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ArgumentFreedom as adequate cause
We are freer the more we understand what determines us.
Supports Compatibilism
Spinoza · · 1677
- An effect can depend on me in two ways: either it follows from my nature alone, and I am its adequate cause; or its explanation requires outside forces that I undergo, and I am only its partial cause.
- In the first case I am active, and free to that extent; in the second, passive. Yet most of our desires move us unawares: freedom is therefore not all-or-nothing, but a matter of degree.
- This degree grows not by escaping causes but by understanding them: knowing why I desire what I desire, I act from myself understood, not from an outside that stirs me. No power to do otherwise is required.
Therefore So one can be wholly determined and yet more or less free, according to whether one acts as an adequate cause: freedom grows with the knowledge of necessity, not with its abolition.
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Deepenings
Adequate cause, inadequate cause
- I am an adequate cause when the effect is explained by my nature alone; an inadequate, or partial, cause when explaining it requires bringing in something other than me.
- To be active is to produce effects of which I am the adequate cause; to be passive is to undergo them. All of freedom lies in this passage from passivity to activity.
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Objection