12.06.11

Free will, transcendental idealism, and platonic ideas

Posted in General at 1:33 pm by nemo

The discussion of free will is, despite our near mockery, a critical dialectic, and far be it from me to throw around loose change versions of free will. But then again the situation requires something more than a logical proof, which won’t be forthcoming (the problem is probably insoluble for good reasons of its own), but a kind overall view of the context of life, will, and the given of outstanding ethical contexts: these don’t arise as superflous fictions on a sea of determinism. They are intrinsic to life and the logic of life, human life. To declare on the basis of physics, or even neuroscience, that all this is illusion/delusion is itself surely delusion. Are you seriously sarying the whole theatre of moral action should be closed down because of what Laplace whispered in the ear of Napoleon. That contextual defense is not a philosophical proof, of course. But as Kant warns, that proof isn’t going to come, and it is related we suspect to a field of judgment: ignorance is required for the action/game to continue. If the game were mechanized and decisions rote the value of the system would bankrupt. A ‘last judgment’ (not the Xtian brand) in a different domain or dimension stands as an unknown in the context of those who act, and especially those cynics determined to act out protocols of evil with nihilist indifference. We can’t be sure, but we suspect, pace Kant, that the joke, the sickest of bad jokes, is on them. Faust, of course, expects to be forgiven in the end, post-Goethe. Sure? How do you spell, …ewig weiblichkeit????

Another line of thinking is the realm of Platonic ideas: are these determined by the laws of physics? Doubtful! The Platonic ideas might induce derision in many, until you consider the logic of the mathematics behind the physics.
Free will is more problamatical in that other expositor of ‘transcendental idealism’ (which is neither transcendental nor an idealism), Schopenhauer, and, ironically, the ‘will in nature’ is a generalized correlate of the laws of nature.

In the model of the eonic effect, the idea of freedom is associated with self-consciousness, as the vehicle of the will, in the transmission of action to a body. Thus much that we consider free will is partly mechanical at the point where we observe it. And in general terms, the ‘will’ has to be a kind of timeless noumenal unknown.

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