From the other topic I just made,
I’m wondering the reason for the almost instinctive dislike of the idea of predeterminism among philosophers. Personally I think the religious notion of (very naive) free will is carried over still into philosophy, so much that we have this deep-seated need to defend the notion that “I can do what I want”. Nietzsche pointed out this has a basis in being able to ascribe moral culpability to people who do what are deemed bad things, so we can judge them as personally deficient since after all they were “choosing” always to do those things and thus are responsible.
Never do we ask if their “freedom of choice” was itself somehow faulty and in such a way that undermines the notion of moral culpability and blame.
I think predetermination is a logically necessary conclusion of the basic rational idea that everything has causes, and that nothing “just happens for no reason”. If you carry this idea out logically to its conclusion you arrive at predetermination, the idea that everything that happened “must have” happened that way and that everything that will happen “must happen” that way.
The important piece to remember is that beings themselves do not usually know their or others predeterminations, because fate is a higher order of causality than conscious (finite) beings have access to. We understand that we can produce causes from ourselves and we seem to have some control over what we do, we feel free and feel ownership over ourselves, but we also recognize that our range of options is always limited and we also understand that our own understanding of causality and determination is limited. We often do and say things we didn’t intend to do or say, a clear example that our “freedom” exists within strange and somewhat unknown boundaries and at times we are animated by things we didn’t sit around and “choose”.
In the space of unknowing, our relative ignorance over our own causality and our predictions about the future, comes the possibility to “freely” insert “new” causes than formerly had been the case. This is the real basis of what we call freedom, that we can set one cause deliberately against another in a way that seems to counteract the original causality of things… In this way we can exert influence.
But even this ability to limit one thing with another and to set causes against each other, even with our feeling of freedom, there is always a higher order of determination that would explain exactly why we did what we did, even it we ourselves don’t know this. As Nietzsche said, even the false belief that we are free, even the naive feeling of freedom, becomes a causal participant in our overall (deterministic) causality.
I argue that it is because of determinism that morality can even mean anything at all: we know that certain beings have necessarily certain needs and desires, and we know and can predict how our actions will impact ourselves and others… Upon this deterministic basis of (relative) knowledge and prediction emerges the possibility to establish values and to use values as causalities for what we do, say, think, and for what we are snd aspire to be. Because everything is causal and impacts other things in determinate ways we are therefore morally responsible for how we affect others, for the causes we introduce into the world; the understanding of this transformed human beings into moral agents, fundamntally changing and elevating the kind of determinism we care capable of possessing.
A more responsible and edified determinism, one that includes more of its own responsibility within itself as a causal factor for its own actions, is a more truly free determinism, for two reasons: it is larger/more comprehensive, and it is more itself (begins to understand and respond more to the fact of its own actual nature and reality, in this case to its causal power and therefore also causal responsibility). Freedom is basically a facet of a kind of determinant causality, such as we possess and we call sentient or self-conscious. It doesn’t mean we aren’t determined anymore and it doesn’t mean we aren’t still predetermined according to some higher more comprehensive level of fated causalities and situations which we have no real access to knowing about. But it does mean that our determinism is more edified, expansive, self-feeling, self-directed, honest, moral and capable of responsibility.
…And for even greater philosophical precision:
"^ This above post (Iambiguous’ post in my other topic, on predetermination) reflects the nihilist defeatist view on predetermination, which is a false view. It goes something like “well if I knew everything was determined already then why do anything?” That’s like saying there’s no point eating dinner because you know in advance that you’re going to eat anyway, so what’s the point? A categorical error, because the meaning and value of eating has nothing to do with whether or not you know you’re going to eat in advance.
The other problem with nihilism-defeatism is its assumption that “well if I knew everything in advance then doing anything would be meaningless anyway”, when in fact it is the exact opposite: once you understand a cause before it occurs you don’t become powerless over that cause, you actually gain power over it and expand your freedom in terms of that cause. The more you know and understand the more free you become because the more power you have over those things which you can now act differently than.
In other words it is our knowledge and foresight that empowers us into greater freedom by expanding the scope of our determinations “upward” (more comprehensively). You subsume lesser causes within greater causes, this is really what “meaning” means, the progressive rank-ordering of causes against each other or what we call “values”.
If you hypothetically gained absolute foreknowledge over all of your own causality (which wouldn’t be possible anyway), you wouldn’t lose your power and freedom, you would immediately be thrust upward into an even greater order of power and freedom – a new climb upon the continuum of being and thus subject to a new scope and logic of predeterminacy. Beings (meaning us too) are always onto-epistemologically situated between that range of predeterminations below us which we have already overcome, and that other range of predeterminations above us which we have yet to know or encounter. Our freedom and indeed the meaning of our conscious sentience lies in the ability to negotiate between these two ranges, to in fact be literally this “middle space” itself. But this is purely structural; we don’t go around thinking this is how we are, because we simply find it more expedient to operate on the assumption that we have limitless freedom, which assumption empowers us to extend ourselves maximally across that middle-space.
A philosopher has a responsibility beyond simply self-maximization in that way, however; the philosopher must understand and compel truth as much as possible, his “maximization” (his maxim) is not simply to unconsciously drive subjectivity to fill out the middle space between onto-epistemically categorically distinct kinds of predetermination but to actually make this situation conscious before itself: in this way the philosopher pushes being as high as it can go, recreating the original condition of “medial subjectivity as comprehensivity-maximization”, I.e. being itself is changed fundamntally by becoming more aligned to the universal which simply moves being (self-valuing) closer to what it already was anyway.
If you feel de-empowered thinking that you are totally predetermined you can overcome that feeling easily by adding the realization that YOU actually lack anything like a “complete understanding”, so even if you’re totally predetermined that thought itself (the thought of being predetermined) can only expand the range of your being anyway (unless you give in to nihilistic defeatism, which is just a misunderstanding of the situation of being predetermined, a misunderstanding more precisely of conflating the mere fact of predetermination with your own actual subjectivity-range (the sub-spaces, within larger predetermination, wherein causes become self-limited and further integrated within the expanding sphere of conscious knowing))."