2 Birds, 1 Stone: An argument against free will and Aquinas' First Way

[Mudhammam]

This is part of a larger presentation that I'm putting together for an event at school. It's a little long, but hopefully you'll find it moderately interesting. Thoughtful comments and/or critiques are always appreciated.

Meanings of Free Will 
There are a variety of senses in which people employ the terms “freedom” or “free will.” The three most common that are relevant to my purposes are: (D1) Metaphysical freedom of the will; (D2) practical freedom; and (D3) spontaneity or novelty. By (D1) I understand “freedom of the will” or “free will” in the sense that philosophers typically discuss the possibility (or lack thereof) of voluntarily action, wherein something (or someone) in possession of rational or personal agency (the “I” implicit in the idea of self-identity) either is or is not imagined to be the ultimate arbiter of its own choices in life. These might include the selection of certain dispositions for one’s self--attitudes, feelings, thoughts, etc.--or simply a next course of action. This understanding of freedom will be my central focus. It stands in opposition to different forms of determinism (i.e. physical determinism, necessitarianism, etc.), a concept that, in brief, holds the present state of affairs, including choices, to be the necessary consequence of antecedent causes and conditions over which no single individual has ultimate power or control. (D2) Practical freedom, on the other hand, is a more general notion of decision-making. It is one that we all take for granted as we go about our lives. You might consider your present location; you may likely tell yourself that you chose to be where you are at this very moment. Though perhaps you acknowledge the role of that dastardly mistress Fortune over a great deal of your life---your ethnicity, nationality, religion, parents, etc.--you would never concede that you lack the freedom to choose between say, voting for a Republican or a Democrat, or what you will eat at some later point. In opposition to practical freedom I would place restraints such as bodily imprisonment or different forms of coercion, e.g. threats against your person if you decline to act in accordance with another’s wishes. (D3) Finally, there is freedom in the sense of spontaneity or novelty. Spontaneity could include behaviors done on a whim, as when a person unthinkingly plunges into action without a moment’s worth of reflection (without apparent rhyme or reason), or it could mean something like spontaneous generation: an event occurs for which there is no efficient cause (defined by the extraordinary polymath Aristotle as “the primary source of the change or coming to rest”). Particle physicists, for example, observe a rather bizarre situation in what otherwise appears to be empty space (no energy, no matter): virtual particles “pop” into and out of existence, seemingly, at random. The key to spontaneity in the contexts that I will be using it is randomness or indeterminacy; there is nothing, and then--voila!--there is something. I contend that only under these conditions can true novelty emerge, for contrary to spontaneity is causation, or determination, wherein antecedent conditions determine or necessitate particular outcomes. 

Unmoved Movers, Self-Movers, and Moved Movers
The trouble involving the phenomena of motion harkens back to the days of presocratic philosophy in ancient Greece and the great debates between the two schools of thought known as the Ionian and the Eleatic. The former included the “materialists,” and those whom in many ways can be thought to prefigure our modern empiricists: Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and the later atomists (Democritus and Epicurus), to name a few. The latter boasted of the “rationalists,” those who turned inward, critiquing and interpreting the world primarily through deductive methods such as logic and mathematics: Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Zeno of Elea, famous for his paradoxes which seem to demand a denial of all motion in the sensible world. A great synthesis of these two opposing schools as it concerned their disagreements over motion arrived in Plato, who aligned himself with the “rationalists” in putting forth his belief that “knowledge is to be found not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them.” Plato recognized the dilemma of Heraclitus’ maxim that “you cannot step into the same river twice,” for knowledge, unlike the sensible world, requires a degree of immutability, or changelessness. Plato’s Realm of Forms or Ideas offered a solution both to the epistemic problems inherent in Protagoras’ subjectivism (“Man is the measure of all things”) and to the uncertainty that necessarily follows if the basis of knowledge lies in perceptions which are always in flux. Moreover, his Forms possessed something of an eternal quality to them, and could thereby potentially resolve the problem of an infinite regress, which motion or change seems to require (alas, the utility of his Forms ultimately received a scathing critique by none other than Plato himself in the dialogue Parmenides).

The problem of motion is this. If an object is in motion, it must always have been in motion, or it must have begun moving after having previously been at rest. This appears true enough to our common sense, if we consider how, akin to a domino effect, one outcome always leads to another in an endless succession of events. Plato was not the first to realize that motion needs a beginning term, regardless if all of past time is infinite (a suggestion that he, unlike his pupil Aristotle, rejected). Before him Thales had posited water as the “first principle” of being; for Anaximenes it was “infinite air”; Anaximander, the boundless “apeiron,” an unlimited and indefinite primordial substance; Anaxagoras posited Nous, or “Mind.” For the atomists it was void and indivisible bits of tasteless, odorless, colorless, imperceptible entities that they called atoms. Plato apprehended the situation as follows: 

“We must begin by making the following distinction: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is? The former is grasped by the understanding, which involves a reasoned account. It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perception. It comes to be and passes away, but never really is. Now everything that comes to be must of necessity come to be by the agency of some cause, for it is impossible for anything to come to be without a cause.”

From this sprung the various cosmological arguments such as were employed by the great Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas in three of his Five Ways, an attempt to establish the necessity of a so-called First Cause, or Uncaused Cause, or Unmoved Mover, by way of motion, causation, and contingency. And yet, at first glance, there is an apparent contradiction to be found when one analyzes Plato’s Unmoved Mover as defined by “the Athenian” in Laws, Book X:

“One kind of motion is that which is permanently capable of moving other things but not itself; the other is permanently capable of moving both itself and other things by processes of combination and separation, increase and diminution, generation and destruction… How could anything whose motion is transmitted to it from something else be the first thing to effect an alteration? It’s impossible. In reality, when something which has set itself moving effects an alteration in something, and that in turn effects something else, so that the motion is transmitted to thousands upon thousands of things 
one after another, the entire sequence of their movements must surely spring from some initial principle, which can hardly be anything except the change effected by self-generated motion… Self-generating motion, then, is the source of all motions, and the primary force both in stationary and moving objects.” 

For Plato, this is the (world) soul. But wait a second. “Self-generating motion” is nothing short of our third definition of freedom, i.e. spontaneity, which we contrasted with determinism by the very fact that it lacks any efficient cause (or mover). For self-motion is merely that, which Aquinas (following Aristotle) summarized by the the principle “liber est causa sui,” or, the free is the cause of itself.” However, in the First Way, Aquinas argues that

“Motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality… Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects… It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e., that it should move itself.” 

Thus, if a self-mover is that which is non-existent or exists simply in a state of rest or potentiality and then--voila!--the next moment something has been actualized, its movement activated without cause, does it run afoul of Aquinas’ objection? And though Plato defines the “source of all motions” as self-generating, doesn’t he concur with Aquinas’ view when he says that “it is impossible for anything to come to be without a cause”?

In Plato’s cosmogony, the cause of the universe, including time, is a divine craftsman he calls the Demiurge. And “why did he who framed this whole universe of becoming frame it?” In short, the reason is because “he was good and… the god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all that was visible--not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion--and brought it from a state of disorder to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder.” Hence, it seems that we have a final cause in goodness, but then we must ask ourselves: (1) In what sense could the Demiurge have begun to bring Cosmos into being from Chaos? (2) Granted that he could have started the process, what impelled him to move at one particular instant rather than another? (3) Finally, how we can still consider motion, under these terms, “self-generating” or “self-moved,” if the god is said to have been moved by a desire to bring about good? For if goodness did not come into being, then it would have always been present as an initiating cause or mover. But if that cause, which existed from eternity, was not sufficient to bring about eternal order, then we require an efficient cause to explain the change by which the Demiurge began to act at all. Otherwise we have an undetermined action on his part, in which something has been “reduced from potentiality to actuality,” but not by something actual. As this is no different than self-motion, causation is left without a role. It is essentially a claim that something arose from nothing and by nothing, viz., the impulse in the Demiurge to move or act following an eternity of rest. Furthermore, why did the Demiurge act at the particular instant that he did? Even though Plato wants to claim that time did not exist, so that terms like “instant” or “before time” do not apply, it can still be pressed that (1) the Cosmos could always have been older than its current age, and (2) the idea of timeless motion or causation is sheer nonsense.

Enter Aristotle. It would be far beyond the scope of my present aims to offer a serious examination of Aristotle’s views which could be considered relevant here. I will only touch on a few points that I think provide a solution to some of the tensions we have hitherto explored, and best demonstrate the impossibility of free will per our first definition as given above. Aristotle perceived the difficulty in asserting that there was once a time in which no time existed. Instead, he argued that the universe is eternal, but, given his views of actuality and potentiality, necessity and contingency, genus and species, etc., posited an Unmoved or Prime Mover, one that is not temporally but essentially prior to nature, or movement. An analogy that has been used many times is that of a hand pressed into a malleable surface such as sand. The hand is the cause, the impression of the hand formed in the sand is the effect, and yet, though the impression is essentially contingent on the hand, there is no reason to assume the impression to have followed the hand successively in time; one can perhaps imagine an eternal cause to be simultaneous with its eternal effect.

This resolves the issues that appeared to emerge from Plato’s account, in which the order of the universe, including time, was thought to begin following an eternity of disorder. The question that remains however, is this: “What is the actual difference between Plato’s Self-Mover and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover?” (or Movers, as he included a number of them in his metaphysics, which was, like most at the time, heavily based in astronomical observations). In other words, is there any real discrepancy in Plato’s narrative, both where nothing comes to be without a cause and the source of all motions is a cause unto itself? The Neoplatonists who came along in the 3rd century, beginning with Plotinus, argued that the conflict between Aristotle and his teacher was more apparent than real. Although there is a clear distinction between the notion of infinite time, which Aristotle asserted, and eternity as the complete absence of any duration, as Plato thought, it’s not difficult to see how these two ideas might converge. As Aristotle writes,

“When a thing moves itself it is one part of it that is the movent and another part that is moved. But it is not self-moving in the sense that each of the two parts is moved by the other part… That which moves itself… must comprise something that imparts motion but is unmoved and something that is moved but does not necessarily move anything else: and each of these two things, or at any rate one of them, must be in contact with the other.” 

Insofar as we accept Aristotle’s premises of a universe which is co-eternal with its First Cause, we avoid Aquinas’s objection that “it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect.”  If, however, we attempt to speak of the effect as succeeding the cause, wherein the effect begins to exist, then there is hardly a distinction to be made between Self-Mover and Unmoved Mover, and moreover, Aquinas’ objection, if it must apply to one, applies equally to the other. Why? Because a mover that is itself unmoved (by another) is merely a mover that moves itself, or rather, it is a cause that is simultaneous with its effect. The criticisms levelled against an Unmoved Mover which acts at a definite moment in time, even if this is conceived to be the absolute beginning, say “t=0,” remain the same as those stated above, and can be restated as follows: If we grant that “that which moves itself… must comprise something that imparts motion but is unmoved and something that is moved,” but then say that this partition by which the “something that is moved” began to move or exist despite the eternal presence of its movent (i.e. mover), we require an additional cause or mover to explain that change, or we have self-motion. If we say that the partition did not begin to exist, but that the part of the Unmoved Mover which was eternal included within itself the other part which was temporal, then it must follow that the unmoved part was unable or unwilling to act as the mover at some prior instant (by instant I understand the point of contact, or the transition from eternal rest to an initial movement), and then it would always have been inactive; or, it has always acted, without further conditions, i.e. on account of its nature, necessarily, and this means that temporality is also necessary, which is identical to infinite time as Aristotle argued. The intersection where the unmoved and moved parts of the so-called Unmoved Mover converge is located at the crossroads of beginningless time and timeless duration. The difference between Unmoved Mover or necessary being, i.e. something which exists simply and necessarily, and Self-Mover or being, or that which is the cause or mover of itself (in the sense of spontaneity), is the absence of successive change defining the former, and temporality defining the latter.

It might be objected that intelligible objects, such as apprehended desires, are a type of Unmoved Movers, and possess utility beyond that of a sort of vague Aristotelian first principle. Goodness, for example, is an ideal that has the ability to move but is not itself moved, and it takes effect “at a definite moment in time.” This may be the case. However, as the gifted Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali observed, speaking in the context of the “eternal will” (granted it is “of the same category as our resolve”):

“As regards habitual things, what is brought about through our intentional act is not delayed after the intent when the intent exists except by an impediment. Once the intent and ability are realized, [all] obstacles being removed, the delay of what is intended is not rationally intelligible. This is only conceivable in the case of resolve because resolve is not sufficient for the existence of the act. Indeed, the resolve does not produce writing unless an intent is renewed, this being a renewed upsurge of motive within the human at the time of act. If the eternal will belongs to the same category as that of our intention to act, then, unless there is an impediment, neither the delay of what is intended nor the [temporal] priority of the intent are conceivable… Moreover, the very same difficulty persists in [that the question still] arises concerning the upsurge, intention, will, or whatever you wish to call it: why did it occur now and not earlier? [The consequence is that] there would be either a temporal occurrence without a cause, or an infinite regress [of causes].”

It is clear, then, that even assuming the idealization of principles or ideas, or what the scholastic philosophers would have called “immaterial substances,” such as the intellect--even assuming these to be Unmoved Movers--there is still required, given a change from one state of affairs to another, an efficient cause that can only be described as either Self-Mover or Moved Mover; this mover would be the determination by which any movement towards a good--or that by which “impediments” preventing apprehension of a good are removed--actualizes at that moment (for humans this often occurs prior to any conscious realization of the desired object). It matters not if we speak of movement in the context of mental or physical states. The objection I raise here is identical to that which plagued both Plato’s Demiurge myth and the account of an Unmoved Mover wherein the unmoved part is infinite or timeless, while the moved part, finite or temporal, has an absolute beginning. To free movement from such a fuzzy connection puts us in the crosshairs of Aquinas’ protests, but my reply is simply this: Even if self-motion involves “the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality,” it certainly is “only in different respects,” viz., time and place. Though it may be incomprehensible, it entails no logical contradiction. The Self-Mover is, in its own manner, unmoved.

Hence, we have come full circle. To briefly summarize:
(1) An Unmoved Mover that is one part unmoved and one part moved cannot have been ineffectual previous to its effecting movement. Whatever utility a Prime Mover or First Cause may possess, it is purely ontological. There is no sense in which motion can be successively derived from such a Mover. An Unmoved Mover is a “cause of itself,” which, if it had begun to actualize motion, would be indistinguishable from a Self-Mover. As it may only actualize motion essentially, however--and thereby necessitating that successive motion be infinite in both directions--it most certainly cannot be said to be free in any sense that would come to the aid of free will as we have previously defined the term. Its potential to render assistance is on par with an Eleatic denial of motion. Rather, an Unmoved Mover requires all motion to be necessary, or actual, as I shall discuss shortly.
(2) When speaking of phenomena that does occur in time, i.e. motion, as in physical events within and around us, or the process of discursive reasoning such as we use in making choices, there are really only two possible motions, and these, as we have already seen, were articulated correctly by Plato when he divided them by Self-Movers and Moved Movers.
(3) My argument against metaphysical freedom of the will, then, is as follows:
P1. If all motion consists of either Self-Movers or Moved Movers, there is no possibility for freedom according to D1.
P2. All motion consists of either Self-Movers or Moved Movers.
C1. Therefore, there is no possibility for freedom according to D1.

The impossibility of freedom on D1 does not preclude the possibility of D2 or D3, i.e. “practical freedom” or “spontaneity.”

[ignoramus]