“… [Intellect’s] activity, in accordance with its own proper
virtue, will be complete happiness. This activity is that of contemplation. For
this is the highest activity…”
– Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, Chapter 7)
A set of definitions:
Fatalism: things that happen, happens so necessarily
Fate: individual lives carry a pattern imposed by fatalism and chance; outcome fated, the path not so
Chance:
a coincidental meeting of two fates (what remains after subtracting ‘laws of
nature)
Causal
Determinism: a successive reaction from a cause, with no external or free action
Free Will:
uncaused action
Truth: that what you like to believe
Fact: that which dismisses your belief and exists regardlessly
The question of fate is a question of how to live. Even if we
remove the concept of fate, by now outdated like the old religions, the
question still persists: how to live with free will? Living on a planet governed
by the laws of nature, by its ‘facts’, what is man to do with his own ability
of ‘uncaused action’? Fate helps us reach a bit closer to the core of this question.
Like the few men who emerged from Plato’s cave, fate reaches a measure closer
to the dilemma of man by eliminating the illusion of free will. The question
then becomes about not how to live with the responsibility of uncaused action, but
how to live, and indeed surrender, to the being and becoming of the pattern
that animates our lives.
But isn’t fate a thought? A make-believe? I wake up at the
time ‘I’ set my alarm to. I eat what I choose from the menu, and take commute
to work based on my decisions of which route to take, when to refill the tank,
which songs to listen to. Similarly, I consciously engage with my colleagues,
talk about matters that I need tending to and small chats that interest me. I choose
when to have the smoke break. Once back home, I choose between taking a nap,
reading a book, going for a walk, playing chess, or scrolling away at my phone.
And so, in every prospect that comes about from my decisions, I make further
decisions – and live. What Sartre said: life is the sum of our choices.
The ‘I’ appears to be pretty prominent. Yet it is not a
singular, linear entity. ‘I’ is the body, is also the mind. It is the doer of the
action, the subject, but is it not the object too? on which the action is
asserted? In one neuroscience research, it was found that while the participant
thinks that he himself raised his own hands, the neurons had already queued
that exact action split seconds in advance. The ‘I’, then perhaps, is not the
subject that initiates the action, but the object on which the action is
fulfilled. It is here that we now touch upon consciousness and instinct.
With our body as the performer, and our brains the command
center, and our lives lived on habits whose origins we can’t know and our daily
desires but an expression of a discreet instigation – where is free will to be
found? Where the is the ‘uncaused’ basis for our actions? Is it free? Is will a
thing?
What is consciousness? There isn’t a definition for it
above, since I didn’t have one. For me, perhaps, it is a summation: of memories
and an identity built on those memories; a live continuum of new thoughts and
old worries; a practicality that ensures we function properly, it keeps us on
our toes. Consciousness is the accessible part of our souls.
What is instinct? An urge. An urge that arrives on you. It beckons.
It whispers. It also thunders in your gut. It guides, it leads, it tells you to
believe, to have faith. The modern man, however, has learned to champion immediate
rationality instead. What doesn’t make sense to his limited vision, his limited
capacity for logic, he dismisses as unworthy of acting out. The zany instinct
loses to the safe calculation of reason.
If consciousness is the accessible part of our souls,
instinct, then, is the intermittent expression of that soul. Consciousness is mistaken
for our illusion of free will, yet in ‘truth’ it is the window to the soul wherefrom
a voice reaches our guts in form of an instinct. The surface of consciousness is
the mechanism for fatalism (for things to happen out of necessity), while
instinct is the becoming of the individual’s fate within that mechanism.
Karl Popper suggested that the soundness of any theory
depends on its fallibility. If a theory cannot be tested, and does not contain the
possibility of negation within its arguments – it is not a theory, or at least
not a good one. Can fate fall? Or more precisely, can we choose not to act
fatefully? Can something exist outside the mechanism of fatalism? Is possibility
possible?
Suppose A has to do a task X. The first question is: will A
do it? If he has free will, he can choose, and either of those two decisions
will lead to respective consequences. Nothing is fixed. No mechanism exists. If
the task X is fatalistic, then it will be done. However, two variables present
themselves: when will it be done, and how? For A, he would want to do it as
immediately as possible, and with as much ease as well. And indeed, he would
put effort toward it; or, he would be hindered by laziness, fear, or other
tasks. So while the doing of the task is fatalistic, his fate is up to his own making.
He would either put effort, or he would postpone with excuses.
In the first case, X puts the efforts toward immediate
completion and ease. Yet he is denied. He fails. He faces strong opposition in
form of events outside his control. He suffers. The task is prolonged, the ease
he hoped for turns into a chronic struggle. Unbeknownst to him, as he is unable
to comprehend all the factors happening simultaneously, he turns the dagger to
himself. He mourns his incompetency and hates his failure to do what ‘he willed’,
what he thought possible. Yet in ‘right’ time, when the all those factors and
forces harmonize into a cohesion, task X is suddenly fulfilled. A is left
baffled: all his struggling yet nothing, and now it falls into his lap.
In both the cases, the variables we sought turned out be fixed
too. At least one of them. The fatalistic event is bound to happen at the ‘right’
or ‘factual’ time, regardless of our willingness or efforts. Yet the manner we
embrace fatalism, our awareness and malleability toward our own individual fate
(our ease), is the very answer of our question: how to live. In words of Goethe,
‘Fate is an elevating thought for the person who grasps that he belongs to it’.
To grasp this elevating thought, then, we must keep our consciousness, the
window to our soul, clean and free of any imperative (great or small, long-term
or daily), so that the voice of the instinct reaches our guts more clearly.
The courage to embrace fate comes from the epiphany that
fate is a happy and indeed liberating thought (even when taken as an intellectual
experiment). Rather than negate our existence, it celebrates it with unison to
something larger than ourselves, larger than the individuals, larger than the parts.
Indeed, fatalism presents us with its own courage; it is said that ‘he who is
born to hang will never drown.’ This happy liberation redeems man of his debilitating
nature of self-criticism and negation, for he is absolved of both mistakes and the
fear of making them. What Miles Davis said: do not fear mistakes; there are
none.
Coming back to our daily lives, I will close this thought
experiment with a quote from Nietzsche: ‘One must keep the whole surface of
consciousness – consciousness is a surface – clear of any great imperative at
all.’ To be constantly thinking if our actions are fatalistic or part of our
individual fates, (whether it is brushing our teeth or accepting a job offer) is
a counterintuitive way to live. We don’t know what our fates entail, what
chances lie upon our way, so any amount of pre-guessing is futile and tiring
effort that might leave us embittered and cowardly. It is only when we live
with our ‘whole surface of consciousness clear’ that we sync with our fates and
fulfill them. Since truth hides in paradoxes, here is one: believe in fate, yet
live in the moment as it doesn’t exist.
August 7, 2026.