Is It You Who Raises Your Hand, or Is It Fate?

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A man shouts in anger, then says, "It was out of my hands." But could he really have done otherwise in that moment — or is that sentence a confession that holds for every choice in our lives? If you did not choose everything that made you who you are, then who is doing the choosing?

Whose hand is it that silences the alarm at the crack of dawn? You reach out, you touch the screen, you decide to sleep another ten minutes. Because of those ten minutes you miss the bus, you are late for work, and as you come through the door you say, "it was out of my hands." There was traffic, the alarm never rang, I couldn't wake up. Behind the sentence sits a quiet defence: I didn't do it, it happened to me.

In Turkish that sentence has a very close relative: kaderimde varmış, it was written in my fate. Two words, and yet the weight they carry is surprisingly heavy. Sometimes they genuinely console. Spoken after a relative who never came off the operating table, "it was written in my fate" lifts from a person's shoulders a burden they could not carry and silences a question they could not answer. And sometimes they do exactly the opposite. When a father who has raised his hand against his own child for years says the same words, they are no longer consolation but escape. The same two words: in one case a cloth laid gently over a wound, in the other a curtain drawn across a crime.

Where is the difference? The difference lies in the raising of the hand. The hand that determined the outcome on the operating table was not your hand. But the hand that struck the child was yours; you lifted that arm, you tightened those muscles, in that moment you could have stopped and you did not. Our intuition here is very sharp. We blame nobody for an earthquake, yet we do not let the contractor who poured rotten concrete call the earthquake fate. In other words, in daily life all of us, without noticing, draw an extremely fine line: a border between what happens to us and what we do.

The trouble is that this border, once you think about it for a while, begins to melt in your hands.

Try it like this. Suppose that at breakfast this morning you chose the olives rather than the cheese. Why? You felt like olives. And did you choose to feel like olives? No, that craving came to you. Where did it come from? Perhaps from not having eaten anything salty the night before, perhaps from having eaten olives every morning as a child, perhaps because your blood sugar sat at a particular level that morning. You built none of these. If you did not choose the desire behind the choice, is the choice really yours?

Or ask a harder version. Picture a man who cannot hold his anger. He shouts, he slams the door, and then he is full of regret. This man watched an angry father; he grew up being shouted at; the way his nervous system answers a threat took shape before he had even learned the words. Now, at 35, having slammed the door, he asks himself, "why am I like this?" Is the answer really "you chose to be"?

And at this point two questions arriving from two very different places end up, strangely, at the same door. One comes from the mosque, from the church, from the books of theology: if there is a God who knows everything and creates everything, and what I will do tomorrow is already settled, how can I possibly be free? The other comes from the laboratory, from physics textbooks, from brain scanners: if my brain is also a piece of matter, and every motion of matter is bound to physical law, then what is my decision other than the chemistry of neurons?

Two questions, one shared fear. The fear is this: perhaps there is no decider called "I" at all. Perhaps there is only a chain of events, determined from beginning to end, which merely looks like a decision from the outside, and we are spectators standing in the middle of that chain, looking at our own link and saying, "there, I chose this."

This is one of philosophy's oldest and most stubborn knots. And notice, it is not an entirely abstract knot. A judge passing sentence in a courtroom has answered this question. A mother scolding her child has answered this question. Someone trying to come out of addiction wrestles with it every morning as they say, "I won't drink today." All of us, hundreds of times a day, build a life on top of a question whose answer we do not know.

Now let us look at how strong that chain really is. Because the other side has a genuinely serious argument in hand.

In 1674 Spinoza sent a letter to a doctor who had written to him. Inside it was a small thought experiment, and that experiment has refused to let anyone go for 350 years.

Throw a stone into the air, Spinoza said. The stone is flying. Now imagine for a moment that the stone could think, that it had consciousness. What would the stone think? Most likely this: "I am flying. I want to keep flying, this is my desire, this is my effort." The stone is aware of its own motion, but it is not aware of the hand that set that motion going. It does not see the arm you swung, it does not know the angle you calculated, it takes no account of gravity. It feels only the impulse inside it, and it calls that impulse "will."

What Spinoza meant was merciless: the human being is that stone too. We are aware of our desires, but not of the causes that give birth to them. The thing we call freedom may be nothing more than a feeling produced by ignorance.

140 years later this thought was translated into mathematics. The French mathematician Laplace, in his book published in 1814, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, imagined an intellect. An intellect that knows the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at a given instant, and grasps the laws of physics without a gap. For such an intellect, Laplace said, the future would be as open as the past. No uncertainty would remain. What you will be thinking tomorrow at noon was already written in the state of the universe today.

This picture is known in short as Laplace's demon, and its power to disturb lies precisely here: the demon is not a God. It contains nothing supernatural. There is only matter and law. Which is to say that removing God from the equation is not enough to erase fate; a perfect clock takes his place, and the clock binds you at least as tightly as fate did.

Then the question reached the brain. In the early 1980s the American neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet set up a simple experiment. He asked his subjects to move a finger whenever they felt like it. He was recording three things at once: the moment the muscle moved, the moment the electrical readiness signal began in the brain, and the moment the subject said, "there, now I decided." The result was this. The readiness signal in the brain started roughly 550 milliseconds before the movement. But the subject's awareness of their own decision came only 200 milliseconds before it.

The 300 milliseconds in between turned into an earthquake in philosophy. Because what it appeared to show was this: the brain had already set out before you felt yourself decide. The decision was not beginning in you; you were merely receiving the news of something already begun. You were not the owner of your own hand but its correspondent.

Libet's experiment is still debated today, his method of measurement has been seriously criticised, and later studies made the picture considerably more complicated. But once that unsettling image has entered a mind, it does not leave easily.

Might the uncertainty of modern physics not open a door, though? We know that in the subatomic world events are not definite but probabilistic. If the chain is not as tight as we assumed, doesn't that make room for freedom? Unfortunately not. Because the thing we call freedom is not randomness. If your decision is settled by a particle in your brain throwing dice, that decision is not yours in the slightest. You have escaped the chain only to sit down at the gambling table, and nothing more. Between a necessity you do not own and a coincidence you do not own, from the standpoint of "you" there is no difference.

And this needs to be seen: the argument did not arrive in Islamic thought in the modern age; it was one of the oldest quarrels there. The line attributed to Jahm ibn Safwan, who lived in the first half of the eighth century under the Umayyads, is called Jabriyya. For the Jabriyya the human being is like a leaf tossed on the wind; the act is ascribed to him, but in reality he is not its owner. At the opposite extreme stood the line associated with names like Ma'bad al-Juhani and Ghaylan al-Dimashqi in the late seventh century, later developed by the Mu'tazila: the human being is the creator of his own act, otherwise punishing him would not be justice.

Both extremes looked consistent, and both extremes lost something. In Jabriyya, responsibility disappeared, because you cannot put a leaf on trial for being blown about. In the Mu'tazila line, according to its critics, creators independent of God appeared in the universe.

And here, right in the middle of these two abysses, one of the subtlest concepts in the history of thought was born.

The story goes that in Basra a man in his forties climbed the pulpit and announced that he was parting from the Mu'tazila view he had defended for years. His name was Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari; he was born in 873, died in 936, and left behind one of the main arteries of Islamic thought.

Ash'ari's solution fits into a single word: kasb. In the dictionary it means to earn, to acquire. The idea is this: it is God who creates the act, but it is the human being who acquires that act, takes it on, makes it his own. Creating and acquiring are not the same thing. You do not create the water you drink, but you are the one drinking. The power for the work you do is given to you from outside, yet the direction in which you turn that power is written to your account.

This solution has been criticised since the day it was born. Its opponents said that kasb is not an answer but a name placed where the answer should be. If God creates the act in its entirety, what exactly is the human being's "acquiring"? A change of label, or a real share?

Another geography tried to answer that question a little more sharply. In Samarkand, in the territory of present-day Uzbekistan, Abu Mansur al-Maturidi, who died in 944, drew the distinction more clearly in his Kitab al-Tawhid, the Book of Divine Unity. According to Maturidi and the tradition that followed him, there are two layers in an act. The act's coming into existence, its actual appearance, is by God's creation. But the inclination that turns towards that act, that hair-thin moment of preference between two options, belongs to the human being himself. Later Maturidi scholars called this juz'i irada, particular will: over against the universal will, that is, general will and power, a small, limited preference given to the human being, yet one that genuinely belongs to him.

Think of it this way. You do not generate the electricity in your home. You did not build the grid, you did not create the current, the source of the power that arrives when you press the switch lies outside you. But you are the one pressing the switch. With that same current you can light a room, and with that same current you can set something on fire. The power is not yours; the direction is.

If you understand particular will in this way, it becomes clear why the concept is at once so small and so important. It is small, because it does not grant you the authority to create the world. You do not determine how many years you will live, which family you will be born into, which illness will knock at your door, which country a war will break out in. None of that is in anyone's hands. But it is important, because what is yours is exactly that narrow gap: what you will do with the power you have been handed.

There is one more principle the tradition of kalam used in untying this knot, in a very compact sentence: knowledge follows the known. That is, knowledge depends on the thing known; the thing known does not depend on knowledge. The astronomer who calculates when an eclipse will occur does not cause the eclipse. His knowledge is correct because the event will happen that way; the event does not happen that way because he knows it. God's eternal knowledge, according to this principle, is likewise not a command compelling the act but a flawless knowing of how the act will come about. To be known is not to be compelled.

There is a scene that shows how practical this distinction is. During his caliphate, Umar had set out towards Damascus. On the road news came that there was a plague epidemic in the region he was heading for. Umar decided to turn back. It is related that Abu Ubayda, then at the head of the army, said to him, as if in reproach, "are you fleeing from God's decree?" and that Umar answered, "yes, we are fleeing from God's decree to God's decree." Then he unfolded the example: if a man brought his camels down into a valley with two slopes, one fertile and one barren, whichever slope he grazes them on, has he not grazed them by God's decree?

The subtlety of that answer is here: fate is not a wall standing across from choice, but a whole within which choice itself is included. Taking precautions is not a rebellion outside fate; it is a part of fate. Fleeing the epidemic is fate, and walking into it is fate. The difference is in which one you choose.

What is interesting is that Western thought, centuries later, arrived at a very similar place in an entirely different language. The line known today as compatibilism accepts that determinism may well be true, but says that freedom does not contradict it. On this view freedom is not being uncaused; it is being able to act according to your own wanting, without being forced from outside. Harry Frankfurt sharpened this with the idea of desire on two levels. An addict wants the substance; but at the same time he knows that he does not want to want it. What separates the human being from the animal and from the machine is precisely this: the ability to look at one's own desires from an upper floor and either endorse them or refuse them. To be free is not to want nothing; it is to want what you want.

Kasb and compatibilism are not the same thing, of course; one sets out from a metaphysical relation between God and the human being, the other from the laws of physics and human psychology. But both make the same move: they do not try to lift the human being out of the chain, they look for a genuine role for him inside it.

Now let us come to what all of this is good for in an actual life. Because an idea that never enters the kitchen is only an ornament.

Aristotle, discussing drunkenness in the Nicomachean Ethics, touches on a very practical point. Lawgivers, he says, punish twice over the man who commits a crime while drunk. At first glance that looks unfair: the man was not himself. But Aristotle's answer is shockingly solid. He may not have been himself while committing the crime; but he was himself when he chose to get drunk. Responsibility looks not at the instant the act was done, but at the road leading to that instant.

Aristotle carries the thought all the way to character. Character is born of repeated actions. You do not act generously because you are generous; you become generous by acting generously, again and again. Which means that today's disposition is yesterday's choices, hardened. The bad side of this is that beyond a certain point the stone sets, and habit does not bend easily. The good side is that the stone is still a stone in flight. Today too, you are repeating something. And what you repeat today is the material of tomorrow's character.

Something very concrete follows from this. Remember that man who cannot hold his anger. Telling him "use your will, don't get angry" is useless, because the arrival of the anger really is not in his hands. But if he repeats, hundreds of times, leaving the room when the anger comes, waiting ten seconds, taking a breath before forming the sentence, then six months later, even if his anger still arrives at the same speed, his hand will not rise at the same speed. What changes is not the emotion but the distance between the emotion and the hand. Particular will does not operate at the birth of the anger; it operates right there, in that narrow gap.

The strange thing is that exactly this came out of Libet's experiment too. Libet showed that movement begins before consciousness; but he also saw that once consciousness enters the picture, in that final instant before the movement is carried out, his subjects could stop it. This was later given a name: not free will, but free veto. Perhaps you are not the one who starts the action; but you are the one who steps in front of the started action at the last moment. The hand that reaches for the cigarette reaches on its own. What halts it halfway is something else, and everyone who has ever tried to quit knows what that something is.

For this reason responsibility is not something that can be suspended until the philosophical argument is over. The English philosopher Peter Strawson said precisely this in a famous essay he wrote in 1962. Even if determinism turns out to be true, he said, we cannot give up feeling gratitude towards one another, feeling resentment, forgiving, getting angry. Because these are not conclusions derived from a philosophical theory; they are the very substance of human relationship. If you stop feeling the difference between someone who pushes you deliberately and someone who bumps into you by accident in a crowd, you have stopped living among people.

Among Turkish thinkers, one of the names who placed this matter at the centre of the will was Nurettin Topçu. In the doctoral work he completed at the Sorbonne in 1934, he took up the tension between conforming and revolting, and thought of the human being as a creature that constitutes itself through its action. For Topçu, will was not a decision taken inside the head and left there; unless it turned into movement it did not count as will. Morality began not in thought, but in the moment the hand rises or does not rise.

And perhaps this is where the matter knots itself, in one respect at least. We expect the question "is it you who raises your hand, or is it fate?" to be closed definitively by a laboratory measurement or a theological debate. Yet the human being is a creature obliged to live without knowing the answer to that question. You do not know what you will do tomorrow. Because you do not know, you have to choose. And after you have chosen, you can argue about whether that choice was settled in advance; but at the moment of choosing, what you hold is not an argument, only that moment.

Perhaps fate is not a sealed envelope placed before you, but a terrain you are walking through. You did not put the mountain there, you did not carve the river, you are not the one warming the air. You did not choose where you were born or how far you will walk. But which of the two slopes you turn towards, whether you reach out your hand to someone who has fallen, whether you raise your arm when the anger comes: that is exactly where you are standing.

And when that moment arrives, it is worth looking once more before saying "it was out of my hands." Because most of the time, the one thing that is in your hands is the hand itself.

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