by Simon Smith
Marking season has come and gone,
and with it my chance to
mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race…[1]
As seasons go (or come) it’s been
unusual, what with the global plague and such. This year, I was marking essays
in applied philosophy, some significantly better, I’d say, than the usual
emetical exam scripts. Their authors had taken the time, or some time,
to reflect upon their chosen topics with no little care. The essays were fairly
interesting, more so than the usual boked up remembrances of Descartes or
Nietzsche, being as they were an attempt to apply new-born philosophical acumen
to some ‘non-philosophical’ material: a book, a film, song lyrics, etc. A refreshing
change to merely reading about philosophy, which is largely what
academic philosophy seems to be about these days.
The standard
of English was better, too, than many a professionally produced paper I’ve
encountered lately; depressingly so. It surprises me that a profession which stakes
its credibility on clarity of thought appears to have so little concern with
basic grammar, punctuation, and, quite often, spelling.
Agonising
Christ, wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse?[2]
It
would, oh it would.
A common theme of this year’s essays was that ol’ black magic called Determinism. Students attacked it vigorously and from a variety of angles; most concluded that Free Will is an illusion while Determinism is the very Hymenoptera’s patella. Curiously, hardly any of them seemed remotely perturbed by this. Coming apocalypse notwithstanding, they have their lives ahead of them and yet they cheerfully accept the idea that they are merely vibrations in the universal web of causal interaction and interpenetration; they accept that their lives, being consequent on physical causes, are also meaningless. Do these nascent Socrates and Socratesses feel the physical and metaphysical weight of a universe pressing down upon them already, I wonder. Has the sudden swell and flood of coughing death impressed upon them the sheer futility of all human endeavour? Perhaps; gloomy little buggers. Or maybe they’ve drunk too deep of the usual old rationalist toot without really thinking about it.
‘Courage!’ he said, and pointed toward the land…[3]
One common assumption seems to be
that Determinism is somehow scientific, or at least supported by scientific
thought, whereas the belief in Free Will is a conjuration of folk psychology. Hardly
a fair assessment. Both Determinism and Free Will purport to say something, not
just about my experience of the universe, but about how the universe really
is. As such, they are both metaphysical positions.
The temptation
to align metaphysics with science cannot be denied, however. Clearly, there is nought
but causal order to the universe, chain-link of events from one end to the
other without pause or pass. All else within its measured span is prefigured,
as it were; why should human action be an exception? That tightly woven skein is,
after all, the necessary ground of all my actions; without it, what could I do?
‘Nothing at all,’ replies the Determinist, ‘as you well know.’
Then we’re agreed:
the dragon wing of Determinism, o’erspreads my actions in their entirety. Such
is the verdict of a scientifically informed metaphysic; and the physical
sciences should know, after all, since cause and effect are meat and drink to
them. Nothing that falls within the purview of scientific investigation could
ever occur without its prior cause.
That such a
purview surveys the entirety of creation is, of course a moot point. Doubtless,
there are modes of exploration and investigation which require something a
little bit more sophisticated than cosmic clockwork to make them go. The social
and historical sciences might be two.
But this is a
path well-trodden indeed. Stepping off it, one might note, instead, that this
allegedly ‘informed metaphysic’ might not be as well-informed as it thinks.
This picture of a universe woven in cause and effect, handed down from
Aristotle to Newton and thence to the modern-day Determinist, is rather out of
date. That antediluvian physical theory was shown to be metaphysically useless
a hundred years ago. Once modern science flipped the relativistic switch,
Farrer, Whitehead, and Bergson were more than ready to reshape metaphysics in
Einstein’s energetic mould. Thanks to them, we now live in a Gershwinian universe:
it’s got rhythm.[4]
It’s common
knowledge in the world beyond philosophy that quantum mechanics – a fundamental
theory in the physical sciences – does not strictly abide by those old-fashioned
rules. Rather, it maps their disruption. Down below the subatomic level, where
stuff and substance no longer matter, it seems that photons and the like just
can’t make up their minds what they’re up to. The fact that what happens on the
quantum level does nothing to falsify the higher-level mapping of causal
relations is irrelevant, for all such talk concerns the efficacy of
calculations, not of what is or is not real: it’s maths, not metaphysics. The
fact remains, when quantum mechanics get to work with their sub-atomic socket
sets, the rules of classical causality no longer seem to apply. Apparently,
then, the sciences to which Determinists appeal are quite prepared to consider
the possibility that Newton’s physical theory does not operate successfully in every
possible or conceivable case. If scientists can do this, why not
philosophers. In short if quantum theory tells a different story, it is surely
not beyond the bounds of possibility that human action could do likewise.
All of which
may or may not be interesting, but it is rather beside the most curious point
of the whole Determinist case, which is talk of causal necessity. Just what,
one might fairly wonder, does that mean? Necessity, after all, is
logico-linguistic: it concerns the ways in which we talk and the relations
between the propositions we use in doing so. The most common examples of
necessary truths, as every schoolboy knows, are tautologies; for example,
either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow. Logically speaking,
this proposition is necessarily true. Anyone who has ever been to old Ireland
will know that, as a matter of fact, it’s a load of bollóga. In the
heaving metropolitan hub that is Knobber, simultaneous rain and not-rain is both
normal and perpetual. It is, I’m told, what’s known as a ‘soft day.’
Therein lies
the rub. Logical concepts such as ‘necessity’ apply very well to propositions,
but they have no real purchase on the world and our encounters with it. The
world of experience and experiment, that is, the world that is known and
knowable, operates within a framework of probability, not necessity. So much we
know: the successful performance of an experiment, whether in the laboratory,
the kitchen, or the bedroom does not guarantee the same results next time. The
hundredth successful performance might give you considerable confidence in the
results, but it cannot necessitate them.
That, by the
way, is what Friedrich Waismann called the ‘open-endedness’ of description.[5]
Of course, the proposition ‘every effect has a cause’ may be necessarily true, but that’s only
because the concept ‘effect’ entails the concept ‘cause’. Whether, as a matter
of fact, of experience, every state of affairs really is caused by some other
is another question entirely. Necessity in a proposition does not equate to
necessity in fact.
Oil and water,
then: necessity and causality don’t mix. Any ‘knowledge’ gained from causal
necessity would be simultaneously a priori and a posteriori. If
we’re going to insist that there’s no room to swing Schrodinger’s cat in this
universe – all available space being positively heaving with Newton’s balls – then
what we have on our hands is a good old-fashioned necessitarian metaphysic. One
might almost imagine that Determinism is just an attempt to secularise an
old-world theology, which itself was an attempt to legitimise and impose an old-world,
authoritarian political philosophy. The schoolmen taught that misfortune was a
divine judgment: poverty, sickness, disability, etc. were the wages of sin.[6]
Secular Determinism is more enlightened, naturally. Too embarrassed to talk
about sin or God directly, we say inequality is natural; poverty, sickness, and
disability – isn’t that just how the universe goes? How grand, if you happen to
be in the universe’s good books; an unnecessary cricket bat to the plums
for everyone else.
All this is,
of course, only half the story, as well we know. And we know the other half very
well too; if we didn’t, we wouldn’t know anything at all.[7]
That’s not to say we’re absolutely free. We aren’t ‘swimming in a perfectly
featureless medium;’ we’re ‘walking the earth among all sorts of obstacles’
without which we wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.[8]
More importantly, we’re walking the earth among all sorts of people without whom
we wouldn’t be able to do anything at all because we wouldn’t be
anything at all.[9] Ah
yes, but that heralds ideas like duty and responsibility, the ‘claimingness’ of
others, the demand for action. In the end, however, isn’t it just easier to hunker
down beneath the comforting fatalism of Determinism and pretend that we’re
merely cogwheels in the cosmic clockwork?
‘Shite and onions!’[10] Them that ‘hoard and sleep, and feed, and know not me’[11] or anybody else it seems always miss the real point of human existence. In the end, that is, we’re not condemned to behave as though we’re free while knowing our every thought and action is ordered by the turning of wheels and the depression of levers. We’re condemned to be free while knowing, in reality, it makes damn all difference one way or the other.[12]
[4] Gershwin, George. ‘I’ve Got Rhythm.’ For the rest, see Farrer’s Faith and Speculation (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1967); Whitehead's Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, edited by David Ray Griffen and Donald W. Sherbourne(New York: Free Press, 1978) as good examples.
[5] See
Friedrich Waismann, ‘Verifiability’ in The
Theory of Meaning ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: OUP, 1982) and ‘The
Resources of Language’ in The Importance
of Language edited by Max Black. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,
1962).
[6]
See Parts 3 and 4 of Hamblet, Wendy C. Punishment and Shame. Plymouth:
Lexington Books, 2011.
[7]
See Hampshire, Stuart. Thought and Action. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1983) 49-50.
[8]
[9] See
Farrer, Austin Marsden. The Freedom of the Will. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 300: ‘thank heaven I have not to meditate in vacuo on what to make of myself….
Thank heaven I have this lecture to write and beyond that, my pupils to see to;
and ah, beyond that, if I dare to look, there is Lazarus on the doorstep
covered with sores.’
[12]
Everybody knows this quotation, but just in case, it can be found in Sartre,
Jean-Paul. ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ at the Marxists Internet Archive.
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