A Dual-Aspect Model of Subjectivity, Teleology, and Non-Libertarian Agency

This paper outlines a dual-aspect model of subjectivity and agency that rejects the standard division between libertarian free will, compatibilism, and mechanistic determinism. Living beings instantiate a single underlying substance with two inseparable aspects—physical and phenomenal. Subjectivity is the phenomenal interior of life itself, not an epiphenomenon of physical processes nor an independent mental substance. Within this framework, agency is the organism’s phenomenal expression of an immanent cosmic direction—teleonomy as the structural basis of teleology. Will is not free in the libertarian sense, nor reducible to mechanistic causation; it functions as the organism’s instrument for realizing intrinsic meaning. Drawing on Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism, Schopenhauer’s inner phenomenal force, Hans Jonas’s teleonomic biology, and contemporary emergence theory, the paper argues that a coherent, non-theistic, non-mechanistic account of agency is possible without invoking supernatural freedom or collapsing into reductive physicalism.