TWELFTH-NIGHT OR, WHAT YOU WILL: Sanchez also blogs about free will. This is one of those subjects I don’t feel especially confident discussing, but here are a couple thoughts tentatively advanced. Pardon the egregious ramblyness. I fully admit that I’m coming at these questions from a decidedly slant angle which may not address what Julian had in mind.

First, a recent conversation with my friend Gene underlined for me the ways in which the question of freedom of the will is linked to the question of personal identity. Free will requires that there be a “me” who chooses, rather than simply a pushing and pulling jostle of neural impulses and affects.

You can see this by investigating your own decision-making experiences, as Sanchez is (sort of) doing, or you can see it by investigating the ways you might seek to influence others’ decisions: That’s what A Clockwork Orange is about. (Burgess called it “a kind of allegory of Christian free will.”) What makes it right to talk at someone in order to cause his neurons to fire in ways leading him to act peaceably or kindly, but wrong to cause the same results by brainwashing him or rejiggering his chemical balance to medicate away his criminal desires? What makes persuasion superior to brainwashing, propaganda, or medically routing someone toward proper actions and thoughts?

There are a lot of components to the answer–we can look at the effect of medicating away bad choices on the doctors who dole out the drugs, we can look at the dangers of medicating away thoughts that ultimately would be really helpful to us–but I think one other necessary component is the belief that there is value in Alex choosing freely, which means choosing for himself. “Freely” doesn’t mean “unaffected by others,” “unshaped by his peers, his impulses, and the state of his stomach”; such “free” choosing is impossible for us and it’s not clear that it would be desirable. But it does mean that underneath or despite all those influences and attractions and impulses, there is nonetheless an “Alex” who can choose; there is a self that is greater than the bundle of impulses and affects. We either have to say, “What happens to Alex is only wrong because of its possible misapplications and its presumed ill effects on the enforcers and the larger society,” or we have to say that there is something great or worth preserving about Alex that is damaged by removing his ability to decide what he will do. I’m not sure what that “something great or worth preserving” could be except the self which can make its own choices–choices which are neither determined nor random, but rather, directed.

And the second thought is that it’s not a coincidence that I’ve relied on a novel here to get my point across. (To the extent that it did get across–like I said, I find this a very difficult and tangled subject.) I tend to believe that free will is one of the philosophical questions that is far better handled in poetry and fiction than in philosophy, in part because it is such a bedrock, foundational issue. (This is one of the things I loved about Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon–it depicted so sharply both “There, but for the grace of God, go I” and the belief that the subjunctive tense exists–it was possible for us to choose something other than what we do choose, we’re not determinalistically forced into our actions.)

This is one reason I disagree with Sanchez that “There’s no non-circular way to justify our most ground-level epistemic principles, but neither do we have any coherent way of rejecting them.” Actually, I understand what he means and agree with the point he’s making–there’s no non-circular way to justify our most ground-level epistemic principles within philosophy, since philosophy relies on those principles to get started. The principles tell us what philosophy is, how and why to do it, and so on.

But I do think it’s possible to justify ground-level principles non-philosophically, via art and introspection. In many ways ground-level principles are like definitions: If I want to tell you what a cat is, I can bubbitz about its genus and species and whatnot, but really I should just grab a cat off the street and show it to you, and then you’ll know. If I want to know what love is (and let’s assume I don’t want you to show me…), it’s probably best to read poetry or some such until I find something that makes me say, Yes–that’s what I’ve felt–that’s it. Nietzsche used the image of “philosophizing with a hammer”–a tuning hammer. You strike against the heart with the tuning hammer until you find the right place and angle, and the heart resonates and understands. Similarly if I want to justify a ground-level principle, my approach will differ depending on what the question is (e.g. is it “what is logic?” or “why should I use logic?”), but I will generally engage in showing rather than in ratiocination. For yet another image, I’ll try to hold your hands under the spigot until you realize that this is what water is.

And art is good at “philosophizing with a hammer.” I don’t think it’s circular, really, to rely on showing rather than on ratiocination as a bedrock for philosophy. To say that the bedrock questions are circular implies that we’re trapped in our own little logical hamster wheels, unable to convince one another because our premises can never communicate. I think that would be true if philosophy were all we had, and if philosophy could never colonize slabs of poetry and music and such. But through pointing at works of art, and saying, “If you want to understand [what free will is, say], look there,” I think we can communicate and convince.

For my final little squib here, I’ll enlist David Lodge, whom Charles Murtaugh has finally convinced me (there’s that word again) to add to my reading list. In the title essay of his newest essay collection, Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues, “Lyric poetry is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe qualia.” I think that’s absolutely right, and I wonder if Julian will find that (or any of this) illuminating or helpful.

If not, I suppose I will have to strike the hammer somewhere else…