“Mohammedan fatalism. — Mohammedan fatalism embodies the fundamental error of setting man and fate over against one another as two separate things: man, it says, can resist fate and seek to frustrate it, but in the end it always carries off the victory; so that the most reasonable thing to do is to resign oneself or to live just as one pleases. In reality every man is himself a piece of fate; when he thinks to resist fate in the way suggested, it is precisely fate that is here fulfilling itself; the struggle is imaginary, but so is the proposed resignation to fate; all these imaginings are enclosed within fate. — The fear most people feel in face of the theory of the unfreedom of the will is fear in face of Mohammedan fatalism: they think that man will stand before the future feeble, resigned and with hands clasped because he is incapable of effecting any change in it: or that he will give free rein to all his impulses and caprices because these too cannot make any worse what has already been determined. The follies of mankind are just as much a piece of fate as are its acts of intelligence: that fear in face of a belief in fate is also fate. You yourself, poor fearful man, are the implacable moira enthroned even above the gods that governs all that happens; you are the blessing or the curse and in any event the fetters in which the strongest lies captive; in you the whole future of the world of man is predetermined: it is of no use for you to shudder when you look upon yourself.” — Nietzsche

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There are too many excuses for human irresponsibility — for feeling that our response to circumstance is unnecessary or even wrong.

We are always placing ourselves outside of everything, dis-involving ourselves, distancing, separating, alienating. People submit to “God’s will”, to fate, to the Invisible Hand of market forces, to some sort of cosmic cycle that autonomously and automatically makes everything return to normal, to “how things are” in the world of business, education, politics, to “the Universe”, etc.

As if we are not ourselves participants, organs, agents of these forces! As if there’s me and then there’s everything that’s going on out there. And then we praise our passivity and irresponsibility as virtuous.

Here is exactly how we were cast from Eden: We forgot that we were organs of Eden, and as such we are entirely Eden but can never be Eden in its entirety. We reduce Eden to a discrete Adam, a discrete Eve, a serpent, a tree, a fruit. We want to reduce the world to side-by-side things, because that makes us like gods, knowing good and evil by reducing good and evil to things that our minds can grasp, master, consume and possess — to mere critera, laws, code. We reduce truth to objectivity, and forget about the deepest truth: that we are a flowing confluence of the world, moved by the world to move the world. Eden is one thing, and we are another, and then we are side by side, no longer within, no longer belonging to it. It belongs to us.

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Soil, water, air and light, under the direction of the seed, organize themselves into life. An Eden organizes itself into Adam.

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Proof that not all Mohammedans indulge in the fatalism that Nietsche observed?: “Allah says, ‘I was a hidden treasure. I wanted to be known and so created the creation.'”