Freedom is an ideal, usually defined in relation to acts or beliefs. We see Freedom as the freedom to act or believe as we wish to act or believe. Yet (leaving aside the difficulty of how wishes are formed), as soon as such a claim is made, exceptions become apparent.

If we were to concern ourselves solely with a definition of the Ideal of Freedom, we might say that the essence is a complete, untrammelled ability to do anything, as the fancy takes us. As this is Freedom in the purest form (the Ideal, the mental Absolute of the conception), we might well claim that it would even apply to the overcoming of the laws of nature. For example, if we wished to fly, our wish would be fulfilled in the instant it occurred to us. If we did not wish to die, we would live forever. We would have that "Mind Over Matter" ability which is the prerogative of the gods. We would, in fact, be gods. However, although I acknowledge that this "essence" is conceived of in the Ideal, I prefer, in this article, to look rather at the way in which the Ideal influences our efforts in reality.

It takes little thought to realise that the individual's freedom to act or believe must be limited in some ways, if one's acts and beliefs are not to impinge upon the freedom of others. If I believe that human sacrifice is necessary to appease the gods, and claim my freedom to act upon my belief, I will undoubtedly be asserting my right to a freedom over another's right to a conflicting freedom (the freedom to live in peace without being murdered to appease the gods). To say that freedom must be limited seems contradictory, but perhaps all real-life applications of ideals involve such distortions. Possibly a definition of freedom has to be contradictory? Conceivably this is so. But what other definitions might we examine?

Perhaps the concept of Freedom in some way encompasses an acknowledgement of one's ignorance? For as soon as one "Knows" one can begin to dictate and declaim; one's actions and beliefs become determined in accordance with an egotistical commitment to the gained knowledge, so to speak, and one's freedom becomes problematical (particularly if one "Knows" that the gods demand human sacrifice). Yet if one confesses ignorance, and comes to believe in the impossibility of any real knowledge concerning Absolutes (or rules out their existence altogether), doesn't this mean that one simply listens, and perhaps contradicts with refuting facts? Doesn't the claim to ignorance lead to paralysis, or plain negativity? And isn't there a sort of anti-hero egotism to this sceptical stance also?

I said just now that Freedom might take the form of an acknowledgement of ignorance: as soon as one "Knows" one may begin to dictate and declaim. It is perhaps necessary to further explain this hypothesis. I mean that as soon as one believes one has knowledge of the Truth (in an Absolute sense, as a perfect and unchanging, eternal thing), one is locked into a structure - the principles of coherence and consistency come into play, and we are carried along by a sort of intellectual impetus. We discover what logically follows from our discovery, our "fixed point," so to speak, so that it rapidly becomes the centre of an all-encompassing mental structure. The assumption that the Truth is eternal and unchanging, traps us in our beliefs, restricting mental adaptation to changing circumstances and promoting a defensive attitude towards questions that may undermine the position of the Truth-Knower. But as we have also said, the position of those professing ignorance is hardly any better, for ignorance can only be passive and/or contradictory towards the Knower (and even contradiction, strictly speaking, suggests some sort of knowledge on behalf of those who profess ignorance). It is hard to think of a creative path for the ignorant, in spite of Socratic Irony. Where then is the proper attitude to adopt?

Of course, behind all the above, is the philosopher's assumption that one must be consistent. Philosophers do not approve of people who are contradictory: we feel that they are deluded, or hypocrites, or we feel sorry for them. Whatever attitude we take, we feel that the expressed inconsistency must be some sort of mistake on their part - a misunderstanding of some sort. To some extent, we do not acknowledge that they can really mean that they hold two (or more) conflicting and mutually exclusive beliefs or contradictory opinions with equal strength. Put to the test, surely they would choose one or the other? I can't help thinking that this philosophical belief is not in strict accordance with reality.

George Orwell's "Double-Think" is alive and well, and was not invented by him. In my experience, people have no trouble at all in holding contradictory beliefs or opinions. If the contradiction is pointed out, the response can vary from confusion to apathy, but the beliefs/opinions mostly seem to endure in spite of any puzzles set by another's observation. Perhaps it is the licence to be contradictory which is fundamental to Freedom (at least, as far as the individual is concerned)? Certainly, in my experience, people seem to regard the right to be contradictory as being part of their own personal freedom. I once pointed out that this was unreasonable, and received the answer, "So what?" It would appear that the freedom to be unreasonable is a freedom exercised every day by the majority of human beings. It is perhaps a fundamental mistake of the philosopher that he or she chooses to ignore this freedom and proceeds to argue along logical lines, thus limiting his or her own ability to propose realistic models of life.

Amongst the disputable things said above, I proposed that a common assumption about Truth is that it is eternal and unchanging. I'd like to expand. I mean that the way the concept of Truth is treated in everyday human society implies such an assumption. When someone lays claim to Truth, it is not supposed that the Truth can change overnight. Yet one could easily imagine someone truthfully saying, "This is the shortest road to Liverpool" one day, when a shorter road is opened the next day. Does this factual change alter the nature of the truth? Hardly. It would seem that a definition of Truth is necessary before we proceed further.

In the example above, the shortest road to Liverpool is not the point - the point is the accuracy of a communication and its correspondence to the facts. This is the process of Truth and this is unchanging. The person who stated that "This is the shortest road to Liverpool" does not become a liar the following day because of the opening of a new road. The process of truth telling has not changed. The facts are no longer in accordance with the statement, but this statement only becomes a lie (or a mistake due to ignorance) if the person persists with "This is the shortest road to Liverpool" after it is no longer true. My main proposal is that Truth is a Process and is generated between people during the communication of facts.

The trouble is, many of us make claims to the truth in areas where we can only express opinion (metaphysical areas, for example). Much of the time, of course, we may never have anything but opinion to work with, and the examination, not to say the construction, of scientific theories would become impossible if we limited ourselves to the unstructured observation of random data in the hope of finding something out. Perhaps this is where the freedom to be contradictory has a rightful place? It could be that a form of rational truth is generated (if sometimes not recognised) during arguments where there is no possible appeal (for the moment) to empiricism. However it may be, our societal nature leads us to engagement with problems where conclusive evidence is lacking, and it is surely part of freedom to be able to express clashing opinions? Just as it is surely part of freedom to seek out the factual evidence to support or disprove such opinions?

From this, it would seem that Truth is composed of two distinguishable parts: accurate communication (leading to comprehension) and correspondence with the facts (empirically verifiable/falsifiable, leading to agreement). Truth is usually closely associated with Freedom (rightly, in my opinion). Could it be that Freedom is a similarly composed process, with the correspondence being between the facts and their approach to the Ideal?

Political freedom and democracy have been closely linked in this century. Yet it seems somewhat weak and watery to associate Freedom with no more than the ability to vote every so often for a limited number of parties, full of vested interests and prejudices. If none of the political parties express our values and beliefs to any satisfactory degree, what becomes of our freedom then? It's not as if it's an easy thing to start up a new political party. Of course, one could join a party and seek to change it from within, but somehow this doesn't seem to encapsulate the essence of that costly Freedom for which so many have spilt their precious blood over the years. And are we to suppose that there was no freedom in any country that happened to lack democracy in the past? In all the past centuries and in the entire world, before the modern concept of democracy came into being, was there really no freedom? It may be as well to remember that true democracy (universal adult suffrage) has been in existence for around seventy years in England.

No, I think that freedom is far more fundamental than this. Freedom, it appears to me, partakes of many of the definitions we attempted at the beginning of this investigation. They all seem to hold some part of the truth. We would want real-life freedom to include some limitation. In safeguarding or developing a free society, we would want to avoid the arrogance of certainty and the paralysis of ignorance. We would want a freedom which acknowledges and accommodates the reality of contradictory beliefs within the free. But above all these, I'd say that freedom involves access to the process of truth, wherever and whenever expressed, under any political system in any geographical or historical context. Democracy can be said to facilitate such access (perhaps the most comprehensive access possible for human society) by producing conditions conducive to the truth process (a free education, public libraries, a free press, and a liberal attitude towards criticism, pressure groups and the dissemination of information). But the most fundamental condition of access to truth is surely the liberty to gather and speak freely amongst our fellows, without fear. So long as truth is accessible and we are free to discover it and agree concerning it, we have a society worth preserving.

The facilitation of access to knowledge and the freedom to develop forums in which to debate the thoughts and findings resulting from such free access, are crucial, then, to a free society. Not simply because the result is a better informed community of individuals, but also because authoritarianism can only arise where knowledge is concentrated in the hands of a few. This is true whether the authoritarianism arises as an organised political force, or whether we are simply dealing with others in a democratic society. It has often been said that "knowledge is power", and indeed it is. When knowledge is disseminated, power is disseminated also. Where one is ignorant, one needs to be able to admit it openly in order to learn. Of course, this places the ignorant person at a disadvantage, and the person with knowledge is aware of this, whether consciously or subconsciously, and is aware that giving away information to another means that the advantage will also be given away. This is perhaps a case where the survival instinct can sway us one way or the other. For individual survival, it is good to have an advantage, it might be argued, but for the species it is also good to have as many knowledgeable people as possible. In this sense, then, an authoritarian society will tend to idealise the individual, whilst paradoxically repressing the vast majority of them, whilst a free society will tend to emphasise an ethical duty to society, whilst not physically enforcing such a duty, relying rather on a free access to facts to persuade each to contribute.

Of course, authority is discernible from authoritarianism. One can be an authority without being authoritarian, simply by being willing to share what one knows, freely (although this can be difficult where the knowledge is of a highly specialised nature and hard to grasp).

Perhaps ultimately, the most real and inalienable freedom, is that mental freedom we have in our own heads, where the Ideal lurks. That creative freedom we call imagination. No matter how repressive a political system might be, such dreams and visions will persist. Certainly, it's the closest we can come to being gods.

Determinism and Free Will [Top of the page]

Often opposed to the idea of freedom (more specifically, to the concept of Free Will), Determinism is the idea that all things are determined, in that, if we only had all the facts within our knowledge, all events and thoughts would be seen to be the outcomes of causal chains following set paths. Rather as a train cannot leave its rails, determinism says that all things follow certain paths from which departure is impossible. These “rails” or paths of causality might be traced back to the beginning of the Universe (in theory, at least), and thus, by implication, they might also be traced to its end.

Of course, determinism - if accepted as applicable to human beings, and hence to human actions - has implications for morality. If we have no choice, how can we apply praise or blame to any individual for any action, good or bad? However, this view can be countered by saying that our attitude towards the saint and the sinner is also determined, and so there is no point in complaining that things supposed to encourage or deter (say, the Nobel prize for the peacemaker, prison for the criminal) cannot have any effect, seeing as it must be determined that such rewards and punishments will, in fact, be given - and will, in fact, encourage or rehabilitate in all cases where they do, and will not, in all the cases where they do not.

The idea of freedom involves the acceptance of the concepts of randomness and of choice. For all courses of action, for any person making a choice in a particular context, a range of possibilities must be open if freedom is to be a meaningful conception within that context. If this is not so, we say the individual has no freedom for that particular situation. A prisoner locked in a cell, for instance, cannot be said to be free to physically leave it. Yet, if we accept that the concept of determinism is true, then it follows that there can be no randomness and therefore no choice. For example, our prisoner must have followed a determined course of actions which inevitably ended in prison, and his or her failure to escape from the cell must be taken to be equally inevitable, as would his or her escape, should that event occur.

In the two paragraphs above, the reader will have noticed that determinism, if accepted, is inescapable. It also appears to be totally ineffectual, as regards helping us to decide actions. If determinism is accepted, the believer in it might just as well proceed as if he or she had free will, seeing as believers will see themselves as just as much subject to determinism as anyone else. In other words, whatever behaviour or character one has, one can claim that it is determined. Determinism does not require change; it merely says that change, if it comes, was determined. Therefore one can change or stay the same as much as one likes. Which means that, even if determinism is accepted, such acceptance appears to have no practical implications. We might just as well proceed as if free will were a reality and randomness and choice were really part of the universe.

This statement requires clarification of the terms Randomness and Choice. It’s my contention that things which cannot be pragmatically confirmed can only be accepted provisionally - any voluntary human action which cannot be consistently predicted by another human being cannot be said to be determined in any provable way. Where a situation involves what appears to be a voluntary act, such as the sudden, arbitrary raising of one’s arm, say, it would appear that a course of action has been chosen by the person raising the arm. If that person says nothing before the action, and there is nothing in the context of the situation to give any clue as to the nature of the coming action, in what meaningful way can we say that the action is determined? The possible courses of action as regards our own bodies, and the motives determining and prompting such personal acts, are so many and so varied as to make the totality of possible choices beyond calculation, unless we apply our ubiquitous human facility of Logical Fiction creation to delineate a field of possibilities and thus, by bracketing a likely set of possibilities from the total within Reality, make our guesses more manageable. In other words, what is Free Will, save a choice from such a large number of possible choices that the resulting action cannot be humanly predicted?

On the other hand, if a person chooses to step out of a tenth-storey window, the matter of choice does not appear in the following action of plummeting to the ground, appearing to indicate that free will, generally speaking, does not have any effect on the laws of physics. Of all the possible directions one might go, having stepped from the window, downwards appears to be the determined direction and we cannot, unaided, choose another.

It appears that, for all practical purposes, some things are best regarded as determined and some things are best dealt with as not determined. To say that my own course of action, in deciding to voluntarily raise my arm, is determined appears to imply a complete knowledge of the entire universe and all its workings, which I perceive as impossible for any creature within the universe. It follows that only the concept of a god, outside all things (including Time and Space) and able to perceive all things and comprehend them in an unending instant, will give any reality to the idea of Determinism in this absolute sense (applied to voluntary human actions as well as physics). However, I do not claim that the impracticality of accurate prediction regarding many human actions entirely rules out any knowledge, I would merely contend that we are better able to draw from the universe some threads of knowledge, if we study the patterns we perceive in unthinking natural forces, rather than attempting to know every detail of any individual person (including oneself).

Fatalism and Wishes [Top of the page]

At the beginning of this article, you may remember that I said: "leaving aside the difficulty of how wishes are formed"? Well, it's time to attempt to deal with this difficulty. How are wishes formed?

Having decided that we cannot claim to have freedom when it comes to the laws of physics (and for Will to exist, such causality must be accepted, or else how could our Willing cause things to happen?), what kind of freedom does this leave? If we say that the perceiving "I" we associate with our Self is a result of experience and a particular type of physiology, aren't these both material factors, and therefore a part of the material world, and hence, determined?

Well, as said elsewhere on this site (see: Regarding the Status of Proof and Evidence, Of Certainty and Logic section), just because the development of some facility was determined by normal development in an organism (which has in turn been determined by the actions of the blind forces of nature over millions of years) it does not follow that an achieved development makes for absolute predictability in the behaviour of that organism. Having once gained such a facility, its implementation does not have to be determined - the facility for pattern perception, for example, does not have to be applied purely to the demands of survival in a simple and straightforward sense. In other words, just because something has a cause, which can be determined, it does not follow that the thing caused can only serve that cause in a determined way, and cannot be reapplied as we see fit. If such were not the case, the concept of Fatalism would be correct.

Fatalism is a concept often separated from determinism, and there is a difference we should be aware of. Fatalism can be said to be the opposite of Free Will in a way that determinism is not. Fatalism says that the Will is formed by causal factors and can never rise above such factors, and therefore can never be free. In other words, Fatalism says that the will is not autonomous (even its wishes are determined). But as we have just discussed above, the establishment of a perceiving "I" can lead to an evident autonomy, which reveals itself in the different decisions different people are free to make in similar situations. Although I believe the difference between people can be explained purely through differences in experiences and genetic variation, this does not invalidate the autonomy of the individual. Each set of experiences is unique, as is each set of genes (leaving aside genetic twins), and the result is an autonomous individual, to ensure survival. Having been granted such autonomy by evolution, it is ours to command. Having reached maturity, we are aware of our autonomy, and aware of our ownership of it.

Fatalism is directly associated with the Will as a facility, within the human mind. It is, therefore, related to mentality. Determinism is more associated with the material world, outside of the individual mind, which I have chosen to refer to as Reality. It therefore follows that Fatalism assigns a particular ontology to the Will, which can be interpreted in alternative ways, according to the individual philosopher's position.

A philosopher mainly accepting the materialist position will explain the mental via the physical and will therefore need to deal with the concept of Fatalism in material terms. Such a philosopher might say that biological structures are far more sophisticated than any machine and far more flexible. This factor, and the ability to rewrite or reuse mental facilities and strategies according to experience, makes the biological entity more than a machine in the accepted sense of the term. This factor makes us autonomous and not automata.

The mainly idealist philosopher will, of course, deal with the concept of Fatalism differently, because the idealist sees the ontology of the mental differently. For the idealist, the mental can allow for the possibility of supernatural elements (although such elements are not compulsory for holding to the idealist position, I hasten to add). To take one possible example, the Will can be said to have been granted as free by god, and that is why it is free, thus repudiating Fatalism (god's gift of a soul makes us autonomous). Another position is that, god can foresee all. In other words, the individual will end up doing what god foresees, even though the individual freely chooses what god foresees. This position is a fudged acceptance of Fatalism, and variations on the theme appear in various religions.

So, how are wishes formed? Well, doubtless the subconscious plays a part we cannot precisely define, however, in my opinion, initially wishes are shaped by our experiences and physiological type. As a child, we are given a sweet and subsequently we have a wish for sweets, arising from an aimed for repetition of the pleasure derived. However, with maturity, we are able to form our wishes based upon our knowledge (the numbers and contexts of our experiences are multiplied by time and reality). At this later stage, we can form our wishes with greater conscious control. We can refrain from wishes we know will never be fulfilled, or channel such desires into harmless daydreams, or can apply knowledge (the knowledge that too many sweets are bad for us, for example). We can concentrate on those wishes we can reasonably achieve and even form new wishes based upon events and abilities we become aware of, or knowledge we have gained through experience.

Rather like a player coming to play a new game, Life "feels" its way into Reality. Having tested and grasped the rules, it eventually begins to manipulate and shape it. Although this particular game shapes the player, the player eventually comes to understand how to play the game for him or herself, and to thus arise from it an autonomous entity. For me, this is the meaning of free will.