[lit-ideas] Re: The Institution of Slavery and the Concept of Free Will
- From: jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2011 19:28:05 -0400
Donal McEvoy wrote:
Donal McEvoy.
I agree. Here below, these views by Popper relate:
My comments are interspersed in English:
Popper's early views on 'free will' were owed mostly to a British
scholar surnamed Compton --especially after Popper was selected to give
the first Compton Memorial Lecture in 1965. "I found myself not knowing
who Compton was." In Austria, where Popper comes from, it is assumed
that a lecture in memory to X has to be about x.
Popper then said:
"The idea that the only alternative to determinism is just sheer chance
was taken over by Schlick, together with many of his views on the
subject, from Hume, who asserted that 'the removal' of what he called
'physical necessity' must always result in ‘the same thing with chance."
Popper was offended by a "novel" written by Schilck: "Frill", or Free
Will as a pseudoproblem"
Popper went on quoting from Hume:
"As objects must either be conjoin'd or not, . . . 'tis impossible to
admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity.’ "Hume's
and Schlick's ontological thesis that there cannot exist anything
intermediate between chance and determinism seems to me not only highly
dogmatic (not to say doctrinaire) but clearly absurd; and it is
understandable only on the assumption that they believed in a complete
determinism in which chance has no status except as a symptom of our
ignorance", but "Freedom," Popper "is not just chance but, rather, the
result of a subtle interplay between something almost random or
haphazard, and something like a restrictive or selective control."
Achilles disagreed. The Greeks did not fight for _freedom_; they fought
for _life_. Indeed, to many of them, an enslaved life was worse than
death. (The fact that Achilles also said, "I rather be a hired labourer
than the King of Hell" confused a few. "Why did he not say, "I´d rather
be a SLAVE"? The implicature, by Achilles, was that slaves led more
comfortable lives than a few hired labourers he apparently knew.
Popper then went to associate himself with another Brit: Sir J. Eccles.
It is with Eccles that he wrote:
"New ideas have a striking similarity to genetic mutations. Now, let us
look for a
moment at genetic mutations. Mutations are, it seems, brought about by
quantum theoretical indeterminacy (including radiation effects).
Accordingly, they are also probabilistic and not in themselves
originally selected or adequate, but on them there subsequently
operates natural selection which eliminates inappropriate mutations.
Now we could conceive of a similar process with respect to new ideas
and to free-will decisions, and similar things."
By "free-will decisions" in the "Q-A" section of the debate he wrote,
"You know, decisions which are free."
But a slave has free-will?
"You are begging the question," he said, adding, "and begging is not
respectable."
Popper goes on to say, "That is to say, a range of possibilities is
brought about by a probabilistic and quantum mechanically characterized
set of proposals, as it were - of possibilities
brought forward by the brain. On these there then operates a kind of
selective procedure which eliminates those proposals and those
possibilities which are not acceptable to the mind.""
In the Q-A section of the debate, Popper was unable to show how "free",
which we use to mean "not enslaved" relates to all that theoretical
psychobiological stuff he was bringing in. "I'm not a historian," he
remarked. "My thoughts on free-will are meant _philosophically_."
At Cambridge, for the Darwin Lecture, he, yet again changes his mind,
or rather made up his mind differently. He had been critical of the use
of "selection" in Darwin's famous slogan, "Survival of the fittest",
which Popper had thought "analytic" and "pretty vacuous at times."
Jjust in time to honour Darwin properly for the Memorial Lecture, he is
candid abou it:
"The selection of a kind of behavior out of a randomly offered
repertoire may be an act of free will."
In the Q-A section of the debate, he elluded the question about Popper
committing what Finlay had called the "free-will error" ("It is wrong
to suppose that any activity is done voluntarily").
Popper went on:
"I am an indeterminist; and in discussing indeterminism I have often
regretfully pointed out that quantum indeterminacy does not seem to
help us; for the amplification of something like, say, radioactive
disintegration processes would not lead to human action or even animal
action, but only to random movements. I have changed my mind on this
issue. A choice process may be a selection process, and the selection
may be from some repertoire of random events, without being random in
its turn. This seems to me to offer a promising solution to one of our
most vexing problems, and one by downward causation".
The problem with Popper's discussion on free will is that he fails to
address the "sociocultural" institution of "slavery" that gave Western
civilisation free will.
It is not remarkable that McEvoy follows Popper "au pied de la lettre.
D. McEvoy, like Popper before him, doubts that an examination of the
institution of slavery, as it existed in the society which gave us the
expression, 'free will' (prohaiesis eleuthera, thelesis eleuthera",
vide "A free will", M. Frede 2011), as coined by Epictetus, a former
slave, is irrelevant for the philosophical discussion of free will.
Epictetus has a good one on this, as Geary recollects:
As his master was inflicting corporal punishment on him, he uttered,
"You will twist my leg".
The world being "determined", that did come to "happen". Epictetus
commented, coldly, "I told you you would twist my leg".
Similarly Oenomaus, when noting Chrysippuss's weakening the claims of
determinism (in Leucippus -- and cfr. Popper's weakening the claims of
determinism for indeterminism in his "Darwin College" lecture -- on
'free' will, above) thought that a new term was in need: the will would
be half-enslaved (hemidoulia).
In "The discovery of freedom in Ancient Greece", Brown professor of
history (elaborating on his Habilitationsschrift) wrote:
"Freedom was such a basic precondition of noble status that the elite
did not even think of it."
In fact, Hecateus did think of it. For Hecateus, as Heodoto has it, had
claimed, to everybody's scorn, that, "originally, the Greeks had no
slaves" (especially Athenians when constructing the old walls of the
old city).
Hecateus's point is hard to prove, or falsify, for Popperian matters.
The fact that Mycenaean civilisation employed 'doulos' and 'eleutheros'
is yet a red-herring, too, in that they apparently used those terms
with a different 'use' as we are familiar reading Greek, and where we
translate them as 'slave' and 'free'. For example, the archbishop of
Mycena was called "doulos theou". A servant of God. Surely
metaphorical. Ditto Gowers ended his letters, "Your obedient civil
SERVANT", not meaning it.
Homer, for example, uses 'dmos', not 'doulos' -- where 'dmos' derives
from the verb, 'to tame', and thus translates as 'the tamed' one. But
there are no slaves in the "Iliad". (There are female slaves in
Odyssea. Ulysses (or Odysseus) is said to have killed the fifty of them
he had, because they had "misbehaved". He hang them. Those were
_brutal_ times).
The author of "The discovery of freedom" goes on to suggest that we
concentrate then also on other terms which may be as useful as
'freedom': 'autarkeia', for example. And I agree. Autarkos means, you
set your own principles. Aristotle's idea of the "auto-mobile", a
self-governing agent.
The classification of 'slaves' and 'free' ones could be complex in
Ancient Greece, as most things were. Anyone familiar with the Greek
language knows that there were the "apetairoi", even in Sparta, This
was an oxymoron, as they were freemen "not integrated into the civic
organisation" -- The Romans understood the notion as "sine suffragio",
as when an "alien" in a country has no voting rights and then is not
"free" in the Hegelian usage of the expression. But then there was the
"katakeimenos", another oxymoronic notion, indended to label a free man
who "is no longer, because he pledges his person in payment for debt".
His price was distributed in "drachmai", the circulating coin in Athens.
There was also the "nenikamenos", another oxymoron: a free man
condemned for debt and "handed over in bondage to his creditor". Some
nenikamenoi were able to buy their freedom back, "for a few drachmai",
though. (Vide Foucault, "Prisons in Greece, and what they mean to us").
As we travel to England, it is difficult to say the situation improved.
Pope Gregory named the Angles "angelic" as he saw a couple of them in a
cage, where they were being sold as slaves in Rome. Ireland was a good
destination for a lot of slaves. Slaves who could knit were
appreciated, since they could perform that activity well after they had
lost the ability to perform others.
In England, a "theow" was a slave -- not a "servus", as in the
Continent --, In "Slavery in the British Isles", an Oxford scholars
quotes a report by Aelfric of such one. On being questioned about his
duties, the "theow" replied, "I must fill the bin of the oxen with hay,
and water them, and carry out the dung. Ha, ha! hard work it is,
because I am not free".
The Danelaw brought some order to the proceedings. But legal codes have
to be read "with a pinch of salt", as Grice says ("To imlpicate is to
write between the lines, and I expect to be "read" between the lines"
-- If in Greece a law went, "No slave should fall in love with a free
person", the implicature was that many did; for surely you wouln't have
a law, "It shouldn't rain on Saturdays.").
A Danelaw codex reads that "a father, if compelled by necessity, has
the power of giving into slavery his son for seven years." There is an
addendum, in manuscript, which reads, "After which term, he has no more
power of doing so -- not without the consent of the son." The Danes
were more civilised than the Angles, on the whole. (The paradox of the
self-enslaving son was taken up by Hintikka).
Similarly, a register in Dartmouth, Yorkshire, reads: "A youth of
fourteen can make himself a slave." Fourteen was the time needed for
the mastery of Anglo-Saxon and surely an iliterate slave was less
worthy. What puzzled Buckle, in "The history of English civilisation",
was, this from the Doomsday Book:
"Brightmaer purchased the freedom of himself for two pounds." ("It is
not clear if he means "pounds of" what").
McEvoy thinks it all boils down to simplistic scenarios. Consider,
"The thief forced me to give him my wallet." "Surely you could have
challenged him". "And get shot?". "I mean, there is no need to go
hyperbolic and say "forced"".
Similarly, McEvoy writes:
>insofar as slaves preferred slavery to honourable suicide it could be
(and was) argued that remaining a slave was an act of "free will",
albeit of a very fractionalised or fettered kind."
This should open a new line of argumentation, but it doesn't unless
McEvoy provides the reference as to who was the first to argue that
way. It couldn't have been the Catholic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe
when she wrote (in her often reprinted "Soft determinism") about her
'being chained up' to be a denial, "as everybody would agree", of her
'free will', Rogers Albritton replied:
"I do want to dispute, first, what Anscombe thinks "_everyone_ will
allow." *I* don't allow it. I don't see (do you?) that my freedom of
will would be reduced at all if you *chained me up*."
Albritton goes on: "You would of course deprive me of considerable
freedom of movement if you did that; you would thereby diminish my
already unimpressive capacity to do what I will. But I don't see that
my will would be _any the less_ free."
Albritton went on to describe Anscombe's views, as he hung his head
down low and said, "Oh!, poor Miss Anscombe in chains."
And so on.
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
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