I understand the point you are trying to make but, why make it? Not only is it incorrect, the motivation is suspicious, if in fact it is merely to posit something novel and contrarian.
It is very clear the Ancient Greeks worked with a concept of the will, one that considered reason as a ruling capacity over oneself (as an organizing principle), and that is not controversial, it’s quite central to their psychological premises.
Socrates (via Plato) demonstrated that failure to do what is rational is either a matter of ignorance (one does not know what the right thing actually is) or a matter of having a soul in disharmony, which is a malfunction of the organizing principle (reason). A well ordered soul recognizes right action through reason and has the correct desire and passions to motivate that action. We must not only know right action we must also have our desires aligned with them.
Aristotle developed this further by differentiating between voluntary and involuntary actions. An act was moral only if the agent voluntarily committed the act. And by voluntary, he clearly meant an act taken in clear conscience, an exercise of reason itself. Virtues, as a result, were to be cultivated by voluntary action after one recognized (deliberated) where on a mean between two vices one is naturally inclined. If I am naturally cowardly, I am to habituate acts (intentionally!) that err on the side of rashness, so that I may build the capacity for courage (the desired virtue).
The stoics developed this even a step further. By marrying some of Aristotle’s metaphysics with this understanding of the mechanism of free will, they demonstrated that the exercise of reason and right action is not only a fulfillment of human excellence, but also, a fulfillment of divine order, or alignment with logos, or the broader universe itself. It is implicit that man has every right and capacity to not do so, otherwise there would be no need to explain, no need to exercise, etc. Reason would be irrelevant in a world that was predestined. It would merely be a torturous gift from the gods.
Simply, reason implies choice. Therefore, if reason was so central to the Ancient Greek understanding of the world and the self, so was choice, and by implication, the freedom of the will to act or not act according to it.
The notion of an 'uncaused causer' or 'humonculous' is irrelevant, even nonsensical. 'Cause and effect' may have simply added up to beings with will. After all, what is the nature of cause? But really the will is understood to be axiomotic in ontology because to experience 'I am' is to experience 'I will' as an immediate, ineluctable reality of consciousness. It is there, always. The most real thing, with being itself. People can be more certain the will is real than Australia is real, for example. Even the outrageous Australians themselves. It is realer than the nose at the end of your face, as it were. Though in a way, seeming more incredible than kangaroos. But anyway, this is why there is never any questioning of will that does not merely amount to rhetorical or performative self-contradiction. It is like trying to discover your lack of eyes by rolling them back to check. What we find in the archaic Greeks is the idea of supernatural or suprahuman will to which man is bound or must bow, but nonetheless he is never deprived of his own will. That was unthinkable, even among peoples more or less convinced they were playthings of divine whims, or rather divine wills. It is unthinkable. It is tantamount to not thinking, or with skeptical philosophers and especially moderns, overthinking.
There is no thought, language, grammar, poetry, philosophy, without the base assumption of will. Aristotle understood it as axiomatic; simply something to be taken for granted, which is why is not strained to bring it up.
That is not what Frede says Aristotle thought. Also “will” may be as central as you say, but not a homunculus-like will. And it is difficult to define a spontaneous will that can do whatever it wants without invoking a homunculus. What I mean is, people think the will is central but they often have non-cogent ideas about the will. Which would ultimately mean that their non-cogent idea of the will is not actually operative in all the places they said it was.
I don't know about "agency." I did not use that language in my article. I talked about free will in the libertarian and not in the compatibilist sense. So I was careful to define my terms. In THOSE terms the spirit of your critique would be: why are you even bothering to argue against free will if whether someone believes you or not is not up to their free will? Or, why are you trying to change people's minds if you don't think people can freely change their mind to your view.
In those terms I have a response: namely, that is an old canard, and a mistake. A person does not use their free will to come to the beliefs they have, nor do they use it to change their beliefs. Or, rather, truth seekers do not. If you want to have true beliefs then as Nagel says, "Belief should be involuntary." My students usually balk at that. The more likely bromide bouncing around in their head would be something like "I can believe what I want. I am free to make up my own mind" and so they will react negatively to Nagel's "Belief should be involuntary."
But Nagel is right. For two reasons, one: if you want your beliefs to track the truth, then believing what you want won't get you there. And two: judgment and will are different faculties of the mind as one realizes only after careful thinking on what are the faculties of the mind.
How does belief formation work? If you want true beliefs then you will only come to a belief or change your beliefs on the basis of good reasons. A good reason can be either overwhelming evidence or a compelling deductive argument.
Notice the lack of valance of "freedom" in the words "overwhelming" and especially "compelling." When faced with an argument that is compelling our mind is compelled and we change our belief. If we do not change our belief it will be because it is uncomfortable for some emotional reason or for some other "want" or "will." Those things make you stray from having your beliefs be identical only to the conclusion of valid and sound deductive arguments.
We do not need nor should we want "will" "choice" or "desire" to play a role in belief formation. Beliefs should be formed by our sound judgment. But judgment in the sense of not resisting what a valid and sound deductive argument is obliging you to believe or compelling you to believe.
We don't choose our beliefs. Or we shouldn't. We should only believe what there are compelling reasons to believe. So there is no paradox in me denying free will and trying to change people's minds.
You do realize that Jaynes' entire opus was nonsense? Or that the lofty word "paradigm" originally only meant "weaving pattern" before a dude called Thomas Kuhn did his bizarre work of ecstatic poetry called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", chiefly marked by the negative correlation between people liking to quote it no end and their ever deigning to read the damn thing in the first place, line by tedious line? Rest of argument presented here mostly looks like mere pareidolia with a lot of big (and anachronistic!) philosopher names dropped, seemingly at random.
This was definitely a thought-provoking article that will inspire me to look more into the topic.
A discussion of how this might apply to the Stoics or to ancient Mesopotamians would have been a nice addition.
One critique I had, though, is that I found myself wondering whether there are a few over-generalizations here, such as:
“We are all followers of David Hume today”
Or:
“pre-Homerian Greeks heard what we would call the inner voice of conscience as if it were a god’s voice in their head.”
Or this:
“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.”
I don’t have a PhD in philosophy, so I’m certainly not claiming to have the academic background to settle these questions, but those statements struck me as broader than the evidence presented in the article seemed to warrant.
Overall, though, this was a very interesting read and gave me a lot to think about. Thanks for writing it!
"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. "
I came across this in a philosophy class as an undergrad years ago and it immediately clicked with me. To me, Socrates' view makes much more sense when I honestly interrogate my own actions and is how I've conceptualized this ever since.
I guess at the end of the day all i can say is schadenfreude. We never made a word for it. The Germans did and we recognized it as a concept we understood and HAD BEEN understood. There was no debate. The Greeks made choices and decisions. They exercised their "will" or spiritus or "the devil made me do it" but never actually made up a word.
Granted they did not argue about this idea in terms we use as they had not yet found out about the possibility of a determined universe. They certainly agree that choices are made. A will exists. The evidence of its actions. As to the inner workings They never made up the specific word. It wasn't yet needed.
When you say "...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.", methinks you misrepresent Hume.
As we know the full quote is this: ""Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." (Hume)
Hume would say that our passion for the party tonight was simply stronger than our passion for better marks weeks or months in the future. Deliberation about the relative value of a deferred pleasure (good marks) vs an immediate pleasure (fun night tonight) might engage reason, but passion decides the choice, not reason, which has no power of its own to decide. The job of reason becomes simply finding the means to enable the passions. eg, helps us get ready for the party and call a cab.
So *we* might say the student's reasoning was correct and he *should* study, but Hume wouldn't. In his philosophy reason has absolutely zero ability on it's own to justify any normative conclusion involving *should* or *ought*. For these conclusions we need a normative rule, and reason alone can never supply one.
Just reproducing my note as a comment here to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the interweb pipes: I would argue it’s in the De Rerum Natura, though that’s not “time immemorial”. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Lucr.+2.251&redirect=true (Clearly the choice of writing “free will” in translation can be questioned)
It would appear that Epicurus, some centuries before Luretius, had a concept of free will which, in line with many later Western philosophers, he opposed to both necessity and chance.
Yes, better go to the source rather than relying on the broken telephone of Lucretius. On the other hand what's impressive in this piece of the De Rerum Natura is that he had to introduce a fundamental indeterministic element, the clinamen, in his account of physics partly to deal with something that is pretty close to our notion of free will (libera voluntas, in the Latin text). It seems to me that this at least partly contradicts the thesis of the post. Edit: keeping in mind that Roman culture had very little to add to the Greek original here (as Lucretius himself admits when he decries the poverty of the Latin language elsewhere in his poem), it's safe to assume that any relevant concept comes from Epicurus.
Thanks! This is a nice essay on a very interesting topic. I agree that the need for collisionality (in the modern physics sense, precisely a non-zero right hand side in the Boltzmann equation) is perhaps more important to Lucretius than free will: were the atoms not to collide there would be no entropy increase, not actual change, and Nature would never create anything.
David, is it your view that everyday ancient Greeks who weren’t famous philosophers likewise did not have a notion of will? Or was it just the philosophers?
That is a tough one for me. I’ve tried to answer before and realized it gets thorny. First: I don’t know and should defer to Frede if he even mentions it. It could be that the ancient folk thought something X and these famous philosophers had a theory to explain the ancient folks intuitions or to advocate for revising those intuitions. That is thorny enough. But if we try to take seriously some notion that the ancient folk was rather differ Because the effect on us of the Middle Ages, the renaissance, and the individualism of more recent centuries means we should be cover the ancients to be subtly different. So then I look to Julian Jaynes and his theory of the origin of consciousness as the breakdown of the bi cameral mind. Ian McGilchrist recently said that Jaynes might be right except for what actually happened was the first unification of the previously separated bi cameral mind. It does make sense to me that whereas I now say to excuse or just describe my irritability that I am low in serotonin and stuff like that. “Don’t bother me till I’ve had my cup of dopamine.” It makes sense that the Ancient Greek folk would say that a spirit or god puppeteers me around to explain uncharacteristic or bad behavior. As the characters in the Iliad do explicitly.
The ancients were right in that if your behavior is out of alignment with what you profess to believe, then you don't really believe it at all. We would be better off thinking this way.
Yes, the ancient model treats agency as the behavior of competing drives, each with its own direction, rather than a separate faculty that chooses among them. Today our talk about free will wasn't even posited as a mechanism. The contrast between reason as a motivating drive versus reason as an evaluator captures the shift in how different eras perceive human action.
I like to call it vector psychology. Since a vector has direction as well as strength and their relations can be calculated so that their combination can be understood as contributing a part to the ultimate direction and strength of the action you end up undertaking. Neurons but also wills or drives are arranged in networks of excitation, inhibition, and disinhibition. Which can be understood via vector analysis too, I think. It is also entirely consistent with a non-metaphysical, naturalistic and psychological interpretation of Nietzsche on wills to power.
Interesting topic! I agree that Plato and Aristotle's value-laden conception of reality is quite foreign to us, but I want to push back on the idea that they had no conception of free will as we understand it. I think they understood our broad conception of nature quite well and were arguing against it.
"Freedom to choose" was not something they valued in itself. Consider the addict who is "free" to OD. They believed our values exist within nature because we exist within nature (this is the concept of "like knows like"). While Plato's conception of the Good is mysterious, I think he made it clear that even if we can't know it, we should accept it as a regulative principle not just of our own moral conduct, but of all of nature. Our flourishing depended on harmoniously aligning our souls to nature, according to this rational principle. To do so, we have to be free from the "tyranny" of our senseless irrational desires. This twofold internal harmony and alignment with nature is required for our flourishing—whereas freedom of choice can be dangerous and self-destructive without knowledge of the Good.
I've written about Plato's conception of desire here, though this post is just one part of a series:
—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.
I agree it's not obvious that Plato or Aristotle had a concept of free will such as we think of it today, but not having the same terminology is not the same as having no concept of it. It's hard to see how they could avoid having something very much like our concept of free will when you consider the materialistic conception of nature we find in ancient determinism and atomists such as Democritus. (Lucretius' "atomic swerve" parallels our notion that free will would "violate" causal closure of the physical, though of course he came later). I don't think our conception of a valueless deterministic reality was at all alien to Plato, and it's this view, along with the moral relativism this materialistic conception of nature supports, that was precisely what he was trying to combat throughout his dialogues.
—One is that they lived in a time 1500 years before the moral relativism we embrace today was even conceivable.
I think this statement will be extremely hard to defend. Much of what we find in the Platonic dialogues is a strong reaction against the moral relativism of the sophists. Consider Protagoras, "man is the measure of all things", and the working over this maxim gets in the Theatetus. Consider Thrasymachus in the Republic who tries to argue that "justice is the interest of the stronger" or Callicles in the Gorgias who defends the notion that maximizing pleasure is the ultimate good (Socrates likens him to a "gully bird" who eats and shits at the same time).
But I'm not quite sure whether you have in mind something more specific when you talk about our conception of free will? It seems to me we've inherited the ancient conception, at least in broad outline.
—But that’s not what Plato meant with the charioteer metaphor when he introduced it in The Republic.
It's in the Phaedrus.
Also, a bit of a side note: I think Freud must have been influenced by Plato's tripartite soul analogy. His conception of the Id, Ego, and Superego align very closely with the Platonic rational, spirited, and appetitive elements.
While the swerve came later, wouldn’t we be justified in thinking it was not a new development in Lucretius, but just him transmitting ideas from his sources?
I understand the point you are trying to make but, why make it? Not only is it incorrect, the motivation is suspicious, if in fact it is merely to posit something novel and contrarian.
It is very clear the Ancient Greeks worked with a concept of the will, one that considered reason as a ruling capacity over oneself (as an organizing principle), and that is not controversial, it’s quite central to their psychological premises.
Socrates (via Plato) demonstrated that failure to do what is rational is either a matter of ignorance (one does not know what the right thing actually is) or a matter of having a soul in disharmony, which is a malfunction of the organizing principle (reason). A well ordered soul recognizes right action through reason and has the correct desire and passions to motivate that action. We must not only know right action we must also have our desires aligned with them.
Aristotle developed this further by differentiating between voluntary and involuntary actions. An act was moral only if the agent voluntarily committed the act. And by voluntary, he clearly meant an act taken in clear conscience, an exercise of reason itself. Virtues, as a result, were to be cultivated by voluntary action after one recognized (deliberated) where on a mean between two vices one is naturally inclined. If I am naturally cowardly, I am to habituate acts (intentionally!) that err on the side of rashness, so that I may build the capacity for courage (the desired virtue).
The stoics developed this even a step further. By marrying some of Aristotle’s metaphysics with this understanding of the mechanism of free will, they demonstrated that the exercise of reason and right action is not only a fulfillment of human excellence, but also, a fulfillment of divine order, or alignment with logos, or the broader universe itself. It is implicit that man has every right and capacity to not do so, otherwise there would be no need to explain, no need to exercise, etc. Reason would be irrelevant in a world that was predestined. It would merely be a torturous gift from the gods.
Simply, reason implies choice. Therefore, if reason was so central to the Ancient Greek understanding of the world and the self, so was choice, and by implication, the freedom of the will to act or not act according to it.
The notion of an 'uncaused causer' or 'humonculous' is irrelevant, even nonsensical. 'Cause and effect' may have simply added up to beings with will. After all, what is the nature of cause? But really the will is understood to be axiomotic in ontology because to experience 'I am' is to experience 'I will' as an immediate, ineluctable reality of consciousness. It is there, always. The most real thing, with being itself. People can be more certain the will is real than Australia is real, for example. Even the outrageous Australians themselves. It is realer than the nose at the end of your face, as it were. Though in a way, seeming more incredible than kangaroos. But anyway, this is why there is never any questioning of will that does not merely amount to rhetorical or performative self-contradiction. It is like trying to discover your lack of eyes by rolling them back to check. What we find in the archaic Greeks is the idea of supernatural or suprahuman will to which man is bound or must bow, but nonetheless he is never deprived of his own will. That was unthinkable, even among peoples more or less convinced they were playthings of divine whims, or rather divine wills. It is unthinkable. It is tantamount to not thinking, or with skeptical philosophers and especially moderns, overthinking.
Thanks for your comment!
In Homer's The heroes are clearly willful agents competing with the Gods. The Gods simply have stronger wills.
Thanks for the comments!
There is no thought, language, grammar, poetry, philosophy, without the base assumption of will. Aristotle understood it as axiomatic; simply something to be taken for granted, which is why is not strained to bring it up.
That is not what Frede says Aristotle thought. Also “will” may be as central as you say, but not a homunculus-like will. And it is difficult to define a spontaneous will that can do whatever it wants without invoking a homunculus. What I mean is, people think the will is central but they often have non-cogent ideas about the will. Which would ultimately mean that their non-cogent idea of the will is not actually operative in all the places they said it was.
Agency is not something we can even question logically, because even to do so implies agency. Its like saying, 'the truth is there is no truth.'
I don't know about "agency." I did not use that language in my article. I talked about free will in the libertarian and not in the compatibilist sense. So I was careful to define my terms. In THOSE terms the spirit of your critique would be: why are you even bothering to argue against free will if whether someone believes you or not is not up to their free will? Or, why are you trying to change people's minds if you don't think people can freely change their mind to your view.
In those terms I have a response: namely, that is an old canard, and a mistake. A person does not use their free will to come to the beliefs they have, nor do they use it to change their beliefs. Or, rather, truth seekers do not. If you want to have true beliefs then as Nagel says, "Belief should be involuntary." My students usually balk at that. The more likely bromide bouncing around in their head would be something like "I can believe what I want. I am free to make up my own mind" and so they will react negatively to Nagel's "Belief should be involuntary."
But Nagel is right. For two reasons, one: if you want your beliefs to track the truth, then believing what you want won't get you there. And two: judgment and will are different faculties of the mind as one realizes only after careful thinking on what are the faculties of the mind.
How does belief formation work? If you want true beliefs then you will only come to a belief or change your beliefs on the basis of good reasons. A good reason can be either overwhelming evidence or a compelling deductive argument.
Notice the lack of valance of "freedom" in the words "overwhelming" and especially "compelling." When faced with an argument that is compelling our mind is compelled and we change our belief. If we do not change our belief it will be because it is uncomfortable for some emotional reason or for some other "want" or "will." Those things make you stray from having your beliefs be identical only to the conclusion of valid and sound deductive arguments.
We do not need nor should we want "will" "choice" or "desire" to play a role in belief formation. Beliefs should be formed by our sound judgment. But judgment in the sense of not resisting what a valid and sound deductive argument is obliging you to believe or compelling you to believe.
We don't choose our beliefs. Or we shouldn't. We should only believe what there are compelling reasons to believe. So there is no paradox in me denying free will and trying to change people's minds.
I want my beliefs to be like my actions. To follow naturally from appropriate causes. That's as much freedom as anyone could rationally want
Oh la la! That connects up my no-free-will-in-ancient-Greek-philosophy with my “Belief should be involuntary” stuff. Thanks!
Rather than contrasting the Greeks to the Moderns...
I prefer to explore...
You do realize that Jaynes' entire opus was nonsense? Or that the lofty word "paradigm" originally only meant "weaving pattern" before a dude called Thomas Kuhn did his bizarre work of ecstatic poetry called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", chiefly marked by the negative correlation between people liking to quote it no end and their ever deigning to read the damn thing in the first place, line by tedious line? Rest of argument presented here mostly looks like mere pareidolia with a lot of big (and anachronistic!) philosopher names dropped, seemingly at random.
What do you make of this line from Letter to Menoikeus by Epicurus?
"some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some by our own power"
This was definitely a thought-provoking article that will inspire me to look more into the topic.
A discussion of how this might apply to the Stoics or to ancient Mesopotamians would have been a nice addition.
One critique I had, though, is that I found myself wondering whether there are a few over-generalizations here, such as:
“We are all followers of David Hume today”
Or:
“pre-Homerian Greeks heard what we would call the inner voice of conscience as if it were a god’s voice in their head.”
Or this:
“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.”
I don’t have a PhD in philosophy, so I’m certainly not claiming to have the academic background to settle these questions, but those statements struck me as broader than the evidence presented in the article seemed to warrant.
Overall, though, this was a very interesting read and gave me a lot to think about. Thanks for writing it!
"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. "
I came across this in a philosophy class as an undergrad years ago and it immediately clicked with me. To me, Socrates' view makes much more sense when I honestly interrogate my own actions and is how I've conceptualized this ever since.
Oh we can believe a lot of things...to be more valuable...never trust a Greek bearing gifts of philosophy...
I guess at the end of the day all i can say is schadenfreude. We never made a word for it. The Germans did and we recognized it as a concept we understood and HAD BEEN understood. There was no debate. The Greeks made choices and decisions. They exercised their "will" or spiritus or "the devil made me do it" but never actually made up a word.
Granted they did not argue about this idea in terms we use as they had not yet found out about the possibility of a determined universe. They certainly agree that choices are made. A will exists. The evidence of its actions. As to the inner workings They never made up the specific word. It wasn't yet needed.
Rehash of Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes, Hamburg, 1946?
When you say "...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.", methinks you misrepresent Hume.
As we know the full quote is this: ""Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." (Hume)
Hume would say that our passion for the party tonight was simply stronger than our passion for better marks weeks or months in the future. Deliberation about the relative value of a deferred pleasure (good marks) vs an immediate pleasure (fun night tonight) might engage reason, but passion decides the choice, not reason, which has no power of its own to decide. The job of reason becomes simply finding the means to enable the passions. eg, helps us get ready for the party and call a cab.
So *we* might say the student's reasoning was correct and he *should* study, but Hume wouldn't. In his philosophy reason has absolutely zero ability on it's own to justify any normative conclusion involving *should* or *ought*. For these conclusions we need a normative rule, and reason alone can never supply one.
Just reproducing my note as a comment here to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the interweb pipes: I would argue it’s in the De Rerum Natura, though that’s not “time immemorial”. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Lucr.+2.251&redirect=true (Clearly the choice of writing “free will” in translation can be questioned)
Lucretius was a Epicurean, and Epicurus had written roughly 250 years earlier, in his Letter to Menoikeus:
some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some by our own power
And…?
It would appear that Epicurus, some centuries before Luretius, had a concept of free will which, in line with many later Western philosophers, he opposed to both necessity and chance.
Yes, better go to the source rather than relying on the broken telephone of Lucretius. On the other hand what's impressive in this piece of the De Rerum Natura is that he had to introduce a fundamental indeterministic element, the clinamen, in his account of physics partly to deal with something that is pretty close to our notion of free will (libera voluntas, in the Latin text). It seems to me that this at least partly contradicts the thesis of the post. Edit: keeping in mind that Roman culture had very little to add to the Greek original here (as Lucretius himself admits when he decries the poverty of the Latin language elsewhere in his poem), it's safe to assume that any relevant concept comes from Epicurus.
I found this essay very intriguing:
https://www.willbuckingham.com/lucretius-clinamen/
The author proposes that Lucretius thought the clinamen was the mechanism for chance but only a useful metaphor for free will.
Thanks! This is a nice essay on a very interesting topic. I agree that the need for collisionality (in the modern physics sense, precisely a non-zero right hand side in the Boltzmann equation) is perhaps more important to Lucretius than free will: were the atoms not to collide there would be no entropy increase, not actual change, and Nature would never create anything.
David, is it your view that everyday ancient Greeks who weren’t famous philosophers likewise did not have a notion of will? Or was it just the philosophers?
That is a tough one for me. I’ve tried to answer before and realized it gets thorny. First: I don’t know and should defer to Frede if he even mentions it. It could be that the ancient folk thought something X and these famous philosophers had a theory to explain the ancient folks intuitions or to advocate for revising those intuitions. That is thorny enough. But if we try to take seriously some notion that the ancient folk was rather differ Because the effect on us of the Middle Ages, the renaissance, and the individualism of more recent centuries means we should be cover the ancients to be subtly different. So then I look to Julian Jaynes and his theory of the origin of consciousness as the breakdown of the bi cameral mind. Ian McGilchrist recently said that Jaynes might be right except for what actually happened was the first unification of the previously separated bi cameral mind. It does make sense to me that whereas I now say to excuse or just describe my irritability that I am low in serotonin and stuff like that. “Don’t bother me till I’ve had my cup of dopamine.” It makes sense that the Ancient Greek folk would say that a spirit or god puppeteers me around to explain uncharacteristic or bad behavior. As the characters in the Iliad do explicitly.
The ancients were right in that if your behavior is out of alignment with what you profess to believe, then you don't really believe it at all. We would be better off thinking this way.
I agree!
We are still ignorant of the good, if we do not act in accordance with it.
Well said @Hail, the Shining Future
Yes, the ancient model treats agency as the behavior of competing drives, each with its own direction, rather than a separate faculty that chooses among them. Today our talk about free will wasn't even posited as a mechanism. The contrast between reason as a motivating drive versus reason as an evaluator captures the shift in how different eras perceive human action.
I like to call it vector psychology. Since a vector has direction as well as strength and their relations can be calculated so that their combination can be understood as contributing a part to the ultimate direction and strength of the action you end up undertaking. Neurons but also wills or drives are arranged in networks of excitation, inhibition, and disinhibition. Which can be understood via vector analysis too, I think. It is also entirely consistent with a non-metaphysical, naturalistic and psychological interpretation of Nietzsche on wills to power.
Hi Randy Gazda! Thanks for your fantastic comment.
Interesting topic! I agree that Plato and Aristotle's value-laden conception of reality is quite foreign to us, but I want to push back on the idea that they had no conception of free will as we understand it. I think they understood our broad conception of nature quite well and were arguing against it.
"Freedom to choose" was not something they valued in itself. Consider the addict who is "free" to OD. They believed our values exist within nature because we exist within nature (this is the concept of "like knows like"). While Plato's conception of the Good is mysterious, I think he made it clear that even if we can't know it, we should accept it as a regulative principle not just of our own moral conduct, but of all of nature. Our flourishing depended on harmoniously aligning our souls to nature, according to this rational principle. To do so, we have to be free from the "tyranny" of our senseless irrational desires. This twofold internal harmony and alignment with nature is required for our flourishing—whereas freedom of choice can be dangerous and self-destructive without knowledge of the Good.
I've written about Plato's conception of desire here, though this post is just one part of a series:
https://philosophyandfiction.substack.com/p/the-idea-of-the-good?r=schg4&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
—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.
I agree it's not obvious that Plato or Aristotle had a concept of free will such as we think of it today, but not having the same terminology is not the same as having no concept of it. It's hard to see how they could avoid having something very much like our concept of free will when you consider the materialistic conception of nature we find in ancient determinism and atomists such as Democritus. (Lucretius' "atomic swerve" parallels our notion that free will would "violate" causal closure of the physical, though of course he came later). I don't think our conception of a valueless deterministic reality was at all alien to Plato, and it's this view, along with the moral relativism this materialistic conception of nature supports, that was precisely what he was trying to combat throughout his dialogues.
—One is that they lived in a time 1500 years before the moral relativism we embrace today was even conceivable.
I think this statement will be extremely hard to defend. Much of what we find in the Platonic dialogues is a strong reaction against the moral relativism of the sophists. Consider Protagoras, "man is the measure of all things", and the working over this maxim gets in the Theatetus. Consider Thrasymachus in the Republic who tries to argue that "justice is the interest of the stronger" or Callicles in the Gorgias who defends the notion that maximizing pleasure is the ultimate good (Socrates likens him to a "gully bird" who eats and shits at the same time).
But I'm not quite sure whether you have in mind something more specific when you talk about our conception of free will? It seems to me we've inherited the ancient conception, at least in broad outline.
—But that’s not what Plato meant with the charioteer metaphor when he introduced it in The Republic.
It's in the Phaedrus.
Also, a bit of a side note: I think Freud must have been influenced by Plato's tripartite soul analogy. His conception of the Id, Ego, and Superego align very closely with the Platonic rational, spirited, and appetitive elements.
While the swerve came later, wouldn’t we be justified in thinking it was not a new development in Lucretius, but just him transmitting ideas from his sources?
Yes, you’re right! It’s a concept that comes from Epicurean philosophy.