Free Will

"He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing."
— Cormac McCarthy (Cities of the Plain)

"We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses--one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will." And the question you have to ask every day is--which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

"Reflect, then on you adult life and pick a truly bad moment, as bad a moment as you can bear to contemplate in suffocating detail. . . Now, so what? In the larger of things, what is the meaning of your regret? Does it count for anything, or is it just a sort a sort on involuntary hiccup, a meaningless spasm provoked by a meaningless world? Do we live in a universe in which striving and hoping, regretting, blaming, promising, trying to do better, condemning and praising make sense? Or are they all part of a vast illusion, honored by tradition, but overdue for exposure?"
-- Daniel Dennett (Freedom Evolves)

Well, Big Frank is chewing on this one. How much control is it that we can exert on ourselves, our experience, our thoughts, our feelings, or the world around us. How much of this control is freely exercised by us? I grew up believing, as still mostly do (remember, I'm chewing on it and so some doubt has entered otherwise I wouldn't have to chew - just swallow) that I have free will. Starting from some religious upbringing: God has us all here in this moral laboratory where our actions will be noted and if they are good ones heaven awaits us and if they are really bad ones we go to hell. I was told this was just and that God wanted it to be totally up to me - exercise my free will and reap the reward or pay the price. Of course, this is all speculative nonsense and nobody can prove it. So scratch that rationale, and remove theology from this discussion. The immutable laws of nature then dictate that we have no fee will; everything that happens is caused by some previous action etc. etc. This applies as much, from a determinist's view point, to a rock dropped, as to an apple seed planted, to animal locomotion, and to all human thoughts and subsequent actions. That seems to make sense and much of it can be proven; however, the bit on thoughts cannot. There is no evidence that Big Frank is aware of that can trace thoughts to actions of atoms or molecules. So Big Frank thinks that he does have control of himself, and acts like he does, but does he? What about the unconscious urges we are not aware of, or genetic predispositions, or of early incidents in life, or a thousand other variables? Big Frank doesn't know.

Bertrand Russell - Reasons for Living

Big Frank is reading Bertrand Russell's autobiography. This is a great book in every sense of the word. A taste of the insight, compassion, and beauty of the writing is eminently clear in the prologue to the book. The prologue is entitled "What I Have Lived For". And here it is unabridged:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hatred burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life would be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

The Unified Will Resolved Through Love

Big Frank is returning to a issue raised in a previous post - the issue of the unified will. HL has been thinking about this a lot and she raised these issues both in conversation with Big Frank yesterday and previously in comments. So Big Frank is responding - through Harry Frankfurt. The basic issue is that, as St. Augustine wrote, we have both the will to do something and the will not to do it. This ambivalence he characterizes as a "disease of the mind". Harry Frankfurt writes in "Reasons for Love" that the way out of this is through a unified will. HL questions in her comments whether it wouldn't be better to "abolish" one will. That's a good question HL!

It perhaps does not make any difference what you call the end result - abolishing one will, preferring one will, choosing one will, or ignoring one will for the other. It is unlikely that the emotion or passion that sparked the inclination to act will be completely abolished or gotten rid of quickly or easily. Although we all know that there are some things that we have wanted in the past that we no longer desire. However, there are also new things that pop up that present new splits in the will. Perhaps a better question is rather what is the process by which the will becomes less conflicted?

Frankfurt writes that having an undivided will is being wholehearted. And, this is, “ to love oneself” (95). Frankfurt tells us why this is so important: a divided will is a kind self-contradiction in thought. And obtaining the tranquility of an undivided will gives you freedom, freedom from obstruction from yourself. As he writes: “Self-love has going for it, then, its role in constituting both the structure of volitional rationality and the mode of freedom that this structure of the will ensures” (97). Although it is difficult to obtain, having it can be a source of great satisfaction because it gives meaning to our lives by giving us settled final ends.

You'll notice that Frankfurt is following a kind of classical model - like the Stoics, he values tranquility above such romantic values as passion and striving for difficult to obtain things. He emphasizes that care and love can be remedies for the conflicted states of mind. Nonetheless, we have all witnessed how temporary times in our lives that were characterized by restlessness, uncertainty, indecisiveness, and instability have led to positive outcomes. It seems that whether we talk of St. Augustine, St. Paul, Buddha, or many many others we can find that they went through times of restless striving that led them to a form of transcendence. Thus, like so many other truisms there is more than a little simplicity in Frankfurt's notion of wholeheartedness. Still it seems a worthy goal and one would hope that his notion of wholeheartedness would carry the day most of the time, with only infrequent episodes of transitional unease.

So it appears that it is advantageous to live a life of tranquility facilitated through self-love. However, at times this can be thrown out of balance, and while by and large through wholeheartedness one weathers these emotion/passions/urges to do something or not to do something, still there are times when one can be transformed in a good way through restless striving. The status quo is not in and of itself always desirable. Through self-love one can stay on track, but it is also true that a interrupted stability often accompanies positive transformations! Ignoring it could result in missed opportunities.

Kierkegaard

Big Frank presents S. Keirkegaard from "Either/Or, Vol. 1":

The essence of pleaseure does not lie in the thing enjoyed, but in the accompanying consciousness. If I had a humble spirit in my service who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me the world's costliest wines blended in a chalice, I should dismiss him, in order to teach him that pleasure consists not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so spakling, what so frangrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

One ought to be a mystery, not only to others, but also to one's self. I study myself; when I am weary of this, then for a pastime I light a cigar and think: the Lord only knows what He meant by me, or what He would make out of me.

The Wisdom of Pascal

Blaise Pascal could lay it down, and lay it down he did systematically (seemingly anyway), in his great book of French prose, and uncommon wisdom: Pensées. Pascal was a great user of reason in his thoughts about the limits of reason.

Here are a few excerpts that Big Frank offers for reflection:

"Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so."

"Respect means; put yourself out. That may look pointless, but it is quite right, because it amounts to saying: I should certainly put myself out if you needed it, because I do so when you do not; besides, respect serves to distinguish the great. If respect meant sitting in an armchair we should be showing everyone respect and then there would be no way of marking distinction, but we make the distinction quite clear by putting ourselves out."

"All our reasoning comes down to surrending to our feeling. But fancy is like and also unlike feeling, so that we cannot distinguish between these two opposites. One person says that my feeling is mere fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule, Reason is available but can be bent in any direction. And so there is no rule."

"The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing"

The End is the Beginning

This is not a new concept. Big Frank finds it appealing because it's familiar; it's old; it's been said by many wise people, and it is eminently psychologically satisfying. In addition, it's one of those sayings that doesn't make any sense whatsoever; yet it makes complete sense and Big Frank likes that:

The disciples said to Jesus, ‘Tell us how our end will be.’ Jesus said, ‘Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death.’
- The Gospel of Thomas 18

Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.
- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

The core of philosophy is no longer an autonomous transcendental subjectivity, to be found everywhere and nowhere: it lies in the perpetual beginning of reflection, at the point where an individual life begins to reflect on itself. Reflection is truly reflection only if it is not carried outside itself, only if it knows itself as reflection-on-an-unreflective-experience, and consequently as a change in the structure of our existence.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 72)

The Beatles had their own take on this: "In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make."

And if you still find this difficult to believe. If the concept that the end really is the beginning then experience it for yourself.

Albert Camus and "The Myth of Sysiphus"

This posting is for Big Frank's brother, Dan. It will no doubt extract from his memory the image of a red international pickup trailing clouds of dust as it roars across North Dakota gravel roads on the way to some sad unpainted barn. In that red truck while Dan drives, and despite his protests, Big Frank reads aloud from Camus' "The Myth of Sysiphus".

The associative links continue. The previous post mentioned the Sysiphusian stuggle and the joy that emerges from persistence. Who better represents this than Sisyphus, the mythical absurd hero sentenced to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain and then watch it descend. Albert Camus, 1957 Nobel Prize winner in literature, wrote “The Myth of Sysiphus and other essays” among many other literary works.

Big Frank now looks at the absurd hero, represented by Sysiphus. Camus writes, in his essay “An Absurd Reasoning”:

I don't know if this world has a meaning that trascends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me -- that is what I understand.

In the face of the impossibility of extracting oneself from this dilemma, there is a way. This is Sysiphus after the rock has rolled down the mountain for the zillionth time, with joy in his heart, picking it up and heading back up the mountain It is, as Camus says not important what is “the best living, but the most living.” This entails “Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given.” And here is where the existentialist and the yogi shake hands, for Camus writes in reference to the life of quantity: “To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. Being aware of one’s life, one's revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”


From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder. Everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.

Here are a few more memorable quotations from Camus:

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

Beware of those who say, 'I know this too well to express it'. For if they cannot do so, this is because they do not know it or because of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.

But a single truth, if it is obvious, is enough to guide an existence.

Longing

More from Parmenides - this time on longing.

"It (the moon) wanders about the earth, shining at night with borrowed light. She is always gazing earnestly toward the rays of the sun."

Then there is this from Peter and Maria Kingsley from "As Far As Longing Can Reach" from the summer 2006 edition of Parabola.

"There is no reasoning with passion and longing, although we like to deceive ourselves by believing there is. All we ever do is reason with ourselves about the form our longing will take. We reason that if we find a better job we will be content, but we never are. We reasons that if we go somewhere special we will be happy; but when we get there we start wanting to go somewhere else. we reason that if we were to sleep with the lover of our dreams we would be fulfilled. And yet even if we were to manage that, it would still not be enough.

What we sometimes refer to, so misleadingly, as "human nature" is simply the state of being pulled by the nose in a hundered different directions and ending up going nowhere very fast.

But although there is no reasoning with our passion, it has a tremendous intelligence of its own. The only trouble is that we keep interfering; keep breaking it up into tiny pieces, scattering it everywhere. Our minds always trick us into focusing on the little things we think we want - rather than on the energy of wanting itself.

If we can bear to face our longing instead of finding endless ways to keep satisfying it and trying to escape it, it begins to show us a glimpse of what lies behind the scense of this world we think we live in. It opens up a devastating perspective where everything is turned on its head: where fulfillment becomes a limitation, accomplishment turns into a trap. And it does this with an intensity that scrambles our thoughts and forces us straight into the present.

Longing is the movement and the calling of our deepest nature. It's the cry of the wolf, the power of the lion, the fluttering of all the birds inside us. And if we can find the courage to face it, it will take us back to where we belong."

Events and Reactions to Events

Well Eckhart Tolle is on the front page, as it were, so I'm going to add another quotation from his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. I think a normal reaction to the book is to jump to the goal - being in the now and to quickly skip over the impediments to getting there, not that Big Frank has arrived by any means. One of the main impediments, as Tolle points out, is the Ego. This is the king of the hill, the entity that dominates our lives and that we tend most to identify with, not recognizing what a tyrant it actually is. I think what Tolle has to say about ego is in many ways that best part of his book. Here's excerpt on events and reactions to events.

"Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it cannot tell the differnce between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness -- not through thinking -- can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see. There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realize there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it and dealing with it. Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspetive."

Marcus Aurelius, addressing the same topic put it this way:

"The mind is that which is roused and directed by itself. It makes of itself what it choses. It makes what is chooses of its own experiences."

And Shakespeare:

“Nothing is either bad or good, only thinking makes it so.”

And then there is Big Frank Dickinson:

"Thinking is the ego's way of making judgements; learning to see through other eyes can pierce the judgemental fog."

All Structures are Unstable

Big Frank has an excerpt from Eckhart Tolle for your contemplation. This comes from the chapter entitled "The Power of the Ego" in his book A New Earth. In it he writes of the egoic mind that most people identify falsely with self. This is an unstable and ultimately unhappy way to live.

"Whatever form it takes, the unconscious drive behind ego is to strengthen the image of who I think I am, the phantom self that came into existence when thought - great blessing as well as a great curse -- began to take over and obscured the simple yet profound joy of connectedness with Being, the Source, God. Whatever behavior the ego manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for more. And ,of course, the need to feel a sense of separation, that is to say, the need for opposition, enemies.

The ego always wants something from other people or situations. There is always a hidden agenda, always a sense of "not enought yet," of insufficiency and lack that needs to be filled. It uses people and situations to get what it wants, and even when it succeeds, it is never satisfied for long. Often it is thwarted in its aims, and for the most part the gap between "I want" and "what is" becomes a constant source of upset and anguish. The famous and now classic pop song, "(I Can't get No) Satisfaction," is the song of the ego. The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily with an intimate relationship, a new possession, or winning at this or that. Illusion will never satisfy you. Only the turth of who you are, if realized, will set you free."

And on that note, we will end this with a another quotation from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides: "It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not. "

Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius Antoniunus Augustus – better know today as simply Marcus Aurelius was born in 121 and died in 190. He was Roman Emperor from 161 until he died. Not only was he an emperor but is also generally acknowledged today as one of the great stoic philosophers. He is chiefly known today for The Meditations – written between 170 and 180.

Transience, integrity, the long view, personal responsibility, and acceptance: these are some threads that run through The Meditations. It is definitely a world in which whining did not belong. There is a repeated mention of “The Logos” – the word – the way things are. The wise person goes with that flow and doesn’t piss and moan about it. It helps, in Marcus Aurelius’ view to be now and to see things in the amplitude of time and space. That, at first blush, does seem a contradiction – be in this small gap between the tick and the tock, and at the same time, from outside time and space, see yourself in the fullness of time and in the speck of space that we truly inhabit. There is certain nobility to the acceptance of what has been served up; within the knowledge of the strengths of the mind, the enduring nature we all have, and the flux that will transform us.

Here are a few of his choice quotations:

“Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already or is impossible to see. The span we live is small – small as the corner of the earth in which we live.”

“Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or loose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors. If you can privilege your own mind, your guiding spirit and your reverence for its powers, that should keep you clear of dramatics, wailing and gnashing of teeth. You won’t need solitude or a cast of thousands either. Above all you’ll be free of desire.”

“Ignoring what goes on in other people’s souls – no one ever came to grief that way. But if you can’t keep track of what your own soul’s doing, how can you not be unhappy?"

“Dig deep; the water – goodness, is down there; and as long as you keep digging it will keep bubbling up.”

“To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. To keep constantly in mind of how the elements alter into one another. Thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below.”