Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Freiheit: radikales Problem (Befangenheit); Spannung zw. Wissen und Tun, aktuellem Tun und Wahl; Beispiel: Piano

Kurzinhalt: Human freedom is a radical problem, and just how radical it is can be disclosed if we again ask, Why do people fail to do what they know they ought to do? The biases ...

Textausschnitt: 6. Human Freedom

116/7 There is a further dimension to this problem of becoming an authentic chooser, namely, the problem of our freedom in executing what we know and value to be better ways of being and behaving personally and collectively. Our moral conscience is a conscious correlation not just between our knowing and choosing, but also between what we choose to do and what we actually do. The much more serious and intractable moral problem is that we do not do what we know we ought to do. Smoking provides a good example. Millions of Americans smoke. We do not have to educate them about the verified statistical correlation between smoking and cancer; for the most part, they believe the experts. Smokers know why they should not smoke, and we do not have to convince them to try to stop smoking - most have already tried and failed. They are free to stop, but they are unable to actualize their freedom. Smokers are essentially free to exist as non-smokers, but they are unable to bring their being as non-smokers into existence. And so smokers have to exist in an inauthentic way since their actual recurring schemes of smoking cannot be reconciled with what they know and would choose as a more valuable way to behave. Such people exist in a self-contradictory way. They may escape the contradiction by seeking various forms of rationalizing, but they cannot completely silence their questions. Unless they meet their own conscious demand, a certain unease accompanies such rationalizing. Thus, the spontaneous demand emerging from our own evaluating and deliberating is that we actually do what we think is truly worthwhile doing. (225; Fs)

117/7 Freedom is not indeterminism. Quite the opposite: freedom involves determinism, but it is we who do the determining, or it is we who ought to determine the worthwhileness of ourselves as self-choosing beings. Ironically, to be free is to oblige ourselves to become a truly valuable self by doing truly valuable deeds. Only then, as Aristotle said, will we be a true friend to ourselves and become a source of other people's admiration and affection. (225f; Fs)

118/7 The same dialectical tension between choosing and doing which emerges in our personal lives also characterizes our communal living. Political leaders already know more intelligible and worthwhile ways to arrange our social order, but they also know that such plans and policies are impractical. By 'impractical' they mean that such courses of actions are actually practical, but they have to be agreed upon and chosen by the governing body, and there are not sufficient votes to pass such policies. There are vested interest groups within the body politic that will block these truly worthwhile policies, because they do not serve their own interests. Such interest groups are free to back such policies, but they refuse to actualize the making of a more valuable social order. Just as self-knowers try to make reasonable their unreasonable courses of action, so dominant social classes rationalize their unwillingness to construct a more intelligible and valuable social order because it might be disadvantageous to their own way of living. The evidence of such behavior in history is massive; groups of people who initiated and sustained conditions for a successful and truly valuable social order will frequently change from a creative minority into a dominant minority that refuses to adapt to changing social conditions.1 (226; Fs)

119/7 Human freedom is a radical problem, and just how radical it is can be disclosed if we again ask, Why do people fail to do what they know they ought to do? The biases we form are simply our own elaborate and very effective cover-ups and the cultural rationalizations that we have inherited and will hand on to the next generation. What makes this problem so radical is that it cannot be solved by a better education or a more comprehensive intellectual enlightenment. Nor can it be solved by assimilating the moral and metaphysical theory that I have been setting forth here. The intrinsic tension exists between what we know and what we choose to do in light of that knowing because our willingness to act in a certain way is an acquired, not a spontaneous, willingness. (226; Fs)

120/7 For example, you may spontaneously desire to play the piano, but you cannot play the piano spontaneously, nor can you learn to play the piano simply by reading books on how to play the piano. You must practice until you have acquired the habit of playing. Once you have formed the habit, then you do not need to be persuaded to play, nor do you have to persuade yourself, since you have acquired, beyond the natural spontaneous desire to play, the newly formed spontaneities that flow from such acquired habits. (226; Fs)

121/7 People are not born naturally courageous or cowardly. Such personal characteristics are acquired. Similarly, people are born, not with a culture, but with a nature. Culture comes from the acquired habits of meanings and motivations that we develop by growing up and living within culture. Finally, we are not born free. We are born choosers, but we are not born with habits of choosing. We must develop the habits that will make our choices more or less effectively free. There is, therefore, a fundamental difference between our potency to be free - the essential freedom that comes from our natures -and the effective freedom we have to win by doing what we know we ought to do. Potential freedom becomes actual freedom only when we make it actual. In doing so, we bring our potential being into actual existence.2 (226f; Fs)

122/7 To solve the problem of personal and collective bias, we need the love that would provide us with spontaneous willingness. One of the most obvious effects of love is the new spontaneities it gives us to do things for the person we love. Our problem is not choosing to do good things for one person, but choosing wisely and willingly within the whole ordering of history. To solve the problem of evil or bias, we need a new ordering of our cultural and historical way of being. In short, the problem arises as a moral problem, but there is no moral solution. Only through some higher form of human living can the problem of moral weakness be resolved. The next chapter will raise the possibility of a religious solution to this problem of moral impotence. (227; Fs)