Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

is known as the Problem of Evil, and challenges anybody who, like Descartes, believes in an all-knowing, all-powerful God. A lot goes wrong in this world. The believer’s God, being omniscient, knew it would; being omnipotent, could have prevented it. But he didn’t, so what of his perfect goodness? One response is to shift the blame onto human beings, saying that God has made them free and that evil results from their misuse of this freedom. This defence can at best be partial, since much that goes wrong cannot be attributed to human beings at all: Vesuvius buries Pompeii and its inhabitants, a tsunami devastates a densely populated coast, the Black Death ravages much of fourteenth-century Europe. But in the case Descartes is considering it is, on the face of it at least, quite plausible. God has given him the power to entertain thoughts, and then to choose whether to assent to them or not; and Descartes has sometimes chosen to assent to a thought when he did not clearly perceive its truth, so falling into error. It was his own fault, there is nothing wrong with the equipment God gave him.

15. René Descartes (1596–1650).

So Descartes’s theology requires him to believe that he has free will. And he cannot ditch his theology. Some of the reasons (or pressures) for that are cultural, no doubt, but he has purely philosophical ones as well: a perfect God who is no deceiver is essential to his escape from radical scepticism. But does he have any independent reason to believe in free will? His contemporary Thomas Hobbes objected that he just assumed it without proof. That was not quite fair, because Descartes does say one brief thing in this connection: it doesn’t really need proof, because our freedom of choice is obvious. In the fourth Meditation we read ‘we feel ourselves not to be determined by any external force’; and in another work three years later, even more emphatically, ‘we are so conscious of the freedom and indetermination that occurs in us that there is nothing we comprehend more evidently or more perfectly’.

As easy as that? Why does Descartes feel entitled to say such things? Let’s be kind enough to assume that he has not made the crass mistake of confusing ‘I am not conscious of being determined . . . ’ with ‘I am conscious of not being determined . . . ’, and jumped from the former to the latter. Remember that he is a classic dualist—a body is one kind of thing, a mind is another—and holds (see Meditation II) that we know more about our minds, and more easily, than about our bodies, or about matter in general. Suppose, as is possible, that he takes this so far as to believe that everything that goes on in our minds is accessible to consciousness.

But is even that enough for Descartes’s purposes? He is aware (just to take one point that might raise doubts) that the relationship of the mind and body is a very intimate one. It isn’t, as he tells us in a famous passage from Meditation VI, like the relation between the pilot and the ship. If the ship is damaged the pilot can see the damage, but he doesn’t feel it, whereas if our body is damaged we feel pain. How then can Descartes be so sure that the feeling ‘that he is not determined by any external force’ isn’t illusory, let alone that ‘there is nothing we comprehend more evidently or perfectly’ than our ‘freedom and indetermination’? Even if he is absolutely sure what is going on in his mind how can he be so utterly confident that he knows why? When you are very keen to believe something any old argument in its favour can strike you as a good one. It happens all around us, and catching other people doing it is quite easy. Catching yourself at it is trickier.

We move on, but two things from this visit to the 1640s will still be there when we look at the secular version of this issue: the business of praise and blame, and the notion of being affected by external factors.Hegel

Earlier (pp. 83–4) we looked at Hegel’s metaphysics in the context of his account of history. Now we can build on it to learn about his account of freedom. It can be thought of as a version—a somewhat grandiose version, but as we have seen there is nothing small-scale or timid about Hegel’s metaphysics—of the idea that to be free means not being ruled by anything external. The Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632–77), whom Hegel much admired, had proposed something rather similar a hundred and fifty years earlier.

We can begin to get the flavour, and pick up a little more philosophy on the way, by looking at something that Hegel’s great predecessor Immanuel Kant said about the source of moral obligation. (Kant was very keen on moral obligations, sometimes to the brink of fanaticism.) Suppose it is a matter of commands and prohibitions imposed on us by some higher authority, the state, the Church, or God. Then the question would arise, even if it were imprudent to ask it too loudly, why we should obey this authority. An honest answer might speak of fear of punishment and hope of reward; but this just turns morality into self-interest. We wouldn’t think too well of someone who refrains from murdering his grandmother only because he might get caught, or miss out on heaven.

Hence the attraction, for Kant, of the doctrine that morality stems from within, from reason, so that we can work out what our obligations are without some outside authority dangling a carrot and wielding a stick. We ‘give the law to ourselves’, as he likes to say—the commands are internal ones. The question ‘why should I obey them?’ is met with ‘because they are my own commands’.

So let us now fasten our seatbelts and reconnect with Hegel’s metaphysics. There was the Idea, that abstract system