One can display their existentialist panache by playing around with this question
and hypothesis is an easier ride than proof. And the yes and no of whether one
has free will or not is a facile binarism, good/bad, moral/immoral, straight/gay, white/black
these are taxonomic (naming) discourses, that if you choose one then you
subordinate the other. We have to detraumatise categories, arrest our need to schematise,
intellectually resist the desire to wear flippers at the local swimming pool Having rolled that red carpet let us look a view on are we ultimately responsible?
Here, one is setting off on a potentially infinite regress. In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.
In order to be ultimately responsible, one would have to be causa sui - the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one’s mental nature. But nothing can be ultimately causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it cannot plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings. “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far”, as Nietzsche remarked in 1886: it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Muenchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. . . .
Think of all the people who are arrogant enough to believe this to be possible.
Do the Christianns currently on an Iraqy mountain have free will.
Does the child in embryo on the mountain who will genetically inherit their mother's trauma have free will? None of this will of course stop those who will continue to rape logic.
and hypothesis is an easier ride than proof. And the yes and no of whether one
has free will or not is a facile binarism, good/bad, moral/immoral, straight/gay, white/black
these are taxonomic (naming) discourses, that if you choose one then you
subordinate the other. We have to detraumatise categories, arrest our need to schematise,
intellectually resist the desire to wear flippers at the local swimming pool Having rolled that red carpet let us look a view on are we ultimately responsible?
Here, one is setting off on a potentially infinite regress. In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.
In order to be ultimately responsible, one would have to be causa sui - the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one’s mental nature. But nothing can be ultimately causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it cannot plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings. “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far”, as Nietzsche remarked in 1886: it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Muenchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. . . .
Think of all the people who are arrogant enough to believe this to be possible.
Do the Christianns currently on an Iraqy mountain have free will.
Does the child in embryo on the mountain who will genetically inherit their mother's trauma have free will? None of this will of course stop those who will continue to rape logic.
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