溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Do Liberty and Necessity Truly Exclude Each Other?
Does the fact that my action is regularly determined by character and motive truly clash with the fact that it is my own free choice?
The reconciling project between liberty and necessity — this long dispute has sprung merely from a confusion of words.
On this question the West split into two camps. On one side stood the compatibilists, who held liberty and necessity to coexist — Hobbes first defined liberty as "absence of impediment," and Hume refined it, fixing liberty as the absence not of cause but of compulsion. On the other stood those who refused the reconciliation. Kant, though he said Hume's determinism had roused him, held that true moral freedom must lie in a noumenal dimension beyond the causality of appearances, and dismissed compatibilism as a "wretched subterfuge." Can freedom join hands with necessity, or must it escape necessity entirely — the two roads drawn by Hume and Kant still flow as the two great rivers of the free-will debate.
Each time word arrives that the brain's causality fully explains my decisions, Hume's question — that this does not thereby erase freedom — grows not stale but taut.
Hume diagnosed the long war of liberty and necessity as a confusion of words.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Hume diagnosed the long war of liberty and necessity as a confusion of words. Liberty is not the absence of a cause but the absence of compulsion. That my action flows regularly from my character and motive is in fact the proof that it is truly mine — an action springing from no cause at all would not be mine. I sense this question rebuilds the condition of regret. Because the choice came from my character, I can regret it and reshape it. I stand before it too, reconsidering whether liberty and being-determined ever needed to be made into enemies.
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