by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Introduction: On Freedom
We have already considered the issue of human freedom directly in Hobbes and Rousseau and, at least indirectly, in Freud and Fromm; but it has not been our central concern. Now, however, as we consider the “two wills” of St. Augustine (354-430), and in the following chapters on Sartre and Socrates, the issue of human freedom and responsibility will be our main focus.
Because we are effectively embarking on a new, and certainly important, area of philosophy, some background and introduction are called for, in the form of a review of some of the themes we have considered so far, and a transition into the version of free will advanced by Augustine himself. So, before we get into Augustine, we shall review the “negative,” materialist “freedom,” or more properly “liberty,” of Hobbes, and we shall consider it in light of the modern theories of free-market, laissez-faire economics. Then we shall consider the Marxist idea of alienation, which effectively constitutes Marx’s diagnosis of the human condition under the conditions of Hobbesian “liberty” as manifested by free-market economics; as we shall see, alienation, for Marx, essentially represents the opposite of real human freedom.
With these descriptions of what, for Augustine, human freedom essentially is not, we shall be ready to move toward an understanding of Augustine’s account of the two wills, which, as we shall see, constitutes Augustine’s description of the internal, psychological dynamic involved in the activity of a positive power of free will. Because Augustine’s philosophy is deeply imbued with a religious, and specifically Christian, outlook, we must take that outlook into account; however, I hope that we shall see that, in essence, within Augustine’s account of the two wills is an essentially modern philosophy, or we might say psychology, of freedom. To the extent that we bring God into the picture, which will be unavoidable, the arguments we shall be dealing with, I suggest, are based strictly on rational, philosophical analysis and are thus independent of any reliance on religious faith.
A First Face of Freedom: The “Negative” Freedom of Hobbes’s Natural “Liberty”
According to Hobbes, as we have seen, all that is, all that is real, is physical. The material world is the only world; there is no immaterial spirit, for example. Furthermore, since the only reality is material reality, the only forces or laws that govern the movements and affairs of the world, including the movements and affairs of human beings, are physical laws, such as the law that for every effect there is some prior, material cause. Thus all human actions are simply mechanical, material effects of prior mechanical, material causes; in other words, human beings are no more than highly complex machines acting with machine-like predictability. According to this view we can have no genuine free will, as traditionally understood; indeed, it would seem that everything that happens in the world must have been determined from the beginning of time, as if the world were just a series of dominoes falling one after another or billiard balls bumping around on a table. We ordinarily assign moral responsibility or blame for the actions of human beings on the assumption that individuals could have acted differently; however, according to this materialist view this assumption must be false, an illusion, for in fact our actions must be entirely determined by external material causes interacting with the internal material structures of our bodies and brains—we are np more “free” than the billiard balls, since our bodies and brains, being purely material, are determined by the same purely mechanical, physical laws.
According to this view, human freedom, often referred to as “liberty,” is simply a function of lack or absence of exterior restraint, thus the reference to it as a “negative” version of freedom: this materialist view holds that we are “free” when no outside force restrains us from doing what we want at any given moment—“freedom” means no more than being free from restraint, permitting us to do whatever we want, or at least whatever we can. According to this view, perfect liberty is experienced only in a state of nature, prior to society, where everyone can do everything—where everyone has a right to everything even, as Hobbes asserts, to one another’s bodies. As Hobbes also points out, of course, such an extreme condition of unrestrained “freedom” results in a condition of “war of every man against every man” making life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” thus Hobbes advocates that we surrender our natural freedom, as it leads to such a disastrous practical result, to the absolute sovereignty of a ruling elite that will purportedly protect our physical security.
Hobbesian Liberty, Continued: “Laissez-Faire” Economics
Hobbes’s view of freedom, involving a lack of restraint, seems very popular today: it is reflected in the widespread distrust of government, and many people seem to think that they would be perfectly “free” if only the government would leave them alone, thus the popular motto (retrieved from the colonial era) “don’t tread on me.” Moreover, this view of freedom is effectively consistent with the philosophical justification of free-market economics, which operates according to “the invisible hand.” According to free-market theory, the market is most efficient when all individuals are left alone to pursue their own material interests without government interference except as needed to enforce the basic rules of commerce, such as to enforce contracts, and to prevent force and fraud (this also means, in principle, that government may not assist, much less subsidize, any business).
Free market theory, as espoused by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), claims to assure maximum efficiency because producers and merchants, in their own best interests, will maximize their productive capacities to meet the demands of consumers, who will accept only the highest quality products at the lowest prices; since the force at work is “invisible” in that it operates without anyone overseeing or governing or intending it, it is known as “the invisible hand.” It must be noted that free-market theory, in the context of today’s corporately-centralized and globalized structures, is arguably impossible to put into practice. Specifically, corporate centralization of power and decision-making is fundamentally at odds with free-market theory’s individualist ethic. Moreover, an efficient free market demands open and free competition in all markets, which is effectively inconceivable in a modern marketplace whose products are so technical and sophisticated as to require enormous centralization of planning, control and capital; and efficiency also requires that all consumers be fully educated and informed about the products of the market, which is also effectively inconceivable in a marketplace in which information is substantially reduced to the increasingly sophisticated and effective manipulations of modern advertising and marketing.
In any event, according to free market theory, the market tends to operate less efficiently when people try to benefit others, thus there is no real room for morality in free market theory—it assumes that people are (or should be) purely selfish and materialistic. Thus with free-market theory’s “law of the jungle,” where the reality is “survival of the fittest,” the market is “free” insofar as anyone can do whatever they want whenever they want without external restraint, in other words without government regulation or control, thus the term “laissez-faire,” which means “let do” or, more loosely, “hands off,” reflecting the attitude, according to proponents of this theory, that government should take toward the economy.
Thus free-market theory evidently reflects, in principle, Hobbes’s view of negative freedom since it strives ideally for a minimum of governmental restraint, imposing only the regulation necessary to prevent force and fraud and so to enable the smooth flow of commerce. The theory also reflects Hobbes’s materialist metaphysics since it is a theory concerning the mechanical, material efficiency of commerce, while effectively ignoring the prospect of free beings engaging in the democratic discussion and formation of moral values. Finally, it reflects Hobbes’s view of human nature as well, since it sees the human participants in that commerce as themselves purely materialistic and selfish.
The Rationality, and Limits, of Hobbes’s “Negative” Freedom
We can see the rationality of this Hobbesian view of freedom as imposing the restraint necessary only to avoid chaos and enable efficiency in the simple example of driving laws. One might feel that to drive a car with perfect freedom would mean driving however we want without the restraints of speeding laws and red lights and parking regulations; however, if we were able to do that, then we can all readily see that the streets would soon be clogged with unyielding drivers and parked cars and gridlock and that any driving at all would soon become impossible. Thus my “right” to drive, in order to be worth anything, requires that I accept the obligation or duty to respect the right of others and thus to accept the traffic regulations that make driving possible for all of us. This understanding that a “right” carries with it a corresponding duty reminds us that the notion of natural “right” according to which we all have the right to everything would afford us no meaningful rights at all; thus, I must accept the constraint of law and duty in order to have any kind of “freedom,” even in the limited sense of non-constraint that Hobbes limits freedom to. It is thus that Hobbes insists that we must surrender our natural “right to everything” for the sake of basic social order and efficiency.
Having noted the rationality of Hobbes’s view of freedom and rights in the context of driving laws, however, we must also note that there is clearly a side to freedom that is not reducible to the mere mechanical efficiency of things like traffic flow. Thus, for example, the freedom to think for myself, to develop my own creative potential and to form and assume responsibility for my own character are matters not of mechanical efficiency but of the very meaning and value of human existence itself; and these are matters that can only make sense if we consider freedom as a positive power. Moreover, it is presumably the premise of American democratic theory that we human beings have precisely such a positive power of freedom, which enables us to be responsible for our own formation of values both individually and collectively; thus the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individual liberties to free speech and religious belief while also preserving the collective rights to exercise religious freedom, form associations with others and petition the government. The very existence of such freedoms seems clearly to exceed the bounds of the limitations Hobbes’s materialism would place on human nature.
Toward a “Positive” Conception of Freedom: Marx’s Concept of “Alienation”
The philosopher and political theorist Karl Marx (1818-1883) sought to expose what he viewed as the humanly degrading condition of modern industrial society and its so-called “free-market” system. Marx is a materialist philosopher to the extent that he focuses on the material conditions of human existence, thus he of course acknowledges that material needs and desires play an important part in the realization of human freedom; however, according to Marx the economic institutions of our modern free-market society, with their exclusive emphasis on the value of “capital,” place us all in a kind of bondage wherein we become extensions of capital (even our own) and thus tools of the system, “appendages to the machine,” where the tools themselves, technological and corporate, become the masters of our destiny―where the tools control us rather than our using the tools for our own personal advancement and fulfillment. He referred to this degraded human condition as “alienation,” meaning that we are alienated, that is separated, from our true nature as free and independent beings.
Marx did not much employ the traditional philosophical language of such things as “free-will,” as we are speaking of it here, but in essence his concept of alienation is the direct opposite of the unified and complete free-will we shall be looking at when we get to Augustine; thus, Marx’s thesis was precisely that, in our industrialized and now technological society, we workers have surrendered our natural freedom to those who control the machines and the technology, and it is Marx’s altogether humane intent to recover human freedom, at least over our material conditions. Moreover, in Marx’s concept of alienation, to which freedom is the antidote, we see strong echoes of Augustine’s theory of “the two wills,” which, as we shall see, involves a psychic separation within the human self. So, to repeat, Marx was in favor of a genuinely positive view of human freedom, and his concept of “alienation” was an effort to explain how a capital-centered, “free-market” system makes freedom impossible. Augustine, like Marx, insists that humans are genuinely free, and his concept of “the two wills” is analogous to Marx’s alienation in that it is essentially the condition we fall into when we are not free. So a glance at Marx’s concept of alienation will perhaps serve to illuminate Augustine’s account of the two wills.
Three Forms of Alienation
According to Marx, modern workers, consumers and citizens are alienated in three distinct ways. First, we are alienated from the products of our own labor. Second, we are alienated from each other. Third, we are alienated from ourselves.
We can see the alienation of ourselves from the products of our own labor in the modern corporate workplace. Thus, when choosing between job offers, do we choose based on the product that a company sells and the contribution that a company makes to the community and the fulfillment of human needs? Or do we make our job selections based on the money a company will pay us? The point here is that it arguably doesn’t matter what the company does—we probably don’t even know (or much care) half the time what our company is doing around the world―as long as we are well compensated and can thus achieve a relatively high, bourgeois social status as evidenced by our material possessions. This indicates the profound alienation, or separation or disconnect, between the individual worker and the work that a worker produces. We probably take this for granted, but it means effectively that, in essence, our work, in itself, is meaningless to us—it has no intrinsic value, we do not value it in itself, for its own sake, rather its value is strictly extrinsic—a function of the money we are paid, which has nothing to do with the work itself. So if all we care about is the money, we don’t care (we may not even know) whether we are assisting our employer to produce butter or guns: what we do becomes irrelevant to who we are, thus we are no longer masters of our own productive capacity, no longer masters of ourselves.
In that same corporate workplace we can also see the alienation of ourselves from others. In today’s highly competitive and insecure economic environment we are aware that, among us and our co-workers, not all of us can survive. Some will be hired, others not. Some will be promoted, others not. Some will be retained, others will be laid off, when cost-cutting pressures drive management to cut the workforce so that shareholders can enjoy the maximum share price. Corporations today often stress teamwork, for the good of corporate profit, and they demand loyalty to the company; but that loyalty does not extend from company to workers as they won’t hesitate to fire us or our co-workers when the economy falters. And consider the cubicle layout of the modern corporate workplace: survival of the fittest certainly applies to us in our cubicles, at our computer workstations, even if the corporate shareholders never have to face this dehumanizing, back-stabbing environment where every worker is expendable and we want to make sure that it’s not us who get laid off, but our neighbors.
Finally we are alienated from ourselves, disabled from seeking our own independent meaning, value and fulfillment in our work. We want the fancy car because we have so lost sight of our real value as natural human beings that only the car can tell us what we’re worth. We readily and thoughtlessly surrender the only human value that is uniquely and inalienably our own—our basic freedom of speech, of body, of personal expression—to submit to workplace drug tests, DNA screening, workplace surveillance, email and telephone monitoring. Even when we are away from the workplace, we are expected to maintain the image of the good corporate citizen since the employee who criticizes the dangerous or harmful or destructive activities of the employer can, absent union or other contractual protection, which are increasingly rare today, be fired without cause. And we know that we are not, as a practical matter, “free to be fired”: we need the job, especially in an increasingly insecure economy where our health benefits, for example, depend on our continued employment.
The Second Face of Freedom: Free Will as a Positive Power
Thus, Hobbesian “free-market freedom,” which effectively denies and thus alienates us from our potential fulfillment as free and responsible beings, is a rather limited and superficial version of freedom. In opposition to this merely negative version of freedom is a positive version of freedom according to which human nature is not merely selfish and materialistic (though, realistically, it does include these characteristics), but also spiritual, autonomous (“self-ruling”), peaceful, compassionate and positively (and also responsibly) free. According to this view, which we have seen championed by Rousseau, freedom is a gift of nature that is inalienable—which can’t be separated (alienated) from the human person without essentially violating or eliminating that nature; in other words, to be truly human is to be free, and if we surrender our freedom we are no longer truly human. This is consistent with the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “We take these truths to be self-evident, that man is endowed by his creator with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That we are “endowed by our creator” implies that such rights are part of our very nature, and moreover that they are “unalienable” implies that we cannot let them go or alienate them without effectively forfeiting that nature. This “positive” freedom constitutes a self-defining and self-moving power, rather than being defined as an absence of external physical restraint. This positive freedom, it must be noted, is certainly “restrained,” so to speak, by the physical realities of nature as well as by truth (more on this to follow), but then so clearly, as we have noted above, is any version of freedom. Moreover, human beings are still animals, and thus feel all the automatic, material tugs of instinct that animals do; but this “free-will” view holds, as argued by Rousseau, that we human beings have a power that animals do not, which is what allows us to recognize the tug of instinct (and selfishness, etc.) and to choose whether to follow or resist it. In short, this view asserts that whereas animals are totally bound by instinct, human beings are not, because we have this positive power and are thus free to refuse it. Human beings are not, on this view, at the absolute mercy of automatic, reflexive, instinctual reaction; rather, we can engage our reason to deliberate and choose our actions, which empowers us to be responsible. To be clear, “reaction” is an automatic, mechanical effect of material causes; by contrast, the “responsibility” that positive freedom entails requires rational deliberation that informs, but does not automatically and mechanically determine, the free choice of the will.
The difference between the two versions of freedom, therefore, reflects and implies a profound difference concerning our view of the nature of reality, in general, and the nature of human being, in particular. The materialist, Hobbesian view of freedom limits human beings to material concerns because, according to this view, there is nothing in the world except material things to concern ourselves with. So in Hobbes’s view, as in the view of free-market economics, there is no real meaning to the idea of “goodness,” for the word “good” is used merely to identify a selfish, subjective, material pleasure or advantage; thus, there is no basis for a general, objective morality because what’s good for you may be evil for me, and Hobbes explicitly denies that there is any objective basis for making a determination between good and evil. This is consistent with the demand of free-market economics, which, to requires us to be strictly selfish so that “the invisible hand” can most efficiently rule the market. By contrast, the theory of free will, as expounded by Augustine, was motivated precisely by the conviction that there is real meaning to the idea of “the good,” and specifically that this idea is given us by God; having said that, however, it is impossible to know, with certainty, what that “good” might be, thus freedom, in practice, requires us not only to choose the good but also to figure out what the good is, which is what ethics is all about (see my chapters on ethics for more on this). In any event, we don’t have to share Augustine’s religious views: we can believe that there is no God and still make judgments based on our own reason and our general consensus as to the value of human life, human freedom and human dignity, and no belief in God is necessary for us to understand the philosophical meaning of free-will and the profound dignity it lends to our conception of human being, a dignity we basically take for granted today and which is in a real sense the very basis for modern Western civilization, especially since the Renaissance and its embrace of the value of the individual human personality.
Nature has given us the power of choice, which is what the will is, along with the powers of imagination and reason, which enable us to consider how things could be different and to deliberate and determine what is right. Note, again, that this activity of “deliberation” as undertaken by the free will is fundamentally different from the deliberation Hobbes talks about: for Hobbes, “deliberation” is just a mechanical weighing of physical pleasures against pains, where what is “good” is just a matter of personal perspective involving one’s own physical pleasure, comfort and security, with no objective validity, so for Hobbes animals also deliberate. For Augustine, by contrast, deliberation is a uniquely human ability to use the faculty of reason to seek an ultimate good, which for Augustine himself is ultimately a function of the goodness of God; but we can leave God out of it to acknowledge that all of us can agree that there is a universal validity to the power of thought that is able to determine that 2+3=5, for example; thus all of us can see that the “good” Augustine seeks in the will of God is also accessible to us all, at least in principle, as we acknowledge some basis for objective reality. More importantly, for all the diversity among the people and peoples of the world, we can hardly dispute a universal acceptance of the basic value of human life, human freedom and human dignity, which is the basis of the possibility of ethics (see the chapters on ethics).
The Genesis of Augustine’s Theory of Free Will: The Problem of Evil
Though we don’t have to ascribe to Augustine’s religious faith to appreciate and indeed accept his views on human freedom, it is helpful to refer to his religious point of departure to understand how his revolutionary view of freedom came about.
As a converted Christian, Augustine’s faith was founded in the monotheistic conception of a single omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God: his God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. Apart from or “before” God there was nothing, God created all, from nothing (ex nihilo), and, as clearly stated in the first verses of “The Book of Genesis,” it was all good. Most of what God created was primarily material—light, air, water, heavenly bodies, plants, animals and humans; but God also breathed into human beings “spirit,” which implies something else than mere material, bodily being. Who knows?―this needn’t concern us here. What does concern us is that Augustine’s vision of God seems to imply a serious logical problem, known as the problem of evil. Clearly there is evil in the world: we see it all the time, don’t we? Now if God is all knowing, clearly He knows about it, and if He is also all-powerful, He could clearly prevent it, and since He does not He must not be all-good; but this is impossible if God is God. If God didn’t know about the evil, then He could still be all-good and all-powerful, but then He wouldn’t be all-knowing; or if He were not all-powerful then He could still be all-knowing and all-good. But given the existence of evil in the world, there seems no logical way that He can be all three—omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent—at once. So either God is not God or there is no God, or there is no evil; but for Augustine none of these options can be true. So, how can it be that God exists and that there be evil in the world?
Due in part to this conundrum, Augustine himself, for some years before his religious conversion at age 32 (see Augustine’s account of it in his Confessions, Book Eight Chs. XI and XII), ascribed to the doctrine known as Manichaeism. In its basic outline, this doctrine is actually very prevalent today in popular and political circles as well as religious. This doctrine implies that God is not all-powerful; rather, some sort of God does exist, as the force of goodness in the world, but in addition to God there is another force, a force of evil, that struggles with God’s goodness. According to this view, all human history is in essence a cosmic struggle between these two great forces of good and evil, which take turns winning the day; thus evil appears in the world when its force wins a battle over God. And this view is popular today still in part because it is so easy to understand that even children have no problem with it, and it lends itself easily to the simple morality of such things as Hollywood westerns and Star Wars, where any child readily sees that some guys are purely good and others simply evil; what’s more, it offers a convenient excuse for adult bad behavior, for if I do wrong I can claim “the devil made me do it” or “I couldn’t help it,” etc. In other words, the wayward adult can claim that she is not really free.
But in a garden in Milan, Italy in A.D. 386, Augustine, by his own account, suddenly experienced the presence of God was converted to Christianity, whereupon his faith demanded acceptance of the reality of the sort of supreme God that would appear to be logically impossible on Manichean terms. According to Augustine’s converted understanding, there is no stand-alone power of evil in the world: all truly is good. Evil appears to exist in the world, but in truth it is no more real, in itself, than the darkness of a shadow. In other words, just as darkness is not real in itself but occurs only as the absence of light, so evil is not real in itself but only occurs as the absence of the good. This view of the world, we should note, is in part a religious and moral version of Plato’s intellectual Idea of The Good, which, like Augustine’s God, is the only reality, whereas the physical world of the shadows is all illusion.
But what of the apparent logical impossibility of Augustine’s God, and how does evil occur, or appear, in the world? Augustine’s answer to the problem of evil is simple. Yes, God knows all, including the evil that happens in the world, and yes, God is all-powerful and therefore could prevent it, and yes too, God is all-good and abhors evil and sorely wishes that it did not exist; however, says Augustine, though God knows of evil and could prevent it, He does not cause it—God is not responsible for the evil in the world, rather human beings are responsible for evil because we have free will. Just as the shadow occurs because I stand up and turn my back to the sun, so evil occurs because I assert my own private willfulness to turn my back to the light of the good. “Willfulness” is the term for the exercise of the will without reference to goodness or truth, a purely selfish and self-serving exercise of the power of will that effectively denies personal responsibility; willfulness is a species of the Hobbesian freedom of non-restraint, of doing simply what I can simply because I can. Willfulness, in short, is a manifestation of the condition of “the two wills,” which is but a shadow of free will and not the positive power of free will itself.
Beware Misinterpreting “The Two Wills”: There is no Separate, “Fleshly” Will
It is easy to misinterpret “the two wills.” Augustine himself refers to the distinct “fleshly” and “spiritual” natures of human beings, manifested by the division in human existence between body and soul (or mind), and this might lead us to believe that the two wills are in essence two separate wills, one that is bodily and one that is spiritual, and further that one tends to evil and the other to good. It may seem that Augustine himself implies this in Book Eight, Ch. V when he speaks of a “carnal” or “fleshly” will as if it were a separate power; however, Augustine makes clear at the end of this chapter that what he means by this “fleshly” will is simply the force of habit, where our body has become accustomed to a particular practice, like smoking or obsessively checking our text messages or Instagram “likes,” as if these had a power of their own. When we think about it, however, we realize that such habits are traced back directly to our own decisions—our own choices repeated over time until they come to feel “automatic” and as if we no longer control them; but on sincere reflection we realize of course that they originate in our own, single, free will—there is no foreign, second will controlling us—and that we are responsible for them through our own willing. In order to break the spell of the “two wills” we must, as Augustine puts it in Ch. VII, “turn back” to come “face to face” with ourselves rather than “flee from” our selves by denying that we are freely responsible for our own willing.
Let’s consider smoking as an example of habit. No one can deny that I had total control over my first cigarettes: it is easy to see that I freely chose, by my own, one free will, to smoke those. But the condition of the “two wills” tempts me to claim that there is an independent power that is to blame for my smoking, implying that smoking is no longer my choice—that bodily addiction has taken over, that it’s “beyond my control.” It is this, as noted above, that Augustine refers to as the “carnal will;” but clearly it is not a separate will but is rather just the force of habit, which is directly traceable to my own one will. By convincing myself that I have lost my power over myself, I have effectively pitted my own free-will in a struggle against itself. If I were honest with myself then I couldn’t deny that I got into this habit by my own free will, and I would have to concede further that I could get out of it the same way because I have free will; but I pretend that I can’t, I claim that “I have no choice,” as if an alien force is controlling me. In short, I lie—and the first victim of this lie is myself. So not only have I given up my power of will, I have also surrendered my power of reason and alienated myself from the truth. I say I want to quit smoking, and I might even say that “I can’t quit” or, again, that “I have no choice,” but this is the lie that I make to myself, because most assuredly I do have a choice but I find myself here unwilling to make it! Just as I might resort to the Manichean excuse “the devil made me do it,” here I say “I can’t help myself” as if I am possessed by an alien power; but there is no alien power stopping me; rather, the power that stops me from doing what I will is myself.
Thus the Manichean, dualistic division of the universe into the opposing forces of evil and good according to which there are two, actual wills—one bad, one good, body and soul—is not Augustine’s view, and the interpretation of the two wills as representing a dualistic division between body and soul is clearly wrong: I obviously have only one will, the power of free choice—to smoke or not to smoke—but precisely because the will is fully free, it struggles to do what it will because it can always do otherwise. Still, the relation of mind and body is mysterious; thus, in Ch. VIII Augustine wonders about how the mind in everyday affairs easily and instantly controls the body even though it is a totally distinct thing from the mind: “I did so many things where the will to do them was not at all the same thing as the power to do them,” he says, indicating that the will, which is simply a part of the whole mental apparatus of the mind, is thus a separate substance from the body, which is where the physical power of movement resides. Yet when I want to raise my arm, for example, I can do it instantly, even though the willing and the doing—the mind and the body—are utterly separate; when the will moves the body, it is easy even though the will and body are two entirely separate “powers,” one mental and the other physical. When it comes to the will to will, however, “the power is the same as the will, and the willing was the doing. Yet it was not done.” In other words, “the body more readily obeyed the slightest wish of the mind… than the mind obeyed itself”—the mind can control the body but it cannot control itself! This is the condition of “the two wills,” which is really a condition in which my one will is locked in a struggle with itself, and since the will is the same as itself it cannot overcome itself and so is trapped in a deadlock and effectively paralyzed—by not willing what it wills. While it may seem that a second will is holding me back from doing what I will, in fact it is my one will holding back itself. We should note that Augustine speaks of the “two wills” at this place in his Confessions as he recounts the spiritual upheaval and mental torment that preceded his religious conversion, where he himself is struggling to will what he wants to will and finds that he cannot seem to do it; it’s like procrastination—I want to do my homework, “I will do it,” I tell myself, yet… I keep not willing it and I finally give up and say, “I will do it tomorrow.”
In a later passage, in Ch. X, Augustine further indicates that this “good and evil” interpretation of the two wills is false: “Let them perish from thy presence, O God… who observing that there are two wills at issue in our coming to a decision proceed to assert that there are two minds in us of different natures, one good one evil.” No! says Augustine—God created all good, thus mind (including the will) and body are complete and good; but the human exercise of free will permits us, regrettably and often tragically, to fall into the trap of “the two wills,” an unnatural and “monstrous” state, says Augustine (Ch. IX), wherein we deny our own freedom and so “flee from” our own selves. The natural condition of the will is one, “complete” will, and Augustine employs a litany of terms to emphasize the inner unity of the will—“complete,” “whole,” “full,” “entire,” “total.” To be “at one with” oneself, in modern terms (not Augustine’s) is to have integrity, the opposite of hypocrisy: the hypocrite, who effectively suffers the condition of the “two wills,” says one thing and does another, while the person with integrity says what she does and does what she says—she doesn’t just “talk the talk” but also “walks the walk.” Analogously, a bridge that lacks structural integrity is unsound—it’s going to fall into pieces, it is not one with itself. Thus, to have integrity is to be “self-possessed,” to be what one by nature is, to be oneself, to will with one’s own one, complete will and “to own it”—to acknowledge personal responsibility for what we will; it is thus that one is autonomous (that is, “self-ruling”), master of oneself, in full possession of oneself, of one’s power of reason and free-will, and this power is precisely the power of freedom in its fullest and most positive sense.
Another Example of the “Two Wills:” Peer Pressure
Consider peer pressure. When your friends or classmates or whatever group of people you want to be a part of—your “peers”—are doing something you find uncomfortable or you think is wrong or you generally don’t really want to do, you feel pressured to do it anyway so you can fit in; that is “peer pressure.” It is also an example of the two wills, since you are effectively torn within yourself: you both want to go along with the crowd in order to be accepted, and you do not want to go along at the same time, and the pressure consists in your not being able to decide simply to will what you will.
Now consider the case where you do go along with peer pressure to do some petty forbidden thing that you didn’t really “want” to do (except you must have “wanted” to do it since you did do it!)—petty vandalism, ill-advised drinking, whatever—and then get caught: what do you tell your parents or your school principal? Don’t you say, “I couldn’t help it,” “I had to do it,” “I had no choice”? This is when our parents say, “what if all your friends jumped off a bridge,” for this of course reminds us that in fact we are lying, because we could “help it,” we didn’t have to do it, we did have a choice because we are free! In other words, you are here clearly suffering the condition of the “two wills” since you are so alienated from yourself, so lacking in integrity, that you are lying to and deceiving yourself: you didn’t do what you did because you had to do it, you did it because you chose to do it, and you refuse even to admit this to yourself—you effectively deny your own freedom of will.
So the condition of “the two wills” is in a real sense a delusion, a bad-faith denial of freedom, a self-imposed bondage to powerlessness or rational paralysis: rather than will what you will, you suffer the pressure to go against your own will, thus effectively paralyzing your own power of free self-determination. It is a self-imposed bondage to the perversion of the will, as when I choose to think that 2+3=6, which I can do in terms of Hobbesian, “negative freedom” since no one can stop me from thinking this if I so choose; however, choosing to think that 2+3=6 is clearly not an exercise of the positive power of free will since such blatant falsity in fact constitutes a failure or repudiation of the power of reason with which nature has endowed me, a perversion of the genuine power, or freedom, of thought, which, to be truly itself, must adhere to the “constraint” of truth. To pervert the will in this way is “willfulness,” a condition in which the will separates itself from reality to stand alone, as it were, against its own truth or good. When willful we pervert the power of the will, we turn our back to the light and to truth to reside in shadow and falsity. In religious terms, it is blasphemy, a rebellion against God, a pretending to be God; but we needn’t resort to religious terms to be able to see it in purely secular, philosophical terms as a fundamental condition of the human psyche to which we all are prone. Moreover, it is an essential condition of free will; that is, we cannot be free except on the condition that our will be capable of denying the truth of its own freedom, just as it is “free” to deny the truth of 2+3=5.
Review of Different Versions of the “Two Wills”
So we human beings are endowed with the power choice that resides in our one will, and the exercise of freedom requires the decision and action of that one will; but the responsibility that comes with freedom is hard, and we all have a tendency, at times, to pretend that we are not free, and this is the condition of the “two wills,” which manifests itself in various ways. So, for example, when we have fallen, through repeated, free choices, into some bad habit, we may feel that our body has taken on a will of its own, and we might claim that “I don’t want” to smoke or “I don’t mean” to obsessively check my phone but “I can’t help it, it just happens;” but these are lies that we tell to ourselves to hide from ourselves that we are in fact responsible for these habits and that we could choose to resist and change them, and the very fact that we lie to ourselves makes it appear that there is a separate power within ourselves—a second will—that is lying to us, even though it is in fact we who lie to ourselves.
Another example of the “two wills” occurs when we find ourselves willing and not willing at the same time as in the case of procrastination, where we “will do” something and yet time passes and we haven’t done it—we haven’t gotten around to willing what we are willing. This version of the two wills sees the will in a paralyzing struggle with itself, and, again, it may seem as if there is a second will keeping me from willing what I will, when in fact, of course, it is the one will that is itself not willing what it wills.
Finally, the case of peer pressure offers another variation of the “two wills,” when instead of not willing what we do want to will, we do will what we don’t want to will. As in the case of habit, it results in our lying to ourselves (and to others) with statements like, “I had to do it,” “I couldn’t help it” or “I had no choice,” which are different ways of claiming that we had no free will and so were not responsible for willing what we willed, which, of course, is a lie.
Beyond Augustine’s Two Wills: How God Can Be Omnipotent and Humans Still Have the Power of Free-Will
I have emphasized that Augustine’s description of the two wills and human freedom, though rooted for him in his religious faith, is strictly philosophical: we can make sense of it in purely rational terms because it is not in any way dependent on or derived from faith. However, there is a nagging philosophical problem lurking below Augustine’s idea of free will, namely, how can this idea be logically consistent with an omnipotent God? It may seem obvious that if God is omnipotent and so has all the power there is, then that can leave no power (i.e., free will) to human beings; and if God is omniscient, He must already know the future and thus, again, we can have no free will since what we will do is already determined. So it behooves us, in giving full consideration to the philosophical basis of Augustine’s views, to consider whether the nature of God is philosophically—that is, rationally—consistent with the existence of human free will. For this purpose I shall turn to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who argues that free will only makes sense if there is an omnipotent God. Note that we shall consider the possible existence of God not as something to be accepted on faith but as something we can approach with the tools of human reason alone, with which all of us are endowed (whether you believe in God or not).
Kierkegaard on Omnipotence and Freedom
“The greatest good, after all, which can be done for a being... is to make it free.” Thus opens Kierkegaard’s journal entry in which he argues, paradoxically, “In order to do just that, omnipotence is required.”1 In short, it is Kierkegaard’s argument that it is only because God is omnipotent that He has the power to let us be completely free, and letting us be free is God’s supreme act of love for human beings. Let me suggest an analogy to human parenting, for human parents raise their children, out of love, precisely in order to let them be free; however, it is clear that, unlike God, human parents are not omnipotent and thus, no matter how great their love for their children, they simply are not able completely and unreservedly to let their children go.2
An infant is totally dependent on the parent, who expresses his love, one-sidedly, in this dependency, by nurturing and directing the child’s every move. As she matures, the child asserts her freedom and the parent at times withdraws control to permit the child to stumble and so learn... to be free: to raise a child is indeed to prepare her “to stand on her own two feet,” thus for both God and parents it is the combination of love and power that motivate them to let their respective “creations” be free. But such letting free is not always easy, thus, for example, Mother puts training wheels on the child’s first bicycle to prevent him from falling, and she fears to remove them for she knows the child will fall. Mother does not remove the wheels to cause the fall, any more than God gives us free will to make us sin: in both cases the purpose is to make us free, out of love, since only without the training wheels can the child be free to ride on her own. So though mother knows the child is going to fall, she does not thereby cause the fall—she is not responsible for it—rather it is the child’s freedom that permits it; so too God knows that by letting us be free we will do harm or “sin,” but the choice to sin is our responsibility, not God’s, and though God in His omniscience may even know what we are going to will, the will, and the choice, are still our own.
It is an inescapable feature of this positive power of freedom, unlike the negative, Hobbesian liberty of non-restraint, that it imposes significant restrictions; positive freedom is a power, the effectiveness of which demands the acknowledgement and mastery of its own limits. In the case of bicycling, for example, genuine, positive freedom demands the acceptance and mastery of the exigencies of gravity and balance. Analogously, in the case of the free power of rational thought, to think freely, to master the power of thought, is to bind oneself to rationality and truth: my “thought” that “2+3=6” may be my constitutional right, but one can hardly say that such a thought represents a free power since clearly that thought is lacking in power and is rather in bondage to falsity or ignorance. No one can stop me from thinking what’s false, except myself, so to think what’s true is obviously where my power lies even though I do not create the truth myself; thus it is that “the truth will set you free”! Again, and in the same way, to bicycle freely is not to zigzag with unconstrained and arbitrary abandon, going wherever I want, because then I’ll clearly fall or run into something; to bicycle with the real power of freedom is rather to master the straight and the true of gravity and balance. Just as the freedom of thought is most real when it recognizes and masters the constraints of truth, so the freedom of bicycling is most free when it recognizes and masters the constraints of physical laws.
Beyond Augustine, cont.: The Limits of Parental Power
As the child matures and begins to leave the nest, no parent can entirely let go because no parent is omnipotent; so the parent faces this paradox of love—that the drive to protect by possession and control is incommensurable with the simple admiration of the child’s free flight. Thus, says Kierkegaard, “This is why one human being cannot make another wholly free, because the one who has power is himself captive in having it and therefore continually has a wrong relation to the one whom he wants to make free.” Thus, for example, the parent, who has the “power” over the child, cannot restrain himself from back-seat driving, unwelcome advice and importunate phone calls even though he wants the child to be free; the parent wants the child to be free and yet can’t completely let go. By contrast, only God, who is omnipotent, has such power as top be able both to love without condition and let go without qualification. As Kierkegaard puts it,
Only omnipotence can withdraw itself at the same time it gives itself away, and this relationship is the very independence of the receiver. God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness. For goodness is to give oneself away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the other independent.
The loving parent also intends to give himself completely, but he does not have the power equally to withdraw, thus a parent is categorically incapable of the perfect love that makes free.
Kierkegaard says, moreover, that “All finite power makes dependent; only omnipotence can make independent, can form from nothing something which has its continuity in itself through the continual withdrawing of omnipotence.” In other words, not only do humans not have the absolute power necessary to let the other go completely in freedom, but also the human tends to get caught up in his own sense of power and become dependent on it, that is, co-dependent. Thus it is not surprising that, humanly, we can turn the nature of power on its head: rather than recognize that the genuine power of love manifests itself in letting go, we think of it in precisely the opposite terms—as involving control and possession. This is why the human will to power erupts so readily into violence, crushing all possibility of love. Kierkegaard concludes with a remark indicating how wrong-headed this view of power is: “Only a wretched and mundane conception of the dialectic of power holds that it is greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent”; in other words, to repeat, the genuine power of love is a giving, as we have seen it described by Erich Fromm, which manifests itself not in control and possession of the ones we love but in letting the ones we love be free.
Thus, ironic as it may seem, it is precisely the omnipotence of God that makes free-will possible, for, according to this view, God is like the loving parent who not only wants us to be free out of love but also, unlike the parent, has the power and self-possession to let go completely, to let freedom be. God of course knows that we are likely to misuse our freedom (to “sin,” that is to “miss the mark” of the good), and that evil will thus occur, but this is the inevitable price of the human freedom that also makes human virtue possible; for just as we deserve no credit for balancing on a bicycle with training wheels, because we are not free, so we cannot be complete and fulfilled human beings capable of our own goodness if we are without free will. So we are free because of the confluence of God’s love, power and goodness, and we are in turn free to use our own power of free will to love God and do good. It is only as free beings that we can genuinely love and do good, for true love and genuine personal goodness require that one must also be free not to love and to do evil, and this is precisely why God makes us free, presumably, and why parents have children, in the first place.
Beyond Augustine, cont.: The Joy and Peril of Adult Love
Let’s now turn to the adult love relationship. Whereas the parent loves from the moment of the child’s total dependency and is powerless to make the leap to making perfectly independent and free, the adult lover loves the beloved precisely by virtue of the beloved’s independence, precisely because the lover, unlike the parent, has not “formed” the beloved. Whereas the parent can never altogether escape the possibility that he is really loving himself in the child, the adult lover, ideally, loves the other as other. Yet in the reciprocal relationship of adult love the insoluble paradox of love persists, for the transition from dependence to freedom, which the parent fails to make, is, between adults, simply reversed in direction. That is, this adult love begins with freedom, but in the very quest for unity, which love is, the lover inevitably sullies the purity of love by the very effort to connect: the lover cannot avoid seeing an image of himself in the beloved, indeed his attraction may, narcissistically, commence precisely with this, and to project himself onto the beloved is to defeat her independence—the inevitable effect of the effort to bond is to bind. In other words, whereas the love of parent for child starts with connection and dependency and moves toward independence and freedom, adult love moves in the opposite direction—from independence and freedom toward connection and unity.
Thus we might say that genuine love is non-dialectical. A dialectical relationship would lead to a synthesis or fusion of lover and beloved, but love, properly understood, defies the fusion that would eliminate the independent existences of lover and beloved. Ideally, love is reciprocal, but it cannot depend on reciprocity since in that case I would love only on condition that I am loved in return, making my love dependent on the other and thus making the love relation one not of independence and freedom but one of co-dependency. Love demands the total separation of lover and beloved in order that each be free because only as free is each a proper object of love, but such separation of lover and beloved is precisely what human lovers seek to overcome. This is the paradox of love―that the lovers seek to defeat the very possibility of love by uniting completely and thus losing themselves in love, rendering continued love impossible: human love, in the words of Erich Fromm, in essence involves that paradoxical effort of “two becoming one yet remaining two.”
Beyond Augustine, cont.: The Negative Perversion of Love: The Abusive Relationship
In the abusive relationship, we see a graphic and extreme example of how “love” can be twisted into a dark perversion of its true nature when the drive to unity, manifested as possession and control, overcomes the requirement that the lover let the beloved be free. The abuser expresses his “love” by demanding and enforcing possession and control; he effectively strives to reduce the beloved to infantile dependency. He won’t let her go “because he loves her,” but as we have seen human love requires, as the essential condition for the beloved to be able to return love to the lover, that the beloved be free to love the lover, which entails equally that she be free not to, and it is precisely this that the abuser, in his powerlessness, feels he must deny. He is enraged by the attention by his beloved to another because it reminds him of her independence, and in reaction thereto he claims that “he beats her out of love.” In truth, the abuser is possessed by a self-loathing, reflected in the victim, that seeks to assert over her the possession that he lacks of himself, and his failure to love himself makes him incapable of loving another. Like Narcissus, he sees his reflection in the victim but is numb to the fact that it is he,3 and he fixates upon his own shadow―the beguiling and delusional image of his own power―thus turning his back to love. Moreover, the “beloved’s” victimization consists essentially not in physical servitude but in her seeing herself through the abuser’s eyes and thus internalizing the selflessness that his shadow casts: her submission is the shadow of his control.
In his denial of the beloved’s freedom, the abuser forsakes the faith that love demands: as we noted above, ideally adult human love is reciprocal, but it is not love if it depends on reciprocity. The falsity of the abuser’s “love” becomes manifest when the victim succeeds at last in asserting her freedom by separating herself decisively to sever the relationship; it is here that the “beloved” typically faces her greatest peril, for this is when most abuse homicides occur. An abusive relationship is at all times hovering perilously over this catastrophic abyss and can avoid it only by a tenuous balance grounded in the submission of the victim, as the abuser sustains himself in the face of selflessness by his control of the other in whom he narcissistically sees himself. When the victim decisively sunders the relationship, the abuser’s delusion that she “loves” him reveals itself as mere shadow and the abuser himself as a mere shadow of it, and, suddenly alone over the abyss, vertigo overwhelms him and he acts to conclude a love that he has perverted beyond recognition, to control love itself by concluding its unrealized possibility. Here, as experience all too often attests, abuse no longer escalates gradually and quantitatively but takes a qualitative leap… to murder.
Conclusion: Shadow and Light, Willfulness v. Freedom
The abuser’s shadow, which is that delusion of power the abuser exercises by asserting possession and control over the “beloved,” represents the willfulness of Augustine’s “two wills”—the urge to do what one wants without regard to reality or truth. This is akin to Hobbes’s freedom to do what you want, the freedom of non-restraint, but it is really a desperate bondage of self that closes itself off from love; this is so because what seems like freedom here is really a function of immediate, unreflective habit or desire, whereas true freedom, understood as a positive power, requires thoughtful consideration, rational judgment and a reliance on or appeal to truth. As to Hobbes’s view that liberty is a function of non-restraint, of the “right to everything,” Augustine would argue, first, that Hobbes isn’t even talking about or acknowledging freedom as a positive power, and second, that Hobbes’s own views effectively constitute a submission to the two wills in that to give away your freedom for material security is to deny your very self, your truth as a human being—to deny, that is, personal responsibility by surrendering all power to a controlling elite.
Augustine follows Plato, in stark contrast to Hobbes, in the idea that there is a genuine and eternal reality at the basis of creation; for Plato the term for this reality is “The Idea of the Good,” and in Augustine, of course, that reality is God. These conceptions are closely analogous, in fact, with the exception of the theological issue of the complete transcendence of God, Whom we can know only by His divine grace, as distinct from the strictly philosophical idea of the Good, which is an intellectual reality directly accessible, in principle, to human reason through the immortal soul. This theological point aside, Plato’s Idea of the Good and Augustine’s conception of God share the proposition that there is only a single, positive power in the world—the power of goodness; thus evil, like the darkness of shadow, is not real, for it is merely what appears in the absence of what truly is, namely God and the Good.
So the shadow represents the two wills at work, it represents willfulness rather than freedom in that, by turning our back to the light of truth and Good (or God), we block out the light to gaze instead at our shadow—we block out truth and goodness to linger and live in the darkness of appearance (Plato’s “cave”) rather than reality. When our one, free will turns from its own truth to engage in that mortal struggle with itself known as the “two wills” it becomes a will that is effectively sabotaging itself, a will that only seems to will but does not will in fact because, in its impossible struggle with itself (impossible because it cannot overcome itself), it is paralyzed by its bondage to its own unreflective habit and desire, a “will” without reason and thus no will at all; for a genuinely free action is the product of a positive power based on reason—an action, in short, that follows from a true and free decision. Rather than a reasoned and responsible and thus free action there is here merely an unreflective reaction, which cannot be positively free because a reaction is like a reflex, just a mechanical effect of a physical cause.
But this narrow, Hobbesian “liberty”—in contrast to the positive power of genuine freedom—is alluring, indeed what power doesn’t one’s shadow promise! Whereas a dog may be spooked by his shadow, and a horse may start, the child, discovering her shadow, is enthralled: her back to the sun, she delights in the shapes and motions of her own casting, over which her power is perfect and complete. I love my shadow because it represents the “I” that is what I want it to be; as in the case of Hobbesian liberty, there is no limit or restraint on what I can do with it. But my shadow is nothing in itself, it’s only a shadow; it is no positive power, its being is only the absence of what enables it—the light of the sun, or truth―without which it vanishes leaving no trace, and its narcotic allure keeps my back turned to the truth of that enabling power. For therein is the truth and the power of positive free will, in the light, which truly is. It is only in the shadows and by the shadows that the shadows seem real; in truth they obstruct and conceal the real. It is in the obstruction and concealment of shadow that the willfulness of will resides, the will torn away from itself and its own truth to cling instead to the shadow’s tempting illusion of self-command.
However, as I turn toward the truth and reality of “the sun” to risk the exercise of free decision, I am painfully blinded and I spontaneously and instinctually recoil and turn away in favor of the cool control of the shadows, especially my own! This sun metaphor reminds us that in my free, responsible decisions (the stuff of ethics) I can never be perfectly sure of what the good requires—ethical issues are issues precisely because, as imperfect and mortal beings, nothing we do can ever be perfectly good or totally without harm, and moreover I cannot know the future. So the blinding light of the sun stands for the anxiety that inevitably attends human freedom and my despair that I can never perfectly do the good, and to face that light of the sun, to walk forward in freedom, requires a faith that there is a meaningful distinction between right and wrong even if I can never know it perfectly (which is really all that “sin” means), and that what I do matters. Analogously, in the case of love, as we have seen, faith is required because the lover must love irrespective of any assurance of reciprocity, for otherwise love turns to co-dependency and, in the extreme case, to abuse. So in all exercise of free will, whether in ethical decision or love (which are really two faces of the same thing), faith is required because, though I can think through my actions and come to a reasonable idea of what is right and true and consistent with what is truly valuable and good, I cannot ever be absolutely certain of the step ahead. And it is the anxiety and despair—the unavoidable conditions of my freedom—that make it tempting to submit to the condition of the “two wills” according to which I deny my freedom to dwell in the comfort of my narcissistic shadow self, a turning from sun to sin, submitting to willfulness, taking refuge in the denial of responsibility offered by habit and peer pressure. “Sin,” again, refers simply to not being perfect, to “missing the mark”—a turning away from our truth and so away from ourselves.
In sum, willfulness may appear to be freedom, but it is only freedom in the negative, Hobbesian sense of non-restraint: it is a matter merely of doing what I can, rather than what I will. Willfulness is like a shadow—it seems like a real power, but just as the shadow has no independent reality, since it is just an absence of light, willfulness is not a positive power of freedom since it only appears when I turn away from reality and truth. Freedom of the will, therefore, is not about that trap of self-command any more than it is about thinking that 2+3=6 or about the unconstraint of haphazard bicycling; it is, rather, about our faith in the future’s indeterminate possibility and the straightness and assuredness of its promise.
NOTES
[1] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Hong and Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978), Vol. II #1251, pp. 62-3 (1846).
[2] The concepts I develop in this section derive primarily from Kierkegaard, while the illustrations―of training wheels, shadows and abuse―are my own.
[3] Marshall McLuhan makes this point in the context of the relation of human beings to their (media) “extensions”: “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perception until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
“Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated with themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who have insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), pp. 41-42.
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