<< Previous | Contents | Next >>
A very powerful opposition to all doctrines based upon or upholding determinism shows itself in the work of Cournot and the neo-critical philosophy. The idea of freedom is a central one in the thought of both Cournot and Renouvier.
Cournot devoted his early labours to a critical and highly technical examination of the question of probability, considered in its mathematical form, a task for which he was well equipped.* Being not only a man of science but also a metaphysician, or rather a philosopher who approached metaphysical problems from the impulse and data accorded him by the sciences, Cournot was naturally led to the wider problem of probabilité philosophique. He shows in his Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances that hazard or chance are not merely words which we use to cover our ignorance, as Taine would have claimed. Over against the doctrine of a universal determinism he asserts the reality of these factors. The terms chance and hazard represent a real and vital element in our experience and in the nature of reality itself. Probability is a factor to be reckoned with, and this is so because of the elements of contingency in nature and in life. Freedom is bound up essentially with the vitality which is nature itself.
[Footnote * : See his Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances: "Hazard," chap. iii.; "Probabilité Philosophique," chap, iv., pp. 71-101; and chap. v., "De l'Harmonie et de la Finalité,"pp. 101-144.]
The neo-critical philosopher, Renouvier, is a notable champion of freedom. We have already seen the importance he attaches to the category of personality. For him, personality represents a consciousness in possession of itself, a free and rational harmony—in short, freedom personified.
From a strictly demonstrative point of view Renouvier thinks it is impossible to prove freedom as a fact. However, he lays before us with intense seriousness various. considerations of a psychological and a moral character which have an important bearing upon the problem. This problem, he asserts, not only concerns our actions but also our knowledge. To bring out this point clearly, Renouvier develops some of the ideas of his friend, Jules Lequier, on the notion of the autonomy of the reason, or rather of the reasonable will. In this way he shows doubt and criticism to be themselves signs of freedom, and asserts that we form our notions of truth freely, or that at least they are creations of our free thought, not laid upon us by an external authority.
More light is thrown on the problem by considering what Renouvier calls vertige mental, a psychopathological condition due to a disturbance of the rational harmony or self-possession which constitutes the essence of the personal consciousness. This state is characterised by hallucination and error. It is the extreme opposite of the self-conscious, reflective personality in full possession of itself and exercising its will rationally. Renouvier shows that between these two extremes there are numerous planes of vertige mental in which the part played by our will is small or negligible, and we are thus victims of habit or tendency. Is there, then, any place for freedom? There most certainly is, says Renouvier, for our freedom manifests itself whenever we inhibit an action to which we are excited by habit, passion or imagination. Our freedom is the product of reflection. We are at liberty to be free, to determine ourselves in accordance with higher motives. This power is just our personality asserting itself, and it does not contradict our being, more often than not, victims of habit. We have it in our power to make fresh beginnings. Renouvier's disbelief in strict continuity is here again apparent. We must admit freedom of creation in the personality itself, and not seek to explain our actions by trying to ascend some scale of causes to infinity. There is no such thing as a sum to infinity of a series; there is no such thing as the influence of an infinite series of causes upon the performance of a consciously willed act in which the personality asserts its initiative— that is, its power of initiation of a new series, in short, its freedom.
Passing from these psychological considerations, Renouvier calls our attention to some of a moral nature, no less important, in his opinion, for shedding light upon the nature of freedom. If, he argues, all is necessary, if all human actions are predetermined, then popular language is guilty of a grave extravagance and appears ridiculous, insinuating, as it does, that many acts might have been left undone and many events might have occurred differently, and that a man might have done other than he did. In the light of the hypothesis of rigorous necessity, the mention of ambiguous futures and the notion of "being otherwise" (le pouvoir être autrement) seem foolish. Science may assert the docrine of necessity and preach it valiantly, but the human conscience feels it to be untrue and will not be gainsaid. The scientist himself is forced to admit that man does not accept his gospel of universal predestination or fatalism. This Renouvier recognises as an important point in the debate. Strange, is it not, he remarks, that the mind of the philosopher himself, a sanctuary or shrine for truth, should appear as a rebellious citadel refusing to surrender to the truth of this universal necessity. We believe ourselves to be free agents or, at least beings who are capable of some free action. However slight such action, it would invalidate the hypothesis of universal necessity.
If all things are necessitated, then moral judgments, the notions of right and of duty, have no foundation in the nature of things. Virtue and crime lose their character; the sentiments and feelings, such as regret, hope, fear, desire, change their meaning or become meaningless. Renouvier lays great stress upon these moral considerations.
Again, if everything be necessitated, error is as necessary as truth. The false is indeed true, being necessary, and the true may become false. Disputes rage over what is false or true, but these disputes cannot be condemned, for they themselves are, by virtue of the hypothesis, necessary, and the disputes are necessarily absurd and ridiculous from this point of view. Where then is truth? Where is morality? We have here no basis for either. Looking thus at history, all its crimes and infamies are equally lawful, for they are inevitable; such is the result, Renouvier shows, of viewing all human action as universally predetermined.
The objections thus put forward by Renouvier against the doctrine of universal necessity are powerful ones. They possess great weight and result in the admission, even by its upholders, that "the judgment of freedom is a natural datum of consciousness and is bound up with our reflective judgments upon which we act, being itself the foundation of these."
Yet, we have, Renouvier reminds us, no logical proof of the reality of freedom. We feel ourselves moved, spontaneously and unconstrained. The future, in so far as it depends upon ourselves, appears not as prearranged but ambiguous, open.* Whether our judgment be true or false, we in practical life act invariably on the belief in freedom. That, of course, as Renouvier admits at this stage of his discussion, does not prove that our belief is not an illusion. It is a feeling, natural and spontaneous.
[Footnote * : Cf., later, Bergson's remark: "The portals of the future stand wide open, the future is being made."]
One of the most current forms of the doctrine of freedom has been that known as the "liberty of indifference." The upholders of this theory regard the will as separated from motives and ends. The operation of the will is regarded by them as indifferent to the claims or influence of reason or feeling. Will is superadded externally to motives, where such exist, or may be superimposed on intellectual views even to the extent of annulling these. Judgment and will are separated in this view, and the will is a purely arbitrary or indifferent factor. It can operate without reason against reason. The opponents of freedom find little difficulty in assailing this view, in which the will appears to operate like a dice or a roulette game, absolutely at hazard, reducing man to a non-rational creature. Such a type of will, however, Renouvier declares to be non-existent, for every man who has full consciousness of an act of his has at the same time a consciousness of an end or purpose for this act, and he proposes to realise by this means a good which he regards as preferable to any other. In so far as he has doubts of this preference the act and the judgment will be suspended. He must, however, if he be an intelligent being, pursue what he deems to be his good—that is to say, what he deems to be good at the time of acting. Renouvier here agrees with Socrates and Plato in the view that no man deliberately and knowingly wills what he considers to be evil or to be bad for him. Virtue involves knowledge, and although there is the almost proverbial phrase of Ovid and of Paul, about seeing and approving the better, yet nevertheless doing the worse, it is a general statement which does not express an antithesis as present to consciousness at the time of action. The agent may afterwards say
. . . "Video meliora proboque
deteriora sequor."
but at the time of action "the worse" must appear to him as a good, at any rate then and in his own judgment. Further, beyond these psychological considerations there are grave moral objections, Renouvier points out, to admitting "an indifferent will," for the acts of such a will being purely arbitrary and haphazard, the man will be no moral agent, no responsible person. A man who wills apart from the consideration of any motive whatever can never perform any meritorious action. Under the conception of an indifferent will the term "merit" ceases to have a meaning. The theologians who have asserted the doctrine (indeed, it seems to have originated, Renouvier thinks, with them) have readily admitted this point, for it opens up the way for their theory of divine grace or the good will of God acting directly upon or within the agent. Will and merit are for them quite separate, the latter being due to the mystical operations of divine favour or grace, in honour of which the indifference of the will has been postulated. Philosophers not given to appeals to divine grace, who have upheld the doctrine of the indifferent will, have really been less consistent than the theoloians and have fallen into grave error.
Renouvier appeals to the testimony of the penal laws of all nations in favour of his criticism of an indifferent will. Motive is deemed a real factor, for men are not deemed to have acted indifferently. Some deliberation, indeed, is implied in all action which is conscious and human, some comparison of motives and a conscious, decision. The values of truth, as well as those of morality are equally fatal to the indifferentist; for, asks Renouvier, is a man to be regarded as not determined to affirm as true what he judges to be true?
The doctrine of freedom as represented by that of an indifferent will is no less vicious, Renouvier affirms, than the opposing doctrine of universal necessity. The truth is that they both rest on fictions. "Indifferentism" imagines a will divorced from judgment, separated from the rational man himself, an unseizable power, a mysterious absolute cause unconnected with reflection or deliberation, a mere chimera. For determinism the will is equally a fiction.
A way out of this difficulty is to be found, according to Renouvier, in viewing the will in a manner different from that of the "indifferentists." Let us suppose the will bound up with motive, a motive drawn from the intellectual and moral equipment of the man. This, however, gives rise to psychological determinism. The will, it is argued, follows always the last determination of the understanding. Greater subtilty attends on this argument against freedom than those put forward on behalf of physical determinism. Renouvier sees that there is no escape from such a doctrine as psychological determinism unless we take a view of the will as bound up with the nature of man as a whole, with his powers of intellect and feeling. Such a will cannot be characterised as indifferent or as the mere resultant of motives.
The Kantian element in Renouvier's thought is noticeable in the strong moral standpoint from which he discusses all problems, and this is particularly true of his discussion of this very vital one of freedom. He is by no means, however, a disciple of Kant, and he joins battle strongly with the Kantian doctrine of freedom. This is natural in view of his entire rejection of Kant's "thing-in-itself," or noumena, and it follows therefrom, for Kant attached freedom only to the noumenal world, denying its operation in the world of phenomena. The rejection of noumena leaves Renouvier free to discuss freedom in a less remote or less artificial manner than that of Kant.
If it be true, argues Renouvier, that necessity rules supreme, then the human spirit can find peace in absolute resignation; and in looking back over the past history of humanity one need not have different feelings from those entertained by the geologist or paleontologist. Ethics, politics and history thus become purely "natural" sciences (if indeed ethics could here have meaning, would it not be identical with anthropology? At any rate, it would be purely positive. A normative view of ethics would be quite untenable in the face of universal necessity). Any inconvenience, pain or injustice would have to be accepted and not even named "evil," much less could any effort be truly made to expel it from the scheme of things. To these accusations the defenders of necessity object. The practical man, they say, need not feel this, in so far as he is under the illusion of freedom and unaware of the rigorous necessity of all things. He need not refrain from action.
But this defence of necessity leads those who wish to maintain the case against it to continue the argument. Suppose that the agent does not forget that all is necessitated, what then? Under no illusion of the idea of freedom, he then acts at every moment of his existence in the knowledge that he cannot but do what he is doing, he cannot but will what he wills, he cannot but desire what he desires. In time this must produce, says Renouvier, insanity either of an idle type or a furious kind, he will become an indifferent imbecile or a raving fanatic, in either case a character quite abnormal and dangerous. These are extreme results, but between the two extremes all degrees of character are to be, found. The most common type of practical reason presents an antinomy in the system of universal necessity. The case for necessity must reckon with this fact— namely, that the operation of necessity has itself given rise to ethics which exists, and, according to the case, its existence is a necessary one; yet ethics constitutes itself in opposition to necessity, and under the sway of necessity is quite meaningless. Here is a paradox which is not lessened if we suppose the ethical position to be an absurd and false one. Whether false or not, morality in some form is practically as universal as human nature. That nature, Renouvier insists, can hardly with sincerity believe an hypothesis or a dogma which its own moral instincts belie continually.
If, on the other hand, truth lies with the upholders of freedom, then man's action is seen to have great value and significance, for man then appears as creating a new order of things in the world. His new acts, Renouvier admits, will not be without preceding ones, without roots or reasons, but they will be without necessary connection with the whole scheme of things. He is thus creating a new order; he is creating himself and making his own history. Conscious pride or bitter remorse can both alike be present to him. The great revolutions of history will be regarded by him not as mystical sweepings of some unknown force external to himself, but as results of the thought and work of humanity itself. A philosophy which so regards freedom will thus be a truly "human" philosophy. Renouvier rightly recognises that the whole philosophy of history turns upon the attitude which we adopt to freedom.
In view of the many difficulties connected with the problem of freedom many thinkers would urge us to a compromise. Renouvier is aware of the dangers of this attitude, and he brings into play against it his logical method of dealing with problems. This does not contradict his statement about the indemonstrability of freedom, nor does it minimise the weight and significance of the moral case for freedom: it complements it. Between contradictories or incompatible propositions no middle course can be followed. Freedom and necessity cannot be both at the same time true, or both at the same time false, for of the two things one must be true—namely, either human actions are all of them totally predetermined by their conditions or antecedents, or they are not all of them totally predetermined. It is to this pass that we are brought in the logical statement of the case. Now sceptics would here assert that doubt was the only solution. This would not realh be a solution, and however legitimate doubt is in front of conflicting theories, it involves the death of the soul if it operates in practical affairs and in any circumstances where some belief is absolutely necessary to the conduct of life and to action.
The freedom in question, as Renouvier is careful to remind us, does not involve our maintaining the total indetermination of things or denial of the operations of necessity within limits. Room is left for freedom when it is shown that this necessity is not universal. Many consequences of free acts may be necessitated. For example, says Renouvier, I have a stone in my hand. I can freely will to hurl it north or south, high or low, but once thrown from my hand its path is strictly determined by the law of gravity. The voluntary movement of a man on the earth may, however slightly, alter the course of a distant planet. Freedom, we might say, operates in a sphere to which necessity supplies the matter. Ultimately any free act is a choice between two alternatives, equally possible, but both necessitated as possibilities. The points of free action may seem to take up a small amount of room in the world, so to speak, but we must realise how vital they are to any judgment regarding its character, and how tremendously important they are from a moral point of view. So far, claims Renouvier, from the admittance of freedom being a destruction of the laws of the universe, it really shows us a special law of that universe, not otherwise to be explained—namely, the moral law. Freedom is thus regarded by Renouvier as a positive fact, a moral certainty.
Freedom is the pillar of the neo-critical philosophy; it is the first truth involved at once in all action and in all knowledge. Truth and error are not well explained, or, indeed, at all explained, by a doctrine which, embracing them both as equally necessary, justifies them equally, and so in a sense verifies both of them. It was this point which Brochard developed in his work L'Erreur, which has neo-critical affinities. Man is only capable of science because he is free; it is also because he is free that he is subject to error.* Renouvier claims that "we do not avoid error always, but we always can avoid it."† Truth and error can only be explained, he urges, by belief in the ambiguity of futures, movements of thought involving choice between opinions which conflict—in short, by belief in freedom. The calculation of probabilities and the law of the great numbers demonstrates, Renouvier claims, the indetermination of futures, and consciousness is aware of this ambiguity in practical life. This belief in the ambiguity of futures is a condition, he shows, of the exercise of the human consciousness in its moral aspect, and this consciousness in action regards itself as suspended before indetermination—that is, it affirms freedom. This affirmation of freedom Renouvier asserts to be a necessary element of any rational belief whatever. It alone gives moral dignity and supremacy to personality, whose existence is the deepest and most radical of all existences. The personal life in its highest sense and its noblest manifestation is precisely Freedom. Renouvier assures us that there is nothing mysterious or mystical about this freedom. It is not absolute liberty and contingency of all things; it is an attribute of persons. The part played thus freely by personality in the scheme or order of the universe proves to us that that order or scheme is not defined or formed in a predetermined manner; it is only in process of being formed, and our personal efforts are essential factors in its formation. The world is an order which becomes and which is creating itself, not a pre-established order which simply unrolls itself in time. For a proper understanding of the nature of this problem "we are obliged to turn to the practical reason. It is a moral affirmation of freedom which we require; indeed, any other kind of affirmation would, Renouvier maintains, presuppose this. The practical reason must lay down its own basis and that of all true reason, for reason is not divided against itself reason is not something apart from man; it is man, and man is never other than practical—i.e., acting."* Considered from this standpoint there are four cases which present themselves to the tribunal of our judgment— namely, the case for freedom, the case against freedom, the case for necessity and the case against necessity.
[Footnote * : De L'Erreur, p. 47.]
[Footnote † : Psychologie rationnelle, vol. 2, p. 96.]
[Footnote * : Psychologie rationnelle, vol. 2, p 78.]
The position is tersely put in the Dilemma presented by Jules Lequier, the friend of Renouvier, quoted in the Psychologie rationnelle. There are four possibilities:
On examining these possibilities we find that to affirm necessity, necessarily, is valueless, for its contradictory, freedom, is equally necessary. To affirm necessity, freely, does not offer us a better position, for here again it is necessity which is affirmed. If we affirm freedom necessarily, we are in little better case, for necessity operates again (although Renouvier notes that this gives a certain basis for morality). In the free affirmation of freedom, however, is to be found not only a basis for morals, but also for knowledge and the search for truth. Indeed, as we are thus forced "to admit the truth of either necessity or freedom, and to choose between the one and the other with the one or with the other,"† we find that the affirmation of necessity involves contradiction, for there are many persons who affirm freedom, and this they do, if the determinist be right, necessarily. The affirmation of freedom, on the other hand, is free from such an absurdity.
[Footnote † : Ibid., p. 138.]
Such is the conclusion to which Renouvier brings us after his wealth of logical and moral considerations. He combines both types of discussion and argument in order to undermine the belief in determinism and to uphold freedom, which is, in his view, the essential attribute of personality and of the universe itself. He thus succeeded in altering substantially the balance of thought in favour of freedom, and further weight was added to the same side of the scales by the new spiritualist group who placed freedom in the forefront of their thought.