Determinism Versus Free Will

In the spring of 343 BC, a certain noble king was determined to find a tutor for his unruly and much beloved 13 year old son. The king called upon his advisors as to who in all the known world would be the best teacher for his only son. There were varied opinions, but all agreed that Aristotle, a pupil of the famous, but long dead, Plato, would be the ideal candidate. However, no one believed that he would ever leave Athens to live in the King’s palace and undertake the boy’s education.

King Philip decided that his son deserved the best education available. So he made a deal with Aristotle. A decade prior, and before Philip knew anything of the great man, his armies had attacked and sacked Stagira, Aristotle’s boyhood home city. Philip’s soldiers had razed the town. Then they carried off all of its surviving citizens and sold them into slavery. Aristotle agreed to become the boy’s tutor if Philip would agree to rebuild the town, find every one of its captured citizens and return them as free people to the newly rebuilt city.

Philip agreed.

Prior to Aristotle, the King and his entire court had been taught by the Stoics, a group of Greek philosophers who believed that ultimate understanding of God and the universe could be attained only through logic and by developing a superior ethic based on self-control, fortitude and denial of emotions.

Think Vulcans from Star Trek!

The Stoics taught that every person’s life was pre-determined because the universe was “a rigidly deterministic single whole” and that no one really had agency at all but rather that people had the illusion of agency.

Soon after meeting his new pupil, Aristotle asked him: “Do men have free will — the power to choose a path forward — or is life, and all of life’s actions, predetermined?”

The boy asked if he could think about the question and took a few days before returning to his teacher to say:

“I believe that all men have freedom to choose one thing over another. While some are cursed — by birth, by sickness, by being enslaved or by whatever is their lot — every man can choose his path within the choices placed before him. By such choices are men — even the most insignificant — made great.”

Aristotle was amazed that someone so young could reason for themselves and come to the same conclusion that, in fact, he had. Aristotle did not agree with the Stoics. Instead, he believed that God had formed the universe in a manner that created true freedom allowing all people to have agency.

Who was this intelligent 13 year old boy who believed in AGENCY? His name…

Alexander the Great.