La Causa Primera: Freedom, Indigence, and the Ontological Structure of Human Agency

This paper provides a systematic philosophical abstract of La Causa Primera: Sinfonía filosófica en cinco movimientos con obertura (Fernández Tamames, 2026), a 176-page treatise arguing that freedom is not a property of rational agency but its ontological precondition. Against compatibilist and functionalist accounts of agency (Frankfurt, 1971; Dennett, 1991), the treatise develops a five-movement argument grounded in the biological anomaly of human neoteny (Namba & Huttner, 2024; Salamon et al., 2025): an indigent organism — one that lacks a complete behavioral program — cannot but choose, and this structural necessity constitutes genuine ontological freedom rather than mere indeterminism (Mitchell, 2025; Liljenström, 2022). From this foundation, the treatise derives an absolute constraint on the reduction of human agency (Martineau et al., 2024; Rueda, 2025), traces the generative chain from indigence to creation, and identifies the interval between stimulus and response as the operational manifestation of free agency (Shofty et al., 2022; Weindel et al., 2025). The argument has direct implications for the philosophy of AI, legal accountability, and the theory of authorship (Gaidartzi, 2025; Gao, 2025; Huang et al., 2024). The full treatise is available in Spanish at PhilArchive (Fernández Tamames, 2026).