Freedom and Responsibility 4/5

We have now reached the third circle: that of the individual and his intellect when he no longer asks questions about the meaning of his power in an absolute sense, as Raphaël and Aureliano did, but about the nature of his responsibilities in his day-today life. These debates and disputes are long-standing and profoundly universal: all spiritual traditions, schools of philosophy and religions have been confronted with the complex and paradoxical relationship between freedom and determinism. Do we experience an illusion of freedom at the heart of the unavoidable reality of overall determinism? Or is it the opposite of that, and are we basically free, even though we appear to be the prisoners of our destiny? Every consciousness is, at one moment or another, preoccupied with this question. Every consciousness asks questions about the choices it has made, its relationship with its past and present and, of course, about the nature of its responsibilities at the existential and social level. Who decides? Do I choose for myself? Am I really free to decide? Having gone beyond the questions of survival we discussed earlier, the human intellect now has to address questions of a different order, and they are difficult, complex and disturbing. Some learn to live with them by simply concluding that they appear to be free, and therefore feel free, whilst others suffer as they struggle with their doubts, with painful events and with the feeling that they are so trapped and confined as to question the very idea of freedom.

One recalls the young Rimbaud trying to understand the curse that has been laid upon him in A Season in Hell. In his quest for freedom, peace and silence, he goes back to his origins, to his Bad Blood, and concludes: ‘I belong to a race that has been inferior throughout all eternity.’ That is why he rejects the order ‘of jobs’ and of God. He is not responsible for his destiny, and nor, at bottom, did he decide to be a poet: haunted by his past, he is haunted by that other ‘I’ that makes him watch the ‘development of [his] thought’ as a bystander. He has decided nothing: neither the intensity of his curse, nor the essence of his election. He endures, suffers, rebels and finally loses heart. So much so that he wishes to remain silent for ever. ‘I am the one who suffers and who rebelled,’ he writes, as though to signal the meaning of the chains that bind him. More serene and older, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke reveals the same feeling and the same demands to the young poet who wrote to him: writing is not a free act. It must be prompted and driven by a higher necessity that one does not choose. Diderot’s character Jacques the Fatalist reached the same conclusion about the illusion of freedom: ‘Everything is written up there.’ He wanted to be serene, fatalistic and rational: why suffer and cry over what one cannot decide? ‘It is written’, ‘Maktûb’, to use the well-known Arabic expression . . . there is no reason to suffer or to feel pity. All the philosophers of the Enlightenment, from Germany to England and France, tried to solve this existential equation. The German philosopher Leibniz tried to reconcile an overall determinism (as to the principle of causality) with the human ability to act within it. Voltaire caricatured his thought in Candide, but Leibniz was, basically, making an objective statement and raising the central question asked by all spiritualities, philosophies and religions: the determination of things and events is beyond question just as my freedom to act is beyond question. How can we reconcile these objective givens? Where does fate end, and where does my free will begin? What am I responsible for?

There can be no human responsibility without freedom. He who has no choice cannot be judged in any way or sense. That is the question that colonized so many minds in the three monotheistic religions: if God knows everything and His knowledge encompasses the past, the present and the future, then He knows what will come to pass, and knows my choices and my destiny. How can we reconcile that proposition with my freedom and, a fortiori, my moral responsibility towards men and in the face of God’s judgement? The mainstream Jewish tradition distances itself from the concept of original sin, and clearly opts for the principle of free will: man is free and responsible for the choices he makes. Jewish orthodoxy and the more mystical currents agree on one basic idea that echoes the theses of Hinduism and Buddhism. We also find it in the Christian and Muslim traditions. We will come back to this, but for the moment let us recall the sharp debates about the question of grace and free will that run through the whole of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. In the sixteenth century, the Jesuit Luis Molina attempted to reconcile the thesis of predestination, which was defended by Saint Augustine (who had argued against the monk Pelagius and his defence of freedom), and the idea of effective free will, and brought the wrath of the Dominican order down upon himself. He also rejected the theses of Luther and Calvin, who invoked the authority of the same Augustine in order to assert that predestination was the essence of the experience of faith. The Jansenists, who were so central to the Catholic Reform movement, tried to reappropriate Augustine’s heritage and developed a theory of grace that radically contradicted theories of free will: only God’s ‘efficacious grace’ could allow human beings to come to terms with their status and a state that was tainted by original sin. We are a long way from the conclusions of the Council of Trent (1547), the positions adopted by the Jesuits and, as it happens, the theology of Thomas Aquinas, all of whom attempted to reconcile human freedom with the power of God.These theologians postulated that, through his will power and reason, man, unlike animals and objects, had the ability to act freely. According to Aquinas, that was in fact a precondition for religion itself. Were it not, he argued in his Summa Theologica, ‘advice, exhortations, precepts, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain’. We find the same debates, probably influenced by the encounter with Christianity, in the Islamic tradition. Belief in fate (an-qadr) is one of the pillars of faith, but schools of thought differed over the nature and limits of the freedom bestowed upon man. The Ash’arites, who defend the idea of predestination, are contradicted by the rationalist Mu’tazlites, who defend the free-will thesis. Two schools emerged from these debates, al-qadariyya, which defends the latter thesis, and al-jabariyya, which asserts that the very essence of God, who knows and understands everything about men and the future, means that men are completely predestined. Both Sunni and Shiite jurists have attempted to reconcile the two theses. In the fourteenth century, Ibn Taymiyya made a distinction between two realms: God knows all things and everything and established the order and laws of nature, but He granted man the freedom to make moral choices, to act and therefore to influence his destiny. What God knows, man does not know, and he must therefore not seek to go beyond the limits of his knowledge. He must come to terms with that and act as best he can as a being who is free and responsible in the light of God’s prescriptions. As we can see, the theses of Thomas Aquinas and of the Jesuit order are close to that position.

The fourth circle is that of the heart and of the paradoxical union of necessity and freedom. As we have said, man is responsible to God and his own conscience only when his freedom is guaranteed. This means resolving potential contradictions and, above all, resisting the temptation to succumb to certain illusions. Every human being knows that he or she has the rational ability to act freely, but it is difficult to deny the constraints of the body and, for believers, the logical implications of the presence and will of God. The paradox is profound. From that point of view, it has to be noted that the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, certain religious schools and some mystical and philosophical currents are in agreement here, and assert that true freedom does not correspond to such a superficial intellectual impression, and that it is a spiritual freedom that is to be found in the depths of being. We therefore have to undergo an inner conversion, enter into ourselves and free ourselves from the illusion that we are free even though we are imprisoned by causalities, the ego and our desires and drives. Just as social and collective laws refer us back to the substance of individual freedom, here it is immersion in being – in the self – that, over and beyond general determinism and the contingencies of its manifestations, allow us to penetrate the essence of the law that governs all things, of the Logos and/or that which animates it (in the sense of giving it a soul). This initiation into the fullness of being by transcending of the self, the ego and the prison of desires is a liberation and gives us a subjective access to the freedom that exists at the heart of the Whole or in the proximity of God. It is a demanding freedom, from self to self, beyond oneself: an extinction of the ego to experience unfettered plenitude. Trapped by the intellect and by words, Hamlet concluded that death was the only escape, the only true extinction of the self and suffering; the above-mentioned traditions say the opposite by calling upon us to accede to the true Life that lies beyond the paradox of the disappearance of the ego. We have to enter into ourselves so profoundly that, as the Jewish tradition has it, the will of God (or of the cosmic order) becomes our own will, and that the two merge, fuse and become one. Christianity speaks of the same fusion through the love of God, and Islamic traditions evoke this proximity in love that reaches its paroxysm when the ear, the eye, the hand and the foot hear, see, hold and walk in and by the light of His presence. The French philosopher Bergson outlined an intellectual mysticism that bore similarities to this experience: in his view, intuition allows us access to the essence of time, to a time that is neither intellectualized nor spatialized, and to the movement that is the essence of beings and of life. This is the tabernacle of freedom. Like the artist, the philosopher knows, feels and penetrates, and can therefore go beyond his individuation and partake in the soul of the Whole. Although they follow different paths and hope for different ends, spiritualities, religions and mysticisms reveal here the meaning of the same experience: we gain access to inner freedom, to the freedom of being not by letting ourselves go (or doing what we apparently want to do), but after a demanding work of introspection and self-mastery. And in our introspection we go on asking questions about the source of our wanting, the finalities of power and the essence of freedom.