Fatalism

Fatalism, as developed in Ruda's Abolishing Freedom, is not the passive resignation to inevitable outcomes that the term conventionally implies. Rather, it is a rigorous philosophical position that emerges from the intersection of Cartesian, Hegelian, and Kantian critiques of naturalized causality. Against Aristotelianism, which illegitimately universalizes natural necessity into the domain of human freedom and thereby grounds a eudemonistic ethics of hope and luck, the fatalist position insists on the absolute impossibility of luck. This is not pessimism but a structural correction: hope is revealed as constitutively erroneous insofar as it treats unknowable outcomes as merely contingently open, when in fact no such contingency exists from the standpoint of a complete causal determination. The fatalist does not merely disbelieve in luck — the fatalist grasps that the very category of luck is a misrecognition of absolute necessity.

This leads to the paradox that is Ruda's central wager: genuine freedom is not a natural capacity or an Aristotelian essence but a result — something that befalls the subject through an unthinkable, externally imposed determination (figured in Descartes as the will of God). The subject becomes free not by exercising an immanent power but by being forced to act under conditions it did not choose and cannot control. The fatalist imperative "Act as if you were not free!" is therefore the condition of authentic freedom rather than its negation. Furthermore, extending to Kant's "The End of All Things," Ruda argues that reason itself is structurally compelled to totalize its own situation, including imagining its own extinction — a rational, quasi-fatalist act that allows reason to reassert itself against an unresolvable conflict between phenomenal and noumenal determinism. Fatalism thus names a position of subjective sobriety: stripped of hope, luck, and natural essence, the subject encounters the real ground of its freedom.

All three occurrences are drawn exclusively from provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, locating Fatalism as a central organizing concept of Ruda's argument rather than a passing remark. Within that source, Fatalism operates as the affirmative name for a position that has traversed and rejected eudemonistic ethics — the cross-referenced canonical concept of Eudemonistic Ethics — which naturalizes happiness and virtue as achievable ends, thereby installing hope as a structuring orientation. Fatalism abolishes this structure by demonstrating that luck, hope's precondition, is conceptually incoherent once natural causality is treated as absolute. This connects directly to the cross-referenced concept of Universality: the Aristotelian error is precisely one of illegitimate universalization — extending natural causality from the domain where it is operative into the domain of freedom, producing a spurious universal. Fatalism is the corrective that refuses this universalization.

Fatalism also bears on the cross-referenced concepts of Freedom, Desire, and Drive. Ruda's fatalist freedom — produced by subjection to an unthinkable external determination — mirrors the Lacanian account of the subject as constituted by what it cannot master: just as Desire is not a capacity but a structural effect of the signifier's castrating impact, and just as the Drive achieves its satisfaction not through attainment but through the circuit itself, fatalist freedom is not a power exercised but a condition undergone. The Kantian extension — reason's rational imperative to imagine the end of all things — maps onto the cross-referenced concept of Dialectics: without totalizing the conflict between phenomenal and noumenal determinism, reason collapses into a bad infinite oscillation. The fatalist act of imagining extinction is what allows reason to break out of this oscillation, performing a move structurally analogous to what Lacan calls the traversal of the impasse through a formal, non-dialectizable cut. Fatalism, in this corpus, is thus an extension and radicalization of the Lacanian critique of imaginary wholeness, redeployed through German Idealism.

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

only a fatalist can be free. This is because there is nothing to hope for, there is nothing to rely on, and there is nothing in our power.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs the paradox at the heart of Ruda's argument in a single compressed movement: "only a fatalist can be free" inverts the common-sense opposition between fatalism and freedom by making their identity structurally necessary, while the triple negation — "nothing to hope for, nothing to rely on, nothing in our power" — systematically dismantles the three pillars of eudemonistic and voluntarist ethics (hope, external support, immanent capacity), leaving the subject with no ground except the absolute determination it cannot escape.