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Freedom and Personality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
Is it possible to say anything on the well-worn theme of human freedom or unfreedom which has not been ahready better said by someone else before us? It may be doubted; yet it is always worth while to see whether we cannot at least set what is perhaps already familiar to us in a fresh light and so come to a clearer comprehension of our own meaning. This, at any rate, is all that will be attempted in these pages; I have spoken in an earlier essay of the “practical situation” in which we find ourselves whenever we have to make a decision as involving indetermination, and my purpose is simply to make it plainer to myself, and so incidentally perhaps to a reader, what I mean by such an expression. I shall start, then, by adopting what we may perhaps agree to call a phenomenological attitude to the subject; that is, I will try to describe the facts in a way which anyone who recalls occasions when he has been driven to take a decision will recognize as faithful to his experience, without imparting into the description any element of explanatory speculative hypothesis. The description is meant to be one which will be admitted to be true to the “appearances,” independently of any theory about the “freedom of the will”—to describe correctly that which it is the object of all such theories to explain.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1939
References
page 261 note 1 The Creative I and the Divine, chapter ix.
page 261 note 2 Though the use of the word “selecting” is really an understatement; often enough the investigator has quite literally to invent his crucial experiment; it is a proceeding which has never been tried before and has not even “entered into the heart of man.” He is like a man who has to open a curiously locked safe and must first forge the key he needs, not like one who has no more to do than to try one key after another out of an already constructed stock until he finds the one which fits. Hence the indispensability in the really great scientific experimenter of the right kind of imagination.
page 263 note 1 Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, pp. 305–6.
page 267 note 1 July 25, 1929. I quote from the report of the Address published by the Cape Times as revised by the author.
page 269 note 1 This is also, I take it, the real meaning of the familiar scholastic expression that the sane man is dominus sui, lord of himself. The phrase is not meant primarily to exalt us with a sense of our own importance; the sarcastic gloss of the poet, “Lord of himself—that heritage of woe,” misrepresents the thought. To understand it rightly we need to have in our minds the position of the “serf” or the vassal. They have some other person who is their dominus, and accordingly, as long as they are acting strictly in fulfilment of the directions given them by this “lord” or superior, it is he, and not they, who in fairness is to be held to account for what they do. As Trinalchio says in Petronius, in excuse of some of his own earlier misdeeds, nec turpe est quod dominus inbet. (The same thing is true equally of a military man who is simply carrying out the instructions of his superior, e.g. in furnishing the firing party for an execution; if the sentence was iniquitous, the iniquity is not that of the officer charged with putting it into effect.) But the man who is dominus sui has no “superior” by whose direction he is bound to act, and therefore the accountability for his act cannot be devolved upon anyone else. He cannot honestly put in the plea of “no official responsibility.” It was just because Hobbes held that none of us, except the “sovereign,” is in the “civil state” dominus sui that he confidently argued that a “subject” is morally obliged to commit a sin, if ordered to do so by the “prince.” The “prince” is the dominus, and the sin is therefore his and not mine.