Evil and the Will

In the back of my mind recently, when I wrote about a strong-willing Irish friend, was the more serious, eternally mysterious question of human evil and to what extent it results from our free will.

Of course, Hitler comes to mind. Just recently, I found an article by Ron Rosenbaum, author of a new edition of Explaining Hitler.  Having studied his subject more thoroughly than most people, Rosenbaum concludes that what made Hitler want to do what he did remains ultimately unclear.

Will power he had in abundance, and hatred. Some (Alice Miller, the Swiss psychoanalyst, among others) have argued that young Adolf's upbringing--being beaten by his father--led to violent hatred and shame, compounded by the defeat of Germany in World War I.  Others have seen Hitler as a demon or monster or madman who ultimately wanted to destroy himself and ruin his beloved Fatherland.

It is interesting for me, having taught a course in evil that put emphasis on the choices we make, to find Rosenbaum concluding that it wasn't a combination of external forces that led Hitler to become Hitler: "it required him to choose evil. It required free will."

The full source of the "continuous series of choices" that Hitler made in his life may never be understood. The author says we may never know what effect an alleged hypnotist had on Hitler after the first war. So rather than indulge in endless speculation, Rosenbaum, lacking definitive proof of the potent combination of personal and social forces that drove him to annihilate millions, concludes that "we may never know with certainty what made Hitler Hitler."

This means that some basic issues about the war and the Holocaust remain uncertain since Hitler's racial war was unlike any other. Hitler arrived on the world scene at just the right moment, in a country eager for authoritarian control and willing to participate in his evil monstrosity.

And yet the greatest evil of the modern era remains, like so much human evil, a mystery.

Freedom: Does it exist?

Sam Harris, a champion of secular, rational thinking and chairman of Project Reason, has a new little book (at only 66 pages, more a pamphlet) called Free Will. The treatise is brief, I suppose, because he thinks this major philosophical issue can easily be dismissed. Free will, as the blurb on the booklet states, is "an inherently flawed and incoherent concept."

So much for the limits of reason, which tells some thinkers that, since our behavior is determined by outside causes, free will is an illusion. It does not exist.

I have always believed and taught the opposite, using as support the philosophy of Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Camus, and the modern existentialists. Freedom of choice is basic to morality. Of course, believing is not the same as reasoning, as Harris would be quick to point out. But I like to think we have an emotional intelligence.

The reality of feelings in making philosophical judgments is nothing new. In a recent New York Times article, Gordon Marino traces the prevalence of anxiety in the work of Kierkegaard and makes an important statement: "Many philosophers treat emotions as though they were merely an impediment to reason, but for Kierkegaard there is a cognitive component to angst. It is in our anxiety that we come to understand feelingly that we are free, that the possibilities are endless."

As I understand this, the feeling of fear is a legitimate part of our known response to reality, and it tells us we are free, even though we have no control over our genetic inheritance and very limited control over the environment in which we are raised. We are conscious of the present and can make the necessary choices to continue to live as well as to do or refuse numerous things.

What does the fascinating world of neuoscience tell us about free will? As Alfred Mele, the recent recipient of a major grant to do a scientific study of free will, says, everything depends on how you define "free will." Does it mean we have not only a body with a brain but a non-physical part of ourselves called the soul or mind? In answering affirmatively to such a question, it seems to me that we have to rely on more than reason.

Michael Gassaniga, a neuroscientist, apparently believes that free will involves a spiritual (non-material) element: "some secret stuff that is you." Mele and many others may disagree with this, and the scientific question remains an open one: does the brain work in such a way that choice is facilitated? (Unknown) Do we need a non-material essence to exercise our will? (Probably not) Are we capable of having thoughts and making choices independent of any physical process? (Apprently not).

So there is no free will if you are a neuroscientist who is limited to studying the brain without considering other realities. But, as one who needs to read much more on this topic, who knows much less than it seems I do, I would say that the will is related to the soul or true self, and that the self, which is comprised of feelings and thoughts--has its own reality, independent of the body.

And I doubt if science can ever silence all the thinkers of the past who would agree with the witticism once made by I. B. Singer: "You have to believe in free will; you have no choice." Why? Because the reality of the self, not to mention the complexity of decision-making, is infinitely more mysterious than a single, rational, scientific answer--especially one reduced to 66 pages, plus notes--can hope to provide. We need to understand feelingly.

How Free are We?

Ursula Hegi, the German-born novelist and author of the best-selling Stones from the River, has a fine new novel, Children and Light, which I have recently read. It was recommended by a friend and former student, and I can see why. Hegi is a masterful stylist with a compelling narrative.

It is the story of a teacher, a young woman named Thekla, in the fictional German town of Burgdorf who worries about the boys she teaches:it is 1934, and many will be expected to join Hitler Youth groups. She doesn't want her boys to become future cannon fodder, as in the last war. She tries to get them to think: "the absence of doubt will turn these humans into beasts," she says in her narrative.

How far can teachers go in shaping the destiny of their pupils? Can teachers help prevent violence, even the suicides of their charges? Can they protect their students? These are the recurring questions she, and the reader, must face as the next war draws nearer, as Hegi wrestles with her own conflicting feelings about her German past.

Thekla's main lesson is summed up when she says, "For us, as humans, there is choice." Yet she knows that choices are difficult and complex in the real world because of fear and shame. We are not capable of not doing wrong, she says.

I recall Isaac Bashevis Singer once saying, "We must believe in free will; we have no choice." Yet the prevailing attitude of the social sciences in modern times has been to focus on the brain as the origin of behavior that is physically determined. We are not only the products of nurture but of nature, of our own biochemical systems.

Challenging this is a recent book by Michael Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. It has attracted much attention in several articles and reviews I have read because the author, a neuroscientist at the Univ. of California-Santa Barbara, believes that "we are personally responsible agents and are to be held accountable for our actions, even though we live in a determined universe."

This strikes me as a crucial statement, a valuable response to the thinking of the ages, which have usually upheld freedom of the will as essential to morality. Now we have a scientist who suggests that the origin of personal responsibility lies outside the brain. Thus he looks beyond a strictly physical basis for good or bad behavior.

These hypotheses will be challenged, of course, and discussed, as they should be; but they point up what is for me the central issue: that there is a non-material element, often called the mind or soul, that cannot be left out of any understanding of ourselves as persons or of our actions. It is refreshing to see that Gazzaniga apparently prefers to go beyond physical determinism and remain open to mystery.

I suppose he would agree with Singer that we have no choice but to believe in free will. Not to believe in freedom, it seems to me, can lead many to blame God, nature, or society for human evil. Not to accept complexity and an element of mystery seems simplistic.