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ACTIONS and OBJECTS from HOBBES to RICHARDSON
By JONATHAN KRAMNICK
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7052-1
Chapter One
Actions, Agents, Causes
The period covered by this study witnesses an important debate about actions. For writers like Hobbes and Hume, human behavior really ought to be described in causal terms. When trying to make sense of what a person does, it is always best to examine the reasons that cause and explain her actions. These reasons typically turn out to be the desires and beliefs an agent has about the effects of her actions, attitudes that are in turn caused by events external to the agent herself. The view that actions are caused by attitudes like desire and belief comes under scrutiny, however, from those who think that causal arguments put at risk one's autonomy and freedom, especially when causes are understood to track back to the outside world. While Hobbes and Hume found causal necessity to be compatible with freedom, their opponents saw freedom as incompatible with any sort of external dependence. My goal in this chapter is to show how this debate encloses a range of philosophical, social, and literary concerns. Foremost among them is whether persons are special kinds of agents, endowed with immaterial souls, or whether mental states like desire and belief are made of the same stuff as the rest of the world and thus susceptible to a kind of limitless causation. Within this metaphysical quarrel over personhood, talk about reasons for action-one's motives, say-often entailed further talk about the societies in which actions occur. As a result, debates about agency had considerable bearing on questions of authority in an age that begins with civil wars and ends with a commercial empire. To look at the motives that lie behind actions was for many to examine how states of mind bring about forms of politics or society. Yet states of mind like motive or intention were often impossible to understand apart from the context in which they occurred. And so the moral of this chapter for the larger project of the book is this: if the philosophy of action consistently found itself tugged between an account of agency that secluded the will within the mind and an account that derived it from external causes, so too did the literary forms designed to evoke the reaches of human consciousness and action. In either case, the line between persons and their component parts, persons and society, the mind and the body, one mind and another, all come under meaningful pressure.
Free Will or Necessity, Part 1
Our story begins with Royalist exiles living in Paris during the early years of the civil War. In 1645 William Cavendish, the Marquess of Newcastle, commissioned Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican theologian John Bramhall to write on the free will problem, a venerable concern of philosophers made relevant again by religious and political upheaval. Bramhall composed a short paper that spring and Hobbes responded quickly; Bramhall rebutted, and the exchange remained for a time within a small group of expatriates. Upon their return to England, however, the debate took a more public face. In 1654 Hobbes's paper was printed and published, without his permission, under the title Of Libertie and Necessitie. Bramhall followed the next year by publishing his rejoinder, A Defence of True Liberty, from Antecedent and Extrinsecall Necessity. Hobbes replied with a new paper, The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in 1656. Two years later, Bramhall returned with Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his Last Animadversions in the Case concerning Liberty, and Universal Necessity. By this time, the debate had moved from a manuscript coterie to a print public and in the process taken on the formal dimensions of a major controversy, with each writer stating his theses in point-by-point response to the other and anticipating and refuting arguments in advance.
Much of the controversy centered on how one might go about defining what actions are, where they start and where they stop. When Hobbes describes an action, he refers to an event with a causal history. Agent P has done action R for reason Q. It is not enough to say that P had Q while doing R; rather, in order to be part of the description, Q must explain the occurrence of R. Consider the following set of events: "[W]hen a Travailer meets with a shower, the journey had a cause, and the rain had a cause sufficient to produce it, but because the journey caused not the rain, nor the rain the journey, we say, they were contingent one to another" and not related as cause and effect. The conclusion Hobbes wishes to derive from the example is simple. The rain happened at the same time as the traveler's journey but did not cause him to go, an action that was presumably caused by the desire to get from one place to another. The weather and a person's decisions each have a causal structure that prominently features reasons. This structure bears on the free will problem because it tethers the will to something on its outside. The agent who decides to go on a journey does so for a reason, and, that being the case, her will has locked onto whatever disposition or attitude explains her action. "In this following of ones hopes and fears," Hobbes writes, "consisteth the nature of Election," by which he means that choosing to act refers to a cause (a hope or fear) and does not occur on its own. So when a philosopher leaves London for Paris in the midst of civil war, he does so presumably because he wants to be in Paris and believes that traveling to Dover and getting on a boat is a good way of getting there. He may further believe, given his Royalist sympathies, that being in Paris is a good idea in the hour of Republican victory. Adding further reasons, however, only sews more stitches to the causal net. It's enough to say at this point that he left because he wanted to be in Paris, for by describing events this way we commit to the idea that "all actions have their causes" (Questions, 70).
To describe an action that an agent performs, one needs to provide the reason for which it was done. One can do so, Hobbes argues, by looking at the sundry passions of the mind, in particular those organized around "appetite and fear ... the first unperceived beginnings of our actions." This use of a mental vocabulary is important (for the moment) to satisfy the requirement that the will, like everything else, has a cause. We have on Hobbes's account provided a description of his decision to take a boat to Paris if we say he feared the Parliamentary army and wanted to be safe among friends. Our description of his actions, however, makes an argument against his will having been free to take them. That is because providing a causal account of actions also supplies the grounds of their necessity, the locking of choice onto the attitude by which it is explained. When, for example, Hobbes argues that the Lord having said to David, "I offer thee three things; choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee" (2 Samuel, 24:12), is not evidence for free will, he claims that one cannot show that "such election was not necessitated by the hopes, and fears, and considerations of good and bad to follow" (Libertie, 7). God affords to David the opportunity to choose among options, but the act of choosing one thing over another requires there to be a reason for doing so, and this requirement locks the will onto the particular hope or fear that rationalizes the choice. Seen this way, the idea of free will is a category mistake, since it ascribes to an appetite a condition that can belong only to an agent, and since it attempts thereby to shed the causes that explain why one takes the actions one does.
Bramhall holds in contrast that "all the freedom of the agent is from the freedom of the will," a position he articulates in opposition to causal accounts of acting. We have sufficiently described an action, on his view, if we say merely that it was undertaken by the will. No lattice of causes trails behind this singular faculty. And so while agents may be said to have reasons for acting the way they do, those reasons never quite exert the force of a cause into an effect. A reason might "representeth to the will, whether this or that be convenient" but the will always retains the right to choose what to do in response to this information (Defence, 10). When "the will is mooved by the understanding," for example, it is "not as by an efficient, having a causall influence into the effect, but only by proposing and representing the object" (Defence, 31). In the gap between the reason that proposes objects and the will that acts upon them lies the vaunted freedom from necessity, for "whatsoever obligation the understanding does put upon the will, is by the consent of the will, and derived from the power of the will, which was not necessitated to moove the understanding to consult" (Defence, 30). Where Hobbes tracks motives into actions, therefore, Bramhall reverses course and sets the will apart from any motive one might have, as if the will were a kind of person within the mind. The result is an elaborate allegory of agency, in which "the will is the Lady and Mistris of human actions, the understanding is her trusty counseller, which gives no advice, but when it is required by the will" (Defence, 30-1). Lest this seem too close to a cause moving into an effect, Bramhall further observes that "if the first consultation or deliberation be not sufficient, the will may moove a review, and require the understanding to inform it self better" (Defence, 31). The effort is at once to sheathe the will from causes and provide for it a kind of psychology of choosing. To be a person, on this view, is to be possessed of a will that can refuse to follow motives or desires. Thus the proper tense in which to describe acts of a free will is the past conditional. Despite the preponderance of causes, free agents "might have suspended or denied [the] concurrence" of past actions or might "have elected otherwise" (Defence, 11, 209).
One important corollary of Bramhall's account of actions is that their proper description really ought not to extend beyond the agent. Insofar as the will is always free to do otherwise, the history of an action should make reference to events within the mind only. In pointed contrast, Hobbes argues that the description of actions should be as extensive as possible. This kind of description, as we have seen, begins by making reference to reasons. Hobbes got on a boat because he wanted to get to Paris. Agent P did action R for reason Q. The more closely one looks at Q, however, the more one sees that it is caused by [Q.sub.1], [Q.sub.2], and so on. Hobbes wanted to get to Paris because he feared for his safety in London. He feared for his safety in London because he believed his writings had angered the Parliamentary authorities. Once opened up to inspection, the causal horizon is nearly limitless. "That which I say necessitateth and determineth every action," Hobbes writes, "is the sum of all those things, which being now existent, conduce and concurre to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were wanting, the effect could not be produced" (Questions, 80). The sum of all things can stretch quite far. At the very least, it can extend beyond the minds of agents to the circumstances and contexts in which agents find themselves. So while it is true that actions depend upon mental states, it is also true that mental states arise from objects, events, and occurrences, from causes external to the head. When Hobbes writes that "nothing taketh beginning from itself" he means to include not only the will but also what we might think of as the efficient cause of the will, the attitude to which the will is locked. Both are brought about by causes not of the agent's "disposing" (Questions, 289). While propositional attitudes like wanting to get to Paris or believing that a boat might do the trick may seem like they begin within us, as mental terms ostensibly should, their proper description, Hobbes argues, ought to reach from the mind to the world. This is because stopping with the mind's internal repertoire of attitudes would fall short of the story in which one comes to have attitudes locked to actions. The route accordingly moves from the outside in: "[E]xternal objects cause conceptions, and conceptions appetite and fear"-and appetite and fear the various acts of the will.
This particular dimension to Hobbes's quarrel with free will is worth a moment's pause. The locking of the will onto attitudes like wanting or fearing, knowing or believing, had seemed to commit Hobbes to a kind of inward account of actions, one that specified their causal history in terms of a mental vocabulary of desires or intentions. But on further inspection it turns out that Hobbes is equally committed to describing the history of actions with respect to their peripheral beginnings, in contexts beyond the person. The long-term result, I will argue over the course of this book, is a balancing of events internal to agents with the external forms by which these events are shaped. Causation casts too wide a net to capture only the propositional attitudes leading up to actions. So it will be important for us to keep an eye on the varieties of externalism that begin for our purposes with Hobbes and extend into the middle of the eighteenth century with Hume-to look, that is, at accounts of action that track attitudes past agents having them to the worlds from which attitudes spring, to societies and polities, to physical units of matter, or simply to other people. Hobbes's version, as we have seen, places emphasis on the near limitless reach of causation, the "sum of all things" that issue into a particular action. "There is hardly one Action, to the causing of which concurres not whatsoever is in rerum natura," Hobbes writes, and then adds as if to explain, that "there cannot be a Motion in one part of the World, but the same must also be communicated to all the rest of the World" (Questions, 239). Hobbes thus elaborates a concept of cause that binds atoms to thoughts to persons to kings to God. On this view, actions don't so much begin with agents as fall backward along a continuous web.
The inclusion of any one action within a web of antecedent causes makes an important statement about the nature of persons, as Hobbes's critics were wont to show. If causation doesn't begin with the will, but rather with attitudes and before that with reasons for those attitudes, then the special place of the person in the overall scheme of the cosmos has been taken away. On the most basic sense of things, Hobbes does not consider persons to be different in substance from other entities in the world. His description of the universe-in which "every Object is either a part of the whole World, or an Aggregate of parts"-admits of one substance, reducible in all instances to the atoms that make up minds and bodies alike. I will explore in the next chapter some of the difficulties that come with this sort of physical model of consciousness and mental causation. I would like now to stick to the place of agents in a world where action occurs as a motion across a single chain. Consider Bramhall's writing a response to Hobbes. Bramhall ascribes to this act a "moral" foundation that begins within him. Hobbes retorts, "I doubt not but he had therefore the Will to write this Reply, because I had answered his Treatise concerning true Liberty. My answer therefore was (at least in part) the cause of his writing, yet that is the cause of the nimble local motion of his fingers. Is not the cause of local motion Physical? His will therefore was Physically and Extrinsecally and Antecedently, and not Morally caused by my writing" (Questions, 142-3). The turn to reasons outside the agent flanks an emphasis on physical description. One motion across the surface of things takes us from Hobbes's writing to the movement of Bramhall's fingers to the appearance of another essay, all without much pause for a person having a will that expresses itself in writing. When Hobbes adds to this account that "what it is to determine a thing Morally, no man living understands," he gets rid of the chance that there might be something in agents-a moral center-that stops the motion of cause and leaves space for an authority over one's own will (Questions, 142).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ACTIONS and OBJECTS from HOBBES to RICHARDSON by JONATHAN KRAMNICK Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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