There are a thousand things I ought to say. I can find no words.
Again he says, “Was it wrong of me to call?”
“Not at all.” I’m still tongue-tied. All I can manage is “Bernard.” It’s a new way for me to say his name. “Bernard.” I’m getting used to saying it like this. From now on, I’ll say it this way often. “Where are you?”
“In Aumessas.”
“Yes, but I mean where? What are you looking at right now?”
“I’ve walked a long way from our house. An hour. It’s the first time down here that I’ve needed to be alone. Up a wooded path on the mountainside. There are chestnut and mulberry trees here, and I’m looking out across a valley.”
On Thorkild and Vibeke’s street, the steel half-roof over the bus stop has something of the color of the sidewalk pavement, of the sky.
“I’m looking at a bus stop three houses down the street from my in-laws,” I say. “It looks like rain.”
We laugh. Something within me is shaking free. The little laugh at almost nothing feels so deep and right. It’s falling into place. It’s all falling into place.
“Thank you for calling, Bernard. I’m really glad you called. Really, really glad.”
~ ~ ~
INTRODUCTION
In the 60 pages that follow, you will find articles addressing one of the most highly debated questions in metaphysics (which is itself one of the most controversial disciplines in 2,000 years of Western philosophy).
Almost every major philosopher has expressed an opinion about how much we decide our own actions ourselves. If everything is predetermined by an almighty God or by the laws of nature, how then can the individual be free? Regardless of whether we conceive of our actions as being immutably arranged by a god, by our genes and upbringing, or by the fundamental physical laws governing the atoms we are comprised of, the essential nature of the question remains unaltered.
Yet the opposition between everything being predetermined and man being master of his own actions is not so simple. Many philosophers do not consider the two ideas to be in conflict at all.
In 1814, the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a vast intelligence that knew every natural law as well as the precise location of every constituent of the universe, and he wrote that such an intelligence would be able to calculate every event at every juncture in time, past and future.
This thought experiment has been known ever since as Laplace’s demon, and it encapsulates the problem of free will. For someone to act freely, most people would agree that two conditions must be fulfilled:
1. The person must have the possibility of acting differently.
2. The person himself must choose how to act — he cannot merely be the last link in a chain of events that has already been set in motion and that can only occur in one way.
Even if an individual attempts to wrest himself free from his upbringing and the immediate expression of his genes, the impulse to do so must itself come from somewhere. Nothing arises from nothing, for that would violate the very nature of our universe. Every single choice he makes is made in an interaction among countless influences of varying strength — and nothing more. He is in no sense master of the struggle among these influences, so how can one say that he acts freely? Or that it would be just to punish or reward him for what he chooses to do?
Most people have an intuitive sense that they act freely and that others do so too. Yet if these same people seriously consider Laplace’s demon and the way the universe is constructed, they normally conclude that it is impossible for us to possess free will. And that it may very well be possible that what we so convincingly experience as our own freedom is in reality an illusion.
The philosophers on the following pages are some of the most influential in the modern debate on the subject, and they represent a broad spectrum of opinions. The following diagram provides an overview of their positions.
The individual possesses free will
Everything is predetermined (Determinism)
Compatibilism, or Soft Determinism Free will can exist in a deterministic universe
(Daniel Dennett)
(Harry Frankfurt)
Everything is not predetermined (Indeterminism)
Libertarianism
Free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe, but the universe is not deterministic
(Robert Kane)
(Peter van Inwagen)
The individual does not possess free will
Everything is predetermined (Determinism)
Hard Determinism
Free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe, therefore the individual has no free will
Everything is not predetermined (Indeterminism)
Hard Incompatibilism1)
The individual has no free will, regardless of whether the universe is deterministic or not
(Galen Strawson)
(Derk Pereboom)
LIBERTARIANISM
Within libertarianism, there are two major strands:
1. Metaphysical libertarianism. The individual possesses a soul independent of the physical universe and its laws of nature. This strand is sometimes bound up with religious belief.
2. Science-based libertarianism. This strand has found support in the field of atomic physics — specifically in Bohr’s quantum theory of subatomic particles, which states that not everything in the universe is determined. Electrons move randomly and unpredictably. Questions then arise about whether the movement of electrons can have any effect on human thought, and
1. Hard incompatibilists hold that the question of whether the world is deterministic or not has no bearing on the question of free will. In the diagram, this position should therefore cover both of the bottom fields.
23
Everything before us. Nothing behind us. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Bernard and I are twenty-one, we’re beautifuclass="underline" on the street people turn around behind us, the smooth skin on his chest almost without hair, my breasts taut against him. We talk at the same time and so quickly, even folks in their thirties can’t understand us. We both moved from home to the city a few years ago, and at night we leap fences into parks and look each other in the eye, letting the sounds and gaps in our voices rub up against each other till they merge into one.
And then we sing loud. Really loud! Because everyone at my school’s gone home. And if anyone can hear us anyway from the basement corridor that goes past the teachers’ small break room, with its cot, its large yielding cushions and pyramid poster, they’ll never be able to guess who’s singing and giggling and moaning and making the cot creak.
For I am the very picture of virtue. Have always been. The door here is locked. And if they can guess anyhow, we don’t care, because life stretches out before us as long as Bernard’s hard-on keeps pounding away inside me. The fall from his nostril to his upper lip, the valley between earlobe and cheek, the piers of his lashes. I grasp his lower back more tightly. Our faces are so close that we’re singing into each other’s mouth:
Twenty-one years old
And burning gas on