Hospers & Free Will

The traditional definition of free will is the ability to make unconstrained factors. The concept has been typically been derived in regard to metaphysical discussions; yet free will in itself has many other implications outside of the realm of the metaphysical such as ethical, legal, moral, religious and scientific. Free will has been heavily debated, discussed and written on through history. Writer, John Hospers, in his essay "Meaning and Free Will," expounds upon the topic of freedom, free will and what these exactly mean.

Hospers begins his discourse on the most obvious conception of free will, in which an act is essentially free if it is a voluntary act. Yet, the term voluntary in itself, he proclaims, must be defined and that is where the murkiness within the scope of free will and its meaning begins. For Hospers, the term voluntary must be refined and more concrete in definition due to the misconception that many have regarding free will. "It is a matter of what meaning we are giving to the word" (Hospers). Thus, how an individual views free is what is free to them. Hospers proclaims that free will is not necessarily free as many advocate it to be or rather there are certain aspects of free will that are free and some that are not. "If it is we and not our acts that are to be called free, then the most obvious reflection to make is that we are free to do some things and not free to do other things" (Hospers). It can, therefore, be said that Hospers agrees with the notion of free will but is not explicitly convinced that all things are free or that individuals can freely act as they so fit.

To support and theorize his point, Hospers mentions free will criterion laid out by G.E. Moore and Schlick. Hospers notes that "Schlick says that free will is the scandal of philosophy and nothing but so much wasted ink and paper, because the whole controversy is nothing but an inexcusable confusion between compulsion and universal causality" (Hospers). Hospers disagrees with this thought but rather notes that free will has nothing to do with compulsion. Hospers agrees with Schlick that there is some form of uniformity with every act, but states that free will is not as cut and dry as Schlick presents it to be. When discussing G.E. Moore's criterion, Hospers, maintains that Moore's viewpoint is that "we are free to do an act if we can do it if we want to; that which we can do if we want to is what we are free to do" (Hospers). Hospers expresses that Moore's point is that a person is free with respect to a given action if he can it if he so chooses to do it. Yet, that is not freedom for Hospers or rather is a distortion of freedom; which is why Hospers states that only certain acts are free and others are not.

Hospers's essay causes the reader to ask the question "is every choice we make determined by past events ultimately beyond our control? And in what sense does the answer make us free or unfree?" (Ash). Here again, the definition of human freedom is one of relaxed vacillation because it merely depends on whom you talk to and their definition of free will and what it is. Hospers adds that there is a psychoanalytic doctrine that can be applied to the concept of free will. "The conscious life of a human being, including the conscious decisions and volitions, is merely a mouthpiece for the unconscious - not directly for the enactment of unconscious drives, but of the compromise between unconscious drives and unconscious reproaches" (Hospers). Here, Hospers brings out the psychological id, ego, and superego discussion and relates it to free will. Hospers adds that the unconscious is the determining factor in impulses and therefore, free will actions.

Moving into the meat of his argument, Hospers brings in examples of both murder and a woman facing decisions to remarry to prove his point about unconscious motivation. "A man is faced by a choice: shall he kill another person or not? [Is this free choice?]....a woman has married and divorced several husbands, is [now] faced with a choice for the next marriage. She may take considerable time to decide the question" (Hospers). Hospers rips apart the word, decide in order to get the reader to try and ascertain that man freely decides every time there is a decision made. It is difficult here to understand whether Hospers agrees that man's past events dictate future decisions or not. Hospers seems trapped in the discussion on the unconscious to prove his logical premise. From Hospers' perspective, the psychoanalytical approach to free will is a mere illusion.

As Hospers reaches his conclusion on free will, he reasons that "we talk about free will and we say yes, that a person is free to do so and so if he can do if he wants to and we forget that his wanting to is itself caught up in the stream of determinism, that unconscious forces drive him into wanting or not wanting to do the thing in question" (Hospers). Hospers, essentially, seems to believe that an act is free "if it were not compelled or coerced, however, he doubts that actions can ever be uncompelled or uncoerced" (Coffin). Here, Hospers seems to untrap himself from the unconscious discussion and contends that behavior is a tug of war between the unconscious and an external force that forces an individual to choose whether he/she will perform an act or not. It can then be said based on this, that for Hospers, he partially agrees with the psychoanalytic thought despite calling it an illusion.  

Hospers is somewhat convincing in his application of the connotation of free will. There are points within his essay that might cause the reader to question Hospers' own conclusion regarding free will given the progression from Schlick to Moore to psychoanalytic dialogue. His viewpoint is not clear cut but is more of an evidentiary diatribe. Hospers seems to want to have it both ways: he believes free will is free will only to a certain extent. This in itself makes his entire thesis only fairly persuasive. 

Works Cited

Ash, Thomas. "Do We Have Free Will?." Big Issue Ground, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2013. <http://www.bigissueground.com/philosophy/ash-freewill.shtml>.

Coffin, Trevor. "Against Psychoanalysis as a Basis for Determinism." HubPages Inc., 2013. Web. 27 Apr. 2013. <http://trevorcoffrin.hubpages.com/hub/PsychoanalysisDeterminism>.

Hospers, John. "Meaning and Free Will." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.10, No.3., 1950. 719-724. Print.