Great IdeasStories, art and words
Fate and free will
Whether our lives are fixed in advance or ours to choose.
The question
Are our lives fixed in advance, or are they ours to choose? Can fate and free will both be true?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 441–401 BC
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
An oracle foretells that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother. Everyone tries to escape the prophecy, and their efforts make it come true. Yet Oedipus chooses to search out the truth and takes responsibility. Sophocles leaves fate and choice tangled together.
29–19 BC (unfinished)
Virgil, The Aeneid
Aeneas is driven by fate to found Rome, and even the goddess Juno can only delay it. But he still has to choose, again and again, to follow his destiny. Virgil shows fate as a calling that takes courage to obey.
“Jove will soon dispose To future good our past and present woes. … An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate.””
AD 413–426
Augustine of Hippo, The City of God
Augustine rejects the idea of blind fate ruled by the stars. He argues that God knows all things in advance, yet human wills are still free, because God foreknows what we will freely choose. His answer was debated by later thinkers for centuries.
c. 1385
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus, in despair, wonders whether everything is fixed by God's foreknowledge. Chaucer drew this speech from Boethius, a Roman writer much read in the Middle Ages. The poem lets fortune's wheel turn while asking how free its people really are.
c. 1595
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
The prologue calls Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lovers, as if doomed from the start. Yet the play is full of rash choices, bad timing and a feud people could have ended. Shakespeare lets the audience wonder how much was fate.
“From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;”
1599–1608
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus
Cassius tells Brutus not to blame the stars: if they are underlings, it is their own fault. It is a famous claim for free will. The play goes on to show how their choices lead to their downfall.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Go to the rung: Shakespeare: Julius Caesar and the Roman Plays
c. 1606
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The witches tell Macbeth he will be king. Would it have happened anyway? Macbeth chooses to murder to make it come true. The play suggests that prophecy tempts, but people choose.
1667
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Milton's God says he made angels and people free, able to stand or fall. He foresaw the fall but did not cause it. Milton's whole poem rests on the belief that freedom is real and that the choice was Adam and Eve's.
1865–1869
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Tolstoy argues that each person feels free in each moment, yet history moves by laws made of millions of choices. Napoleon thought he steered events, but was carried by them. He tries to hold freedom and necessity together.
1903
Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle
John Marcher is sure something huge and terrible is waiting to happen to him, like a beast in the jungle. He waits all his life, and lets his friend May's love go by unnoticed. Too late he sees that his fate was to have missed his life by waiting.
“Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle.”
For young readers
Fate is the idea that some things are meant to happen, no matter what. Free will is the idea that we choose what we do.
In many old stories, heroes try to escape a prophecy, and it happens anyway! But in others, like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a character says our lives are up to us, not the stars. Do you think your future is already set, or do you make it?
Talk about it
- Do you think some things are meant to happen?
- Cassius says 'the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' What does that mean?
- If Macbeth hadn't met the witches, would he still have become king?
- John Marcher waited his whole life for something to happen. What lesson might that teach?
- What choice did you make today that changed what happened next?
Where else on the site
Every rung tagged with this idea:
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.