/lit/ - Literature

The causa sui is the best internal contradiction ever devised, a kind of logical freak or outrage: but because of man's excessive pride we have come to be deeply and terribly entangled with this particular nonsense. The yearning for 'freedom of the will' in the superlative metaphysical sense that unfortunately still prevails in the minds of the half-educated, the yearning to bear complete and final responsibility for one's own actions and to relieve God, the world, one's ancestors, coincidence, society from it—this is really nothing less than being that same causa sui and, with a daring greater than Munchhausen's, dragging yourself by your hair out of the swamp of nothingness and into existence. Now, if someone can see through the cloddish simplicity of this famous concept 'free will' and eliminate it from his mind, I would then ask him to take his 'enlightenment' a step further and likewise eliminate from his head the opposite of the non-concept 'free will': I mean the 'unfree will' which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not make the mistake of concretizing 'cause' and 'effect' as do the natural scientists (and whoever else today naturalizes in their thinking...), in conformity with the prevalent mechanistic foolishness that pushes and tugs at the cause until it 'has an effect'; 'cause' and 'effect' should be used only as pure concepts, as conventional fictions for the purpose of description or communication, and not for explanation. In the 'in itself' there is nothing of 'causal associations', of 'necessity', of 'psychological constraint'; the effect does not follow 'upon the cause', no 'law' governs it. We alone are the ones who have invented causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, coercion, number, law, freedom, reason, purpose; and if we project, if we mix this world of signs into things as if it were an 'in itself', we act once more as we have always done, that is, mythologically. The 'unfree will' is mythology: in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. Whenever a thinker sniffs out coercion, necessity, obligation, pressure, constraint in any 'causal connection' or 'psychological necessity', it is almost always a symptom of where his own inadequacy lies: to feel this particular way is revealing—the person is revealing himself.

>The causa sui is the best internal contradiction ever devised, a king of logical freak or outrage: but because of man's excessive pride we have come to be deeply and terribly entangled with this particular nonsense. The yearning for 'freedom of the will' in the superlative metaphysical sense that unfortunately still prevails in the minds of the half-educated, the yearning to bear complete and final responsibility for one's own actions and to relieve God, the world, one's ancestors, coincidence, society from it—this is really nothing less than being that same causa sui and, with a daring greater than Munchhausen's, dragging yourself by your hair out of the swamp of nothingness and into existence. Now, if someone can see through the cloddish simplicity of this famous concept 'free will' and eliminate it from his mind, I would then ask him to take his 'enlightenment' a step further and likewise eliminate from his head the opposite of the non-concept 'free will': I mean the 'unfree will' which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not make the mistake of concretizing 'cause' and 'effect' as do the natural scientists (and whoever else today naturalizes in their thinking...), in conformity with the prevalent mechanistic foolishness that pushes and tugs at the cause until it 'has an effect'; 'cause' and 'effect' should be used only as pure concepts, as conventional fictions for the purpose of description or communication, and not for explanation. In the 'in itself' there is nothing of 'causal associations', of 'necessity', of 'psychological constraint'; the effect does not follow 'upon the cause', no 'law' governs it. We alone are the ones who have invented causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, coercion, number, law, freedom, reason, purpose; and if we project, if we mix this world of signs into things as if it were an 'in itself', we act once more as we have always done, that is, mythologically. The 'unfree will' is mythology: in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. Whenever a thinker sniffs out coercion, necessity, obligation, pressure, constraint in any 'causal connection' or 'psychological necessity', it is almost always a symptom of where his own inadequacy lies: to feel this particular way is revealing—the person is revealing himself.