​Chapter 17

The symmetry between wagers established earlier does not entail an ontology. It removes the objection that an ontology cannot admit freedom on equal terms with causality. What follows is a construction of the world from two primitives, offered as a coherent viewpoint.

Causality is the primitive of repetition. A process repeats a passage; an object repeats a determination. In the first, a transition has held before and holds again: this state, that state, the same passage. In the second, a form continues to hold as the identity of the thing. Take a proton. It may propagate in a wave-like state and be registered as a localized particle, yet these are not two objects succeeding each other. The same quantum determination persists across different manifestations. The proton is not an underlying entity hidden beneath the wave and the particle; it is the continuity of the act that appears as both. Whether repetition appears as recurrence or persistence, the act was in force before the present instance, and the instance conforms.

Freedom is the primitive of birth, and what is born is a determinacy nothing supplied. Novelty settles nothing: a kaleidoscope turns out a figure no earlier figure resembles, and the figure follows from the position of the glass a moment before. A meteorite leaves a crater that never existed, and the crater follows from the impact. Where a form arrives underived, nothing preceding it made it the form it is — and after it, something exists to conform to. John's spread held several grounds and no order among them; the sufficiency of need against the prohibition was supplied by none of them, and it holds from the settling onward.

Arendt made beginning the center of action: to act is to start what the preceding course did not carry, and she grounded the capacity in natality — a man begins because he was born, and birth brings into the world what no prior state contained. The capacity comes with the species, which is where the accounts part. Freedom is a predicate of an act here, held while the act holds, and no human being possesses it by having been born. Her beginner is public as well: what he starts appears among others and becomes action by being seen. A settling at a table with nobody watching is the case at issue.

The two primitives are symmetric in what they cost. Causal explanation terminates in a transition it does not further clarify, and the terminus is a primitive whether it is called force or law. Birth terminates in an act it does not further explain. Neither can dismiss the other for ending somewhere; this does not show which occurs, only that the ledger is even.

Chance adds no third primitive. A stable profile across cases is a form in force before the instance, which makes it repetition. A determinacy nothing supplied is a birth. A form is in force or laid down; an event with neither is a positing whose author went unidentified.

Repetition and birth are not independent categories placed side by side. Each becomes determinate only against the other. Repetition is a form holding again; without birth, there would be no contrast by which "again" could be distinguished from mere being. Birth institutes what did not hold before, and without repetition no established form would be there for anything to appear new against. Neither is a second kind of thing alongside the first; the pair is how the same positing shows in its two states.

Birth takes two forms. It may institute the first repeatability, drawing a cut from which a chain can begin; or it may enter a chain running, interrupt its inherited form, and institute another.

Self-positing is the case where nothing is available. No I waits in reserve to posit itself, and the demand for material comes from the wrong side: material must be distinguished from I, and the distinguishing is what is being born. The cut brings up an authoring side and a posited side, together with the difference by which they are two. An I that posited only itself would have posited nothing determinate. To be this rather than that is to have a boundary, and a boundary requires something on both sides of it. The positing that constitutes an author must therefore lay down what the author is not, in the same stroke.

The opposition concerns determinacy, without implying hostility. Fichte worked through this structure in the first principles of the Wissenschaftslehre: the I does not precede its self-positing, and the not-I is posited within the I as what opposes and limits it. Here that structure is extended into ontology, and it goes one step Fichte does not take. For him the not-I is a limit posited and pushed back without end, the I approaching a completion it never reaches. The argument has established that a positing does not evaporate when the positing stops. The settled side goes on being carried out. The not-I, once laid down, persists as a repetition, and that persistence is what makes it material. Matter is the posited side left in execution. Author and world arise together: the cut institutes both poles, while the continuation of the posited pole gives the world its materiality.

Self-positing holds only while the act continues. No external ground secures the I, and no settled determination carries it forward. Its persistence is enacted by the act, and that is the Name.

In the earlier books, the act of freedom was called differentiation. Freedom names the act from the side of its source; differentiation is what the act does. The will draws a cut where no division was given, instituting two sides together with the difference between them. The sides arise with the cut: the authoring side and what is posited. A birth is a differentiation, and what it institutes may afterward persist as repetition.

The other case begins within repetition in force. It does not create without material. It takes what persists and institutes a form that did not previously hold: a sentence from letters, a statue from stone, a winged cat from the ideas of cat and bird. The letters, the stone, and the ideas belong to repetition; the sentence, the statue, and the new creature do not follow from them by repetition alone. The material fixes what can be attempted and with what. The elements are inherited: the letters were there; cat and bird existed before. What is not inherited is that these letters in this order say this, that these planes make this figure — the unity is instituted, and the material had no form to supply.

The author constituted in a free act will be called the will hereafter. Once a form is instituted, the will may persist in it as continued execution. This continuation is sediment. Authorship was called the internal form of the settling earlier in the argument. That identity does not extend to the sediment. The first persistence of the instituted determination is repetition; as it holds, it becomes law, and where law constitutes what endures, it becomes nature. The cut also gives birth to time, and sediment gives that time duration.

The will has not withdrawn. It is present in the sediment as what posits itself that way — and the hardening is that self-positing. Sediment is freedom continuing in the mode of unfreedom. The will persists inside the determination, holding it — and the holder has identified himself with the held. Sediment is will continuing as its own execution after it has ceased to remain free toward what it posited.

Sediment therefore cannot exist without freedom, as repetition cannot institute the form it repeats; there must first be an act that gives the form. Nor can sediment endure apart from will: a result detached from the doing contains no source of its continuation. Sediment receives both its determination and its existence from will: freedom institutes what is to persist, and the will persists in it.

This is how birth becomes repetition. A form instituted once and carried on unexamined is a form in force before the next case — the exact description of the first primitive. The stone falls as it fell, without any decision, and the falling is a settlement still being conducted. Determinism reads the execution as the source, and the reading is not a blunder about evidence: an executed settlement just bears no sign of the author.

Freedom and unfreedom are inseparable. Unfreedom can neither arise nor endure without freedom, as sediment is a continuing act. Freedom, in turn, becomes determinate only by positing or encountering something that holds. In self-positing it brings forth the not-I whose persistence becomes matter; in human action it encounters that persistence as the furnished world. Freedom gives unfreedom its existence, and unfreedom gives freedom the material and difference within which another birth can occur.

Time is born in the free act and lasts in its sediment. The settling occupies no prior temporal line; it introduces the first before and after, and it has no duration. Duration begins where the sediment goes on, carrying forward the distinction instituted. Act-time becomes world-time in that continuation. No handover occurs, a handover being a second act requiring its own continuation and running the regress without end. The positing has stopped; the repetition has not.

Sediment is repetition, and repetition is time. The act is before it — not earlier along a line, since the line starts with the sediment, but on the other side of the cut. The impulse running along the fiber, the axe coming down, the house standing where it was built — each is the will's and none is the will. They repeat what was settled, and the settling is what they repeat.

Nature and the Name are two modes in which will persists. In nature, will exists as repetition, carrying a determination into further instances. In the Name, will persists by renewing its self-positing and thereby sustaining itself as author. Nature endures for as long as its repetition continues; the Name lives for as long as the act posits itself again. When repetition is interrupted, the nature ends. When self-positing ceases, the Name dies, even though its sediment may remain. These are different holdings, and failure in either does not entail failure in the other. A will may run without interruption and settle nothing, with every answer given in advance and carried out. And a repetition may break while the positing continues.

Within a human life, a free act may institute a rule for future conduct: "I will be kind." Once this decision has settled, later acts may receive their determination from it. The question is then answered in advance: the established rule supplies the response before the particular encounter is considered. A principle freely chosen once can become a mode of unfreedom when it continues as repetition.

The possibility of freedom returns when the settled answer is opened again in the particular case: what does kindness require here, toward this person, now? The answer may coincide with every past response. Its content does not decide whether the act is free. The decisive difference lies in its source: repetition carries forward an answer given, while freedom sets up the answer in the present act.

Introspection cannot distinguish a freely renewed commitment from a sedimented one, since both may be experienced as sincere conviction. The difference appears when a particular case reopens the question. A living will can depart from its usual answer when the case requires it. A man may refuse a request and remain kind. If a refusal would mean, in his own eyes, that he had never been kind, kindness has hardened into a condition of his identity. He is no longer free; kindness holds him.

At the far end of sedimentation, will is concealed within its own repetition. Matter is will persisting as a determination that is no longer reopened. In the falling stone, the instituted transition continues as regularity. The will remains present, while its authorship is no longer visible within the transition. Inspection finds no separate settling behind the event: what the act has become is the event's determinate passage. Matter is the deepest sediment of will.

The will posits itself partly as what it settled and partly as what examines the settled. The share belonging to each admits of degrees. The stone is the limit: a will entirely posited as its determination​^[2], examining nothing. Between the stone and a will lies every human case, and no threshold divides them — the continuum is the will, positing itself as this mixture of hardened and unhardened. A dog runs mostly on what has been settled in it and not by it, and there are joints at which its execution holds off — the trained recall against the scent, the pause before the unfamiliar hand — where the execution does not simply run and what follows is not read off from what preceded. Whether anything is settled there, and by whom, is not available for inspection, which is what the argument established for the human case.

Peirce built a cosmology on this shape. Original spontaneity, habit-taking as the world's tendency to acquire habits, laws as habits grown reliable, matter as regularity crystallized — the direction is the same; the source is not. For Peirce chance comes first and habit binds it into law. Chance falls out and leaves no settlement; a regularity forming around it therefore forms around nothing, so that habit-taking must be a habit the world took, which is his regress and which he accepts as a primitive tendency. The act is primitive here, and the difference shows in what becomes possible afterward: a tendency hardened out of spontaneity cannot be withdrawn, because nobody existed to withdraw it.

Withdrawal requires a side that examines what was settled, and in the stone that side is at zero. What the stone keeps is the kind of form it has. A determination that was posited belongs to the order of the revocable, whether or not anything present is in a position to revoke it, and the possibility travels with its origin. Regularity congealed around chance never enters that order at all.