SOTF Chapter 1: “I Have Become a Question to Myself” Our internal consciousness tells us that we have a power, which the whole outward experience of the human race tells us we never use. John Stuart Mill Conundrums of the Will: “You are the storm” Everybody Believes in Free Will The heading would seem to be a rather bold and reckless statement, since many writers, including great seers and sages, have taken great pains to explain why they don’t believe in free will. Ancient writers, such as Aristotle, seem to be unaware of the will in the modern sense. Martin Luther writes a book whose very title (De Servo Arbitrio or On the Bondage of the Will) would seem to refute this claim. Indeed, Luther writes: Thus the human will is placed between [God and Satan] like a beast of burden. If God rides it, it wills and goes where God wills…If Satan rides it, it wills and goes where Satin wills; nor can it choose to run to either of these two riders or to seek him out, but the riders themselves contend for possession and control of it. ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"NElHyFsC","properties":{"formattedCitation":"{\\rtf Luther and Erasmus, {\\i{}Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation}, 140.}","plainCitation":"Luther and Erasmus, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, 140."},"citationItems":[{"id":920,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/44212/items/TEQ55HQZ"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/44212/items/TEQ55HQZ"],"itemData":{"id":920,"type":"book","title":"Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation","collection-title":"The Library of Christian Classics","publisher":"The Westminster Press","publisher-place":"Philadelphia","edition":"Ichthus","event-place":"Philadelphia","author":[{"family":"Luther","given":"Martin"},{"family":"Erasmus","given":"Desiderius"}],"translator":[{"family":"Rupp","given":"E. Gordon"},{"family":"Watson","given":"Philip"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["1969"]]}},"locator":"140","label":"page"}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} Luther and Erasmus, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, 140. And if one wants a more contemporary account, we can turn to Sam Harris, whose book, Free Will, is written to prove we don’t have it. And the case that Mr. Harris makes is compelling. “Consider” he asks, what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and would need to have complete control over those factors. But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom—for what would be the influence of the influences? More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm. Harris, Free Will, 14. And yet…neither author is willing to completely abandon free will. Luther is merely talking about it in relation to our ultimate destinies, heaven or hell. He will allow that “Man has a free will, but it is to milk cows, to build houses.” This will operates on the intermundane level and nothing more. And we will find that a man’s attitude toward our ultimate ends, or lack thereof, have a profound influence one how he thinks about free will. For his part, Harris will allow that we can indeed have some control over our lives: Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one’s thoughts and feelings can—paradoxically—allow for greater creative control over one’s life. It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biological puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bite of food may be all that your personality requires. Ibid., 47. This would seem to refute Harris’s own thesis, for what would you call “grabbing hold of one of your strings” if not “free will”? For the truth about humans is that regardless of our religious or philosophical predispositions, we find it difficult to believe that there are not things in our life which really are “up to us”; that what happens next really depends on our own decision; that when we come to a fork in the road, we really can choose to go to the right or the left, and that subsequent events will indeed depend on this choice. Nobody Believes in Free Will But at the same time, we also feel that at certain times, we have no control whatsoever. There is not, I believe, any person who has not at one time, having performed a foolish act, asked himself, “why did I do that?” And we can certainly identify times when our “free” will is an illusion, that while we may feel free, it turns out that we are merely re-enacting in our lives the rage of a father, the coldness of a mother. When making a purchase or casting a vote, we may feel we are free when in fact we are acting under the influence of advertising or propaganda; we may feel that we are taking control of our lives when in fact we are merely responding to the social demands of a corrupt and degenerate culture. Further, modern psychology has given us the notion of the “unconscious,” a well-spring of causes for our actions that we cannot reach or understand, save by heroic, expensive, and lengthy means. The knowledge that our actions may trace to overly demanding potty training or an unresolved Oedipal Complex raises the prospect that we are not who we think we are, and raises the uncomfortable suspicion that we will never really know the man we meet in the mirror. There are certainly many valid disputes over the range and meaning of this new science, it has become clear that it cannot easily be refuted. Those who are most adamant about free will tend to be so in the case of others. They are sure that the addict or the criminal could have acted otherwise. But when it comes to their own peccadillos and misdemeanors, they are ready with a rationalization. This is really not so much a triumph of hypocrisy as a failure of empathy; we know well our own constraints, but cannot extend that knowledge to the “other.” We are too near the one and too far from the other. So we are left with a conundrum, simultaneously affirming and denying the freedom of the will. Nor is it particularly helpful to say, “Sometimes it’s one and sometimes the other.” For if we cannot separate them by a rule, we have said nothing useful. If we cannot understand how our acts do or do not reflect freedom or servility, we cannot act to widen the one and reduce the other. And without this knowledge, freedom will be, at best, accidental. And freedom that is thus so occasional will do nothing but diminish until it disappears altogether, and we become mere parodies of what we could be. Without some effort to understand were freedom lies, our wills will be in the power of another. Should We Care? Philosophers and other professional thinkers often dwell on subjects that have little interest for the general public. But on the question of the Will, it is hard to find someone who is not interested, someone who does not have some opinion on this matter, whether implicit or explicit. Why do we care so deeply about this subject? There are two primary reasons: Freedom and responsibility. We are loathe to think that we are only that which most manifestly we are: products of a deterministic universe in which all outcomes are dictated by the immutable laws of physics. No one can reasonably deny this, so the question becomes, “Is that all we are?” Is there anything about us which is capable of transcending the brute facts of our physical nature? Instinctively, we wish to carve out an arena of freedom, one in which all our actions are not dictated in advance; an arena in which we can actually create something new, something never before discovered. And the first thing we wish to create is ourselves, to feel that we have some degree of control over the development of our own lives and personalities. It would seem that the logical place for this control is in the freedom of the will. The second reason has to do with moral responsibility. It is simply not possible to create order, either in the personal or in the political realm, without some standard of moral responsibility. If people are not morally responsible, we believe, then order will have no rational basis. The only thing left will be arbitrary power and violence. Therefore, as Hannah Arendt notes, free will is the postulate of every ethical and legal system. Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, 5. But there is a deeper psychological reason: We want to know who we are, and we cannot know this without knowing our own will and just how free it is or is not. We all find ourselves, sooner or later, in the position of St. Augustine, who in what is arguably the first psychological autobiography, says, “But Thou, O Lord my God, hearken; behold, and see, and have mercy and heal me, Thou, in whose presence I have become a question to myself; and that is my infirmity.” Augustine, Confessions, bk. X, 33, pg. 239. We cannot plumb this question without delving into the will and discovering its freedom, if any. But there is a final and more decisive reason for understanding our wills: creativity and the future. The will is the organ for the future in the same way that the memory is the organ for the past, for it deals not only with things no longer present—except to the mind—but with things never existed at all. Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, 13. Every creative enterprise, every re-ordering of the future, has its origin in the Will. Doubtless, there were many things necessary before Alexander could conquer his empire, but absent his Will, there would be no empire. Many things had to be in place before Beethoven could write a symphony, but absent his Will, there would be no Ode to Joy. This creativity is tied to the very meaning of human personhood. As individual animals, we are mere instances of a species, homo sapiens. Our ‘perfection’ lies in exemplifying the nature of that species. But as persons, we are named and so become, as it were, a species unto ourselves, something unique and unrepeatable, and capable in liberty of transcending the possibilities of a nature, of all nature. Wilhelmsen, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence, 121. But this personality is something that must be achieved in time and through freedom. Thus freedom is the necessary ground for the achievement of personhood. The Will is critical for the development of our humanity in that it is through the Will that we exercise our moral imagination, which is what primarily separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Most of the things we regard as distinctively human, such as language, beliefs, rational choice, decision, purpose, play, etc. exist in animals in some form; All of our “human” capacities exist in a continuum with the animal kingdom. The leader of a troop of baboons or a pride of lions on a hunt makes as many rational choices, tactical judgments and managerial decisions as would a human in the same situation. And some animals, like Dolphins, can be taught language and syntax. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, 27–28. But what we cannot imagine an animal doing is exercising his moral imagination and changing the course of his life. A lion, lunching on a leg of lamb, is not likely do ask, “What has this lamb ever done to me that I should I have stalked, terrorized, and killed it? Is this really a healthy diet for me? Should I stalk granola bars instead?” Questions such as these can only arise in a being whose will can freely command the intelligence to deal with questions of value and imagine a different future. It is not that the lion has no will, but his will is not free to range over such questions, at least as far as we know; it is always bound to goods that are given by the need for survival and guided by instinct. We can note here by way of anticipation that Will is a peculiarly Christian notion, arising only in the Christian era. Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing, 3. There was no faculty of mind corresponding to the notion of “freedom” in the way that Intellect corresponds to truth or Reason to meaning. Ibid., 6. The Ancient Greeks had no notion of Will; rather, they had proairesis, the ability of the intellect to choose between alternatives, or ‘rational choice.’ Proairesis is best explained by the American philosopher, Yogi Berra, who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Rational choice will help you choose the best road, but Will leaves open the possibility of creating a new road. And this was important to the Christians, who viewed life as a pilgrimage that required Will and Freedom, necessities only discovered by St. Paul. Ibid., 18. But Christianity itself runs into a problem, one which it will communicate even to the non-Christian modern world. That is the problem of reconciling Free Will and Omnipotence; the problem was not unknown to the Ancients, but is given greater urgency by the Christian notions of God. The Problem of Omnipotence Laplace’s Demon It is indisputable that we live in a world of matter governed by the Laws of Physics. These laws are deterministic; they always operate such that the same causes produce the same effects and allow no room for freedom. The law of gravity is ruthless and permits of no exceptions. We may have the illusion of defeating it, say with contraptions composed of wing and propeller, but that is just an illusion. Gravity reigns supreme and sublime, and those who violate the Law will find swift punishment. Indeed, in reality it’s not a “Law” at all; it’s just the way things are. Cause and effect always hold. Where then is there a place for freedom? There is, however, one problem with such “scientific” determinism: it cannot account for all that we see. In fact, it cannot account for the fact that we “see” at all, or rather, that we are conscious of what it is that we see and can reach a judgment about it. That is to say, Determinism cannot account for the fact that we are conscious of something called “determinism.” Materialism attempts to account for consciousness either through reductionism or emergence. The first holds that matter is already endowed with something like consciousness, and the second treats consciousness as an emergent property of matter, which, when configured in a certain way, such as in the spinal cortex, allows consciousness to emerge. The first results in a kind of pantheism, or “panpsychism,” which gives the theory a rather metaphysical cast, which in turn defeats the whole idea of a physical science. The second would require distinct biochemical states in the brain be associated with statements like “E=MC2,” or “I love you.” Both Reductionism and Emergence are empirical statements for which there is, at present, no empirical evidence; either belief must be accepted or rejected sola fide. For a further discussion of these issues, see Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. But whether or not one of these peculiar faiths is the True Faith, neither allows any space for freedom. We are left to contend with “Laplace’s demon,” the mythical intelligence which knows, for a given instant, the exact position and momentum of every particle, and hence can compute with absolute certainty both the past and the present, and compute it down to the smallest detail. An attractive proposition, no doubt; the answer to all things, but an answer that leaves no place for freedom. Predestination If the position of the materialist in regard to freedom is precarious, the situation is even worse for the person of faith. For just as the metaphysical claims of religion exceed the claims of materialism, so too do the problems with those claims. For the one thing that religion in general and the Christian religion in particular cannot deny to God is omnipotence, the power to order all things. And since God stands outside the order of time and can grasp the totality of time at a glance, we must grant him foreknowledge. There is simply no way to avoid the conclusion that given an omnipotent and all-knowing God, there is no room for freedom. In the presence of the Divine Will, there is no space for any other will. In a religion that relies on prophecy, in a religion where Mary is fated to be the Mother of Jesus and John to be his prophet, we cannot avoid the conclusion that all things are preordained, our final end is predestined, and that Christianity has not gotten any farther than the pagan idea of Fate. No matter what our struggles, our fates were sealed before the foundation of the world. Free will, insofar as it exists at all, can only be a secondary and never a primary cause of our actions. But this leads to an additional problem, one not faced by materialists: God’s justice. A scheme of rewards and punishments requires that man really is free, and an absolute punishment would seem to require that he is absolutely free. Take away that freedom, and what can remain of God’s justice? Christianity will struggle with this problem, and the answers will lead us down pathways that can be frankly disturbing. Hence the positions of the believer and unbeliever alike result in the same problem in regard to man’s freedom, with the believer having the additional problem of reconciling omnipotence not only to freedom, but to justice. Is there any way out of this dilemma, or must we simply rely on faith? Before answering this, let us look at how philosophers have approached the subject. Freedom and Philosophy A Taxonomy of the Theories Every philosopher has some view of the human person, and hence some view of freedom and will. And among the philosophers there are a hundred variations and a thousand nuances on a few predictable themes. Nevertheless, it is customary to give a rough taxonomy of these competing themes under three headings: Determinism, Libertarianism, and Compatibilism. Determinism we have already met; it is the idea that everything I do, and the next line I write, was forged in the fires of the Big Bang or fixed in the Mind of God before the world began. Fate, as either Physics or as Divine Will, rules everything. Hence, there would seem to be no way to preserve either freedom or free will. And as tragic as that might appear, the logic of either science or faith (take your pick) will permit no other outcome, and intellectual honesty compels us to take this course; both freedom and will must be sacrificed to brute fact and necessity. Libertarianism is the opposite: we are absolutely free in our decisions, or at least we are often so. No matter what we have done, we could always have done otherwise. This solution has the advantage of preserving both freedom and will. Hence, the world really is a moral enterprise and we really can be held responsible for all our actions. However, for material beings in a social setting and operating under a large variety of constraints, an absolute freedom is hard to maintain. It just doesn’t seem to match the lived reality we all experience. It avoids the question of omnipotence by simply denying it. So freedom is maintained at the cost of reality. Compatibilism attempts a third course; it holds that free will is possible even in a world governed by necessity. Some of our actions, at least, are freely willed, even if we are not free to do otherwise than what we do. It might be explained this way. Suppose there is a rock that happens to have consciousness and will. I take that rock up to the top of a tall building and toss it off. On the way down, our compatibilist rock might say, “I freely will to fall; it’s such a nice day for a fall and the bump at the bottom will be so much fun.” Thus our rock freely wills his fall, even though it was not free to do otherwise. Free will is maintained, but at the cost of freedom itself. But does that even make any sense? A “free will” without freedom? And does it even fulfill any of the reasons we had to be interested in free will? For example, if we care about moral order, can such a “free will” be assigned responsibility when it could not have done otherwise? Can our rock be responsible for a fall it could not avoid or change it? Is a mental state enough by itself to assign moral agency? Suppose this rock were to land on somebody’s head and kill them. Would the fact that the rock “freely willed” its fall be sufficient to assign guilt to it? Would not the guilt of blood fall on the one who dropped the rock? On its face, compatibilism would seem to be nothing more than a dodge, a way to have your cake and eat too. On the other hand, if we are to maintain both freedom and necessity, it seems that any answer will be “compatibilist.” But that would seem to be an impossible task, one mired in a contradiction before it starts. Freedom, therefore, presents a problem that would seem to have no solution, and therefore can never be anything but an illusion. Can we, or should we, accept this? Omnipotent Powerlessness We cannot imagine the laws of physics being weakened enough to permit any degree of freedom. Such a world would be nothing but chaos, which would preclude any genuine freedom. If the laws of gravity were weakened even a little bit, we could not even guarantee that the coffee would stay in the cup, rather than drift off into the atmosphere. And since physics has no will, there is simply no way for this weakening to happen, no way for it to raise up a law counter to its own Implacable Law. But it is otherwise when we think on the Divine. Having an Infinite Will of its own, [T]he “Absolute” has a sovereign ability, out of its own freedom, to create and send finite but genuinely free beings … in such a way that, without vitiating the infinite nature of God’s freedom, a genuine opposition of freedoms can come about. Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama Volume II: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, 190. The result is a kind of “omnipotent powerlessness” which is exemplified by Christ on the Cross: a saving power by the complete surrender of power. Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Volume IV: The Action, 325. God’s power is not compromised, but man is allowed a genuine if finite freedom. Man really can, like Job, stand against God and demand answers. But this gift of freedom comes with a heavy burden. We noted the chaos that would result if the laws of physics were weakened enough to permit freedom, but what would we expect to see if God allowed a space for a will capable of being opposed to his own? The laws of physics would still hold, but now there would be an arena of freedom by which man had to guarantee order by his own will. This order is possible to the extent that man sees his freedom as the image and likeness of God’s own Freedom. But insofar as his will is opposed to Infinite Will, we would expect to see a certain amount of disorder in the affairs of men, both in small and petty ways and in great and terrible ways. And that is in fact what we see. The Burden of Freedom It would not be correct to say that in this realm of freedom, God simply abandons man; the Cross is guarantee of that. But like a loving Father, he provides room for his children to make their own mistakes, even as he assures us that in the end, those mistakes, tragic as they are, will not be the last word. Since God no longer directly provides order to man as he does for the rest of nature, it is up to man himself to provide it. God provides food for the birds of the air and raiment for the lilies of the field, but man must from his own wits build systems of production and exchange, family and marriage, law and order, education and training, community and government, and the hundred other things that make individual life and life in community possible, pleasant, and fruitful. God provides no instructions for man as he does instincts for the animals; we must figure these things out for ourselves, both as individuals and as political communities. Of course, these systems must conform themselves to the order of nature and to the natural law. The former would seem to be a matter of experience and natural science. But science, particularly on the modern understanding, can result in a false “omnipotence” over nature, and convert if from a friend to an enemy that must be “conquered” and exploited. The danger of such a “conquest” is that we might actually succeed; in which case, we lose. In any case, it takes time and trial to learn how to live in the natural world. But as difficult as understanding nature is, its problems pale in comparison with those with grasping the natural law. Nature at least is fixed, while the natural law is a moving target. Natural law is simply man’s understanding of the Divine Law, an understanding that develops over time. The Divine Law is not, of course, subject to change, but our grasp of it—that is, “natural law”—does change. Hence, while the natural law is fixed in its first principle (“the good is to be done and evil is to be avoided”), the applications of that principle will vary with culture and circumstance. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, 94, 4 & 5. One obvious example is slavery, which through most of human history was justified as part of the Natural Law, but now is repudiated under that same rubric. God gives us no party or program; we must work it out for ourselves; we must discern his order among the shifting tides of history and the changing face of knowledge. Hence this “working it out” is a question of time and history, which poses a particular problem for our time, our moment in history. The Problems of Modernism The modern world has become synonymous with Liberalism, a doctrine which seeks to “liberate” the individual from all the constraints of received authorities and natural communities. Most of all, it seeks to “liberate” us from the past, and allow each individual, as pure individual, to create his own moral universe de novo. It can do this because it has introduced a dichotomy between the moral and physical (or “scientific”) realms. And it has replaced all of our rich natural ties with thin contractual ties, all of which are voluntary and exist only as long as we want them to. This would seem to present us with the ultimate possibility of the Will: the ability, by our own Will and wits to create our “private” moral universe. What could possibly be more free than that? Has freedom at last found its true home? And yet, there are reasons for doubt. It is simply not possible (even if it were desirable) to “free” man form all social ties and make them purely voluntary. For we are socially dependent creatures, unable to survive on our own. Our survival depends on the work of thousands, and on complex social, economic, and political systems and institutions. Can a “privatized” morality really contain these institutions, or will they end up tyrannizing us and subordinating the multitude of privatized wills to the private wills of those with power over these necessary institutions? Or in other words, will freedom unbounded turn out to be unbounded freedom for the few and total slavery for the many? The modern experiment is 300 years-old, and there are reasons to believe that it is coming to its end, reasons to believe that it cannot in fact provide the order which we must create, or can create that order only with violence and repression. And then we will have to rethink humane order, and will a new one into existence. It would be a mistake, I believe, to merely reject this order out of hand. Few of us are willing to forego antibiotics when we are ill. And it is pleasant to think that I could have dinner tonight in London or in Tokyo if I so wished. But at the same time, we recognize that the unrestricted use of antibiotics, for example as a routine part of the feedstocks of cattle, could render them useless and occasion a new pandemic. And the power to transport us around the globe is connected to the power to destroy the globe. Each advance comes with dangers, and the greater the benefit, the greater the dangers. Without some communal Will, some shared ideal of the common good, we can place no safeguards on these institutions. The institutions that form us are also the institutions that deform us. Hence, the Will takes on a political aspect, since no single will can accomplish this. There seems to be a danger of falling off into license on one side and tyranny on the other. But I think it likely that there are really the same things: license is not liberty, but the prerequisite to tyranny; they are not opposites, but complements. The Sins of the Father Of all the communities that form us (and that we in turn form) none is more basic than the family. It is from this ready-made society that we are called into being by an act of love, that is, by the act of a “we”. From this little society we receive many gifts. Physical gifts, to be sure, such as food and warmth, but also the greater gifts. Aside from the gift of being itself, we receive the gift of language, of community and friendship, our first experience of love, our first knowledge of moral norms, our incorporation into rhythms of work and play. However, not all the gifts we receive are benign; some are surely malignant. The knowledge of good and evil promised to Eve begins in the crib. For we learn evil in the only way possible: not by doing it, but by becoming its innocent victim. He who does evil has no real knowledge of it; only the one who experiences evil as a victim learns what it is. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 64. And this experience begins with childhood, even in the best of families. In some families, violence flows as freely as mother’s milk; in others, there are malignancies more subtle but more damaging. Moreover, what we learn as children tends to propagate itself not only in our own lives, but in the lives of our own children. Cycles of violence can be set up which can continue for generations. Our sins outlive us. This knowledge alone should make us pause, but it does not. This is because our wills are often so encumbered by false beliefs, disordered desires, and social fictions that it can scarcely be called “my” will; we have resigned our freedom to others, and done so while hardly even knowing it. Our task is to separate the good gifts from the bad. We need to cherish even the bad gifts, because they remain gifts and convey a knowledge we could likely obtain in no other way. But it is a knowledge we need to keep to ourselves, and not pass to others, or at least not by replicating the experience in those we meet, and certainly not in our children. Calming the Storm; Answering the Question I have attempted in this a brief outline of the problems associated with the Free Will, a will that must be simultaneously affirmed and denied; a Will that is necessary to the development of the person, but that conflicts with the necessity of the physical world and runs afoul of the Divine Will. It is a freedom that places on us a burden to create order in both the world and our lives, even though we know little of the world and next to nothing of order. A few things, I think, are self-evident. One, man’s freedom cannot be part of his physical nature, since the physical world permits no degrees of freedom. Rather, it can only be part of his super-nature, his connection with the Divine. As such, it cannot simply be given to man, infused in him in the same way an instinct is infused in an animal. Rather, it is a seed that must be developed over time. And two, this development is nothing less than the growth and development of the individual personality. But paradoxically, this individual development is never wholly individual. The will is forged within the family, and requires social institutions to nurture it. We develop our will only in relationships with other persons, with institutions and social formations. These social formations may not have our good in mind; indeed, they may seek to subvert the will to their own malign purposes. The Will must be informed by the intellect and judgment to separate out the good gifts and the bad. We must let go of the bad gifts from the family, not so much by rejecting them as by forgiving them, since only with forgiveness can we really “let go” of something. Even the malign gifts of the family, since they are still gifts and convey real knowledge, must be loved even as they are purged. But the malign efforts of social formations to subvert the will must not only be rejected, they must be eradicated, insofar as that is within our power. Only in this way can we calm the storm of Sam Harris, answer the question of St. Augustine. The calm will be brief, and the answer will be partial, but that is all that is within our power, and that is good enough. The monarch butterfly navigates infallibly to a home it has never seen. One generation of monarchs leaves the home, but another returns; no single butterfly makes the whole journey, but one generation passes the knowledge to the next, how we do not know. But we must build a road to a home we will never see, at least not this side of the Great Divide, and travel by a path we cannot know. In truth, we are building this road so that others may travel it, just as we started out on a road others had pioneered. This is our obligation: to leave our children a better and smoother road than the one we found; to go further than our fathers and to smooth the way for our children. This can only be done by the development of our will in freedom, and by communicating that freedom to the whole of the social order. I would not, as the Romantics, reduce the whole of human personality to the Will. Knowledge and work and judgment are also crucial to our development. But it is the Will that directs knowledge, controls the passions, allows for real creativity and that exercise of the moral imagination which distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. In what follows, I will attempt to examine the implications of Free Will for the individual, for the political order, for economic order, and for psychology; I will try to hint at some way to answer the Liberalism of our age without discarding the benefits, which are indeed a real advance. But the astute reader will note that while I have talked of the Will, I have not defined it. This is deliberate. For the Will, considered as a human concept, develops as all such concepts do in specific environments and moments of time. The best way to understand it is to examine its origins and development. And that will be the task of the next few chapters. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Allen, Texas: Christian Classics, 1911. Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Willing. One-Volume Edition. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978. Augustine, Aurelius. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1961. Harris, Sam. Free Will. New Haven & London: Free Press, 2012. Luther, Martin, and Desiderius Erasmus. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation. Translated by E. Gordon Rupp and Philip Watson. Ichthus. The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1999. Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Kindle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Theo-Drama Volume II: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990. ———. Theo-Drama: Volume IV: The Action. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Dallas: The University of Dallas Press, 1970. SOTF Chapter 1: “I have become a question to myself” Page 10 SOTF Chapter 1: “I have become a question to myself” Page 11