[Peace-discuss] The Revolutiona ry Communist Party says.

[LAURIE SOLOMON]

>But what else could "free will" possibly be?  How could it NOT entail both
an inherent right and a corresponding responsibility?

 

I can think of two things: One thing is that "free will" could refer to just
the possible capacity to act independently, autonomously, or without any
predetermination from an outside source but without any reference to
"rights" to or "responsibilities" for exercising that capacity or
restrictions on how it is to be exercised. The second, which is more in line
with reconciling "free will" with "predetermination" but not necessarily
religious notions of the two and certainly not in line with the "negative"
concepts of freedom and liberty that permeate the English tradition of
Liberalism, would be "free will which gives individuals the rights and
obligations to act in ways that advance their self-realization which is seen
as being only possible when it advances the common good of the collective (a
view more in line with a positive conception of liberty or freedom  where
the collective's job is to remove obstacles to such actions and to force
individual members of the collective to fulfill their responsibilities to
strive for and achieve self-realization in ways that advance the common good
of the collective).

 

>Use common sense for a change.  Do you know anyone who does NOT possess and
exercise free will?  Even a baby.  Even a prisoner.  Even an >elderly person
with dementia.  All of them exercise some measure of free will, even if it's
just token and ultimately futile resistance to some authority >figure.
Observe them and learn.  Put your books and your esoteric theories aside for
a bit and just observe.

 

Don't be so damn insulting and cock sure of yourself.  For starters, I do
not use those concepts or that dichotomy in my everyday life; they are in
practice meaningless to me.  I only am using them here because others have
brought them up and used them in their discussion; and I wanted to stay
within the same language and framework  that they have selected for the
discussion so as to remain more or less on the same page for communications
purposes.  Secondly, in so far as I am using the notions and distinctions
here, it is within a rather academic discussion for purposes of the
discussion where my intent was to first to clarify some things that were
said by dialectically seeking further elaborations and details and secondly
to note some possible logical sources of confusion and contradictions that
are involved in the "free will"/"predetermination" debate both here and
which has taken place in religion and political philosophy throughout the
years.   Thirdly, I could observe them as you suggest and from my
observations come to the conclusion that they give good evidence against any
predestination or predetermination existing at all.  Fourthly, I seriously
question if random and impulsive  or reflexive behaviors  can really be or
are considered examples of "free will" since the notion seems to connote or
otherwise imply that the actors (a) are rational actors acting rationally,
(b) are engaged in conscious and deliberate actions or thoughts, and (c) are
purposefully undertaking meaningful intentional courses of action and
thought.  I do not think that most who use the concept of "free will"
consider it to cover or otherwise include unthinking reflexive and impulsive
reactions and actions, unintentional and unconscious behaviors, or
non-purposeful and meaningless responses and behaviors.

 

>Good grief.  It's just elemental logic.  As for liberty, you must at least
be familiar with some of the Ten Commandments.  How could God tell humans
>to do certain things, or NOT do certain things, if said humans didn't
possess the LIBERTY to exercise their FREE WILL to CHOOSE whether or not >to
obey a particular commandment?  What sense would it make?

 

To you it might be just elemental logic (by the way what type of logic is
elemental logic); but I do not see it that way.  While a case such as you
have made can be made;  it does presuppose that God is rational and
practical and asks sensible things of Humans so as not tell humans to do
impossible, senseless, or undesirable things or things that are known by God
to be things that Humans are not going to be willing to follow; or it
supposes that God is not rational, sensible, or practical so as to ask
humans to do things that are known by God to be predetermined in any given
case to either happen or not happen independent of any human intentions or
decisions since those intentions and decisions are also already
predetermined by God. (One could ask in response to your question, "What
sense would it make," what sense would it make to whom - humans or God?
However, either way, that is what is in question.  What are in question is
if the notion of  LIBERTY existed  then or if it is a modern concept, if the
notion of LIBERTY means or refers to the free will to choose (or more
importantly has to necessarily mean that and nothing else), and if said
liberty is an intrinsic RIGHT and OBLIGATION as you have claimed elsewhere
in which case it may not be optional or voluntary but predestined and
without freedom to choose. 

 

I am also familiar with the fact that the story of the Ten Commandments is a
product of humans ( and even if based on fact, it is an interpretive
construct interpreted and written by scribes, scholars, clergy, and
historians) with no empirical evidence that the commandments or the stone
tablet came directly from God and not from man or originally said what is
ascribed to it by humans whose story we hear and read about in the Bible or
in scrolls.


>To me your reasoning is sometimes like wanting to argue about whether a
chair, for example,  actually exists, or whether we just THINK it exists, or
>some convoluted variation on that theme.  Just sit on it, for God's sake.
If it supports your weight, it exists.  That's all you need to know.  (Even
if >collapses under your weight and you fall on your ass, as occasionally
happens to me, it exists.  Hahahaha!)

 

That sort of positivism and empiricism is both over simplistic and an
argument that could be used equally well to deny the existence of God who
humans do not directly see or experience as such in a concrete empirical
substantive form but rather assume as an article of faith to behind the
things we attribute as being manifestations of God.  What makes your
positivist empiricist article of faith truer, better, or stronger than my
article of faith that it may all be the product of either  individual
thought and perception of individuals in terms of private personal
experiences of phenomenon as real concrete things or intersubjective thought
and perception of individuals engaged in social interaction and
communications in terms of public socially constructed conceptually defined
socially shared experience and social reality?  Unfortunately, I find that
the dogmatic commitment to the truth of one's articles of faith such as what
one experiences as a real concrete experience are and can only be a real and
concrete experience and not an illusion, an hallucination, or a product of
human cognition, perception, and social communications is often the same
sort of dogmatic belief structure that results in racism, ethnic predjudice,
sexism, religious fanaticism, narrow mindedness, wars, and the like.  

>As for the "pursuit of happiness", there are numerous references in the
Bible - and I'm sure in other so-called holy books as well - to "joy", to
"inner >peace", to "living the abundant life", etc.  Those are all just
synonyms for happiness.  There's no need to over-analyze it.

 

But it is you who are stating (and maybe insisting) that those things are
identical to or synonymous with the "pursuit of happiness."  I am open to
the possibility that they are not and may refer to something quite different
from what gets associated with the "pursuit of happiness" of "happiness."
Even the notion of the "pursuit of happiness" depends on its meaning on who
is using it  and in what context.  For many, it means "the acquisition of
material goods," tangible physical experiences and actions, or empirical
concrete pleasures in contrast to pain. Others think and feel it refers to
spiritual experiences and feelings, to psychological contentment as distinct
from pleasure, joy, or excitement.  There is no need to over-simplify it or
dismiss the complexities as being over-analysis as if over-analysis is an
inherently bad undertaking without any benefits.

 

I am not finding the continuation of this discussion to be very productive.
While I know that I said I made my comments with the intent of provoking
discussion, I do not think that circular arguments based on the constant
presentation of articles of faith, truths by definition, and tautologies to
be very fruitful.  I am not going to waste my time responding to the
dismissal of arguments with statements that it is elemental logic, it is
over-analysis, it is obvious, that it does not matter, or expressions like
that.   When I note that in the history of political philosophy there have
been two very different philosophical traditions regarding the meaning and
notion of "liberty" and "freedom" as concepts, or that there has been
contradictions in the history of political thought over the status of
predetermination and free will, or that ideas of  "Natural Law" and "Divine
Right" are not unproblematic within the history of political philosophy or
theory, I find it unacceptable to be told that these are silly or frivolous
disputes or the points of opposition are not legitimate  arguments worthy of
bringing up or attending to .

 

I am also not particularly fond of people assuming that I know what they
think or say I know or should know even if I tell them the opposite, of
being told that I am being wrong-headed or academic when I raise
intellectual, theoretical, analytic, or abstract arguments that are not
commonly accepted by those I am engaging in the discussion with.  So I think
it best that I end this now.



 

From: John W. [mailto:jbw292002 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 6:25 AM
To: LAURIE SOLOMON
Cc: Bob Illyes; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Revolutiona ry Communist Party says.

 

 

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 9:17 PM, LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at advancenet.net>
wrote:

(SMILE)

>Which is a small portion of the truth.

> Which is another portion of the truth.

I never said that either of these points were THE TRUTH or even hinted that
they were the "whole truth."  I only suggested that they were each A TRUTH.

All right, good.  We have a point of agreement, then.

  

>Come on, Laurie.  Absolutely central to the notion of free will is the idea
that each individual >has both the right and the responsibility to live in
liberty >and to pursue "happiness" (the >"abundant life", according to the
Bible) without infringing on the life, liberty, and pursuit of >happiness by
others.  

First of all, in your view,  the idea that each individual has both  the
right and the responsibility to live in liberty and to pursue "happiness" is
central to the notion of "free will;"  I am not so certain about it.

That's all right.  You're still not too old to learn.  :-)  But what else
could "free will" possibly be?  How could it NOT entail both an inherent
right and a corresponding responsibility?

Use common sense for a change.  Do you know anyone who does NOT possess and
exercise free will?  Even a baby.  Even a prisoner.  Even an elderly person
with dementia.  All of them exercise some measure of free will, even if it's
just token and ultimately futile resistance to some authority figure.
Observe them and learn.  Put your books and your esoteric theories aside for
a bit and just observe.


>Secondly, I do not have intimate or even good knowledge of the Bible
(either the Hebrew or the >Christian Bibles) or even claim to or, for that
matter, want to.  However, somehow my passing >encounters with it did not
bring me in touch with the concepts of "liberty" or "pursuit of
>'happiness'" or the use of those terms.

Good grief.  It's just elemental logic.  As for liberty, you must at least
be familiar with some of the Ten Commandments.  How could God tell humans to
do certain things, or NOT do certain things, if said humans didn't possess
the LIBERTY to exercise their FREE WILL to CHOOSE whether or not to obey a
particular commandment?  What sense would it make?

To me your reasoning is sometimes like wanting to argue about whether a
chair, for example,  actually exists, or whether we just THINK it exists, or
some convoluted variation on that theme.  Just sit on it, for God's sake.
If it supports your weight, it exists.  That's all you need to know.  (Even
if collapses under your weight and you fall on your ass, as occasionally
happens to me, it exists.  Hahahaha!)

As for the "pursuit of happiness", there are numerous references in the
Bible - and I'm sure in other so-called holy books as well - to "joy", to
"inner peace", to "living the abundant life", etc.  Those are all just
synonyms for happiness.  There's no need to over-analyze it.


>Nor do I recall any connections between "free will" and the inherent or an
intrinsic RIGHT or >RESPONSIBILITY to live in liberty and to pursue
happiness.

You don't need to "recall" the connections.  Just use your common sense.
You have free will; that's a given.  You have the freedom or the right to
pursue UNhappiness, I suppose, if you think that will make you happy.  :-)
The notion of "responsibility" enters in through a simple process of
deductive (or would it be inductive?) reasoning:  Since all men are created
equal, if YOU have the right to pursue your own happiness, then other humans
likewise have a right to pursue THEIR own happiness as well.  You therefore
have a mutual responsibility to TRY to avoid infringing on the other's
pursuit.


>That is not to say that, by implication, it might be related to an
individual  having what is >described by the "negative" notion of freedom or
liberty and associated with the pursuit of >happiness.

I have no idea what that means.


>Nevertheless this does not have to be as a RIGHT  or as a RESPONSIBILITY
nor does it >specify in substance what constitutes  either the nature or the
substantive contents of >"HAPPINESS."

No need to specify it.  You yourself have the right/freedom to define
happiness for yourself, though of course your definition may be verifiably
WRONG.  The only limitation is where your pursuit of your happiness
interferes with someone else's pursuit of his/her own happiness.

Of course in practice it gets a bit more complicated.  But you like to talk
theory, so that's what we're doing here.


>Thirdly, what references I remember to "Natural Law" and "Devine Rights" by
political >philosophers prior to The Enlightenment focused on the rights of
monarchs not individual >common men when they addressed men; otherwise, they
tended to refer to States, the >Church, and filial obligations not 'free
will" of individuals.  Of course, I could have forgotten or be >in error.

It doesn't matter.  You and I, being Enlightened, understand that All Men
Are Created Equal, don't we?

It's "divine", by the way.  Andy Devine was that overweight sidekick with
the funny voice on about a thousand TV and movie westerns back in the 1950s.



>Free will also allows for folly, the making of bad choices that are
inconsistent with the long-term (or short-term, for that matter) happiness
of oneself and others.  There's no conflict whatsoever.

I do not disagree that free will allows for folly, error, and the making of
bad choices that are inconsistent with happiness of oneself and others or
with HUMAN plans; but I do not think that allows for this with respect to
predetermined  Natural Laws or predestined overarching absolute plans of an
all-powerful omnipotent God.  If it does, then, in my view, predestination
and predetermination are meaningless as is omnipotence of Natural Laws or
Devine Plans.  Natural Laws and Devine Plans  then become  probabilistic
affairs which can be  ignored, violated, modified, or avoided at will by
individuals.

This is where it gets interesting.  If you can manage to forget about
"predestination" and all the baggage appertaining to that word, there's no
conflict at all.  There's no such thing as "predestination" when it comes to
humans endowed with free will.  God's "foreknowledge" or "omniscience" is
not at all the same thing as man's "predestination".  I can easily
illustrate the difference if you really need me to.

I'm going to attempt an analogy.  Please be patient with me, because all
analogies are imperfect.

Think for a moment of God as an immensely wealthy human who wants to
establish a nature preserve somewhere in Africa.  We - all of us humans -
are the animals with which He wishes to populate the game preserve.

Now animals have free will too, though it's not nearly as complex as that of
humans.  If what they perceive as a predator is chasing them, they can turn
right or left, jump into the water or over the water, find a hole to crawl
into, run really fast, or whatever.  They're limited by their inherent
physical design, but still they have a certain amount of free will which
they can exercise.

So God as the immensely wealthy philanthropist is going to capture as many
animals as He can for his nature preserve.  He has Land Rovers, helicopters,
tranquilizer guns, lots of helpers, etc.

Still, some animals, through the exercise of their free will and cunning,
are going to escape God's dragnet and avoid going to the nature preserve.
They're going to continue living out in the wild until poachers or some REAL
predator or disease or famine or old age gets them.

But an individual animal's exercise of his free will is not going to prevent
God the wealthy human philanthropist from carrying out His plan of
establishing the nature preserve, is it?

Yeah, it's a pretty bad analogy, I know.  :-(

 

>Also, there IS an overarching plan which is capable of being known.  You
exercise your free >will in refusing to know it.  :-)

How do you know that there is an overarching plan which is capable of being
known,

Lots of ways.  Reading.  Observation.  Logic.  Personal experience.

 

that I recognize or know of such a plan (or even care about if it exists or
what it is),

You do NOT.  Read what I said above.


>that the plan has anything to do with any exercise of free will by me, or
that it entails my >refusing to know it.

Just elemental logic, Laurie.  See above.




  

From: John W. [mailto:jbw292002 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:20 PM
To: LAURIE SOLOMON
Cc: Bob Illyes; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net


Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Revolutiona ry Communist Party says.

 

 

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 3:20 PM, LAURIE SOLOMON <LAURIE at advancenet.net>
wrote:

Just for the sake of provoking the discussion, I offer the following
comments:

1. " Oddly, both the radical Marxist and the radical Libertarian camps tend
to
ignore human nature, designing societies for hypothetical beings if pure
reason. So I think they are not as different as they appear superficially."

Not so oddly; both do not tend to ignore human nature as much as they both
make the assumptions of the historic period that they came out of
philosophically (i.e., the Enlightenment) in that they both presume man to
be a rational animal and the world to be a rational place capable of
understanding, knowing, and controlling if not molding.


Which is a small portion of the truth.

 

While the Libertarians assume an English Liberal tradition of a Utilitarian
bent
coming out of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, James Mills, Jeremy Bentham, and
J.S. Mills as their basic grounding; Marxists come out of the Continental
Idealist tradition assuming a less atomistic and more organic bent (i.e.,
the whole is greater than its parts and gestalt approach) which came out of
Comte, Saint-Simon, Hegel, etc. as their basis.


Which is another portion of the truth.

 

2. " I think that Christianity gets it right in a lot of ways. I would say
that
rights are inherent and that the capacity of people for folly is not to be
underestimated."

Aside from disagreeing with the whole notion of "inherent rights,"  I think
that Christianity and its doctrines tend to be a little confused if not
uncertain about the estimating the capacity of people for folly, depending
on if one gives priority to pre-determination or free will.  If one holds
pre-determination as the prime directive, then people have no capacity for
folly; God has the capacity for folly and people do as they are
pre-ordained.  If one accepts free will as the prime directive, then the
notion of inherent rights as formulated is undermined; but people have great
capacity for folly although without some overarching absolute plan that is
capable of being known it is hard to define folly or irrationality, or
deviance/sin.


Come on, Laurie.  Absolutely central to the notion of free will is the idea
that each individual has both the right and the responsibility to live in
liberty and to pursue "happiness" (the "abundant life", according to the
Bible) without infringing on the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness by
others.  Free will also allows for folly, the making of bad choices that are
inconsistent with the long-term (or short-term, for that matter) happiness
of oneself and others.  There's no conflict whatsoever.

Also, there IS an overarching plan which is capable of being known.  You
exercise your free will in refusing to know it.  :-)

 

3.  "A more orthodox Christian position would be that rights
are God-given and that people are prone to sin. No matter which way it is
said, if these statements are correct then human nature represents a severe
constraint on what sort of political systems will work and how well they
will work."

Again leaving aside my disagreement and assuming for the sake of the
discussion that these statements are correct, then I have to ask if human
nature does not represent a severe constraint on what political system is
possible, if any at all will work, and/or if they could work well enough to
be significantly different from none at all.


That's precisely what I - and I think Bob - am/is/are saying, Laurie.  :-)


 

-----Original Message-----
From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
[mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of Bob Illyes
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 11:33 AM
To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Revolutiona ry Communist Party says.

John and Noam are addressing roughly the same issue, in my opinion. "An
instinct for freedom" is a way for saying that human nature matters when
designing a political system or strategy.

Oddly, both the radical Marxist and the radical Libertarian camps tend to
ignore human nature, designing societies for hypothetical beings if pure
reason. So I think they are not as different as they appear superficially.

I think that Christianity gets it right in a lot of ways. I would say that
rights are inherent and that the capacity of people for folly is not to be
underestimated.  A more orthodox Christian position would be that rights
are God-given and that people are prone to sin. No matter which way it is
said, if these statements are correct then human nature represents a severe
constraint on what sort of political systems will work and how well they
will work.

Bob

-------------
Carl posted: "If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there
will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there
are opportunities to change things, there's a chance for you to contribute
to making a better world. That's your choice."  --Noam Chomsky

John W. wrote:
>... The generic, unspecified "revolution" as the solution to all the
>enumerated ills of the capitalist system - which the Communists/Socialists
>always do a pretty good job of enumerating. *yawn*  Been there, tried to do
>that.
>In my dotage I disagree most profoundly with this statement by Chairman
Bob:
>"What has proven to be possible-and what has proven NOT to be possible-has
>nothing to do with "human nature" or "personal responsibility"...and
>everything to do with the system that was put in place to ensure "the
dreams
>of our founders."  I now know most assuredly and emphatically that there IS
>such a thing as "human nature", which goes a very long way toward
determining
>the types of self-seeking "systems" we humans put in place and have ALWAYS
>put in place.  Unless "human nature" is understood and taken into account,
>there is absolutely no possibility that human society can ever improve.
Our
>Founders tried to take human nature into account with their system of
checks
>and balances, but of course they did it in such a way as to leave many
>loopholes in which they could protect their own privileged status.
>JBW

 

 

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