Imagination and Free Will

Imagination and Free Will

Discussions of free will typically focus on bodily action, trivial or momentous. Is such action compatible with determinism? Is it free in the ordinary compatibilist sense? But that is not the only kind of action that can be described as free: there are also acts of the imagination. About this kind of action, I would say two things: (a) such actions are not free from the past, and (b) they are free from coercion.[1] For causation by the past (and present) is not a kind of coercion. You are free to do things if you are not coerced and wish to do them, but you are not free from your own mental and physical nature—it determines what do you, down to the last detail. You are free to imagine what you want to imagine, even though your wants (etc.) determine what you choose to imagine. I think the case of imagination brings out clearly the truth of these two propositions. First, you are clearly not free from your own nature in your imaginative life: what you imagine is uniquely fixed by the totality of impinging physical and mental causes—your brain and your mind. In particular, your imaginings are a function of your desires and experiences; and of course, you are not free from those—why would you want to be? No one ever imagines things wildly at variance with everything they know, desire, and have experienced. No two brains could be exactly alike and yet one has an imaginative life quite different from the other. If they did, it would be random and pointless—like having a belief completely unrelated to everything else about you. This kind of “freedom” is a fanciful myth. Yet you are perfectly free to imagine whatever you feel like imagining—what you feel like imagining being part of your antecedent nature. No one is stopping you—and no illness or brain failure either. Your imagination is working perfectly, and it follows your general (and detailed) psychology (and physiology). You have all the freedom of imagination you could ever want; specifically, you can imagine whatever you desire. Indeed, your freedom in this respect is greater than your bodily freedom, since the body is far more subject to coercion and malfunction. Other people can force you to act against your will by causing your body to move (or not move) in certain ways, but they can’t do that to your imagination. They can imprison your body but not your mind: in jail you can imagine not being in jail—you can perform this act (but not the act of bodily escape). Also, your body can fail you in your desired projects and often does, but your imagination is a reliable partner—it goes where you tell it. You can be in imaginary heaven while stuck in bodily hell. Other people can’t even tell what you are imagining, as they can tell what your body is up to. Thus, the imagination is a haven of freedom, unlike the body which must cope with the physical world. I think few people would deny that this is a case of genuine freedom, and it is perfectly compatible with psychophysical determinism. That is, they would accept a compatibilist account of imaginative freedom: the imagination is clearly free to do as it pleases, though just as clearly not free from the past, because determined by it. The body, by contrast, is not generally free of coercion or constraint—we can’t do whatever we want with it. We are not free to move about as we wish and we are not free to flout natural laws and we are not free to defy our bodily state: but we can do all these things with our imagination. It is paradigmatically free. Compatibilism is true of it, clearly. Freedom is manifest in it. The body acts as a kind of burden, limiting our freedom to do as we desire, but the imaginative mind is anything but. Intuitively, acts of imagining are genuinely free—as free as a bird. There is no impediment to enjoying the freedom inherent in imagination—the indulging of wishes. The imagination says yes to desire, however forbidden or suppressed by external forces. In the light of this, there should be no sense of tension between the freedom of the imagination and its determination by the past, except an equivocation on the word “free”. Freedom of the imagination is in no whit undermined by its dependence on the past.[2]

[1] See my “Two Concepts of Freedom” and other essays on free will on this blog.

[2] Only if our imagination were controlled by some external power and detached from our actual desires (etc.) would we not have freedom of the imagination. But this is not actually the case, barring some exotic tale about mind control from elsewhere. Normally, we imagine what we genuinely desire not what someone else has brainwashed us into thinking we desire. To the extent that this is not true, we are not free. Sheer determinism, however, does not undermine our status as free agents.