Dante Nietzsche and Free Will

Virtually everyone who writes about freewill writes about it in binary terms: either it’s a thing we have or it’s a thing that doesn’t exist. Even Nietzsche, despite his overarching “will to power” didn’t believe, when he asked himself the question, that humans have free will: the ability to make a choice that is not determined by the forces that bear upon that moment.

Dante apparently knew better. Free will is not a matter of yes or no, black or white, on or off or any binary. It’s a matter of degree. Some people perhaps don’t have it at all, some have it weakly, in others it is quite strong. It’s never absolute; there is no one for whom everything they do or desire is chosen freely. We who believe in God say that even God is (according to our inadequate human terms) constrained by his nature, which is loving and creative.

A distinction must here be made: saying that someone’s will is strong is not to equate a significant degree of free will with the common phrase “strong willed,” which is a phrase we use for toddlers who won’t eat their vegetables. “Strong willed people” are people without will at all. They are driven entirely by impulse, an innate stubbornness that becomes a rejection of will, of reason, of responsibility in any meaningful sense. Strong willed people may act out of fear and may earn our pity or our contempt. But they are in chains as much as any non-human animal. They sink of their own weight into hell. And they’re probably happy there—or no less happy than they were on earth.

A person of strong will on the other hand is a person who is capable of making choices not in reaction to the vectors of forces acting upon him or her or them but freely, according to an honest and, to a degree, disinterested evaluation of the circumstances.

“I judge this to be the best course of action in this instance, therefore I will take it.”

Are there any absolutely free decisions? No. And having a strong or a free will does not ensure any decision is the best. It only ensures it was freely made to some degree.

It is the thing Christianity seeks to create: people with freedom of will, though the phrase itself never occurs in the Bible and no one in the New Testament seemed to have been aware that that was the goal. A reading of the scriptures nonetheless reveals that it always was the goal. It is the same as what is again and again explicitly stated there; it is the same as love.

Free will may be the one thing that exists only when you believe in it, only in those who believe in it.