Sartre's Defense of Free Will

Free will seems to make good common sense to us.  It appeals to our gut instinct.  It fits naturally and comfortably with our sense of ourselves.  It feels right.  But yet, it's a very difficult position to defend on philosophical grounds.  Try to make a rational argument for free will, and you'll probably find yourself stammering incoherently.  Finally, you'll end up blinking and shaking you head in confusion, as you realize that it's all a little more complicated that you thought.  Meanwhile, the advocate of determinism will stand there, smiling smugly with their arms folded.  They believe they have logic and causality on their side.

Determinism is the idea that choice and free will are an illusion, that all human actions are "determined" by a combination of environment, biology and conditioning.  Just as everything in nature has a root cause that leads to an inescapable effect, so too with every human action.  Just as the tides rise and fall not by choice, but by cause, so too, as the determinists would have it, whether a man goes to a doctor or refuses to see a doctor, it's all still determined by factors beyond him and beyond his control.  The belief that the decision was his to make is just a lie he tells himself.  It was all "determined" in advance by his childhood, his genetics, and so on.

If you're like me, you immediately get the feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with this idea.  It's not just that you don't like it.  You get the sense that something is being overlooked, but you can't quite put your finger on it solidly enough to form a decent rebuttal.  Well, I'm not one to let sleeping dogs lie, and I'm definitely not one to let such depressing claims about the nature of my existence go unaddressed.  Free will is a big deal to me, and I would pool all my resources into constructing and argument in its favor, if someone, thankfully, hadn't already done the job for me.  Jean-Paul Sartre has constructed such an argument, and it's far more brilliant than anything I could dream of coming up with.

Make no mistake about it.  I'm not proposing some radical interpretation of Sartre.  Free will always held a prominent place in his ideas, and he was clearly a firm believer in it.  However, a casual reader might not fully appreciate how central it was to his ideas.  In fact, free will is a big part of existentialism in general.  While the determinists had environment dragging human nature along behind it and human nature in turn dragging human being like some fatalistic daisy chain, the only objection the traditional defenders of free will could make was that there was some mystical element in human beings that rose above mere causality.  The existentialists took this whole argument and turned it on its head with their dictum "existence precedes essence."  This is really just a fancy way of saying that a human being is a work in progress.

Existence is given to us, but, the existentialists argued, its up to us to define the essence of that existence.  A chair is just a chair, but a human being is a creative process generated from within.  The determinists had the environment and society creating human nature, but the existentialists had the human being creating their own nature, day by day, second by second.  For the existentialists, a person didn't run away because they were a coward; they were a coward because they ran away.  To them, the action emerges first, freely chosen out of a kind of void of our existence and then it comes to define the person afterwards.  More importantly, the person is always free to redefine themselves by a new act.  A man who has defined himself as a scoundrel is free to choose to be a hero at the next opportunity.  We aren't bound and confined by our past.  The choice is always open.  Or as Sophia put it in Vanilla Sky, "Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around."

Now this "existence precedes essence" might sound arbitrary and unsubstantiated, but it was the roads the existentialists took to get there that that made all the difference.  Different philosophers of the school approached the problem from a variety of angles.  Friedrich Nietzsche rearranged the furniture of morality around the creative act.  Soren Kierkegaard proposed a leap of faith, suggesting that there will always be a chasm of doubt between us and even the most fundamental things that we hold to be the truth, a chasm that evidence and argument alone will never be able to fully bridge, and so ultimately it comes down to making a choice, a "leap", an act of will.  

Sartre approached the problem on more....I guess you could say "psychological" grounds for lack of a better word.  He placed consciousness itself under careful analysis, and under his microscope he revealed things about its nature too problematic for the determinists to dismiss.  He showed that a human being is not a rock or a chair and so can't be held subject to the same causality.  A human being isn't just a different kind of thing.  A human being has a completely different kind of existence.

Following the road Sartre took is going to take much more than one post.  Consider this as just a preamble.  From here we'll take his ideas step by step, and I'll post new installments through-out this 2nd season(?) ...semester(?) ...whatever.  It may not be apparent at first how any of it relates to free will, but as the ideas build upon each other like layers of brick onto a foundation, the design of the entire edifice will start to come into focus.  It's a fascinating theory.  It's definitely my kind of theory.  It's definitely a nuclearheadache kind of theory.