on human freedom

The following comes from an email to a friend written on December 3, 2007. It's been edited for content and style, as well as to preserve my friend's (and my) privacy. I'm slapping this up here after having been inspired by some excellent writing over at my friend Malcolm's blog regarding the nature (and the very existence of) human freedom. If I understand Malcolm correctly, he thinks human freedom is an illusion; that we believe we possess it arises from a strong but ultimately false intuition rooted in such things as our concept of "I" and what it means to act freely.

What follows isn't meant to be academically rigorous; think of it more as a meditation on an interesting issue. While I'm not sure Malcolm and I see eye-to-eye on this, we seem to be in fundamental agreement that it doesn't matter what the objective reality is. I think, in fact, that when most people ponder the question of whether we actually possess free will, they conclude that the best thing to do is to act AS IF they are free, as opposed to taking the slacker's way out and adopting a kind of moral nihilism of the "we're not free, therefore we're not responsible for our actions... so let's go throw bricks through shop windows" variety.

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The subject of human freedom is deep and wide and not really amenable to neat summarizations, though my own gut feeling, which I may or may not have expressed before, is that the free will/determinism dichotomy has a whiff of the artificial about it-- that the truth is, in fact, that these two things are not-two in the Zen or philosophical Taoist sense. Our minds, being analytical, tend to create separation and distinction, but the truth lies somewhere "underneath" or "beyond" our mental processes. Freedom is what exists in and through determinism and vice versa.

You talked about the heart-hardening passage in Exodus and about how it bothered you. I know where you're coming from. The problem with notions of radical voluntarism (all is God's will-- Jeff Hodges was discussing this on his blog w/relation to Islamic conceptions of God) is that, for Westerners at least, there arises the question of responsibility. If everything is God's will, including our thoughts and actions, then how can God find us accountable for anything? One version of this problem is the debates that have long surrounded the Calvinistic doctrine of double predestinaton. If we're predestined to go where we'll go, how are we responsible for getting there? The track was already laid out before we were born! Another, related version of the debate comes in the question of divine foreknowledge-- a subject I've probably beaten to death while simultaneously having only scratched the surface.

It's not just a Christian question, either. When I gave a lecture on Zen at Howard Divinity School in DC, one astute listener asked me a question about karma and freedom: if your current situation is determined by your accumulated karma, and if this is true from moment to moment, then how can a Buddhist say that you can choose to break free of the vicious cycle (Buddhism does, after all, accept that there is a such thing as human freedom: you make karma even as you're subject to it)? That day, I was stumped and I gave some sort of lame answer that the listener accepted, but not cheerfully. Nowadays, I'd probably zip right to the not-two answer, but I'd do so in the knowledge that I'm merely hinting at a nondiscursive truth, not something that can be laid out in a neat Aristotelian schema.

Back to the Bible, then: I'd agree that the Bible provides a rather conflicted picture of, say, the fate/freedom question. I think this is appropriate and represents a good opportunity for thoughtful people to wrestle with the scriptures, because ultimately we each have to arrive at The Answer (or maybe it's just My Answer) by this process. The Bible is one huge kong-an in that sense: the only worthwhile answers that come from it are expressed in how we live them, not how we say them.

For me, the Pharoah passages are compelling, but what truly takes the cake is the case of Judas Iscariot, an eternally fascinating character for me. If you look at Judas through, say, a Hindu lens, you see that he is merely following his dharma (here understood in the more Hindu manner: law, role, function, duty-- "what you must do, go and do quickly"), a dharma already set out for him. Judas' part in the cosmic drama of the Easter story often fills me with pity (which I suppose sets me apart from Dante Alighieri, who consigned Judas to the lowest circle of hell), but from a godlike perspective he was doing no more than what water does when it follows various paths down the rough trunk of a tree.

However, from a modern Western Christian perspective, there's this question about fate and freedom: Jesus seems fully aware of Judas' impending betrayal, and he (Jesus) even makes himself complicit in his own demise by sending Judas off to do what must be done. Judas here is seen as part of an immense divine plan: for redemption, someone's got to do the dirty work. For us moderns, it seems unfair that Judas might simply have been a puppet, one who gets punished merely for fulfilling his assigned function. The fact that Judas is remorseful enough to kill himself resonates with us modern folks, too: was part of his mind standing helplessly by, watching him perform the betrayal yet unable to do anything about it?

I think I mentioned that I may, in fact, be a closet compatibilist. I'm not a flaming compatibilist like Daniel Dennett, who sees no contradiction between determinism and freedom, but I have my own vaguely held and largely intuitive reasons for thinking he may be on to something. Many Christians are, of course, compatibilists once they realize their beliefs may lead to logical contradiction (e.g., predestination and freedom); they simply accept on faith that they stand in the face of a divine mystery. If they do this honestly and earnestly, I can't say that I resent them, but I think my inner Zen monk wishes they had gone through the effort of really wrestling with the problem. Real spirituality is work, in my opinion, and a person can only benefit from grappling with tough issues, even if a given bout ends in stalemate or defeat.


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