Fatalism as Practice

Fatalism as Practice names the paradoxical mode of agency that Ruda traces in Descartes's account of the passions: the point at which the soul ceases to be merely acted upon by external natural causes and begins to generate its own internal movement, collapsing the distinction between subject and object of motion. This self-caused movement is not arbitrary voluntarism but a "practice of truth" — a firm, non-revisable commitment grounded in the soul's self-relation, in which the will does not deliberate endlessly but settles into a stable orientation. The concept asks how such a practice, which has the structure of freedom (the soul causes itself), can simultaneously be fatalistic (the soul cannot do otherwise). The tension is productive: fatalism is not passive resignation to an external necessity but an internalised necessity that the subject takes up as its own form of action.

The theoretical move thus locates fatalism at the hinge between natural causality and the causality of freedom. Once the subject internalises necessity — once what happens to it becomes indistinguishable from what it wills — the externally imposed and the freely chosen converge. This is not the elimination of freedom but its radical redefinition: freedom as the active affirmation of what one cannot not do. The "practice of truth" is the name for this convergence in the register of the will, making fatalism something one does rather than something one suffers.

This concept appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, a source whose central wager is the rehabilitation of fatalism not as a counsel of passivity but as a rigorous philosophical stance. Within that argument, Fatalism as Practice is the hinge concept: it must show that a fatalist orientation is compatible with a determinate, enacted commitment — a "practice of truth" — rather than mere inertia. The concept thereby engages several cross-referenced canonicals in a specific way. It echoes the structure of Desire insofar as desire, too, is irreducible to a voluntaristic act directed at a positive object; like desire, fatalistic practice is constituted by an ineliminable lack or necessity rather than by sovereign choice. The non-revisability of the practice also resonates with Repetition's logic: what one cannot not do circles back compulsively, and the fatalist makes that compulsion the ground of action rather than its obstacle.

The concept further implicates Reflection in the Hegelian sense: the move from externally-caused passion to internally-generated emotion is precisely the move from external reflection (necessity as a transcendent beyond) to determinate reflection (necessity internalised as the subject's own innermost constituent). The subject of fatalistic practice is one who has performed this reflective internalisation. Relatedly, Identification is at stake: to take up fatalism as a practice is to identify not with an external image or symbolic mandate but with the necessity one discovers inside oneself — structurally close to what late Lacan calls identification with the sinthome. Finally, the "practice of truth" bears on Jouissance: the non-revisable commitment that can no longer be exchanged or abandoned has the compulsive, non-negotiable quality of jouissance, suggesting that fatalism as practice names a mode of action organised around a kernel of the Real rather than around symbolic deliberation.

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

How can we reconcile this practice of truth with the defense of fatalism?

The phrase "practice of truth" is theoretically loaded because it yokes a performative, enacted dimension ("practice") to an epistemic-ontological claim ("truth"), implying that truth is not contemplated but enacted through a firm, non-revisable mode of willing; the word "reconcile" then flags that fatalism and active practice appear contradictory, making the entire concept hinge on how necessity and agency can be co-constitutive rather than mutually exclusive.