In my opinion, ‘free’ is as a state that someone can inhabit enabling them to both perform free acts and have free will. A free act is an act which is a result of a person’s own deliberate action, the person could’ve also acted otherwise in this scenario. If the person’s action did not cause the act or the person did not have any other choice but to perform the act, the act is not classified as free. Free will is the power/capacity to choose among alternatives or to at in certain situations independently or natural/social/divine restraints and constraints. Philosophers have argued over the question of whether we even have free will for decades as some believe that human actions are purely objective and products of free will whilst others believe that actions are purely determined by external conditions or fate. This is where the theories of incompatibility and compatibility come into play. However, the purpose of this essay is to not argue whether we have free will at all but rather to debate over where someone in love is more free than someone who is not in love. I will be arguing for the opposition as I believe that our capacity to exert/display complex emotions (such as love) inhibits our ability to exert our free will.
Emotions cloud our judgement. Regardless of whether you believe in determinism or indeterminism, we all have a basic consensus that every act has causality. It doesn’t matter, in this argument, whether you believe that past events or whether we are the cause for future events as I believe that all causes for events and actions are determined by our human condition. Our human condition is the society, the environment and the social ecosystem that we live within. Jean-Paul Sartre dubs this element of our life as ‘facticity’ as everything that goes on around us has the capacity to have implications on our future decisions or our current lifestyle. Our human condition consists of varieties of emotions, actions and influences and we are not able to transcend these influences. Sartre states that we have to be able to transcend this ‘facticity’ in order to attain our Authentic Self but I do not believe we are able to do so. One can never truly be free of social pressures and therefore cannot make choices objectively. People are not always able to transcend their facticity as they act in bad faith due to social judgement and subjugation. We are not always what we will as we don't always have control of our choices. Because of this, our future actions are determined by society (regardless of whether our actions are determined by our past or by other conditions).
I earlier mentioned that our human condition/facticity is comprised of emotions and influences and I believe that these elements have severe implications on our self and our actions. We do not have free will when we are influenced by emotions as emotions cloud our judgement and can often prevent us from making our own deliberate actions. The more complex the action, the more likely our judgement can be clouded. There have been several case studies and experiments to determine whether love prevents us from performing free acts and I will use some of their promulgations and results to back up my claim.
There are many neuro-hormonal changes that occur in our brain when we fall in love. Dopamine, the pleasure hormone, is released during novelty events or pleasurable events (ie. sex). We feel a sense of fulfilment and happiness when dopamine is released which makes new things and following animal instincts desirable. In fact, Sigmund Freud himself backs up the claim that love and sex incite actions in our life. He stated that there are only two basic drives that serve to motivate all thoughts and behaviour; the two basic drives are sex and aggression. Sex and aggression are both elements of our animalistic instinct that we fulfil when we are overtly emotional (eg. During love or during rage). These drives underlie every motivation and act that we as humans experience, and this claim by Freud bolsters my argument that the elements of love (ie. sex) incites acts that we do not fully have control over. There are other hormones such as Serotonin and adrenaline (adrenaline causes people to act aggressively when they see someone hurting/interfering with their loved one or their relationship with their loved one) which are released by love and cloud our judgement and actions. Serotonin, to put bluntly, is a hormone which incites obsessive thoughts. When we have intrusive thoughts pulling our focus away from our day-to-day lives, this is serotonin at work trying to preoccupy us with our feelings of love. People are often driven to make irrational decisions when they feel the effects of serotonin. For example, there have been cases where people get married too quickly as they were under the influence of serotonin which blinded their rationality, leading them to quick divorces once the serotonin levels fall. In a recent case study, it has been shown that when people between the age of 20-25 marry, nearly 10% of them divorce within a year. These people marry at such young ages due to sexual drives and irrational actions but once they lose the effect of love, their neuro-chemical hormones (ie. serotonin) drop and they realise that they made a mistake and divorce.
Using these examples of hormones clouding our judgement and inhibiting our use of reason shows that our emotions can inhibit free will. We don’t have the capacity to act independently of social restraints when we are in love as there are not only biological factors involved but there are also a multitude of social factors. Being in love means that you desire the happiness of your partner and you admire them for who they are. Love, as a state of mind, enables one to become more compassionate, generous and benevolent to your significant other. Using this definition of love, as provided by lifehack.org, highlights the idea that there are three factors of feeling love: (a) we desire the happiness of others, (b) we admire someone else and (c) we develop more positive traits. Both subpoint (a) and (c) show that love changes us: due to the social aspect of love, our capacity to exert free will is changed.
Subpoint (a) explores the idea of how we desire the happiness of others, this shows that to be fulfilled as a human being, we need the validation of others. This completely nullifies the concept of free will as if our decisions and actions are ontologically dependent on whether the act will satisfy someone else, we don’t have free will. Our will is suppressed someone else and this is due to the feeling of love.
Subpoint (c) then explores how we change due to love. This is not a change that we are in control of, it just occurs due to the exertion of love. We did not have the choice over whether we would become more benevolent or kind. The hormones within us and our complex emotions take over our self and changes the way we act and the way we feel. This shows that there is an inadvertent change than is incited within a person once they fall in love and they don’t have control over what happens in their personal sovereignty, rendering their free will obsolete as they don’t have the capacity to choose an alternative development of traits.
To synthesise these claims, I am using the social and chemical aspects of the emotion of love to show that one in love does not have the capacity to exert free will as their use of reason and their ability to control personal sovereignty is eroded and nullified. Reason is a vital element of exercising free will as the capacity to be rational means that we can choose our actions without influence from external factors and facticity. However, reason can be inhibited by our emotions as these emotional drives (desires and appetites) can take over our reason, leading us to make irrational choices that do not fully use our free will. Therefore, I conclude that reason is a prerequisite for the exercise of free will but reason can be inhibited by emotion.
Love imprisons our free will.
Sources Cited:
https://jmkodros.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/1527105180851.jpg?w=1400
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