Not So Free, Or Maybe

The Stoics are some of my favorite Ancient Greek philosophers – not only does the word “stoicism” arise from them (and not the other way around), but they subscribe to a host of ideas that at first seems most counterintuitive, but that grows on you as the arguments proceed, the paragon of good philosophy. There is a ton to their views, and I could go on and on about them, but it is the Stoic position on fate and determinism that I find most fascinating.

The Stoics find moral luck to be abhorrent. That is, that someone should be held responsible for something outside of their control is to them an untenable position: that only one of two drunk drivers is punished because only one happens to hit a pedestrian because that pedestrian happens to be there seems resolutely unfair to the Stoics. (Not that they mean to say that neither is culpable – it’s that only one is in fact punished that is the problem.) Thus, they take it to be the case that one can only be responsible for, and one should only care about, those things that one can control. And therein lies the rub, for the Stoics take it to be the case that all events are determined, that every event (and human action) has a preceding cause, and thus, since no alternative is open at the moment of action, that there is no such thing as free will. From this, the Stoics can find it irrational to display overt emotion, because, for example, anger at someone’s action involves the belief that the action could have proceeded differently, which in fact it couldn’t have.

This, then, is where Sartre comes in, for he holds that true freedom rests not in imagining one’s situation to be different and wishing it were so, but in acting given one’s facticity, making choices within the situation one finds oneself in and making the best of it. Freedom, to Sartre, is not lying to oneself about one’s situation, and making decisions based on and wholly within that situation. It’s a balance between, on the one hand, the constraints of body and worldly condition, and on the other, the ability to imagine being above those constraints, and most of all being able to act on that imagination while understanding and accepting one’s physical constraints.

It would appear, then, that the Stoics and Sartre are much at odds, for how can one resolve to act, even given an understanding of one’s facticity, if all actions are predetermined anyhow?

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I leave the question unanswered until next time, and leave the discussion for now with this possibly unrelated and possibly related photo.