Socrates never mentions free will and it does not appear in the works of Plato or Aristotle, or so says classicist and philosopher Michael Frede. In his book, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, Frede writes, “[I]f we look at Greek literature from Homer onwards, down to long after Aristotle, we do not find any trace of a reference to, let alone a mention of, free will.”

Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind popularized the hard-to-believe idea that the pre-Homerian Greeks heard what we would call the inner voice of conscience. But, Jaynes said, they thought it was a god’s voice in their head. In Homer’s Iliad many significant moments, for example, actions that turn the tide of a battle—but also insignificant moments of quotidian agency—are described as caused not by the Homeric heroes but by the gods acting through them. It was as if the gods played puppeteer standing over the scene like over a gameboard and pulling the strings connected to Hector and Achilles.

For the moment, we may put Jaynes aside as overly speculative, if still evocative. According to Frede, the reason Plato and Aristotle do not have a concept of free will is because, “[n]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.” That’s right. They did not make use of the concept of will, much less free will.

Frede: “[N]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.”

Plato and Aristotle’s famous “tripartite view of the soul” is grounded in the idea that there are distinct forms of motivation which often come into conflict with each other and therefore “must have their origin in different capacities, abilities, or parts of the soul,” as Frede writes.

According to these ancient Greek thinkers, the collected parts of a human soul can be thought of metaphorically as a charioteer, which is Reason, gripping the reigns of two horses, Desire and Passion. As a metaphor, this strikes us as not so bad today. It looks a lot like our preferred folk metaphor of a homunculus at a control panel patched into the central nervous system. But the ancient view is more complicated than the metaphor suggests, and stranger too. Frede says the ancient thinkers had “a highly specific form of wanting or desiring, in fact, a form of wanting which we no longer recognize or for which we tend to have no place in our conceptual scheme.”

In other words, we don’t think of ourselves, of our agency, in the same way as the ancient Greeks did. And we may never be able to. But the way they thought can be made understandable from the outside, if not usable, so to speak, from the inside.

Frede says it’s safe to assume that Plato and Aristotle thought human beings at least sometimes acted voluntarily, or because they desired to so act, et cetera. The ancient Greek “folk” (non-philosophical layperson) had a commonsense psychology in which they attributed intentions and so on to each other. But the philosophical theory which Plato and those other philosophers posited to explain this commonsense folk psychology is what the modern mind does not, perhaps cannot, share in.

Aristotle does not share our notion of a will as essentially spontaneous, an uncaused causer.1

Consider the Latin velle, the German wollen, and “to will” in English. They all mean something like wanting or willing. The ancient Greek word boulesthai is closely related and yet, Frede says, should not be translated as “willing” because it signified a very specific form of wanting conceptually distinct from our sense of “willing.” Nevertheless, we lack any better term to translate it into.

According to Frede, boulesthai is “a form of desire which is specific to Reason.” “It is the form in which Reason desires something. If reason recognizes, or believes itself to recognize, something as a good, it ‘wills’ (boulesthai) or desires it. If Reason believes itself to see a course of action which would allow us to attain this presumed good, it thinks that it is a good thing, other things being equal, to take this course of action.” And, if it thinks that it is good to do something, then it does it. Or Reason makes us do it.

The ancient view assumed that “reason by itself suffices to motivate us to do something. This is an assumption which is made by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and their later followers.” But it is an assumption that is incommensurate with how we think about motivation and agency today. We are all followers of David Hume today insofar as we think that between reason and desire only desire is motivating on its own. My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable. Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

In other words, it’s possible that I’d rather avoid a little pain than prevent the destruction of half the world. It’s conceivable I would not switch one for the other; that is, I might let half the world be destroyed rather than endure a little pain in my finger.

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

That is our modern intellectual inheritance. Those preferences would sound like nonsense to the ancient Greek philosophers. The difference is Hume has limited “rational” to mean only instrumental reason. Being rational can help you instrumentally to achieve your goals, your values, your desires. But establishing what is valuable is not a part of rationality when the latter is conceptually limited to be only instrumental reason.

What, then, is value in our post-Humean paradigm? For us, value is just a matter of desire or preference, with all the subjectivity and relativism that this implies. If value were arrived at via reason instead of desire, value would be objective—it would be something you could be wrong about instead of being something which depends as it does today on subjective desire wherein if you think it’s good then it’s good.

Two things separate us most remarkably from the ancients. One is that they lived in a time 1500 years before the moral relativism we embrace today was even conceivable. The other is their lack of an important role for will in their understanding of human action. We, by contrast, have made an apotheosis of will; we’ve turned it into the end all be all.

Socrates’ view is especially foreign to us because he specifically denied the conceptual possibility of “weakness of will,” or akrasia, that is, situations in which we act against our better judgment. In cases of weakness of will, like bad habits or procrastination, our reason tells us a task is important or urgent but when we do something else instead, we demonstrate, according to Socrates, that we actually believed the other thing—the thing we actually did—to be more important, more valuable. A student going to a party rather than studying the night before a test demonstrates he values the party more than studying. Socrates would categorize procrastination as a failure of rationality, a subjective evaluation of what would be good to do, an evaluation which was objectively false. His reason or reasoning was wrong (indeed, his rational evaluation of the pros and cons of the various options open to him was wrong) because it motivated him to do the less reasonable thing. Contrariwise, after Hume, we say the student’s reason was correct (he reasoned that he should not go out but instead study the night before the test); he just didn’t want to do the reasonable thing. Acting against your better judgment was impossible according to Socrates, because Reason does what it views as best done. In those case where it might appear you acted against your better judgment, you were in fact judging what you did to be better—best all things considered—but, Socrates would say, you were simply wrong about that.

The paradigm we live in today describes the case differently. It says: our reason did indeed evaluate the undone course of action (about which we procrastinated) as the most valuable, and therefore the thing we ought to do, but we did not want to do it, and so we did not do it.2

Frede says, “modern readers apparently can hardly help thinking of cases of acute mental conflict,” when thinking of the charioteer metaphor. We project our homuncular conception of the mind onto Aristotle’s works. “We sit there anguished, tormented, torn apart by two conflicting desires which pull us in opposite directions, while we try to make up our mind which direction to take,” (italics added). But that’s not what Plato meant with the charioteer metaphor when he introduced it in The Republic. Standing in for Reason, the charioteer, according to the ancient understanding, himself has a desire; he desires the good. (His task is to train his horses to also go in that direction. Horses do not act on the basis of reflection or wisdom; they act out of habit or instinctively; but they can be trained to act in line with what Reason judges proper.) The ancients understood that to cash out the italicized “make up our mind” a few sentences above, we would have to invoke another metaphorical charioteer inside the first charioteer. The ancient paradigm avoided this infelicity by giving Reason a desire of its own, capable of motivating us on its own. The charioteer has a telos or drive of its own, which is sufficient on its own to succeed in motivating action.

According to the ancient Greeks, when we do what we believe is best, it’s because we saw it was best, and not because we saw it was best and also had this other thing, a will, which decided to do it. The addition of a mental event, an extraneous willing, is what gets the regress going. Aristotle’s view makes sense at just the point ours starts to go awry. Indeed, Aristotle was the first to oppose the notion of a homunculus as leading to an infinite regress, although he opposed it in biology as a bad theory of the life force a sperm brings to an egg.

Conceiving of the mind in the homuncular manner is to conceive of self-consciousness as an autonomous monitoring and control system and conscious will as an uncaused causer. The ancient conception of the mind was different. The ancient’s conceived of the mind as a collection of desires or motivating drives (that is, the rational charioteer and nonrational horses are all drives, drives of different kinds), each in competition with the other drives to get the creature to do what each drive innately wants the creature to do. No uncaused causer anywhere.

Whence our intuitive notion of causal determinism?

During the Scientific Revolution, Medieval explanations (which had been Aristotelian, teleological, purpose-based, and qualitative) began to lose esteem and were replaced by quantitative and clockwork-like explanations, as in the mathematical equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.

But the success of scientific explanations from the 1600s up until the advent of quantum mechanics (around 1900) only cemented a deterministic understanding of the world that was already conceivable without the walloping, world-historical success of Newton.

[Determinism …] would have been conceivable by a caveman observing the regular trajectory of his spear.

Indeed, the kind of determinism that could threaten humanity’s sense of agency would have been conceivable by a caveman observing the regular trajectory of his spear. He would have found that if he threw it with a certain effort, it reliably flew a certain distance; if he added some amount of effort more, then it would go some amount of distance farther.

There were regularities to be discovered everywhere. Our prehistoric ancestors saw the repeating paths across the sky of their projectiles, the sun, the moon, and the stars. They endured the relentless repetition of the seasons. Any regular pattern—physical or narratological—could take root in the early human imagination and begin to seem like a prison of the endless repetition of the same.

“Gronk, we sit around this campfire, as we have always done, and you say you are stronger than our clan leader, Thogson, which is what so many untested youngsters have always said.”

“Gronk, we sit around this campfire, as we have always done, and you say you are stronger than our clan leader, Thogson, which is what so many untested youngsters have always said. Upstarts like you are destined to try and fail. You are like Snarp from legend, who challenged the dragon and was killed. Thogson is like Thog of legend, who challenged the dragon and defeated it. But you cannot help yourself. It has always been thus.”

“a deterministic view of human conduct… is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system.”

“A universal and persistent foundation stone in our system of law, and particularly in our approach to punishment, sentencing, and incarceration, is the belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil.” US v Grayson 1978.

Steward Machine Co vs Davis 1937:

“[T]he whole presupposition of the criminal law is that most people, most of the time, have free will within broad limits,” and that “the law has been guided by a robust common sense which assumes freedom of the will as a working hypothesis in the solution of its problems.”

Ronald Reagan said:

“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

Is the person in the street a libertarian or a compatibilist? The relatively new movement called experimental philosophy has for a couple of decades taken the armchair thought experiments of philosophers to the person in the street. Practitioners then utilize the statistical research methods of social psychology to get data on how people respond—whereas philosophers had made claims for their thought experiments from a sample of one. It turns out that what people say about free will depends on framing and ordering effects; that is, surveys and experiments can elicit compatibilist as well as libertarian intuitions. If a vignette about Newton’s success at discovering the laws of nature precedes the survey question, a larger percentage of respondents agree that free will and science are incompatible. If an action was described as immoral and with sufficiently concrete detail, people reintroduce free will in order to hold the evil doer morally responsible.

Robert Sapolsky describes the untutored, folk view as a mix: it’s broadly libertarian with compatibilist aspects. “We have something resembling a spirit, a soul, an essence that embodies our free will, from which emanates behavioral intent; and… this spirit coexists with biology that can sometimes constrain it… A well-intentioned spirit, while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak.”

In other words, we have our biology, including aspects of brain function that “can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, etc.,”—basically Sapolsky’s entire book, Behave. “And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or nongendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel.” The homunculus, if you think about it, cannot be made of brain stuff (“squishy biological brain yuck”) or else there’d need to be a tinier homunculus inside the first homunculus. In order to avoid an infinite regress, the homunculus must be an immaterial substance that is capable of spontaneous action outside any causal story preceding it.

Sapolsky says the folk view allows that there are some things “outside the homunculus’ purview—seizures blow the homunculus’ fuses, requiring it to reboot the system… Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock.” However, aside from a few situations in which biology overpowers it, the homunculus maintains its ability to act unpredictably and contrary to everything that had come before.

This view is not supported by science, Sapolsky argues. And, as Sam Harris points out, it’s philosophically confused for invoking a causa sui, i.e., a self-causing, uncaused causer, namely the soul-like homunculus. (Nietzsche said it best: “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity’s excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense.”) The folk view is further problematic philosophically-speaking because of the question of interaction. A dualist view like this needs to explain how the soul, which is immaterial, can “pull” on the “levers” which are physical or biological. It was Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, who presciently pointed this out in extensive correspondence with the father of modern dualism, Rene Descartes, who had absurdly invoked the pineal gland as the place where the impossible interaction occurs.

[DRAFT]

The quotes that get the problem of free will going. Timothy O’Connor 2000. Galen Strawson 1986. Robert Kane.

It’s maybe not so much that people believe in magic per se…. They believe that determinism is inconsistent with free will. So that leads them to the bad libertarian definition of free will as well as to denying causal determinism at least when it comes to human agency,

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Network: unbidden, Haynes, Nietzsche, “thoughts just appear,”

Meta-commentary:

Questions for my students:

For in the comments:

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I’m David J. Frost. I teach philosophy, write literary nonfiction, and live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé. My essays has appeared in the Missouri Review, The Smart Set, SLAB literary journal, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I went to Columbia for undergrad and lived in NYC for 10 years. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy from UNC-Chapel Hill.

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Adam Gopnik, writing in an aside in the New Yorker, says that the argument between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris “is worth having”—and “in some sense it’s the only argument worth having.”

That stunned me. It’s pretty darn categorical. Gopnik is usually a quite subtler thinker and gifted writer. Indeed, he is one of my favorite stylists.

According to Gopnik, Dennett’s and Harris’s opposing positions on the free will debate represent two differing options secular materialists have in place of faith. They both “reject superstition and the supernatural, but end in radically different places,” with one side “accepting that the materialist view of the world without inherent meaning can produce only fatalism,” and the other side saying, “it can give us the great if ambiguous gift of freedom.” A marvelous insight as usual with Gopnik, but just slightly cockeyed. It is rather that Dennett attempts to saddle Harris with said fatalism, but both men see their differing materialism in positive terms. There is no representative of the ugly position defended by “Lui” in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, which was part of the ostensible occasion for Gopnik’s article.

Writing and revising the free will article took me years. Yes, years. I corresponded by email with Robert Sapolsky in June 2023. Looking at my computer files, I can see that it was way back in December of 2022 that I was researching the role free will played in denying line-of-duty death benefits to surviving family members of police officers who commit suicide. The drama with my first submission, revise and resubmit, and my demurral, happened in March 2024. The piece was finally accepted February 2026.

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Years ago, I had the good fortune to housesit for a friend while he and his wife were traveling over an extended Christmas break. They were med students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. So, their place was not grand. As on-campus, institutional housing, it was not much more than a glorified dorm room. Nevertheless, I luxuriated in the quintessential feeling of the house sitter: that uncanny sense of newfound freedom. In this unfamiliar space, all my old habits were wiped away. I had a clean slate. I could reset, reboot, start fresh. Anything was possible.

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Each shivering weekday morning, I would take the three-dollar interborough bus to my publishing job in midtown. After work, I’d ride the subway to the Bronx Zoo station and happily trudge home through the snow in the relative warmth of the afternoon. In their apartment, the thrilling sense of possibility persisted. I took in all the unfamiliar stimuli: the anatomy textbooks on the coffee table; the mini Eiffel Tower on the bookshelf (we had first met in Paris); the aluminum-edged kitchen table adorned with a plastic yellow and white daisy in a cobalt blue vase; and three comfy reading chairs, any of which I was free to choose to sit in, to read any book I wanted until I wanted to do something else.

I was as free as the Spring wind until one day I came across a box of See’s Candies, a pack of cigarettes, and two mesmerizing bottles of bargain booze. I had to eat them all, smoke them all, drink them all.

I tried to resist but couldn’t stop myself. Deterministic procedures booted up in my brain. I could feel my free will evaporating, as a multitude of open possibilities collapsed into one closed necessity.

As soon as I’d finished indulging my physical addictions, my old habits of mind returned too. The house sitter’s quintessential experience of open-endedness was spoiled. My longstanding mental and behavioral patterns resurfaced, predictable as ever. I was me again.

Sound familiar? We’ve all experienced such joyous feelings of freedom. And we’ve all had moments when we felt our free will was compromised, in one way or another, to one degree or another.

If you’re not sure what I mean, try not eating for three days. Really set your conscious willpower to fasting. Then you will know the inner struggle against physiological drives: vectors of psychic force, pushing you, imposing on you, enjoining you to eat. Perhaps you can distract yourself by drinking water, but the metabolic need for calories is too basic. Thoughts about food bubble up, until food is the only thing you think about. Lure and temptation transform to need and command and, ultimately, to unfreedom.

There certainly are occasions we seem to lack free will, such as irrational outbursts, split-second instinctual reactions, persistent bad habits like nail biting, procrastination, and any case of acting against our better judgment. Think of Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “I can see, and I approve, the better course, and yet I choose the worse.” Think of Paul in his Letter to the Romans: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” To act unfreely in this way often feels terrible, like self-hatred or holding oneself in contempt.

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Thinking about the philosophical problem of free will, or what comes after denial, may therefore seem a fruitless endeavor to some, a mere spinning of our cognitive wheels that never gets us anywhere. For Sapolsky and Harris, however, the so-called problem of free will is in the rearview mirror. They are convinced. They know we don’t have free will, even if they don’t always believe we don’t. The changes to society they envision will simply have to accommodate the truth that it’s a hard truth to believe, but a truth all the same.

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The cognitive space where Sapolsky and Harris have arrived is new territory, an intellectual position with novel paradoxes, but—most importantly—a position that brings with it a number of urgent moral imperatives.

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The essay opens describing Kelly as my fiancee. Throughout the story, there are hints at relationship trouble. My sleep-peeing—sleepwalking and peeing in the closet unconsciously—made Kelly display a pent-up prickliness. (Pent-up because she believed she could not hold me responsible since I did it all unfreely.) During the info-dump about psychology studies which show that people become more aggressive when primed with thoughts about free-will denial, we have a few too many tiffs.

In a longer version of the piece, we break up before the end of the essay. Along the way, an editor I consulted over Zoom asked me “What is this essay about?” A simple question but not so simple to make sure there is a good answer. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the essay should be about: How do Kelly and I explain our breakup without referencing free will? That is nice and specific. That is a specification of a more abstract or generalized expression of the point of the essay: how would society and the individual live while denying free will? How does denial change one’s self-conception? How do you explain the behavior of yourself and others without referencing free will?

I had to think back to why Kelly and broke up, which was not a pleasant experience. Neither thinking about it nor the actual process of our break up was pleasant, but I meant thinking about it was unpleasant. I had to explain it in the essay but I did not like even to try to explain it to myself in my own mind, my own inner monologue. But thinking about it in the context of free-will denial was different; it felt different and ended up in a different place. [Bare details.] I recalled that Kelly had said she would try to help the relationship by going off birth control which she speculated might be suppressing her libido. It is not comfortable to think about one’s romantic and sexual and life partner having a low libido. Indeed, when I go to explain the break up to friends who do not know Kelly I say “She said … it was like trying to be romantic with a roommate.” I suspect that it had been that way since the beginning. If I am a detective of the human heart, I’d guess that she moved in with me for a variety of reasons—some of which were economical—and hoped that she would become attracted to me in that way over time.

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