As art, Noctis is heir to a history of ideas; it participates in and reflects upon a longstanding dialectic concerned with what place humans hold in the world, which has taken shape over centuries of human discourse. In order to understand the game's full significance, we must provide a context to account for its role in that grand conversation. By placing Noctis within the context of history, we shall expose the role it plays in settling one of the greatest problems philosophy has ever produced. To do this - and since Noctis' chief concern is with depicting the real universe in a believable fashion - we need to examine how our views of the universe itself (and our station therein) have changed over time.
Enlightenment, Romanticism and the March of History
Coincident with the emergence of the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe was an unprecedented explosion in scientific progress. Having built rapidly upon the rudiments of natural philosophy, scientists presented for the first time a testable picture of how the universe functions.
From Isaac Newton to Adam Smith, the trend across every intellectual sphere was to view the universe as a rational, deterministic system, circumscribed by inviolable rules. Humans, being a part of the universe like any other, were given the same treatment as everything else, and were asked to assume their proper role in a world described by reason.
But in the early decades of the 19th century, a vigorous countermovement to the Enlightenment arose, known as Romanticism. Romantics praised the human capacity for direct intuition of the facts of the world and reveled in intuitive - and even mystical - expressions of true ideas through poetry, art and other creative endeavors. They objected that there is no purely deterministic element at the core of human emotion; that there are no rules to govern aesthetic beauty. Beauty is real; love is real; free will is real; and the intellect alone cannot hope to encompass what can only attain truth through intuition. They claimed these unquantifiable realities existed contrary to the Enlightenment paradigm.
By 1830, the battle for the future course of human thought began, with the combatants on both sides straining for all their worth. But neither could achieve any significant advantage over its opponent. In the end, they both fell to a third, outside participant who pulled the mat out from beneath them. And so it was that in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
The theory of evolution did not originate with Darwin, but what distinguished him from earlier evolutionists, and what cemented his status as among the most important scientists ever to have lived, was his unflagging emphasis on blind chance as the significant motivator for evolutionary change. Although he couldn't explain how organisms evolved, Darwin noted that when succeeding generations exhibit physical changes, no natural laws determine which changes will propagate through the species, and which will die out. Science in the shadow of Darwin therefore became concerned not with prescribing rigid order to the universe, but rather with observing the intrinsically random behavior of natural systems. There is a principle of spontaneity at work in the universe, and Darwin touched his fingers to its pulse.
Darwin's insights in the field of biology were soon followed by similar revolutions in the physical sciences. By the close of the 19th century, the illusion that science could present us with an infallible mirror-image of the real world had been thoroughly shattered - and science was stronger for the change. But the courses of science and art are wildly divergent; and whereas modern science must contradict the simple Enlightenment conception of the world, games like Noctis are free to embrace such notions and explore their consequences.
Noctis and Free Will
As people wrestled with Enlightenment and Romanticism, there lurked always beneath the surface a broader philosophical problem: the existence of free will. Are we free to choose our own actions, or are our acts determined in advance by preexisting conditions? Many Enlightenment thinkers were given to the mechanistic view that, in principle, if we knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, we could then predict the course of future events, including the behavior of living beings. Romantics, on the other hand, refused to believe that all the complexities of human life could reduce down to determinism, and insisted that the human will is prone to spontaneity in a way that no data could ever predict.
