OUTLINE OF SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH LECTURES
In these lectures, we shall approach the First Part of the course, which will deal with the Existence of free will.
1) In trying to see how the average man is commonly convinced that he possesses free will, we are led to the conclusioin that the fact that we are free is an immediate datum of consciousness.
Generally speaking, the human soul knows itself, not by its essence but through its actions, that is to say, by reversion or reflexion on its acts. In each act of intellectual judgment, the soul knows, not what it is, but that it is. In the particular case of the acts of the will, those acts are known in this way, because will is rooted in intelligence, and therefore exists in intelligence intelligibly. And the immediate reflexion of intellectual consciousness attains and knows these acts of the will in their very mode of emanating from the will, that is in their way very quality of being free. Thus consciousness knows immediately that the will is free.
The objections raised by the philosophers who deny free will against the value of that immediate consciousness of the existence of freedom originate either in a misconception of the connection between act and faculty, or in a misconception of the very indetermination characteristic of free will, or in a misconception of the transcendental relation involved in free acts.
Reflexion upon the moral behavior of mankind leads back to the same fact of the natural and immediate consciousness of free will in each of us.
2) But if consciousness knows immediately that the will is free, it does not know (in an explicit or scientific manner) what free will is. Immediate consciousness of freedom is a singular and existential knowledge, which philosophy must recognize as it recognizes every fact of nature, and which philosophy is able to justify, but which does not constitute either a philosophy of freedom or a philosophical demonstration properly termed. It gives to the philosopher only a sure sign or inductive attestation. Such a singular and existential knowledge, which remains involved in the concrete and cannot be intelligibly worked out, has the significance of a pre-philosophical fact.
3) The third point, now, concerns another way of establishing the existence of free will. That other way is a properly demonstrative one, and consists in showing, not that I am conscious of being free, but that man as man must be free.
Here, proceeding in a genuine Aristotelian method, we are not yet to consider the intimate nature of free will, since we are trying to answer the question whether freedom exists, and not yet the question what freedom is. But, knowing of freedom that only which is sufficient to recognize the thing designated by this name, we have to consider the diverse categories of existing beings according to the principle from which their action emanates, in order to define from this point of view the actual class to which the human being belongs. And thus we see that man, -- because he is a being which acts by virtue of a judgment established each time not by nature, but by reason, -- and because consequently he judges of his own judgment, -- holds his own judgment in his power, when the latter concerns an act to be done; for the objective reason of the judgment is then the end to be obtained, and that objective reason does not fix univocally the judgment if the end can be obtained by diverse means.
Now to hold one's judgment in one's power is the very thing that is designated by the nominal definition of freedom (to be cause of one's self, to act without necessitation.)
4) Scientific laws are necessary: what is the significance of this assertion? The statistical laws suppose the primary laws, or laws of specific determination; and these laws express the ordering of a nature or essence to a determinate effect.
The natures or essences are abstract and universal objects of thought, which science disengages from the concrete and considers apart therefrom. Thus the scientific laws, dealing with the ordering of natures to their effects, are necessary. But the events in the world are contingent, for they belong to the order of concrete and singular existence, and depend on the coming together and criss-crossing of many natures in interaction, comings and crossings which do not, for their part, express the specific exigency of any essence or nature.
The true significance of the notion of scientific causality is that each nature tends to a certain determined effect. But rigorously speaking, the same causes never to produce the same effects in concrete existence, except in the case of a perfect machine. Mechanical causality is only a particular case of causality. It tends to imitate the necessity by right proper to pure mathematical essences.
In the world of nature the events which happen are either events of nature strictly so called or fortuitous events. Both are necessary as to the fact and at the same time contingent. The world is not a machine, but a symposium or a republic of natures.
Therefore, a free agent can exist in nature and introduce here contingent events without endangering the intelligible stability of the world nor the necessary quality of scientific laws.
The error of what is called scientific determinism consists essentially in confusing the necessary determination of each cause to a specific effect (or the necessity of the laws) with a mechanical or absolutely necessary determination of each singular event by the other events and by the very fact of the existence of the universe. That is the answer to the first difficulty against freedom mentioned in the first lecture.