In this course, we will now turn to the delicate question of free will, in order to better understand what freedom is for Spinoza, for the Enlightenment and for the early liberal philosophers.

As we've already seen, Spinoza (1632-1677) is well known for considering free will as an illusion from which it is extremely difficult to free oneself.

Why so? Because it goes against the philosophical tradition since Antiquity, and still defended by Descartes (1596-1642), that human beings can initiate something from nothing and bear full responsibility for their actions, especially before God, says Saint Augustine (354-430), father of the Christian Church.

But also, of course, before human justice.

It's the idea that our will, and our will alone, allows us to direct our lives, that we have absolute power over our actions, and that we derive the freedom of our actions solely from ourselves, thus possessing an indeterminate power of decision.

In other words, mankind is able to disrupt nature's order, rather than be subjected to it.

In the conduct of his life, because he would be subject to no law other than that of his own will, he would therefore be not only above nature and animals, mere machines, but also above all other finite modes of nature. This was the position of Descartes (1596-1650), for whom the causes of human impotence and inconstancy lay not in the natural order, but in the vices of human nature itself.

But while Spinoza credits Descartes for opening the way to rational control of the affective life, he distances himself from him entirely by firmly criticizing this hypothesis of an "absolute power" of the will.

Spinoza, on the other hand, considers that our world is perfectly coherent and determined, and that everything that happens is necessary and is the result of the causality of things, according to which an effect always has a cause, and this cause is itself the effect of another cause, and so on.

This is the idea of absolute determinism, from which he establishes in his Ethics that men have no free will whatsoever because, he says, they are conscious of their actions, but they ignore, or prefer to ignore, the true causes that determine them.

For Spinoza, human beings, as "finite modes" of nature like animals or plants, cannot therefore start something from nothing; they are not exempt from the laws of nature, both in their bodies and in their minds.

Worse, for him, the greatest danger of freedom is to believe in our free will, and to believe that we can act without being determined by external causes.

For Spinoza, freedom is not the expression of free will, but the ability to understand our rightful place in the world, to understand our determined nature and, from there, to direct our existence towards that which "increases our power to act". By always looking to the future with optimism, and seeing the world as it is, rather than imagining it as we'd like to see it.

Of course, the problem that arises is human responsibility and their actions. we could conclude that if individuals are not free in their actions, they would not be responsible for them, especially in the face of justice. But this view is misleading, because without going into too much detail, recognizing one's social, familial and historical determinism does not prevent us from considering the responsibility of actions committed, since these are voluntary.

On the other hand, it would be an illusion to believe that the actions of a criminal are never linked to his own determinism. While it's not a question of excusing them, it is at least a question of trying to understand them. In fact, this is what justice does: beyond punishing unlawful actions, it plays the role of foreseeing and protecting the future, which is why certain crimes are not only punished but also treated, taking the offender's family, social and psychological background into account.

This approach to freedom as a capacity to act is the connection we can make with 18th-century Enlightenment philosophy. According to one of its greatest ambassadors, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the Enlightenment was indeed the means of freeing humans from the state of tutelage, or as Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) would have said, from voluntary servitude, for which they themselves were responsible.

Kant's motto is "Think for yourself" and "Dare to know", the famous Latin "Sapere Aude".

Spinoza's capacity to act is thus the power that humans have within themselves to understand their own animal condition, and to comprehend nature and its phenomena, whether positive or negative, by relating them to objective causes, so as not to rely on moral explanations that are false and illusory, i.e. explanations shaped to suit our desires. Rather, it consists in seeking to explain them through reason, with a view towards emancipation and freedom.

And the progress, which led to the first technological revolutions and the first liberal and entrepreneurial ideas of the late 18th century, notably with the English liberal philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) and the English economist Adam Smith (1723-1790).

And it's worth recalling Sigmund Freud's (1856-1939) definition of an illusion. According to the father of psychoanalysis, who always acknowledged Spinoza's influence on his work, an illusion is precisely "a belief motivated by the realization of a desire, and there by disregarding reality".

Finally, it's worth pointing out that while the libertarian movement we're about to discuss refers directly to this new liberal philosophy, there are those who point out that figures such as Ayn Rand (1905-1982), author of "La Grève" and "La Source vive", support the existence of free will, believing that human beings have the capacity to make free choices.

But the reality is quite different, and the confusion stems rather from a semantic problem: by recognizing the capacity of human beings to act, and to make choices, while acknowledging the logical determinism of which they are the object. the first libertarians are, in reality, also heirs of Spinoza. What they have in common with Spinoza is the belief that humans are not above nature but instead are the result of an evolutionary process that places them within a determinism, a history that goes beyond them, and is largely responsible for what humans are and what they do.

Finally, if belief in free will is an illusion from which it is extremely difficult to extricate oneself, it is because it refers back to another illusion that feeds it, the illusion of final causes, which I invite you to study in the next chapter.