Martin LeFevre: Free Will Is an Oxymoron

At nearly 1000 meters, the reservoir is seasonally about two weeks ahead of the Valley. So even at mid-afternoon, the air is chilly, but the colors of autumn are sharper and stronger.

After the hot, rainless summer months, and the depletion by the mountain communities nearby, the reservoir is down by about half. Even so, it’s a little higher than it was last week, following the first hard rain last night.

The sky is mostly clear, but there are a few white and gray cumulus clouds, which hover like celestial islands over the pines. As the sun descends toward the treetops, the wind dies down completely, and an astounding quiet descends over the land and water.

The water, which was gently lapping the shore, grows dead calm, and the brilliant sun reflects off the lake with a doubling effect. Its intensity is to the sense of sight what this cosmic echo chamber is to the sense of hearing Attuned to the place after the better part of an hour listening and watching, the sound of a large, unseen bird is heard from some distance away, each down-stroke of its wings audibly beating the air.

At the root of the problem of ‘free will’ are two seemingly irreconcilable facts: first, the idea that the human will is free; second, the fact that universe is governed by cause and effect (that is, deterministically).
Since humans are not separate, special creations, but inextricably part of the universe, we are also governed by cause and effect.

That means the will can never be free, and the independent chooser is an illusion. As Schopenhauer said, “a man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.” One chooses and wills out of one’s conditioning, that is, the past, not out of separate, supposedly ‘free’ agency. But if ‘free will’ is an oxymoron, is there such a thing as freedom at all?

There is another factor, one that provides a way out of the philosophical dilemma, as well as a way out for the human being in this wretchedly deterministic world. That is the creative element in the universe--not just at the beginning with the Big Bang, but unendingly, in evolution and in life.

The ceaselessly creative force in the universe—in evolution and in life—is what gives humans our moral and ethical agency, and with it responsibility. We are not wholly determined by prior causes, biological or psychological.

However there is no freedom with the self, only freedom from the self. That’s because when one acts from the self, one is acting from conditioning--familial, societal, and personal.

Freedom is a state of being in which one is not acting from self and conditioning, but from insight and understanding. That implies a different kind of consciousness altogether. Freedom is not the outcome of will, or any kind of effort, but of undivided observation of the movement of thought and emotion.

Using the same terms for two completely different phenomena adds to the general confusion. That’s why the language of ‘lower self’ and ‘Higher Self’ has to be thrown out in my view.

So what words should one use for that quality of being in which self and thought, ego and will, memory and association don’t rule? If these qualities define consciousness, what describes the state of mind/brain that occurs with their negation?

Perhaps one can put it this way: Negating consciousness awakens cognizance. Of course cognizance can mean both knowledge and awareness, but I’m using it to mean awareness that transcends knowledge. The negation of consciousness as we know it awakens the awareness of cognizance as I’m using the word. Therefore no duality is implied.

There is no separate self; the self is both a useful construction and deadly illusion of thought. And yet we are distinct individuals, at least to the degree that we are ‘not divided,’ which is the literal meaning of the word individual. Each person is autonomous, though no one is separate, however isolated we may be, or feel ourselves to be. We are responsible for who and what we are, as well as for humanity as a whole.

What makes us morally responsible is not that we have ‘free will,’ but that we have the capacity to see beyond our conditioning, and act freely and creatively in the present.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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