we should conclude that transcendental freedom is itself a perfectly natural property.
But the possession of a perfectly natural property suffices for being fully real. So any
practical argument for possessing transcendental freedom would suffice for us to be
fully real.
Moreover, the problems concerning persistence over time that we discussed in
section 6.5 would not arise here, at least if we accept the Kantian picture in which
things in themselves are fundamentally non-spatiotemporal: transcendental freedom
must be ascribed to the whole person rather than any sub-personal stages. However,
if we abandon the view that persons are fundamentally atemporal beings, the worries
about persistence over time threaten us once more, unless it is the case that persons
are transcendentally free at each moment that they exist.
How fares the doctrine of transcendental freedom when it is shorn of transcen-
dental idealism? If you are attracted to libertarianism about free will—that is, the
doctrine that we have free will even though having free will is incompatible with
causal determinism—then the doctrine of transcendental freedom should be ser-
iously considered. The general intuition in favor of incompatibilism is that the
existence of factors outside of your control sufficient toensureyour choices is also
sufficient to ensure that your choices are not free. If we are mere beings by courtesy,
then every feature we enjoy, including features related to our choices, supervenes on
the distribution of fundamental properties and relations. And the distribution of
fundamental properties and relations across a given possible world seems to be as
much out of our control, at least if we are not fully real, as facts about the past and the
laws of nature.^48 But if we enjoy transcendental freedom, then there is an aspect of us
that is not determined by features outside of our control, and this aspect suffices for
our full reality as well.
6.7 Individual Modes of Being
Before closing this chapter, let us explore one more intriguing way in which persons
might be fundamental. Perhaps persons are fully real not by sharing in a fundamental
mode of being but rather by virtue of each person’s enjoyment of a unique funda-
mental mode of being. On this view, there is a fundamental mode of being that I and
only I enjoy, and the same is true of each of you. Let us call this viewindividualistic
fragmentationalism,or“IF”for short.
If we adopt IF, we face questions. Call my personal mode of being K. Do I enjoy K
as a matter of necessity or could I have enjoyed some other mode of being instead
of K? And if I could have enjoyed some other mode of being, could something non-
identical with me have enjoyed K? There are plausible ontological schemes in which
relevance is Cover and Hawthorne’s (1996) compelling case that materialism and agent-causation do notfit
nicely together.
(^48) See Cover and Hawthorne (1996: 58–60) and O’Connor (2014: 29–30).