Wherein does the central question of free will lie? It is generally represented thus: Am I forced in every case to act in a certain way, or am I free also to act otherwise? A brave soldier remains on the battlefield under hostile fire, although he could also flee. A good man gives his last shirt to a beggar, although he could also not give it. Honourable Cordelia speaks the truth which destroys her, although she could also have lied. Virtuous Brutus kills his friend Caesar and involves himself in a civil war which he hates, although he could have lived quietly at home with Portia. Where, then, have we to seek freedom of will? in the fact that the soldier did not flee, that the man gave his shirt, that Cordelia spoke the truth, and Brutus lifted up the dagger against Caesar? or are all these "actions" nothing but externals, while the essence of freedom lies not in the actions, but before them, not even in the decisions, but earlier still in the "will" itself? The soldier stands under fire, Cordelia speaks the truth, Brutus kills his friend - all this is only the ordo et connexio rerum, behind which lies the ordo et connexio idearum, and it is in the latter, the ideas, that the essence and secret of freedom lies hidden. A flash of lightning might have killed Caesar, a parrot might speak the truth or a drunken man get rid of his shirt; the "actions" would have been the same, but there would have been no trace of freedom. This "freedom" lies somewhere far away and deep, while actions are only pure externals, from which we draw conclusions with more or less justice about the inner happenings of human life.

For that reason the question of freedom of will has so vast an importance in the history of human thought. It seldom arises independently. It is always connected with the basic question of being, and it has burned up and glowed with especial vehemence in those epochs in which men were revising their views on the ultimate bases of life. So it was during the Pelagian dispute, and in Luther's dispute with Erasmus. Luther abandoned "free will" to his opponent, quite gladly and without a struggle - in so far as it was not a question of good or evil, of the salvation or destruction of the soul. For him Buridan's ass was no problem; the problem began where the discussion reached the relation of man to God. It was the same difference as between Augustine and Pelagius: is man saved through his own force, through "works", "merit", or through grace? Augustine, quoting St. Paul and the prophet Isaiah, spoke of grace; Pelagius, trusting his own reason, required works. The Greeks, too, pondered not a little on this question, and tried to solve it, in a slightly different form but with the greatest earnestness. Was Oedipus acting freely when he killed his father and married his mother? Or was Pharaoh in the Bible acting freely when he kept the Jews back in Egypt, when it is written in the Scriptures that "God hardened his heart". In both cases a man performs actions of world-historic importance, is punished for them most heavily, and is clearly not in the least free in respect of them. Destiny, the gods, God, are over us~ all is determined through the will of the Supreme Principle, against which none can set himself. Even a sparrow does not fall to the ground against the will of Providence, as Hamlet says and the Scriptures teach. Thus, if men reflect on free will they cannot leave untouched the primary source of life.

Thence, too, there arises at first sight this curious paradox: many men, or many men who have thought and felt deeply, have denied man's freedom of will with all the strength of conviction of which they have become capable only in moments of supreme spiritual exaltation, and have thus agreed in their assertions with the superficial materialists who have "simply drawn their conclusions from the general thesis of the prevailing regularity of phenomena in the world. And I think that an ordinary determinist, even one not particularly acute, if he listened to Luther or St. Paul, would prefer any liberum arbitrium to that servum arbitrium which they have undertaken to defend. For one must be blind and dumb not to feel under all their arguments, even the most abstract, the doctrine of faith, of grace and of Almighty God who created our world after His image out of nothing. The same can be said of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and even Kant. They deny man freedom of will because they clearly cannot make up their minds to place so precious a treasure in the hands of a mortal and limited being. Spinoza in his youth, bearing Descartes in mind, admitted man's freedom of will; at that time a man placed in the situation of Buridan's ass would have been no man but a wretched ass, if he had taken no decision. In his riper years, however, when he had grasped the essence of things more deeply, he too felt that man must not be allowed the right of dominating his destiny; and with his native decision he did not even stop before obvious nonsense and declared categorically that a man who had got into the position of Buridan's ass would have died of hunger.

I think that Spinoza experienced a quite particular satisfaction in the right - the inner and consequently quite unfounded right (tertium genus cognitionis - cognitio intuitiva!) - . - of proclaiming aloud so challenging a nonsense. It is hardly possible to believe that he did not realize the nonsensicality of the assertion that a famished or even a merely hungry man who had to choose between two bits of bread equidistant from him would die of hunger rather than make a choice because he had no "reason" for preferring the one to the other. If he did say so, it was only to open a rift in the idea of the possibility of human free will. God, he maintained, and God alone possessed free will. It would be madness to leave man to take any decisions "freely". God had given freedom once, to the first man, and now saw that anything was preferable to what resulted: man exchanged Paradise for our toilsome life on earth. Who knows what more he might have contrived, what further disasters he might have called down on himself, if after expulsion from Paradise, he had been left with freedom? Only if one assumes that God is indifferent towards His creation, that everything is all one to Him, that His basic qualities are indifference and dispassionateness - only so can one abandon man quietly and even so indifferently to himself. In such a case "freedom" and "necessity" are equivalent conceptions which are swallowed up in impersonal indifference.

Of course, Spinoza's paradox is, strictly speaking, quite unnecessary. Man can well be allowed to make use of what is God's attribute; only, the precious treasure must not be placed at the disposal of a limited and ignorant entity. Thus Luther came far nearer to the truth when, disregarding logical consistency, he gave man full authority to do as he would, within the limits of practical acts. Even Kant, who was clearly trying to express in scientific form what Luther put in the phraseology of religion, sinned grievously against the truth when he made the whole field of empiria dependent on the principle of necessity. In the empirical field man is granted a certain freedom - but only within the limited measure suitable to a limited entity. He can go right or left, choose which he will of several like objects, even act in more important cases (I should not care to say which) without considering anything but his fortuitous whim. But the more grave, weighty, and important the dilemma confronting man, the more the possibility of free action vanishes for him; to choose between good and evil, to decide his metaphysical destiny, is not granted to man. If a chance leads us to the edge of the abyss, if, after many years of peaceful, carefree life, some menacing "to be or not to be" confronts us, like Hamlet, then it seems to us as though some new, enigmatic power - perhaps beneficent, perhaps hostile - were guiding and determining our action. Ordinary determinism, with its inclination towards "natural" explanations, refuses to perceive this - for its whole purpose lies in not going beyond the limits of what it is accustomed to consider comprehensible. If man actually receives help from some strange and mysterious source - one must accept it, as one accepts all that is profitable, but one may not imagine a "mystery", for this is too enigmatic, and threatens one, if one notices it, with extreme disquiet.

But willful blindness towards the unknown and fear of it do not alter the facts: something imperious and irresistible fetters our freedom and guides us towards ends unknown and incomprehensible to us. How could it be otherwise? How could one, I repeat, allow weak, impotent, limited man an even partial share in the solution of the basic problems of his being? How should he, who came but yesterday into the world and is wholly occupied with thinking how to keep a foothold on it - how should he know whither to turn his steps and what to make of himself? Time is infinite, space is infinite, there are innumerable worlds, life's riches and its terrors are inexhaustible, the secrets of the universal structure are incomprehensible - how can an entity hemmed in between so many eternities, infinities, unlimited possibilities, know what it has to do, and how can it choose for itself? Plato, indeed, allowed anamnesis - the recollection of what was in previous lives - but only to a very limited degree. We remember at times what we saw when we lived in freedom, but we remember it rarely and vaguely, and besides, we do not remember the most important things. For that reason, too, Plato believes that the soul solves the fundamental questions of her being before birth, before becoming incarnate in the flesh, when she still has knowledge of the truth, not mere memory, and knows not just a little, but all that need be known. The soul chooses her own lot, but not after she has come down upon earth, but before, when she still lives in the intelligible world. But as soon as she has descended upon earth she loses her knowledge and with it her freedom, and acts now, not as today she thinks it necessary to act, but as she was commanded to act before eternity began, according to the lot which she chose.

We see that the most profound thinkers have suspected a great mystery in freedom of will. Malebranche says textually: "La Liberté est un mystère." And presumably this is so. Every attempt to grasp the idea of freedom, every attempt to strip from her the secret veil in which she has always appeared before the best representatives of philosophic and religious thought, merely leads to the illusion of a solution, and will be punished sooner or later in every sincere inquirer with deep and torturing disappointment. It is impossible to speak of free will (as of anything affecting the first and last truths) in the language of pure conceptions purged of contradiction, if one wishes form and content of the word to correspond even approximately. Either one must simplify reality, i.e. distort it past recognition, or permit oneself inevitable, almost paradoxical contradictions, or else, like Plato, have resort to myths.

Or - and this is obviously the right way out - one must not be above either contradiction or myth. One must agree once for all that all our conceptions, however we construe them, are bi-dimensional, while truth is tri-dimensional or more. Therefore in speaking of free will it is impossible to start from an exceptional case, like Buridan's example. Still less can one rely on the general principle of no effect without cause. Between the "freedom of will" of Buridan's ass, or even of no ass, but a man confronted with a similar dilemma, on the one hand, and Augustine saving his soul or Plato meditating on Socrates' death and the fate of the just on the other, there is so great a difference that to reduce all these cases to a single problem would mean having eyes and not seeing, having ears and not hearing. And a conception covering alike Augustine and Plato and all men and beasts who hesitate before an impending decision and take a decision, would monstrously overstep its competence and terms of reference. This overstepping, which is so customary in philosophy, must be most carefully eschewed by those who still believe that philosophy, although it never has given and never will give final answers to the questions which itself raises, is yet, with art and religion, that which men have always justly esteemed their supreme good. Of course the philosophical solutions of problems are transitory; I even hope that the time is not far off when philosophers will be allowed the privilege of admitting openly that their duty does not lie in solving problems but in the art of depicting life as unnatural, as mysterious and as problematical as possible. Then its chief "failing" - the immense number of questions and the complete lack of answers - will cease to he a failing and turn into an advantage.

29 - QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS