Lyric Essay

 

These three works – Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Sigmund Freud’s On the Oedipus Complex, and Sam Harris’s The Illusion of Free Will – were written in greatly differing time periods and with varying intents. However, they all answer that some, maybe not obvious, form of fate is the true determinant of human action, and that the concept of free will is merely a societal construct which fails to retain its purity in reality.       

Sophocles’s Greek tragedy Oedipus the King questioned whether fate or free will governs humans. If fate, was Oedipus “born for pain,” so that he had to result in a single final state? Who was responsible? Was “Apollo quite enough” to lay such a fate on a mortal? If free will, was it Oedipus’s impulsive behavior of shunning Creon and his wife’s opinions which caused his ultimate demise?

                Being a Greek tragedian, Sophocles wrote, and would have insisted to view, Oedipus’s story theologically. The author’s own belief in the control of deities and supernatural powers over humans was carefully reflected. Without a true understanding of surroundings, an individual cannot act in free will as it would require entirely conscious action. The tragedian slightly touched on Oedipus’s childhood – a time of underdeveloped consciousness – when he had killed his father and had forgotten his birth mother. Childhood being the foundation of character, Sophocles subtly implied fate presided over the groundwork of Oedipus.

Though, this absoluteness was intentionally blurred during Oedipus’s kingship of Thebes. His fiery and impulsive behavior, shown by the will to “banish… whoever [necessary]” without second thought and the response of “you can never touch me” to those at a lower echelon, insisted his personality’s free will dictated events. This murkiness was utilized to allude to reality itself: as clarity to inquiries is rare in the world. However, with fate already established as the foundation, could free will truly reign during the king’s adulthood?

This would seem as a roadblock to the primary question, but Sigmund Freud disagreed with the impassibility. In On the Oedipus Complex, his analysis juxtaposed the previous one: not because he refuted fate as a significant, if not entire factor, but because of his perspective. Rather than searching for hints of “destiny and human will,” Freud examined human conditions and followed with deductive reasoning: contrasting Sophocles’s inductive reasoning of answering a large question through Oedipus’s tale. Humans’ purpose is to survive and reproduce. Before civilized society, males competed for power in the hierarchy. Even familial males turned on eachother. Furthermore, females are required for reproduction, and once survival needs were satisfied, humans did whatever necessary to reproduce.

This video shows similar behavior thriving in the animal kingdom. 

Freud utilized evolutionary psychology and applied it to Oedipus Rex. Fate was not Apollo’s word, but was “Nature” and evolution. Oedipus, nor anyone else, had any say in such. The true timeline for this story had begun at mankind’s dawn, thousands of years ago. Though, this does not answer the theological lens’s roadblock of whether free will controlled Oedipus as a king. How does the lens of “sexual” and survival impulses provide a different conclusion? Freud’s perspective offers fate as the controller of Oedipus even as king. However, it is not nature which controls fate, but the nature of civilization which controls it. Modern society has imposed norms – for the better – that such actions as Oedipus’s deserve “repulsion” and “self-punishment,” which is why Oedipus’s realization led to his fallout. Regardless of his actions to attain or avoid this realization, societal construct would have inevitably caught up and forced it; free will never had the slightest possibility of existing.

Beginning his last paragraph with “today,” Freud invited the audience to step in Oedipus’s shoes rather than to shun him. This helped to realize that Oedipus had acted, from an evolutionary standpoint, naturally. Sophocles had just demonstrated the effects of primal behavior in a civilized world.

Sam Harris extended the idea of stepping in another’s shoes so as to conclude that “free will [is] an illusion” in his article The Illusion of Free Will. His reference to Hayes and Komisarjevsky’s rape and murder of the Petit family is like Oedipus’s own story. The two real-life men first severely harmed the father, William Petit: just how Oedipus first killed his own father. Then, they “raped” the mother and behaved inappropriately with the daughters: just how Oedipus had sexual relations with Jocasta. Harris, rather than jumping to conclusions, analyzed the criminals’ past to understand their motivations as Hayes later showed “remorse and… attempted suicide”: Oedipus stabbed his eyes after the full realization. Knowing these criminals had traumatic childhoods, did they truly commit the crime under free will?

Here is a sample of Sam Harris on free will.

Every moment in an individual’s life morphs them in some way. At birth, we are constrained by genetics. As life unfolds, our experiences constrain our mindsets. With this reality, how can one ever genuinely have free will? Specific events and survival instincts had led to Oedipus’s impulse to kill the stranger who happened to be his biological father. This killing, and every later event, developed Oedipus’s impulsivity which the story emphasized.

Freud, if alive today, would concur with Harris’s judgement as Freud believed childhood trauma significantly affected behavior – as defined in psychodynamic psychology. Truthfully, Sophocles, Freud, and Harris would all agree the naiveté in believing free will governs our lives. So why has this conclusion not become a consensus? Our close-minded definitions of fate and free will are the answer. When fate is mentioned in Oedipus the King, Apollo, not nature, is immediately thought of as the creator. Free will is just considered us doing something, not whether our minds are free of the past. Nature – of evolution, the mind, and surroundings – engages in a feedback loop with individuals where it juts events into our lives only to catalyze our reactions which again affect externals. Nature is a culmination of all past actions by beings, and our conscience is a culmination of all past situations.