Is freedom of our will absolutely free?

Question

Thanks to all your kind answers. Have a great weekend!

Answer 1

Absolute freedom is illusory at best. The will is limited and bounded by its appetites if nothing else. The only true freedom of the will is found paradoxically in handing it over totally to someone with power to direct and act in the best interest of that will unbounded by appetite, passion, limitations of talent and ability or self interest. Freedom is found in our willingness rather than our willfulness, i.e. submission to the perfect Will of God of our own free will and accord. Not my will, but Thy Will be done.

Answer 2

I believe in free will, I believe you are the happiest person when the things you have in life is based on your decision, not dictated by your family or society, but I guess sometimes you need to adapt it to ethics.

This gives me another question in mind. So what if in a marriage one of them is not happy, is it ethical to leave your partner because you are happier with someone else and you have the free will?

I think how you look at freedom of our will depends on your perspective. Women in China feel they're free if they don't live with their mother-in-laws, they're free from the extra violence (aside from their husbands), just being at home doing the house chores and taking care of kids without dealing with harrassment from in-laws is freedom.
While in places like the US a lot of religious people feel they are freed by their religions, although they have to fulfil their religious duties which for me, a non-religious person is too much work and I wouldn't feel free at all.

Now I realize even more that it's so relative...

Answer 3

No, freedom always has a price tag. Any time you decide to swim upstream instead of following the herd it costs you something.

Answer 4

All of our choices have consequences. Even if you spent the rest of your life meditating in a monastery, that choice would have consequences. So what do you mean by free? It sounds like a bit of a trick question, though I am sure you did not intend it that way.

Answer 5

the freedom of will is free :) we do however choose according to some things over which we have no control, such as our upbringing, our belief system, our state of mind etc. and so the freedom is based on un-free elements.

Answer 6

no - the will is never free if viewed in a cross-cultural spectrum (?) - the 'will' is determined largely by cultural conditioning and emphasis on particular societal values. It's like determining why we act in a certain way - in the end it will come down to something that is beyond our control - 'because i was born like that', 'because i was taught that...' etc... Right?

Answer 7

nothing is absolutely free, except the love of God.

we have the free will to make our own decisions, but we also have to pay for the decisions that we make.

but we also reap the rewards for the right decisions that we make.

Answer 8

The Judgment is negative: No. The Will is positive: What is free?


'Free Will

As possibility is the mere inside of actuality, it is for that reason a mere outside actuality, in other words, Contingency. The contingent, roughly speaking, is what has the ground of its being not in itself but in somewhat else. Such is the aspect under which actuality first comes before consciousness, and which is often mistaken for actuality itself. But the contingent is only one side of the actual - the side namely, of reflection on somewhat else. It is the actual, in the signification of something merely possible. Accordingly we consider the contingent to be what may or may not be, what may be in one way or another, whose being or not-being, and whose being in this way or otherwise, depends not upon itself but on something else.

To overcome this contingency is, roughly speaking, the problem of science on the one hand; as in the range of practice, on the other, the end of action is to rise above the contingency of the will, or above caprice. It has however often happened, most of all in modern times, that contingency has been unwarrantably elevated, and has a value attached to it, both in nature and in the world of the mind, to which it has no just claim. Frequently, Nature, to take it first, has been chiefly admired for the richness and variety of its structures. Apart however from what disclosure it contains of the Idea, this richness gratifies none of the higher interests of Reason, and its vast variety of structures, organic and inorganic, affords us only the spectacle of a contingency losing itself in vagueness. At any rate, the chequered scene presented by the several varieties of animals and plants, conditioned as it is by outward circumstances - the complex changes in configuration and grouping of clouds, and the like - ought not to be ranked higher than the equally casual fancies of the mind which surrenders itself to its own caprices. The wonderment with which such phenomena are welcomed is a most abstract frame of mind, from which one should advance to a closer insight into the inner harmony and uniformity of nature.'

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slactual.htm#SL145n

'Self-existence, being-for-self, however, into which being for another returns, in other words the self, is not a self of what is called object, a self all its own and different from the ego: for consciousness qua pure insight is not an individual self, over against which the object, in the sense of having a self all its own, could stand, but the pure notion, the gazing of the self into self, the literal and absolute seeing itself doubled. The certainty of itself is the universal subject, and its notion knowing itself is the essential being of all reality. If the useful was merely the shifting change of the moments, without returning into its own proper unity, and was still hence an object for knowledge to deal with, then it ceases to be this now. For knowing is itself the process and movement of those abstract moments; it is the universal self, the self of itself as well as of the object, and, being universal, is the unity of this process, a unity that returns into itself.

Φ 584. This brings on the scene spirit in the form of absolute freedom. It is the mode of self-consciousness which clearly comprehends that in its certainty of self lies the essence of all the component spiritual spheres of the concrete sensible as well as of the supersensible world, or, conversely, that essential being and concrete actuality consist in the knowledge consciousness has of itself.

It is conscious of its pure personality and with that of all spiritual reality; and all reality is solely spirituality; the world is for it absolutely its own will, and this will is universal will. And further, this will is not the empty thought of will, which is constituted by giving a silent assent, or an assent through a representative, a mere symbol of willing; it is concretely embodied universal will, the will of all individuals as such. For will is in itself the consciousness of personality, of every single one; and it has to be as this true concrete actual as self-conscious essential being of each and every personality, so that each single and undivided does everything, and what appears as done by the whole is at once and consciously the deed of every single individual.
'

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc2b3.htm

Answer 9

Maybe there are only degrees of freedom. Afterall, we are all bound to our biology

Answer 10

it comes with the cost of responsibility..