'No Fate But What We Make'
Marcus Aurelius is my favourite Stoic philosopher. While he didn’t originate most of the ideas associated with that school, his Meditations remain one of the readable and enduring summaries of Stoic philosophy. My understanding of Stoicism is that while we cannot control events that happen to us, we can control how we respond to them. There’s no point getting upset over things we can’t change. But how do Stoics view the idea of fate? To what extent do we possess free will? The question came to mind after I stumbled across the following quote from Marcus Aurelius: “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.”
Classical Wisdom Weekly, which publishes online content and e-newsletters on thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, posed the question of how Stoics viewed the question of fate versus free will:
Ancient Stoics believed in a causal or ‘soft’ determinism: a view that maintains that everything that happens has a cause that leads to an effect. Each and every event is a part of the unbreakable chain of cause and effect, which is dictated and steered by the gods’ providential plan of fate. Nevertheless Stoics, however, also assert that even in a deterministic world, our actions are ultimately ‘up to us’.
The Lazy Argument attacks this claim by attempting to show the futility of any action in the face of fate. […] The essence of the Lazy Argument is to demonstrate how no action matters if every event is fated. And since your life is set to unwaveringly follow a determined track, there is no point to exert any effort or even think about the right course of action.
The response of Stoics to the Lazy Argument was to assert that our actions do have an impact on the outcome of events, as Classical Wisdom Weekly describes:
Ancient Stoics accept that everything is fated, but dismiss the rest the argument. To say something is fated to happen does not mean that it will happen regardless of what you do. Rather, to the Stoics it means that this event is a part of the unbreakable cause-effect chain in which some causal elements are crucial for bringing about the effect. Moreover, knowing that the outcome is fated does not give you any insight into what actions lead up to it.
I would agree with the Stoics in this response to the Lazy Argument. Sophocles provided one of the most vivid depictions of fate in Oedipus Rex. In that classic Greek tragedy, an oracle warns Laius, father of Oedipus, that he will be killed by his son. Laius tries to avoid this prophesized fate by binding the infant’s feet together and ordering his mother Jocasta to kill him. Unable to go through with the murder, Jocasta orders a servant to slay the baby boy instead. The servant leaves the child to die by exposure, but he is found by a shepherd and given the name Oedipus. Subsequent events end with Oedipus killing his father Laius and marrying his mother Jocasta, just as the oracle said would happen.
Every action characters take in Oedipus Rex to try and avoid their fate only leads to the fulfillment of the oracle’s prophecy. Proponents of the Lazy Argument might say Laius should have done nothing, since his fate would have been the same regardless. Their view is that of predeterminism: the idea that all events are decided in advance or already known by God, fate, or some other force. But if you believe in fate, short of hearing what our fate is directly from God or an oracle, we can never know what our “fate” is until it happens. Trying to determine one’s fate from some external source inevitably leads to idealism and mysticism.
Is there a more scientific outlook on our capacity for free will? I think there is, and it comes from none other than Karl Marx in the opening pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past,” Marx wrote. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” To put it another way, we have free will to make our own history; but that freedom is limited by the time and place in which we come into the world, and the material possibilities that exist in those specific circumstances. The idea that history in the last analysis is driven by development of the productive forces is the basic thesis of historical materialism. Before we can do anything else, we need to cover basic necessities of survival such as food, clothing, shelter, etc.
Within those parameters, my view of fate is similar to that of the first two Terminator movies (i.e. the only ones that matter): “The future is not set. There no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Marxists don’t deny the role of the individual in history, but simply recognize that the choices of individuals are circumscribed within a given set of material conditions. “Fate” is irrelevant unless someone tells me in advance what my fate is. You can look at the past and say everything was fated or destined to happen, but that really explains nothing at all.
The more you study history, the more you realize how events we now take for granted could have turned out very differently. If Socialists and Communists in Germany had provided a united front against the Nazis, Hitler might never have come to power or been overthrown by a revolutionary mass movement. If Bernie Sanders in 2016 had broken from the Democrats and formed a mass socialist party—a historic opportunity Sanders threw away to slavishly support Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—the current landscape of U.S. politics might look very different.
Marcus Aurelius’s quote is easy to interpret it in a passive way reflecting the Lazy Argument, i.e. why bother doing anything if everything is predetermined? I don’t think that was Marcus’s intention. Rather, he’s saying that what’s done is done. Time only moves in one direction. We each have just one shot at life. When history occurs, we can say whatever happened was “waiting to happen since the beginning of time” (incidentally, how can there be a beginning of time? That’s a separate conversation). But to fall into the fatalist view of Morpheus in The Matrix—that “what happened, happened and couldn't have happened any other way”—is to ignore the impact of our own actions.
History shows that the choices of individuals at crucial junctures can have massive impacts. To ascribe whatever happens to “fate” only reflects an ignorance of history and intellectual laziness.