Free Will (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, September 05, 2010, 06:00 (5195 days ago) @ romansh

Romansh,-Once again my preoccupation with Nietzsche leads me to a powerful argument concerning free will:-"There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as "The thing in itself," without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a contradictio in adjecto, I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!
 Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence "I think," I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must be necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an "ego," and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could i determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps "willing" or "feeling?" In short, the assertion "I think" assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further "knowledge," it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me." (Beyond Good and Evil, section 16.)-It seems that the assertion of free will is definitely tied to the assertion "I think." Thus, the question of free will is one that to Nietzsche is one that we can have no certainty on; In the same book, N suggests that free will lies only at the center of where all our drives intersect.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"