sequences. In China, India, and Greece alike, fairly early in the abstraction-
reflexivity sequence there arose the question of fate or destiny. This was a major
objection for the early Mohists against the early Confucian cult of Heaven or
Destiny. It crystallized among the Buddha’s contemporaries in the concept of
karma, which the Ajivikas called an inescapable Fate, and which the Buddha
and the Jaina founder, Mahavira, proposed to overcome by meditative detach-
ment and by asceticism, respectively. In Greece, soon after the conception of
logical necessity was formed, the Megarian logician Diodorus Cronus, and
after him the Stoic school, argued that every statement about the future is either
true or false, and hence everything that will happen is already logically deter-
mined. Debaters countered that this would leave the world to fate, and under-
mine the motivation of the individual to do anything at all; to which the Stoic
Chrysippus made the rejoinder that the actions of the individual are also
determined.
As soon as the generalized notion of causality was formed, it became an
object of debate because it promoted the formulation of an equally abstract
concept of morality. Thus the oppositional path taken by the Mohists drove
in the direction of monotheism, which can be regarded as the projection of a
generalized human morality onto the supernatural plane of a God personality.
In India several philosophers who denied karma were attacked for denying
morality by the Buddha, who thereby promoted a moral standard not pre-
viously heard in this intellectual community.
These debates were fairly quickly resolved, as a philosophical conception
of morality was created which eliminated the tension with omni-causality: in
China, human moral action was identified with either ritual and social tradi-
tion, or harmony with the cosmic tao; in India, causality was identified with
the world-order of illusion, which the highest morality lies in transcending; in
Greece (leaving aside the polytheist position which had no moral or cosmic
tension), the predominant philosophical ethics were based on skeptical with-
drawal from all judgments, cosmic and moral alike, or on Stoic harmonization
of self with an immanent world principle governing the universe. For the
Greeks, the moral argument for free will was never strong, and the issue
focused on the more generalized question of determinism versus indeterminism.
Plato and Aristotle influentially identified freedom with acting in harmony with
reason (which was identified with cosmic order) and unfreedom with being in
thrall to the passions.
In all these cases, the tension dissipated as the abstraction-reflexivity se-
quence hit its middle ranges. Under monotheism the tension increased; in fact
it became the driving force for development of higher abstraction in what began
as positions that had no use for intellectual abstraction, and developed major
factions explicitly hostile to it as their indigenous philosophies appeared.838 •^ Meta-reflections