Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

freedom is the kingdom of grace.’ (The World as Will and Representation — author’s emphases.) So Schopenhauer kind of pushes us towards what we might describe as a mysterian solution — the ability to make choices, especially moral choices, comes from grace, which in turn comes from outside the phenomenal world. (This is choice — and value — imparted from the top down, so to speak.) Simply stated, it is because we have an essence outside of the everyday world that we are able to have free will. Or otherwise, it is to say that some mysterious force from outside the world acts through us to allow us to be free agents in the world.

From the scientific perspective — or so it is usually supposed — since subjectivity is really an illusion, then so too is free will. Science essentially is a ‘monism’ — that is, the universe is of only one substance and that substance is matter (or perhaps just energy). This being the case, what appears to be the free agency of subjects is actually derived from this ‘materialism’ (or ‘physicalism’) of the universe and, as such, is completely restrained — determined — thus ‘determinism’.

Free will versus determinism is usually therefore the core of the free will debate. There is a kind of polarism here, in that the two alternatives are often regarded as mutually exclusive. But, as we will see, this need not be the case.

Pierre Laplace’s ‘demon’ — as it was described — was able to know the entire history and future of the universe just by knowing the position and motion of all objects at one moment in time (as a consequence of Newton’s laws). The

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