Free Will

Free will is always a fun topic on a rainy afternoon. If you take the biological paradigm favored by such varied fin de siecle thinkers as Zola and Freud then one’s fate rests in that mixture of genes and environment that comprise the discipline of epigenetics. Jews believe in free will while Calvinists famously hold to the notion of predestination—which is curiously close to   scientism. However, there's one caveat, one back door into the problem. That is grace. Max Weber spent a whole book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, dealing with this form of exceptionalism. If you were prosperous and successful, you'd received god's Grace. Luther may have inveighed against the selling of pardons, but is this not exactly what went on in Geneva—a city that was predestined to be what it became (if you buy the idea that everything is as it’s meant to be or it would be different) and the home town of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

and watch the trailer for Erotomania which will be featured in the Nihilist Film Festival

and listen to "Gypsy" by Fleetwood Mac