Why Grice connects with Hampshire and Hart but less with Berlin and Ayer

by JLS
for the GC

Grice had been born "on the wrong side of the tracks", he charmingly said ('but I could have chosen otherwise'). At Oxford, thus, he wasn't meeting at All Souls with J. L. Austin, I. Berlin (later Sir Isaiah), S. N. Hampshire (later Sir Stuart), A. J. Ayer (later Sir Alfred), and H. L. A. Hart. He joined Austin and his "Play group" (which also comprised Hampshire and Hart, but not Berlin or Ayer) only after the war.

Still, this discussion by Berlin, citing Swinburne's rather tacky line (too much reason, little rhyme?)-- 'From Hope and Fear Set Free' -- should relate.

After all, Grice gave seminars on "Freedom", never 'free will'.

"DOES knowledge," Berlin asks, "always liberate?"

"The view of the classical Greek
philosophers (as from Plato onwards),
is that it does.

"Ancient Stoics and most modern rationalists are at one on this issue."

"According to this view freedom (negative freedom) (Greek 'eleuthers') is the
unimpeded fulfilment of my true nature - unimpeded by obstacles
whether external or internal."

"In the case of the passage from which I
have quoted, the "free" (eleutheros) in question (I follow Festugihe)
is "free from mistake," that is, from false beliefs about myself, which obstruct my understanding."

"The "free"
is that of self-realisation or self-direction - the realisation by the
individual's own activity of the true purposes of his nature (however such
purposes or such natures are defined) which is frustrated by his misconceptions
about the world and man's place in it."

DOING, NOT BEHAVING.

"If to this I add the
corollary that I am rational - that is, that I can understand or know
(or at least form a correct belief about) why I do what I do, that is,
distinguish between acting -- or better "doing" -- (which entails making choices, forming intentions, pursuing goals) and merely behaving (that is, being acted upon
by causes the operations of which may be unknown to me or unlikely to
be affected by my wishes or attitudes) - then it will follow that knowledge
of the relevant facts - about the external world, other persons and my
own nature - will remove impediments to my policies that are due to ignorance
and delusion."

"Philosophers
have differed widely about the character of man's nature and its ends; ,
what kind and degree of control of the external world is needed in
order to achieve fulfilment, complete or partial, of this nature and its
ends; whether such a general nature or objective ends exist at all; and
where the frontier dividing the external world of matter and nonrational
creatures from active agents is to be found."

"Some philosophers have
supposed that such fulfilment was (or had once been, or would one day
be) possible on earth."

"Some maintained that
the ends of men were objective and capable of being discovered by
special methods of inquiry, but disagreed on what these were: empirical
or apriori; intuitive or discursive; scientific or purely reflective; public
or private; confined to specially gifted or fortunate inquirers, or in
principle open to any man."

"Others believed that such "ends" (telos) were subjective,
or DETERMINED by physical or PSYCHOLOGICAL or social factors,
which differed widely."

"Aristotle, for example, supposed that if
external conditions were too unfavourable - if a man suffered Priam's
misfortunes - this made self-fulfilment, the proper realisation of one's
nature, impossible."

"On the other hand the Stoics like Epictetus and Epicureans held
that complete rational self-control could be achieved by a man whatever
his external circumstances, since all that he needed was a sufficient
degree of detachment from human society and the external world."

"To
this they added the optimistic belief that the degree sufficient for self-fulfilment
was in principle perfectly attainable by anyone who consciously
sought independence and autonomy, that is, escape from being
the play-thing of external forces which he could not control."

"Among the assumptions that are common to all these views are two."

(i)

Things and persons possess natures - definite structures independent of whether or not they are known;

(ii)

These natures or structures are governed by universal and
unalterable laws.

(iii)

These structures and laws are, at least in principle, all
knowable; and that knowledge of them will automatically keep men
from stumbling in the dark and dissipating effort on policies which,
given the facts - the nature of things and persons and the laws that
govern them - are doomed to failure.

"According to this doctrine men are not self-directed and therefore not
'free' when their behaviour is caused by misdirected emotions - for
example, fears of non-existent entities, or hatreds due not to a rational
perception of the true state of affairs but to illusions, fantasies, results of
unconscious memories and forgotten wounds."

"Rationalisations and
ideologies, on this view, are false explanations of behaviour the true roots
of which are unknown or ignored or misunderstood; and these in their
turn breed further illusions, fantasies and forms of irrational and compulsive behaviour.

True liberty consists, therefore, in self-direction: a man is free to the degree that the true explanation of his activity lies in the intentions and motives of which he is conscious, and not in some hidden psychological or physiological condition that would have produced the same effect, i.e. the same behaviour (posing as choice), whatever explanation or justification the agent attempted to produce. A
rational man is free if his behaviour is not mechanical, and springs from
motives and is intended to fulfil purposes of which he is, or can at will be,
aware; so that it is true to say that having these intentions and purposes
is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for his behaviour.

"The unfree
man is like someone who is drugged or hypnotised - whatever explanations
he may himself advance for his behaviour, it remains unaltered by
any change in his ostensible, overt motives and policies."

"We consider the unfree man to be in the grip of forces over which he has no control, not free, when it is plain that his behaviour will be predictably the same whatever reasons he advances for it."

"To put matters in this way is to identify rationality and freedom, or at
least to go a long way towards it."

"Rational thought is thought the content
or, at least, the conclusions of which obey rules and principles and
are not merely items in a causal or random sequence."

"Rational behaviour
is behaviour which (at least in principle) can be explained by the actor or
observer in terms of motives, intentions, choices, reasons, rules, and not
solely of natural laws - causal or statistical, or 'organic7 or others of the
same logical type (whether explanations in terms of motives, reasons and
the like, and those in terms of causes, probabilities etc. are 'categorially'
different and cannot in principle clash or indeed be relevant to one
another, is of course a crucial question."

"But I do not wish to raise it here."

"To call a man a thief is pro tanto to attribute rationality to him: to call
him a kleptomaniac is to deny it of him."

"If degrees of a man's freedom directly depend on (or are identical with) the extent of his knowledge of the roots of his behaviour, then the following holds."

"A kleptomaniac who knows himself to be one is free."

"A kleptomaniac may be unable to stop stealing or even to try to do so."

"But his recognition of this, because he is now - so it is maintained
- in a position to choose whether to try to resist this compulsion
(even if he is bound to fail) or to let it take its course, renders him not
merely more rational (which seems indisputable), but more free."

"But is
this always so?"

"Is awareness of a disposition or causal characteristic on my
part identical with - or does it necessarily provide me with - the power
to manipulate or alter it?"

"There is, of course, a clear but platitudinous
sense in which all knowledge increases freedom in some respect."

"If I
know that I am liable to epileptic fits, or feelings of class consciousness,
or the spell-binding effect of certain kinds of music, I can - in some
sense of 'can' - plan my life accordingly.

Whereas if I do not know this,
I cannot do so.

I gain some increase in power and, to that extent, in
freedom.

But this knowledge may also decrease my power in some
other respect.

If I anticipate (or predict) an epileptic fit or the onset of some painful,
or even agreeable, emotion, I may be inhibited from some other free
exercise of my power, or be precluded from some other experience - I
may be unable to continue to write poetry, or understand the Greek
text which I am reading, or think about philosophy, or get up from my
chair."

"I may, in other words, pay for an increase of power and freedom
in one region by a loss of them in another.

Nor am I necessarily
rendered able to control my fits of epilepsy or of class consciousness or
addiction to Indian music by recognising their incidence.

If by knowledge
is meant what the classical authors meant by it - knowledge of
facts - not knowledge of 'what to do', i.e

ii. Agent knows that he wills (to) do p.

which may be a disguised way of stating not that something is the case, but a commitment to certain ends or values, or of expressing, not describing, a decision to act in a certain fashion."

"If I claim to have the kindof knowledge about myself that I might have about others, then even though my sources may be better or my certainty greater, such
self-knowledge, it seems to me, may or may not add to the sum total of my freedom.

The
question is empirical: and the answer depends on specific circumstances.

From the fact that every gain in knowledge liberates me in some respect,
it does not follow, for the reasons given above, that it will necessarily add
to the total sum of freedom that I enjoy.

It may, by taking with one
hand more than it gives with the other, decrease it.

But there is a more radical criticism of this view to be considered.

To say that one is free only if one understands oneself (even if this is
not a sufficient condition of freedom) presupposes that we have a self (alla Grice, "Personal Identity", Mind 1941, drawing from Locke)
to be understood - that there is a structure correctly described as
human nature which is what it is, obeys the laws that it does, and is
an object of natural study. ...

"Since choice involves responsibility, and some human
beings at most times, and most human beings at some times, wish to
avoid this burden, there is a tendency to look for excuses and alibis.

For this reason men tend to attribute too much to the unavoidable
operations of natural or social laws - for instance, to the workings of
the unconscious mind, or unalterable psychological reflexes, or the
laws of social evolution.

Critics who belong to this school (which owes
much both to Plato, Hegel and Marx and to Kierkegaard) say that some
notorious impediments to liberty - say, the social pressures of which
Mill made so much - are not objective forces the existence and
effects of which are independent of human wishes or activities or
alterable only by means not open to isolated individuals - by revolutions
or radical reforms that cannot be engineered at the individual's will.

What is maintained is the contrary: that I need not be bullied by others
or pressed into conformity by schoolmasters or friends or parents; need
never be affected in some way that I cannot help by what priests or
colleagues or critics or social groups or classes think or do.

If I am so
affected, it is because I choose it.

"I am insulted when I am mocked as a Jew only if I choose to accept the opinion - the
valuation - on Jews of those by whose views and attitudes I am dominated."

"But I can always choose to ignore this."

"And THEN I am 'free'".

...

"Action is choice; choice is free commitment to this or that way
of behaving, living, and so on."

Two-stage model of free will.

STAGE 1:

"The possibilities are NEVER fewer than two:
to do or not to do; be or not be."

"In its extreme form this doctrine does away
with determination at one blow: I am determined by my own choices;
to believe otherwise - say, in determinism or fatalism or chance - is itself
a choice, and a particularly craven one at that."

"Yet it is surely arguable
that this very tendency itself is a symptom of man's specific nature.

Such tendencies as looking on the future as unalterable - a symmetrical
analogue of the past - or the quest for excuses, escapist fantasies, flights
from responsibility, are themselves psychological data.

I cannot choose to self-deceive me.

To be self-deceived
is ex hypothesi something that I cannot have chosen consciousl~,
although I may have consciously chosen to act in a manner likely to
produce this result, without shrinking from this consequence.

There is
a difference between choices and compulsive behaviour, even if the
compulsion is itself the result of a choice.

The
illusions from which I suffer determine the field of my choice; selfknowledge
- destruction of the illusions - will alter this field, make
it more possible for me to choose genuinely rather than suppose that I
have chosen something when, in fact, it has (as it were) chosen me.

But
in the course of distinguishing between true and counterfeit acts of
choice (however this is done - however I discover that I have seen
through illusions), I nevertheless discover that I have an ineluctable
nature.

There are certain things that I cannot do. I cannot (logically)
remain rational or sane and believe no general propositions, or remain
sane and use no general terms.

I cannot retain a body and cease to gravitate.

I can perhaps "try" to do these things, but to be
rational entails "knowing that I shall fail"".

My knowledge of my own
nature and that of other things and persons, and of the laws that govern
them and me, saves my energies from dissipation or misapplication.

It
exposes bogus claims and excuses; it fixes responsibilities where they
belong and dismisses false pleas of impotence as well as false charges
against the truly innocent.

But it cannot widen the scope of my liberty
beyond frontiers determined by factors genuinely and permanently
outside my control.

To explain these factors is not to explain them away.

Increase of knowledge will increase my rationality, and infinite knowledge
would make me infinitely rational.

It might increase my powers
and my freedom: but it cannot make me infinitely free.

How does knowledge liberate me, then?

Let
me state the traditional position once again.

On the view that I am
trying to examine, the classical view which descends to us from Aristotle,
from the Stoics, and finds its
rationalist formulation in the doctrinesof Spinoza and his followers both
among the German idealists and modern psychologists, knowledge, by
uncovering little-recognised and therefore uncontrolled forces that
affect my conduct, emancipates me from their despotic force, the greater
when they have been concealed and therefore misinterpreted.

Why is
this so?

Because once I have uncovered them, I can seek to direct them,
or resist them, or create conditions in which they will be canalised into
harmless channels, or turned to use - that is, for the fulfilment of my
purposes.

------- Why the 'analogical' use of 'free' can be rendered generally

x is free
---- physical level. The stone fell freely.
---- biological level. The albatross flies free.
---- anthropic level. "I am free".

"Freedom is self-government - whether in politics or in
individual life - and anything that increases the control of the self over
forces external to it contributes to liberty."

"Although the frontiers that
divide self and personality from 'external' forces, whether in the individual-
moral or in the public-social field, are still exceedingly vague -
perhaps necessarily so - this Baconian thesis seems valid enough so far
as it goes."

cfr. BACON

"But its claims are too great."

"In its classical form it is called
the doctrine of self-determination."

"According to this, freedom consists
in playing a part in determining one's own conduct.

The greater this
part, the greater the freedom.

Servitude, or lack of freedom, is being determined by 'external' forces - whether these be physical or psychological;

the greater the part played by these forces, the smaller the freedom
of the individual.

So far, so good.

But if it be asked whether the
part that I play - my choices, purposes, intentions - might not themselves
be determined - caused - to be as they are by 'external7 causes, the
classical reply seems to be that this does not greatly matter.

I am free iff I can do as I intend t do. Whether my state of mind is itself
the causal product of something else - physical or psychological, of
climate, or blood pressure, or my character - is neither here nor there.

It may or may not be so.

This, f it is so, may be known or unknown.

All
that matters, all that those worried about whether a man's acts are free
or not wish to know, is whether my behaviour has as a necessary
condition my own conscious choice.

If it has, I am free in the only
sense that any rational being can ask for.

Whether the choice itself -
like the rest of me - is caused or uncaused, is not what is at stake.

Even
if it is wholly caused by natural factors, I am no less free.

Anti-determinists have naturally retorted that this merely pushed the
problem a step backwards.

The 'self' played its part, indeed, but was
itself hopelessly 'determined'".

"It may be worth going back to the origins
of this controversy, for, as often happens, its earliest form is also the
clearest."


CAUSE -- 'aitia'

"It came up so far as I can tell as a consequence of the interest
taken by the early Greek Stoics in an idea: that
of causation, i.e. the conception, new in the fourth century B.c., of
unbreakable chains of events in which each earlier event acts as a
necessary and sufficient cause of the later."

"It was perceived as early as the
beginning of the next century that there was something paradoxical,
and indeed incoherent, in maintaining that men's states of mind, feeling
and will as well as their actions were links in unbreakable causal chains,
and at the same time that men "could have done otherwise" than in fact they did."

Mochus, Chrysyppus.

Chrysippus was the first thinker to face this dilemma, which did
not seem to trouble Plato or Aristotle, and he invented the solution
known as self-determination.

The view that so long as men were
conceived of as being acted upon by outside forces without being able
to resist them, they were as stocks and stones, unfree.

If, however, among
the factors that determined behaviour was the bending of the will to
certain purposes, and if, moreover, such a bending of the will was a
necessary (whether or not it was a sufficient) condition of a given action,
then they were free.

For the doing depended on the occurrence of a volition
and could not happen without it.

Men's acts of will and the characters
and dispositions from which, whether or not they were fully aware of
it, such acts issued, were intrinsic to action.

This is what being free
meant.

Critics of this position, Epicureans and sceptics, were not slow
to point out that this was but a half-solution.

We are told that they
maintained that although it might be that the operations of the will
were a necessary condition of what could properly be called acts, yet
if these operations were themselves links in causal chains, themselves
effects of causes 'external' to the choices, decisions and so on, then the
notion of responsibility remained as inapplicable as before.

ELEUTHEROS, DOULOS, HEMIDOULOS.

"The cynic Oenomaus called such modified determination "hemidoulia" - 'half-slavery'."

"I am
only half free if I can correctly maintain that I should not have done x
if I had not chosen it, but add that I could not have chosen differently."

----

"Given that I have decided on X, my action has a motive and not merely
a cause."

"My 'volition' is itself among the causes - indeed, one of the
necessary conditions - of my doing, and it is this that is meant by
calling me or it free.

But if the choice or decision is itself determined,
and cannot, causally, be other than what it is, then the chain of causality
remains unbroken, and, the critics asserted, I should be no more truly
free than I am on the most rigidly determinist assumptions.

Keyword: "Free Will"

It is over
this issue that the immense discussion about free will that has preoccupied
philosophers ever since originally arose.

Chrysippus' answer, that all that I can reasonably ask for is that my own character should be among the factors influencing behaviour, is the central core of the classical doctrine of freedom as self-determination.

Its proponents stretch in unbroken
line from Chrysippus and Cicero to Aquinas, Spinoza, LOCKE and
Leibniz, Hume, MILL, Schopenhauer, Russell, Schlick, AYER,


NOWELL-SMITH, and the majority of the contributors to the subject in our own
day.


"Thus when a recent writer in this chronological order, R. M.
Hare, distinguishes ("Freedm and reason") free acts from mere behaviour
by saying that a pointer to whether I am free to do X is provided by asking
oneself whether it makes sense to ask

'Shall I do x?'

or

'Ought I to do X?',

he is restating the classical thesis.

"Hare correctly says that one can ask

'Will I make a mistake?' or

'Will I be wrecked on the sea-shore?'

but

not

'Shall I make a mistake?' or
'Ought I to be wrecked?;

For to be
wrecked or make a mistake cannot be part of a conscious choice or purpose
- cannot, in the logical or conceptual sense of the word.

And from
this Hare concludes that we distinguish a "free" from an unfree doing by the
presence or absence of whatever it is that makes it intelligible to ask
'Shall I climb the mountain?' but not 'Shall I misunderstand you?'".


But
if, following Carneades, I were to say

'I can indeed ask

"Shall I climb the mountain?", but if the answer - and the action - are determined by
factors beyond my control, then how does the fact that I pursue purposes,
make decisions, etc. liberate me from the causal chain?', this
would be regarded as a misconceived inquiry by the Stoics and the entire
classical tradition.

For if my choice is indispensable to the production
of a given effect, I am not causally determined as, say, a stone or a
tree that has no purposes and makes no choices is determined, and that
is all that any libertarian can wish to establish.

But no libertarian can in
fact accept this.

No one genuinely concerned by the problem constituted
by the prima facie incompatibility between determinism and freedom
to choose between alternatives will settle for saying 'I can do what I
choose, but I cannot choose otherwise than as I do.'

Self-determination
is clearly not the same as mechanical determination.

If the determinists
are right (and it may well be that they are) then the sort of determination
in terms of which human behaviour should be described is not
behaviouristic, but precisely Chrysippus' hemidoulia.

But half a loaf is
not the bread that libertarians crave.

For if my decisions are wholly
determined by antecedent causes,the mere fact that they are
decisions, and the fact that my acts have motives and not only antecedents,
do not of themselves provide that line of demarcation between freedom
and necessitation, or freedom and its absence, which the ordinary notion
of responsibility seems, at least for libertarians, so clearly to entail.

BACON again.

It is
in this sense that Bacon's followers claim too much.

This may be seen from another angle which will bring us back to
the relations of knowledge and liberty.

The growth of knowledge
increases the range of predictable events, and

predictability

- inductive
or intuitive - despite all that has been said against this position, does
not seem compatible with liberty of choice.

I may be told that if I say
to someone, rather stupidly,

'I always knew that you would behave with wonderful courage in this situation'

the person so complimented will not suppose
that his capacity for freedom of choice is being impugned.

But that seems
to be so only because the word 'knew' is being used, as it were, in a stupidly
exaggerated way -- hyperbolically meant to trigger a conversational implicature, as Grice has it.

----


When one man says to another

'I know you well: you simply cannot help behaving generously; you could
not help it if you tried',

the man so addressed may be thought susceptible
to flattery, because of the element of complimentary hyperbole in the
words 'cannot help' and 'could not. . . if you tried'.

If the words were
intended to be taken LITERALLY, _sans_ implicature - if the flatterer meant to be understood as saying

'You can no more help being generous than being old, or ugly, or thinking in English and not in Chinese'

- the notion of merit
or desert would evaporate, and the compliment would be transformed
from a moral into a quasi-aesthetic one.

This may be made clearer if
we take a pejorative example: if I were to say of Smith

'Smith can no more help being cruel
and malicious than a volcano
can help erupting. Therefore, one should
NOT blame him, only deplore his existence or
seek to tame him or restrain
him as one does a dangerous animal'.

X might well feel more deeply
insulted than if we lectured him on his habits on the assumption that
he was free to choose between acting and refraining from acting as he
did, free to choose to listen to our homily or pay no attention to it.

The
mere fact that it is my character that determines my choices and actions
does not, if my character itself and its effects are due to ineluctable
causes, render me free.

Knowledge of
the causes and conditions that determine my choice - knowledge,
indeed, that there are such conditions and causes, knowledge that choice
is not free (without analysis of this proposition), knowledge that shows
that the notion of moral responsibility is wholly compatible with
rigorous determinism, and exposes libertarianism as a confusion due to
ignorance or error - that kind of knowledge would assimilate our moral
views to aesthetic ones, and would lead us to look on heroism or honesty
or justice as we now do on beauty or kindness or strength or genius.

We praise or congratulate the possessors of the latter qualities with no
implication that they could have chosen to own a different set of
characteristics.

This world view, if it became generally accepted, would
mark a radical shift of categories.

If this ever occurs, it will tend to
make us think of much of our present moral and our legal outlook, and
of a great deal of our penal legislation, as so much barbarism founded on
ignorance.

It will enlarge the scope and depth of our sympathy.

It will
substitute knowledge and understanding for attribution of responsibility.

It will render indignation, and the kind of admiration that is its opposite,
irrational and obsolete.

It will expose such notions as desert, merit,
responsibility, remorse, and perhaps right and wrong too, as incoherent
or, at the very least, inapplicable.

It will turn praise and blame into
purely corrective or educational instruments, or confine them to aesthetic
approval or disapproval.

All this it will do, and if truth is on its side, it
will benefit mankind thereby.

But it will not increase the range of our freedom.

Knowledge will only render us freer, if in fact there is
freedom of choice - if on the basis of our knowledge we can behave
differently from the way in which we would have behaved without it -
can, not must or do - if, that is to say, we can and do behave differently
on the basis of our new knowledge, but need not.

Where there is no
antecedent freedom - and no possibility of it - it cannot be increased.

Our new knowledge will increase our rationality, our grasp of truth
will deepen our understanding, add to our power, inner harmony,
wisdom, effectiveness, but not, necessarily, to our liberty. If we are free
to choose, then an increase in our knowledge may tell us what are the
limits of this freedom and what expands or contracts it. But only to
know that there are facts and laws that I cannot alter does not itself
render me able to alter anything: if I have no freedom to begin with,
knowledge will not increase it. If everything is governed by natural
laws, then it is difficult to see what could be meant by saying that I can
'use' them better on the basis of my knowledge, unless 'can' is not the
'can' of choice - not the 'can7 which applies only to situations in which
I am correctly described as being able to choose between alternatives,
and am not rigorously determined to choose one rather than the other.
In other words, if classical determinism is a true view (and the fact
that it does not square with our present usage is no argument against it),
knowledge of it will not increase liberty - if liberty does not exist, the
discovery that it does not exist will not create it. This goes for selfdeterminism
no less than for its most full-blown mechanistic-behaviourist
variety.

The clearest exposition of classical self-determinism is probably that
given in his Ethics by Spinoza.

Hampshire represents him, it
seems to me correctly, as maintaining that the fully rational man does
not choose his ends, for his ends are given.

The better he understands
the nature of men and of the world, the more harmonious and successful
will his actions be, but no serious problem of choice between equally

Stuart Hampshire, 'Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom7, Proceedings of
tke Britisk Academy 46 (I 960), 195-2 I 5.

acceptable alternatives can ever present itself to him, any more than to
a mathematician reasoning correctly from true premises to logically
unavoidable conclusions. His freedom consists in the fact that he will
not be acted upon by causes whose existence he does not know or the
nature of whose influence he does not correctly understand. But that
is all.

Given Spinoza's premises - that the universe is a rational order,
and that to understand the rationality of a proposition or an act or an
order is, for a rational being, equivalent to accepting or identifying
oneself with it (as in the old Stoic notion) - the notion of choice itself
turns out to depend upon the deficiencies of knowledge, the degree of
ignorance. There is only one correct answer to any problem of conduct,
as to any problem of theory. The correct answer having been discovered,
the rational man logically cannot but act in accordance with it: the
notion of free choice between alternatives no longer has application. He
who understands everything, understands the reasons which make it as
it is and not otherwise, and being rational cannot wish it to be otherwise
than as it is. This may be an unattainable (and perhaps even, when
thought through, an incoherent) ideal, but it is this conception that
underlies the notion that an increase in knowledge is eo ipso always an
increase in freedom, i.e. an escape from being at the mercy of what is
not understood. Once something is understood or known (and only then),
it is, on this view, conceptually impossible to describe oneself as being at
the mercy of it. Unless this maximal rationalist assumption is made, it
does not seem to me to follow that more knowledge necessarily entails
an increase in the total sum of freedom; it may or may not - this, as I
hope to show, is largely an empirical question.

To discover that I cannot
do what I once believed that I could will render me more rational - I
shall not beat my head against stone walls - but it will not necessarily
make me freer; there may be stone walls wherever I look; I may myself
be a portion of one; a stone myself, only dreaming of being free.
There are two further points to be noted with regard to the relationship
of freedom and knowledge.

(a) There is the well-known objection,
urged principally by Karl Popper, that the idea of total self-knowledge
is in principle incoherent, because if I can predict what I shall do in the
future, this knowledge itself is an added factor in the situation that may
cause me to alter my behaviour accordingly; and the knowledge that
this is so is itself an added factor, which may cause me to alter that,
and so on ad infiniturn. Therefore total self-prediction is logically
impossible. This may be so: but it is not an argument against determinism
as such (nor does Popper so represent it)-onlyagainst self-prediction. If

X can predict the total behaviour ofy, and y predict the total behaviour
of X (and they do not impart their prophecies to one another), that is
all that determinism needs. I cannot be self-consciously spontaneous;
therefore I cannot be self-consciously aware of all my states if spontaneity
is among them. It does not follow that I can never be spontaneous;
nor that, if I am, this state cannot be known to exist while it is occurring,
although it cannot be so known to me. For this reason I conclude that,
in principle, Popper's argument does not (and is not meant to) refute
determinism.

(b)

self-predict

Hampshire advances
the view that self-prediction is (logically) impossible.

When I say

'I know that I shall do X'
(as against, e.g.,
'X will happen to me', or 'You
will do X'), I am not contemplating myself, as I might someone else,
and giving tongue to a conjecture about myself and my future acts, as
I might be doing about someone else or about the behaviour ofan animal
-for that would be tantamount (if I understand him rightly) to looking
upon myself from outside, as it were, and treating my own acts as mere
caused events.

To use Grice's clever metaphor ("Disposition and intention" -- I'm on the stage, not on the first row." 1949). Grice thought that Hampshire had taken that idea from him. Hence his "Intention and uncertainty."

----

In saying that I know that I shall do X, I am, on this
view, saying that I have decided to do X.

For to predict that I shall in
certain circumstances in fact do X or decide to do X, with no reference to
whether or not I have already decided to do it - to say 'I can tell you
now that I shall in fact act in manner X, although I am, as a matter of
fact, determined to do the very opposite' - does not make *sense*.

Any
man who says 'I know myself too well to believe that, whatever I now
decide, I shall do anything other than X when the circumstances actually
arise' is in fact saying that
he does not really, i.e. seriously, propose to set himself against doing X,
that he does not propose even to try to act otherwise, that he has in
fact decided to let events take their course.

For no man who has truly
decided to try to avoid X can, in good faith, predict his own failure to act
as he has decided.

He may fail to avoid X, and he may predict this.

But
he cannot both decide to try to avoid X and predict that he will not even
try to do this.

For he can always try; and he knows this.

ANTHROPIC.

He knows that
this is what distinguishes him from non-human creatures in nature.

To
say that he will fail even to try is tantamount to saying that he has
decided not to try.

In this sense 'I know' means 'I have decided' and


(1 Iris Murdoch, S. N. Hampshire, P. L. Gardiner and D. F. Pears,
'Freedom and Knowledge', in D. F. Pears (ed.), Freedom and tAe Will
(London, 1963), pp. 80-104.)

"... cannot in principle be predictive."

I have a good deal of sympathy with Hampshire's position, for
I can see that self-prediction is often an evasive way of disclaiming
responsibility for difficult decisions, while deciding in fact to let events
take their course, disguising this by attributing responsibility for what
occurs to my own allegedly unalterable nature.

But I agree with
Hampshire's critics in the debate, whom I take to be maintaining that,
although the situation he describes may often occur, yet circumstances
may exist in which it is possible for me both to say that I am, at this
moment, resolved not to do X, and at the same time to predict that I
shall do X, because I am not hopeful that, when the time comes, I shall
in fact even so much as try to resist doing X. I can, in effect, say 'I know
myself well. When the crisis comes, do not rely on me to help you. I
may well run away; although I am at this moment genuinely resolved
not to be cowardly and to do all I can to stay at your side.

My prediction
that my resolution will not in fact hold up is based on knowledge of
my own character, and not on my present state of mind; my prophecy
is not a symptom of bad faith (for I am not, at this moment, vacillating)
but, on the contrary, of good faith, of a wish to face the facts. I assure
you in all sincerity that my present intention is to be brave and resist.
Yet you would run a great risk if you relied too much on my present
decision; it would not be fair to conceal my past failures of nerve from
you.' I can say this about others, despite the most sincere resolutions on
their part, for I can foretell how in fact they will behave; they can
equally predict this about me. Despite Hampshire's plausible and
tempting argument, I believe that such objective self-knowledge is
possible and occurs; and his argument does not therefore appear to me
to lessen the force of the determinist thesis. It seems to me that I can,
at times, though perhaps not always, place myself, as it were, at an
outside vantage point, and contemplate myself as if I were another
human being, and calculate the chances of my sticking to my present
resolution with almost the same degree of detachment and reiiability
as I should have if I were judging the case of someone else with all the
impartiality that I could muster. If this is so, then 'I know how I shall
act' is not necessarily a statement of decision: it can be purely descriptive.

Self-prediction of this kind, provided that it does not claim to be too
exact or infallible, and meets Popper's objection, cited above, by
remaining tentative, allowing for possible alterations of conduct as a
result of the self-prediction itself - seems possible and compatible with
determinism.

In other words, I see no reason to suppose that a deterministic
doctrine, whether about one's own behaviour or that of others, is in
principle incoherent, or incompatible with making choices, provided
that these choices are regarded as being themselves no less determined
than other phenomena. Such knowledge, or well-founded belief, seems
to me to increase the degree of rationality, efficiency, power; the only
freedom to which it necessarily contributes is freedom from illusions.
But this is not the basic sense of the term about which controversy has
been boiling for twenty-two centuries.

I have no wish to enter into the waters of the free will problem more
deeply than I already have.

But I should like to repeat what I have
indeed said elsewhere, and for which I have been severely taken to task
by determinists.

That if a great advance were made in psycho-physiology;
if, let us suppose, a scientific expert were to hand me a sealed envelope,
and ask me to note all my experiences - both introspective and others -
for a limited period - say half-an-hour - and write them down as
accurately as I could.

And if I then did this to the best of my ability, and
after this opened the envelope and read the account, which turned out
to tally to a striking degree with my log-book of my experience during
the last half-hour, I should certainly be shaken; and so I think would
others.

We should then have to admit, with or without pleasure, that
aspects of human behaviour which had been believed to be within the
area of the agent's free choice turned out to be subject to discovered
causal laws.

Our recognition of this might itself alter our behaviour,
perhaps for the happier and more harmonious; but this welcome result
itself would be a causal product of our new awareness. I cannot see
why such discoveries should be considered impossible, or even particularly
improbable; they would bring about a major transformation of
psychology and sociology; after all, great revolutions have occurred in
other sciences in our own day. The principal difference, however,
between previous advances and this imaginary breakthrough (and it is
with this surmise that most of my critics have disagreed) is that besides
effecting a vast alteration in our empirical knowledge, it would alter our
conceptual framework far more radically than the discoveries of the
physicists of the seventeenth or twentieth century, or of the biologists of
the nineteenth, have changed it. Such a break with the past, in psychology
alone, would do great violence to our present concepts and usages. The
entire vocabulary of human relations would suffer radical change. Such
expressions as 'I should not have done X', 'How could you have chosen
d' and so on, indeed the entire language of the criticism and assessment
of one's own and others' conduct, would undergo a sharp transformation,
and the expressions we needed both for descriptive and for practicalcorrective,
deterrent, hortatory etc. purposes (what others would be open
to a consistent determinist?) would necessarily be vastly different from
the language which we now use. It seems to me that we should be unwise
to underestimate the effect of robbing praise, blame, a good many counterfactual
propositions, and the entire network of concepts concerned
with freedom, choice, responsibility, of much of their present function
and meaning. But it is equally important to insist that the fact that such a
transformation could occur - or would, at any rate, be required - does
not, of course, have any tendency to show that determinism is either
true or false; it is merely a consequence which those who accept it as true
tend not to recognise sufficiently. I only wish to add that the further issue
whether the truth of determinism is or is not an empirical question, is
itself unclear. If so revolutionary an advance in psycho-physiological
knowledge were achieved, the need of new concepts to formulate it, and
of the consequent modification (to say the least) of concepts in other
fields, would itself demonstrate the relative vagueness of the frontiers
between the empirical and the conceptual. If these empirical discoveries
were made, they might markagreater revolution in human thought than
any that has gone before. It is idle to speculate on the transformation of
language - or of ideas (these are but alternative ways of saying the same
thing) - that would be brought about by the triumph of exact knowledge
in this field. But would such an advance in knowledge necessarily constitute
an overall increase in freedom? Freedom from error, from illusion,
fantasy, misdirection of emotions - certainly all these. But is this the
central meaning of the word as we commonly use it in philosophy or
common speech?

I do not, of course, wish to deny that when we say that a man is free -
or freer than he was before - we may be using the word to denote moral
freedom, or independence, or self-determination. This concept, as has
often been pointed out, is far from clear: the central terms - willing,
intention, action, and the related notions - conscience, remorse, guilt,
inner versus outer compulsion, and so on - stand in need of analysis,
which itself entails a moral psychology that remains unprovided; and
in the meanwhile the notion of moral independence - of what is, or
should be, independent of what, and how this independence is achieved -
remains obscure. Moreover, it seems doubtful whether we should
describe a man as being free if his conduct displayed unswerving
regularities, issuing (however this is established) from his own
thoughts, feelings, acts of will, so that we should be inclined to say that
he could not behave otherwise than as he did. Predictability may or
may not entail determinism; but if we were in a position to be so well
acquainted with a man's character, reactions, outlook that, given a
specific situation, we felt sure that we could predict how he would act,
better perhaps than he could himself, should we be tempted to
describe him as being a typical example of a man morally - or
otherwise - free? Should we not think that a phrase used by Patrick
Gardiner, a 'prisoner of his personality',' described him better? So
aptly, indeed, that he might, in certain cases, come to accept it -
with regret or satisfaction - himself? A man so hidebound by his
own habits and outlook is not the paradigm of human freedom.
The central assumption of common thought and speech seems to me
to be that freedom is the principal characteristic that distinguishes man
from all that is non-human; that there are degrees of freedom, degrees
constituted by the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice; the
choice being regarded as not itself determined by antecedent conditions,
at least not as being wholly so determined. It may be that common sense
is mistaken in this matter, as in others; but the onus of refutation is on
those who disagree. Common sense may not be too well aware of the full
variety of such obstacles: they may be physical or psychical, 'inner' or
'outer', or complexes compounded of both elements, difficult and
perhaps conceptually impossible to unravel, due to social factors and/or
individual ones. Common opinion may oversimplify the issue; but it
seems to me to be right about its essence: freedom is to do with the
absence of obstacles to action. These obstacles may consist of physical
power, whether of nature or of men, that prevents our intentions from
being realised: geographical conditions or prison walls, armed men or
the threat (deliberately usedas a weapon or unintended) of lackoffoodor
shelter or other necessities of life; or again, they may be psychological:
fears and 'complexes', ignorance, error, prejudice, illusions, fantasies,
compulsions, neuroses and psychoses- irrational factors of many kinds.
Moral freedom - rational self-control - knowledge of what is at stake,
and of what is one's motive in acting as one does; independence of the
unrecognised influence of other persons or of one's own personal past or
that of one's group or culture; destruction of hopes, fears, desires, loves,
hatreds, ideals, which will be seen to be groundless once they are
(op. cit. (p. 186 above, note I), p. 92)
inspected and rationally examined - these indeed bring liberation from
obstacles, some of the most formidable and insidious in the path of
human beings; their full effect, despite the acute but scattered insights
of moralists from Plato to Marx and Schopenhauer, is beginning to be
understood adequately only in the present century, with the rise of
psychoanalysis and the perception of its philosophical implications. It
would be absurd to deny the validity of this sense of the concept of
freedom, or of its intimate logical dependence on rationality and
knowledge. Like all freedom it consists of, or depends on, the removal of
obstacles, in this case of psychological impediments to the full use of
human powers to whatever ends men choose; but these constitute only
one category of such obstacles, however important and hitherto inadequately
analysed. To emphasise these to the exclusion of other classes
of obstacles, and other better recognised forms of freqdom, leads to
distortion.

Yet it is this, it seems to me, that has been done by those
who, from the Stoics to Spinoza, Bradley and Hampshire and the earlly Grice, have
confined freedom to self-determination.

To be free is to be able to make an unforced choice; and choice entails
competing possibilities - at the very least two 'open', unimpeded
alternatives. And this, in its turn, may well depend on external circumstances
which leave only some paths unblocked. When we speak of the
extent of freedom enjoyed by a man or a society, we have in mind, it
seems to me, the width or extent of the paths before them, the number
of open doors, as it were, and the extent to which they are open. The
metaphor is imperfect, for 'number' and 'extent' will not really do.
Some doors are much more important than others - the goods to which
they lead are far more central in an individual's or society's life., S o me
doors lead to other open doors, some to closed ones; there is actual and
there is potential freedom - depending on how easily some closed doors
can be opened given existing or potential resources, physical or mental.
How is one to measure one situation against another? How is one to
decide whether a man who is obstructed neither by other persons nor
by circumstances from, let us say, the acquisition of adequate security
of material necessities and comforts, but is debarred from free speech and
association, is less or more free than one who find its impossible, because
of, let us say, the economic policies of his government, to obtain more
than the necessities of life, but who possesses greater opportunities of
education or of free communication or association with others? Problems
of this type will always arise - they are familiar enough in utilitarian
literature, and indeed in all forms of non-totalitarian practical politics.
Even if no hard and fast rule can be provided, it still remains the case that
the measure of the liberty of a man or a group is, to a large degree,
determined by the range of choosable possibilities.
If a man's area of choice, whether 'physical' or 'mental', is narrow,
then however contented with it he may be, and however true it may
be that the more rational a man is, the clearer the one and only rational
path will be to him and the less likely will he be to vacillate between
alternatives (a proposition which seems to me to be fallacious), neither
of these situations will necessarily make him more free than a man
whose range of choice is wider. T o remove obstacles by removing
desire to enter upon, or even awareness of, the path on which the obstacles
lie, may contribute to serenity, contentment, perhaps even wisdom, but
not to liberty. Independence of mind - sanity and integration of
personality, health and inner harmony - are highly desirable conditions,
and they entail the removal of a sufficient number of obstacles to qualify
for being regarded, for that reason alone, as a species of freedom -but
only one species among others. Someone may say that it is at least
unique in this: that this kind of freedom is a necessary condition for all
other kinds of freedom - for if I am ignorant, obsessed, irrational, I am
thereby blinded to the facts, and a man so blinded is, in effect, as unfree
as a man whose possibilities are objectively blocked. But this does not
seem to me to be true. If I am ignorant of my rights, or too neurotic
(or too poor) to benefit by them, that makes them useless to me; but
it does not make them non-existent; a door is closed to a path that leads
to other, open, doors. T o destroy or lack a condition for freedom
(knowledge, money) is not to destroy that freedom itself; for its essence
does not lie in its accessibility, although its value may do so. The more
avenues men can enter, the broader those avenues, the more avenues
that each opens into, the freer they are; the better men know what
avenues lie before them, and how open they are, the freer they will
know themselves to be. To be free without knowing it may be a bitter
irony, but if a man subsequently discovers that doors were open although
he did not know it, he will reflect bitterly not about his lack of freedom
but about his ignorance. The extent of freedom depends on opportunities
of action, not on knowledge of them, although such knowledge may
well be an indispensable condition for the use of freedom, and although
impediments in the path to it are themselves a deprivation of freedom -
of freedom to know. Ignorance blocks paths, and knowledge opens
them. But this truism does not entail that freedom implies awareness of
freedom, still less that they are identical.
It is worth noting that it is theactual doors that areopen that determine
the extent of someone's freedom, and not his own preferences.1 A man
is not free merely when there are no obstacles, psychological or otherwise,
in the way of his wishes - when he can do as he likes - for in that
case a man might be rendered free by altering not his opportunities of
action, but his desires and dispositions. If a master can condition his
slaves to love their chains he does not thereby prima facie increase their
liberty, although he may increase their contentment or at least decrease
their misery. Some unscrupulous managers of men have, in the course
of history, used religious teachings to make men less discontented with
brutal and iniquitous treatment. If such measures work, and there is
reason to think that they do so only too often, and if the victims have
learnt not to mind their pains and indignities (like Epictetus, for
example), then some despotic systems should presumably be described
as creators of liberty; for by eliminating distracting temptations, and
'enslaving' wishes and passions, they create (on these assumptions) more
liberty than institutions that expand the area of individual or democratic
choice and thereby produce the worrying need to select, to determine
oneself in one direction rather than another - the terrible burden of
the embarras da choix (which has itself been taken to be a symptom of
irrationality by some thinkers in the rationalist tradition). This ancient
fallacy is by now too familiar to need refutation. I only cite it in order
to emphasise the crucial distinction between the definition of liberty as
nothing but the absence of obstacles to doing as I like (which could
presumably be compatible with a very narrow life, narrowed by the
influence upon me of personal or impersonal forces, education or law,
friend or foe, religious teacher or parent, or even consciously contracted
by myself), and liberty as a range of objectively open possibilities,
whether these are desired or not, even though it is difficult or impossible
to give rules for measuring or comparing degrees of it, or for assessing
different situations with regard to it.

There is, of course, a sense, with which all moral philosophers are
well acquainted, in which the slave Epictetus is more free than his
master or the emperor who forced him to die in exile.

Or that in which
stone walls do not a prison make.

Nevertheless, such statements derive
I should like to take this opportunity of correcting a misstatement on this
subject which occurs in my lecture Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford, 19 5 8
[now reprinted in revised form in Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969)J),
and of thanking Richard Wollheim for pointing this out.

their rhetorical force from the fact that there is a more familiar sense
in which a slave is the least free of men, and stone walls and iron bars
are serious impediments to freedom; nor are moral and physical or
political or legal freedoms mere homonyms. Unless some kernel of
common meaning - whether a single common characteristic or a
'family resemblance' - is kept in mind, there is the danger that one or
other of these senses will be represented as fundamental, and the others
will be tortured into conformity with it, or dismissed as trivial or
superficial. The most notorious examples of this process are the sophistries
whereby various types of compulsion and thought control are
represented as means to, or even as constitutive of, 'true' freedom, or,
conversely, liberal political or legal systems are regarded as sufficient
means of ensuring not only the freedom of, but opportunities for the
use of such freedom by, persons who are too irrational or immature,
owing to lack of education or other means of mental development, to
understand or benefit by such rules or laws. It is therefore the central
meaning of the term, if there is one, that it is important to establish.
There is yet another consideration regarding knowledge and liberty
to which I should like to return.l It is true that knowledge always, of
necessity, opens some doors, but does it never close others? If I am a
poet, may it not be that some forms of knowledge will curtail my
powers and thereby my liberty too? Let us suppose that I require as a
stimulus to my imagination illusions and myths of a certain kind
which are provided by the religion in which I have been brought up or
to which I have been converted. Let us assume that some honourable
rationalist refutes these beliefs, shatters my illusions, dissipates the myths;
may it not be that my clear gain in knowledge and rationality is paid for
by the diminution or destruction of my powers as a poet? It is easy
enough to say that what I have lost is a power that fed on illusions or
irrational states and attitudes which the advance of knowledge has
destroyed; that some powers are undesirable (like the power of selfdeception)
and that, in any case, powers are powers and not liberties.
It may be said that an increase in knowledge cannot (this would, I
think, be claimed as an analytic truth) diminish my freedom; for to
know the roots of my activity is to be rescued from servitude to the
unknown - from stumbling in a darkness populated with figments which
breed fears and irrational conduct. Moreover, it will be said that as a
result of the destruction of my idols I have clearly gained in freedom of
self-determination; for I can now give a rational justification of my
beliefs, and the motives of my actions are clearer to me. But if I am less
free to write the kind of poetry that I used to write, is there not now a
new obstacle before me? Have not some doors been closed by the opening
of others? Whether ignorance is or is not bliss in these circumstances is
another question. The question I wish to ask - and one to which I do
not know the answer - is whether such absence of knowledge may not
be a necessary condition for certain states of mind or emotion in which
alone certain impediments to some forms of creative labour are absent.
This is an empirical question, but on the answer to it the answer to a
larger question depends: whether knowledge never impedes, always
increases, the sum total of human freedom. Again, if I am a singer, selfconsciousness
- the child of knowledge - may inhibit the spontaneity
that may be a necessary condition of my performance, as the growth of
culture was thought by Rousseau and others to inhibit the joys of
barbarian innocence. It does not matter greatly whether this particular
belief is true; the simple uncivilised savage may have known fewer joys
than Rousseau supposed; barbarism may not be a state of innocence at
all. It is enough to allow that there are certain forms of knowledge that
have the psychological effect ofpreventing kindsofself-expression which,
on any showing, must be considered as forms of free activity. Reflection
may ruin my painting if this depends on not thinking; my knowledge
that a disease, for which no cure has been discovered, is destroying me
or my friend, may well sap my particular creative capacity, and inhibit
me in this or that way; and to be inhibited - whatever its long-term
advantages - is not to be rendered more free. It may be replied to this
that if I am suffering from a disease and do not know it, I am less free
than one who knows, and can at least try to take steps to check it, even
if the disease has so far proved to be incurable; that not to diagnose it
will certainly lead to dissipation of effort in mistaken directions, and will
curtail my freedom by putting me at the mercy of natural forces the
character of which, because I do not recognise it, I cannot rationally
discount or cope with. This is indeedso. Such knowledge cannot decrease
my freedom as a rational being-, but it may finish me as an artist. One
door opens, and as a result of this another shuts.

Let me take another example. Resistance against vast odds may work
only if the odds are not fully known; otherwise it may seem irrational
to fight against what, even if it is not known, can be believed with a
high degree of probability to be irresistible. For it may be my very
ignorance of the odds that creates a situation in which alone I resist
successfully.

If David had known more about Goliath, if the majority
of the inhabitants of Britain had known more about Germany in 1940,
if historical probabilities could be reduced to something approaching a
reliable guide to action, some achievements might never have taken
place.

I discover that I suffer from a fatal disease. This discovery makes
it possible for me to try to find a cure - which was not possible so
long as I was ignorant of the causes of my condition. But supposing
that I satisfy myself that the weight of probability is against the discovery
of an antidote, that once the poison has entered into the system death
must follow; that the pollution of the atmosphere as the result of the
discharge of a nuclear weapon cannot be undone. Then what is it that
I am now more free to do? I may seek to reconcile myself to what has
occurred, not kick against the pricks, arrange my affairs, make my will,
refrain from a display of sorrow or indignation inappropriate when
facing the inevitable - this is what 'Stoicism' or 'taking things philosophically'
has historically come to mean. But even if I believe that reality
is a rational whole (whatever this may mean), and that any other view
of it, for instance, as being equally capable of realising various incompatible
possibilities, is an error caused by ignorance, and if I therefore
regard everything in it as being necessitated by reason - what I myself
should necessarily will it to be as a wholly rational being - the discovery
of its structure will not increase my freedom of choice. It will merely set
me beyond hope and fear - for these are symptoms of ignorance or fantasy
- and beyond choices too, since choosing entails the reality of at least two
alternatives, say action and inaction. We are told that the Stoic Posidonius
said to the pain that was tormenting him 'Do your worst, pain;
nothing that you can do will cause me to hate you.' But Posidonius was
a rationalistic determinist: whatever truly is, is as it should be: to wish
it to be otherwise is a sign of irrationality; rationality implies that choice
- and the freedom defined in terms of its possibility - is an illusion, not
widened but killed by true knowledge.

Knowledge increases autonomy both in the sense of Kant, and in
that of Spinoza and his followers.

I should like to ask once more: is
all liberty just that? The advance of knowledge stops men from wasting
their resources upon delusive projects. It has stopped us from burning
witches or flogging lunatics or predicting the future by listening to
oracles or looking at the entrails of animals or the flight of birds. It may
yet render many institutions and decisions of the present - legal, political,
moral, social - obsolete, by showing them to be as cruel and stupid and
incompatible with the pursuit of justice or reason or happiness or truth,
as we now think the burning of widows or eating the flesh of an enemy
to acquire his skills. If our powers ofprediction, and so our knowledge of
the future, become much greater, then, even if they are never complete,
this may radically alter our view of what constitutes a person, an act,
a choice; and eo ipso our language and our picture of the world. This may
make our conduct more rational, perhaps more tolerant, charitable,
civilised, it may improve it in many ways, but will it increase the area
of free choice? For individuals or groups? It will certainly kill some
realms of the imagination founded upon non-rational beliefs, and for
this it may compensate us by making some of our ends more easily or
harmoniouslyattainable. But who shall say if the balance will necessarily
be on the side of wider freedom? Unless one establishes logical equivalence~
between the notions of freedom, self-determination and selfknowledge
in some a priori fashion - as Spinoza and Hegel and their
modern followers seek to do - why need this be true?

Hampshire and E. F. Carritt, in dealing with this topic, maintain that, faced with
any situation, one can always choose at least between trying to do
something and letting things take their course. Always? If it makes
sense to say that there is an external world, then to know it, in the
descriptive sense of 'know', is not to alter it. As for the other sense of
'know' - the pragmatic, in which 'I know what I shall do' is akin to
'I know what to do', and registers not a piece of information but a
decision to alter things in a certain way - would it not wither if psychophysiology
advanced far enough? For, in that event, may not my
resolution to act or not to act resemble more and more the recommendation
of Canute's courtiers?

Knowledge, we are told, extends the boundaries of freedom, and
this is an a priori proposition. Is it inconceivable that the growth of
knowledge will tend more and more successfully to establish the determinist
thesis as an empirical truth, and explain our thoughts and feelings,
wishes and decisions, our actions and choices, in terms of invariant,
regular, natural successions, to seek to alter which will seem almost as
irrational as entertaining a logical fallacy? This was, after all, the
programme and the belief of many respected philosophers, as different '
in their outlooks as Spinoza, Holbach, Schopenhauer, Comte, the
behaviourists. Would such a consummation extend the area of freedom?
In what sense? Would it not rather render this notion, for want of a
contrasting one, altogether otiose, and would not this constitute a novel
situation? The 'dissolution' of the concept of freedom would be
accompanied by the demise of that sense of 'know' in which we speak
not of knowing that, but of knowing what to do, to which Hampshire
and Hart have drawn attention; for if all is determined, there is nothing
to choose between, and so nothing to decide.

Perhaps those who have
said of freedom that it is the recognition of necessity were contemplating
this very situation. If so, their notion of freedom is radically different
from those who define it in terms of conscious choice and decision.
I wish to make no judgement of value: only to suggest that to say
that knowledge is a good is one thing; to say that it is necessarily, in all
situations, compatible with, still more that it is on terms of mutual ,
entailment with (or even, as some seem to suppose, is literally identical
with) freedom, in most of the senses in which this word is used, is
something very different. Perhaps the second assertion is rooted in the
optimistic view - which seems to be at the heart of much metaphysical
rationalism - that all good things must be compatible, and that therefore
freedom, order, knowledge, happiness, a closed future (and an open one?)
must be at least compatible, and perhaps even entail one another in a
systematic fashion. But this proposition is not self-evidently true, if only
on empirical grounds. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the least plausible
beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.