Against the Free Will Thesis, Nietzsche argues that a free agent (that is, one sufficiently free to be morally responsible) would have to be causa sui (i.e., self-caused, or the cause of itself); but since we are not causa sui, no one can be a free agent.
Nothing is a cause of itself.
Thus, the I is both cause of itself and conceives itself alone in itself.
Buras' second premise is that nothing is a cause of itself.
This I is not only cause of itself (causa sui; Eckhart, deepening the tradition of this concept, says sache mîn selbes: "cause of myself"; cf. Summerell, 2002).
Kant also uses the term 'spontaneity' in a somewhat different sense in a metaphysical context, to refer to a mental cause that can sufficiently determine an effect in time while also lacking any temporally prior sufficient cause of itself (A445/B473).
The first is that, the whole of all "essentially ordered" causes must have a cause, but if the cause of this multitude comes from the totality of caused causes, then this cause will be the cause of itself, which is impossible.
The I that knows itself, wills itself, and is its own abode, and therewith the I that is, in univocal causality, cause of itself and yet, in this unity, the one rationality, is, according to Eckhart, what man ought to become and what man can become in taking on the true poverty of spirit.
One might ask with Richard Lewontin (2000 [1992], p. 139), however rhetorically: "How is it that a mere molecule [DNA] can have the power of both self-reproduction and self-action, being the cause of itself and the cause of all other things?" Getting straight on genetic determinism is important.
But, having stated that the self-subsistent substance is not generated from something else, 'Abd al-Latif maintains that intellect does not need anything other than itself in its conceptualizing and formation (tasawwuri-hi wa taswiri-hi), that it is perfect and complete eternally, and that it is the cause of itself.
