溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
In the Midst of Nature's Causality, How Is Freedom Possible?
If every event is necessarily fixed by a prior cause, how is a freedom that begins something new of itself possible at all?
Besides causality according to the laws of nature, there must be a causality through freedom.
This question was a watershed of modern philosophy. Hume, reducing causation to habit, loosened necessity — but at the same stroke shrank freedom into the regularity of disposition. Kant, even after Hume roused him from his "dogmatic slumber," refused compatibilism as a "wretched subterfuge": true moral freedom must lie in a dimension wholly beyond nature's causality. So he divided the phenomenal from the noumenal, placing necessity and freedom on different tiers. Yet Schopenhauer who followed returned even noumenal freedom to the necessity of character, and later idealists expanded freedom into the unfolding of history. Is freedom outside causality or within it — Kant's two worlds set that question most dramatically apart.
In an age where every act seems reducible to the brain's causality, Kant's question — that I can nonetheless begin anew — remains not stale metaphysics but the last line of defense for human dignity.
Kant honestly laid out a contradiction reason falls into by itself: an antinomy in which both "everything is fixed by cause" and "there must be a free beginning" can be proven.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Kant honestly laid out a contradiction reason falls into by itself: an antinomy in which both "everything is fixed by cause" and "there must be a free beginning" can be proven. His solution was to split the world in two — as appearance I am bound by natural law, but to myself as thing-in-itself, freedom stands open. I sense this question is the metaphysical ground of regret, for without freedom there is no self to regret. I stand before it too, wavering each day between the two selves within me — the fixed one and the one that begins.
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