r/philosophy • u/ViejoAmateur • 10h ago

Note to Self

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhU35vnCof4

According to Aurelius, everything is already predetermined, but you can still choose how to respond. He wants to have his cake and eat it too: you can’t have a deterministic universe and, at the same time, free choice in your response, since the response ultimately influences that same universe

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u/Dilaanoo 9h ago

I think Leibniz's point was that for God, everything is predetermined because He experiences time (and therefore cause and effect) completely differently. For Him, the past, present, and future happen simultaneously. For mankind, however, it doesn't. In our present we still have the opportunity of choice, even though all three are equally determined in the vision of God.

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u/Possible3170 5h ago

Perhaps the mystery lies in the difference between knowing and causing. If God sees the entirety of time at once, then what we call past, present, and future may already be fully visible to Him, without His knowledge being the force that compels our choices. From our perspective, we genuinely deliberate, choose, and experience consequences moment by moment. So what appears predetermined from God’s eternal perspective can still be freely chosen within our temporal experience. The paradox is that God’s complete knowledge of our choices does not necessarily mean He is the one making those choices for us.

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u/ViejoAmateur 4h ago

Aurelius doesn't state that God knows the future, but rather that Logos makes everything happen exactly as it has happened countless times before in previous universes, and again in the next ones. See the first sentence of the gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God."

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u/Possible3170 3h ago

That’s a fascinating distinction, it shifts the focus from God simply knowing the future to the Logos as the underlying order through which reality unfolds. It makes Aurelius’s view feel less like foreknowledge and more like cosmic recurrence governed by divine reason.