Self-creation. In the face of such considerations men
have looked in opposite directions for a vindication
of significant free decision. A new and historicized
version of the Stoic creed calls on us to identify our-
selves with the march of historical process from which
we should vainly hope to cut ourselves off; so let us
lead it on. Such, broadly, was the attitude of Hegel;
such is the attitude of Marxists today, and, in effect,
of those Western optimists who are content to back
the momentum of scientific and technological advance.
By contrast, several schools of existentialism have put
forward a parody of Augustinianism—our acknowl-
edged conditionedness by factors of all kinds is a state
of subhumanity from which we must be raised into
authentic existence by deciding for ourselves what we
will be and do. Kierkegaard and the religious existen-
tialists see the challenge to self-creation as the chal-
lenge to determine your existence in the face of God;
Sartre and the atheists see it as the challenge to be
God to yourself—there being no other God for you.
The call to embrace historical destiny and the call
to exercise self-creation, however seemingly opposed,
equally exemplify a distinctively modern belief in the
openness of the future. The ancients saw free will as
freedom to fulfill the determinate requirements of
human nature, human nature being a fixed quantity.
Insofar as thought later turned in a theistic direction,
human nature became a God-given form, articulated
in divine commands, and oriented towards God, the
immutable living perfection. Even Kant, with his pas-
sion for moral autonomy, was still viewing free will
as power to impose upon one's conduct a law written
into the very structure of one's mind. The two suc-
ceeding centuries have dissolved the fixity of the human
aim. Romanticism popularized the conception of the
artist as a creator of the unique and allowed the indi-
vidual life or even the common life of an epoch to
be seen as an unique invention. Historicism showed
the degree to which what passed for human nature
had been a cultural product changing with the times.
Evolutionism suggested the mutability in principle of
the human species, and technology has seemed to put
into our hands the means of transforming our existence
beyond recognition. In consequence, freedom of will
is seen as no longer limited in scope to the fulfillment
of human nature, but as the power and the respon-
sibility, whether corporate or individual, to determine
in some measure the very nature we are to express.
