Two views of free will

Praxis, not argument

(Hello dear readers! It’s been a few weeks - I’ve been visiting some family, an activity that requires my full mental and emotional presence, so I haven’t been able to sit down and write until now. I’ve missed us.- P)

I’ve been reading this wonderful collection of philosophical essays on Buddhism and free will, and want to try and distill some of its ideas into concrete practices. My goal here is not to convince you of the existence or non-existence of free will via some argument, but rather to invite you to engage with what I’m saying in your direct experience as a kind of view. So try it out and if you are so inclined, let me know what happens.

Contract your free will

The first practice is simple - look into your experience for where the free will is. What is this feeling of will or control that we have? Start by examining the experience of considering a decision. It could be something simple, like deciding what to eat, or something complicated, like a major life decision. Notice both the reasons and the feelings that enter into your awareness while you are considering that decision. Where did the reasons and the feelings come from? Did you choose to feel the way you feel about the options? Did you choose the reasons that enter into your awareness in order to evaluate the options? You might say that the feelings and the reasons came from your self (whatever that is!) — but that begs the question. Could you choose to have different feelings, or different reasons? Try to feel otherwise, or try to have different reasons. First, where did the trying come from? If you watch carefully, can you experience the beginning of the intention to have other feelings or reasons emerge? Where did that intention come from? If new feelings or reasons entered into awareness, did you choose their contents? Where is the choosing? Keep searching and see what you can find. Is there anything like free will in your direct experience?¹

Expand your free will

You might find that while the contents of our minds are given to us and not under our direct control, there is still a feeling of agency around the act of choosing itself. Although the contents seem given to us, in some minimal way, it can feel as if there is a feeling of will associated with yea or nay — like some kind of emperor giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a proposed action. Suggestively, this minimal form of will might be what the progenitor of the Western concept of free will had in mind. The usual intellectual history is that idea of free will originated with Saint Augustine, who came up with the idea as a means of resolving the Christian problem of theodicy — i.e. how can a just God punish us for our actions (eternally, no less) if we bear no responsibility for our actions. Christian Corseru, in his article Freedom from Responsibility² , writes:

…he also uses the term voluntas (‘the will’), which he adopts from Cicero and especially Seneca, who use it to refer to the Stoic manner of assenting to a given proposition. For the Stoics, this assent to propositions of the sort, “No man can compel you to receive what is false,” has moral valence.

So one minimal account of the experience of free will could amount to this agreement/disagreement³.

However, in order for us to agree or disagree with a proposed course of action, we need space and time. By that I mean, if you are walking around in the world controlled by habitual action, or shadow, or karma (a related topic I plan to write about soon), there may not be mental space or time for you to intervene to give a thumbs down to that course of action. Consequently, the practice here is to find that space and time - the now-classic tool of mindfulness is how you can create that space. The more you engage in practices of non-judgmental observation and non-engagement / non-involvement⁴, the more you will find that there is a capacity to exercise judgment in between the moment where an intention, thought, or feeling arises, and the subsequent impulse to action. You might also examine the antecedents of some behavior based in your life history or trauma and work to release that trauma through different therapeutic modalities. The release of those habitual ways of being can unleash a torrent of energy that was previously tied up in the maintenance of those ways of being, and you may find a new capacity for taking action on that basis.

What’s actually true?

Why does it matter? Philosophers disagree, and you can find support for a variety of perspectives within Buddhist texts. What matters is the skillful application of these views⁵. When someone is behaving badly toward you, taking a no-free-will view can be skillful in order to arouse compassion. Truly, we are all prisoners of our own mental content, and people who cause great suffering are likely even more trapped than most. At a higher level of practice, it’s also the case that there is a kind of natural sense of there not being free will. Beneficial activities appear as affordances in our field of experience, as if by magic, and in letting go into the Source (Dharmakaya, Ground, etc.) we find that this primordial wisdom is in fact in charge of things. It can seem at times as though we are puppets being pulled either by our ordinary conditioning or something greater. But in neither case is there some kind of transcendental subject willing things. On the other hand, when we need to deal with the consequences of our own unskillful actions, especially when those actions emerge relationally, it can be skillful to take full responsibility for them, to accept them fully, and ultimately to grieve any pain we’ve caused others⁶. Taking responsibility can involve working with our own patterns of behavior, seeing your own role in the co-creation of recurring patterns of interpersonal conflict, and specifically setting up the environmental conditions where better behavior is more likely to arise.

1. Partly inspired by Susan Blackmore’s wonderful meditation What Am I Doing which appears in the anthology.

2. Also from the aforementioned anthology.

3. Of course, you can also observe the agreement or disagreement arise from somewhere. And you can also wonder to what extent there is truly a will involved if the desire to agree or disagree is also something that simply appears in awareness. So while getting to this point is definitely good progress and useful for the reasons I explain, ultimately you shouldn’t stop here.

4. For example in Dzogchen-inspired practices like in Opening Awareness, or even in your more ordinary secular mindfulness practices.

5. This is the so-called soteriological perspective - what set of perspectives bring us closer to liberation?

6. Grieving doesn’t necessarily require agency, of course.