A philosophy of life, for it to qualify as even half-way sensible, must be capable of reliably improving the lives of those who adhere to it. Ideally, such a philosophy would also be equally actionable at both the individual and societal levels. For the quality of our lives is not only determined by the way in which we orient ourselves in the world, but also the very architecture of the world itself. After all, we don’t live in a vacuum. Rather, we live in the world; a world we stumbled into by happenstance and now find ourselves playing an active role in shaping. And it’s the quality of the relationship between ourselves and the design of this world that is the quality of our lives. Thus the ideal philosophy of life would be one that effectively improves this relationship at both ends. The philosophy of life that is humanity’s present default, a kind of hedonistic materialism with humanist shading, it seems safe to say, is some way from ideal. As effective as it’s been, bringing us out of the dark ages, affecting progress on almost all fronts, its inadequacies and deficiencies have been made blatantly apparent. Accordingly, humanity needs a new orientation. One that retains what is working within our present system but fills the cracks, too. So what’s the alternative? Well, it’s hard to imagine Enlightenment becoming the target of civilisation, for better or worse. What about well-being? Seems obvious enough, no? After all, that’s what really matters, right? The trouble with well-being, as an orientation, is that it’s already implicit in almost every philosophical system. Hedonism thinks hedonism is the way to go because it’s the most effective means of creating well-being (however narrowly defined) — not because it runs counter to it. Same deal with Enlightenment. Same with economic materialism. So well-being is already central to humanity’s efforts, in other words. To rally for well-being is therefore to assert the obvious. The trouble is not that well-being is entirely absent from the discussion, rather it’s that humanity’s present philosophy is held to be the most effective at producing it — and historically, that’s correct. To come along and pronounce that GDP is an inadequate measure of things, that there is more to life than economic prosperity, that it’s well-being that matters, is bound to fall on deaf ears. Not for lack of sympathy, but for lack of originality. Of course GDP is inadequate. And of course well-being is what really matters. However, when GDP has proven itself to be such an effective target, as it has, moving the needle of almost every dial, when economic growth has long served as such a reliable proxy for every kind of improvement, one must bring more to the table than mere self-evident declarations. One must provide a substitute that is both as actionable as GDP and compatible with it; a new orientation that throws out the bath water but keeps the baby. Well-being, however, is not a substitute for economic growth. Economic growth is an engine of well-being, albeit a highly imperfect one. Well-being is not an engine of well-being. Indeed it is the thing itself; the end rather than the means. What we need, therefore, is a new and reliable means — a technology for generating human flourishing — that extends beyond the limitations of economic growth. Enter, health.
As I’ll attempt to persuade, health — not happiness, nor pleasure, nor economic growth, nor Enlightenment, nor even well-being — is the most powerful psychological-philosophical orientation; the most reliable guide to the good life, the most expansive, the most actionable, and above all, the most grounded in what it actually is to be human. While the importance of health is generally acknowledged, at least superficially, the way in which we live, and the way in which we’ve structured the world, reveals how little we truly appreciate its primacy. We pay lip service to the idea of health, yet undermine it with almost every action. Why? Much of the problem, I’ll argue, is a function of our individual and collective ignorance of health as a philosophical concept and physical reality. Our thinking is ordinarily shallow, charged with cultural associations, rife with misconceptions, simply mistaken. However, that we don’t sufficiently understand or appreciate health, as a thing, is far from perplexing. On the contrary, it’s entirely natural and unsurprising given where we come from, the evolutionary and historical roads that have led us to this point. Correcting this oversight — ameliorating this particular branch of ignorance — I hope to convince, is among the most important and consequential things we can do to improve our individual and collective fate. And the first step, it seems, is to remove health from the shell of banality and obviousness that so disguises its substance and place it under the light of critical inspection. Once we understand it, we can then appreciate it. Once we appreciate it, we can then embody it. And once we’ve embodied it, we’ve done our job.
What is health?
Health is a good thing, certainly. It’s a statement that’s unlikely to elicit any real disagreement. However, when fully understood, health seems like a lot more than just a good thing, and rather a concept that encompasses all good things. Now this assertion is far less axiomatic. But as I’ll do my best to render sensible, all that we care or should care about, all that we value or should value, is grounded in good health. Indeed, they’re not only grounded in good health, they’re manifestations of it. Of course, this claim rests on a very particular — and perhaps non-obvious — conception of health, one that I hope to persuade is rationally justified.
So what is health? The traditional conception of health, certainly that which is most firmly lodged in the human psyche, is defined in negative terms — that is, the absence of sickness. The contemporary biological definition of health, in contrast, centres around the concept of homeostasis — that is, physiological equilibrium or balance; a definition which, coincidentally, accords with the long-held Eastern (and now New Age) view of human health: the idea of some kind of alignment or harmony between the three dimensions of the human condition — mind, body and spirit.
On some level, all of these definitions are accurate. Health is, in part, the absence of sickness. Health is also homeostasis. And, if instead of conceiving health in terms of homeostasis, one elects to think in terms of mind, body and spirit, that’s cool, too. There’s no conflict between these definitions because, besides the fact they’re all hitting on the same general essence, they’re all simply facets of what is in fact a far deeper/broader concept. That said, the ideas of health as the absence of sickness and health as homeostasis, once unpacked — that is, critically examined — already carry us a long way from the popular conception. So before we look to expand our conception of health, let’s first see what kind of picture these two separate, yet related, definitions give us.
Health as the absence of sickness
The idea of health as the absence of sickness seems perfectly intuitive. Obvious, even. We are healthy when we aren’t sick, and vice versa. Things couldn’t be simpler, right? According to this entirely common sense picture of things, there’s two distinct states that a human being may find themselves in — health and sickness — that are both defined in terms of the absence of the other. It’s a binary view of things, in other words — like yes and no, on and off, plus and minus. What could possibly be wrong with this picture? All appears well; until, that is, one’s forced to actually define sickness. See, if health really is the absence of sickness, it follows that one should have an intelligible definition of sickness. And clearly “sickness is non-health”, however true, doesn’t cut it. In order to define sickness in terms of the absence of health, health would need to be defined. And in order to define health in terms of sickness, sickness would need defining. So neither term can be meaningfully defined in terms of the absence of the other, without first defining the other, for that would result in a kind of infinite recursion. In other words, sickness has to be a some-thing, rather than a non-thing. But what exactly?
Google defines sickness as “The state of being ill.” Thanks, Google. Fortunately, perhaps recognising the uselessness of this particular definition, Google — being the generous search engine that she is — provide us with a second — sickness: “The feeling or fact of being affected with nausea or vomiting.” And so there you have it. Two equally vacuous definitions that nevertheless characterise how we — “we,” being the statistical average of us — think about sickness. We consider ourselves to be sick when we’re “ill”, that is, when we’re stricken with nausea or vomiting or a comparably apparent form of unpleasantness or abnormality. Conversely, we’re healthy when there’s no apparent illness, abnormality, or persisting unpleasantness. Certainly, this captures a meaningful chunk of what it is like to be sick, however, it doesn’t do the same for what sickness, in a more fundamental sense, actually is. Can someone be sick and unaware of the fact? In other words, can someone be sick — in some generally uncontroversial sense — and yet still feel healthy? Well of course. Thus sickness cannot be judged in terms of subjective experience alone. One could even imagine someone who is sick, but whose subjective experience is actually made more pleasant by the sickness. Consider some kind of neurological dysfunction wherein serotonin production is substantially elevated. Moreover, what if this is all the individual has ever known? If so, we couldn’t define their sickness as abnormal, at least not without referring to what is normal for others, or what is ideal according to some defined standard. And so it is that with very little reasoning, our picture of sickness is made more subtle, less intuitive. Almost immediately, we find ourselves in deep philosophical waters. What we’ve realised, or at least what I hope has just been made sufficiently apparent, is that we cannot define sickness in terms of itself. We can merely describe it, allude to its phenomenology. In order to properly define it, we must define it in terms of its variance against some idealised, perfectly healthy human organism. That is, we cannot define sickness without first defining health. And we must define health positively — it must be a set of positive standards or criterion — for as we’ve just seen, we cannot define it in terms of sickness. Now that’s not to say that there is no place for sickness within a rational definition of health, it simply can’t be front and centre.
Health as homeostasis
‘Health as homeostasis’ provides us with a very different conceptual picture. Instead of viewing health and sickness as two distinct modes or states, each being defined by the absence of the other, through the homeostatic lens we see health as a kind of dynamic equilibrium, a physiological sweet-spot of sorts, an island of optimal function surrounded by a sea of sickness (that is, non-optimal function). It’s quite a remarkable idea when you think about it. Within any human being at any given time, there’s an inordinate number (trillions at the very least, but who really knows) of physiological processes taking place, processes at every level of emergence — cells, tissues, organs — processes that make life possible. Each of these processes has an optimal range of function, somewhere between too much and too little, too fast and too slow. And health is the emergent phenomenon that manifests when most or all of these processes are within the optimal range. Sickness, on the other hand, is what emerges when enough of these processes are outside — or well outside — the optimal range, that it shifts the entire organism out of homeostasis and into disequilibrium. Sickness, in this sense, is disequilibrium, dysfunction.
To be sure, homeostasis is not some purely intellectual concept. Rather it’s a very tangible component of modern medicine. Consider, for example, the routine check-up. One visits their local general practitioner — someone trained to view the human organism from a thousand feet — who seeks to ascertain a much about their health status as possible. This usually involves the patient having their blood pressure taken and having blood drawn, the results of which both serve as proxies for the state of a great deal of physiological processes, the latter providing a far more comprehensive and detailed picture. Depending on whether or not the patient’s results fall within the healthy or “normal” range — a range defined in terms of established norms for particular reference classes (age, sex etc.) — the doctor will either assure the patient that all is good, or look to correct — with some kind of intervention — what appears to be dysfunctional (abnormal hormone levels, for instance). In a nutshell, this is how we do medicine in the 21st century.
According to homeostatic thought, perfect health must be perfect homeostasis. Perfect balance. Perfect equilibrium. Perfect alignment. Perfect function. Every physiological process doing what it should precisely when it should. The picture this idea paints is one of a kind of finely-tuned machine, or perhaps a highly efficient manufactory, perfectly organised biological chaos. As sound as this idea seems, does it really capture all that it means to be healthy? Or is there more to the concept of health than mere biological balance?
It doesn’t take much reflection to appreciate that there must be more to health than homeostasis. Consider, for example, congenital blindness, or any other ‘benign’ congenital disease. Despite being born without eyesight, it seems possible that one may nevertheless find themselves in a state of perfect homeostasis. In other words, blindness does not necessarily imply physiological imbalance. To be blind is to simply be without a particular attribute. What’s inherently unhealthy about the absence of a particular attribute if it doesn’t interfere with homeostasis? Now one could argue that sight is a vital part of our homeostatic machinery, thus being without it would surely have undesirable biological — that is, homeostatic — implications. In practice, this is almost certainly true. Being without vision would, one imagines, make things a hell of a lot harder. However, there is nothing in principle to suggest that blindness must impede homeostasis. It’s even conceivable that blindness could, in some contexts, prove homeostatically beneficial. For instance, if blindness lead one to have certain insights about what is important in life or what is truly valuable about our humanity, those insights could well be extremely conducive to homeostasis. In any case, let’s assume that it’s possible to be both blind and in a state of perfect homeostasis. If so, how then could we claim that it’s somehow ‘less healthy’ to be blind than to have perfect vision? All other things being equal, what makes having eyesight ‘healthier’ than not? If we can’t appeal to homeostasis, how could we justify this claim? Or is it simply non-sensical to speak of health in terms of anything other than biological homeostasis?
As I’ve already suggested, there has to be more to an enlightened conception of health than mere homeostasis. As I’ll argue, we are perfectly justified in preferring vision to blindness, all things being equal. Moreover, not only are we justified in preferring vision to blindness, we are also justified in claiming that it’s healthier to have eyesight than to not.
Towards a positive conception of health
Health as the absence of sickness and health as homeostasis are both what’s known as ‘naturalist’ conceptions of health. That is, they’re both based on the premise that health can be entirely understood in terms of empirical facts about human physiology; that health is completely and solely within the purview of biological science. Health as the absence of sickness is also a fundamentally negative conception of health. That is, health is what you get when certain undesirable conditions do not exist. Health is what you get when there’s no sickness. Health as homeostasis, while not a negative conception in the same way health as the absence of sickness is, nevertheless implicitly eschews any kind of positive standards of health, beyond of course those that pertain to homeostasis. As we saw, homeostasis provides no defensible basis for arguing that to have vision is healthier than to not. Naturalism (also known as neutralism) is ‘value-free’, in other words. This is to be contrasted with normativism, which in this context, is the position that concepts such as health and disease are not only reflections of certain underlying biological realities, but functions of our values. According to the normativist (also known as ‘constructivist’) view, defining health not only involves establishing certain facts about human physiology, but also “involves shared judgments about what we value and what we want to be able to do.” In other words, the normativist conception of health should take into account both what it is to be human and what it ought to be. Thus, in contrast to the naturalist or neutralist position, the normativist conception of health is a fundamentally positive one. That is, it’s based on a set of positive standards regarding what it means to be healthy. As I’ll argue, normativism is the superior of the two positions — philosophically speaking — and pragmatically, the most aligned with how we should think about — and act on — our own individual health.
The difference between homeostasis and health is that the former is a purely biological phenomenon, a value-independent physical reality, whereas the latter is what we may refer to as a ‘bio-cultural’ concept, a phenomenon that emerges at the nexus of biological facts and human values. Contrary to the naturalist view, health cannot be reduced to biology, though it is of course grounded in it. To illuminate this point, consider mental health. What we define as psychologically healthy or otherwise is just as bound up in cultural values and expectations as it is physiology. It is deemed unhealthy, for instance, to have a short attention span or to be ‘hyperactive’. We diagnose it as ADHD and prescribe rather powerful drugs to treat it. But in what sense is this unhealthy? Like blindnesss, a short attention span doesn’t imply physiological disorder or imbalance. There is no wholly objective standard by which to support the claim that such a trait is necessarily unhealthy. Indeed it’s only considered unhealthy and treated as an illness for the fact that we value behaviour that conforms to social and cultural aims and values, and dislike behaviour that diverges from them. In the case of ADHD, we label it an illness because it clashes with our present system of education, our values of order and obedience. We value, as a society, good boys and girls who do what they’re told, while we punish and alienate those who don’t. Biologically speaking, there is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about a short attention span or an abundance of uncontainable energy. In one context — school — such traits are maladaptive. In another context, however, they could be highly well-adapted.
There’s innumerable examples of this kind of thing; a trait — or set of traits — that are adaptive in one context and maladaptive in another. Almost all of what makes modernity so challenging, in fact, can be traced back to layers or dimensions of our psychology that were once highly advantageous — serving to keep us alive — that are now extremely antagonistic to our individual and collective well-being. Our tribal instinct, for example, was once the difference between life and death. In the context of a world where one was at constant war with one’s neighbours, when an unfamiliar face most often meant an unfriendly face, a propensity to harbour ill-will and animosity — suspicion at the very least — towards the world outside of one’s tribe was perfectly sensible — healthy, even. Fierce tribal loyalty and out-group resentment reflects what was a response to a certain reality of human life at the time. Today, however, in a world where someone from the other side of the river and over the hill is highly unlikely to plunder one’s village or enslave one’s people, tribalism is a highly problematic piece of software to be running. It’s not the end of the world when it’s confined to the domain of sport, but it’s quite possibly the end of the world when it seeps into our politics, informing how we view relations with different people from different places.
Naturalistically, that is, without appealing to values, there’s no grounds on which to label either ADHD or tribalism unhealthy. They’re both simply evolved traits that were once — and in some contexts perhaps still are — perfectly adaptive. If one employs values in their conception of health, however, one may respectably argue that both ADHD and tribalism are — generally speaking — unhealthy and should be treated as such. That’s not to say that a value-dependent conception of health must necessarily assert that both of these traits are unhealthy. Indeed, depending on the particular values employed in such a conception, one might argue the opposite: that they’re both perfectly healthy qualities — ideal, even. This is of course the very problem with a value-laden, positive conception of health, and thus the most common objection to it. How could we possibly have a meaningful, universal, objective conception of health — so the argument goes — if such a conception were to include values, values that are inherently subjective, relative, contextual? While this objection may at first appear to be a devastating argument against a positive conception of health, as I’ll argue, it’s not.
As we saw with well-being, values are intimately connected to facts; facts about the world, facts about ourselves, our brains. The two classes of knowledge that values and facts represent — philosophical and scientific, subjective and objective — are not separated, as it’s popularly thought, by some kind of impassable epistemic chasm. With Reason, we can bridge them. Facts about the relation between the human brain and the world — facts about what is — can and should inform us as to how things ought to be. The fact that the interaction between our brains and the world results in subjective experience — consciousness, qualia — combined with the fact that there are things we can do to improve the qualitative nature of experience, serves as a scientific, objective rationale for pursuing — that is, valuing — well-being, and mitigating — disvaluing — suffering. Such a value is not merely arbitrary, relative or contextual. It’s not divorced from the world of facts; it’s steeped in it, and inseparable from it. And just because values are not objective in the same fashion as the laws of physics, it does not follow that we are obliged to take everyone’s conception of values equally serious, in the same way that we’re not obliged to take every theory of gravitation equally serious. Permitting values into our conception of things, in other words, is not to invariably permit all opinions, to do away with any kind of objectivity and thus surrender to epistemic relativism. Contrary to this concern, we can in fact be right and wrong about questions of right and wrong. Values are more than mere smoke and mirrors, as it were.
In the same way that a science of well-being or a science of morality is a real and achievable ideal, and not a mere contradiction in terms, so too is a rational, value-inclusive conception of health. We can indeed include values into our picture of health, without sacrificing our intellectual self-respect. So the question is not ‘Should we include values into our conception of health?’, for values should and already do inform how we conceive of health, but rather, ‘What values should we include?’ To that let’s now turn.
Which values?
If we’re intent on including values in our conception of health, as I say we should be, we must then ask ourselves, ‘which values?’ We can’t simply argue that all that is good is healthy, while all that is bad is otherwise, even if what we end up with bears a striking resemblance with this claim. No, we’re doing philosophy here — very serious philosophy — so we must be a touch more rigorous. Given the ground we’ve already covered, it would seem to make sense — at least it seems to me — to start with well-being. And since I’m the one writing this thing, that’s what we shall do…
Health as well-being
What does well-being have to do with health? To be sure, this isn’t the first time this question has been posed. Indeed it’s a question that’s at the heart of the philosophy of medicine, an area of philosophy that we’ve been stumbling through — perhaps a little drunkenly — for the past number of paragraphs. And as with any even remotely interesting philosophical question, with this one, opinion is divided. There is no consensus. For the most part, there’s a clean split between the naturalists and the normativists on the subject of the relation between health and wellbeing. The naturalist will claim that in no way does health imply well-being, though they are likely to acknowledge that well-being is a fairly reliable indicator of health, a kind of happy accident of homeostasis. If we were to compare two individuals, both whom were in the optimal physiological range for their particular reference class, yet one had a higher level of well-being than the other (and let’s imagine it’s not only self-reported but actual well-being), in the mind of the naturalist, both are equally healthy. The fact that one experiences greater well-being than the other is, to the naturalist, entirely irrelevant. It merely reflects the differences between the two individuals’ physiology.
The normativist, on the other hand, will argue that well-being is a vitally important part of what it means to be healthy. All other things being equal, she who feels better is healthier than she who feels worse. Not only is this view consistent with how we presently do medicine, and in-line with our most fundamental value, it’s also supported by our biological understanding of things. Feeling good, that is without external chemical intervention, is highly conducive to healthy physiology. Conversely, feeling bad is highly deleterious, physiologically. The evolutionary logic to this particular biological phenomenon is clear enough. Physical or psychological suffering serves as a physiological alarm, alerting one that something is up, something that needs correcting. Hunger pains, for instance, signal that one must eat or else it’ll be bad news. Well-being of any kind, in contrast, signals that things are good, a sort of physiological endorsement of one’s behaviour. ‘Keep on doing whatever it is that you’re doing,’ it says.
Even when the suffering experienced is purely psychological, there’s very real, highly adverse physical effects. Consider depression. Depression is not only a reflection of poor health — either physical or psychological or both — it’s also a cause of it. Similarly, well-being is both a reflection and cause of good health. While it’s possible in principle to imagine two individuals with different levels of well-being and yet who — leaving values aside — are equally healthy, in practice, that’s not what we see, for that’s not how human biology works. It’s mistaken to think of two individuals who experience different levels of well-being but that ‘all other things being equal’ are equally healthy. In practice, all things are not equal by virtue of their divergent psychological compositions, compositions which are both grounded in and inform physiological function.
In other words, psychological phenomena — consciousness and its contents — cannot be separated from physiological phenomena, for the two are one and the same. Well-being, indeed all conscious experience, is physiology. At the end of the day, it’s all just chemistry; various configurations of matter, with various properties at various levels of emergence. It’s not sensible, then, to speak of one’s physiology as distinct from how one feels, for how one feels is itself an emergent property of one’s physiology. That this point is not made clear in the literature is evidence of how deep the most extreme brand of mind-body dualism — ‘substance dualism’ — runs through our thinking. Even within the most scientifically literate circles (those intersecting with the field of medicine, for instance) the idea that we are a physical thing — a body with cells and tissues and organs — and a mental thing — a self, a spirit, a soul — and that the two can be divorced from one another, is remarkably pervasive. To be clear, there’s no question that we’re a physical thing as well as a mental thing. However, these two properties are part of the same unitary substance; that is, the fabric of Reality. That this isn’t fully appreciated, I suggest, can be attributed to the degree to which our experience of ourselves — that is, what it is like to be us — is so persuasively non-physical, that the idea that ‘all that we are’ emerges from a single substance is so counter-intuitive as to render the very notion absurd. Experience tells us — with literally every bit of personality — that we are this ethereal force, a voice that lives between our own ears, a spirit that couldn’t possible reside in any kind of physical substance. The weight of this experience is such that, even when we’re confronted with the facts of the matter, we’re unlikely to discard this intuitive, felt model of ourselves.
If it’s indeed true that the entirety of our being is comprised of a single substance, as I believe we will confirm with time, there could be no metaphysical divide between one’s physiology and one’s psychology — that is, between the physical and the mental. Any sensible conception of health must therefore include both dimensions of our being, for they’re both ultimately properties of the same substance. Health is — at the highest level of abstraction — what emerges when the fabric, material, substance — call it what you will — of Reality is configured in such a way. Accordingly, our conception of health must incorporate everything there is to know about the various ways in which this substance can be arranged, the physiology, as well as what it is like to be arranged in such a way, the emergent psychology. One is not superior — metaphysically or otherwise — to the other, both facets are equally significant pieces of our humanity, both of which we must acknowledge if we are to understand, and ultimately better, our health.
Following all this, and to hammer the point home, not only is it sound philosophy to incorporate well-being into our conception of health, given that — in practice — it makes no sense whatsoever to seperate health from value and that we are right to prefer one particular physiological configuration to another, it’s also sound biology, for well-being and suffering — and the entire phenomenological landscape that separates the two — are both emergent properties of particular physiology, non-physical properties that are just as pertinent to a rational understanding of health as their physical counterparts.
So it makes sense to include well-being, as a value, into our conception of health. The next question is, are there any other values, analogous to well-being, that we should let in also? In short, yes, yes there is. To be healthy — I hope to make the case — is to be free. The extent to which we are healthy, in a very practical sense, reflects the extent to which we are free. Before we unpack this particular claim, let’s first explore the concept of freedom, and why it is something we should value.
Freedom
Freedom is an obviously and notoriously tricky concept to pin down, philosophically. However, in everyday life, it’s a term we throw around all the time, and on some level, we all seem to know what we mean by it. So while it’s not immediately clear what freedom is precisely — in any kind of metaphysical sense, that is — our ordinary, colloquial use of the term, I suggest, reflects a reality of some sort that underlies it. In the case of freedom, there’s a there there, so to speak. That is our starting premise. Freedom is not a mere illusion, but a very real and important thing. Moreover, it’s a thing that we are justified in caring about, a thing that we ought to care about a lot more than we presently do. That’s the next premise. Together, we get something to the effect of “Freedom is real and something we ought to value, a lot.” To make sense of this claim, it’s necessary that we first do a bit of definitional work, so that when we’re talking about freedom, we’re talking about the same thing. Then we can begin to examine why it’s something we ought to value.
What freedom isn’t
At the outset, let’s make clear what freedom isn’t. Freedom isn’t freedom of the will. As I see it, however which way you cut it, the idea of ‘free will’ makes no sense. We have no control over the preconditions that led to our existence, no say in where we are born, nor what we are born with. We don’t have a say, in other words, in either nature or nurture, the twin variables that shape who and what we are, so how could we possibly claim to be free in the intuitive sense that most of us feel ourselves to be? Our will, contrary to the opinion of many, is in no way ‘free’ — at least not in any usual sense. Certainly, one can make allusions to the bucket of mysteries at the foundations of quantum theory, bend over backwards in order to leverage one mystery to explain another. However, there is no intellectually defensible grounds for pulling such a magic trick. In fact, it’s intellectually dishonest. At this point, there is nothing one can point to in order to justify the belief in the concept of free will. To the best of our knowledge, we’re all at the mercy of cosmic forces way beyond ourselves. It is certainly possible, however, that at some point our understanding could change; that an insight into the mechanics of existence somehow supports free will, and that our present inability to make sense of the concept merely reflects the all-too-real limitations of our intelligence and not the absence of its place in Reality. So, for now, whatever freedom is, it isn’t free will.
What freedom is
With that out of the way, we can now begin to think about what freedom is. At a high level of abstraction, like health, freedom is an emergent property of the universal Substance. Every blob — that is, every unit, fragment, mass — of Substance exhibits a certain range of freedom. Depending on how a particular blob of Substance is configured, such a blob could be said to exhibit more or fewer degrees of freedom than another blob. A rock, for instance, has very little freedom. A frog has more freedom than a rock; it can move on its own accord, for instance. In this most straight-forward sense, a frog can do more than a rock. The way in which it is configured permits a range of capability that the rock does not exhibit. Lest we be accused of discriminating against rocks, let’s draw another comparison, this time between two forms of animate Substance. Consider two frogs. One with all four of its legs, the other without any of them. The four-limbed frog is capable of hopping great distances, doing and moving as other four-limbed frogs do. In contrast, the no-limbed frog can’t hop at all, it can only wiggle around a bit. Accordingly, as a function of its physical impairment, the no-limbed frog cannot hunt for itself and is therefore dependent upon the assistance of other frog family and friends for its survival. All other things being equal, the first frog is more capable than the second. It is this most banal, down-to-earth sense, I suggest, in which freedom is a meaningful concept. However, banal though it is, when we stretch it to consider our own lives, it becomes rather interesting.
At the heart of this conception of freedom is the notion of abilities or capabilities. We are free, I suggest, to the degree that we are able or capable, unfree in every respect that we’re not. This is obviously a rather sweeping statement, but I believe it gets at the crux of the matter. Let us illustrate by way of example. Consider two individuals. One who can do five pushups, the other fifteen. Who is the ‘freer’ of the two? Assuming this is the only respect in which the two differ, the answer would be the latter, of course. No matter how hard the former tries, no matter how much self-belief they have, no matter how much they believe in the idea of ‘mind-over-matter’, no matter how many motivational Youtube clips they’ve consumed, they can do no more than five pushups. They are physically incapable of doing more, in other words. Constrained by the relationship between the laws of physics and the configuration of their organism, they’re not free to do more than five pushups. Conversely, the latter individual is free to do more than five pushups — precisely ten more. I encourage the reader not to let the obvious triviality of this example conceal what is significant about it. The point is not that it is significant how many pushups one can do — though if we should value freedom, perhaps it’s more significant than is generally appreciated — but rather, that there are very real and testable ways in which we are free, and equally real and testable ways in which we’re not.
The above was an example of physical freedom. But what about psychological freedom? Is there such a thing? If so, what does it mean to be psychologically free in a world without free will? First things first: psychological freedom, like its physical counterpart, is a meaningful concept. Just because we’re not the ultimate arbiters of our own fait does not mean that there is no sense whatsoever in which we may be free, psychologically. In a far more restricted sense, we’re all free — to a degree. That is, the degree to which we are capable. And while it’s not nearly as sexy as the notion of complete and unperturbed free will, it has the advantage of being real.
The concept of psychological freedom is slightly blurrier than physical ability, for the obvious reason that the powers of the mind are mysterious in a way that our physical abilities are not. Put another way, our psychological capabilities are instantly malleable in a way that our physical capabilities are not. At the snap of a finger, our minds may become capable of something that, only a second ago, they weren’t. [Of course, the physical and the mental are inexorably connected — physical capabilities being contingent upon psychological capabilities, and vice versa — however for our sake, it’s necessary that we separate them.] That said, there are nevertheless rather clear-cut boundaries to our psychological capabilities which serve to illuminate the notion of psychological freedom. For instance, whether or not one is capable of composing a great work of poetry is hard to say (what with the inherent subjectivity of poetry, the ambiguity regarding what constitutes ‘greatness’ and the rest of it). But theoretically, any even remotely literate person is in principle capable of producing what may be regarded as a ‘great work of poetry’ however slim the odds may be. However, if one is illiterate — that is, incapable of working with the symbols that make for poetry — it is a certainty that such a person will not produce poetry of any kind, let alone the great variety. That is, not unless they first become literate. Here one may object “but anything is possible if one simply believes!” While I’m sympathetic to the sentiment, and respect its rhetorical value, I must (politely) disagree. No matter how intensely I believe I can speak French, I cannot speak French and will not speak French, that is, not until I’ve invested the necessary time required to learn the language. Until I learn the language, I’m not free — that is, capable — to speak it.
Before we take a look at why we should value capabilities (freedom) and why we should include them in our conception of health, there is another facet to psychological freedom — one that is connected yet somewhat separate to the concept of capabilities — that seems to warrant address. While we appear to be at the mercy of cosmic forces we scarcely understand, inescapably bound to the unbreakable chain of cause and effect, there is a sense — however narrow — in which we appear capable of rising above it all, of transcending the reactivity that generally characterises our condition and exercising what amounts to the closest thing we have to an independent Will of our own. What I’m alluding to is an idea that is central to many of the spiritual traditions, one of the main ideals of the contemplative life. That is, the idea of overcoming our conditioning, the ideal of realising a state of perfect equanimity, or non-reactivity; to no longer be made angry or upset or bitter or jealous by things that would ordinarily have that effect. In short, to act with pure intention always, rather than react reflexively and predictably. This idea is somewhere near the bullseye of Enlightenment, and I suggest, much more than a mirage, and instead, a very real possibility for anyone willing to walk the Path. That it’s a destination that few of us are driving at represents the degree to which, as a culture, we are ignorant of the various landscapes of mind that are available to us all. Even within the traditions that recognise and explicitly aim at this end, the maps they’ve drawn are, at best, less than perfectly reliable guides. With time, with progress, I like to think, we will discover far more direct routes to this way of Being. For that’s exactly what it is: more than a capability — a superior piece of homeostatic software — though it is that too, rather a wholly different mode of Being, a fundamentally distinct ontology. The ontology of freedom.
To be clear, I’m not making any metaphysical claims here, at least none that conflict with our common sense understanding of cause and effect, nor am I undermining the position on free will that I sketched earlier. Regardless of how equanimous or non-reactive one becomes, one is still participating in the same process of cause and effect as even the most reactive creature. By cultivating equanimity, one is merely changing the nature of their relationship with causality, rather than breaking with it entirely. Similarly, even the most realised, non-reactive individual cannot be said to exhibit free will, at least not in the philosophical sense. However, we might reasonably say that they display what is ostensibly a greater degree of free will; that is, the kind of free will we’re referring to when we employ it in a practical rather than philosophical context. In other words, the practical difference between voluntary and involuntary behaviour (see Locke on this point).
Why freedom?
Admittedly, justifying freedom — as a value — is a little like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Though freedom is connected to facts about our organism and facts about the world, it remains one thing to call it a thing, and quite another to decry it a valuable thing. Much as we did with well-being, here too must we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps (as we must in order to get any intellectual affair on its feet and walking). Nietzsche famously had a big problem with this reality, warning that, lacking a genuine foundation, the entire moral, intellectual, cultural edifice we had constructed, was destined to crumble. This concern, while perfectly understandable — especially in light of the historical context in which he was working — was, like the rest of him, more than a little dramatic. While it’s true that values are constructed, the facts they’re grounded in are not; they’re discovered. Some values are justified, given the facts, while others are not. Where I’m sympathetic to Nietzsche is on the point that many of our values are arbitrary, harmful even. We have smuggled many erroneous ideas into our cultural framework throughout history, most often under the guise of divine wisdom. However, that doesn’t render the whole enterprise erroneous. Clearly Nietzsche didn’t think so, either. Otherwise he presumably wouldn’t have so polemically championed his own set of values as he did. Or perhaps he intended his work to be ironic. In any case, values are inescapable. They’re essential to the human project. And while we should do what we can to purge those that make no sense, provided the various facts of the matter, we must remain committed to the project, which requires our taking the issue of values seriously, rather than dismissing it as fraudulent from the outset. Yes, we are amidst a rather significant stage of cultural reconstruction, as Nietzsche saw as inevitable, but so we will always be. This thing will always be a work-in-progress. Whether it’s a work-of-progress, however, is on us.
“We [contemplatives]… are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colours, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. …. Whatever has value in our world does not have value in itself, according to its nature — nature is always value-less — but has been given value at some time, as a present — and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!”
Nietzsche
Now back to freedom. Why should we care about it? That is, why should we value it? First and foremost, because of its relationship to well-being. While freedom by no means guarantees well-being, the two are tightly correlated. Our capabilities, as the source of our personal freedom, are also the source of much personal satisfaction, fulfilment, joy, meaning. And though they may not always elevate our well-being, they always have the potential to. They’re the tools in the toolbox, so to speak. Their being in the toolbox doesn’t guarantee that we will always or necessarily wield them to good effect, but at least it’s an option. In the case of capabilities, it’s truly better to be with than without.
If we consider the lives of the most actualised individuals, we can see them as a process of cultivating and effectively leveraging capabilities; a process of expanding and relishing in their circle of personal freedom. To be sure, there are many ways to flourish in this world, many of which do not demand our constantly extending our capabilities. Some methods simply require our doubling down on a small collection of them. That said, there are no means by which one may flourish without any capabilities, however modest. Our flourishing is always and necessarily predicated on some capability. Capabilities — that is, freedom — is thus an essential precondition to human flourishing. In order to live a good life, by any standard, we must create and exercise our freedom.
There is another reason why we ought to value freedom. Just as we ought to value the quality of conscious experience, preferring well-being to suffering, so too should we value the possible range of conscious experience. By this I don’t mean the qualitative range of experience, the distance between the peaks and valleys of the moral landscape, but rather the quantitative range of possible experience, the total scope of realisable phenomenology. All other things being equal, it’s better for there to be more, rather than less, things to experience; more, rather than less, ways to flourish. And it is our capabilities, both those intrinsic to our organism and those that are extrinsic, those that are augmentative, that provide for our range of possible experience; with additional capabilities comes additional possible — realisable — experiences; that is, additional freedom, additional space of Being. In valuing freedom we are valuing the state-space of our existence. We are saying that we want the world of experience, the world we inhabit, the world of Being, to encompass as much as possible. In valuing well-being, on the other hand, we are saying that we want this space of Being to feel as good as possible. When combined, we’re saying: we want to feel as good as we can in any many ways as we can. That’s the money, philosophically speaking.
When viewed through this lens, we get an interesting perspective on history. The whole process of civilisational development, through this lens, can be seen as one long (or short, depending on perspective) process of state-space expansion, a ballooning of capabilities and therefore possible experiences. With very little exception, we are free to do and be and experience more than at any other point in time. For the most part, and to an overwhelming extent, we are freer than ever. There is simply so much more to be had from life, from our humanity. And with all the challenges we’re presently facing, all the shit that has gone — and may go — wrong, it seems worthwhile taking a step back, if only for the briefest moment, to appreciate just what a tremendous achievement this — civilisation — is. Irrespective of how we’ve done on the well-being side of things (and I think we’ve done pretty good), there is no question that we enjoy unprecedented freedom. Yes, it may not be as evenly distributed as we’d like, but the fact remains. There is more to life than was before. This is huge, and should be recognised as such. And importantly, it should also be appreciated that this wasn’t inevitable. We take the development of civilisation, the development of technology, the advancement of freedom, almost as a given. But, presumably, things could have gone very differently. It’s not as if the tendency towards freedom is baked into the physics of things, right alongside the law of entropy or gravitation. At least not that we know of. Rather, or so it at least appears, we have fought for this freedom — literally and otherwise. We have given blood, sweat and tears for it, heart and soul and everything in between. And so we must continue.
