Alright everyone holdya horses! :atlas: Before we go about arguing this don’t you think we should really understand Binswanger’s position? As I thought, that quote is very misleading when not in context. The Oist view of causality is that an entity acts in accordance with its nature. When Binswanger says that consciousness does not adhere to the same law of causality that matter does he is not contradicting this view. I thought very highly of this book and recommend it to everyone interested in this thread. I quote at length (brackets and errors mine):
The popular belief that there is a conflict between free will and causality stems from a mistaken conception of the law of causality. The proper view of causality, originated by Plato and Aristotle, recognizes that causality is a relation between the nature of an entity and its actions. An entity of a given kind has the properties it has, which gives it certain potentialities and no others. The actions possible to an entity are determined by its identity, by what it is.
There is nothing in this proper understanding of causality to clash with free will. Man, by virtue of his nature, has the potentiality of initiating a process of rational thought, but he does not have to actualize that potentiality.
However, as far back as the 17th century, the proper, Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of causality lost favor, and came to be supplanted by an arbitrary construct: the notion that causality concerns “events”, not entities and their actions, and that every event is a necessitated reaction to previous events. Unfortunately it was Galileo that popularized the new event-to-event view…
[skipping over a quote from historian]
This notion of causality does lead to determinism. But the event-to-event view is wrong. We do not encounter any such thing as free-floating ‘events’; actions are actions of entities. The event-to-event model of causality cannot be applied even to its proponent’s favorite case: billiard balls…
[skipping over his example which is similar to the one I used above. You can’t replace the billiard balls with eggs and expect the same thing to happen]
Accordingly, the proper understanding of the law of causality is that the actions of an entity are an expression of its identity; the interaction of entities is an expression of the identity of each. What an entity can do is determined by what it is. “The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action.”
[Here he makes a footnote indicating that this MAY be at odds with Rand’s view of causality, since he sees it as what an entity CAN do whereas some of her statements are phrased in terms of what an entity WILL do. This is, I think, where his ‘dualism’ is introduced. But I don’t know exactly what that word ‘dualism’ means historically in philosophy and I’m not sure it’s the right way to describe Binswanger’s view.]
This understanding of causality represents an integration of three concepts that are irreducible primaries: “entity”, “identity”, and “action”. We perceive entities acting. We form concepts for their actions by observing them act. We form “walking”, for instance, by observing men and animals walking. The concept of “walking” includes the fact that legs are involved in an action. Thus, we know that a billiard ball cannot walk- the action would be a violation of its identity, since it has no legs (and lacks many other requirements)…
[skipping over some stuff]
Next, by observation and induction, we discover that the material world is governed by mechanical causation. Matter as such is inert; it cannot set itself in motion. As scientific knowledge progresses, we learn that even the self-generated actions of living organisms, in their physical (non-conscious) aspects are essentially like those of inanimate objects- ie. are deterministic. The difference is that living organisms possess an internal store of physical energy, and their structure enables them to route that energy to power different types of action.
The motions of material objects, and of the material aspects of living organisms, are subject to strict necessity: whatever they do they had to do. The same matter in the same circumstances will act the same way. But the form of causation applicable to man’s consciousness is different- because man’s consciousness is a different kind of phenomenon. The nature of man causes him to have the power of choice- fundamentally, the power to focus his mind or not. By virtue of his makeup, including the makeup of his nervous system, man has sovereign control over the operation of his conceptual faculty. When a man chooses to use that faculty to pursue conceptual understanding, the action is not causeless- his choice is the cause. The same applies when he lets himself drift passively or chooses actively to evade.
Free will is a specific form of causation, not a cancellation of causality, a form of causation that arises from and depends upon the functioning of one’s nervous system and body, as one interacts with the world. [binswanger has a footnote here explaining that the relationship between mental activity and the brain is a scientific issue, and that all philosophy says is that consciousness can direct the body and the choice to focus is volitional.]
Can the choice to focus be explained causally? the answer depends on what one means by “explaining the choice”. [Harrison, I draw your attention here because I think this may be part of what you’re struggling with] The very existence of a choice between focus and non-focus can be explained causally: man, by virtue of his makeup, has such a choice; lower animals, which lack the conceptual faculty, do not have this choice. But the specific outcome of the choice- the fact that a given man chose to focus rather than not- can be explained only in the sense that one focuses for a reason: in order to be fully aware. But this reason is not a necessitating factor. It is only a potential reason; the actualization of that potential takes an act of will. At root, the actualization of that potential- ie. setting the goal of full awareness- is what the exercise of free will consists of.
What one cannot do is “explain” the choice to focus (or not to) in the sense of specifying some antecedent factor that MADE one choose the way one did. This fact constitutes a philosophical problem only for those who equate causality with necessitation. And there is no way to justify that equation. Taking causality to mean necessitation is an over-generalization from the kind of causation applicable to matter. But consciousness is not matter; it is not inert, but active. [fascinating footnote here which I am shortening: A material object is the sum of its parts, and what a material object does is also describable as the sum of what each part does. Thus, the object’s causal properties reduce to the causal properties of those parts. But consciousness is an organic whole, and the causal properties of consciousness are not reducible to the properties of its constituents (it has no constituents).] To insist that consciousness must be governed by the specific form of causation exhibited by matter is to approach man with an arbitrary, a priori commitment to materialism.
In an extemporaneous discussion of the issue, Rand said:
“The appearance of a conflict between causality and free will is due to taking causality to be only that which governs the material world. Consciousness is an existent having a nature different from that of matter. The law of causality implies, accordingly, that the type of action consciousness can take will be different.”
Free will means choice, and free will is a phenomenon of consciousness. The nature of consciousness is different from the nature of matter, and the law of causality says that different natures entail different forms of action.
What I just quoted spans several pages. I don’t know what constitutes fair use, but given that we are discussing Binswanger’s views and only two of us seem to have read this book, I think that it’s appropriate to quote him so he’s not misrepresented. I also think all of that context is necessary to understanding that quote William posted.
All that being said, I agree with him. I think that’s some fantastic stuff.