Epictetus was not metaphorical

by JLS
for the GC

"In his youth the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus was a slave. His real name is unknown; Epictetus means "acquired.""

An examination of the institution of slavery, as it existed in the society which gave us the expression, 'free will' (prohaiesis eleuthera, thelesis eleuthera", vide "A free will", M. Frede 2011), as coined by Epictetus, a former slave, may turn to be somewhat relevant to the philosophical discussion of free will. Epictetus has a good one on this.

"You will twist my leg", he said to his master. That came to happen. Epictetus went on, "I told you you would twist my leg". Oenomaus, when noting Chrysippuss's weakening the claims of determinism (in Leucippus -- and cfr. Popper's weakening the claims of determinism for indeterminism in his "Darwin College" lecture -- on 'free' will, thought that a new term was in need: the will would be half-enslaved (hemidoulia).

I read from "The discovery of freedom in Ancient Greece", by a Brown professor of history (elaborating on his Habilitationsschrift): "Freedom was such a basic precondition of noble status that the elite did not even think of it." In fact, Hecateus did think of it. He once claimed, to everybody's scorn, that, "originally, the Greeks had no slaves" (especially Athenians when constructing the old walls of the old city). Hecateus's point is hard to prove. The fact that Mycenaean civilisation employed 'doulos' and 'eleutheros' is yet a red-herring, too, in that they apparently used those terms with a different 'use' as we are familiar
reading Greek, and where we translate them as 'slave' and 'free'.

Homer, for example, uses 'dmos', not 'doulos' -- where 'dmos' derives from the verb, 'to tame', and thus translates as 'the tamed' one.

The author of "The discovery of freedom" suggests that we concentrate then also on other terms which may be as useful as 'freedom': 'autarkeia', for example. And I agree.

The classification of 'slaves' and 'free' ones could be complex in Ancient Greece. There were the "apetairoi", even in Sparta, I believe, i.e. freemen not integrated into the civic organisation. Then there was the "katakeimenos" -- a free man who is no longer, because he pledges his person in payment for debt. Also the "nenikamenos", a free man condemned for debt and handed over in bondage to his creditor.

As we travel to England, it is difficult to say if the situation improves. A "theow" was a slave, and this online study on slavery in the British Isles, mentions a report of such one. "I must fill the bin of the oxen with hay, and water them, and carry out the dung. Ha, ha! Hhard work it is, because I am not free!". One also reads in the same study of a law in those days: "A father compelled by necessity has the power of giving into slavery his son for seven years, after which he has no more power of doing so without the consent of the son." and that "a youth of fourteen can make himself a slave", or that "Brightmaer purchased the freedom of himself for two pounds."

It may be argued, as it has, that "insofar as slaves preferred slavery to honourable suicide it could be (and was) argued that remaining a slave was an act of "free will", albeit of a very fractionalised or fettered kind."

This seemes to open a different line of argumentation. I wouldn't know who the first to argue, as it is noted he did, was. But the point has to taken 'with a pinch of salt'. When G. E. M. Anscombe ("Miss Anscombe") wrote about 'being chained up' to be a denial, "as everybody would agree", of 'free will', Rogers Albritton replied as follows:

"I do want to dispute, first, what Anscombe thinks "_everyone_ will allow." *I* don't allow it. I don't see (do you?) that my freedom of will would be reduced at all if you *chained me up*."

Why? Well, quite naturally, Albritton goes on: "You would of course deprive me of considerable freedom of movement if you did that; you would thereby diminish my already unimpressive capacity to do what I will. But I don't see that my will would be _any the less_ free."

Those who attended the lecture report that, as Albritton described Anscombe's views, he hung his head down low and said, "Oh!, poor Miss Anscombe in chains."

Popper, who lectured frequently on "free will"* never addressed the topic of what the expression _means_ and opted for what it 'implicates'. His views are complex, but hardly literal, then!

* Popper's early views on 'free will' were owed to Compton, especially after Popper was selected to give the first Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture in 1965. "The idea that the only alternative to determinism is just sheer chance was taken over by Schlick, together with many of his views on the subject, from Hume, who asserted that 'the removal' of what he called 'physical necessity' must always resultin ‘the same thing with chance. As objects must either be conjoin'd or not, . . . 'tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity.’ "Hume's and Schlick's ontological thesis that there cannot exist anything intermediate between chance and determinism seems to me not only highly dogmatic (not to say doctrinaire) but clearly absurd; and it is understandable only on the assumption that they believed in a complete determinism in which chance has no status except as a symptom of our ignorance." "Freedom," he wrote, "is not just chance but, rather, the result of a subtle interplay between something almost random or haphazard, and something like a restrictive or selective control." And, with Eccles, "New ideas have a striking similarity to genetic mutations. Now, let us look for a
moment at genetic mutations. Mutations are, it seems, brought about by quantum theoretical indeterminacy (including radiation effects). Accordingly, they are also probabilistic and not in themselves originally selected or adequate, but on them there subsequently operates natural selection which eliminates inappropriate mutations. Now we could conceive of a similar process with respect to new ideas
and to free-will decisions, and similar things. That is to say, a range of possibilities is brought about by a probabilistic and quantum mechanically characterized set of proposals, as it were - of possibilities
brought forward by the brain. On these there then operates a kind of selective procedure which eliminates those proposals and those possibilities which are not acceptable to the mind." At Cambridge, for the Darwin Lecture, he changes his mind, just in time to honour Darwin properly: "The selection of a kind of behavior out of a randomly offered repertoire may be an act of free will. I am an indeterminist; and in discussing indeterminism I have often regretfully pointed out that quantum indeterminacy does not seem to help us; for the amplification of something like, say, radioactive disintegration processes would not lead to human action or even animal action, but only to random movements. I have changed my mind on this issue. A choice process may be a selection process, and the selection may be from some repertoire of random events, without being random in its turn. This seems to me to offer a promising solution to one of our most vexing problems, and one by downward causation". Similarly, the Templeton Foundation awarded a big prize to Prof. Mele that is 'bound' to 'revolutionise' our account of 'free will', and will be out there -- for 'free' and in an unbiased format!