Article
Freedom
A Jewish theory of character is immediately suspect from the perspectives of contemporary man, because of its peculiar conception of the role of freedom in man’s control of his own future character development. Its view of freedom as a key element in a moral conception of character — and the three terms “Jewish,” “moral,” and “character” are each independently unthinkable without the presupposition that, to some extent, man retains a core of free will — must be stated in contrast to two contradictory tendencies in the thought of our times. The first is the whole scientific tradition which constitutes the “established” scholarship of our day — scientific, psychological, and philosophical; and the second is the counter-culture whose radicalism and romanticism have so profoundly affected the lives and consciousness of its adherents, and of others as well. Despite an ongoing tradition of criticism of its stifling determinism, the established scholarly disciplines of the Western world have for the greatest part embraced the principle of necessity and causality, and diminished the role of the freedom of the will to the vanishing point. Biology, sociology, history, and now to some extent the law as well, have become the modern elaborations and extrapolations, with greater or lesser variety, of the old determinism of Parmenides, Democritus, and Laplace. Man is more and more seen as externalized, an object of Nature qualitatively no different from any other natural thing, and hence devoid of any significant interiority or internality that marks him off from the rest of the natural order. Free decisions, will, novelty, uniqueness, responsibility, morality, and (of course) such entities as soul, metaphysical yearnings, the desire for self-transcendence, religious aspirations — all these are illusions thrown up by the biophysical organism and have no intrinsic worth. Man, Darwin taught, is an animal, and an animal, as we all know, is a machine — and hence, by this simple equat…
