Simply Sartre by David Detmer

Author:David Detmer [Detmer, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO009000, PHI046000
ISBN: 978-1-943657-43-8
Publisher: Simply Charly
Published: 2020-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

4

Freedom

As a philosopher, Sartre is known, above all else, as a defender of freedom, and as an opponent of determinism. The main determinist argument is simply that all events are ruled by the principle of causality, and that this must also therefore be true of human actions, since these are events. In challenging this argument, Sartre did not dispute the premise that all events are caused. Instead, he attempted to show that actions are not mere “events.”

According to determinism, the future is not really open, but rather is fixed now. What happens next will result from what is going on now, just as the events occurring now are doing so because of what transpired in the past. This thesis of determinism by universal, unbroken causation is not to be confused with fatalism, or the doctrine of “predestination”—the radically unscientific view that everything must unfold in a certain way in order to conform to some pre-established “plan” that we are powerless to alter. On the contrary, determinism, if anything, is a hyper-scientific doctrine under which everything takes place strictly in accordance with physical laws. According to this view, there is a causal explanation for everything that happens, such that nothing other than what did in fact happen could have happened, given the antecedent conditions and the application of the relevant physical laws. Similarly, in this view, all the “choices” that you make are in fact necessitated in this same way and could not have been other than what they in fact turned out to be. Even if the choice seems very much to flow from you, rather than from any external causal source—you did exactly what you wanted to do, because of your desires, concerns, principles, and character—a determinist will still insist that these seemingly subjective and personal factors are themselves the necessary effects of prior causes. You have the character you have, with its characteristic desires and priorities, precisely because of a complex causal nexus that includes your genetic inheritance and all of your life experiences up to now—with each of these factors, in turn, having come about as a necessary result of past causes.

Note that when we are dealing with purely physical matters, we always assume that there is a causal explanation as to why things happen the way they do. If the car won’t start, we do not accept as an “explanation” that it was a random, uncaused event, a break with all prior chains of causality, the absolutely novel first step in a new chain, a bold venture into an open, undetermined future. Rather, we investigate and we find, for example, that the lights were left on all night, draining the battery. Once we discover this, we not only know why the car didn’t start, but also that it couldn’t possibly have started. The dead battery was a causal antecedent that brought about not a mere possibility, but a necessity—it couldn’t have been otherwise.

Why should we assume anything different about human actions? They, too, appear not to

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