Questions and Lecture # 3 on Sartre and William James on Freedom
William O'Meara (c) copyright 1997
Questions for the Lecture
1. What are Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's views on anguish? How does Sartre comment on them?
2. How is anguish involved in the determination of one's values? Explain.
3, For William James, what is the crux of the issue between science (determinism) and religion (freedom of choice)?
4. Describe James's experience of anguish or dread.
5. How is this revealed to be a confrontation with his own personal freedom? Explain, by pointing to James's personal resolution of this crisis.
6. What kind of evidence is available to predict what a human act will be? Is this evidence conclusive or inconclusive?
7. What are the two ways to approach the universe then on this question of determinism and freedom? Explain these two approaches.
8. Which approach is exemplified by Skinner? Would Skinner agree with the way James says that a behaviorist would state his argument? Explain your answer!
9. Which way of approaching the universe does James select? Explain his reasons.
10. Which way of approaching the universe do your hold? Why do you hold one view? Why do you not hold the other view?
11. Is it possible for a person to hold to both views without a contradiction?
Lecture on Sartre and William James on Freedom
Sartre comments on Kierkeagaard's and Heidegger's views on anguish. Kierkegaard describes anguish as an apprehension of one's own freedom. Sartre says that this is correct. Anguish is a different experience from fear. Fear is fear of something in the world, llke bombs. But anguish is the emotional apprehension of myself, what I fear I might do or not do. Sartre gives the example of an army recruit. "The recruit who reports for active duty at the beginning of the war can in some instances be afraid of death, but more often he is afraid of being afraid; that is, he is filled with anguish before himself." (Being and Nothingness, paperback, p. 35)
Heidegger describes anguish as the apprehension of nothingness. Whereas fear is fear of something definite in the world, anxiety or anguish is an all-embracing fear of nothing in the world and of everything, precisely because it is fear of one's own nothingness. As Sartre explains, anguish is consciousness of my future possibility, seeing it as dependent upon my own choice, not certain of my ability to realize that possibility. If nothing compels me to realize that possibility which I see, then nothing prevents me from failing to realize that possibility. Nothing in the world determines me either way; I become aware of myself as not a thing but as something unstable, unsure, something radically free, something afraid of its own freedom.
One key experience of myself as nothingness and freedom occurs in the existentialist apprehension that I myself choose my own values. Sartre writes, "Values in actuality are demands which lay claim to a foundation." (Ibid. p. 46) But if the foundation of values were found in facts, then what would be valuable would be determined by facts and my will would not be in control of its own values; my will would not be master of itself. But if my will is the source of values, then this foundation is a foundation that can be changed at any time and it is possible for me to have no values whatsoever. "It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of value and that nothing, absolutely nothing justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation."(Ibid.)
Edward Moore describes the crucial role freedom played in James' life and philosophy:
James as a young man, became quite interested in science--particularly in physiology and psychology--and seems to have come quite early to a realization that the crux of the issue (between science and religion) was whether man was the mere machine that science made him out to be or whether he had a free will and could of his own volition do the good. James' study of science led him further and further toward the mechanistic view, but his religious inclinations were so opposed to the direction his beliefs were taking that finally when he was about 30 years old, he had the following experience:
I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there, when suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the assylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them enclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether, I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and though the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone. In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life... I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious bearing." (Varieties of Religious Experience, James quotes this material from his own diary but attributes it to an anonymous correspondent.)
That James' struggle was mechanism (determinism: thinking of the human as a machine) versus free will may be seen by his identifying himself with the idiot who had no mind of has own and was but a machine, and by the fact that he only begins to get out of his despondency when he is convinced by a French philosopher that the will is free. He wrote in one of his notebooks:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second 'Essais' and see no reason why his definition of Free Will--'the sustaining of a thought because I chose to when I might have other thoughts'--need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present--until next year--that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. (Letters, I, 47)
James told his father that his depression was largely overcome as a result of this discussion of Renouvier's (Letters, I, pp. 169-170 in Moore, American Pragmatism pp. 114-116).
In Principles of Psychology, James reviews the question of evidence in regard to the question of determinism versus freedom of choice. He concludes that it will be impossible to make mathematical measurements of the antecedents of the human act which would enable us to predict what that human act will be. In terms of objective evidence, the evidence is inconclusive; there are too many variables to be taken into account and it is practically impossible to measure the exact input of any variable into a human behavior. Hence, there are two ways to approach the universe, assuming either determinism or freedom of choice. The determinist assumes the great scientific postulate that the world must be one unbroken fact with necessary connections from past to the present through to the future, so that the future is in principle predictable by true knowledge. The moral postulate assumes freedom of choice; this is the postulate that what ought to be can be, and that bad actions cannot be fated, but that good ones must be possible in their place. What ought to be is the realization of moral ideals. The tragedies that occur in life, from the moral point of view, are tragic because they should have been prevented, could have been prevented if only people had chosen to act differently.
James continues: "When scientific and moral postulates war, and objective proof is not to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary choice. If meanwhile, the will be undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself. We ought not to hope for any other method of getting at the truth lf indeterminism be a fact." (Principles of Psychology II,573)
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William O'Meara (c) copyright 1997