The Choice

Is not between the left, the right, or the aisle of centrism.  These supposed ideological alternatives are options only because minds have been directed,  or often misdirected into believing that such a choice can be made.  The choice is not, as Joshua proclaimed, to follow God  or to not follow God. Such choices all presume that choices are ideological options. But such options are all made to follow hither or thither.  Maybe I follow hither and hither lets me down, so I wander thither.  Maybe I am just let down by hither and thither but there is no other choice, so there really is no choice to make but to too often wander on the road presented because the road not taken has a road closed sign.

The structure of choice eliminates the possibility of choice beyond the capacity of humanity.  And yet choice seems quite logical.  Do I live in the country or do I live in he city?  Is it really I who determines my choice or is it the actual experiences that  any I has experienced that predetermine all choices.  Does “free will” trumpet determinism, or are both perspectives somehow shrouded in the miscomprehension of the I?

If I do have the capacity to freely will my choice why do I believe my will is free?  Is there any possibility that whatever choice my will leads me to will can have consequences only for myself?  Can any choice I make not in some way determine the choice of another?  But if the choice that I make lead to determining the outcomes of another then how do the choices of another not lead to determining the I, and the choices that the I makes?

I would like to suggest a different direction that the debate over the freely willing or the deterministic perspective of choosing the actions of the I. Taken as a given that any I can freely, apart from all influences of the Other, make a choice.  But also taking as a given that no I can be totally barred from rejecting at least some of the actions or words of the other, then we must conclude we have no will apart from the other, but no other can totally consume any individual into itself, then we enter into a realm of both truth and non-truth of both propositions.  So this argument about the freedom of the will vs. the societal determination of any individual becomes the unanswerable question, even beyond attempting to answer it from the both/and perspective.  

The failure  of trying to facilitate any conciliation between free will and determinism is denied by both/and needing to favor one or the other.  It may be true that both/and may be closer to a rational realism, but even the most neutral both/and perspective must allow for some choices to be made by the I, and if the I can make any non-determinist choice, then how, when and under what circumstances  can the I break the determinist mold and make an independent choice against the determinism that overwhelms his ability to willfully choose.  And if being capable of breaking independently into any choice not determined why cannot the I become totally non-determinist in all of his choices?

The answer might be found in the existential idea that because ultimately we are all faced with the prospect of our  determined option, we therefore determine in an existential moment the choices in the crisis of the existing moment.  

There are several avenues of thought of thought that lead us beyond the determined crisis and to the choice we make.  But rather than focus on particulars of any individual thinker I wish to concentrate on some of the key points of existential choice amidst an environment attempting to determine our fate as individuals.  

One of the key elements of existentialism was moving towards a novel conception of the self not being  a substance or thing with some pre-given nature (or “essence”) but as an individual existence situated in  ways of being; whereby we are always in the process of making or creating who we are as our life unfolds. This means our essence is not given in advance; we are contingently thrown into existence and are burdened with the task of creating ourselves through our choices and actions. 

For many this means a theoretical detachment and objectivity, and existentialism generally begins in a temporal medias res, or successive first-person experiences. The human condition is revealed through an examination of the ways we concretely engage with the world in our everyday lives and the nothingness of the non-transcendent morality that leads to anxiety, alienation and the boredom that arises from our existence having no transcendent purposes other than situationally existing moment to moment. And so here is where the existential perspective attempts to supersede the problem of both/and as I view  it. Existentialists tend to  agree that what distinguishes our existence from that of other beings is that we are self-conscious and exist for ourselves, which means we are free and responsible for who we are and what we do. This does not mean we are wholly undetermined but, rather, that we are always beyond our determined environment  and remain ourselves because of our capacity to interpret and give meaning to whatever limits or determines us.

Existentialism should not be dismissed, however, for promoting moral nihilism. A person who can accept the responsibility for his freedom must, in order to live up to his freedom, also take responsibility for granting that same right of responsibility  to all other individuals and, in doing so choices are no longer proclamations of the I who makes a choice of individual but a denial to those who try to impose a transcendence upon the I that becomes a denial of the I.  The freedom comes only because each I   is non-transcendent and free of all transcendence.

For most of my life I must admit a complete immersion into most of the above principles.  But still, I have come to believe that somewhere the overall existential philosophy has a big hole in its perspective.  What is missed is primarily the communitarian nature of that existence and the methodology of the transference of that information. So while I agree that existence of any individual I is built upon the encounters within his existence. I am still troubled by the I apart from the other, in any of his interactions with the Thou, and I am troubled that somehow any existential situation can express itself triumphantly beyond the Thou—that and I can even exist without a Thou.

Of course a person can totally reject society and walk away by himself and have no interactions with any Others; or circumstances could possibly place one into the position that Alexander Selkirk (the more or less real personification of his fictional counterpart, Robinson Crusoe).  But I doubt any human could be born and immediately abandoned and never have any future contact with humanity. At some stage he might become abandoned and left to fend for himself; and he might grow into a Wolfboy “savagery” as far as normal society becomes he has developed little conceptualization of the Thou.  There are reports (whether true or not) of such things.  But dismissing that type of oddity, even the individual who might feel the Thous within his existence have become intolerable and departs to become the solitary I, he carries the Thous with him into any self, or forced, for that matter, isolation.  The human I remains mired within the existences of his encounters with Thous.  And the I that becomes a hermit from society certainly carries the consequences of the unfavorable situations he encountered with the Others that led him to isolate himself from the Others.

But human encounters with Thous becomes complicated because they are differing levels of Thous we encounter.  First, we encounter our immediate community of our families, our neighbors, those we have personal social interconnections with.  This can extend to a second degree of personal encounter, the shopkeeper, or encounter with a person not apart of our primary encounterment with the Thous of our immediate social relationship. But there is a wider third level in our social encounters with the Thou in our contemporary existence that affect our abilities to choose in the moments of choice.  These are the “President” whom most I’s have no personal experience but nevertheless become very relevant Thous in whatever choices the I in the existential crisis finds himself.  There are a multitude of other contemporary Thous that mingle into our consciousness and create the crisis we face in our existence.  If so, no individual  faces a moment of existence alone, but in connection with the Thous on all of the differing degrees of contemporaneous Thous that are parcel in the existence of any I; then he cannot simply exist simultaneously apart from those Thous because they and the I are completely interconnected with the I and the Thous are interconnected with each I that becomes incorporated into the existence of every I. The I cannot exist independent of the Thou and that leads me to conclude that we are not self-conscious and cannot exist for ourselves, which means we are not  free and  singularly responsible for who we are and what we do.

If the consciousness of any I  is not independent of the Thou, then rather than self-consciousness leaving us free to exist for ourselves and our singular responsibility leading to our individualism, that very ideology leads to a pathological deception of the importance of the self.

Once the self is determined to more important than the Thou that exists within him, then the self splits the I asunder from his own reality of his unique individual composite of the I-Thou that is the reality of all human I’s.  No longer a part of the thou and believing he no longer facing his choices in conjunction with the total I-Thou of his reality, his choices can easily become determined for him or he can easily attempt to determine the choices of others.  And this false conception of the I, separated from the Thou which is as much a part of the consciousness of any I is what leads to the nothingness of the non-transcendent morality that leads to anxiety, alienation and the boredom that arises from our existence. 

So any choice that the I makes becomes a vain effort to heal the affliction created by his severed individualism that includes the Thou. Alone the I is infertile and both his choices and his responsibility for those choices are foisted upon him and his fate is determined by the situations in continued encounters with Thous he no longer recognizes as existing within the I.  The situations then become confrontations with the Thou part of the I that has been severed and we face the situation that Sartre describes where the Thou is alien to I.

And individual severed from himself, making choices for himself, attempts to reconnect with the lost Thou and create an Us.  The Us could begin with the Us of family… the Thou is reframed into an Us that attempts to place the upon existence of the other  into a an embrace that the locks the door against Others not included into Us.  The I marries to complete himself and join with another into an Us.  But an Us is against other Us’s, and maybe against itself.  If the marriage is consummated to form an Us against them, an everlasting loves ends with one of the I’s in depression and dreaming forever of his mistreatment by the lost love.  Compounded upon a society of a nation of individuals  disconnected from themselves and being told that their choices and the responsibilities for those choices ae theirs to make, choices begin to formulate around a selfishness that exploits the necessary Thou connection into the three levels of Thou into exclusive Us’s against all Us’s not included in the Us of the individual.

So I would like to reframe free will from the singularity placed upon it, and the singular choice of its expression to a discussion that the freewill of the I cannot be freely determined in isolation from the existence of its Thou.  If my free choice excludes the Thou them my choice is not free.  True freedom can come only from a choice that is concerned with the needs of my Thou, because denying the Thou determines the vacuosness of a self making choices that harms the self. It is, as if the heart could decide to not supply blood to the brain.  If my choices are to favor me, I can never be fulfilled by the very choice of being isolated that creates a limitation on my ability to choose and my  choices are determined by the Others whom I have isolated.  

Only when my choices are made to favor the Thou of my existence can the self become extradited from the bondage of selfishness.  Only when I desire a utilitarian bestness for the other do my choices liberate me into freedom and grant me the freedom from the crisis I am facing in conjunction with the other.

Bondage can only be placed by dispossessing the self from the unity he has with the Other. Freedom can only come with the recognition that my choices are dependent on placing the needs of my Thou above the needs of myself. If the needs of the other becomes the determinant of the I in a situation by granting more consideration than myself, then I face each situation with a choice that ends up benefiting me the most and grants the I greater freedom of choice than if my choices are determined by my opposition to the choices, or even the existence of the Other.

Our choices become determined by the implementations of each singular I upon another.  The I cannot take the responsibility for any choice in which the Thou is excluded, responsibility for the situations in which one finds himself excluding the Thous make himself arbiter of only himself and in opposition to the Other and instead of accepting the responsibility necessary to freely choose, the I blames the Other for limiting his opportunity to choose.

So what I suppose I am attempting to suggest is that free will an determinism undermine the self through the principles of free choice and determined choice, and suggest choice is only free and undetermined when it is choice made by the recognition that my existence is not singular but communal and I choose for the betterment of the other and not the betterment of self. 
Because how is any self bettered apart from the betterment of the other?