We're still toying with the question of how and where man's freedom fits into the overall cosmic scheme of things. Literally: for how is free will possible, and why is it here? If it doesn't exist -- as believed by religious and scientistic determinists -- then at least this frees us of anxiety, since whatever happens must happen, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. It also frees us of moral qualms and conflicts for the same reason.
If free will is just an illusion, then there are no such things as error or evil. So don't worry, be happy! And yet, despite the presence of more secularism than ever, there appears to be more anxiety than ever, so there's a disconnect somewhere.
Aphoristic pointers and clues:
If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist.
But error does exist, so...
Error supposes that something happened that should not have.
Something is supposed to happen, and we are supposed to make it happen. So responsibility and guilt are built into the fabric of existence? Not sure I like that idea.
The stone is right, wherever it falls. Whoever speaks of error postulates free actions.
Wait -- I think I found a loophole: belief in free will must be an error.
To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.
D'oh!
The prestige of freedom in a society that professes scientific determinism is a Christian holdover.
That's a low blow.
The determinist is impatient with his opponents, as if they had the freedom to speak as they wished to. Determinists are very irritable people.
Why not? Irritability is an effective defense against self-awareness.
In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge.
Which leads directly to the irreducible paradox of personhood:
The permanent possibility of initiating causal series is what we call a person.
In this giant book I'm reading on metascience, the author points out that there are some eight different forms or schools of Thomism. This troubles me, since there is only one Thomas, and I even chose him for my confirmation saint. One reason I joined the church is to exit my own circularity and fragmentation, and now I find out that my own saint is riven by octupularity?
Of the eight approaches, I find that two or three of them speak to me; it's not that I ever intended to join a school of thought, rather, that these schools describe where I already find myself.
For example, the school of transcendental Thomism revolves around the idea that "the ultimate root of all metaphysical inquiry" is "the drive to know and the intelligibility of being." It "argues that the human intelligence cannot be satisfied until it arrives at some 'Ultimate Reality' which is the 'Ultimate Good.'" This Ultimate Being "is implicit in all our thinking and provides the 'horizon' on which metaphysics is based."
So, I guess that makes me a transcendental Thomist. Except I equally relate to what he calls "Phenomenological Thomism," because this includes the personalism which for me holds the Key to Everything.
Ironically, John Paul II is perhaps the most well-known personalist, despite the fact that he was a student of Garrigou-Lagrange, the latter representing an entirely different school of thought ("essentialist Thomism") which is much more objective, rigorous, and even hostile to the potential subjectivism of personalism.
Maybe I'm a little slow, but I see the three approaches as complementary. A thought just floated by: it is as if Garrigou-Lagrange's essentialism is the Father, John Paul II's personalism is the Son, and Norris Clarke's dynamic transcendental horizon is the Holy Spirit.
This may also be how and where the whole existentialada may be harmonized with Schuon, who writes that not only is there "no incompatibility whatever between the 'absolute Absolute,' Beyond-Being, and the 'relative Absolute,' creative Being," but "this distinction is even crucial." For the Divine Relativity
is the necessary consequence of the very Infinitude of the Principle: it is because God is infinite that He comprises the dimension of relativity, and it is because He comprises that dimension that He manifests the world.
A world that includes free persons:
God did not create an intelligent being so that the latter might grovel before the unintelligible; He created him in order to be known starting from contingency, and that is precisely why He created him intelligent.
Only if the mind is rational is the will free, and both are rooted in the Person:
Now one thing is the existential determination of man, which he shares with every pebble, and another thing is his liberty, which he owes to his deiform personality and which causes him to participate in the Divine Nature.
Now, "The individual will is free insofar as it is real," for "if it were not in any way free it would be deprived of all reality." Rather, only the Divine Will would be free, and we would simply be necessary consequences of it.
I think I'll conclude with a passage from The Way Toward Wisdom:
Since, for Aquinas, the human person is the culmination of the visible universe, and the mediator between it and the spiritual realm, a good understanding of the human person can be considered the key to the knowledge of all Being for which the human person serves as the analogical microcosm. Thus personalism is central to a Metascience, since beings with intellect and will are the supreme form of Being (Ashley).
Concur.
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