Freedom, Freud and Other Foibles

By David Begelman Ph.D.

FREEDOM, FREUD and OTHER FOIBLES is an anthology of articles on a range of philosophical and scientific issues such as free will and determinism, psychoanalysis, abortion, reincarnation, addiction, judicial activism, animal rights, method acting and such authors as Shakespeare, Stanislavsky, Camus, Jung, Viktor Frankl and Christopher Bollas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369423349

David Begelman Ph.D.

David Begelman, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist with an ongoing clinical caseload. He previously authored six books dealing with psychological, philosophical and legal topics and served as an associate or contributing editor on several psychological journals. He has held a variety of positions in academia, clinics and hospitals, as well as having a theater career as actor. In the past he was a film and drama critic on two newspapers.

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Copyright © 2024 by David Begelman Ph.D.

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Rev. date: 06/20/2024

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CONTENTS

Free Will

Freud as Degenerate: Psychoanalysis, the Seduction Papers, and Racial Theory

Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

Broccoli and Socks: Treating the Schizophrenic Child

Abortion, Church Law, and the Endless Controversy

Addiction Fiction

Albert Camus and His World: Here Comes the Sun!

Martha C. Nussbaum on Animal Rights

Deconstructing Disabilities

Frankl Agonistes

Judicial Activism: Legal Reality or Political Sound Bite?

Macbeth

Thornton Wilder’s Good Old Days

Protests, Resignations and the Newer Climate of Change

The Quirky Underbelly of Reincarnation

Second Amendment Jitters

Stanislavsky Revisited

The Sommelier and His Crowd

Wonders of the Invisible World: A Dissenting View

Some Remarks On Sacred Cows: Revisiting Method Technique

Art Unbound: Once More Unto the Breach

For Ruth and Jay.

FREE WILL

I T’S A STORY rehashed endlessly these days, one about freedom of the will clashing with determinism. It’s supposedly nothing less than updated scientific wisdom that is said to force upon us an unwelcome prospect: however much we cling to the belief that many or most of our decisions are freely undertaken, the opposite is actually the case. This, some philosophers preach, is the searing truth we should confront. Goodbye, they intone, to cherished notions about how free we are in deciding this or that, not to mention our moral responsibility for our actions.

The expression Free Will, is very much at home in technical discourse, less in ordinary parlance. When it makes its occasional appearance in the latter, it amounts to a somewhat awkward or high-falutin style of speaking when describing everyday experiences or transactions in which the notion of a freely undertaken act or decision is embedded. In more abstract or philosophical discourse, on the other hand, the term finds a more suitable niche. I daresay the ordinary person would be bemused by a question about whether he or she believes in Free Will, although perfectly comfortable with questions about whether this or that act was freely undertaken in a variety of circumstances.

When it comes to philosophy or neuroscience on the other hand, the expression Free Will is very much at home in the discourse of specialists who consider it to represent a fiction. In this connection, philosophers who rule out Free Will were dubbed hard determinists by William James. Called Incompatibilists by their contemporary champions, their opponents, holding that there is no opposition between Free Will and Determinism, are called Compatibilists or soft determinists. They trace their convictions to such former luminaries as David Hume and appear to be a majority persuasion among philosophers according to recent polls, although here as elsewhere in intellectual history, the truth is hardly established by a head count.

Incompatibilism, it should be noted, lacks the novel cachet its current proponents intimate. An older lineage was likewise implicit in the writings of Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) and before him, Roger Joseph Boscovitch (1711-1787). So the doctrine (or suggestive renditions of it) debuted long before contemporary slants on the same theme started to flourish.

Among late arrivals in the discursive mix is cognitive neuroscience, the new kid on the block. It is referenced by such stalwart Incompatibilists as Harris (2012) who consider it a conceptual arsenal strengthening a case for their position. Despite this, Incompatibilists remain convinced that science—as as though any such entity were a single-minded monolith—at whatever evolutionary stage it happens to be, endorses their version of Determinism. Accordingly, whatever the state of past or present scientific advancement, the same conclusion is invariably proclaimed by this constituency. One can only speculate that their doctrine hardly requires newer accretions of knowledge to make its mark when older foundational sources suffice nicely to do the job. Were universal causal sufficiency all that is needed to establish a case for Incompatibilism, any nervous system enmeshed in a worldly causal flux—even before it yielded up its internal secrets in the lab—likewise seems to prove the point! That is, should a fancied universal causation necessitate all effects, what is the purpose of recruiting the latest findings of neuroscience to impart the lesson? It’s as if allegiance to an older, broader and not especially fine-tuned idea of universal causation weren’t up to the task of dispelling Compatibilist sentiment without backup from newfangled sidelines!

Of course, the game here is an artful one. Elucidating the causal underpinnings of any event is construed by Incompatibilists to be empirical evidence for their encompassing doctrine, while the failure to do so in many cases is not chalked up to confirming Indeterminism or the absence of causal underpinings. On the contrary, in such cases hidden causes are forever imagined as hide and seek components of the grand and presumably obvious scheme of things! It may leave the casual observer to wonder what empirically dispositive findings could hypothetically falsify Incompatibilist sentiment.

Again, should our history as a species and our causal environment be enough to explain or predict behavior, what’s the significance of cognitive neuroscience as this pertains to the philosophical issue under discussion? It’s one thing to cite newer findings in brain science as instances of our expanding knowledge; it’s quite another to reference them as buttressing a philosophical viewpoint that does quite as well on its own without them. Why load the bucket with more cement than you need?

Searle’s observation that we need to know more about the brain before we solve the free will problem (Searle, 2004 p. 215) may be redundant. If, as the Incompatibilist Van Inwagen (2017) stressed, the laws of physics and past states of the world or the universe completely determine all outcomes, why tout the latest neuroscience findings if only to reinforce the same philosophical point? Any comprehensive view of external or internal causes necessitating all mental or behavioral effects will do the trick nicely, thank you. And developments in neuroscience, may amount to little more than frosting on the cake.

The controversy over Free Will and Determinism has surfaced and resurfaced repeatedly over hundreds of years, without any firm resolution to date—at least not one disputants feel they are obliged to endorse. In these debates, attention has sometimes focused on ordinary linguistic practice and usage to help in resolving the hoary debate. Yet the question arises: how can investigations into ordinary usage or the meanings we attach in commonplace ways to certain terms bear on philosophical issues about Free Will that would seem to transcend purely linguistic considerations?

In her important work Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt (1963) cites statements made by the Nazi during his trial in which he declared they were made "of my own free will." Speaking of the attitude of the German people about their past, Arendt stated that some were not likely to say they committed murder of their own free will (p. 14).

The italicized phrases are examples of what I propose to call their forensic or ceremonial usages. They are at home in legal or oath-taking arenas of discourse. And they have a role in such contexts as attestations that certain decisions or actions were undertaken without undue pressure or coercion—in the ordinary sense of these terms. What seems clear about these usages is that they can in no way be construed as false or misconceived on the assumption that Determinism is true. They pose no challenge to Incompatibilism since their meaning is one understood to exclude coercion in the ordinary, not contra-causal sense. Accordingly, for an Incompatibilist to maintain that Eichmann could not have made a declaration of his own free will since Determinism is true, misconstrues what he meant by the expression in confusing its meaning with a philosophical thesis utterly foreign to the intent of his words. Not that Incompatibilists fail to appreciate this point—they realize it quite well. It’s just that by contrasting Determinism with Free Will in their treatises, they muddy discourse through the use of an expression that has a home in other, unrelated contexts.

Determinists of vastly different persuasions (Nahmias, 2005, 2014; Harris, 2012) persistently pose questions about the ordinary person’s understanding of the existence of Free Will, as though its meaning were the same for the person on the street as it is for philosophers. Do you believe you did X of your own Free Will when you made that decision? asks the philosopher. I guess so, replies the ordinary person; After all, nobody forced me to do X, and why do you speak that way? I’m not on the stand! might be the drift of an interaction between a person on the street and the academic who is not averse to having language go on holiday (Wittgenstein, 1953) in order to stress a higher-order point. It’s not that this should be understood as taking the wind out of Incompatibilism; the doctrine can be construed as saying something important. It’s just that it couches the bugbear freedom as in Freedom of the Will in language that causes unnecessary diversions of argument, borrowing as it does from linguistic contexts foreign to the issue under consideration. When we take a closer look at some Incompatibilist commentary, it becomes clear that its force in many instances derives from borrowing meanings attached to the ordinary use of certain terms and recruiting them for use in the higher reaches of metaphysical discourse.

Very often philosophers fail to distinguish the idea of agents choosing from their choosing freely, as preempted by Determinism. Some Incompatibilists, Harris among them, aver that because an agent’s actions are causally determined, it’s not he or she that actually chooses, a rather different claim than one denying freedom of choice. Indeed, the idea that one does not choose if the choosing is causally determined would appear to sabotage the very idea of human agency, as though personhood itself evaporates as a meaningful concept when encased in a nexus of causes. Yet the counterintuitive flavor of such surmises can be revealed by considering scenarios all too commonplace.

I go to a restaurant and inspect a dessert menu with three options: blueberry, apple and lemon meringue pie. I select apple pie. My choice was obviously caused, although I may be ignorant of its origins. Should I then find myself consuming a slice of apple pie after making my selection, it has to be intellectual perversity to imagine I did not choose the apple pie. Going on, despite this did I choose freely? The Incompatibilist maintains I did not, since my choice was caused (or causally ordained, in another manner of speaking). But what he ignores is that my having a choice in the restaurant is a feature of the restaurant, not of me, Incompatibilism notwithstanding. And paradigmatic examples of having a choice in a wide variety of other contexts may represent the same type of situation encountered in the restaurant example! Accordingly, having a choice in most circumstances denotes an external, not personal reality.

A curious spin-off of the conflict between hard determinism and lack of causation or Indeterminism is the fate of moral responsibility under both. It is held that both it and freedom go out the door if Incompatibilism is true. Ironically, both are often considered to suffer the same fate under Indeterminism. The latter, providing as it does for uncaused, chance or random mental events (assuming that these three terms are roughly interchangeable) hardly guarantees survival of the cherished notions of freedom or moral responsibility. Ironically, this would mean both are nullified in all possible worlds! After all, either Determinism or Indeterminism applies on the level of human decision-making and action, courtesy of Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. Accordingly, what hypothetical state of affairs would permit freedom and responsibility to get their presumably outmoded feet in the door? And how should this eventuality be acknowledged or investigated? It would appear that there is no conceivable place for either of them under either causation or its absence, a peculiar consequence of a formulation widely touted as an empirical thesis!

Even Harris, ostensibly unaware of the ramifications of the Janus-faced preemption, declares that our wills are determined by causation, thereby nullifying responsibility, or else are products of chance, guaranteeing the same conclusion (Harris, 2012, p. 5). What’s compelling about the idea that Determinism impugns free will, when there is no alternative formulation avoiding the same upshot?

Incompatibilists imagine that the case for their doctrine is fortified when one considers the thrust of recent investigations into the vagaries of decision-making revealed in certain laboratory studies. Thus, it is thought that the investigations of Libet (1992, 2003, 2006) have enormous implications for eroding Compatibilist hopes for rescuing free-will from the disappearing act such inquiries appear to suggest.

Briefly, Libet has shown in a series of ingenious experiments that brains register decisions to make movements before (to the tune of about 500 milliseconds) a person is consciously aware of deciding to make them. But such findings may turn out to be studies in irrelevance more than they are threats to Free Will. They systematically confuse a loss of freedom with acts undertaken without awareness. In line with this, my being unable to discern my own underlying decision-making (because it is registered neurophysiologically by what Libet terms readiness potential) in advance of my conscious awareness does not preclude the process in question as being mine. Libet implies that it is necessary to distinguish a conscious decision of mine from an invisible neural event as other than a part of what I do because it is unconscious. Here, it’s as though readiness potential were the handiwork of a homunculus operating as another personality. But my unconscious readiness is still a part of me, even when temporal latencies between it and overt processes or events can be shown to exist.

Needless to say, the implications Libet draws from his findings presuppose a problematic theory of double agency. He might just as well have referred to unconscious physical substrates without latencies from conscious decision-making to arrive at the same conclusion, i.e., How can I have Free Will when I am unaware of the readiness potential driving my conscious decision-making even though both events may be simultaneous? Moreover, we don’t need anything as esoteric as a readiness potential to score similar philosophical points. All we need are acts that are committed without conscious intention, an amazingly large constituency of our actions. Accordingly, while there may be latencies between some of my overt and covert processes, this seems to be wholly beside the point when considering the bearing such a finding has on Incompatibilist doubts about free-will.

To flesh the argument out, Libet’s scenario provides for representations of both readiness potential and conscious decision-making as conceptually distinguishable processes. And it is puzzling why the existence or non-existence of a latency between them should have the enormous implications for free-will Libet ascribes to it. After all, every part of me is still me, even those aspects of me that I am unaware. Dennett (2003) has made a similar observation. Incompatibilists should remain content with causation purely and simply, latencies notwithstanding.

Determinism cuts a curious figure as a doctrine about the world when cast, as it usually is, in universalist metaphysical garb. It’s customarily touted by Compatibilists and Incompatibilists alike as an empirical thesis, although (1) evidence for it is meager, considering all possible events it is supposed to cover, and (2) the case for it is fudged when Quantum Mechanics shows it to be false (although physicists like Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg have felt that QM on the Copenhagen interpretation is itself dubious or incomprehensible).

With respect to (1), just how many events out of the total number of possible ones have actually been demonstrated to have a sufficient causal basis? Is the universe a demonstrably deterministic one, or does this remain merely a fervent hope in the minds of its proponents? If the truth of Determinism is flouted based solely on its insignificant—because comparatively occasional—proof, do Incompatibilists stand rightfully accused of irresponsible generalization?

With respect to (2), the Indeterminism presumably shown to characterize events on the quantum level wends its way into contrarian arguments that are thinly veiled red herrings. That is, some interpretations of QM, grudgingly referenced by both kinds of determinists as a refutation of their overriding theory, are more often than not sidetracked into arguments aimed at showing why Indeterminism on the quantum level has no implication for events on the human cognitive level. The maneuver is a shifty one; if an invisible particle can elude causality, maybe Indeterminists can be more optimistic about a similar reprieve on the macroscopic level despite Incompatibilist reservations about quantum realities bubbling up to that level.

Briefly, physicists, including Einstein, found that while the probability of an atom in a state of higher energy emitting a photon at a given moment could be specified, it was not hypothetically possible to determine the moment of emission, nor its direction. As a result, the doctrine of a strict universal Determinism for many physicists seems to have taken a tumble on the quantum level. Some events were indeed a result of chance should we regard Indeterminism as an ontological, not merely epistemological conundrum (Flanagan, 2012).

One way to avoid endless controversies over Determinism is to regard it less as an empirical thesis about the world and more like a regulatory principle of scientific inquiry. Nagel (1953) for one has defended this tack, arguing that determinism is capable neither of decisive proof nor disproof (p. 199), and that one might regard the doctrine less like a demonstrably infallible one about reality than it is a guiding principle of scientific conduct, on a par with, Seek and ye shall find (and when you don’t find, seek anew) when it comes to causal inquiry.

Going on, in the realm of what we may casually refer to as voluntary action it strikes me as wrongheaded to contrast free decision-making with compulsive, addictive, hypnotically induced, or unconsciously produced patterns. Many philosophers describe such behavioral patterns as diminishing what in their view is the elasticity of human action. Thus, compulsive persons lack the freedom to make quite commonplace choices available to others. Is it high time to correct the record about the alleged restrictions such clinical patterns have on free decision-making. This does not speak to faulty reasoning in the higher reaches of the Determinism/Free Will debate. It only represents choosing unfortunate examples with which to score philosophical points.

Take compulsions. What philosopher has not referred to what is termed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (coded F42 in DSM-V) as seriously limiting the freedom to act. The difficulty here is that compulsions, at whatever range of severity in their clinical presentations, cannot be contrasted with free acts should we construe these maladaptive patterns as being beyond control or "lacking