“Therefore, if things have no necessity for coming to pass when they do, they cannot have any necessity to be about to come to pass before they do.
Wherefore there are things whose results are entirely free from necessity. For I think not that there is any man who will say this, that things, which are done in the present, were not about to be done in the past, before they are done.
“Thus these foreknown events have their free results. Just as foreknowledge of present things brings no necessity to bear upon them as they come to pass, so also foreknowledge of future things brings no necessity to bear upon things which are to come.”
—from Book 5, Prose 4
I have no difficulty at all understanding the existence of my own free will right here and now, as I am quite aware of how, as a rational animal, my actions are moved by my judgments.
With my apologies to Marcus Aurelius, when I woke up this morning, I had to decide if I would even get out of bed. Realizing that it will be preferable for me to have some money, so I can have a home to come back to, I commit to going to work. When I arrive, I find myself confronted with a number of different people, many of whom will treat me very poorly. Though I have feelings of irritation and resentment, I choose today to respond with patience and kindness, rather than unleashing my Irish temper.
Yet I seem to have great difficulty if I consider some other situation further in the future, and I will worry that my free will has been crushed by the cold hand of fate. An awareness of my rationality is frozen by a fear of destiny.
With my apologies to Douglas Adams, when I wake up on a Thursday five years from now, I will discover that a construction crew is about to tear down my house to build a bypass road. I will feel indignant, and in protest I will lie down in front of the machinery. Being in a less patient mood than usual, because his wife has left him, the foreman will simply run me over me with a bulldozer, just before my helpful friend from Guildford will arrive to defuse the situation.
My management of my feelings today appears entirely within my power, and yet my gruesome death by bulldozer that is to come feels coldly determined, something I have no power to escape at all.
Why is that? Somehow, a knowledge of what is at the present allows me to accept freedom, while a knowledge of what will be in the future leads me to deny it.
In reality, of course, there is absolutely no difference between the two situations, besides their locations in time. In both cases I am faced with certain circumstances, and in both cases I use my own estimation to respond. My choices to be forgiving on one day and combative on another are entirely my own, and so too the consequences are mine to determine.
Yes, something happens now, and yes, something will happen then, but where the actions of a rational soul become involved, those results are produced by contingency, not by necessity.
Here or there, now or then, Providence fully knows what I do, and what I will do, and yet I am still the one who is doing it.
Written in 1/2016
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