This article of mine has now been published by The Philosophers' Imprint and is available for download here. I would welcome discussion in the comments here.
Here is the abstract:
The essay offers a philosophical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory of the will, focusing on (1) Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of “willing” an action, the experience we have which leads us (causally) to conceive of ourselves as exercising our will; (2) Nietzsche’s arguments that the experiences picked out by the phenomenology are not causally connected to the resulting action (at least not in a way sufficient to underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility); and (3) Nietzsche’s account of the actual causal genesis of action. Particular attention is given to passages from Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols and a revised version of my earlier account of Nietzsche’s epiphenomenalism is defended. Finally, recent work in empirical psychology (Libet, Wegner) is shown to support Nietzsche’s skepticism that our “feeling” of will is a reliable guide to the causation of action.
In addition to Nietzsche scholars (who have been discussing these issues quite a bit lately), I hope the essay will be of interest to philosophers interested in action theory who might not otherwise be interested in Nietzsche.
Monday, September 24, 2007
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8 comments:
'Now, Nietzsche, it must be conceded, simply takes for granted that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with causal determination of the will. Why he takes this incompatibilism for granted is not hard to see, though: it is deeply embedded in ordinary moral and religious thought. As Galen Strawson has noted, the incompatibilist idea of responsibility "has for a long time been central to the Western religious, moral and cultural traditions."' (page 7)
In light of the current literature on free will (particularly its empirically-sensitive strains), is Nietzsche correct in taking the centrality of incompatibilism for granted? Does the current 'state of the art' of the aforementioned literature support Nietzsche in doing so? And, whether it does so or not, does Nietzsche have anything special to contribute to the issue as it is raised in the literature?
Dr. Leiter,
First I wanted to say "thank you" as this article has provided me with a cited authority for a similar position I've been trying to articulate in a philosophy of action class.
Second, I would say that although it seems apparent that deterministic incompatibilism eliminates the concept of "free will" as meaningful, it does not eliminate the possibility of moral sanction (or "responsibility", though I find this term more problematic, and think most concerned with this issue would allow the substitution of "sanction" or "judgment" in lieu of "responsibility").
Consider, for instance, the antagonist shark in the movie "Jaws". While it is well known and accepted that the great white shark is a "predator by its nature" and does not make meaningful "choices" to attack humans as such, it is similarly clear that its somewhat "unfree" status does not preclude the possibility that many if not most of those viewing the film assigned a level (intuitively) of "moral responsibility" to the shark insofar as many would walk away thinking/feeling that the shark was "evil" or "bad" in the moral sense, despite being well aware that the shark is not a "moral agent" in the sense humans have heretofore been considered as such.
Also, and of course Nietzsche would not have been able to anticipate this, current quantum theory suggests that "hard incompatibilism" (i.e. both free will and determinism are rejected in favor of "randomness" of sorts) is to be considered seriously as the most valid option.
A brief observation on your note 21. You write that Mele (2006) "establishes only that there is an alternative interpretation [of Libet's data], not that his [Mele's] alternative is correct." In fact Mele makes a case (a convincing one, in my view) that the common interpretation of the data is incorrect. His argument undermines the view that the early rise in RP corresponds to the subject's having an intention, or having made a decision, to move.
I haven't read this latest article yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so. I have a couple questions that i was hoping you might blog about.
I was hoping you could clarify Nietzsche's relationship (or lack thereof) with the Romantics and the Existentialists.
I know that Emerson was a major influence on Nietzsche. I haven't read much about this, but I'm assuming his "Self-reliance" was very influential on Nietzsche's ideas. Now, Emerson was a Transcendentalist, and that American movement arose out of English Romanticism, if my understanding is correct. However, I recall reading passages by Nietzsche that seem quite polemically charged against the Romantics. Is my memory simply faulty? If not, why is this? It seems to me the "Romantic hero" is similar to Nietzsche's overman.
If, as Reginster argues in "The Affirmation of Life," Nietzsche's main (or one of his main) project is overcoming nihilism through self-mastery and self-creation, why does he write against the Romantics? After all, he (for a time) fairly worshiped Wagner, and later Goethe, both influential Romantic figures.
I think of Aphorism 157 in BGE: "The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night." This seems to be reminiscent of the Romantic ideal of controlling one's destiny (perhaps a la Neil Perry in "Dead Poet's Society").
Second, what about Nietzsche's alleged proto-existentialism? You have forcefully written that Nietzsche was a naturalist, and I find your arguments convincing. However, I'm not clear why that excludes possible existentialist leanings. I am no expert on Sartre, but there seem to be at least a few striking parallels between their ideas. Perhaps I have a skewed understanding of both Nietzsche and the main existentialist currents, but it seems that self-creation is central to both. A rejection of God, religion, and traditional modes of making life meaningful are shared in common. It seems to me the main difference(albeit significant) is Nietzsche's rejection of Kantian metaphysics and Sartre's modified acceptance of it. But does this really lead to any different conclusions in terms of practical effects on how one lives?
I would very much like to see your thoughts on these issues!
Sorry for the length and unfamiliar terminology of this comment (it's an excerpt from a book ms. under review), but I think it's germane to the Libet discussion in your article.
At this point, it's necessary to address the question of intentional action. The thought of bodies politic is materialist, but not mechanistic; we want to account for the production of subjectivities via subjectivizing practices, but we do not wish to deny the reality of subjective action. Now it's no doubt true, as the situated cognition people remind us, that many of our actions are habitual and skilled and hence proceed without need for conscious control: our training has allowed a "second nature," so that consciousness is freed to plan ahead without having to direct all the details of an action (here the sports register is most clear: a skilled tennis player is thinking about what will happen in the next few strokes, not attending to weight shift, hip movement, arm extension, etc.). Nonetheless, there are case where a deliberate, conscious decision is made that directs an overall plan (even if one does not "decide" consciously to shift one's weight in striking a tennis ball, one does indeed decide to play a tennis match). Now if one adopts a linear causality (input, processing, output) framework, and concentrates on a very short temporal scale of simple muscular action, then it seems "free will" is compromised, or at least rendered problematic by some neuroscientific results. Libet 2004 summarizes a celebrated series of experiments that show that brain processes necessary for muscular activation (the "readiness potential") begin some 350 milliseconds before subjects are aware of their intention to move their arms. It seems that the true "cause" of action lies in unconscious neural processes, and that subjective consciousness merely registers the results of these processes; consciousness is thus "epiphenomenal" with regard to such action. Extending the results of these experiments can tempt some thinkers to render consciousness a completely superfluous observer in all contexts.
Two sources enable us to call this picture into question. Freeman 2000a shows how the notion of circular causality drawn from dynamic systems modeling enables us to see consciousness as a "dynamic operator," as an emergent functional structure operating in the "dynamic architecture of brain state space" (136). Importantly for our purposes in elucidating the thought of bodies politic operating above, below, and at the subjective level, Freeman puts consciousness in a nested hierarchy of emergent processes, extending "both below the level of the neuron, in the chemistry of synaptic membranes and the readout of the genome during learning, and above the global state of the hemispheres, to include self-awareness and the environment, especially the social encounters by which individual brains assimilate meaning" (136). Conscious decisions must be seen on the time-scale appropriate to intentional action, which is longer than that of readiness potentials, and involved in the ongoing life of the human as autonomous system, with its continuous history of feedback between intention and results, built up into habitual patterns of response capacities. Gallagher 2005 can be seen as picking up on Freeman's analysis at the phenomenological level. Gallagher shows that the time-scale appropriate to the analysis of intentional action is that of the act as a whole informed by consciousness, not the millisecond scale of neural processes (238-239). Focusing on the presence of feedback loops in living beings, Gallagher argues that "feedback loops that involve conscious deliberation require an extended duration equivalent to a specious present – that is, a duration that is stretched out over at least several seconds, and is experienced as such" (239; see also Varela 1999). Following Freeman and Gallagher then, we can say that a dynamic systems approach to situated cognition enables us to think the actualization phase of sense-making – the adoption of a direction for action – as sometimes encompassing deliberate intention, without compromising our commitment to a materialist, naturalistic, take on the embodied-embedded nature of bodies politic.
It occurs to me I should give the full bibliographic information for the references in my comment:
Freeman, Walter J. 2000a. How Brains Make Up Their Minds. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Libet, Benjamin. 2004. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Varela, Francisco J. 1999. The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness. In Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, eds. Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press: 266-314.
Also of interest to the issue of free will from a dynamic systems perspective is:
Juarrero, Alicia. 1999. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Dr. Leiter,
I was wondering why you didn't emphasize the reading in sec. 354 of The Gay Science as a way for Nietzsche to deal with the problem of epiphenomenalism and consciousness. I believe you indicated that it was "overreaching" in your essay..? Do you mean for Nietzsche, or for a faithful interpretation of Nietzsche?
Thanks,
Mark
On page 14 of "Episodic Ethics," an intriguing expansion upon his earlier "Against Narrativity," Galen Strawson suggests a partial parallelism between the emotional underpinnings of Diachronicity ("the Emotional Priority Thesis") and the claim that "belief in strong free will" is "perhaps best seen as a kind of conceptualized post hoc expression of the reactive attitudes, rather than as an independent element in a person's mental economy" (p.11).
He also later makes some striking claims about moral psychology -- particularly about conscience and guilt -- that may be interesting to consider in light of GM II.
Both articles are available here:
http://web.mac.com/gstrawson/iWeb/philosophy/philosophy%20publications.html
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