The French language offers two ways of speaking about freedom: libre arbitre means ‘free will;’ volonté means ‘the will’ or, better, ‘volition’. Each carries with it distinct conceptual baggage. On the one hand, we exercise free will when making a choice. For volition, on the other hand, our freedom amounts to an exertion of effort. One is intellectual; the other laborious. Although you could get away with using either in everyday conversation, the choice of one term rather than the other is consequential. Indeed, the history of this semantic rift spills beyond the French language. It reveals a fissure at the core of what it means to author one’s own life story.
Two hundred years ago, disputes over the nature of freedom were all-consuming in France. That’s not only because political upheavals rocked the 19th century. In the wake of the 1789 French Revolution, men and women experienced radical democracies, military dictatorships, resurgent monarchies and constitutional republics – a living exercise in political science during which questions of liberté (another term for ‘freedom’) preoccupied national debates.
A scientific revolution also ignited beyond the Palace of Versailles, setting the fates of free will and volition on a collision course. The rise of psychology and neurology threw into disarray the terms with which people made sense of their selfhood. By the beginning of the 20th century, the young sciences showed how freedom involves our entire bodies; indeed, it penetrates far deeper into our being than mere choice.
The philosopher and psychologist Maine de Biran (1766-1824) led the vanguard. During a long political career, from the court of Louis XVI to the lower house of parliament – an institution created after the brothers of the executed king took over the throne in 1815 – Biran used his influence to gather the foremost French scientists. They studied the mind as part of the body. At a time when the nervous system’s workings were only beginning to be understood, the gatherings were, for some, an occasion to dispel freedom as an illusion. Emblematic was the physiologist Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis (1757-1808) who claimed that ‘The brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile.’ Material enquiry, and not the abstract notion of free will, was to explain our agency.
Biran saw the fledgling brain sciences otherwise. In his work The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking (1802), Biran showed how our freedom hinges on volition, which can’t be easily confined to the space between our ears. Materialist scientists tilted at windmills, so Biran charged. The idea of free will is a fiction because our freedom needs friction.
Biran’s insight was that our nervous system is not a cause of volition but its constraint. In putting our body to use, we exert effort and encounter resistance. The play between the two – their modulation over time – gives rise to habits. According to Biran, habit follows a double law: ‘the less we feel, the more we perceive’. Before I studied the French language, the silent consonants and serous liaisons struck my ears like an indistinguishable mélange. By focusing on individual words, contorting my tongue and taking risks to speak, I eventually came to inhabit the language. Thanks to my sustained volition, a cacophony of foreign sounds eventually gave way to meaningful speech. For Biran, the paradigmatic habit is self-education.
His book overthrew the longstanding view that habit is blind repetition. René Descartes and Immanuel Kant had condemned habits as mechanical routines. They cloud clear judgment. For Biran, however, the discrete decisions of our free will matter less than the direction of our volition over time. And as habits take over, new resistance mounts. My patterns of thought and verbal crutches take the place of intentional speech. When I find myself lost in conversation at a cocktail party, voilà rolls off my tongue instinctively whenever I feel it’s time to wrap up. Habits open an opportunity to renew our efforts and overcome the resistance that takes over within us.
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