The sort of article about which I usually just post "interesting article" over at the Chronicle. But I think that it shows the modern misunderstanding of the ways in which we deal with the world.

A false dichotomy is espoused in the article:

Either our behavior is a consequence of prior events (modern readers can substitute "contingencies of reinforcement," "genetic predispositions toward fitness maximization," "electrochemical events taking place across neuronal membranes," and so forth), in which case we are not responsible for such actions, or it is truly spontaneous and thus random, in which case we are, if anything, even less responsible.

Why should this grim choice even need to be made? It's this relevation of 'free will' to the ability to choose, rather than that of creation that forces us into these dead-ends of inquiry. If we view the will as the faculty which decides between two choices, we are very quickly brought to the conclusion that the will is, rather, no faculty at all. If the choices are equal in worth, our will is random. If the choices are not equal, our choice is pre-determined ("for no one chooses evil over good"). The only option, when faced with two choices, is for the willing-subject to create a third.

Most people are creatures of habit, and all people are creatures of habit most of the time. Our habits give the impression that all our actions are predictable, but this hypothesis is manifestly false. I have a proof of this existence of free-will which does not work over the Internet. (It involves hitting.)

The real problem, however, is that this attempt to explain the past through various hypotheses about the origin of human behavior neglects to understand the needs of the future, though this is only to be expected. The faculty of reason is always and only interested in the past: it cannot deal in anything but the past. Even in its predictions it must create a "future past", in which the events it predicts are posited as, in a sense, already having occurred. Not only must their causes be found in the past, but the future which contains these events is itself present, in that reason hypothesizes it. The whole of time is, in this system, viewed "all at once"; as though we stood at the end of it and looked back. The faculty of the future, however, is the will, in the use of which we look forward.

The will, unlike reason, cannot deal with the past at all. Any attempt to bring it to bear on events past creates nothing but wind-eggs and daydreams. However, the will is perfectly capable of creating the future, and does so at each moment that we are conscious of our actions. When we are merely being creatures of habit, we create nothing, living out only the predictions of reason. When we are present, however, causality can have only the claims which it has previously established; it can dictate no terms not previously agreed upon.

Of course, with each moment that the will allows to slip from future to past, reason assumes domination of that moment, applying its categories and interpretations to what is now its rightful prey. Thus, causality, whose existence is no more firmly established than freedom, and is in fact the mirror image of that quality, presumes to dictate why and how such things have come about. The fact that presently we tend to believe firmly in reason and causality, and disbelieve in freedom and will, is an historical accident without philosophical basis. It is instead based on the undeniable fact that at this point in time more people are comfortable than at any other in history. We have sold our birthright for a pottage of lentils.

We view, then, all events through this distorted backwards glance, and deny the existence of anything before it. "It is one thing, however, to insist on being loved for one's self, and not, for example, because of a hefty trust account; quite another to demand that love emerge spontaneously, somehow bubbling up and taking form without any cause whatsoever." And yet a 'cause' for love is entirely unsatisfactory. One may have a ground and reason for love, and indeed should, but a caused love is not love at all. It is a great mystery, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, that many things must be loved before they are loveable. This power of loving the unloveable cannot be justified retroactively. Only the forward-looking will can perform this task for us. It is the loss of faith in our power to do so--to change things for the better, to alter our own narrative of how things will be--that is so worrisome to me.

I should be the last to deny or decline to accept more control over the forces around me. But to claim that those forces are the only things in existence removes all reason for me to do so. Our goals are set, not be reason, which can only tell us what is, but by our will, which allows us to make things as they ought to be.

Via Arts and Letters Daily.

UPDATE:

I should probably mention Nietzsche. His myth of eternal recurrence is the ultimate vision of an eternal past. Since our will is an illusion, our only hope is to align ourselves with the events around us. What would we do, he asks, if a demon came to us and told us that we would live our lives over and over again wthout end? Personally, I'd kick the d-mned thing, but he suggests that there are moments when we would thank it.