Free-Will, Destiny, and Causality. What Is the Relationship Between Predestination and Choice?

The morphological element of the causal is a “principle” and the morphological element of destiny is an “idea.”

An idea is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one is either entirely ignorant or else — like the man of the spring and every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet — entirely certain. – Oswald Spengler

Systems of thought, meaning, and worldviews

Every culture has its own sense of meaning making. The Greeks described the world as an interplay between chaos and order, for the Hindus it is the dance of the lord Shiva, the dream of Brahma, while for the Chinese it is the unceasing flow of the Dao. Western people have their own views about existence as well. For them, often times it is either the Will of God, the Laws of Physics, of the probabilistic movement of quarks and electrons.

Even though somewhere in the turn of the 17th century the Western religious view began to get replaced with a worldview heavily influenced by Newtonian mechanics and Darwin’s evolutionism, I am not fully convinced that either of them are fully and wholesomely right. Any system, dogma, theory, or belief has it’s limits. Reality exists outside of these limits.

That is to say, if we take words such as “God”, “Brahma”, “Dao”, or “Laws of Physics,” “atom,” “quark,” or “electron,” as metaphors instead of interpreting them as observable, real, and tangible phenomena. A “Law” is as much an abstraction as the word “God”. Thus, it is best to say that just like the Laws of Physics, God was created in the image of man, and not the other way around.

With that being said, nature, like history, doesn’t have laws. It has patterns, and it’s good not to mistake the two.

Destiny in the modern context

From the standpoint of the modernized, globalized and digitalized societies the word “destiny” might seem as a relic of the past, although it is still widely and heavily used in political rhetoric. We speak about the “destiny of a nation” or the “destiny of humankind,” using language in such a way as though it is something that exists completely outside of us, with people having no agency or power over its affairs.

Here, it can be easy to take a black and white stance and to say that either everything is predestined, or it is subject to human will or rational thinking. I’d like to suggest that maybe it is none of the above. Maybe we don’t have to split everything into hard categories of “predestination” or “free-agency”. Maybe, there is something that exists between these two far-fetched points of view?

In his book “The Decline of the West,” German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler wrote:

“He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is not describable.”

In our current zeitgeist, words such as “fate” and “destiny” often get an odd look. We have no problem with concepts such as “luck” or “chance” because they fit nicely into our worldview, which is predicated on quantification, measurement, and probability theories. Naturally, most people fall under the spell that everything can be measured, counted and predicted, as though the entire universe may yield to the mathematical mind of the current man and be explained by his methods.

In this situation I want to ask: can you predict what your child will be drawn to vocationally at the age of 7? What he or she will be like at 25? Can you measure the movement of trust, love, or companionship? Can you quantify the qualitative moments of experience that are left for you as a living, breathing, and thinking human being?

Of course, we can say that nothing can be predicted because all things are subjected to randomness, but this seems to be tilting to another extreme. It is untrue to say that randomness is completely devoid of order, just like that order has nothing to do with randomness. If there was no order in chaos, why then do galaxies orbit one another instead of saying “to hell with this!” and falling apart?

Gravity, you might say. Yes, but isn’t gravity the type of order that keeps things together instead of submerging them in chaos? If there was no chaos, things would be static, dead and uninteresting. If there was no order — we wouldn’t survive a minute in that type of existence.

“Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom, conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words.” — says Spengler

Similarly, in another passage he wrote:

No systematist, no Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,” and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,” “despair,” “repentance,” “devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent.

Do you choose it, or does it choose you?

In the West the most common way of speech is to say that a person decides what to do with his life and then does it. Thus phrases like “I chose to be a lawyer,” or “he found out the truth” are natural ways of underlining human agency in action. In the East the situation is a bit different. There, it is not uncommon to hear phrase like “the law chose me” or that “the truth found him.”

So who chooses who? Do you pick flowers, or the flowers alure you to be picked? As you can already feel — it is more a matter of speech, than a matter of fact. When claiming the former we exclude the latter, thus we fall short in both regards. Neti-neti, as the Hindus say. Neither this, nor that. What to do then? Pick flowers and don’t bother with explaining your reasoning. It arises naturally just as the sent of rain after it’s fact.

“The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect.” — says Spengler.

Thus, it is sometimes best to accept the fact that “we don’t know” instead of making claims that we do. Know-it-all-ism is a symptom of grandiosity and an expression of hate toward the mystery of the unknown. It’s scary, it’s awe-inspiring, and most importantly – it is true.

Fatalism just as free-will are both objects of speech, not observable facts. All words are symbols, referrals, but they are not the facts themselves. It is good to use them, but it provides a great sense of misery and confusion when they get misused. Thus, as it was said by Alan Watts, let’s not mistake the menu with the food. Let’s guide our mind and it’s process of meaning making into its right place instead of letting it run loose or rampant.

As said by Mark Twain:

“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

Understanding our limitation and ignorance is the first step to a type of knowing that we wouldn’t achieve otherwise. Nonetheless, all of us are bound by a type of perception which we did not choose nor did we wish to have. It came like spring after winter, naturally and spontaneously. Conversely, what we CAN choose is whether we will be aware of this fact or not. If we are, maybe we will be able to tolerate the perceptions of others better, for both they and we are clueless in the matters of being and not-being alike, even if we pretend not to be.

Thanks for sticking by! If you’ve enjoyed this article, be sure to follow my profile for more post of a similar nature. 🎓✨