Fatalism (Kantian)

Fatalism (Kantian), as developed in Ruda's reading of Kant, designates the paradoxical structure immanent to Kantian free will itself: freedom, properly understood, is not the capacity to choose between determinations but the act of willing that has no object — a will that wills freely only insofar as it wills nothing. The categorical imperative, on Ruda's account, does not offer the subject a genuine alternative between obedience to the moral law and submission to natural causality; rather, both paths are forms of obedience. The subject cannot escape determination from either the phenomenal (natural) or noumenal (moral) side. This structural closure — the collapse of "free choice" into two modes of compulsion — is what the text calls fatalist.

The fatalism is not a collapse of freedom into necessity in the vulgar sense, but something more precise: it emerges from the subject's position in what the page calls a "double-count," the subject being simultaneously tallied within the phenomenal order (as determined, natural being) and the noumenal order (as autonomous moral agent). The gap or "blind spot" produced by this double inscription is itself the site of freedom — but as incomprehensibility rather than sovereignty. Freedom here is structural, not agentive: it names the point at which the subject cannot be accounted for by either register, a "third cognition" that the subject embodies without mastering. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the subject is constituted at the point of a structural impossibility — a remainder that cannot be dialectized away.

This concept appears exclusively in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, where it serves as the theoretical pivot of Ruda's argument: the case that authentic freedom must be thought through fatalism rather than against it. The concept cross-references several canonical Lacanian nodes. Most directly, it is a specification of the Double-Count — the subject is counted twice, once as phenomenal and once as noumenal, and fatalism names the structural consequence of that dual inscription producing a subject who is, in both counts, subject to a law. It also extends Lack and the Lost Object: the will that wills "nothing" is precisely a will oriented around an absent object, a structural void rather than a positive content — the categorical imperative, like desire, is organized around what is constitutively missing. The connection to Splitting of the Subject is also operative: the subject is split across two incommensurable registers (phenomenal/noumenal), with neither side capable of fully accounting for it, producing the blind spot that is simultaneously the mark of freedom and its undoing.

The concept also engages Maeontology (the ontology of non-being) insofar as freedom is located in a void — a "nothing" — rather than in any positive determination, and Autonomy (Kantian), of which it is a critical inversion: where autonomy traditionally names self-legislation and self-determination, Kantian fatalism names the structural impossibility of that very self-determination from within Kant's own framework. The concept thus functions as an immanent critique, using Kant's own architectonic to show that Dialectics (in the sense of two forces each generating the other) cannot escape to a synthesizing third term — the fatalist structure is a dialectic that refuses sublation, resonating with Lacan's use of dialectics as irreducible antagonism rather than Hegelian resolution.

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

It is this structure that provides the very ground for the emergence of fatalism, since I will only if I will nothing... Either I obey (the moral law) or I obey (natural determinations).

The phrase "I will only if I will nothing" is theoretically loaded because it collapses the grammar of volition into a self-canceling structure: the act of willing is conditioned on the absence of any object of will, making freedom formally identical with a void. The disjunction "Either I obey (the moral law) or I obey (natural determinations)" then seals the fatalist conclusion — both branches of the supposed free choice are modes of subjection, leaving no exterior position from which genuine self-determination could be exercised.