Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

before we can make any further progress. There’s the need to tackle the thorny issue of whether we’re actually free to make choices of any kind.

Spinoza said that if a stone catapulted through the air had consciousness then it would think that it was flying of its own free will. Spinoza believed that everything in the universe is already fixed — although really because everything is part of God, and God is outside of time. He also believed the universe to be supremely good, because it is God’s creation — or rather within God. So the apparently unpleasant events that we often see around us are really just aberrations that we should treat with equanimity. This view — similar to a mystical view of the world — is, with Spinoza, a form of determinism. There is no free will, in this view, because of the universe being equal with God.

Another way to look at things is to look at what was discussed in earlier chapters — especially regarding Kant and Schopenhauer. From Schopenhauer, a person is not a ‘thing-in-itself’ but only a phenomenon of the Will (meaning the noumenon) and therefore cannot have free will in the normal sense of the term. (In this sense Schopenhauer saw things a bit like Spinoza.) But the mind can separate itself from the Will (by genius, according to Schopenhauer) and become, in his term, ‘objective’. The mind therefore gains a small amount of free will. Schopenhauer redeems himself somewhat

however by contending that free will can come about as an act of grace as well as a result of genius: ‘Necessity is the kingdom of nature;

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