Science, Free Will, and Existentialism

This is the first in a new series of posts, on “Science and Philosophy," featuring interviews with influential scientists and philosophers of science. This is part 3 in an interview series with Bas van Fraassen. Click here for part 1 and part 2.

Bas van Fraassen

Source: Source: Princeton

Bas van Fraassen is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. He is a recipient of both the Hempel Award and Lakatos Award, the two most-renowned prizes in the philosophy of science.

Walter Veit: You have mentioned Jean-Paul Sartre as an influence. Is it not odd for an analytic philosopher to cite Sartre as their inspiration?

Bas van Fraassen: My formal training in philosophy was mainly in analytic philosophy, and most of my work has been as well. But from the beginning, I had a strong interest in existentialism and phenomenology, and I was getting books in Dutch by the small group of existential phenomenologists there.

Just by luck, one of these, Joseph Kockelmans, emigrated to the US, and I had two seminars with him when I was a graduate student. He had written a terrific book in philosophy of science, from an existential phenomenology point of view, that I treasured. So it never seemed to me that analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy are different at heart, however different their literary styles may be.

It was, in fact, a logician, Richmond Thomason, who pointed me early on to Sartre’s essay, “The Transcendence of the Ego,” and I have recently written about this, to explore logical aspects of this existentialist theme.

Walter Veit: Last week, I published an article "Existential Nihilism: The Only Really Serious Philosophical Problem" on Camus arguing that, contrary to popular belief, he might have been the best philosopher among the existentialists, compatible with much of modern science and philosophy. Such a synthesis between a naturalist and existentialist picture of the world has recently been illustrated by the popular television shows Bojack Horseman and Rick & Morty.

Bas van Fraassen: I am truly impressed by what you set out to do in this article, and by your argument that the nihilism found in existentialist writings is similarly present in scientism and naturalism. In some ways, I have tried to argue for something similar, though along different lines.

We differ in part, I think, in that I have no admiration for either naturalism or scientism in general, let alone for the Alex Rosenberg variety. And my existentialist sympathies are not with the atheism, but rather with those themes that Camus and Sartre have in common with, for example, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Bultmann.

In “The World of Empiricism” I confronted the question, “Is there a constructive side to empiricism? Or does it make the search for meaning and meaningfulness hopeless? Is meaning just a matter of the psychopathology of everyday life?” In response, I set out to show how the continuity in the empiricist tradition morphs into existentialism. I held up Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, as embodying extreme empiricism come to life. I wrote that, in the same way as existentialism, “empiricism deprives us of so much that might comfort us in a hostile world. And it is true, it does: all it can offer is the agony and the ecstasy of freedom in a world governed by no laws except those we create ourselves.” And then what? My final response is in another essay, “The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire”, and it hinges on recognizing the call to decision, to take on the responsibility for making life meaningful.

Walter Veit: What are the most important lessons we can learn from the existentialists, such as Camus and Sartre?

Bas van Fraassen: Let me focus on one challenge to traditional philosophy which is also, for each person, an existential challenge. On both a personal and an intellectual level we do not have to look far to see a flight from responsibility. Self-deception and self-medication, every form of bad faith, are obvious ways. But the existentialists exposed ways in which many philosophical theses and ideas tend to absolve us from responsibility as well. Determinism is especially attractive, for if freedom of choice is an illusion, then there are no choices to regret.

The main example that has preoccupied me is in epistemology. The traditional idea of inductive logic and today’s strict Bayesian epistemology have two principles in common: What is our evidence is an objective fact, and what our evidence is, determines uniquely what beliefs and opinion it is rational to hold. So rational belief is rationally compelled; there is no choice involved in what the evidence is, and once the evidence is in, there is no choice about what to believe. Again, if there is no choice, there is no responsibility: how could we be responsible if we had no choice?

There are ripostes to such philosophical ideas also in analytic philosophy. The fallacies involved in the discussions of determinism and free will are very well known. The wobbly, rickety, shaky status of basic presuppositions in epistemology is not well known and is a constant subject of debate. But meanwhile the existentialists, in their phenomenological analysis of our condition, as thrown into a world we never made, confront us with their expose: much of philosophy purported to give us a ‘rational’ basis for fleeing responsibility for ourselves.

This is part 3 in an interview series with Bas van Fraassen. Click here for part 1 and part 2. Stay tuned for part 4!

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