One surprise when you read Aristotle is just how unimportant freedom is to him. It may be our central political value, but Aristotle rarely even mentions it. When he talks about the quality of being free, ἐλευθεριότης, he just means the ability to spend money wisely: “liberality.” What we want from society is not freedom but justice: fair distribution of resources, fair punishment for misdeeds, and so on.
A lot of people are unwilling to countenance this downgrading of freedom, and seek in Aristotle’s pages a “higher freedom,” the ability to act, not according to desire, but according to reason.
Insofar as we are human beings, we should certainly act rationally, for according to Aristotle reason is our human essence. But in the opening chapters of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, I think we find a more complex and interesting possibility.
There, Aristotle discusses a pair of concepts allied to what was later called freedom: ἑκών, voluntarily or happily, and ἄκων, under constraint or unhappily. Aristotle glosses what we do ἑκών as what we are responsible for. When we act ἄκων, or as we might say unfreely, we are in fact not acting at all, for something else is constraining us. In such cases we are not responsible for what we do.
What is it, then, to be “responsible” for one’s act? For Aristotle, as is typical of him, responsibility has various kinds and degrees; but in the strictest sense, we are responsible for things we choose to do. Freedom is then, most strictly, freedom of choice. How very modern!
Not so fast. What does Aristotle mean by “choice” (προαίρεσις)?
Choice for him—again, in the strictest sense—results from deliberation (βούλευσις). Deliberation, in turn, relates what Aristotle views as the two morally-relevant components of the human mind: desire and reason. Desire is an impetus toward something other than itself (desire, we may say, doesn’t desire desire). The overall name for what it seeks is ἐυδαιμονία, which is often (though controversially) translated as “happiness.” Basically, it denotes, not a feeling (as “happiness” does), but everything in your life going as well as it can.
Reason has (again, as is typical for Aristotle) different degrees and forms. In deliberation, reason begins from one’s overall concept of happiness and, using as premises what one knows about the world and one’s position in it, reasons back from that end through various means to it until it arrives at one’s current situation, determining what one can do here and now that will lead most efficiently to happiness. Since one desires happiness, one will then automatically perform that act. Reason and desire come to agreement, and their confluence produces the action.
When an act is performed after reasoning things out this way, then, it arises from the agent’s entire moral psychology, i.e. as the confluence of its two components, reason and desire. The source of the action is then (in the strictest sense) the person performing it, who is therefore wholly “responsible” for that action. If we go on (as Aristotle doesn’t) and call such an action “free,” we arrive at a definition of freedom: freedom is the ability to express your whole self in your actions, where your “self” is the totality of your desires (or at least the currently relevant ones) plus your reason.
Your desires tell you what you love, and reason tells you what you are good at: Aristotle’s “whole self” is not simply reason or desire, but coincides with what I call the “personal nature” of the individual (# 9). We may say that freedom for Aristotle is the ability to express your personal nature in your actions.
The whole point of deliberating is then to identify the single course of action that will most efficiently lead to happiness. It may happen, however, that deliberating arrives at a number of actions that I can perform right now that all lead, with equal efficiency, to happiness. In such a case, the alternative actually chosen has nothing rational to recommend it over its alternatives, and the choice is merely random. Choosing among alternatives, in fact, is servile:
But it is as in a house, where the freemen [ἐλευθέροις]are least at liberty to act at random [ὅ τι ἔτθχε ποιεῖν], but all or most things have been prescribed for them, while the slaves and the animals do little for the common good…(Metaphysics XII.10 1075a19022, my translation).
Freedom for Aristotle has nothing to do, then, with freedom, as (roughly) the ability to choose one of a number of alternatives, where the choice itself has no previous cause (and so is called an act of ”free will”). That concept of freedom, our concept, has theological, and—as we will see—specifically Christian, origins. It has to, because (as Kant argues) it implies a break in the chains of natural causality: as what Kant called the capacity to begin something truly new, freedom cannot come from nature, which—for Kant anyway—is causally governed through and through.
In the world of quantum physics, to be sure, there are uncaused events, such as proton decay. Kant, though he knew nothing of quantum physics, calls such events “spontaneous.” But, as Hume had already pointed out, who values such spontaneity? It cannot be anything other than a capacity for totally random activity; and who wants to act that way? For Hume, a free action is one that arises from one’s “internal character, passions, and affections”—or from what I call one’s “personal nature” (Hume, Enquiries, Oxford 1902 p. 99). Similarly for Aristotle.
Free choice in Aristotle’s sense requires extensive knowledge of oneself, while free choice in our sense requires only the power to act without cause. And you cannot know yourself without knowing a lot about the world and society you live in. Such knowledge was once summed up as the “liberal arts,” which is not an arbitrary name but tells us that such studies give us the knowledge we need to be truly free.
To say that something has theological, or even Christian, roots does not mean that it is false; but we see that there are at least two problems with the theologically-derived sense of “freedom:” it is an ad hoc revocation of natural causality, and it denies the necessity of self-knowledge. The latter makes it a philosophy which proclaims the irrelevance of philosophy.