How Free Are We? The Great 1700s Debate About Fate, Freedom, and What Makes a Person Good

Something Strange Happened in a German University Town

Imagine you’re a student in Halle, Germany, in the year 1723. You’ve been going to lectures by a famous professor named Christian Wolff. He’s brilliant. He explains everything with mathematical precision—the nature of the soul, the existence of God, why people do what they do. His arguments seem airtight. Students are flocking to him from all over Europe.

Then one day, a messenger arrives with an order from the King of Prussia himself. Wolff has 48 hours to leave the country. If he doesn’t, he’ll be hanged.

Why? Because some of the other professors—especially the Pietists, a group of deeply religious Lutherans—had convinced the king that Wolff’s philosophy was dangerous. They said his ideas made human beings into nothing more than complicated machines. If Wolff was right, they argued, then there’s no real freedom, no genuine choice between good and evil, no point in praying or trying to be a better person. A soldier who believed Wolff’s philosophy might just desert his post—because according to Wolff, he couldn’t have done otherwise.

The king didn’t care about the philosophy. He cared about deserting soldiers. So Wolff fled to another city, where he got a hero’s welcome.

This wasn’t just a petty academic squabble. It was the eruption of a question that had been simmering for decades, and that philosophers still argue about today: Are human beings genuinely free, or are our choices just the inevitable result of causes we can’t control?

What It Means to Say Everything Has a Reason

To understand why Wolff’s philosophy got him into so much trouble, you need to understand a simple-sounding idea called the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It says: Everything that happens has a reason why it happens that way rather than some other way.

At first, this seems obvious. If a rock falls, there’s a reason (gravity). If your friend gets angry, there’s a reason (maybe you said something mean). If the universe exists, there’s a reason. Most people accept this for everyday things.

But Wolff and the philosopher Leibniz (who influenced him) took this idea to its extreme. They thought everything that happens—including every choice you make—has a reason that makes it the only possible outcome. If you know all the facts about someone’s personality, their history, their circumstances, and what they perceive, you could predict their choice with certainty. There’s no “maybe they’ll pick chocolate, maybe vanilla.” Given the causes, they must pick chocolate.

Wolff gave a proof of this. He said: If something happened without a sufficient reason, then it would have come from nothing. But nothing can come from nothing. So everything must have a sufficient reason.

A critic named Christian August Crusius—who was a student of a student of Thomasius—pointed out that this “proof” is actually circular. It assumes what it’s trying to prove. But Wolff didn’t care much about that objection. He thought the principle was obviously true.

The problem is what follows from it. If every choice you make has a sufficient reason that determines it, then you never really could have chosen otherwise. You feel like you have free will—you deliberate, you weigh options, you decide—but that feeling is just an illusion caused by your ignorance of all the reasons pushing you one way or another.

This is what the Pietist professors found terrifying.

The Pietists’ Objection: You Know You’re Free

The Pietists—especially a philosopher named Joachim Lange—had a forceful reply. It wasn’t complicated. It was based on something every human being experiences.

Lange said: Just look at your own experience. When you’re deciding whether to tell a lie or tell the truth, whether to help a friend or ignore them, whether to do your homework or sneak out—you experience yourself as genuinely choosing. You feel the weight of the decision. Afterward, your conscience either praises you or blames you. If you weren’t really free, your conscience would be pointless—like feeling guilty about the weather.

Lange argued that this experience of freedom is more certain than any abstract philosophical principle. We’re directly aware that we can choose. The idea that we’re just complicated puppets is something you have to argue for using chains of reasoning. But you don’t have to argue for freedom—you live it every moment.

So between the two sides, there was a standoff. Wolff said: Logic tells us everything has a sufficient reason, so freedom must be an illusion. Lange said: Experience tells us we’re free, so the Principle of Sufficient Reason must have limits.

This is still a live debate today. Some philosophers (called “hard determinists”) side with Wolff: they think science has shown that every event, including human decisions, has physical causes, so freedom is an illusion. Others (called “libertarians” about free will, not to be confused with political libertarians) side with Lange: they think our experience of choice is too real to deny, and that determinism must be false for human beings.

Most people, if you ask them, think they’re free. But it’s surprisingly hard to prove.

What About Morality? If We’re Not Free, Are We Still Good?

This brings us to a deeper question that the whole controversy was really about. If people aren’t free, can they still be morally good or bad?

Wolff thought yes. He had a whole system of ethics built around the idea of “perfection.” He said: Human beings naturally want what seems good to them. If you teach people to understand what’s truly good—what leads to their own perfection and happiness—they’ll choose it. Morality is really about improving your understanding. An evil person is just someone who doesn’t know any better.

The Pietists hated this. They thought Wolff had it completely backwards. For them, the real problem with human beings isn’t ignorance—it’s a corrupted will. You can know perfectly well what’s good and still choose evil. That’s what makes you morally responsible. It’s also why you need God’s help to become good: your own reason isn’t enough to fix your will.

This connected to a bigger debate about the relationship between reason and emotion. Thomasius, who was a generation earlier than Wolff, had argued that in moral matters, the will dominates reason. Our passions and desires push us around, and reason is just a helper that figures out how to satisfy them. For Thomasius, becoming a good person isn’t about understanding abstract principles—it’s about loving the right things. He called this “rational love.”

The Middle Ground: Alexander Baumgarten

Between the Wolffians and the Pietists, there was a philosopher named Alexander Baumgarten who tried to have it both ways. Baumgarten had been educated by Pietists—he attended Francke’s school and Lange’s lectures. But he also secretly studied Wolff’s philosophy, which was forbidden at the time. He ended up creating a system that took from both sides.

From Wolff, Baumgarten kept the idea that philosophy should be systematic and rational. From the Pietists, he kept the idea that the will has its own life that isn’t completely controlled by the intellect. He argued that the soul has a “lower” faculty of sensibility—our feelings, intuitions, immediate experiences—which has its own kind of perfection, different from logical perfection. Something can be beautiful or emotionally true without being logically clear. This laid the groundwork for the whole field of aesthetics (the philosophy of art and beauty).

Baumgarten also tried to address the Pietist objection about immortality. Wolff had argued that the soul survives death because it’s a simple substance that can’t be destroyed. But Pietists worried this made immortality into just a cold metaphysical fact, disconnected from virtue. Baumgarten amended this: he argued that the soul would retain not just its cognitive capacities after death, but also its moral character. Being good in this life actually matters for what you become in the next.

The Deeper Puzzle: What Kind of Thing Is a Human Being?

All these debates point to a deeper question that nobody in the 1700s fully resolved: What are we, exactly?

Wolff’s view made us sound like very sophisticated computers. We take in information, process it according to rules, and produce outputs (actions). If you had complete information about the inputs and the rules, you could predict everything.

Thomasius had a different picture. He thought the human mind is fundamentally active—it doesn’t just passively reflect the world. When you perceive something, you’re not just receiving an impression; you’re doing something. Your mind has its own nature, and the world has to be graspable by that nature for you to understand it. This is a subtle idea that later philosophers (especially Kant) would develop much further.

The Pietists had yet another picture. For them, the most important thing about a human being is not the intellect but the will. What defines us is not what we know but what we love, what we choose, what we commit ourselves to. And the will, they insisted, is not determined by reasons. It can just… choose.

Crusius developed this into a full philosophical system. He argued that there are “material principles” of thought—rules that aren’t logical necessities but that our minds just have to follow. For example: if you can’t separate two things in thought, they can’t be separated in reality. This isn’t a truth of logic. It’s just how our minds work. Crusius used this to argue that the Principle of Sufficient Reason has limits: there are “free first actions” that aren’t determined by any prior reason. They just happen because the agent chooses them.

A Voice from the Margins

During this whole period, a young man named Anton Wilhelm Amo was studying philosophy in Halle and later Wittenberg. Amo had been brought from Ghana to the Netherlands as a child and given to a German duke. He ended up becoming the first African-born professor of philosophy in Germany.

Amo wrote a dissertation arguing that the human mind is impassive—it doesn’t receive sensations passively. Instead, it’s purely active. This put him in an interesting position in the debate. He agreed with the Pietists (and Thomasius) that the mind is active rather than passive. But he also argued that sensation itself is something the mind does, not something that happens to it—a view that went even further than most of his contemporaries.

In another work, Amo argued against the legality of slavery in Europe. His life itself was a testament to the idea that human beings are more than just products of their circumstances.

What This Means for You

You probably think you’re free. When you decide whether to study for a test or scroll through your phone, it feels like you’re genuinely choosing. But think about it more carefully. Where do your desires come from? Your personality, your habits, your fears, your hopes—they were shaped by your genes, your family, your friends, your experiences. If you had been born in a different family, in a different country, in a different century, you would want different things. You might even be a completely different person.

So maybe the feeling of freedom is real, but it’s compatible with everything about you being determined by causes you didn’t choose. This position—called “compatibilism”—says that freedom doesn’t require the ability to do otherwise; it just requires that you’re acting according to your own desires and not being forced by external constraints.

Or maybe the feeling is an illusion, and we really are just very complex machines.

Or maybe there’s something about human consciousness that genuinely escapes the chain of cause and effect—a spark of true spontaneity.

Nobody has settled this. That’s part of why philosophy is still worth doing. You’re invited to think about it yourself.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Principle of Sufficient Reason	The claim that everything that happens has a reason why it happens that way rather than another way; the central target of the free will debate
Determinism	The view that every event, including human choices, is caused by prior events and couldn’t have happened otherwise
Freedom of the will	The capacity to genuinely choose between alternatives, not just to follow whatever causes push you
Pre-established harmony	Leibniz and Wolff’s theory that the mind and body don’t actually interact but are synchronized by God from the beginning
Pietism	A movement within German Lutheranism that emphasized personal religious experience, feeling, and moral transformation over abstract theology
Rational love	Thomasius’s concept of a moral orientation based on recognizing the fundamental equality of all humans and acting from love rather than rules
Aesthetics	The philosophical study of beauty, art, and sensory experience; Baumgarten founded it as a distinct field

Key People

Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) – A philosopher who had to flee Leipzig after defending controversial ideas; argued that practical life is more important than abstract theory and that women should have access to education
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) – A systematic philosopher who tried to apply mathematical methods to everything, including ethics and theology; was exiled from Prussia for his deterministic views
Joachim Lange (1670–1744) – A Pietist theologian who led the charge against Wolff; argued that freedom is directly experienced through conscience and can’t be explained away
August Hermann Francke (1663–1723) – A Pietist leader who built enormous schools and orphanages in Halle; convinced the king that Wolff’s philosophy was dangerous
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) – A philosopher who studied secretly under Wolffians while being educated by Pietists; tried to reconcile both sides and founded aesthetics
Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) – The most sophisticated critic of Wolff’s system; argued that the Principle of Sufficient Reason can’t apply to free choices
Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1700–c. 1750) – The first African-born professor of philosophy in Germany; argued the mind is purely active, not passive

Things to Think About

Think of a time when you made a genuinely hard choice—something where you really could have gone either way. Can you identify all the causes that pushed you one direction or the other? If you could identify all of them, would that mean you weren’t really free?
The Pietists argued that a person with a fully determined will couldn’t be morally responsible. But what if someone’s will is determined by good causes—by loving parents, a good education, and a peaceful society? Would you still call them a good person? How is that different from someone whose will is determined by bad causes?
Here’s a strange thought experiment: suppose a super-intelligent computer could predict with 100% accuracy what you’ll choose to do tomorrow. Does that mean you’re not free? Or does it just mean you’re predictable? If the computer’s prediction is based on knowing everything about you, does it matter whether the prediction is causing you to act or just describing what you’ll do?
Wolff thought that understanding what’s truly good would automatically make you want it. But have you ever known exactly what the right thing to do was, and still done the opposite? What explains that gap between knowing and doing?

Where This Shows Up

When people argue about whether criminals “could have done otherwise” or whether their backgrounds made crime inevitable—that’s the Wolff-Lange debate playing out in courtrooms
When scientists talk about whether the brain is just a biological machine and free will is an illusion—that’s a modern version of the same question
When you hear debates about whether punishment is about revenge (which assumes freedom) or just about preventing future harm (which doesn’t need freedom)
When people argue about whether education or character-building is more important for becoming a good person—that echoes the Wolff-Pietist debate about whether goodness comes from understanding or from the will