On Freedom and Fatalism: The Yogavasistha and Arthur Schopenhauer | Dr. Aleksandar Uskokov

So I want to talk about freedom and fatalism, or sort of the range between the two, uh, in two philosophical and soteriological systems.

Um, and but before I do that, I'd like to clarify in what sense, uh, I will think about freedom here.

So this is a frame taken from sort of one of the, uh, um, points in which-- on, on which I base the talk, and that is Arthur Schopenhauer.

And freedom is, uh, generally and commonly and uncontroversially taken to mean, uh, that a sentient entity is free to choose between several possible actions, right, at any given situation, and that freedom is required for having some sort of moral responsibility, right? And that's a relatively non-controversial sense in which we understand freedom, and it's, uh, also, um, a sense that is very common to the Indic traditions.

There's a discussion in the Brahma Sutra, uh, and in the commentaries about, well, whe- whether the agent is actually free or not because moral responsibility, uh, and soteriological aspirations have to sort of go with the agent, right? So there's a discussion between Vedantins and Sankhyas on this point, right? Uh, but there is a second sense of freedom, I, I think most clearly expressed by Schopenhauer, in which, and I'll-- this is my writing, but so that you get it right, I'll just read.

An entity is free if its actions are not determined by something else.

Are you ultimate originator of their actions? In this understanding of freedom, choice is not necessary, and sometimes it's not even involved.

It doesn't present itself.

Um, it's better understood as some s- sort of spontaneity, a natural expression of the thing's essential nature, svabhava, as, uh, uh, Sanskrit scholars would say.

So, um, again, I'll come to, at the end of the talk, to Schopenhauer, how he thinks that this is freedom.

But for the moment, for those of you who have read obviously some Indian philosophy, you may think of the difference between, say, the heat that is natural to fire.

Fire is free to burn whenever it does burn.

Versus the heat that a water has, which isn't its natural capacity, but is received from fire.

So water isn't, in a metaphysical sense, it is not free to burn.

It can only burn by, by the borrow char-- borrowed characteristic of heat that comes from fire itself.

This is not a hundred percent necessarily the way that Schopenhauer would think of that, but it's, I think, a good sort of starting point to think about what s- what sort of other, other kind of freedom there may be, metaphysical freedom.

A sort of spontaneity that is not restricted by any external factors.

So today I'll try to make the case that these two ontological, soteriological systems, that's what they both are, have what we sometimes in academia call deep structure similarity.

That is, uh, they have a shared form in the way that they understand freedom.

Although their realizations, the, the specific, uh, uh, um, version of freedom versus fatalism or freedom versus determinism is not necessarily identical, right? They are not translatable to one another, the systems, but they share this deep structure, which is either similar or identical, um, in any case.

All right.

So I-I'll briefly introduce them, um, and briefly is always an aspiration, so [laughing] we'll see-

Yeah

... how that looks like.