After reading Dostoevsky, I’ve been thinking about free will quite a bit. The narrator from Notes from Underground rejects rational utopia and chooses suffering just to prove he can choose something. The entire premise is that if we reduce humans to predictable machines following rational self-interest, we lose what makes us human. The irrational, self-destructive part. But what if even this choice to suffer is predetermined?
Determinists like Pierre-Simon Laplace stated that if you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, you could predict everything that would ever happen. Your “choices” are just patterns set up 13.8 billion years ago. I don’t agree with this.
On Hume
Compatibilists like David Hume argued that people have been arguing freedom and determinism because they define freedom and necessity differently. He defined them as:
- Necessity (Determinism): “the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together”
- Liberty (Free Will): “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will: that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may”
Flow
Hume doesn’t just say free will and determinism can coexist, he argues that liberty, or free will, requires necessity. If your actions didn’t flow from your desires, character, and motivations in a predictable way, they’d be random. And random actions can’t be yours in any meaningful way.
But this is a bit of a cop-out? Hume’s ideas make our actions not “free” but rather actions of sophisticated puppets. Genuine power is drained, and ultimate human significance is lost.
Hume also addresses how his necessitarian view creates dangerous consequences for religion: If everything follows natural necessity (including human actions), and God created the universe and predetermined everything, then “there is a continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all to every single volition of every human creature… The ultimate Author of all our volitions is the Creator of the world.” In other words, If there is a God, and we were to judge this God by the same moral standards we use for humans, then this being is accountable for all the unnecessary and avoidable evil we discover in it.
His appeal to naturalistic psychology is really interesting too: “Whether we are the victim of gout or of robbery, we naturally feel the pain of such evils. No ‘remote speculations’ or ‘philosophical theories’ concerning the good or perfection of the whole universe will alter these natural reactions.” So, we can’t philosophize away our natural moral sentiments.
Hume’s necessitarianism undermines traditional theism as it posits God being morally irrelevant or culpable - neither of which works for orthodox Christianity.
On Nietzsche
Nietzsche was a hard incompatibilist — he rejected both libertarian free will and compatibilism. He thought free will was an illusion.
Eternal Recurrence
Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence asks: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh’” (The Joyous [Gay] Science)
This idea of eternal recurrence isn’t new. The notion that life is cyclical has been entertained for pretty much forever. But there are two key differences in Nietzsche’s presentation of the idea:
- Your life can never change. It will be the same, down to the littlest details.
- He did not state this as a factual claim, although his personal diary implies he believed it to be true
So the question isn’t whether you have free will or not, it’s whether you can affirm your life despite lacking it. A strength of will, I guess. Do you celebrate being alive or not? If you do, you’d be happy to hear the demon’s words. If not, then maybe you’re not making the most of your time here. The affirmation of the eternal return is only possible if one is willing to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself.
To push it further, this way of thinking would be different based on when the demon appears to you bearing the news:
“If it appeared on your deathbed, then it could occasion only a moment of elation or horror and the whole of your life preceding that point would be unaffected; whereas if it appeared when you were a child, it would colour your attitude to experiences for the rest of your days.”
Nietzsche recommends an attitude of acceptance towards suffering, which in its own way is quite attractive. You don’t need free will to live authentically, you just need to take responsibility for what you are - even if you didn’t choose to become it.
This thought experiment intensifies all of my feelings, both good and bad, about the past. I like my life so far. I’ve been through good times, bad ones as well, and have learned a ton. It would be very nice to think of all the good memories coming around again, and knowing I learned from the bad ones makes me think that reliving them wouldn’t be so bad. I don’t know though.
Self-Creation
“You should become who you are” — but first, you must accept what you are.
After the death of God, Nietzsche argues life doesn’t give you meaning. You give life meaning, as the Übermensch would. The process of self-creation is long; it consists of self-overcoming, Amor Fati, and finally creating your own values. Furthermore, you inherit the burden of infinite becoming — as becoming is not geared towards a final destination or goal. It’s the constant re-challenging of one’s beliefs.
And, in the process, you make peace with eternal recurrence.
On Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky was the complete opposite. As a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, he saw free will as absolutely essential to human dignity and morality. He “found in Christian religion the only solution to the riddle of existence.”
Orthodox theology teaches “synergy” — that salvation is a gift from God and man cannot save himself, and that man must work with God in the process of salvation. We have free will through God’s grace. This is unlike strict Calvinism, as Orthodoxy preserves genuine human agency in cooperation with the divine.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tells the returned Christ that the Church has “corrected” his work by taking away the “fearful burden of free choice” from humanity. The Inquisitor argues that people are too weak for freedom, that they want miracle, mystery, and authority instead.
But at the end, after listening silently for the entirety of the Inquisitor’s monologue, Christ’s silent kiss (an act of unconditional love) affirms that freedom is worth the suffering it brings. There is no reason for control, that the minds of men are not as weak as they would seem. Free will isn’t just philosophically true, it’s what makes us human and allows for genuine love and growth. The suffering that comes with free will is the price of human dignity. Without the ability to choose evil, choosing good becomes meaningless. Without the risk of damnation, salvation loses its significance.
To respond to Hume’s claim about predeterminism, Dostoevsky would argue that this logical trap would only work if you trust pure reason over faith. For Dostoevsky, God does permit evil precisely because he values human freedom so highly. Where Hume sees God’s sovereignty as threatening human agency, Dostoevsky sees God as the guarantor of human agency. Divine love requires genuine freedom - otherwise our love for God would be mere programming.
The Fundamental Divide
Hume: Free will and determinism are compatible, but this creates problems for religion.
Nietzsche: Free will is an illusion, but we can live authentically through eternal recurrence and self-creation.
Dostoevsky: Free will is real and essential - it’s what allows for genuine moral responsibility, love, and spiritual redemption.
Ironically, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky agreed that something crucial would be lost (that being ultimate human significance) if Hume’s compatibilism were true - they just drew opposite conclusions. Nietzsche embraced the loss and created new values; Dostoevsky insisted the loss was unacceptable and defended traditional religion. All three struggled with the same core question though.