Kant famously states that we cannot know whether we possess free will or not, but that we are entitled to believe it; and even that we are morally constrained to have faith in our freedom…. It has seemed to me, for a while now, that this is a fine example of a grammatical mistake; of using language non-perspicuously. Perhaps one can express my intuition like this:
If it is not an epistemologically decidable question whether or not we are free, are we then supposed to say that we believe that we are free? Well, that’s something a philosopher will say in his initial rehearsal of knowledge and beliefs with which he starts his investigation of ‘decidability’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ .
But that rehearsal does not express belief in anything; it contains no claims. Are we then to say that we have faith in our possession of freedom? But how would such a faith be achieved, how expressed, how maintained, how threatened, how lost?
(The preceding paragraph is a reworking of some remarks Cavell made on Carnap – see his ‘The Claim of Reason’, p.242-3)
These are neither rhetorical questions nor mere psychological questions. They are grammatical questions, that is to say, their form is: What is called ‘achieving faith in freedom’? What is called ‘expressing your freedom’? What is called ‘maintaining the belief that you are free’? What is called ‘having your faith in freedom threatened’? What is called ‘losing faith in your own freedom’?
If ‘freedom’ is taken in its metaphysical sense referring to the fact of free will, then these questions have no answers. And that means that the foundation for the application of the concept of ‘faith’ is lacking in this case; the concept is being applied without content. Language is on holiday.
(The mistake, it seems, is that one believes that one is making sense, just because the verb-phrase ‘to have faith in’ is syntactically transitive and can take ‘freedom’ as its syntactical object. The transitivity of verbs cannot, however, not be based solely on syntactical considerations. One must also consider the semantics of the possible objects of verbs. And ‘freedom’ in its metaphysical sense is not admissible as the object of the verb-phrase ‘to have faith in’.)
However, if ‘freedom’ is taken in its practical or even political sense, then these questions do have answers. But in that series of answers (and in the language games to which they belong) the question of the epistemological decidability of free will do not arise at all.
Practically speaking, we do not relate to our freedom at all; We stand in no relation – e.g. knowledge, belief, faith – to our own freedom.
