Free Will by Ilham Dilman

Author:Ilham Dilman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-06T17:10:16.605254+00:00

9

HUME AND KANT

Reason, passion and free will

1 ‘Passion and reason, self-division’s cause’

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound;

What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?

Passion and Reason, self-division’s cause.

Fulke Greville

bless’d are those

Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core

Shakespeare

Fulke Greville speaks of the will as inevitably divided between reason and passion. Shakespeare takes such a division seriously but, through Hamlet, he recognizes the possibility of reason and passion being united in a man’s will and purpose.

Hume denies the possibility of such a conflict. He represents the will as inevitably determined by the passions, with reason as their slave. Kant allows this as a possibility, but claims that the will can and ought to be determined by reason, with the passions subordinated to its sovereign demand. Neither Hume nor Kant, however, can see the possibility of reason and passion being

‘commingled’. The question which they pose is this: Is the will inevitably determined by the passions? Is it possible for reason to overcome the passions? Behind Hume’s and Kant’s diametrically opposite answers to this question lies a dichotomy to which they both subscribe, namely the view that reason and passion are exclusive categories. Since for Hume reason is inevitably

‘inert’ there is no question of the will’s conforming to reason in opposition to the passions. But for Kant ‘conformity to reason’ and ‘subjection to passion’

represent two exclusive and exhaustive conditions of the will, and indeed of humanity, and he favours the former as alone providing the condition necessary and sufficient for the autonomy of the will.

This question of the conflict between reason and passion over the control of the will is an old one. Plato was concerned with it when he asked whether pleasure and fear are the ultimate motives of human action and he tried to bring out the role which men’s ideals and their conceptions of the worth of things play in their lives. He argued that when considerations of pleasure usurp the position of reason in a man’s life they become destructive of the possibility of a man thinking for himself and acting on his own behalf. He was deeply interested in the question of what underlies the possibility of selfcontrol, and he believed that it involves the use of thought and criticism.

The same preoccupations run through Spinoza’s Ethics. There he is critical of Descartes’ ‘voluntarism’, the view that selfcontrol can be achieved by determining one’s objectives through reason and pursuing them with resolve.

He believes that such a view ignores the empire of the emotions in human life.

Yet he does not subscribe to the dichotomy which drove Hume and Kant in opposite directions, and he differs from Hume in his account of emotions. He thinks of them as forms of thought which give rise to dispositions to respond to their internal objects in certain ways.

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