Self-Determination Reveals Freedom as a Uniquely Personal Factor
The preceding discussion allows us to grasp the fundamental significance of the free will. We may now identify freedom with determination, with the
self-determination we discover in the will as a constitutive element of the personal structure of man. Freedom thus manifests itself as connected with the will, with the concrete "I will," which includes, as noted, the experience of "I may but I need not."
In the analysis of self-determination we reach right down to the very roots of the experience of "I will" as well as of "I may but I need not." The freedom appropriate to the human being, the person's freedom resulting from the will, exhibits itself as identical with self-determination, with that experiential, most complete, and fundamental organ of man's autonomous being.
We are thus considering freedom as real, the freedom that constitutes the real and privileged position of man in the world and also the main condition of his will. This premise is of essential significance, inasmuch as any discussion concerning the free will, if it starts with the concept of freedom as such instead of the reality that is man risks deviating into an unwarranted idealism.40 The fact of self-determination and all that determination relies upon in the structure itself of the person, namely, self-governance and self-possession, provides the key to the reality of the person we are attempting to reach. Indeed, self-determination manifests itself as the force holding together the human dynamism and integrating it at the level of the person. We may now distinguish between the dynamism at the level of the person and the dynamism at the level of nature. The latter does not seem to contain the necessary factors for self-determination, and we may thus conclude that neither does it contain any acting in the sense we have established in the preceding chapter.
The Difference between the Dynamisms of Self-Determination and Instinct Let us reaffirm that at the level of the dynamism of nature itself there is no acting, there are no actions, but only what, strictly speaking, we may call "activations"; at this level there is in every particular instance a specific sum total of all that is taking place in the subject and that forms the distinct whole of its life and of its dynamism.
The formation of this whole is oriented in a certain direction or along a kind of bioexistential axis, which depends on the natural endowment of every individual being or on its potentiality. Thus nature may to some extent be identified with the potentiality that lies at the origin of activations themselves. The significance of
"nature," however, is broader than the sphere of activations alone and extends also, or even primarily, to the direction of, or the general trend in, the integration of these activations. Thus all that happens in an individual being bears the mark of some purpose, which depends on this direction. The subjective basis for both the
integration and the purpose at the level of nature is called - especially in animals -
"instinct." Instinct is not to be confused, in spite of close similarity of meaning, with drive, which will be considered in some detail later.
It is by instinct that in an individual animal everything that, strictly speaking, only happens in it receives direction and is brought together into a whole, which may give the impression of acting even though it is - however splendid in its own way it may appear - but a coordination of activations. Acting - the action in the strict sense, that is, in the sense that finds justification solely in the total experience of the human being - can be spoken of only in the case of self-determination. When, however, instinct is the guiding force we only have a certain external analogy with acting; the operating dynamism has the semblance of acting but does not satisfy the essential conditions of acting, of the action.
The reasoning just presented in order to introduce some necessary comparisons leads us further afield than the experience of man alone, it brings us, as explicitly stated, to the world of animals. The problem in itself has many, obviously
interesting, aspects but this is not the place to consider them in detail. The point to be made here in connection with these comparisons is that the dynamism at the level of nature is in opposition to the dynamism at the level of the person, and that the cause of this opposition is the fact of self-determination. In the dynamism at the level of nature there is no self-determination to serve as the basis from which acting itself as well as its direction and purpose are derived. The dynamism at the level of nature lacks that special dependence on the ego which is the characteristic mark of the specific dynamism of the person.
Free Will Reflects the Self-Dependence of the Person
It is the dependence of acting on the ego that serves as the basis of freedom, while the absence of this dependence places the whole dynamism of any individual being (say an animal being) beyond the sphere of freedom. "Necessity" is the conceptual equivalent of the lack of freedom. Necessity as the opposite of freedom - which owing to self-determination is exclusively "personal" - is thus attributed to the dynamism at the level of nature alone, the dynamism that has instinct as its integrating factor. The person is dynamized in his own manner only when in the dynamization he depends on his ego. This is precisely what is contained in the experiential essence of self-determination and what conditions the experiencing of efficacy. In this' case efficacy derives from freedom.
Special note should be taken of the fact that the fundamental significance of man's freedom and of his free will, elucidated in its concrete exercise and experience, brings to the forefront the relational network establishing the exercise of its
dynamism in its essential dependence on the ego. It is at this point that the realism of experience belies the idealism of pure abstraction: for taken in abstraction from the concrete notions among the elements of the person, freedom may be seen as epitomized by "independence" from all possible factors. Actually, however, the reverse is true. The lack of the relational concatenations of numerous factors within and with reference to the structure of the man-person in its dependence on the ego in the dynamization of the subject precludes the freedom of human action; this latter has then no proper groundwork to emerge from by its own proper mechanism. It is here that there runs the intuitive, best evidenced line dividing within a primitive type of experience the person from nature, the world of persons from the world of
individuals (e.g., animal individuals), whose whole dynamism is limited to the level of nature. In this last case the distinctive trait is the lack in their dynamization of a necessary connection with the ego. In point of fact, the structure of mere individuals differs from that of the person. We do not find in it the structural-dynamical
complexes which we have earlier identified as governance" and
"self-possession" and which form the structural condition of self-determination. At the level of nature, the dynamism of the individual flows in and is absorbed by the potentiality of its own subject, which consequently establishes the direction of
dynamization (e.g., instinct is a manifestation of nature's directing the functioning of an Individual as well as of the actualization of this supremacy).
Such a structural connectedness is possible chiefly due to the absence of the ego. In fact, within natural species as such there are only individuals but no constituted egos. The necessary factor in constituting the ego, that is, the person in his strictly experiential profile and content, is the presence of consciousness and
self-determination. It is through self-determination that the transcendence of the person in the action is justified, whereas the action itself is constituted as the act of the person (which we have clearly differentiated from the acting person). Action so understood reveals the experiential moment of the relation and dependence upon the ego, in which consists, first, the very foundation of personal freedom. With freedom it accounts, second, for the person's transcendence in the action.
The Contextual Meaning of the Transcendence of the Person
At this stage it seems necessary to examine the idea of "transcendence" more closely - in particular, the sense in which the term is used in this study.
Etymologically "transcendence" means to go over and beyond a threshold or a boundary (trans-scendere). This may refer to the subject's stepping out of his limits toward an object, as is in different ways the case in what is known as intentional acts of external ("transcendent") perception. The manner in which the subject
transgresses his limits in this type of cognitive act differs from his outgoing in acts of willing, whose character is conative. Later in our study we will consider in more detail the characteristic features of the particular intentional acts. Transgressing the
subject's limits in the direction of an object - and this is intentionality in the
"external" perception or volition of external objects - may be defined as "horizontal transcendence." But it is not the kind of transcendence we are concerned with when speaking of the transcendence of the person in the action (though, as we shall see later, the other is also involved). The transcendence we are now considering is the fruit of self-determination; the person transcends his structural boundaries through the capacity to exercise freedom; of being free in the process of acting, and not only in the intentional direction of willings toward an external object.41 This kind of
transcendence we shall call "vertical transcendence," in contrast to the other kind of transcendence that we have called horizontal.
Thus conceived, transcendence as an essential of the person can be best characterized by comparing the dynamism of the person with the dynamism of nature. First, concerning the person, self-determination accounts for the dominant position of the ego. This dominance serves as a kind of guideline. In contrast, there is no such domination in an individual who is but the subject of activations
coordinated by instinct. On the one hand, by analogy with the expression "the acting person," we should use the expression "the acting individual." On the other hand, the adequate and fundamental formulation of the action finds its expression in "human action" which only by analogy can be tentatively transposed to nonpersonal
individuals as "individual action," though in fact there is nothing to justify this definition. Acting, the action, in the strict sense cannot occur where there are no means to make one's dynamization depend on the ego.
The Role of the Objectification of the Ego in the Structure of Freedom The fundamental significance of man's freedom, of the exercise of his "free will,"
forces us to see in freedom first of all that special self-reliance which goes together with self-determination. To say that man "is free" means that he depends chiefly on himself for the dynamization of his own subject. Hence the fundamental significance of freedom presupposes the objectification which we discussed earlier. The
precondition of freedom is the concrete ego, which while it is the subject is also the object determined by the acts of will. The dynamism at the level of nature alone, to which we refer as an illustrative comparison, does not manifest that objectiveness of the subject. This deficiency was already asserted on the occasion of the analyses in the preceding chapter, where the distinction was drawn between subjectiveness and efficacy. We noted then that the ontological foundation when there is something only happening in it, manifests subjectiveness alone; but when it acts it manifests its subjectiveness together with efficacy. As the efficacy is based on self-determination and as the subject efficaciously determines itself, it is then also its own object. This is how objectification enters into the fundamental significance of freedom: it
conditions the self-reliance.
4. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WILL AS THE PERSON'S POWER OF