western scientists blench at such outrages it is often in spite of the inherent logic of their premises, rather than because of it. There is, for instance, nothing incompatible between concentration camps and the following statement by the renowned natural scientist, Sir Arthur Keith: “Nature keeps her human orchard healthy by pruning. War is her pruning hook.”7
THEOLOGY’S COMPROMISE
Christian theology, which is in the strongest position to rebut the grim consequences of a consistent application of the “determinist’s creed,” has in fact frequently compromised with it. In his eagerness to make Christianity intellectually respectable, the theologian has attempted to reconcile Christianity with the monumental metaphysical systems which were part of the legacy of Greece to the medieval and modern world. His mistake lay, not in trying to make sense of Christianity, but in his uncritical assumption that the philosophy of Plato or of Aristotle comprises the last word in a rational account of man and his world. As a result, theology became wedded to a kind of thinking which denies many of biblical Christianity’s truest insights, most of which are traceable to an unerring appreciation of human freedom. Although few if any theologians ever capitulated completely to this alien outlook, many did compromise with it. Consider, for example, the crucial question of whether men do evil voluntarily. The watershed which separates Greek from Hebraic thinking is summed up in the contrast between Socrates’ claim that no man knowingly does evil and St. Paul’s declaration that men “are without excuse, because, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were they thankful” (Romans 1:20,21) . The latter presupposes freedom, while the former precludes it. Yet a distinguished contemporary denies any substantial difference between these two outlooks and even brands as “cheap” any attempt to call attention to it.8
More often than not, Christian theology has been equivocal in its
7Quoted in the New York Times, January 8, 1955, p. 13
8See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 95.
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estimate of freedom. The classic example is the famous contention of St. Augustine that, while it is indeed a great freedom to be able to sin, it is a still greater freedom to be unable to sin (non posse peccare).9 Precluding as it does the act of choice, such a “freedom” receives its name only by an abuse of words. When stripped of its misleading label, it turns out to be merely a disguised version of the determinist’s ideal of complete predictability. Under the persistent influence of this unbiblical bias, Christian theology itself has sometimes regarded human freedom, not as the greatest gift of God, but as something to be overcome in the next world.10
If human freedom is not particularly desirable anyway, there is nothing objectionable about the famous theory of predestination. Four of the very greatest names in the history of Christian thought, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, have all held this doctrine. Although they may differ somewhat in their formulation of it, they all maintain it in such a form as to preclude freedom. If it is objected that in other passages they assume freedom, this simply shows that they, no more than other thinkers, are able consistently to suppress the fact.
The argument most commonly urged in support of predestination is that, if man were free, this would detract from the majesty of God. Any defense of freedom automatically convicts itself of a presumptuous attempt to usurp divine prerogatives. But what if he willed to create individuals independent of himself and capable of responding freely to him? Within the terms of the argument under consideration, he would have to apply to the theologian for a permit. And his application would be rejected!
WISER THAN MEN
Under the influence of the “determinist’s creed,” men have tried to think and act as though there were no human freedom. No true fact, however, can be consistently denied, and this is what makes their failure so revealing. Whoever ignores or suppresses truth will be caught in an eventual self-contradiction. This is the last laugh which
9See, for example, St. Augustine, The City of God, Book XXII, Chapter 30.
10One of the shining exceptions is Sören Kierkegaard, who in some passages, at least, fully appreciates that the entire difference between biblical and other forms of thought hinges upon its affirmation of freedom. See, for example, Sören Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, translated by David F. Swenson (Princeton University Press, 1946 ), pp. 61f.
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truth enjoys at the expense of all misconceptions of it. Accordingly, whoever tries to exorcise freedom from one area of his thinking thus finds it grinning over his shoulder in another.
Obliged by these inconsistencies to acknowledge that freedom is no imaginary bogey, but still unwilling to come to terms with it, he yearns for a world which would correspond more closely to the “determinist’s creed.” In former times he sought it in a “higher” world of platonic ideas. Today he is more apt to seek it in a “brave, new world” under the dictatorship of science; that is, to take matters into his own hands and make the wayward creature, man, behave “rationally,” which is to say, predictably.
In contrast with so many other theories, whether philosophical or scientific, the Bible consistently acknowledges human freedom. It is presupposed by all its key words, such as sin, repentance, forgiveness, love, and covenant. Consequently, though not intentionally philosophical, it contains by inference what is probably the most thorough understanding ever written of what it means to be a free agent. If, as the present book tries to show, the denial of freedom ultimately frustrates the intellectual pursuits in whose name it is denied, then, on purely rational grounds, the Bible must enjoy a distinct advantage over most other systems. This is one more variation on St. Paul’s thesis that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”