The ancient philosophical tension between determinism and free will has captivated thinkers for millennia, yet framing this as a simple either/or debate fundamentally misses the richness of human experience and how agency operates in context. From Democritus’s atomic materialism to contemporary neuroscience, we’ve oscillated between viewing ourselves as either completely determined beings already made or entirely free agents with the will to make ourselves. This binary thinking obscures a more nuanced reality born in experience: we live within multiple layers of constraint and possibility simultaneously as embodied creatures in material and social worlds. This is a reality that becomes even more complex when we consider Nietzsche’s radical reconceptualisation of freedom, Whitehead’s process philosophy of ‘becoming’, and Levinas’s ethics of personal responsibility.

Classical determinists like Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a universe where perfect knowledge of initial conditions would render every future moment predictable. On the other hard, libertarian philosophers such as William James championed genuine free will, arguing for real choice in human action in the personal and broader circumstances of the world. Modern science has added complexity through quantum mechanics, with some physicists like Henry Stapp suggesting quantum indeterminacy creates space for consciousness to influence physical events, while others like Sean Carroll maintain that quantum randomness hardly constitutes the ground to argue for meaningful freedom.

Nietzsche, however, challenges both sides of this traditional debate by questioning the very foundations of our concepts of freedom and responsibility. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche dismantles the conventional understanding of human agency by reframing the entire debate around free will. Rather than accepting the traditional philosophical binary of either possessing free will or lacking it entirely, he suggests that both free will and unfreedom (as Herbert Marcuse put it in One-Dimensional Man) are fundamentally misunderstood psychological experiences that reveal more about our emotional relationship to power than about the metaphysical nature of choice itself.

When Nietzsche describes his notion of will to power there is suggestion that it can lead to intoxication such that what we typically celebrate as autonomous decision making is often nothing more than the pleasurable sensation of exercising control. This intoxication suggests that our sense of freedom may be illusory, a kind of psychological high that comes from feeling powerful rather than from actually being free in any meaningful sense. This implies both pleasure and impairment: we feel good about being in command and able to decide, but this very feeling may cloud our judgement about what’s actually happening.

Conversely, his characterisation of an unfree will as a sort of  displeasure with obeying reveals that our sense of constraint or determinism often stems not from philosophical reflection but from the simple emotional discomfort of being subject to forces beyond our control. We don’t conclude we lack free will through careful analysis; we feel unfree because obedience is unpleasant, because being commanded rather than commanding wounds our ego.

This psychological reframing is radical because it suggests that the entire free will debate may be rooted in our emotional responses to power dynamics rather than in genuine metaphysical insights. Nietzsche is essentially arguing that when philosophers debate free will versus determinism, they’re often just describing how it feels to be in charge versus how it feels to be dominated, a far cry from the cosmic questions about human agency they believe they’re addressing.

For Nietzsche, freedom lies in a different place. A person doesn’t escape determinism but rather has the capacity to become the artist of their own existence, wielding what he calls “amor fati”, or the love of fate, as a form of radical affirmation that transforms necessity into freedom through creative interpretation.

Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy offers another perspective to this discussion. Rather than viewing the universe as composed of static substances acted upon by external forces, which is a mechanistic view, Whitehead sees reality as consisting of “actual occasions of experience” that are constantly becoming. Each moment involves a new creative synthesis of past influences that become emergent realities. This means that freedom and determinism are not opposing forces but complementary aspects of temporal becoming. We are shaped by our past, but each moment contains genuine novelty and creative potential in moving forward. As Whitehead writes in Process and Reality: “The universe is not a mere mechanical succession of states, but a creative advance into novelty.”

Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments seemed to show brain activity preceding conscious decision-making, leading some to declare free will illusory. Yet philosophers like Alfred Mele have demonstrated how such studies reveal the complexity rather than the absence of human agency. The debate has become increasingly sophisticated, moving beyond simple determinism versus freedom towards understanding the intricate relationship between constraint and choice, a relationship that Whitehead would describe as the ongoing process of self-creation within inherited conditions.

Emmanuel Levinas introduces an entirely different dimension to this discussion by arguing that our most fundamental experience is not freedom in the sense of acting for our own interests but ethical responsibility. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas contends that the face-to-face encounter with the Other precedes and grounds any question of freedom or determinism. The face of the Other makes an undeniable ethical demand that calls our freedom into question before we can even establish it. This doesn’t eliminate freedom but reveals that our deepest freedom actually emerges through responsibility, specifically, through responding to the vulnerability and need of others within personal encounter.

Rather than resolving this ancient puzzle through philosophical argument alone, we might instead examine how freedom, constraint, and ethical responsibility actually manifest in lived experience. We are not either completely free or entirely determined; we are beings who encounter multiple micro-freedoms within vast networks of political, social, and cultural circumstances that simultaneously enable and limit our possibilities, while being constantly called to respond to others in ways that transform the very meaning of freedom.

Consider how a student from a low socioeconomic background navigates university. They face economic constraints that middle-class peers don’t experience, yet within these limitations, they exercise countless small freedoms: choosing subjects, forming friendships, developing ideas, resisting expectations. Their path is neither predetermined nor unlimited. Instead, they forge agency through creativity, finding unexpected routes towards their goals, sometimes through conformity, sometimes through rebellion, always through awareness of their circumstances. In Nietzschean terms, they engage in self-creation through the artistic transformation of their constraints. From a Whiteheadian perspective, each decision represents a moment of creative synthesis, inheriting the past while introducing genuine novelty. And following Levinas, their deepest freedom may emerge not only through self-assertion but through their responsiveness to other students, family members, or communities, thus discovering that responsibility for others becomes the foundation rather than the limitation of genuine freedom.

This multiplicity of localised freedoms operates across every dimension of human experience. We are constrained by biology, history, language, culture and social structures, yet within these boundaries, we continuously create meaning, form relationships, and reshape our environments. A migrant worker may have limited economic mobility but exercises profound freedom in sustaining cultural traditions, supporting family networks, or engaging with and organising community. Their agency manifests not despite their constraints but through their creative navigation of them, what Nietzsche might call their “will to power” expressed as life-affirming creativity rather than domination.

Political movements demonstrate this dynamic beautifully. Activists working under authoritarian regimes face severe constraints yet discover remarkable freedoms through solidarity, creative resistance, refusal and collective action. Their awareness of systematic oppression becomes the foundation for generating new possibilities, not despite their constraints but precisely through understanding them. Here we see Levinas’s insight into how responsibility for others creates forms of freedom unavailable to purely self-interested action. The activist discovers that their deepest freedom emerges through their response to the suffering of others, while simultaneously embodying Nietzsche’s vision of creative self-overcoming and Whitehead’s process of creative advance through collective becoming.

The struggle between freedom and constraint is not something we resolve but something we inhabit because of our inescapable embeddedness. We live in the tension, finding ways to forge freedoms through consciousness of our limitations and pockets of possibility. This awareness itself becomes liberating, allowing us to recognise where we can act and where we must accept, where we can resist and where we must adapt, where we can hide and what and whom we should protect. But Levinas adds a crucial dimension: we also discover where we must respond to others, where our freedom is called into question by ethical demand, and where responsibility becomes the foundation of authentic agency.

Micro-freedoms emerge not from the absence of constraint but from the creative navigation of multiple overlapping systems of possibility and limitation at human sites of potential action. We become most human not when we imagine ourselves as purely free agents, but when we acknowledge our embeddedness while still claiming our capacity to shape, resist, and transform the conditions that shape us. Following Nietzsche, we learn to love our fate while creating new values in its presence. Employing Whitehead, we understand ourselves as ongoing processes of creative becoming. In synchrony with Levinas, we discover that our deepest freedom emerges through ethical responsiveness to others. In this ongoing dance between determination, choice, and responsibility, we discover not binary answers but the complex, beautiful reality of human agency in its intricate situatedness, in experiencing agency that is simultaneously self-creating, world-inheriting, and other-responding.

20/6/2025