On Free Will
A Classical Christian Perspective
It had been Timothy’s life long dream to compete in the championship match at Wimbledon. Tennis was the river of constancy for which his fantastical machinations for glory flowed and carved through an otherwise dull and desert-like landscape of banal existence. This was it. This was his moment. And yet, here Timothy was bouncing left and right in his soft sneakers on the evenly manicured grass court with his pants down.
No seriously. His pants were down. Actually no, his pants were missing. Gone! Oh dear, it was even worse than this. Timothy’s legs were missing! Only floating spongy, bouncy sneakers remained. The entire bottom half of his body had become suspiciously translucent. He could feel the hot sweat coursing through the maze of matted dark hair on his tanned Italian legs but could no longer see such vital appendages.
“What was happening?” he thought. Why was the crowd cheering and chanting for exactly two and half seconds only to, in a rather electrifying manner of horror, switch instantly to sincere, hauntingly quiet contemplation on the match at hand? His opponent had merely been partaking in a casual and intentionally derisive water break throughout the entirety of this nonsensical nightmare. Nothing of interest was actually taking place in the moment. And yet the process rinsed and repeated while one of Timothy’s legs nauseatingly blinked back into existence through a strobe of layers: athletic shorts, skin, muscle, bone, blood vessels. Faster and faster. A storm of three dimensional Photoshop layers flashing through its particularly ordered, revelatory sequence.
Timothy looked at the scoreboard and then recalled the sobering reality of his impotent competitive situation. The score read 6–0, 6–0, 5–0 with his opponent serving at 40-Love. Match point. Now Timothy also remembered that he was on his 33rd rematch. The score had been the same for every previous expensively generated discommodious play-through. It was only now, Timothy remembered, that, quite invariably, he was a loser.
Timothy was such a loser that the virtual reality system he found himself in was in the process of unceremoniously glitching out. The system had given him every chance possible to score at least one point. But the problem here lied not within the system but with the gratuitous deficiency in Timothy’s tennis game.
A literal world shattering crisis was occurring. Timothy, as one may healthily conjecture by this point, had earnestly considered himself a tennis player. Oh did he ever will to play such a majestic game of primordial pong for all of his young life. But the conceptual delusion had been met by a harsh virtual-reality, reality.
The truth was, as incontestably evidential, that Timothy had never picked up a tennis racket in his life and even in a computer-generated dream world did he have no business in representing a legacy of potentially unnecessary serving-yelps and elbow injuries left beforehand by the many who did in fact retain this (at least partially) identity of tennis player.
The question we must struggle with as this poor lad laments his broken machine-driven quest, which clearly wasn’t sufficient in overcoming logical impossibilities, is whether Timothy’s inability to play tennis is, as empathetically as we can muster the thought, fair. Why can’t a young man with a dream to live out his undeserved fantasy yearn for such experiential sensations previously unbeknownst?
The answer, I argue, lies in freedom, or a lack thereof. And the second answer lies in will, which we won’t deny its relevance.
Oh, and I suppose a third and fourth answer can be circumvented by dialogue concerning nature and consciousness. But perhaps we shouldn’t philosophically bog poor Timothy down before breaking through the membrane of his pressurized-rubber-core existential crisis.
“Why can’t I play tennis?” Timothy finally asks.
“Timothy, my boy.” (Here I am assuming the tone of a wise sage that surely young Timothy will appreciate). “Why do you presume you can play tennis as if this proficiency is something that should come freely to you?”
“Because I desire it.” His glassy eyes soften my heart. Then through clenched teeth he exclaims, “Because I will to!”
“And I desire you to be the kind of tennis player I am as well, but alas you are not me my dear Timothy.” A small tear finally crests the top of his cheek. “Although we cannot merely will for all desires, my son, consider the possibility that we may will toward a truer freedom, one we don’t always seek … but should.”
“What is this strange talk you speak of?” he asks.
“Oh Timothy,” I chuckled wisely and sagely. “It’s all in Plato, my boy. All in Plato. Consider the existence of a particular Chosen One who is the very essence of a tennis player. He is the ideal. To play tennis is to fulfill his nature. His mastery of the game is utter perfection. For this man, his proficiency of play is sublime. One might say that he plays freely, without effort and without impediment to his expertly measured flow. In fact, his freedom is complete. The totality of his being is fulfilled in tennis.
“But,” I raise my palm in rumination, “Does he actually will to play tennis? Well he damn well should! And he does happily so. That is who he is after all. He is … the … tennis player.
“This is what it means to be free, Timothy. When one’s will converges with one’s teleological nature one has become exhaustively free.”
Timothy has cooled from his earlier pouty state and now possesses a certain air of irritation over something new. I can’t quite place my finger on it. “You’re losing me, old man,” he replies. “What are you saying? That I do or that I don’t have free will?”
“Were you free to win the game?”
Timothy didn’t like this response. “Whoa, back up. But I chose to play. It was something I wanted to do, so I did it. You can’t tell me I didn’t choose to play. I did by my own free will.”
Finally I’ve found the chance to wag my restless finger. “You’ve exercised your will, yes. But what does that have to do with freedom?”
“Everything. I wasn’t forced to play. I chose to. Are you gonna try to tell me the choice was an illusion? That a series of preconditions mechanically connecting and eventually terminating in the complex firing of neurons in my brain resulted in this so-called choice to play tennis?”
Again I resume my humbly astute chuckling. “Timothy, you sound so Western right now.” Timothy rolls his eyes. “Why must we confine ourselves to these silly analytical ideas? Think older. Get traditional with me. Freedom is not simply the will to do otherwise. To be free is to be who you were truly meant to be. Remember the chosen one — the quintessential tennis player. What if he chose not to play tennis? Why, this would be absurd. He would be denying his very nature. To not play tennis, for this tennis swatting specimen of perfection, would be to deviate from the only action that gives him essential being. It is his one true desire — as it should be— because of who he is. His true desire and his true being are to be united. And to choose non-being, well,” I scoff, “to not be is to not be free.”
“Being?” Timothy sighed. “You’re starting to sound nauseatingly Aristotelian.”
“Guilty!” I throw up my arms and round my back with what was, in my estimation, the perfect dash of ostentatiousness. “For the chosen one, playing tennis is what is, for him, the Good. To will to not play tennis is to will away from the Good.
“Goodness. Being. Freedom. These are all words for essentially the same thing, Timothy. And on the other side of the coin is Evil, Non-Being, Bondage.”
“Oh boy,” Timothy said. “Now with platitudes.”
“In the real world, what is the final cause of man? I posit that it is to become like Jesus…”
“And the preaching,” he slips in.
“The more we orient our will toward Jesus, the more he sanctifies us. And through this sanctification, we align our will with our true nature, which is in the likeness of him; the true human one. Only by his grace is this made possible for us. That’s freedom!”
Timothy swallows some of his own spit. “Oh, an awkward pause.” He blinks a few times and then adjusts his jaw. “Please. Tell me more.”
“You see, you desired to be a tennis player but you never practiced because you were so addicted to the video game known as Pokemon. You desired to pick up a racket, but the pull to eat pizza and play Pokemon was just too great. You had the will, but you didn’t have the freedom.
“Sin is like your addiction to Pokemon. If your true nature was to be like the chosen one/ideal Tennis Player, then addiction to Pokemon was what made you unfree. Sin is bondage. It is movement away from true being. The face of evil looks a bit like a Pikachu from the game known as Pokemon.”
“Ok fine. Free will is complicated. Got it.”
I tilt my head forward. “But is it really, though?”
“Whatever.” Timothy appears to have forgotten his intemperate annoyance with the subject matter. “So what about determinism, libertarianism, or compatibilism? Where do these debates fit in? How do we know if we have any actual will at all?”
“Forget those silly categories.” And with a monumental, rebellious handwave I dismiss hundreds of years of Enlightenment argumentation. “You’re conscious aren’t you?” I then ask. “In my estimation to deny your own will is akin to denying your own consciousness. There is what appears to be an infinite simplicity and unity of our subjective consciousnesses. Something you must employ in an attempt to deny, rendering the argument self-defeating.
“And if this unity truly does exist — which, of course, it does — then what sort of fuss is there about consciousness’s transcendence over material forces? In it’s simple irreducibility, why disturb the peacefulness of our sensible acceptance of the will?”
“Listen man,” Timothy says, “I just spent 48 hours straight in a virtual reality machine. I’m tired, hungry, and my brain hur-”
“I maintain, Timothy, that this sort of commitment to materialism has some origination in the bondage we’ve been speaking about.”
Timothy clears his throat. “You’ve been speaking about,” he says softly. “Ok,” he announces more loudly. “Right on dude. Why don’t we pick this up tomorr-”
“In a way, Timothy, you could say this kind of thinking is much like your addiction to the video game known as Poke-”
“Please stop…”