/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19870795]

All credit to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for providing the brilliant literature which introduced me to these ideas. What do you think of the concept of free will? I don't care about the consequences of belief or disbelief in this concept, that is not what I'm asking about. I want to know the validity of it in itself. As far as I can see, it is a nonsense concept. Say I move a table. I have done this because I willed it, but did I will my willing to do it? In other words, what produces one's will? The act is everything, and adding in prior "decisions" which "precede" an act is merely tossing the question back a step. As Nietzsche I think correctly said, a truly free will would require man to become as God himself, to be a self-cause, but it would seem to be a very ill-advised God to create such a wildly imperfect will as my own. So really it seems that the acts of a given will must either depend upon sheer randomness or some in-built nature, and if one is going to argue that the will is transcendent to the extent that no accurate human judgement of it is possible, than as a result no man has the right to assert any freedom of the will or any moral judgement whatsoever, as this would overstep his bounds. If the will acts in accordance with a given nature, responsibility for it rests with that which produced this nature to begin with. How could a will choose its own nature if it was truly free, or in other words, acted with total indifference? How could a totally indifferent substrate be drawn to action at all, unless it were compelled by foreign forces? And if a will were to choose its own nature, how could any choice towards anything specific be possible given this total indifference? To choose a nature is to have it appeal to one's....nature, correct? But doesn't this contradict the doctrine of the nonexistence of an in-built nature and thus the truly indifferent substrate inherent in free will? Furthermore, for those claiming it is within the power of a nature to alter itself, they are correct, but the capacity and willingness to change must at first be present within the nature in question. The capacity to change one's nature must be...within one's nature. So, one could say the will exists outside time and space, but the question of its nature and that which spurred the decisions in question still remains, even if we dismiss causality. So all that can be said is this it exists, and that its decisions are dependent on...its decisions. As Nietzsche again correctly points out, this is a tautology. As I've already said, one might as well disregard arguments for preceding decisions of the will which determine actions, and so we should simply look at the singular act itself. If I possessed the power of a God to bring something from nothing, and if I as this God was bound by neither nature, motive, nor necessity of any kind, I haven't the foggiest idea why a contemptable being such as myself would be my choice of creation.

[Anonymous No.19870798]

(cont.)
And, as a God, I could just as easily bring myself back to the swamps of nothingness just as easily as I was brought from them, that is to say effortlessly and instantly(which is distinct from the lengthy, emotional and physically laborious process of suicide), but I seem to be mysteriously lacking in this ability. I admit I haven't been exposed to the Kantian idea of intelligible freedom which Schopenhauer endorsed in saying that man can choose his own nature (else why would he feel guilt), but I can't see how this is possible given what I said. Guilt, at any rate, is not necessarily rational.

[Rick Vigorous !!MMwVgUrCHqf No.19870836]

I think it's a mostly pointless concept to argue over because really it's just mental masturbation over the idea of what "will" really is. Let's say I have in front of me two tokens, identical except for their color; one is red and the other blue. I am challenged to choose a token. Ignoring all predisposition or aversion to certain colors, or the idea that one may be right or wrong, how am I to know why I chose one or the other? Is it will? Is it random? Let's say I'm aware that the exercise is to examine "free will", so now I'm making a conscious effort to exert my will in my choice. I could just as easily choose either, but how could it ever be proven without a doubt that it wasn't simply the result of certain dispositions, or inevitabilities, or fate? It couldn't be. It's a pointless endeavor. There's no possible way we could ever truly prove the existence or nonexistence of free will. This might be a schizo ramble, I apologize if it is; I'm a bit drunk.

[Anonymous No.19870898]

tl;dr

Nietzsche says somewhere that a deterministic world and a world of many free forces clashing with each other would look the same

It doesn't matter

[Anonymous No.19870907]

>>19870898
I think it matters, because it's reality determines the justification for either a state of natural innocence or true moral accountability for one's existence