You Must Follow the Freedom

In any proposition about man its  paradoxical fusion of freedom and determinism must emerge. --Dávila 

Yesterday we spoke of the Two Machines, the idea that the temperament or personality style with which we are born brings about the environment that feeds back into the personality and reinforces it. 

Of course, it’s more complicated than that, because other factors come into play besides genes and environment. One of them is our good old frenemy chance, which in my opinion gets a bad rap from both sides, whether horizontaloid or verticalish. The former often deny it in the name of a scientistic determinism, the latter in the name of a monadic predestination. 

Well, I say two cheers for chance, insofar as it must be a side effect of freedom (and especially a confluence of free beings above and below). To say freedom is to say undetermined, which is to say potential. This potential occupies a kind of middle-earth realm between Being and nothing. Freedom is not yet Being, but nor is it nothing.

Unless you are an existentialist, in which case it is Nothingness, precisely — the selfsame titular nothingness in Sartre’s Being and ___________. For Sartre there is no human nature because there is no God, and therefore no telos, meaning, or purpose. As such, the self-evident existence of freedom is just the brute fact of our being condemned to choose between meaningless alternatives.

Now, according to Paul, the Lord is Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 

The meaning of this is at once obvious but full of metaphysical implications, because it means that what we experience as freedom goes all the way up, so it is truly a kind of vertical thread uniting us to God. But what kind of thread is this, since Sartre is half-correct, in the sense that freedom can feel like a kind of absence rather than a presence.

Jumping ahead a bit, it can only be a presence if it reaches towards its telos (which is experientially the same as the telos reaching back and down to us). 

We've all heard John's crack that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. 

Now, I don’t know Greek, because if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me. But that’s an interesting construction: not “may” or “can” but shall, implying necessity, even though we’re talking about a freedom which would seem to imply an absence of necessity. What’s going on here?   

If the now doesn’t stretch forward to its own fulfillment, then Sartre is correct that it's just an absurdity foisted upon us by an existence that isn’t even indifferent, rather, just is. Somehow, existence gives us a menu of meaningless choices for reasons we’ll never know because there are no reasons. It’s absurdity all the way down, up, inside, and out.

Could be. 

Or couldn’t be.

Note that it’s either one or the other. There’s no “might be.” Rather, we’re dealing with necessity, with the Must Be. For if there’s even just the itsiest bitsy of meaning, then there it is. You can’t have the concept that there are no concepts, an insight that insight doesn’t exist, or a discovery of meaning in a meaningless cosmos. Your wheel, Nicolas!

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist. Error supposes that something happened that should not have.

Am I wrong? AM I WRONG?!

If so, then truth necessarily exists and we must be free to know it:

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

And ultimately, 

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

Now, one of my favorite aphorisms is the following:

The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person.

But the sands have run out on this post, and you know the rest. There are things to put off and people to avoid, so I must be going.

Wait. One last quote, this one by Schuon:

The purpose of freedom is to enable us to choose what we are in the depths of our heart. We are intrinsically free to the extent that we have a center which frees us: a center which, far from confining us, dilates us by offering us an inward space without limits and without shadows; and this Center is in the last analysis the only one there is.