Journal 6

The Ontology of Freedom

Freedom has probably been one of the most debated problems in the history of thought. And this is understandable: whether we consider ourselves free or not infinitely conditions how we think and act. Furthermore, on this matter not only depend our notions of responsibility and rights, but also our very concept of human dignity. As such an important idea, many men of thought have devoted their lives to its development. Most notably, Sartre lays freedom at the core of his philosophy, so much as to condemn us to be free.

L'existence précède l'essence, asserts Sartre and proceeds to analyze the concept of this statement. However, he seems not very interested in studying its validity and considers evident the fact that we are free. Yet, it would be an interesting challenge to seek the reasons that make this possible, other than stating, from the beginning, that humans are free by definition. This is, nonetheless, no easy task and the present work will be limited to the making of general comments only.

As it was mentioned before, Sartre considers that, in human beings, existence precedes essence. Interpreted under our modern scientific understanding, this statement seems completely reasonable –especially when seen from the theory of natural selection. What is not so clear, however, is why this idea cannot be extended to the rest of natural things: no one serious, scientifically speaking, would presently assert that there is a final cause for things in the Aristotelian sense or, even less, a plan that guides nature. We could then say that everything that can happen happens and, thus, existence precedes essence in every entity.

One can easily see, nevertheless, that this is not the meaning that the philosopher gave to his statement. Most probably, Sartre was talking about the human capacity of self-creation and how existence precedes essence in the sense that we are not something until we decide to. Yet, are we not all bound by similar aims and desires? Do we not all want happiness for ourselves and our loved ones? Because, even if our essence is not as simple as that of a bird or a dog, we do have, besides being free, other common factors that define us. For this reason, freedom is in itself not enough to make an entity human: we can, indeed, conceive machines or animals that could be free but would still not be human.

The question is how is freedom possible and what makes humans have it. Starting from a physical standing point, the notion of freedom has been traditionally complicated. Moreover, its incompatibility with Newtonian causality led not few philosophers to assert human determinism. That is the case, for example, of Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach, who considered humans to be nothing more than fragile machines. Yet, the modern physical background offers a model of the world radically different from that of the times of Newton. The attempts to link quantum mechanics to freedom abound, but no strong conclusion can be drawn other than, if there is a theory open enough in its predictions to leave room for the existence of free beings, that theory is quantum mechanics.

With a physical background flexible enough to admit freedom, the question can now be stated at the level of biology. What are the attributes necessary for a living being to be free? When analyzing this question, the first thing one thinks about is probably consciousness. However, although our notions of consciousness and freedom are definitely linked in deep ways, using such an ill-defined concept in the attempt to clarify the nature of freedom will evidently yield no results.

But, what is, after all, the definition of freedom? We will define freedom as the ability to act in different ways under the exact same circumstances in a deliberate manner. Taking this into consideration, analysis, imagination, memory, self-awareness and randomness seem to be prerequisites for freedom. First, we consider analysis of relevance because we identify it with the process of decision; that is, consideration and evaluation of options. For this, memory and imagination are necessary attributes of free beings, since these properties are necessary to complete decision-making: memory is needed to consider past actions and their consequences; imagination is required to considerate future actions. Finally, self-awareness is necessary for the being to recognize itself as an acting entity and randomness must be included to avoid deterministic processes.

After all this analysis, it is clear that we still do not know what the ontological characters of freedom are, or even if it is appropriate to talk in those terms. Furthermore, it becomes obvious that every clarification of the phenomena will end up in a description of what we see as our own attributes and will, naturally, exclude all other beings. What we mean by this is that every study of the prerequisites of freedom, as the one presented in the preceding paragraph, is under risk of defining terms exclusively to fit humans –such as happens with other attributes that we deeply associate with ourselves, like reasoning or feeling.

From this, one could argue that the best course of action is to postulate freedom, such as Sartre did. However, we should not stop trying to understand and define this important notion in better terms if we are to comprehend ourselves better. Grasping a notion like this is far from being out of our reach and, therefore, every attempt to progress in this way, either from science or philosophy, should be encouraged: it is only by better understanding ourselves that we will be able to make sense of and improve the world we live in.

Maximiliano Isi