Chapter 41 Law, Arbitrariness, and Necessity: The Failure of Determinism

We turn to what Klages considers one of the fundamental confusions that has plagued Western philosophy from the Stoics to Kant: the failure to distinguish between spirit and life, which has resulted in the collapse of all attempts to explain the feeling of freedom.

The stakes of this confusion are immense. By conflating necessity with legality, and arbitrariness with lawlessness, philosophers have created false choices that obscure the actual nature of human experience. As Klages provocatively states: "There are no natural laws, and the moral law is renamed arbitrariness." This radical claim sits at the center of today's lecture, which will trace three movements: first, the historical failure of determinism and indeterminism; second, the true nature of necessity as distinct from law; and third, the six fundamental types of life-feeling that emerge from this analysis.

The False Equation

When the Stoics adopted the Heraclitean Logos and Democritean causality, they immediately believed that the supposed conditionality of willing could be understood through a legal order governing the world's course. Listen to Chrysippus: "The natural law is the world reason, according to which what has become has become, what is becoming will become, and what is to become will become... For it is impossible that anything, even the slightest, occurs differently than according to the common nature and the reason law prevailing in it."

If world reason has predetermined the entire course of events according to unbreakable laws, then every act of will occurs with the same inevitability as leaves falling in autumn wind. My experience that my act of will springs from within myself would be pure illusion.

The Stoic Contradiction

Yet here emerges the first great contradiction. The very same Stoics who maintain that natural law governs everything with iron necessity also insist that the origin of volition lies in the personality, which is therefore responsible for its actions. Even more remarkably, they issue prescriptions to the bearer of will with a concept of duty that enters antiquity with the judicial gestures of the old God Yahweh himself.

How can disobedience be conceived if legislative reason preplanned everything? The Stoics answer: because passions entangle the rational part of the soul in errors. But this raises a new question: how can errors arise from irrational impulses within a rational world?

Klages bypasses this genuine contradiction to focus on something even more remarkable: the Stoic belief that different degrees of ability to comply with the all-regulating world law are compatible with complete freedom for the entirely determined will. Freedom becomes "the knowledge of what is permitted and prohibited." The wise person possesses complete freedom precisely because they follow the law without resistance. As Chrysippus states: "The virtue of the happy person consists in the fact that everything is done in accordance with the agreement of the individual's personal identity with the will of the world ruler."

The Hidden Truth

Even without better information than the Stoics provide, Klages insists, one must sense from such thought processes that the omnipotence of law and the omnipotence of arbitrariness flow from the same source. The Stoics denied chance, yet they reconciled free will with legal pressure through voluntary law compliance—not by chance, but from inner compulsion.

This pattern repeats through the centuries. Every moral advocate who concerns themselves with the problem of freedom ultimately ends at the same point, regardless of how different their formulas may appear.

Three Historical Examples

First, Abelard: morally good volition takes place in accordance with conscience—thus unforced. In conscience, natural law reveals itself. But natural law is the will of God.

Second, Spinoza: natural law and moral law are identical; all decisions of will occur with natural law necessity. Yet freedom of self-determination derives from the soul's activity, specifically from the domination of clear and distinct thinking, whose most perfect achievement is knowledge of God. He understood determining power by analogy to human will and attributed the origin of legality to a willing world reason.

Third, Kant: the phenomenal world and human willing are strictly determined in every process. Yet the freedom of personality required for moral law results from its ability to obey that law unconditionally. "The moral value of an action consists solely in its submission to the principle of universality." The "dignity" of man is rooted in his "freedom of a rational being under moral laws."

As Schiller expressed it: "Take the deity into your will—And it descends from its world throne."

The Categorical Imperative's Origin

Kantian dualism makes visible where the commonality of law and arbitrariness is found. When we appeal against moral law to the inevitability of our actions, it throws back at us: "You can, for you must!" This is the formula we have encountered before: the primacy of the practical—the willing—over the theoretical—the knowing reason.

Translated from epistemological complexity into simpler medieval metaphysics, we arrive at the Augustinian: "All things are nothing other than acts of will," or conclude with Duns Scotus that the world owes its existence to the whim of the spirit God, and moral worthiness of action is unfounded because the command followed comes from the pure arbitrariness of the Almighty, whose decisions are determined by nothing—not even by reasons of knowledge.

Yahweh said: "Let there be light"—and there was light. He could have said: "Let there be darkness"—and it would have become darker still. Everything that exists, and then also the knowledge of it, exists according to an absolute command.

The Semitism of Spirit

Klages now reveals what he considers the hidden connection: over the Greek belief in willing for reasons, the Jewish belief triumphed in recognition from purposes that almighty arbitrariness, prompted by nothing but itself, sets. The Old Testament tyrant of will, without whose intervention no sparrow falls from the roof, is the same principle that believes in legal dependency of the world's course and drives modern belief in cause itself.

Determinism—whether by clergymen, Stoics, or Kant—means the determination of the knowing mind for the complete absolution of the willing mind. The supposedly holy scriptures of Christianity agree astonishingly with the natural sciences of these same Christians in one word: law. None appears more often in holy scripture, none more often in the sciences, and none is given such high rank and irresistible binding power in both cases.

The Intellectual-Historical Evidence

With the unmistakably inevitable inclination to limit understanding by the demands of an absolutely almighty will, one inadvertently provided intellectual-historical evidence for the origin of the concept of law not merely from spirit, but from those prerequisites of its existence in life which we immediately recognize in the self-authority of every volition.

The Epicurean Alternative

What of indeterminism? Epicurus argued: "It would be better to follow the myths about the gods than to be a slave to the law of nature; for the former at least offer hope of grants of prayer, but natural necessity is relentless."

Yet according to the intellectualism of antiquity in the conception of will, even Epicurus remained far from making absolute arbitrariness the basis of knowledge like medieval metaphysicians. His formula was: "Everything happens according to necessity, intention, chance." His effort to limit the effectiveness of law testifies to a different disposition, but his use of "intention" and "chance" reveals he too lacked insight into the fundamental difference between legislative reason and the creative powers of life.

Nietzsche's Bold Innovation

We arrive at Nietzsche, who offers perhaps the most provocative formulation. In "Beyond Good and Evil," he writes: "That 'lawfulness of nature' of which you physicists speak so proudly exists only thanks to your interpretation and poor 'philology'—it is no fact, no 'text,' but rather a naive-humanitarian adjustment with which you sufficiently cater to democratic instincts... Someone might come who could read from the same nature precisely the tyrannically ruthless and relentless enforcement of power claims."

Nietzsche proposes that this world has a necessary and predictable course not because laws prevail in it, but because laws are absolutely absent, and every power at every moment draws its last consequence.

The Power Monad Thought Experiment

To rescue the unconditionality that his "will to power" requires, Nietzsche suggests we imagine power monads that reproduce without restriction and disappear from the world's course after each exercise of power. Could such absolutely unconditional power monads bring about a world event of necessity's nature?

Klages' answer: they would bring about neither necessity nor anything at all.

If we take the observer's standpoint, what the world experiences would be entirely created by power monads themselves and therefore without cause. But this sets a sufferer of activity against the active one, thus limiting the active one by the material on which its activity depends.

If nothing existed but power monads, no one would gain knowledge of them—not even themselves—because they would first have to stop being mere effectors in order to find something.

From the power monad's standpoint: it would have nothing to accomplish if there were not a moment when what is to be effected is not yet present, although as something to be effected it must already be envisioned. Thus in every moment of its effect, it would suffer the urge and the world situation itself—thereby stripped of its nature as power.

The nothing-but-power monad would become the omnipotence monad, and the omnipotence monad—God—would lie beyond any conceivable reality. For neither could it become perceptible in reality nor would it find a reality from its side.

The Paradox of Omnipotence

In psychological language: the willing I would have no way to experience its power without the possibility of experiencing its impotence. Consequently, there is no experience of wanting without the experience of the resistance of necessity. Only in view and in relation to necessity does will exist.

Consider the fundamental cases of our inability: I cannot be in two places at once; therefore I want to measure the distance as quickly as possible. I cannot turn back time; so I want to mitigate the consequences of what has happened. I cannot change a point in the future into the present; so I want to accelerate the course of events.

Will breaks at the barrier of ability, but ability is made of the stuff of necessity. Measured by will, the "Almighty" becomes all-powerless, because if everything were already, absolutely nothing could be wanted.

Two Types of Causality

Today we can hardly speak of causes without meaning their legality. But humanity thought about causal relationships for millennia without considering their legality. We must notice that it is sometimes harder to consider endless causal series than to be content with the very next link as something definitive—such as when we believe we have discovered the origin in our own self for our decisions.

If we call the scientific concept of causation the mechanical one, then personal causation touches on magical causation, as the intermediate links between decision and executing movement remain hidden from us. Divine causations also fall under personal causation, forming the transition from original humanity to logically thinking humanity—the epic or heroic age, where natural processes appeared as emotional expressions or will manifestations by god-like figures.

The Fate Powers

When we measure back mental development beyond this intermediary age, we encounter traces of a much older way of thinking. Alongside gods and demigods stand peculiar fate forces—often personified but retaining a darker character pointing back to the far more primordial world of impersonal demonic formations.

These fate powers—the Moirai, Parcae, Horae, Keres, Erinyes, Ananke, Ate, Nemesis—are predominantly female. Their close kinship with spinning and weaving earth mothers has long been recognized, as has the thousandfold documented fact that it was predominantly women who represented the idea of fate cultically or magically as priestesses, seers, sorceresses: the Witch of Endor, the Pythias, Sibyls, Vestals, Druids.

The Homeric Scene

Consider the crucial scene from Iliad, Book 22. Athena demands that Hector, "long destined for doom," not escape destruction. Zeus grants her request but does not take the decision himself:

"Now the father raised the golden scales, placed in the pans two dark death lots, one for the Peleion and one for the warrior Hector, took the middle and weighed: then Hector's fate weighed heavily towards Hades; Phoebus Apollo left him."

Zeus decides only after he has ascertained the will of fate by means of scales and lots. We have reached the layer of symbolic thinking. The motive for Zeus's action lies in darker times than those that created the Olympic gods—times when entirely random occurrences alone were attributed the ability to predict the unavoidable.

The slightest hint of regularity in events would have absolutely rejected such oracle arts. If we translate into principle form what was not thought at that time but worked irresistibly in minds, these sentences characterize the conviction:

Everything that happens to a person, and everything that happens through them, is an occurrence—including feelings, decisions, and actions. The compulsion ruling over them means either torment and ruin or stroke of luck and bliss. Each event is connected with every other, and the most incidental act can shake the whole and call forth vengeful fate as much as the most powerful—comparable to touching a single spider's thread when it makes the intricate web tremble to its center.

Man and Fate as Unity

Despite everything being accomplished not by human work but compelled, despite action completely dissolving into event, we cannot escape the impression that there is a mysterious connection between the doom and the hero who suffers it. Man and his fate seem like two sides of a higher unity, and the necessity of events appears as the expression of a being in which we ourselves are involved.

The Blissful Compulsion

Recall what was revealed about the pathos of experience in antiquity. Words like "inspiration" and "enthusiasm" testify that there can be a compulsion appearing as exuberant happiness far surpassing ordinary feelings. Plato was still Greek enough to praise the source of humanity's highest goods in "divine madness."

Even Nietzsche, whose willful nature was coupled with irreconcilable contentiousness, was forced to proclaim: "My love ignites eternally only through necessity!"

We see in utmost dubiousness what became unproven habitual opinion thanks to all apostles of morality: the belief that the experience of necessity is nothing but the experience of being forced—comparable either to the slave's futile struggle with his chain or at best to self-denial.

How dreadfully alienated were these thinkers from life when they were completely blind to the case of highly intensified moments of existence, confusing necessity with the adverse obstacle of prohibition and ascribing to it legal compulsion that one overcomes only by slavishly submitting!

The Hidden Motive

Just as necessity becomes blissful compulsion only insofar as the suffering soul momentarily merges with the essence that expresses itself in it, so too is demanded law-abidance affirmed only to the extent that the obedient personality knows itself highly personally involved in the will to power of a spirit that commands through laws.

The demonization of life in the belief of fate meets with the glorification of laws—the canonization not of life-alien but of life-hostile arbitrariness. On the side of life corresponds what Nietzsche proclaimed: "Where life freezes, the law piles up!"

The Six Basic Types

Without having discussed them all, we can line up six basic types of life feelings with their corresponding personal ethos:

The Egoist: "I want"
The Altruist: "I should"
The Sentimental Person: "You want"
The Ascetic: "He wants, I must"
The Animalistic Person: "It drives, I must"
The Elemental Person: "It happens, I must"

Among these, the two middle ones are mere intermediate types. The first two and last two are each variations of a single kind. The "should" of the altruist is only a generalized and legalized form of the "want" of the egoist. The necessity of the self due to the necessity of essence is common to the last two.

Klages has demonstrated that both determinism and indeterminism are apparent opposites that can turn into each other because what they oppose to will and its freedom—general lawfulness—already includes the generating reason of will itself. The concept of law, whether natural or moral, originates not from observation of nature but from the self-authority of volition projected outward.

The bifurcation of human experience becomes clear: one life attitude is that of I-originality, deriving the inner process from the commanding spirit; the other is that of life-originality, deriving it from a power weaving reality itself. For the I-original attitude, willing and event, willing and experience, must unfold separately. For the life-original attitude, external and internal fate cannot fall apart into fundamentally different kinds of necessity.

The crucial question is not how the original self aligns with any kind of law, but how it finds a place within necessity. This requires establishing beyond doubt whether the experiential autonomy of willing is indeed what we mean by the reality of events as we set out to find a scope for action.

What emerges is Klages' most radical claim: the experience of necessity, properly understood, is not the experience of legal compulsion but of participation in a being that is simultaneously our deepest self and the impersonal power of life itself. The soul's momentary merging with the essence expressing itself through necessity—this is the authentic experience of freedom that all legal formulations of liberty obscure.

The implications are devastating for the entire Western philosophical and religious tradition. From the Stoics through Christianity to Kant and beyond, philosophy has substituted spirit's hostile opposition to life for life's own necessity. The glorification of law represents the canonization of life-hostile arbitrariness.

Against this stands the archaic wisdom preserved in the belief in fate: that man and doom are two sides of a higher unity, that necessity expresses a being in which we ourselves participate, that the highest moments of existence come not from autonomous willing but from merging with the necessity that speaks through us.