October 7, 2022
Traditionally, the essential defining trait of humanity, what distinguishes us from the other animals, is free will. Whereas animals are fixed in their behaviors beyond a limited range of options, we may choose, for better or worse. I suspect the contrast has been exaggerated, that animals are not so limited as they are said to be. Animal behavior has always been interpreted reductively out of bias, out of a need to establish human superiority and to rationalize animals’ killing and mistreatment. But there is still a limited truth to it. Or so we think until we look around us and see millions of people possessed by herd mentality in a way that no animals would be guilty of. Not that it is a new observation or a new phenomenon: in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver’s morale and self-respect are broken by the realization that human beings are Yahoos, greedy, selfish, aggressive savages worse than any beast.
In Swift’s day, when the British Empire was undergoing its long metastasis, imperialist ideology rationalized the organized Yahooism of empire, its raping, pillaging, and plundering, by projecting all the savagery onto the peoples it conquered and exploited. It would be some satisfaction at least to be able to say that after more than three centuries, we know who the real savages are. But it is not true at all. England has managed, finally, to extract Boris Johnson from the seat of power, a man whose schtick is “I’m a Yahoo and proud of it, right down to my untamable hair, but I’m still better than you because I went to the best schools and can quote Homeric Greek.” Yet right now, those vying to replace him as alpha savage are Brexiteers who are in denial about the fact that the emperor not only has no clothes but no empire. Their proud incompetence and flagrant corruption will allow the UK to sink even further into misery than it is now. But of course the United States is in even worse condition. Donald Trump, of the equally untamable hair, has unleashed a tide of Yahooism beyond anything seen before in American history. The hair is clearly a message: I run wild, and you can’t stop me.
If this is the outcome of free will, surely we are better without it. The idea that human free will runs out of control unless curbed was the argument for absolute monarchy in the writings of people like Thomas Hobbes, the flaw in the argument being of course, “Who will watch the watchmen?” and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The elitism of libertarians like Ayn Rand is an updating of the same fallacy. Those who fall for it are of course always imagining that the ruling elite will be themselves and their cohorts, who are, of course, beyond criticism. Arthur C. Clarke gave up and, in Childhood’s End (1953) grasped at the wish-fulfilment fantasy of a superior alien race that will conquer the human race for its own good, establishing a sort of guardianship until the human race evolves to a state of childhood’s end and the beginning of adult rationality and responsibility. “Griffin’s Egg,” a science fiction novella by Michael Swanwick, possessed of one of the most darkly Swiftian imaginations since Swift himself, suggests, apparently seriously, that we cannot afford to wait for evolution. We must take the risk of “playing God” and rewire the human race genetically and neurologically before we annihilate not only ourselves but the planet. I suspect that the metaphor in the title is an ironic comment on Edgar Pangborn’s “Angel’s Egg,” subject of an early newsletter, which took a more idealistic view of human nature.
What is will? Will is that which acts to achieve or realize desire. Will and desire are inseparable, although not the same thing. It is perfectly possible to have desire without will. We have a name for that: the long-distance high school crush. But the will acts, and is thus the human analogue of instinct. However, animal instinct does not run out of control like human will: it is self-regulating, has some sort of governor that is lacking in human behavior. The human will, stung by desire as by a gadfly, frequently rampages madly out of control. It is Freud’s id, a concept influenced by Schopenhauer’s notion of a blindly desiring will beneath the façade of reality that he called “representation.” Or, worse, it is subject to a kind of collective hypnosis, individual wills subsuming themselves en masse to the will of an autocrat or dictator, or to a controlling oligarchy, thrilled by the prospect of participating in a collective will far more powerful than their individual one. The famous propaganda film celebrating the Nazis was titled The Triumph of the Will.
But the autocrat or the oligarchy themselves lack control, including the autocrats who masquerade as the opposite, as the coldly controlled absolute ruler. We are witnessing a perfect example in Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB man of ice who prided himself on having the strength and discipline of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or perhaps of Darth Vader, but whose obsessive inner demon drove him to make a terrible mistake, unfortunately without the benefit of having read Macbeth.
In Freud’s late system, the id was supposed to be restrained by the superego, the introjected body of laws and moral principles that we often call conscience, but modernity is characterized by the loss of authority of traditional cultural law and morality. This led any number of the Modernist writers and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century to flirt with various forms of authoritarianism in the hope that somebody would be able to re-impose traditional morality and restraint before the world degenerated into sheer anarchy. Sometimes the authoritarians themselves genuinely seem to believe in this salvational mission, but of course it is the Hobbesian error all over again. Most authoritarians, however, are simply crazy with the will to power, and their followers are those who are waiting eagerly to be let off the leash to run wild, in the name of “freedom.” It is not a new phenomenon: Shakespeare shows that difference in The Tempest between the coldly-plotting Machiavellians Antonio and Sebastian and the out-of-control clowns Stephano and Trinculo, getting drunk and running around yelling, “Freedom! Heyday!” very much in the spirit of January 6. Milton said that what such louts call “liberty” is actually “license,” not true freedom but merely lack of restraint. License says, “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do.” We saw plenty of it during the pandemic.
The old myths were not stupid. They were a way of thinking through the problems of human existence symbolically rather than theoretically, but the idea that they are nothing more than a way for the priesthood to bamboozle the people is itself stupid. That lesson has been learned about non-modern cultures, whether historical or contemporary. Ironically, it has been harder to see the profundity of the symbolic patterns of the Bible and of the extra-Biblical myths and symbols, along with centuries of commentary and theology, because we are still caught up in the ideological battles surrounding them. This is the burden of Northrop Frye’s three late books on the Bible and literature, The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision.
Mind you, the ideological sand traps are within the Biblical texts themselves. Perhaps the greatest limitation of the Christian vision has been its insistence on postulating a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, and yet still somehow all-loving, even though a truly omnipotent and omniscient deity cannot logically be absolved of responsibility for the appalling amount of suffering in the world. It is exactly free will that is supposed to absolve God of responsibility. We freely and knowingly chose evil and rebellion against God, and the suffering that is human history is God’s just punishment, culminating in hell for the really hard-core sinners. Confronted with the fact that much suffering is innocent, such as the suffering of children, Christian theology was forced to invent the doctrine of original sin. The Fall crippled the human will, which is now evil and can, without divine grace, will only evil. There is no such thing as an innocent child: we are corrupt from birth.
Yet at the same time, theology is forced to maintain the exact opposite: God predestined all of this. He predestined the choice of some people to will good and others to will evil. Which means he predestined the Fall of Adam and Eve and thereby the whole human race. Paul says so explicitly in Romans 8-9. Sometimes it is claimed that the fact that God foresees bad actions is not the same as his causing them, but that will not wash. Theology says that nothing can happen without God having willed it to happen. “Free” choice is only God’s grace acting through a human agent: “my motions in him,” as Milton’s God the Father puts it. The only thing theology can do is postulate a paradoxical Fortunate Fall: the suffering that God has predestined is terrible, but out of it, God will bring greater good than if we had not fallen.
What if we simply bracketed, as the phenomenologists say, all this ambivalent ideological superstructure, set it mentally aside for the moment? When we do so, the Genesis story that looked like a simpleminded folktale weaponized for ideological purposes may look like a profound symbolic working through of the problem of human nature, one that we can compare to modern evolutionary theory, itself groping to explain what has happened to produce the perversity of human nature. Forget predestination and all the ideological anxiety structures erected to justify the ways of God to men. The Genesis story shows the human race as capable of freely choosing, unlike the animals. Somehow we are no longer bound to instinct. We have innate tendencies, which Freud called “drives,” Maslow called “instinctoid” tendencies, but they are not mandatory and we are capable of setting them aside. We are radically free, then, as existentialism recognized. Post-structuralism has spent decades congratulating itself for re-instituting predestination, calling existentialism naïve and insisting that we are nothing but functions of various power systems and structures. Like predestination itself, this seems to me to be a product of anxiety. As Marx said that dialectical materialism was Hegel’s Idealism turned on its head, I think the post-structuralist view that we are nothing but an epiphenomenal product of power systems is predestination turned on its head. There is a hatred of human freedom and autonomy, which is seen as pride needing to be humbled, especially if it is bourgeois pride.
But what if we truly are free, radically free, not free to do anything we please in some kind of reality-disconnected way, but free to choose, guided by reason, which takes over in human beings from the guidance of animal instinct? I have quoted Milton’s significant aphorism several times in recent newsletters: “Reason is but choosing.” Reason does seem to be the factor that loosened the grip of instinct on the human psyche. Reason is capable of detaching human consciousness from the twin wills that Freud rightly saw dominating the unconscious: the will to pleasure and the will to power. But reason is also capable of detaching us from the conformist pressures of the superego: of the tribal laws and customs that conditioning and peer pressure make so coercive. The wills to pleasure and power are nature ungoverned by instinct; on the other hand, the conformism of what some social scientists have called “shame culture” and what Northrop Frye called a social “myth of concern” are culture ungoverned by rational, critical evaluation. The superego, bound by “myths of concern,” has no ability to detach and ask itself whether or not it is simply being a slave to blind custom, which is as bad as being enslaved to blind desire. If your customs say, “Thou shalt eat babies on alternate Tuesdays,” the only response of concern is “Our forefathers made this law, and so it must be preserved forever, without criticism. Pass the salt.”
Freud’s view was pessimistic. In a late book, Civilization and Its Discontents, he presents a vision of historical cycles much like that of Spengler in The Decline of the West. Civilizations are built by the “sublimation,” or rechanneling, of the energies of the twin wills of the unconscious, the drives of pleasure and power. They are diverted into the delayed-gratification tasks necessary to sustain a complex civilization, and the diversion is largely coercive, a product of the superego’s unending supply of “Thou shalt not’s.” But this is a wearisome task and leads for most citizens to a life of unending frustration and starved desires. As a culture ages, its capacity to repress and rechannel diminishes, resulting in what Freud called “the return of the repressed.” The drives of pleasure and power, chained under the earth like the Titans in Hesiod’s Theogony, begin to break free and manifest themselves. The result is “decadence,” characterized by the obsession with sex and violence, both in fantasy and in outbreaks of anti-social behavior. The return of the repressed has advanced much further in the century since Freud and Spengler.
But this ironic cycle is not the whole story. Milton’s central theme is liberty, and that entails freedom of the will. He understood quite well that people are not free if they are in the grip of the pleasure and power drives: in Paradise Lost, Abdiel, the rebel against the rebel angels, so to speak, throws Satan’s taunts about his servility to God back in his face: “Thyself not free, but to thyself enslaved.” But he understood something that Dante also understood in his way: that the twin wills to pleasure and power cannot simply be repressed. “Just say no” has never worked in all of history, and abstinence is just the other side of indulgence. Enslavement to the superego guilt trip demands of abstinence and repression is no better than enslavement to desire. That is why (influenced by Spenser) temperance becomes a central virtue for Milton in his masque Comus and elsewhere. Temperance is neither indulgence nor denial. Frye explains it as the internalization of the law. External laws, even good ones, are in loco parentis: that is indeed how Freud explains the superego, as a residue of parental commands. But if we do not become free of our parents, we remain children. We do not become free of parental authority by revolting against it, except for a transitional period in adolescence. Defiance of the law is not freedom, just another way of being obsessed with the law.
We have to develop our own internal law or set of values, freely chosen and lived by because it is ours. The way we do this is through reason and its power of critique, in the sense it has had since Kant, the power of detaching and evaluating the claims of authority against the criteria of logic and evidence. In an important book significantly titled (out of Kant) The Critical Path, Frye says that, the more mature the society, the more the binding and conformist myth of social concern is in creative tension with an opposite tendency he calls the “myth of freedom.” In whatever way the myth of freedom may have manifested itself in earlier societies, in modern times it has a strong association with science and with democracy, a form of government with an open myth of concern—that is, one open to criticism by the myth of freedom. In personal life, the myth of freedom manifests itself as the process of maturing into true individuality, the liberation from slavery to the pleasure and power drives on the one hand and from social pressures on the other.
Slavery to the pleasure and power drives often masquerades as individualism, even though it is only what Milton called license. Likewise, social conformism masquerades as true community, even though it is only beehive collectivism. Reason’s power of critique, of what we call critical thinking, learns to discriminate, to separate the truth from the masquerades, and choose freely.
But something in turn guides reason, for reason alone is not enough. It is often said, rightly enough, that Christianity is superior to Classical philosophy in understanding the limits of reason in the face of the irrational. “The evil that I would not, that I do,” Paul says ruefully. I know it is wrong, yet I am in its grip, whatever it is. Reason is anchored to the data of the senses, which means it is limited by the ego’s perspective, which is that of an internal subject or consciousness confronting, through the senses, an environment objective to it, both natural and social. This subject-object division is what Blake called the “cloven fiction,” as readers of The Productions of Time will know, because the whole argument of the book hinges on it. So long as we remain trapped within the horizons of the subject-object perspective, the split between inner and outer, desire and law, individual and environment, cannot be resolved. Subject-object dualism is the source of all the other dualisms of human life. Reason, whose power is discrimination, analysis of differences, can perceive all the antinomies but cannot resolve any of them. The most it is capable of is what Yeats called “vacillation,” in a poem of that title, whose first line is, “Between extremities, man runs his course.” Thus, reason gives us the power to choose, but what good is that if our only choices are between necessary but irreconcilable opposites?
Traditionally, beyond reason is revelation, a vision in which all the opposites are united that reason can only see as conflicting. When reason reaches its boundaries and breaks down into paradoxes, another power takes over. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil, representing reason, hands over Dante to a greater guide, Beatrice, who stands for revelation, which can understand what reason alone cannot because it sees in terms of unified opposites, of what The Productions of Time, borrowing from Romantic philosophy and criticism, calls identity-in-difference. Revelation is a spiritual power: the Greek term for it is apocalypse. But in modern times it is no longer the exclusive property of the Church. The Church from its establishment had been faced with the same choice as Adam and Eve, and, like them, freely chose power. The Protestant revolution of the 16th century, resulting in the religious wars of the 17th century, took place because the Church was hopelessly corrupt. Hence the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the Age of Reason, in which the myth of freedom for the first time achieved equal power with the myth of social concern, and whose principles were embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
But reason and enlightenment in themselves were not enough. In the Romantic period, the theory of the imagination emerged as a new, largely secularized version of revelation, if we define “secularized” as detached from institutional religion, although not necessarily ceasing to be spiritual. The will to pleasure and the will to power are products of the subject-object perspective, which is inherently alienated. The subject is split from what it desires, and can overcome that division in one of two ways. If the pleasure principle predominates, the subject’s impulse is to drown itself in the other—the impulse that Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents calls “the oceanic.” If the will to power predominates, the subject’s impulse is the opposite: to possess, to master, or, failing that, to destroy the other. The imagination, or whatever we want to call it—including “grace” in a spiritual context—unites the subject with the objective world, although preserving both subject and object as an identity-in-difference. This is the perspective for which I have borrowed Blake’s phrase “expanding eyes,” and the arts are a form of meditation that provides models of such expanded vision. The perception of identity-in-difference or unity of opposites is frequently dismissed as irrationalism. But true irrationalism denies reason: imaginative irrationalism is, in a phrase of Wallace Stevens, “to reason with a later reason.”
The imaginative vision, whether we approach it through art, through religion, or through the “later reason” that we call criticism or critique, is the genuine basis for true freedom of the will. The superego structures of society, including law, are external and coercive; the unconscious pleasure and power drives possess and enslave people from within; reason reaches its limit in showing that we run our course between these two extremities. Contrastingly, imagination, or whatever we choose to call it, not only models a condition in which desire is not inevitably alienated from its object but provides at its greatest intensity an actual experience of that condition—an epiphany, hierophany, apocalypse, peak experience, ecstatic identification, sense of a unity not bought by the murder of diversity, an I-Thou relationship (in Martin Buber’s phrase), a gnosis, an experience of love in which two become one without ceasing to be individuals, an everyday miracle. Liberal education can be defined as a technique of meditation whose goal is both achieving and understanding such a visionary experience.
Aided by imaginative experience informed and critiqued by reason, modern individuals are faced with the task of choosing, of freely willing their own individual “myth to live by,” as Joseph Campbell calls it. Previous ages inherited a mythology, instilled as a set of stories accompanied by cultural norms. But in modern democracies, in which the “myth of freedom” has equal sway with the social myth of concern, individuals are not only permitted but impelled to exercise their free will and commit to a myth that makes sense out of life, guides life choices, and, last but not least, provides hope and a sense of possibility. They are free, of course, to choose Christianity or some other traditional mythology; they may choose a non-traditional belief system and become Wiccan or Zen Buddhist; or they may become intellectuals who deny the need for a myth to navigate by, refusing to concede that postmodernism or scientific rationalism are themselves conceptualized myths. The poet John Ciardi once defined a poem as “a machine for making choices.” Everyone has to have some ground for making choices. The kind of radical skepticism that asserts that all grounds deconstruct is not exempt. We must choose, day after day, commit to something, and then will it. What is new in the modern age is awareness that all myths are constructs springing from the individual imagination. Religious figures who defend “orthodoxy” are fond of sneering at liberalism’s narcissistic smorgasbord approach to values. They will tell you that you cannot pick and choose. What they really mean is that you are not only required to accept their myth but their interpretation of the myth. Nevertheless, there are dozens if not hundreds of versions of Christianity, and every one of them has been constructed by some individual or group, then declared doctrine. There was no consensus about the Trinity, the nature of Christ, the Eucharist until a consensus was finally imposed, more or less coercively. But the ability to impose has been loosened in modern democratic societies, resulting in a kind of free will more radical than history has yet seen.
A good thing? Yes, but scary. I teach undergraduates. To tell college students they must choose or fashion a personal mythology when they can’t even decide on a major, or for that matter decide whether they are going to continue to choose college at all, might seem an exercise in futility. But that is the message, and has always been the message: you are adults now, and must choose your life. How in the world do you do that? I remember being that age, and I remember not having a clue. Yes, liberal education, which can potentially expand our horizons beyond the narrow limits we grew up in, can provide a map. But it is only a map of possibilities—how to choose among them? I only know one answer, expressed by a counsel by George MacDonald, in his classic Victorian children’s fantasy “The Golden Key”: “You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.” You must plunge in, take risks, fail more than once, suffer the consequences, and hopefully learn. I speak not as the Wise Old Man but as someone who can no longer keep track of his failures, from minor embarrassments to major, guilt-scarred fiascos. But they are the price paid for the moments that make me glad I have lived not just a life but the life I chose to live. That, so far as I can see, is the human condition.
I read an article recently about Generation Z, ages 11 to 25, claiming that they have grown up risk-averse. It means that they drink less, have less sex, and prefer to socialize at a supposedly safe electronic distance through their phones. I am always wary of negative portraits of younger people by their elders, but, if there is some truth in this description, I can certainly understand it. A college freshman this year has grown up in a middle-class family hit hard by the 2008 economic meltdown, followed by the social pathology that has afflicted the United States since 2016, simultaneous with the pandemic. We have all been damaged by these things, not just the young. But it is true that it is the life-task of young adults to adventure out in the world, and that means taking risks, including foolhardy risks, and failing, more than once. Failure is part of the plan, not a bug but a feature. Our word “error” has a root sense of “to wander”: the knights errant in medieval romance were knights who wandered. Even if they had a goal, like finding the Grail or becoming a knight of Arthur’s court, the only way to get there was to wander blindly and hope that something would turn up. And in choosing and pursuing a goal, the idea is not to play it safe, no matter what your parents or Career Services tells you. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce names his autobiographical protagonist Stephen Dedalus. Daedalus is the symbolic figure of the artist, the one who invents his own way out of the labyrinth and achieves freedom. But he is paired in the myth with his son Icarus, who chooses to fly higher despite his father’s warnings, and who dies when his wings melt in the sun. The moral of the myth is not “Flight is dangerous. Better to stay in the labyrinth, imprisoned yet alive." No, the true moral is, “Dare to fly, but try to make such choices as, when you do crash, you can still walk away alive, to risk and fall again another day.”