Fate vs. Free Will

In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus life is ruled by fate.  Try as he might to escape the destiny the Fates have spun for him, of killing his father and marrying his mother, it nevertheless comes to pass.  This notion of a master plan, as uncomfortable as it was for Oedipus, was yet comfortable for the ancient Greeks, as it was for all primitive peoples, because it put their lives into the context of a greater meaning (although what higher purpose Oedipus’ fate served remained unclear). 

Many millennia later we know that events are not the products of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos hunched over their spinning wheel.  The dinosaurs were extinguished not by the Fates, but by the orbit of an asteroid crossing that of our planet, as a matter of random chance, and crashing into it.  Their demise, and the consequent rise of the mammals and us, was an accident.   The notion that our lives are ruled by chance is not as comforting as the idea that they are being scripted by some master planner, but part of the maturation process over the millennia is the triumph of reason over wishful and fanciful thinking.  Perhaps ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in this, as I too was a fatalist in my youth, and even now an event that seems just too perfect may temporarily resurrect that feeling of destiny, but fatalism is a childish notion, an atavistic remnant of an earlier era, and the wisdom of maturity soon returns me to sanity and the uncomfortable truth. 

In the TV series Fringe, as well as the current film The Adjustment Bureau, based on the Philip K. Dick story Adjustment Team, the writers want to have it both ways: everything is fated yet free will is still possible.  The Observers or Adjusters intervene to correct an action that threatens to derail the master plan.  This, however, is nonsense.  If events are predetermined, then there is no room for free will, and vice versa.  The two are logically incompatible.  Once variation is introduced anywhere into the system, all determination is threatened.  That means you cannot travel to the future for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist yet (except, of course, insofar as we are all already travelling to the future).  Ironically, if fate existed, and everything was predetermined, then life, the actual playing out of these predetermined events, would become redundant and absurd; we, as individuals, would not exist, we would be mere notations of another hand, and original thought would be impossible, since all of our thoughts would have been, as it were, pre-thought.  This way lays madness. 

Unlike what you might infer from this movie, I don’t think Dick was a determinist, either.  Rather, he used fate as a metaphor for chance, to suggest the way randomness impinges on our lives.  But this issue is treated much more effectively in the German film Run Lola Run, in which a sequence of events is replayed repeatedly with slight variations so that we can see how contingency affects the outcome.