Necessity or Freedom? The Politics of an Eighteenth-Century Metaphysical Debate

N ecessity o r F reed o m ? T h e P o liticsmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB o f an E ig h teen th -C en tu ry M eta p h ysica l D eb a te A R A M V A R T A N I A N The pre cise re lationship between necessity as a metaphysical or moral concept and freedom as a civil and political principle is a subject open to speculation. W hile the one need not, in strict logic, preclude the other, there is at least plausibility in the common belief that a morally free agent is, by the nature of things, fit to be also (within prescribed limits) a politically free agent; and that, conversely, a human being incapable of free choice would have no true claim to the exercise of political liberty— indeed, that the notion of such liberty has something gratuitous and absurd about it when applied to a be­ havioral automaton. Thus, even if the ideas of metaphysical necessity and political freedom are not formally in contradiction, their incon­ gruity is apparent to ordinary reasoning and is reinforced by semantic and psychological habit. If, to illustrate this point, we take the early case of Hobbes, we are impressed by the cogency of his general out­ look. Anticipating several philosophes o f the eighteenth century, Hob­ bes was, of course, a mechanical materialist who denied that thinking and action could in any proper sense be described as free. He argued, 153 154 / ARAM WVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA V A R T A N I A N instead, that these resulted from corporeal movements that put the individual, whether he knew it or not, under ceaseless constraint. The Hobbesian politics turned out to be of a piece with his vision of a human nature ruled by necessity; for in that sphere, too, freedom became an idle word, and the outcome of all political initiatives was seen as determined by superior force among competing “bodies” in collective “motion.” Compatibly with this, Hobbes left little or no place to any consideration that the subjects of his Leviathan might possess natural freedoms or inalienable rights. In taking a historical leap to modem times, a similar pattern of ideas may easily be observed. We find that apologists of dictatorial government prefer to picture men, not as metaphysically (and therefore immutably) free agents responsible for their choices, but rather as passive participants in poli­ tics, swayed and driven by a complex of external and impersonal causes— historical, national, economic, environmental, physiologi­ cal, etc.— that dispose of their wills despite themselves. By contrast, in those societies where political liberty is a long-established fact, the dominant ideology, whatever its local version might be, takes for granted that human beings, despite all the pressures of circumstance acting on them, retain a margin of personal choice in their decisions. And one finds, in use among such peoples, an everyday rhetoric that intimately joins the notion of moral freedom to that of political and civil liberty. I have insisted on what may seem an obvious thought-structure in order to set in sharper relief the inversion of this normal paradigm during the Enlightenment, particularly in France, where several philosophes— La Mettrie, Diderot, D’Holbach— who advocated, each in his way, freedom as an intellectual, religious, civil, or political goal, also categorically spumed it as a metaphysical and moral concept. The beginnings of this anomaly were in Spinoza. The great systematizer of determinism (or fatalism e, as it was called in eighteenth-century France) had, without any visible twinge of self-contradiction, warmly approved the Republican and liberalizing tendencies of Dutch politics in his day. A like paradox runs through the story of his life. One wonders why, if Spinoza was inclined to respect necessity in all things, he had not resigned himself to the fate of being a Jew. His excom­ N ecessity o r F reed o m ? ImlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG 155 munication was, in effect, a drastic act of liberation. In that case, did his later espousal of determinism, in ter alia, spring from a desire to vindicate after the fact the course he had all too freely chosen? For, as everyone knows, the...