Reason, Faith, and the Authentic Self

In a society dependent on technoscientific progress, the conflict between faith and reason is liable to be underestimated, due to a rationalist bias. Faith or intuition will be interpreted as an inferior form of cognition, the assumption being that knowledge is the ultimate goal of both science and religion or art. But this rationalist interpretation understates the magnitude of the conflict.

Reason versus Faith

Reason has mostly been a weapon we’ve deployed against obstacles in the social and natural environments: we devise hypothetical models and test them to discover regularities we can exploit. The problem is that the regularities we find in most of the world are perfectly inhuman. The more we exercised reason to know what nature is and how it works, the more we had to doubt our intuitions and our comforting self-image. To take the most glaring example, the natural world we observed, measured and modeled got larger and older, the more objectively we examined it. We once thought we were at the center of a universe that consisted only of our solar system, and that the universe began only “days” before our arrival in the animal kingdom, just several thousand years ago, as the biblical Creation myth speculates. Now we know the universe is unimaginably larger and older than that, consisting of trillions of galaxies and having begun billions of years ago. And that’s just the observable universe. Natural reality includes dark energy and matter, which dwarf the universe as we experience it. Plus, there may be a multiverse which dwarfs even that vaster universe.  

In fact, the smart money is on meta-cynicism. Anthropocentrism has been proven wrong at every turn, and so we can induce that the end of human knowledge will be some supremely negative form of self-effacing anti-humanism. If you want to picture the most rational worldview, you should begin by imagining a monstrous form of objectivity, such as the kind we attribute to the baddies in science fiction, to the indifferent aliens or to the cold and calculating robots. This objectivity devours every precious illusion, including all the life-preserving myths and fairytales that nurture our pride in the human enterprise. But objectivity doesn’t stop there, as indicated by its postmodern, deconstructive phase. Reason embarrasses the life-affirming emotions and intuitions, but it eventually turns on itself so that science and knowledge in general become de-sentimentalized. Knowledge turns out not to be a tool or a weapon, after all, but something like a black hole that negates everything in its path, finally devouring itself. Reason is for understanding the world, but in standing under or apart from phenomena, as we learn to detach from them to see them as they really are, we learn to do the same for ourselves. As a result, the Cartesian divide is undone and the posthuman vision is of a natural universe of amoral, inhuman processes that can’t exactly be affirmed as such, since reason ultimately reveals the world to be indifferent to meaning, truth, value, and other such anthropocentric illusions. The universe as we objectively present it to ourselves is utterly inhospitable, a source of horror or anxiety for enlightened creatures. 

The honourary saint of Reason is thus the devil, beginning with Prometheus or the serpent of Eden whom the Gnostics revered as the first skeptic and truth-teller, because he subverted the shaky divine order as it was naively intuited by the animal slaves that adhered to Yahweh’s commandments. The serpent warned Adam and Eve that their creator was tricking them and holding them back, whereas they had the power to investigate and to exploit natural processes to their advantage. But Reason as symbolized by the nay-saying serpent turned out to be cursed, since the cost of knowledge is death, the banishment from the paradise that the world seemed to be when we encountered it in our innocence as a young species. (We still perceive the world to be a magical paradise when we’re children and don’t know better.) The mythical character Satan became the cynic who challenged Yahweh with doubts as to whether Creation was as magnificent as it seemed, as in the Book of Job. In the New Testament, the devil is demonized, because Christianity began as a barbaric, anti-intellectual form of Judaism that obliged everyone not only to moderate our behaviour but to think as children and to banish ungodly thoughts, to avoid everlasting punishment. Failing those superhuman feats, believers merely had to worship Jesus in a cult of personality to be saved from original sin and from the other flaws of Creation, in a new world to come at the cataclysmic end of time.

Early, radical Christianity thus stood for faith against reason, for delusional happiness that’s opposed to the civilized project of our becoming godlike masters of nature, thanks largely to our rational powers of inquiry. But Christianity was coopted by the Roman Empire and thus came to serve the secular interests that terminate in barely-conceivable, posthuman nihilism. Thus, Christian theologians developed systematic arguments for theism and for the Church’s compromised social policies. Christians thought they could prove their doctrines by citing this or that biblical passage, taken out of historical context in the familiar, pseudoscientific (literalistic) manner. With its dubious claim to offer an all-embracing system for submitting to God, Islam compounds this twisted rationalism so that the self-annihilation practiced by Islamist terrorists is indeed a fitting symbol of the nihilism inherent in any attempt to rationally justify a worldview. Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism likewise make their peace with reason, offering arguments, explanations, and systematic analyses in their theologies, although Hinduism and Buddhism are more up-front about the nihilistic consequences of enlightenment. Nirvana, for example, is a state of mental nothingness that happens after the self is extinguished, that is, after the thought routines are allowed to come and go un-anchored to any mythical underlying ego.

The Zen Buddhist explicitly criticizes reason’s role in our suffering, since reason is supposed to serve the illusion of a self that stands apart from the world in an objective mindframe. Instead, says this Buddhist, we’re all already enlightened and have only to be shocked into recognizing the mystical truth that hides in plain sight. But this criticism of reason is misplaced. The illusions of ego are sustained by faith, emotion, and myths, not by objectivity. As I said, reason eventually devours itself and bridges the Cartesian divide, leaving us with the horrific monism that drives so-called enlightened mystics from all the world’s religions to madness and to act out as sociopathic narcissists who tyrannize their flocks. There’s also the experience of metaphysical oneness, achieved through meditation and a conditioning of self-consciousness, but this form of enlightenment should be impossible without the preparatory work of instrumental rationality, which guides the practitioner to seek to dispense with delusions and to meditate as a means of achieving the goal of awakening to reality.    

But to return to the main theme, if rational inquiry ends in posthuman (anti-humanistic) nihilism, religious faith and the artist’s trust in her muse are conservative preferences for a happy way of life that’s undignified and insufferable from the enlightened viewpoint. This is the post-Nietzschean scope of the clash between reason and faith. Through technoscience, reason brings death to all living things, as the haphazard evolution of organisms gives way to the intelligent design of machines. But reason also brings the death of the humanist’s self-image, since the enlightened soul learns to view herself as the rest of nature “views” her, as a pointless triviality. By contrast, faith, that is, the set of intuitions and sentiments that drive most religions and artistic expressions is a precondition for a way of life that seems worthwhile to the one living it. To live “well,” without stultifying self-consciousness as informed by inhuman objectivity, you need to believe in yourself, your nation, and your species. You need to trust the mega-fictions (noble lies) that bind us together in our overpopulated oases from the undead wilderness.

When God “died,” after the old myths lost their power to enchant, thanks to the Scientific Revolution’s shake-up of the Western power hierarchies, the demonization of reason likewise lost its force. But reason is essentially demonic and the enlightened few are well-conceived of as alien interlopers, although the popular astrotheological conspiracy theories aren't rationally compelling. What’s paramount is the foreshadowing symbol of power elites as cold-blooded lizard demons. Those most affected by inhuman reason are merely clever primates, biologically speaking, but psychologically and ethically these rationalists are on their way to a posthuman outlook, in which case they might as well be the Illuminati aliens or David Icke’s reptilian demons. No one’s proved that the privileged few who capitalize on technoscience are extraterrestrial monsters, but we do seem to intuit that our destiny is to become such pitiful creatures. We feel we’re heading towards a certain future and we project our fear in the form of a sci-fi myth.

Personal Authenticity: the Meeting of Reason and Faith

What, then, is at the root of this clash between reason and faith? What are the processes that pull us in such opposite directions? Reason likely evolved for limited purposes, but once unleashed by self-consciousness, as in ancient Greece, the Buddhist reformation of Hinduism, or the Scientific Revolution, reason in the sense of unflinching objectivity seems to be a self-destructive, countervailing force, empowering our clever species to annihilate all life. When we objectify, when we demystify the world and see past our prejudices and projections, we become as monstrous as the godless universe we behold. Reason unites us with reality, not in some blissful transcendence or lame relation of semantic agreement, but by laying waste to the fictions that separate us from the world of lifeless facts, by skewering our naïve self-image and automating our behaviour as we lose confidence in our unconscious, gut reactions or irrational sources of inspiration. We who live under Reason’s shadow seek proof and quantified evidence to force the conclusion, and we will ourselves to perform our duty; we thus turn from subjects into objects, mirroring the lifeless phenomena that flow according to natural “law” which is no law at all, the anthropocentric metaphor notwithstanding. Natural events are forced, just as rational inferences are necessitated by the “laws” of reason which reduce to the pragmatic interest in discovering reliable instruments to increase our power. As texts on critical thinking attest, the ultimate value of logic is its reliability in helping us succeed in instrumentally rational (pragmatic) terms; that is, logic is more likely to get us what we want than, say, mentally disordered, delusional thinking.

Faith, intuition, emotion, and unconscious inspiration also evolved to fulfill limited evolutionary functions. But again, in their advanced forms, these are brakes on our rational union with the nothingness inherent in nature. A familiar example is religious fundamentalism. The fundamentalist is caught up in a cultural backlash, in a degrading tribalism that’s wholly explainable in ethological terms, in which case the fundamentalist has reverted to a subhuman way of life. Religious faith dictates all manner of outrageous lifestyles to prove tribal loyalty, typically rationalizing patriarchal or otherwise tyrannical systems in a sordid con that exploits our existential fears. While pretending to celebrate our alleged transcendent spirits, the fundamentalist’s cult solidifies an earthly power structure that operates according to natural rather than supernatural principles. But more tellingly, fundamentalism, or literalistic religious belief, is condemned for its stubborn irrationality, its blinkered opposition to technoscientific progress, and its physical destruction of modern civilization in the case of religious terrorism. The fundamentalist is supposed to fail to appreciate Reason’s myriad improvements to human life, such as the medical technologies that increase our lifespan or the countless engineered products that elevate our living standard, such as the automobile and the internet.

This latter point about regression, though, is analytically short-sighted. Notice how livestock are cared for in the interim before they’re slaughtered. We’re happy in our artificial retreat from the animal’s struggle in the wilderness, in that we’re self-empowered and don’t have to fear an early and violent death around every corner. But that narrow happiness blinds us to the greater event unfolding—which is the annihilation of life in general on behalf of machines whose objectivity more nearly matches the undeadness of physical reality. The consumer’s bliss is a distraction, like the addict’s fleeting pleasure which allows the underlying disorder or vice to destroy her. In secular liberal society, we’re all more or less feminized and infantilized, and we rationalize the degradations that accompany our techno empowerment, because we reason that we’d much prefer modern civilization, with all its costs, to the so-called state of nature. If, however, we lose our inner selves in our struggle for status and civilized pleasure; if our urge to seem normal rather than deviant in our competitive dominance hierarchies turns us into mediocrities, while the sophisticated power elites lose their humanity in turn, due to corruption and thus an onset of sociopathy; if happiness is construed as requiring extroversion and materialism, which destroy the inner life and surrender the individual’s power to large corporations which exploit technoscience to enslave the mass of consumers with pharmaceuticals, fast food, and other addictions, then that conservative defense of so-called advanced or developed society rests on an illusion. Instead of distinguishing ourselves from nature, we rational, modern consumers are caught in the grip of a natural retrenchment that uses animal pleasures to mollify us so that the unholy work might proceed.

In either case, then, pure reason or pure faith leads to disaster. Objectivity poises us to snuff out the anomalies of life and self-awareness, while faith enthralls us to delusions, preparing us to be manipulated in a religious fraud or tainting our happiness with dishonour. This latter point, though, opens up the possibility of a paradoxical intermingling of reason and faith which we should call existential authenticity. The enduring problem with irrationality isn’t that it stands in the way of rational progress, since as I’ve said and as has been recognized since the Romantics and the Frankfurt School, that progress is an illusion. Instead, the problem is aesthetic and ethical: irrationality in a species with a gift for discovering the truth is a disgusting waste and a mark of shameful cowardice since the philosophical and scientific truth happens to be unpleasant.

Take, for example, the infamous geneticist, Francis Collins, who excels as a scientist even while he fervently espouses evangelical Christianity. Collins’ explanations of the compatibility of his commitment to scientific methods of inquiry and his subservience to anachronistic dogma and faith-based revelation are notable only for their lameness. Collins writes, “But reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page. Ultimately, a leap of faith is required.” The notion of a “leap of faith” is an allusion to Kierkegaard, but no Christian has read Kierkegaard deeply, who goes on to write such boilerplate as this:

For me, that leap came in my 27th year, after a search to learn more about God's character led me to the person of Jesus Christ. Here was a person with remarkably strong historical evidence of his life, who made astounding statements about loving your neighbor, and whose claims about being God's son seemed to demand a decision about whether he was deluded or the real thing. After resisting for nearly two years, I found it impossible to go on living in such a state of uncertainty, and I became a follower of Jesus.

That passage is just evangelical propaganda which follows a template as opposed to being evidence that Collins has wrestled, in “fear and trembling,” with the intolerable absurdity of religious faith, with the facts that the leap subverts the comforts of Christendom and that Christ-like individuals must be outcasts who are paralyzed, like Jesus on the cross, by the knowledge that the paradoxical meeting of God and mortal creatures would have to be appalling.

According to the Christian myth, wayward humans executed God, but God used their sin as the mechanism for our redemption, since God’s death became a sacrifice to save us from spiritual death. But that tidy bit of systematic theology, which Kierkegaard would have called Hegelianism, misses the point that religion isn’t supposed to be rational, that the spiritual life can’t be reconciled with secular concerns. On an existential reading, which assumes that reason and faith are at odds and that that conflict produces in anyone with intellectual integrity the pains of angst, horror, or awe, the essence of Christianity isn’t that God literally became a human male at a particular moment in history. Instead, it’s that God’s stay on earth would be untenable, which is why the character Jesus didn’t fit into Jewish or Roman society, why he was ironically executed in horrific fashion, and why his followers soon betrayed his absolutist principles and settled for the compromises of institutional Christianity which rationalize the anti-spiritual exigencies of worldly empires. The long history of the Church’s abuse of power is itself striking proof that faith and reason are at odds, since the Church lost its faith when, thanks to the delayed end of time, the Jesus cult had to live with and thus to excuse the merely rational (and thus typically amoral) affairs of politics and business.

By contrast, personal authenticity would involve an agonizing blend of reason and faith.We would have to understand the unsettling truth that religions are all wrong when taken literally, and that nature isn’t how we would prefer it to be, which is why the ancient animists pretended nature is full of life and why we likewise can’t abide the wilderness, given its manifest indifference to life, but replace it with cities and cultures. Yet we’d also have to resort to faith or to some form of irrationality, to avoid suicide or debilitating anxiety or depression. Contrary to Jung, the psychological ideal isn’t personal wholeness or the unification of all elements of the personality, but the honourable struggle to improvise some beautiful tragedy in the wake of nature’s attempt to undo the anomalies of life and consciousness. 

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Freud and Nietzsche: Psychiatry between Existentialism and Scientism

Art by Andrew Baines

In The Denial of Death, the anthropologist Ernest Becker defends and broadens Otto Rank’s view of psychotherapy. Rank was one of Freud’s colleagues who broke with Freud, like Jung. Jung and Rank both interpreted psychological problems in spiritual and philosophical terms, whereas Freud clung to a narrower, sexual theory of mental dynamics. For Rank, the human mind is torn between opposite tendencies, towards separation and greater individuation, on the one hand, and towards union with a collectivity, on the other. This is an absurd, dangerous foundation for personal growth, because it threatens the person with the fate of being forever internally conflicted and with the anxiety of oscillating blindly back and forth between the poles. For example, a person might demonstrate her ego’s distinctiveness with displays of conspicuous consumption, while pretending to worship a deity that demands humility and submission to its greater power. The opportunity for what Becker called “heroism” is found in creative solutions to this existential predicament of having an unstable mental structure, stemming from the trauma of separation at birth, and of being propelled by the fear of the final separation at death. Art, love, and a mystical hope for cosmic reunion with a divine being that somehow encompasses all natural things are Rank’s recommendations for avoiding the stalemate of neurosis, of failing to learn how to unlearn past experience or to find a balance between the desire to stand out and to fit into a greater whole.

Freud from Nietzsche

Becker’s presentation of this theory emphasizes its existential aspect, and indeed Rank’s ideas are much more plausibly universal than Freud’s positing of infantile sexuality. But Becker’s criticism of Freud neglects Freud’s direct connection with existentialism. Freud, after all, was aware of Nietzsche’s writings, although he professed to having avoided reading them in depth, even while Freud’s work betrays his familiarity with several Nietzschean themes (as well as with Darwinism). As a relevant Wikipedia article says, “in the 1890s, Freud, whose education at the University of Vienna in the 1870s had included a strong relationship with Franz Brentano, his teacher in philosophy, from whom he had acquired an enthusiasm for Aristotle and Ludwig Feuerbach, was acutely aware of the possibility of convergence of his own ideas with those of Nietzsche and doggedly refused to read the philosopher as a result.” However this may be, Nietzsche must have rubbed off on Freud. This study, for example, summarizes what the two approaches share:

(a) the concept of the unconscious mind; (b) the idea that repression pushes unacceptable feelings and thoughts into the unconscious and thus makes the individual emotionally more comfortable and effective; (c) the conception that repressed emotions and instinctual drives later are expressed in disguised ways (for example, hostile feelings and ideas may be expressed as altruistic sentiments and acts); (d) the concept of dreams as complex, symbolic "illusions of illusions" and dreaming itself as a cathartic process which has healthy properties; and (e) the suggestion that the projection of hostile, unconscious feelings onto others, who are then perceived as persecutors of the individual, is the basis of paranoid thinking. Some of Freud's basic terms are identical to those used by Nietzsche.

The Christian psyche famously provided Nietzsche with his case study in repression and paranoia, just as Nietzsche demonstrated his “genealogical” form of explanation in his account of master-slave morality. Instead of dictating principles or arguing systematically, Nietzsche sought to undermine various philosophies and perspectives by purporting to trace their psychological causes back to either “noble” virtues or to unheroic, “weak” acts of self-deception. For example, instead of celebrating the will to power, a Christian might passive-aggressively cloak her predatory instincts with a show of false humility. Logicians typically regard Nietzsche’s whole approach as resting on the genetic fallacy. Moreover, his philosophy seems self-contradictory, since he presupposes the universal truth of his metaphysics of power, even while he maintains that knowledge depends on perspective and that all truth-claims are surreptitious attempts to overpower others. All living things are beasts, for Nietzsche, and beasts have no sound basis for believing they’re in touch with objective, nonpragmatically-construed reality. Reasoning is a sham, and displays of power are the only demonstrations that matter in that they testify to the greatness of heroic individuals who distinguish themselves from the prosaicness of the herd mentality.

In any case, Freud does add much to the structure of Nietzschean thought: whereas Nietzsche’s arch concept is power, Freud’s is sex. But while Nietzsche’s corresponding image of people as animals led him to write only aphoristic or literary appraisals, Freud’s single-minded interpretations were in the service of his drive to pioneer a science of the mind. Freud reduced every desire or impulse, every conscious or unconscious image, every mental or social event to a sexual cause originating in the Oedipal or castration complex. Whereas power is vague and can take myriad forms, sex is concrete and objective. The Id or unconscious may be irrational, but if it desires sex with the mother, expressions of that desire can theoretically be confirmed, because the sex act provides a benchmark for comparisons. Thus, in a dream a cigar might unconsciously symbolize a penis. Likewise, had Nietzsche identified a particular powerful act as all-important in human relations, as Freud had done in Chapter Four of Totem and Taboo(a prehistoric killing of a father figure, or alpha male), Nietzsche’s thought might have taken on the power of a science. However, like the phony spirituality of Christian religion, psychoanalysis is only pseudoscientific in the Popperian sense of being unfalsifiable. You can posit an infantile, unconscious sexual urge to explain any action, but the merit of that explanation isn’t tested in practice. Indeed, in so far as the applications of psychoanalysis testify to its power, the theory fails the test of being technoscientific, because the analyst-analysand relationship is typically endless. The talking never ends, because the imagination can always conjure new sexual fantasies and interpretations of events in the person’s formative years. Moreover, the theory is awkwardly implausible: sexual impulses are hormonal and the relevant hormones are released in puberty; thus, children have no sexual desires. 

Becker’s existential psychology would likewise be unfalsifiable, since you could just as easily trace any decision or action to a response to some universal fear, such as the fear of death or of standing out as an independent individual. However, existential psychology has the merit of being more plausible than psychoanalysis. Children do learn about death at an early age and they certainly are frustrated by obstacles to their attempts to further their bloated self-interest. The existential condition of being condemned to realize that we’re mortal and fragile creatures with the potential for creative transcendence does plausibly distinguish human mentality from most other animal forms.

Nietzsche against Freud

Ernest Becker

Meanwhile, psychoanalysis can be criticized on Nietzschean grounds. Psychoanalysts may pretend to be interested only in instrumental, value-neutral evaluations of their success or failure in technoscientific, medical terms. Their ostensible goal is to allow the patient to vent unconscious longings, while preserving enough of the ego’s illusions to help sustain a profoundly dishonest society that reflects the absurdity of our mental foundations in our infantile urges. But psychoanalysis is little better than a cult of personality, like the cult that pervades North Korea. Although psychoanalysts don’t necessarily worship Freud, their theory of the mind is just the handiwork of that amoral genius who strove first of all not for truth but for power, going as far as to steal some of Nietzsche’s methods while ignoring the existential insights that would undermine psychoanalysis if they were more widely known. Becker likewise shows that Freud was ruthless in serving his “personal immortality project,” as Freud attempted to outlive his biological death by creating an institution that would survive him while bearing the marks of his preoccupations. More importantly, the pretense that psychoanalysis is scientific is itself an exercise in self-deception and thus fails the existentialist’s test of demonstrating the primary virtue of personal integrity. For Freud, the mind is always at odds with itself, because the social forces informing the Superego are bound to clash with the infantile urges of the unconscious Id. Thus, there will always be work for the psychoanalyst and Freud’s immortality is secure. Freud’s pessimism is thus a subterfuge, covering for his animal urge to overpower others by imposing his peculiar reconciliation with the prevailing Victorian mores onto patient and therapist alike, not to mention on wider Western culture which has absorbed Freud’s scientistic version of Nietzsche’s thought.

While existentialists, too, are often pessimistic, they hold out simple honesty and responsibility as practical ideals, and it’s relatively easy to distinguish between those who know and are true to themselves, and those who lie compulsively to others and to themselves. To be sure, psychoanalysis admits of a difference between mental normality and pathology or neurosis. But the absurd foundation of the human psyche, the idea of which psychoanalysis inherits from existential philosophy via Freud’s engagement with Nietzsche’s writings, conflicts with the therapeutic goal of curing the patient. This is evident from Becker’s discussion of the existential undertones of Freudianism, in which the point emerges that there is no firm line between mental health and disorder. So-called mental normality is already the beginning of neurosis. We’re all trapped by the existential paradox in which we try to immortalize ourselves, to preserve our ego by one illusion or another while simultaneously wishing to merge with a greater totality such as a god or a culture. For Becker, neurotics are merely failed artists, lacking the genius to transcend their greater awareness of life’s absurdity, which enhanced understanding prevents them from automating their social interactions. Thus, for example, the neurotic will be incapable of fulfilling his sexual function as a member of our species, but will cling to perversions to lessen the resulting anxiety.

Becker attempts to divide mental health from disorder in a revealing way, saying clumsily at one point, “But somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure, and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism” (240). Thus, he criticizes Rank for being

so intent on accenting the positive, the ideal side of perversion that he almost obscured the overall picture…Routine perversions are protests out of weakness rather than strength; they represent the bankruptcy of talent rather than the quintessence of it…In fact, we might say that the pervert represents a striving for individuality precisely because he does not feel individual at all and has little power to sustain an identity….If, as Rank says, perversions are a striving for freedom, we must add that they usually represent such a striving by those least equipped to be able to stand freedom. They flee the species slavery not out of strength but out of weakness, an inability to support the purely animal side of their nature. (232-3)

This is supposedly because perverts or fetishists were deprived of a certain upbringing which might have established a secure sense of their body, “firm identification with the father, strong ego control”, and “dependable interpersonal skills.”

Art by Albert Carel

Of course, there are differences between normal and abnormal sexual behaviour, although Becker’s analysis here is rendered dubious by his inclusion of homosexuality as a perversion that supposedly has ingenious or somehow inferior “motives” (232); instead, this abnormal sexuality is likely in part genetic. In any case, what Becker doesn’t justify is his value judgment. Even if fetishists were weak in being unable to carry out their species role of sexually reproducing with routine indifference rather than with creative flourishes, why should that weakness necessarily call for a cure? This is like saying that normal people lack the “strength” to murder without being burdened by a conscience. Whether our species ought to continue is an empirical question, not one with a self-evident answer. So the average sexual reproducer’s “strength,” fostered by a certain upbringing shouldn’t necessarily be encouraged. At least, Becker only presupposes that the weakness in question represents a failure. If it turns out that our species eventually destroys the planet’s capacity to sustain life, the “failure” of the perverts who resist normal sexuality would have to be reinterpreted as tragically heroic rather than ignominious since the value assignments would be reversed.

Whatever the merits of Becker’s discussion of this particular point, psychiatry is notorious for being unable to sustain its distinction between mental health and disorder, without resorting to spurious appeals to mass opinion. In fact, there are two sources of this difficulty. One is, as I said, the universality of the existential condition which renders us all clueless puppets in the big picture, an assumption Freud takes over from Nietzsche. The other source is the scientism which Freud adds to Nietzsche. Psychiatrists in general must be instrumentalists rather than righteous in their evaluations if they’re to retain the esteem that’s due to practitioners of a science. Engineers are interested only in doing what works, given some presupposed goal, not in figuring out which goals are right in the first place. Thus, if psychiatrists are medical doctors curing the mind rather than the body, they must likewise presuppose the social functions that enable them to target deviations as requiring their professional attention.

In so far as psychiatry is still informed by Freudianism, the discipline is caught between existentialism and scientism, between recognizing the absurdity of our situation, which calls for an artistic or a religious response, and feeling compelled to fit into a power hierarchy and seeing technoscience as the best instrument to secure the therapist’s elevated status and to establish a certain social order. Nietzsche’s revenge against psychiatry is that he has the resources to heal the doctor, to diagnose the phony neutrality of a pseudoscience as a disguise for a power play, and to recognize the source of the absurdity of that play in the existential condition which calls for decidedly nonscientific solutions.

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The Paradox of Moral Obligations

What is a person, fundamentally speaking? A person is a creative void facilitating a fractal tripling of natural forms in the symbolic and technological realms. The void in each person is functional, not physical: while we aren’t absolutely empty, we’re defined by our fictions, such as by folk conventions about our identity as supposedly unified, immaterial selves or spirits. In evolutionary terms, animal brains became more sophisticated over a long period until the cerebral cortex developed, becoming a brain within a brain that initiates a spiral of abstraction in mental space. The higher, primate brain is biologically discontinuous from the environment, by way of its isolation within the skull, but the cerebral cortex has autonomous and global, holistic access to the rest of the brain, providing the person the power to veto his or her emotional impulses or instinctive reactions, and to imagine strategic models of the environment. These models are pragmatic idealizations and thus, strictly speaking, fictive; in science, they’re called “ceteris paribus,” meaning that their generalizations pertain to the counterfactual scenario in which certain factors falling outside the model’s purview don’t interfere with the modeled regularity. That is, the model is about only a small part of the world that’s isolated by the imagination, even though in reality that modeled part is entangled with the whole of nature. Despite our having a substantive neurological identity, then, we’re effectively hollow as persons in that as we model ourselves as well, we retreat to evermore rarified reifications, including daydreams and theological speculations. While we seem to ourselves to be the universe’s starring attractions, we’re vacuous in our and existential homelessness and chameleonic flexibility We can survive virtually anywhere because we’re so lacking in a fixed identity and are so detached from nature that we’ve devised an objective stance towards the outer world, which has empowered us with technological applications of our models that have reshaped the environment to our benefit.

Whereas an animal is like a robot in lacking much hidden, mental depth, a person’s mind is master of the symbolic niche. That mind and niche are physically nowhere, as such, and so we’re the proverbial ghosts in the machine. We’re cognitively detached from stimuli and from our animal side, and so we’re liable to feel alienated and forlorn, oppressed by our understanding that the world that’s given rise to such freaks as us must be godless and out-of-whack. We boast of our spiritual depths, making esoteric religious pronouncements such as that the ultimate material (Brahman) and Self (Atman) are one, that matter and mind are aspects of the same thing, that our personal identities are masks worn by ultimate reality and that each of us, therefore, is fully God. And we war over the contradictions between our religious fictions, not willing to face the truth that was put best and most recently by the so-called existential philosophers and psychologists. At most, matter and mind are one in that what we usually think of as mind is entirely imaginary, and so the former cancels out the latter; the fictitious mind isn’t nothing at all, mind you, but it’s an embarrassing lie, an instrument used by greater forces to marshal our skills for the next round of mass extinctions and evolutionary transcendence. And at best we’re divine in that we’re godlike tools for transducing natural stimuli into symbolic representations and for imposing the products of those idealizations onto nature in the forms of our artifacts. Far from making us worthy of being revered, our divinity is likewise an indignity: our omniscience and omnipotence depend on our ability to form Voltron-like megamachines, that is, social collectives or mass minds which are inevitably oppressive in their hierarchical composition. Thus, our personal capacity for enlightenment is typically shortchanged, as a minority takes command and sets about oppressing and infantilizing the masses; the rulers become especially godlike, corrupting themselves in the process, while the bovine herd idles, numbing itself with bestial diversions.

The Moral Conundrum for the Enlightened Few

If this is our existential reality or if some such account is, at least, the most compelling philosophical story about the meaning of our species, we face an ethical conundrum. The enlightened person must be poised between feeling compassion and disgust for us all. On the one hand, we have every reason to pity ourselves and others, since we’re all trapped as playthings of monstrous (unguided but creative) natural forces and elements, and our vaunted spirituality is ironically a form of profound emptiness (fictitiousness). There is no substantial unifying self, but only a mammalian brain that dreams it’s a god, which fiction ironically brings divinity into functional being, as evidenced by the results of our artistic imagination, scientific objectification, and technological industry. So we’re each more or less deluded and lost. Shouldn’t we therefore help each other find ourselves? Wouldn’t nobility consist in the humility needed to recognize that since we’re all victims of the same existential grievances, we all need help, and vanity must be due just to a crass sort of narrow-mindedness? The ethical task would seem obvious: to elevate each other however we can, not putting ourselves before others, but recognizing the universality of our struggles. 

And yet precisely because of the absurdity of our hollowness and of the entire sham of human history in which shameful delusions and neuroses have been so decisive, an enlightened person should lack the motivation to aid anyone, including herself. On the contrary, her empathy should be impeded by her disgust with the horrific implications of our existential condition. She may pity the fellow traveller who needs help, but she could just as easily take pleasure in watching that person suffer as she muses that the other is being inadvertently punished for that person’s inevitable faults. We deserve help not because we’re finite and fallible, but because we’re perverse; we abuse ourselves and flee from fulfilling our potential, and that willfulness makes us worthy of moral support. By contrast, animals may on occasion be pitifully weak or wrongheaded, but because they’re incapable of evil, helping an animal can be an act of charity but not a moral intervention. The ethical imperative begins with the sense that we should cheer for the underdog and should feel revolted when the weaker individual is bullied, as well as exalted when the weaker one triumphs against all odds. But a fully moral act also converts evil into some good. The underdog mustn’t be just physically inferior; instead, that weakness should be the source of the underdog’s squalor, and the weaker one’s degradations must stand out as signs of the grotesque impersonality at the root of all things. Otherwise, the underdog could merely use assistance (like any animal), but there would be no moral demand to offer any, because there would be no cosmic crime to be avenged, no grand absurdity to whitewash with an ultimately futile exercise of virtue. The spilt blood that cries out for vengeance must appall as a sign that the universe is a headless behemoth; otherwise, the sight of that blood would compel us merely to clean it up on instrumental grounds. But just because indignities are so appalling when understood by an enlightened person in their existential context, they provoke horror and disgust as easily as they do empathy and compassion.

Is it true, though, that compassion has moral status only when shown towards a faulty individual who’s in need of assistance? Suppose you encounter a wholly innocent person who’s made wrongly to suffer. Notice that this isn’t as easy to imagine as you might think. Take the biblical character of Job, for example. Job is supposed to be a righteous man who’s done nothing to earn the pains that God inflicts on him due to his wager with the angel Satan. But if Job’s righteousness depends on his faith in God, Job loses his status as a guilt-free individual since Job would thereby have to be gullible, ignorant, and likely tribal in his thinking. If Job loves his particular god, he would likely condemn outsiders and even kill them should they desecrate the holy sites of Job’s religion. The fact is that it’s not easy to imagine a perfectly innocent mortal. Even an infant or a child is nauseatingly self-obsessed. Still, a child is comparatively innocent, so suppose you encounter a child in peril and empathy compels you to save the child. What would make this action morally admirable? I contend that the moral status is due to the act’s heroism: saving the child undoes an outrage, but this outrage consists in the world’s exploitation of the child’s weakness. Innocence, in this case, is itself a kind of fault or deficit: the child can’t fend for itself, is easily overpowered, and is thus liable to suffer unless the child is protected by an adult.

So once again, empathy for a child’s plight counts as morally praiseworthy because the heroic act is in response to an offense against our sense of dignity. First there’s nature’s mindlessness which wreaks all manner of absurd havoc, but there’s also our helplessness—in the case of relatively innocent individuals such as children—or our set of vices which keeps us from fulfilling our potential, including Job’s vice of likely being too religious. The point is it’s not the unfairnessof some suffering that makes its elimination a moral obligation. The unfairness is never absolute, because none of us is perfectly innocent; we’re tarnished just by being natural animals. Perfect innocence, that is, an admirable rather than a disappointing or revolting character entails not just a record of selflessness, but omnipotence so that nature at large could never get the better of such an individual. The purely innocent person, then, would be a god, which is another way of saying that mortality is indeed a sort of original sin. We feel obligated to aid those who don’t deserve the suffering they receive, because the whole sordid situation is an affront to good taste; both the more guilty party, namely nature’s monstrousness or the aggressor’s vice, as well as the victim’s helplessness or error in judgment that contributes to the victim’s predicament are despicable and call out to be rectified. Morality is an act of creative destruction: we erase the offense, if only to preserve our sense of dignity and to be able to live with ourselves, and we replace the offense with a less outrageous state of affairs.

Resolving the Paradox

Notice how Pauline Christian morality handles the conflict between the need to be disgusted by the world and the moral calling of compassion to help others. On the one hand, we’re revolting in God’s eyes, because of original sin, which is our “fallenness,” our tendency to be corrupted. On the other, we receive mercy rather than destruction by God’s “grace,” as a gratuitous, undeserving gift of God’s sacrifice. Thus, God’s hatred of sin is appeased by the torture of the messiah, while his pity for us, owing to our deplorable condition, manifests in that same displacement of his wrath. God accepts the penalty for our wickedness, while we receive the blessings; Jesus didn’t deserve that punishment and we don’t deserve salvation from hell, but we all receive those judgments nonetheless, and the absurdity of Jesus’s punishment must be meant to cancel out that of our gift of salvation. The conflict between the interests in justice and in forgiveness—which originates in the fact that morally-charged compassion is shown only to the unworthy, not to the innocent—isn’t resolved in Christianity but is only concealed by a Jesuitical shell game.

Secular, so-called rational morality doesn’t fare better, since reason and objectified facts are blind to all values, including both the moral imperative to strive for a highest good, and the aesthetic sense that our existential condition is appalling. Thus, reason-based morality doesn’t get off the ground and likewise disguises its deficit with scientistic rhetoric that compels consent by reminding us how admirable are the other fruits of reason. Morality is supposed to be just one more technical problem to solve by a feat of social engineering. We want pleasure rather than pain, and so, in theory, perfected know-how can make us happy under all circumstances. This may be true as far as it goes, but it’s not morality. We may actually want pleasure, but that doesn’t mean we ought to have that preference; on the contrary, we may deserve to suffer regardless of our genetically-programmed inclinations. Also, notice that a world in which everyone is physically happy is consistent with that world being dystopian, as in 1984 or Brave New World.

What, then, tips the scales so that either disgust or compassion should win out? Can the conflict be resolved? The real mystery is why pity and empathy should have become central to morality. The psychologically prior reaction is the negative one of being revolted by our torments. Of course, empathy has an evolutionary origin, but its cause in being part of some lasting fitness won’t suffice for any moral worth. Our species is fundamentally appalling, and that sense is reinforced as we learn more about ourselves and our history. The sadist who exploits someone’s weakness isn’t evil, then, in spurning the option to pity that victim instead. Sadism is neither moral nor immoral, but is aesthetically grounded in distaste for cowardice, duplicity, or other such common faults; the sadist punishes others for their imperfections. But the moral impulse somehow transcends this natural urge to loath that which can rightly be loathed. Instead of merely feeling contempt for us all, based on knowledge of our myriad wrongdoings, a certain type of person will suffer from a different reaction; she’ll feel a pang of worry on other people’s behalf, identifying herself with others and choosing to put them before her even to the point of risking her life in coming to their aid.

Empathy is likely premised on a utopian dream that our deplorable condition will be overcome once and for all, that our suffering is fated to end (in the afterlife or at the end of time) or at least that historical progress is possible if we learn to envision our equality in suffering. This hope derives from the Zoroastrian myth that elaborated on the primary fiction of a substantive, unified self. That self is immaterial and thus vacuous, as is the utopian future in which absolute good conquers evil. Again, these fictions take on a life of their own, as it were, becoming socially operative as noble lies that motivate us to act as though the lies were profound revelations. We help others because we believe compassion is for the greater good, and we do improve each other’s lives in the process, but once again progress as an increase in happiness isn’t yet morally relevant. Without suffering, there would be no morality since morality makes sense only on the condition of our wretchedness. The more we support each other and the less we suffer, the less we can speak properly of whether we’ve gotten what we deserve or of whether we ought to continue in that vein. Morality is about the peculiar choice to transcend evil by converting it into good. Once the conversion is complete, there’s no longer any meaning of whether the result ought to be so, since it then simply is or has been made so. That is, there’s no longer any horror to banish. This is why heaven is as terrifying as hell, since eternity in either case is inhuman. What’s human is the creativity that requires time, inner emptiness, and alienation to bring to fruition a project that transcends some commonplace, despicable reality.

When we suffer by identifying with someone else’s misery, we act anti-naturally. Although we could despise that victim for being a plaything of nature, fated to die like anyone else for no satisfying reason, we find we can elevate the circumstances by acting heroically to blot out the absurdity that’s finally responsible. We rescue the victim from some misfortune, because we imagine we all have special worth as autonomous, spiritual beings. Metaphysically, we’re not supernatural, but when based on the enlightened horror caused by knowledge of what we all are, empathy and compassion are nevertheless anomalous. We make ourselves godlike when we oppose chaos and mindlessness, like the biblical god who supposedly hovered over the face of the deep before creating the universe. We’re godlike also when we struggle to bring into being a world that subsists only in our imagination and in the fictions that express our creative vision. Morality is the wonder of a heroic revolt against a repugnant natural order, when the tide of pointless misery is temporarily turned back and we erect lighthouses of virtue with our selfless deeds.

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The Irrelevance of Scientific Determinism

Freewill is a conundrum. We feel free, as though we can control ourselves and decide what to do rather than being forced along a certain path like a leaf blowing in the wind. But we can’t understand how we could be free, because understanding involves positing causes on top of causes and analyzing one thing in terms of something else. A fallen leaf moves along a certain path, because the leaf is blown by the wind. And why does the wind blow? That’s because of differences in atmospheric pressure. But why does wind blow this way rather than that? Well, that’s because the wind encounters objects in its path, including the curled-up shape of the leaf, which create pockets of turbulence and eddies. And why is the fallen leaf curled up so that it spins as it blows? That, in turn is because the leaf is dead, and so water and minerals no longer flow through its veins, preserving its former structure. And so on and so on until the process of understanding one event encompasses the history of life on Earth and the causes of our planet’s formation in the story of the whole universe. The one event of the leaf’s swirling in the breeze pales next to the immensity of what you have to know to understand why that event happened as it did.

Indeed, biologists and neuroscientists already have sufficient knowledge of how the body works, to render nonsensical our feeling that we have freewill. Yuval Harari summarizes some of the relevant findings in Homo Deus. Brain processes, he points out, are either deterministic or random. A neuron will fire either in response to stimuli or spontaneously due to the intrinsic uncertainty of the chemical factors involved such as the timing of the release of neurotransmitters. Virtually never-ending causal chains and randomness don’t leave room for personal autonomy. Moreover, although an action may be uncoerced, we don’t choose our desires. What we want is caused either by our genetic programming, by the formative environment in which we learned how to behave as children, or by the accumulation of our experiences. Desires have unconscious causes, as is shown by the fact that scientists observing brain activity can predict what a subject will do before the subject is consciously aware of her decision.

Also, with respect to what scientists can empirically confirm, there is no such thing as the single, essential self, let alone an immaterial spirit; instead, the brain is divided into regions that have different, sometimes conflicting functions. As Harari puts it, there’s the experiencing self, the part of the brain that processes moment-by-moment stimuli, and then there’s the narrating self, the part that gives meaning to experience by telling us what to think or feel and by ignoring most of the information processed by the experiencing self. We identify with our inner monologue because it adds meaning to our life. “It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas,” writes Harari, “and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death” (299). Finally, says Harari, we cling to the fiction of a soul, of a single self that bears ultimate responsibility for our actions, because we can’t bear the alternative that everything we do is in vain. “Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused” (300).  

Instead of challenging the scientific deconstruction of the self, I want to consider two meta-questions. First, is the notion of a scientific theory of freewill even coherent or is instead personal freedom naturally impossible from a scientific point of view? Second, what would a free creature look like in nature, speaking hypothetically? How would this creature’s internal components have to be arranged to liberate it from the rest of the world so that we could reasonably think of it as being both free and real? 

Why the Concept of Freewill is Unscientific

I’ve already suggested the answer to the first question. Just as a miracle is defined as being beyond our comprehension, whereas science is precisely the most rigorous form of human understanding, and so there can be no miracles as far as science is concerned, absolute freedom in nature is antithetical to the way the world works according to science. Indeed, “complete freedom from nature” seems synonymouswith “miracle.” If freedom is the ability to do what you want even if the world is attempting to compel you to do the opposite, you have the power to overturn the world, which is preposterous. Of course, this is a strawman interpretation of personal freedom. The idea of freewill isn’t that we can do whatever we want, including, say, taking flight by flapping our arms, or that we can resist the force of every natural cause. Even if the mind is willing, the body may be weak and so we may succumb to some temptation, for example.

Absolute freedom from everything other than the self (or other than the many parts that make up the self) should be distinguished from a more realistic, limited form of freedom.Absolute freedom would entail that the self alone—rather than anything else in the natural universe—is responsible for its actions, because this self operates according to supernatural laws and so the external web of causally-connected events has no bearing on what this self does. An absolutely free person in this sense would look something like a black hole: it wouldn’t be part of the fabric of natural reality, and so no account of natural mechanisms would be relevant to explaining what happens in this person’s inner domain or what might flow into nature from this estranged individual. A ghostly, angelic figure with a mandate from some supernatural realm might be absolutely free. Neo in the virtual reality of the matrix, who channels his knowledge from a higher reality, might likewise be perfectly free from the programs that dictate the matrix’s virtual causes and effects, which is why in the film he can perform miracles such as flying and dodging bullets.

By contrast, limited freedom would be an approximation of the absolute kind and would be due to some natural arrangement of mechanisms. Limited autonomy would require a dichotomy between self and world and even a conflict between them as the self struggles against external forces, controlling itself and the world as best it can and so breaking a prominent causal chain. Taking into account the free self’s relation to the rest of the world would thus necessitate an emergent, psychological or social level of explanation. For example, defying gravity and flying just by willing your body upward would be a case of absolute freedom, since this miracle would violate natural laws and the flight would be due solely to internal causes that are completely disconnected from your surroundings. Limited freedom that achieves a similar end would require a slow learning process, as you come to understand natural laws and how to exploit them. Thus, you might discover how to engineer an airplane that allows you to fly. In the latter case no miracle is performed, but there is an anomaly afoot, a partial disconnect from the environment as you live more and more in your head. Someone with limited freedom isn’t liberated from all physical limitations or from the limits of her mind or body, but this freedom does represent a Gordian knot of complexity so that the flow of outer causality doesn’t just wash through this sort of self; instead, she processes stimuli and meditates on her options so that the outcome of her reflections is dictated largely by the rules of her inner world, which is to say that she’s the primary cause of her actions.

Still, even if we discount absolute freedom as supernatural, limited freedom will likewise be invisible to scientific investigation. A scientist wants to know how events happen. Theories are added to theories as the complexity of causes requires an analysis, a breaking-up of phenomena into parts. The epistemic division can be temporal or mereological. We can explain later events in terms of earlier ones, and so a theory of how stars formed in the early universe can help explain why plants currently grow or why our sky looks blue during the day. We can also explain something’s capacities by examining its parts, and so the star’s current molecular composition can account for the star’s macrophysical characteristics such as its size and temperature. Science deals with facts in those respects, but limited freedom wouldn’t be a purely factual matter. To see this, consider the difference between freedomand independence. A distant galaxy is independent of ours, but it would sound strange to say that either galaxy is free from the other. Autonomy isn’t just the person’s relative independence from the world; the liberated self must be fundamentally at odds with everything else so that the self is thought of as having rights against being coerced even by natural forces, and so that the self’s opposition to the rest of nature has moral significance. For there to be even limited freedom, the world must be somehow in the wrong for abusing the autonomous creature. Scientific explanation, though, is indifferent to moral evaluation, and so “freewill” shouldn’t be part of any scientific theory’s vocabulary.

Harari shows that the concept of freewill is crucial to Western liberalism, but the concept may also help make sense of the earliest evidence of human cultures, such as the practice of burying the dead; any special regard shown to friends and family at the expense of hostile, indifferent, or rival others indicates a belief in limited freedom in the above sense. The belief would be that the loved one deserves to be buried rather than to have its decay be made a spectacle of, because the memories of that departed person’s specialness as a former moral agent should be honoured. Moreover, the idea of limited autonomy may be implicit in any complete account of animal behaviour, which is why illiberal hunter-gatherers attribute symbolic importance to the hunt and ritually thank the animal for sacrificing its flesh so that the hunters might live another day. There’s the sense that all living things struggle against their environment, since nothing cares more about a creature’s welfare than that creature itself, and the nonliving world cares not at all whether it lives or dies. People may be especially free in the animal kingdom, but all organisms are free to some extent, compared to the rest of nature which has no agency at all. Again, this means not that animals can perform miracles, but that they’re constructed in such a way that they can oppose the prevailing patterns in nature. Creatures aren’t supernatural; they’re antinatural: they oppose the world in so far as they make exceptions of themselves and fight primarily for their exclusive benefit.

The determinist may speak as though scientists have been open-minded about discovering a basis for freewill, but this underestimates the scientist’s methodological barrier to recognizing the freedom that might be hiding in plain sight. It’s not as though scientists explored the body’s interior and just happened to find no liberated source of ultimate responsibility for the person’s actions. To the extent that those latter terms carry moral weight, the scientist is professionally obligated to assume that they should be replaced with more operational, quantifiable terms so that the scientist can proceed with the instrumental business at hand of helping to engineer a modern civilization. The concept of moral obligation may be useful to the practice of living well, but science isn’t concerned with that kind of practicality. Scientists want empowering knowledge. In fact, Harari exposes this Faustian essence of modernity when he writes of “the modern covenant.” Modernity, he says, “is a surprisingly simple deal: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power” (199). Scientists strip nature of the illusion of meaning, in their act of explaining events in strictly objective, material terms. Liberalism, then, is the religion that compensates for this deadening effect of science. Despite science’s having shown that there’s no real basis for freewill, we persist in assuming we’re free, but that’s just a gratuitous act of modern faith, for Harari. Again, though, this is an understatement. Even if we were relatively free from the nonliving world, scientists would have no business speaking about that aspect of how we relate to the environment; that is to say, scientists would have no grounds to speak thusly of why we relate to the world out of self-interest, and thus why in the limit case we oppose everything but ourselves.

The Obviousness of Our Real Freedom

To see the difference between explaining the natural basis of freedom and recognizing freedom itself, consider what it would be like to create a partially free creature in nature.Again, the goal wouldn’t be to create a magical being that can perform the miracle of withstanding everything nature can throw at it. Instead, pretend there’s no life in the universe and think of what sort of design would be required to assemble the first natural creature that’s liberated in certain striking respects from the overall flow of natural events. To begin with, the creature would have to be shielded from the rest of the world to prevent it from being overwhelmed and to allow the creature to decide how to act by consulting the contents of its inner world. So we’d have to erect a barrier, dividing nature into two parts (from the creature’s perspective), the inner and the outer. Were that barrier impermeable, we would have two universes on our hands, like ships passing in the night, and were the barrier impermeable only in one direction, from the outer to the inner, the creature would be absolutely, miraculously free which isn’t the goal. So the barrier must be permeable in both directions, allowing the inner and outer worlds to affect each other while providing the creature some breathing room to decide how to respond to the environment.

Also, the world inside the creature which is (imperfectly) protected from everything else must be organized to allow the creature to act with autonomy. This means the creature would have to understand that it’s one thing in opposition to everything else and that it can act on a limited basis to further its interests but will be resisted in some ways by the environment. Its thoughts would thus have to be processed by a control center somewhere safe behind its barrier. The creature must be driven to assert itself, to seek advantages to make it happy even if that should entail disadvantaging competitors; otherwise, however free its thoughts might be from the thoughtlessness of purely physical processes, the creature wouldn’t have the audacity to challenge the outer world, say, by studying natural regularities and modifying them to its benefit. This self-directedness might be accomplished by introducing the capacities to feel pleasure and pain, to discriminate between experiences by learning to heed certain enticements and warnings. To more fully liberate itself from baseline causality, the creature should learn to recognize itself as a distinct entity so that it can mentally model itself as an agent in the indifferent world. The creature would be even more fully liberated were its body equipped to apply the thoughts and feelings at its core. Thus, the creature might be outfitted with organs that allow it to sense changes in certain dimensions of the outer world, and also with appendages that allow it to manipulate the causes of stimuli to help improve its experience and living standard.

Such a creature would be naturally real (not magical), detached from that which lies beyond its barrier, motivated to oppose the natural environment in certain respects, and also enabled to apply its self-interested intentions, to make good on its partial liberty by injecting the contents of its mental space into the lifeless or foreign one and even replacing the wilderness as much as possible with an extended barrier. Of course, this creature is precisely what’s evolved in myriad forms on our planet. Cells have membranes, trees have bark, and animals have skin along with fur, feathers, or scales. Cells have nuclei protecting genetic instructions, and an animal has a brain ensconced in its skull to direct its self-interested (if not necessarily selfish) cogitations, as well as wings, fins, or claws to help it get what it wants. Some mammals evolved opposable thumbs, bipedal locomotion, and an enhanced brain which produces self-awareness and the capacity for higher orders of thought. These latter creatures which we call persons are apparently as liberated as real creatures can be. To wit, people have reshaped the planet in the Anthropocene Age, replacing the wilderness with villages, cities, and civilizations; rival creatures with domesticated pets; and jungle law with ideologies and cultural pastimes and enterprises.

Let’s return to Harari’s case against freewill. At each point we can see that far from discounting limited freedom, the mechanisms in question are its preconditions. Brain processes must be deterministic or random or else the creature couldn’t discern its opportunity to systematically oppose nature amidst the chaos that would ensue without the natural regularities which it can nevertheless transcend at the mental and social levels. Every thought and feeling has some cause or other, but the longer the evolutionary history and the more complex the brain, the less tractable becomes any objective account of why a certain mental state arises; hence the need to shift to a perspective that posits the subjective viewpoint which is apparently our brain’s byproduct. In a deterministic universe, the complete explanation of any event would have to take into account every other event, which would be impossible for reasons given in relativistic physics, and which would be fruitless, given the prevalence of natural chaos. In any case, the universe is fundamentally indeterministic (at the quantum level), so the pursuit of complete explanations is wrongheaded. We must choose between models based on their utility, and so a model of organisms that’s consistent with the phenomenology (that is, with the feeling that we have some degree of self-control) can hardly be dismissed—even if the model is unscientific because it introduces a subjective factor.

How can there be a single self, though, if the brain is divided into modules that evolved to achieve different functions? This question can be turned around: How could limited freewill have evolved with no miracles, unless natural selection gradually lengthened the leash, as it were, by adding parts to the brain that make creatures more and more independent, that accrued layer upon layer of internal causes of the creature’s behaviour so that an objective explanation that discounts subjectivity becomes cumbersome to the point of being misleading? We don’t choose our desires if we think of ourselves as exclusively our conscious egos, but we needn’t think of ourselves that way. Evidently there’s an unconscious side to a personal self, as becomes plain when we dream in personally-distinctive ways without being consciously alert while we’re asleep. So neuroscientists have greater access to what’s occurring in the brain than the patient herself: before the patient becomes aware of her choice, experimenters can predict whether she’ll go left or right, by hooking her up to a machine that reads the brain’s electrical activity. This need imply only that her thought originates from one side of herself rather than another; her personhood, that is, her capacity to act as a person with limited freewill in a moral context encompasses her whole brain as well as her whole body. All are needed or are at least convenient in achieving her purposes. Moreover, objectivity and quantification don’t have the high ground when scientists know more about our choices than do their subjects. Strictly objective, impersonal processes didn’t devise scientific methods of inquiry or brain scanners in the first place; creatures that have opposed nature at every turn on moral grounds and that are thus manifestly free from their natural environment have done so.

Indeed, far from showing that freewill is an illusion, science and technology are themselves classic proofs that an anomaly is playing out in this corner of the solar system. Whereas natural systems tend to become more disordered, organisms struggle against entropy by eating each other, robbing the order found in each other’s bodies and ingesting it. Whereas natural processes don’t react to each other with any awareness or design, organisms do and their history isn’t fully explained without some understanding that living things seek to preserve themselves in an environment that can crush them in a billion possible ways and that even requires them to die to make room for more fitting adaptations, as the environment changes. Whereas the interiors of nonliving things, including rocks, planets, and stars, aren’t fundamentally different from their exteriors and can be explained in the same theoretical terms, biological, neurological, psychological and social patterns are irreducibly different from ones found in nature’s lifeless parts; the former require some appeal to subjectivity, to an inner-outer distinction that carries moral weight, or else there’s a crucial point being missed. And whereas natural transformations such as the evolution of star systems don’t indicate that the later forms are liberated from the earlier ones, the spread of extended phenotypes, that is, artifacts, demonstrates precisely the existentially-weighty fact that organisms set themselves against their environment for love of themselves (and perhaps also of their kind).

So if scientific investigation is instrumental in empowering our species to the point of making us infamous for wiping out most of the planet’s biodiversity and displacing lifeless and less-free nature with intelligently-designed cultures, machines, and cityscapes that serve as outer vessels for the contents of our minds, this rigorous search for knowledge further detaches us from the natural processes that have hitherto prevailed. Uncovering the mechanisms that enable us to process information with intelligence and with anti-natural intentions may show that we’re machines as opposed to immaterial spirits—unless you interpret “spirit” as a simplified image of the creature that’s strangely liberated and thus alienated from natural cycles and thus that seeks not homeostasis (that being the evolutionary purpose of less-free animals), but cancer-like growth of the mind throughout the lifeless void. In any event, what science certainly doesn’t show is that people are just physical objects like everything else in the universe. After all, why then wouldn’t rocks or stars practice science to achieve power over the rest of the universe in the name of all rocks or stars?  

The foregoing is what philosophers call a compatibilist picture of freewill, since it assumes that causality is inescapable in the sense that there’s no miraculous, absolute freedom from natural regularities. But these regularities develop something that opposes them, by evolving bodies that simulate foreign, unnatural worlds in the organization of their innards; that is, nature creates organic subworlds, from cells to animals to people and perhaps to societies, each complete with barriers so that we might have expected we wouldn’t miss the existential significance of this emergence. And here Harari may have a point against liberalism despite the ineffectiveness of his premises against freewill. Liberalism may be a modern religion championing liberty, reason, and personal empowerment, but limited freedom as I’ve represented it isn’t a godsend. Just as we can incur back pain for having evolved the ability to walk upright, so too we can suffer from alienation if we don’t retreat to an undignified state of childish delusion, for having been cut off from the world by our inner depths. Thus, another proof of limited freewill is the forlornness associated with grasping that we don’t belong to nature and might as well have been abandoned when we’ve been equipped with ultra-complex, self-isolating brains. Freewill is the ability not just to choose what we want—albeit often at an unconscious level, objective processes notwithstanding as complete causes of mental states, with no reference required to a subjective viewpoint. Freewill is the ability also to travel down the wrong path and it’s the mental space needed to understand that the moral and aesthetic evaluations of the culture-laden worlds we create are ultimately absurd. We’ve been liberated from nature only by accident, and our revolt against the mindless vistas is very likely doomed to be terminated before any absolute triumph has been achieved. Creatures revolt not because we know best but because we’re often selfish and are disgusted with the world as it physically is, so that we’re desperate to replace it with so many reflections of us.  

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