Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXIV)

Having insisted, psychoanalytically, on the I’s derivation from its world — in Adorno’s words, “the preponderance of the object,” the subject’s radical dependence on the object — Lear now brings a critical perspective to the philosophical discussion of freedom.

Specifically, Lear critiques the account of free will famously developed by Harry Frankfurt, whose criterion of freedom is a certain “harmony of the soul.” On this view, I am “free” if and when my “first-order” and “second-order” desires “harmonize” — that is, when I have and act upon only those desires (impulses, inclinations, and the like) that I endorse, that I want to have and enact. When there is disharmony — for instance, a person is overcome by compelling first-order desires, say, nicotine cravings, that he or she does not want — there is no freedom. (I am in these sorts of situations unfree, in the sense that I do not recognize my impulses and the actions they precipitate as mine, as expressions of my will, but as instead somehow alien to that will.

In light of his forgoing reflections, Lear finds this conception of freedom incomplete — such a harmony of the soul is perhaps a necessary, but hardly a sufficient condition of a robustly free will. It is not enough that my first-order desires are brought into line with my second-order desires; those second-order desires must themselves possess certain qualities,  if they are to constitute a free will. To motivate these additional qualities, Lear invites us to consider the following possiblity:

“Suppose…one’s values or “higher order” desires have been instilled in one in an unreflective, coercive way. Even if one is able to make one’s “lower order” desire march in step, there is a sense in which one’s whole harmonious will is an expression of enslavement to external coercive forces. One cannot tell what freedom a person enjoys just by considering the structure of his soul in this way.” (188)

Such a psychological possibility shows why harmony of the soul is not on its own sufficient: while both my desires and the behaviors that issue from them may indeed comport with my “will” — I feel and do precisely what, upon reflection, I want to feel and do — it is unclear whether or not that will is really mine at all. Thus the manner in which this will is assimilated, and later maintained, counts a great deal; an assimilation that is “coercive,” or even merely “unreflective,” would vitiate freedom.

Hence we cannot reliably determine whether a soul is free on the basis only of its “internal” harmony or disharmony, that is, without some knowledge of its “external” relations. If Lear’s earlier claim about psychoanalysis is correct, and the I emerges and develops by means of identifications, then we must suppose that every I’s “second order” desires — at least originally and for some time after — are internalizations, as an “ego ideal,” of the most important trait or traits in the infantile environment. This includes above all the parental attitude, loving or not, to oneself — specifically one’s drives, needs, or “first order” desires.

But so long as my ontological core — my idealized self-conception or second-order desires — are simple precipitates of this early experience in an unchosen environment, I am in a crucial respect not free. For even if I succeed in “shaping” myself and my life pattern, such that my daily inclinations comport with my “will,” that is, my basic self-conception — nevertheless, why call this will mine, rather than the will of my parents’, or more accturately, my childishly-distorted perception and assimilation of their will? What if my attitude to my first-order desires is still — well into adulthood — a rough approximation of my parents’ attitude to these same desires, which initially it unquestionably was? Of such a will, we might say that it is “free” of internal impulses that would encumber its higher-order self-determination; but we cannot plausibly say (at least without additional knowledge) that it is free of its environment.

“Since the human soul is a psychological achievement, a response to and differentiation from the world, the fundamental issue cannot be merely internal harmony, but whether one has made one’s soul one’s own.” (188)

It follows that, from Lear’s perspective, even a harmonious soul — perhaps, after a point, especially a harmonious soul — lacks the all-important quality of “self-ownership,” inasmuch as it cannot or will not reflectively make itself its own.

This achievement of self-ownership, reminiscent of Kant’s account  in “What is Enlightenment?” and by no means a “given” in normal development, is essentially what Lear seems to mean by “individuation.” And we cannot know whether a soul has individuated, has achieved or even attempted self-ownership, until we have a sense of its reflective distance from the unelected identifications of its origin. The qualifier “reflective” is important: someone who grows into a stark repudiation of his original identifications may well still be unconsciously gripped by them, meaning no genuine distance has yet been reached. For a soul to qualify as self-possessed and so really “free,” then, “a process of differentiation must have occurred so that there is a point in distinguishing the person from the environment” (188).

But how will we know when such a “process of differentiation” has occurred? Indeed, what exactly does such differentiation look like, in the concrete? I will take up these questions in the next entry.