Sartre's Question (Act Two)

At this point you may be wondering, "If it all comes down to our ability to question, then why this circuitous route through consciousness and nothingness?  Why even bother with Sartre to begin with?"  A fair question.  Well, as I said in the previous post, determinism builds its case entirely on the basis of causality.  So, any argument that wishes to challenge determinism must begin by establishing some human capacity to transcend causality.  Since free will is such a powerful intuition to us, we're almost tempted to argue this transcendence of the basis of free will itself.  It's tempting to push through out of frustration and declare, "But our actions obviously proceed from choices!"  However, since determinism refuses to grant credibility to this intuition and regards it as a delusion, then we're faced with a bootstrap problem where we're arguing free will on the basis of free will.  So, it becomes necessary to find some other foundation for this transcendence.  Sartre turned to the nature of consciousness itself, and began building from there.

Trying to argue a transcendence of causality is no easy task.  Causality is one of the most fundamental principles of science.  The idea of something being beyond or exempt from causality strikes some as a sort of voodoo or mysticism.  It strikes some as an appeal to the superstitious.  This is why the determinist tends to feel that they have science and logic on their side.  They reason that since causality has provided us with a better, more rational, explanation of the workings of nature, then it seems to follow that it would also provide us with a clearer understanding of how human beings work as well.  Their mistake, I believe, is in their assumption that causality is an unlimited commodity, a remedy for whatever ails you, applicable to any situation.

Consider a volcano.  Ages ago, when a volcano erupted, people took it as the explosive wrath of the gods.  Then science revealed to us the truth about tectonic plates, the molten rock in the Earth's core, and so on, and the superstitious explanation gave way to the causal explanation.  It was not the manifestation of a living being's wrath, but rather the blind forces of matter interacting with one another like the cogs and gears of a machine.  Or consider disease.  People once took it as punishment from a vengeful deity, displeased with their sinful existence.  Then science eventually discovered that it was caused by the spread of bacteria, and again the causal explanation dethroned the superstitious one.  Or finally consider the sun itself.  Long, long, ago people believed it was being driven across the sky by a divine charioteer.  Our ideas about the sun have undergone many transformations since then, but these days causality has expunged nearly every trace of the divine from our magnanimous fire in the sky.  It burns at the expense of its own nuclear power, rather than at the whim of any god.

My more quick witted readers may begin to see a common theme emerging here.  In all of these cases, prior to the causal explanation being given, these things were all ascribed to the will of a conscious being.  In other words, as explanations go, causality is an alternative to consciousness.  It stems the anthropomorphic tide.  It keeps us from projecting our own nature onto inanimate matter.  It grants us a means of understanding the mechanisms of non-conscious things.  This is how causality has gained its reputation as the exorcist of superstition.  The determinist has grossly confused the matter.  Rather than understanding that the superstition lies in ascribing a free will to things which don't possess it, the determinist has concluded that free will itself is a superstition.  The determinist says, in effect, "Well, we've outgrown the notion that earthquakes are controlled by something with a mind of it own, now we should outgrow the notion that a human body is controlled by something with a mind of its own."  You know...for science.

A compelling argument, I know.  Thank you.  But yet it's still not quite enough to completely establish free will, although I feel it does get determinism on the ropes at least.  Arguing for free will takes more than just undermining determinism.  It has to be established in own right.  And it's going to take more than just declaring that our ability to question transcends causality.  In fact, I suspect that some people may be largely unimpressed by that proposition.  If I had led with that, or I simply left this proposition from the last post to stand without further explanation, I would hardly consider it a compelling argument against determinism in its own right.  It requires further qualification.  It requires further explanation.  It needs to be tied in with Sartre's concepts of consciousness and nothingness, so that a complete picture might emerge.  This will be the goal of my next post.

(...to be continued.)