​Chapter 9

The attaching cannot be done by an intention. An intention is a state that arises, and it can be a link in a causal chain like any other, so that pointing to John's intention only relocates the question to where the intention came from. Fit with motives fails: a random outcome can coincide with what someone wanted, and coincidence with a desire is not authorship. The feeling of having done it fails because that feeling attaches indifferently to caused events and to accidents; a man who acted from compulsion may feel he chose, and a man whose hand slipped may feel he moved it. Later endorsement fails most instructively — a person can take ownership of what just happened, and the determinist showed how easily this works, reading a nature off a deed and handing it back as the deed's cause. Retroactive appropriation is available to both sides of this dispute, which is why the difference cannot lie there. And origination in John's body settles nothing, since a seizure occurs in him and is not his doing.

They fail together, and for a reason that lies in the question. Each looks for a link running between John and the settling, and the only kind of link on offer is this: the act came out of what John was. His character produced it, his motives issued in it, his dispositions found their occasion. John stole because he was a thief. The deed belongs to him as a symptom belongs to a disease. Ownership of that kind is what determinism supplies, and it is what the question requests when it asks what makes the settling his.

There are no two facts here to be linked. What makes John's deed free is his doing it. John is present in the act as the one performing it; he is not included as a nature the act proceeded from, and that second presence is what the question was looking for. Agency is the internal form of the act, not an item standing behind it. Agency is a primitive, and it is placed where a primitive would have to go. The determinist has a river flowing and a gravitation, two things with a relation between them, and he takes the relation as basic. Here the agent and the free act are the same occurrence, and that is taken as basic.

Calling this a circle mistakes what has been said. A circle would define authorship by the deed and the deed by authorship, keeping two terms and passing between them. Only one term is in play. The doing has an author in the way a motion has a direction, and asking what attaches the direction to the motion is searching for a second thing that was never there.

The identification does not by itself refute determinism. Identifying the agent with the act says what the deed is; the dispute over its causal history remains exactly where it was. Nothing in the account denies the formation, the motives, or the physiology. The difference lies in whether the grounds were found sufficient or taken as sufficient, and observation is not positioned to report it.

John does not choose the material available to the examination. The grounds were carried to the table — a man raised in a religious tradition who has never read Stirner cannot ground a theft in Stirner, and the whole spread was furnished by his history, his knowledge, and his circumstances. That furnishing is a condition on the act and not the act itself. The taking of grounds as sufficient is what remains.

Before the settling there is an organism, a memory, a set of motives, a capacity for reflection, a formed personality, and a spread of grounds laid out. All of that is the bearer, and the free act is not deduced from them — which is the point of the distinction, since deducing is the ownership just refused. The author comes into being with the answer. A finished John does not produce the settling; in settling the question, John becomes its author, and becomes answerable for it.

Sartre had removed the ego from behind the act, and the removal is more radical than is usually acknowledged. An author constituted in the act is constituted rarely. Most of what a man does executes what he is, and the executing is not defective — a life of it runs perfectly well, and nothing requires that free acts be frequent or that a person accumulate them. The claim is about what occurs at some joints, and its scope is one deed at a time. Read otherwise, as a condition under which nobody ever coincides with what he has become, it would say something about consciousness in general and would say it without evidence.

The compatibilist grants all of it and keeps his position. Of course John settled the case himself, he says; John is his psychophysical system, and the working of that system is his doing, so the contrast between a nature and an acting John doubles a single man for no reason. The doubling is elsewhere. A rule does not read itself, and no consideration reaches over to examine its neighbor; the spread lies inert until someone takes it up. The distinction is between the grounds and their application, and the aggregate of states is the material applied. Insanity shows the same seam from the other side: the system runs, the movement issues, the grounds are all present, and the applying is absent. The compatibilist uses that distinction as freely as anyone.

He can enlarge the system to include the applying. Suppose a proto-agent before the act — the arena of motives and rules, crystallizing into a determinate self at the moment the conflict resolves. Then the act is the resolution of a conflict inside an existing system, and what determined the manner of crystallization? Weights, integration, some rule of assembly: the loop from the first chapter under a new name, with the same question running on it. The proto-agent buys coherence by giving back everything the account was for.

Authorship is not demonstrated by a causal chain, a behavioral marker, or anything an observer could check, and the reason is now visible. What a demonstration would exhibit is a link between the agent and the act, and a link is derivation. Kant drew the line where it has to be drawn: freedom is not an object of theoretical knowledge, and what cannot be established by demonstration must be postulated if imputation is to mean anything. His postulate rested on the moral law. The present postulate rests on the act. What is postulated is that the settling answers the open question and constitutes, in answering it, its author.