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Machan's Musings - Human Initiative & the Blues
by Tibor R. Machan

A strong passion of mine is American Blues. My favorites are Albert Collins, Albert King, and B. B. King, but there are dozens and dozens more I listen to, including some foreigners such as the incomparable Eric Clapton. And there is that semi-blues, Southern Rock favorite of mine, the Allman Brothers Band cum Greg Allman and Friends. Well, I could go on listing them all—if I were a poet, I’d surely pen an ode to the bunch, that’s how much they have enriched my life.

But the reason all this comes to mind and is worth a public notice is a bit more philosophical than musical. I am talking about originality, the unique capacity of people to create something new in the world, something for which they can take credit (or sometimes blame, if it’s a bad thing they have created!).

Albert King, whose rendition of so many standards simply sends me, is reported to have been a left-handed player, but instead of restringing his instrument, he played it upside down. OK, perhaps this is not quite comparable to Mozart or Rembrandt, let alone Tolstoy, but it does offer a rather plain and accessible illustration of just how innovative human beings can be. But why is this noteworthy?

Well, problem is that the bulk of official academe in our time is very firmly wedded to the idea that we aren’t really authors of anything. A recent past president of the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern (the big and prominent) Division, Daniel Dennett of Tufts University, chose this as the theme for his Presidential Address, namely, to debunk the idea that anyone is an author of anything at all. Instead, Dennett maintains, we are all but a point in a stream of causal relations. So, while we are all a part of what brings about things, we are not a decisive part, one that might have been otherwise except for our own initiative in the process.

The last person who laid out this view unabashedly was the famous behaviorist psychologist, the late B. F. Skinner, in his famous book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' (1971). Skinner made no bones about it: Human beings are spurred to action by their encounter with their environment. There is no free will or personal initiative that plays any role in how they behave. It’s all a process of events causing other events in an eternal daisy chain. According to Skinner there aren’t any individuals, actually, just points converging in time and space that we mistake for actual individual human beings.

Dennett is less forthright—he argues that we do have moral responsibilities, although he denies we could have done other than how we actually did, thus denying the crucial element of personal moral and legal responsibility for us. But he will not completely bite the bullet of his own view and endorses, instead, a "compatibilist" view, meaning, a view where determinism and moral responsibility are supposedly both real in our lives. And Dennett is by no means alone in this, only one of the most visible from the Halls of Ivy.

Alas, his gambit will not work; for if one couldn’t have done otherwise than one did, holding one responsible—guilty, specially—makes no sense. Which is why defense attorneys are so eager to show their clients couldn’t help themselves, had to do what they did.

But back to my initial point: the evidence for human authorship and creativity—and thus for responsibility in the meaningful sense (where one might have done something else)—is all around us, but most especially in the world of art. Here people just put into the world all kinds of things that would never have been there without them. And how on earth do they do all this? Just listen to music, read a novel, view some paintings, or even attend a comedy club to appreciate what a big deal all this creativity is, how novel are the creations!

Well, they think up a bunch of stuff, on their own (though with plenty of resources to supply them with materials they can combine and recombine). This is where human beings are so different from the rest of the living world: they can choose to think up stuff, to pay attention—or not! And this takes personal effort and isn’t ever merely the outcome of cultural, biological, molecular and other causes. While our species may well have come about through the natural processes of evolution, when this process got to us, it came up with a pretty amazing, extraordinary—free—being.

And I sure am glad of it—for I wouldn’t be able to take such delight in blues folks without their having this great capacity for creating, indeed authoring, all their wonderful music.
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