Conflict of Determinisms

The "conflict of determinisms" names the constitutive antagonism that, for Ruda reading Schmid's "intelligible fatalism," is the very ground from which the subject emerges. It is not a conflict between freedom and necessity as two pre-given, stable terms that might eventually be reconciled or synthesized; rather, it is a conflict in which each determinism — rational/moral freedom (the intelligible order) and phenomenal causality (the natural, empirical order) — strives to overdetermine and subsume the other without ever succeeding. The conflict is therefore irresolvable in principle: no third term, no Aufhebung, no meta-standpoint is available from which it could be decided. This very irresolvability is what Ruda identifies as the transcendental antagonism that makes ethics possible at all.

What is theoretically decisive is that this conflict does not precede the subject and then affect it from outside; it is rather the conflict that constitutes the subject as split. The forced, impossible decision to act morally — made under conditions where no rational algorithm can settle the matter — is what retroactively produces both freedom and the subject who claims it. Freedom, on this account, is not a capacity the subject antecedently possesses and then exercises; it is an effect that is generated by the very impossibility of the conflict's resolution. The split subject (Spaltung) is thus not a symptom of the conflict but its structural outcome: the subject is the mark left by the collision of two mutually exclusive, yet equally necessary, orders of determination.

The concept appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata at page 98, embedded in Ruda's engagement with what he calls "intelligible fatalism." It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. In relation to Contradiction, the conflict of determinisms is a specification: whereas contradiction in the corpus names the general motor of being and thought (the Hegelian principle that every identity contains its own negation), the conflict of determinisms localizes this motor in the precise Kantian-Schmidian problem of practical reason — the antinomy between transcendental freedom and natural causality. It radicalizes the Hegelian point by insisting that no dialectical advance can absorb or sublate this particular antagonism; the conflict exceeds "any of our capacities." In relation to Dialectics, the concept functions as a limit-case or critique: rather than a dialectic that moves through negation toward some resolution (even a negative one), the conflict of determinisms is precisely what forecloses sublation, making it closer to Lacan's "implacable dialectic" — an irresolvable structural tension.

In relation to Knowledge and Splitting of the Subject, the concept operates as a generative impasse: just as savoir in Lacan is constitutively incomplete and never adds up to a totality, the conflict of determinisms names a site where no form of knowledge — neither empirical nor rational — can close the gap between the two orders. The split subject emerges here not from a deficiency of knowledge but from the structural impossibility that the conflict installs. The concept thus serves Ruda's broader argument that freedom must be thought not as a given attribute or contingent fact, but as the retroactive product of an impossible, forced act — placing it squarely within a Lacanian-Hegelian tradition that grounds the subject in the Real of an unresolvable antagonism.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (p.98)

a conflict in which each side seeks to overdetermine the other; a conflict that exceeds any of our capacities, since it is rather a conflict of and in capacities... the antagonism of two determinisms (freedom vs. phenomenal embeddedness).

The phrase "a conflict of and in capacities" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to place the conflict at the level of the subject's faculties — as if the subject were a neutral arena in which freedom and causality compete — and instead shows that the conflict constitutes and divides the capacities themselves, making this an antagonism that is internal to the very structure of subjectivity. The parenthetical "freedom vs. phenomenal embeddedness" then names the Kantian antinomy precisely, signaling that the split subject is not an empirical psychological phenomenon but a transcendental structural outcome of an irresolvable formal antagonism.