Discussion about freedom

Freedom or a matter of free will? A discussion between Gabriel Rosenstock, Waqas Kwaja and Hatto Fischer

The entire discussion started after Gabriel Rosenstock forwarded to me on Wednesday, October 17, 2012 following message which he had taken from the server of 'Nonduality Highlights' (they publish one email letter per day):

Dustin LindenSmith

I recently finished my second, more careful reading of Sam Harris's great little book called “Free Will.” The topic seemed much less dense on my second reading of its scant 66 pages, although this is admittedly one of my first real engagements with a thorny philosophical topic such as this one.

For those unfamiliar with Harris or his work, he's a Stanford philosophy grad and UCLA neuroscience Ph.D. who authored the amazing 2004 book, “The End of Faith,” and who co-founded a foundation in 2007 devoted to promoting science and secular values called Project Reason. In "Free Will," he lays out a cogent argument against the existence of free will in human beings; or to be more precise, he describes in objective, scientific (and subjective) terms why our apparent freedom of will is an illusion.

A common response to this argument is that “if we have no free will, why do anything?” Or, “if we have no free will, where does moral responsibility and ethical behaviour come from?” I really enjoyed the following rejoinders to these kinds of arguments by Harris in Chapter 5, in which he reflects on his personal experience with losing his own belief in free will:

“Losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. … Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life. … Getting behind our conscious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_(author)

Sam Harris's books are availabe at Amazon.com and are listed here:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&field-keywords=sam%20harris&linkCode=ur2&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Asam%20harris&sprefix=sam%20h&tag=nondualitysal-20&url=search-alias%3Daps

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights/message/4732

Since I prefer that people do not simply pass on something as if it says something all by itself, I replied as follows:

Athens 17.10.2012
Dear Gabriel,
what do you say to this book? I pose this question because passing on such a thought for the day is one thing, where you stand personally on this issue another.

A friend of mine in Berlin is organizing for the Museum of History an exhibition of how 150 artists have understood, interpreted and responded to the freedom concept since 1945. Naturally there will be very different works coming from former East Germany compared to from West Germany. A key element is freedom as a treacherous illusion with which many dissidents were lured to the West as part of an overall scheme aiming to undermine the Eastern regimes. That was a part of the Cold War strategy.

Freedom as I have known it both as a personal desire and how reflected in various philosophical schools has almost been left nowadays out of all political equations. Mitt Romney refers always to 'freedom of choice', and means consumer choice. Consequently there needs be made a distinction between decision and choice, when dealing with the question whether or not the individual is free to determine an own life pattern, including the kind of job to earn a living. A choice is a matter of preferences and alternatives e.g. blue and not a red car. I made this distinction clear in my PhD since I used the motto: 'the choices are free but not the people!' Implied is that illusionary freedoms cannot be equated with a substantial freedom which goes hand in hand with being able to question and to think through your own concept of life. Unfortunately very few can afford that luxury of living openly in doubt. The pressure of society is enormous to conform and to succumb to anything but becoming free from all negative determinants of society.

When I worked in a hospital, one orderly said to me one day had it not been for the student movement, he would not be here, in this job. He meant till the student movement of 1968 he was following the pattern of his father, grandfather and great grandfather for if a farmer, always a farmer. Only once the students altered the self consciousness and he became aware that he did not need to do the same thing as his previous generations, that he had self value, that was the moment when he picked up his socks and started to invest in his own second education.

I do not think 'free will' is a viable concept but rather a tautology. If you are free, then you do not need to use will power or the like to do something. And a basic understanding has been by those who escaped slavery, that once they overcame the fear of the unknown, then they were really free for the first time. There is this amazing story by Frederik Douglas, a slave who escaped from the South and made it up North. He pointed out why slaves never escaped from the plantation was that they preferred the known suppression of their master to the unknown swamps they would have to cross to freedom. Their imaginations were rich and thus they invested the swamps with all kinds of monsters. Also he saw how the slaves would not use the few free hours like Saturday evening or Sunday to learn, to educate themselves; rather they would squander these hours by getting drunk. That then is important for freedom always is based on a sober truth. That is why Michel Foucault would say that we have to get rid of the illusions which we do not need, but leave those we need to live.

Freedom can be an illusion when used to seduce people, but it can also be real when entering life with a love that overflows any concept of life and still gives orientation in life. I suppose that is also what both children and parents struggle for all the time, namely to overcome the negative determinants under which past generations have suffered, in order to express the love they have for each other freely.

As said I much prefer you add your own thoughts to such messages for just passing them on does not say anything as to where you stand.

But thanks for drawing my attention to this book. You have become for me a very rich source of information. It is amazing how you stretch out your antenas into the world and come back with these signals.

All the best
hatto

On 10/17/12 5:24 AM, "Gabriel Rosenstock" <grosenstock04@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Hatto,

Thanks for latest. You ask where I stand. I don't know if I stand at all. I am Gabriel, a wingéd creature. Recently I watched a classic video of Segovia, the guitarist, playing in the Alhambra in the 70s. He talked about 'destiny' all the time. This was his destiny, to play the guitar. Forging his will was merely the shaping of his musical destiny, becoming the master player which his instincts inspired him to be.
My thinking (such as it is) is too fluid, too poetic, to actually come to the full stop which is implied in a stand. Freedom? Remember when the Americans refused to eat French fries and called them 'Freedom fries'? They give us such cause to laugh (and to weep), do they not, God love them! When it comes to freedom and the question of free will, I fall back on the insights which are covered by the Sanskrit term 'vasanas'. You and I are born with these 'vasanas', these qualities which colour our personality and give a peculiar flavour to our sensibility, our temperament, our tastes and inclinations, our great gifts and our weaknesses, our talents and latent abilities and so on. We follow these instincts as best we can. Much as I might admire the innate qualities of another, I will not follow the path of a molecular scientist or mountain climber. Nor will I follow your path, philosopher-poet. The path we walk is our path, none other. And I love straying from the path.
I suppose I am attracted to the vacum state described here by Osho:
http://www.messagefrommasters.com/Psychic-World/Destiny-Free-Will.htm

Why am I this way, why is one of my brothers this way and two other brothers are not (as far as I know)?. It's because of the vasanas! We can't blame everything on the weather!

Internet definition of vasana:

[vasana], karmic residues, unconscious propensities, disposition, habit energy, thought, habit formation, habit thought dormant, potential tendency, habitual pattern, habitual propensity, habitual tendency, impression, imprint, inclination, inherent tendency, inveterate tendency, karmic impression, karmic imprint, karmic propensities, imprints, predispositions; karmic traces, latency, latent predisposition, latent tendency, mental imprint, negative psychic imprint, potency, potential tendency, potentiality, predisposition, propensity, propensities, sediment of impressions. Tibetan synonym: nus pa, habitual patterning.

Best,
Gabriel

After that a friend of his, namely Waqas Kwaja, joined the discussion since Gabriel had forwarded to him the reply he had send to me.

Dear Gabriel,

Thanks for sharing. I am no philosopher, but to me freedom is a myth that we continually valorize (or deface) through indiscriminate usage and mindless circulation. Only someone who was all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful could be free. But is there anyone who has those qualities? I cannot even make a guess. We are poor creatures constrained and contained by our biology, our environment, and the limits of our intellectual capacity and our imagination. Though, admittedly, we don’t know yet what we can and cannot do. There are only options, again a limited number of them, and we are not even totally free to exercise our choices regarding them as well. Inclinations? And the ability and resolution to follow up on them? That may be about the best we can do, it seems to me. But even our inclinations are packaged within a circumscribed range.

One of these days we’ll actually grow wings perhaps, and then you won’t be alone laughing at us from your wingéd perch.

Warmly,

Waqas

Athens 18.10.2012
Dear Waqas,
yesterday I answered already Gabriel by saying straying off the path is a good metaphor, but it can become problematic, philosophically speaking, if that means not following your destiny. And since he invoked the term 'destiny', I made a reference to where I discuss a poem by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke:
http://poieinkaiprattein.org/poetry/katerina-anghelaki-rooke/the-role-of-the-concept-in-katerina-s-poem-destiny-also-flows-by-hatto-fischer/
I think as well everyone is a philosopher, if philosophy is understood as the art of posing in a such a way questions that the conditions under which it can be assumed to have found some answer for them can be reflected upon. That covers as well the entire field of open questions which cannot be answered completely but which do influence our concept of life.
Having said that freedom is not a myth. It is concrete. You feel and live it. That applies especially to constraints. To become free by setting yourself the constraints under which you wish to live makes you both free and creative. It is like the school boys released for the summer vacations. You leave behind the class room and while running out you can smell the lakes you will jump in and the long evenings spend by talking with your friends. There is even the need to become free from the fear to what happens during the night, when asleep, best done by staying up all night and talking with your friends while the moon dips behind the trees and morning light comes up. Or even more concretely my PhD supervisor claimed to have one advantage over his students, namely he knew the meaning of freedom after having been a prisoner of war. Since Italian when the Germans captured him in Africa, he was buried in the sand with only the head poking out. Since then he knews what is freedom. That concrete sense is more difficult in modern times with many things more abstract, so that there is a strong tendency to self inflict certain constraints, in order to replace a lack of experiencing reality.
As for wings, may I cite a poem by the Tunesian poetess Najet Adouani:

I wish I had wings
I only wish I had wings
Wings like those of the angels
so that I can fly over seas and rivers,
Hills and deserts
I ask my soul to borrow me her flames,
I need that only for a short while,
I want to walk in that glow for me.
I wish to have powerful wings,
Stronger than the wings of birds,
I need wings as vast as infinite spaces
wings as vast as history.
Yes, I wish I had wings of clay and of fire,
purple and gold, silver and tin,
iron and diamonds,
wings heavy and light.
I wish to had wings which hold me over the universe;
everywhere I can be a loaf of bread in the hand
Of a starved infantŠ
A handkerchief wipes of the tears of a bereaved of child.
A smile breaks night's fear,
A hymn of a lost Bedouin
Entertains a peace's caravan.

More poems by Najet Adouani can be found at:
http://poieinkaiprattein.org/poetry/najet-adouani/

with best regards
hatto

On 18th of October 2012, I received another letter from Waqas in which he explains his agony about the concept of freedom. He begins by citing something I said in my previous letter.

hatto wrote:

„Having said that freedom is not a myth. It is concrete. You feel and live it. That applies especially to constraints. To become free by setting yourself the constraints under which you wish to live makes you both free and creative.“

Dear Hatto,

What you write with much wisdom and depth, and I feel embarrassed to say that to me wisdom and depth themselves may be two bars of the cage I feel we live in. If freedom is a concrete, as you say, then it is already a
prison-house. And we may believe that we have the volition to set our own constraints, but really what they are depends on what we are cognizant of only. Likewise, creativity may be an expression of the impulse to be free,
but this too has its own limitations.

The person who was buried up to his neck in his imprisonment during the war has a physical sense of both the constriction as well as the material (sand) under which he is buried. Anthony Hecht in his poem "More Light, More Light" writes of such an experience where one Jew in a concentration camp is forced to dig a hole in the ground to bury another, who is then shot by the Germans, only to be himself installed in the same hole to be killed likewise next. Ask the first about freedom, and he will tell you. But the two mentioned in the poem are silenced forever from talking about their views on the subject. These are material, physical, constraints in both instances,
but they may both represent what to me is the human condition, namely, that we are all buried up to our necks in intangibles, history, convention, tradition, beliefs (including both religion and ideology), social mores and
expectations, gendered perceptions of the self, education, nurturing, class divisions and hierarchies, economic disparities, racial classifications, and so on. The Germans outside the dug holes are as much in a prison house, an
imprisoned state, as the Italian soldier or the reviled Jews inside them.

On another note, I would like to ask the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the meaning of this fabled term and concept, freedom. Or the ones whomade the decision to drop the bombs on them. Perhaps, we should also ask the Caribs, the Arawaks, the Mayans and the Aztecs, the Inuits, the scores of tribes erased from the land mass we today call the Americas, the Aborigines, the Maoris, and many, many others swept away from the face of the earth for a "mess of pottage"--the people who destroyed, degraded, or displaced them themselves envenomed and enfanged by their own constraints and limitations, fired by the prison-house of need they may or may not have fully understood.

I am afraid, I may have a rather bleak view of what we understand by the term freedom.

Warm regards,

Waqas

About concrete freedom needs to added the story told by political scientist Johannes Agnoli who said about his students at the Free University of Berlin that they have it much more difficult than he has it. He knows what is concrete freedom while they exist in a vague and abstract context. Johannes Agnoli meant by this his experience as prisoner of war during Second World War when he had fought with the Italian army in North Africa and was captured. They imprisoned him not in a cell but buried him up to his neck in sand. He knew from then on what freedom means.

As Dileep Jhaveri puts it, poetry is a constant translation even within the own language: 'eine Nachdichtung' (post-poetic creation). Something took place and then in seeking to translate this experience into words, it takes on its own wings and begins to fly out of the window. A better term for this transcription might be poetic associations which allow other thoughts or further going responses. It may not be the term exactly needed or looked for, when asking what does freedom mean to you, but by way of associations there shall be brought about a very good answer, even if it seems to be like an indirect one. Poets love to make subtle hints, while wishing to avoid the position of being a teacher especially of 'morality'. That is akin to a fisherman using a latern to attract the fish when out at sea during the night. Or else it is the Bedouin calling into the quit desert at night when even he seems to be lost and he might just get an answer back from another Bedouin equally lost.

On 10/18/12 7:06 AM, "Gabriel Rosenstock" <grosenstock04@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for sharing the poem, Hatto.

'Hymn of a lost Bedouin' hit home as a number of years ago I wrote a poem, below, with a Bedouin title, Mustanbih, which you must add to your list if you are a collector of wonderful words!

G.

Mustanbih
for Peter van de Kamp

Mustanbih: an Arabic word for a Bedouin who entices dogs to bark by imitating them, especially when he is lost in the desert at night trying to find a camp – perhaps his own camp. Often it’s not a dog but another lost Bedouin who answers him.

I am giving voice now for twenty years

and my echo – a rare thing –

has been swallowed by the last bog.

I am more lonely than the tasteless dew I drink

to keep hoarseness at bay.

I know in my wheezing heart

that it’s in endless circles I’m walking

and to tell the truth

I might as well have kept my mouth shut

stared long at the stars

and stretched out to die quietly.

My country is foreign to me.

Let them all be poured into a pot,

all those old place names, boil them

until the poison of unfamiliarity

is drained from every bitter syllable.

The blackbird speaks pure gibberish.

Plants have forgotten their own secrets.

The Man in the Moon has disappeared overseas.

The rain doesn’t cleanse my skin.

The sun after it doesn’t dry me.

Stone alignments send me astray.

Nora-the-Bog* can’t show me the way.

I have long forgotten

what signs I must watch for.

In Kerry I whined like a pup,

in Tipperary I spoke like a wolf,

in Kildare like a hunting beagle,

like a gentle hound at the Border.

At a golf course in Clare

a politician showed his teeth to me,

a man who wouldn’t know Oscar’s sword –

the Bodyslicer –

from his own golf-club.

East of Waterford, a Dutchman strings barbed wire

and a sign in English barks

KEEP OUT!

Along the Shannon’s tributaries 3,000 fish rot.

I heard a whisper in Glenasmole

that put the heart crossways in me:

Patrick, the Adze-Head, slagging off Oisín,

Oisín, son of Fionn, who spurned Heaven

without the faithful companionship of his hound!

A strain of fiddle music in Leitrim depressed me.

Badger blood glistened on a moonlit road.

A banshee in Aughrim,

at the door of a heritage centre,

combed my locks gently:

‘Dear, dear, where did you end up?’

I whooped from a cliff in Connemara.

Not even a seal answered.

A clam dropped by a seagull

down on top of my head

drove me clean mad for a week

so that I went searching for Cnú Direoil,

the lovely dwarf that Fionn owned,

all four fistfuls of him!

But he’s just about dust now,

no more than the tiny bride they found for him:

Blánaid, forgotten by her own.

Bizarre, isn’t it, this hound-language

that the hounds themselves can’t follow!

Follow they could … but they don’t want to hear.

From now on I’ll walk arseways

and out through my own tail

to where I’ll find Cnú,

his heart as big as himself is small,

charming whole worlds to sleep

with airy trick-o’-the looping fingers.

Gabriel Rosenstock

(Translated from the Irish by Paddy Bushe)

* the grey heron

Dear Gabriel,
What a fine poem! Love it. Personal note: I must remember to send you the pdf of “No One Waits for the Train.”
Waqas

What then is freedom? The freedom to associate is a gift poets make use of. It can be compared to the freedom to breathe the air, provided that air is not polluted, or even worse poisoned by all kinds of rumors, so that we cannot trust anymore the sounds we hear out there, in the streets engulfing the entire city. When looking at Athens from Lycabettou over to the Acropolis and then behind it towards Pireaus, it does remind of how the city overcame the onslaught of the Persians by not only listening to the oracle, but in interpreting the advise 'hide behind wooden boards' wisely. For the Athenians decided this meant to hide on boats, so that the burning arrows of the approaching Persians could not harm them. Marx made the brilliant remark that the freedom of the Athenians was precisely that they could return afterwards to the destroyed city and rebuild it because they had kept alive the memories of the city. Someone said memory equals the imagination and without both, man would be lost. It is the river of freedom from which the poets fetch all their associations. What more to say then when freedom is like the bird ready to sing as long as it can fly.

Hatto Fischer

Ahens 20.10.2012

^ Top

« In search of the lyrical 'I' | Poetry and philosophy in the global age »

Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Navigation

Discussion about freedom