Determinism and Freedom

The concept of "Determinism and Freedom" as treated in Ruda's text names the paradoxical structure discovered by C.C.E. Schmid — a late Kantian position dubbed "intelligible fatalism" — in which freedom does not simply negate or transcend determinism but rather redoubles it at a higher level. In the Kantian framework, the noumenal realm is precisely the domain where the subject is thought to be free from empirical causal chains. Yet Schmid's insight, as Ruda presents it, is that the very nature of freedom — its rational, lawful, universally practical character — generates its own form of necessity. Freedom, rather than being an escape hatch from determinism, produces a determinism proper to the intelligible (noumenal) order itself: what one might call a moral-rational compulsion that is no less binding for being self-legislated.

This framing situates morality as a "universally practical discipline" whose complete realisation would amount to a total "moral revolution." The implication is Kantian but pushed to an extreme: if rational freedom is genuinely universal and if its law binds unconditionally, then the fully moral subject is not less determined but differently and more thoroughly determined — determined by reason itself. The opposition between freedom and determinism collapses into an identity at the noumenal level, producing a structure that is neither simple libertarian free will nor brute mechanical causality, but a third term that the concept of "intelligible fatalism" tries to name.

Within the source (provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata), this concept functions as a foundational theoretical pivot: Ruda introduces Schmid's intelligible fatalism not as a historical curiosity but as the philosophical key to rethinking what it could mean to "abolish freedom" in a productive, emancipatory sense. The concept cross-references directly to Intelligible Fatalism (the Schmidian term being elaborated), Moral Revolution (the telos of the fully realised universally practical discipline), Judgment (since the moral law's application to cases is precisely the domain of practical judgment — the determination of the particular under the universal law), and Universality (since the whole argument depends on freedom being genuinely, unconditionally universal in its practical demand).

The relationship to the canonical concept of Universality is one of specification and radicalisation: just as Lacanian theory shows that universality is never a neutral container but is internally fissured (grounded in exception or shared lack), Ruda's "intelligible fatalism" shows that the universality of the moral law does not open a space of indetermination but forecloses it, producing a higher-order necessity. Similarly, the cross-reference to Judgment is structurally important: if freedom produces its own determinism, then the faculty of practical judgment — subsumption of the particular under the moral law — is not a moment of contingent choice but of rational compulsion, echoing the Kantian sense of determinative judgment operating under an apodictic necessity. The concept thus sits at the intersection of Kant's practical philosophy and the post-Lacanian interrogation of universality and freedom, using the Schmidian hypothesis to argue that genuine emancipation may require passing through, rather than around, the determinism that freedom itself generates.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (page unknown)

one does not overcome determinism in the realm of noumenal freedom. Rather, precisely because of the nature of freedom, one ends up with another kind of determinism.

The phrase "another kind of determinism" is theoretically loaded because it refuses both poles of the classical antinomy: the subject is not freed from determinism by accessing the noumenal realm, nor does the noumenal simply replicate empirical causality — rather, "the nature of freedom" itself is what generates this second-order necessity, making freedom the cause of its own constraint and collapsing the standard opposition between autonomy and fate.