III. Freedom and Necessity

Meanwhile, reject as we must the assumption of the two worlds to which, according to Plato and Kant, man belongs, it is nevertheless true that man lives at the same time in two worlds, and the moral law inhabits one of them, which is not the world of experience. But all the same even this world is no super-sensuous one. The two worlds, in which man lives, are the Past and the Future. The Present forms the boundary of the two. His whole experience lies in the past, all experience is past, and all the connecting links which past experience shows him lie with inevitable necessity before, or still more, behind him. In these there is nothing more left to alter, he can do nothing more in regard to them than recognize their necessity. Thus is the world of experience the world of knowing, and the world of necessity.

It is otherwise with the Future. Of it I have not the smallest experience. Apparently free it lies before me, as the world which I do not explore as one knowing it, but in which I have to assert myself as an active agent. Certainly I can extend the experience of the past into the future, certainly I can conclude that these will be even so necessarily determined as those, but even if I can only recognize the world on the assumption of necessity, yet I shall only be able to act in it on the assumption of a certain Freedom. Even if compulsion is exercised over my actions, there remains to me the choice, whether I shall yield to it, or not, there remains to me as last resort the possibility of withdrawing myself by a voluntary death. Action implies continual choice between various possibilities, and be it alone that of doing or not doing, it means accepting or rejecting, it means defending and opposing. Choice, however, assumes in advance the possibility of choice just as much as the distinction between the acceptable and the inacceptable, the good and the bad. The moral judgment, which is an absurdity in the world of the past, the world of experience, in which there is nothing to choose, where iron necessity rules, is unavoidable in the world of the unknown future – of freedom.

But not simply the feeling of freedom is assumed by action, but also certain aims. If in the world of the past, the sequence of cause and effect (causality) rules, so in the world of action, of the future; the thought of aim (Teleology). For action the feeling of freedom is an indispensable psychological necessity, which is not to be got rid of by any degree of knowledge. Even the sternest Fatalism, even the deepest conviction that man is a necessary product of his circumstances, cannot bring it about that we cease to love, and to hate, to defend and attack.

But all that is no monopoly of man but holds also of the animals. Even these have freedom of the will, in the sense that man has, namely as a subjective, inevitable feeling of freedom, which springs from ignorance of the future and the necessity of exercising a direct influence on it.

And just in the same way they have command of a certain insight into the connection of cause and effect. Finally the conception of an end is not quite strange to them. In respect of insight into the past and the necessity of nature on the one hand, and on the other in respect of the power of foreseeing the future, and the setting up of aims for their action the lowest specimens of humanity are distinguished far less from the animals than from civilized men.

The setting up of aims is not, however, anything which exists outside the sphere of necessity, of cause and effect. Even though I set up aims for myself only in the future, in the sphere of apparent freedom, yet the act of setting up aims itself, from the very moment when I set up the aim, belongs to the past, and can thus in its necessity be recognized as the result of distinct causes. That is not in any way altered by the fact that the attainment of the end is still in the future, in the sphere of uncertainty, thus in this sense in that of freedom. Let the attainment of the end be assumed as ever so far distant, the setting up of the aim itself lies in the past. In the sphere of freedom there lie only those aims which are not yet set up, of which we do not even know anything as yet.

The world of conscious aims is thus not the world of freedom in opposition to that of necessity. For each of the aims which we set ourselves, just as for each one of the means which we apply to its attainment, the causes are already given and are under certain circumstances recognizable as those which brought about the setting up of these aims and determined the way in which that was to be achieved.

It is impossible, however, to distinguish the realm of necessity and that of freedom simply as past and future; their distinction often coincides also with that of nature and society, or to be more exact, of society and that other nature from which the former displays only one particular and peculiar portion.

If we look at nature in the narrower sense, as apart from Society and then both in their relation to the future, we find at once a serious difference. The natural conditions change much slower than the Social. And the latter are at the period when men commence to philosophise, at the period of the production of wares, of a highly complicated nature, whereas there are in nature a large number of simple processes, whose subjection to law can be relatively easily perceived.

The consequence is, that despite our apparent freedom of action in the future, this action, nevertheless as far as nature is concerned comes to be looked on as determined at an early period. Dark as the future lies before me, I know of a certainty that summer will follow winter, that to-morrow the sun will rise, that to-morrow I shall have hunger and thirst, that in winter the need for warming myself will occur to me, and that my action will never be directed to escaping these natural necessities, but with the idea of satisfying them. Thus I recognize, despite all apparent freedom that in face of nature my action is necessarily conditioned. The constitution of nature external to us and of my own body produce necessities which force on me a certain willing and acting which being given according to experience can be reckoned with in advance.

It is quite otherwise with my conduct to my fellow men, my social actions. In this case the external and internal causes, which necessarily determine my action, are not so easy to recognize. Here I meet with no overpowering forces of nature, to which I am obliged to submit myself, but with factors on a level with myself, men like myself, who by nature have no more strength than I have. Over against these I feel myself to be free, but they also appear to me to be free in their relations to their fellow men. Towards them I feel love and hate, and on them and my relations to them I make moral judgments.

The world of freedom and of the moral law is thus certainly another than that of recognized necessity, but it is no timeless and spaceless and no super-sensual world, but a particular portion of the world of sense seen from a particular point of view. It is the world as seen in its approach to us, the world on which we have to work, which we have to rearrange, before all.

But what is to-day the future will be to-morrow past; thus what to-day is felt to be free action will be recognized to-morrow as necessary action. The moral law in us, which regulates this action, ceases, however, with that to appear as an uncaused cause, it falls into the sphere of experience and can be recognized as the necessary effect of a cause – and only as such cause are we at all able to recognize it, or can it become an object of Science. In that he transferred the moral from the “this side,” the sensual world, to the “other side,” the super-sensual world, Kant has not advanced the scientific knowledge of it, but has closed all access to it. This obstacle must be got rid of before everything else, we must rise above Kant if we are to bring the problem of the moral law nearer to its solution.