The enlighteners not only killed God, quoting Nietzsche’s lament. But with it also the free will. In the empirically conceived natural science something like free will is disproved for all times. Nihil est sine ratione1lat. “Nothing is without a cause” is the sentence of the reason on which we will perish, Heidegger prophesies, if we cannot overcome it. The world of enlightened natural science is deterministic. There is no place for free will in it. Libertarians2This refers to philosophers who seek to defend free will, not radical free-market economists. who defiantly defend free will and so-called compatibalists who want to pretend the trick that there would be guilt even without free will are building nothing but cloud cuckoo homes. Most liberals and libertarians do not even bother with this problem and only therefore see no problem at all in conjuring atheism and freedom like a rabbit out of a hat. Cynics and the Stoics of antiquity know better: freedom of will exists only through God. Without God, there is no cynicism. At this point we differ quite substantially from existentialists, to which also Max Stirner belongs, when he boasts:
I Have Based My Affair On Nothing.
Max Stirner The Unique And His Property
But we know: “Nothing comes from nothing”
But we know: we are shaped by our genes, our experiences since childhood, our upbringing, all the events of our lives. Inescapably determined: “From nothing comes nothing”, we shout to the nihilists.Kynismus
The assumption of a supernatural power, God, is a logical prerequisite for the cynicism
We cynics and also the ancient stoics (in contrast to the elites of Silicon Valley who only presumptuously call themselves stoics) trust in a freedom that is supernatural. It’s given to us by God. It is not a question of faith, but logical: without God, cynicism and stoicism are not possible.
The German Romantics, who will be discussed later, warned already at the time of the French Revolution that a natural science that only recognizes numbers can only find dirt. (Novalis). The world, they exclaimed in vain, must be romanticized. The american philosopher Emerson belongs to them, to us. The other, the ugly Germans did not listen to them and were thus doomed to develop racial science, extermination practices and Covid-19 terror.
We, on the other hand, trust in the power of the strongest, borrow from him the right of the stronger.
Without God no freedom, no self-realization and therefore no parrhesia.
- 1lat. “Nothing is without a cause”
- 2This refers to philosophers who seek to defend free will, not radical free-market economists.