It’s so nice and rare to be absorbed in an activity, so captivated by the thing you’re reading or doing that you aren’t thinking about anything else. I find that I have a wandering mind and only certain activities and certain kinds of reading ever completely consume my attention enough that I can say I am truly absorbed. Philosophy does that, sometimes meditation, martial arts, being with certain people.
We really are mysteries unto ourselves, in a way, and investigating and detecting the unknown of one’s self and exploring the details of one’s being is a task that takes time and effort and is hardly simple and straightforward (yet still meaningful and worthwhile). The project of a lifetime even.
But trying a thing, learning it is for you or not for you and trying another thing: it’s like being on a case, being a detective of sorts, a detective of the self and what it means to be oneself specifically. A book called Savage Detectives comes to mind, a book by a Mexican author, Roberto Bolano, in which two amateur poets travel across Mexico to find a great poet they admire, and in the process learn a lot about themselves and what they are capable of. And what one person learns about themselves is different from what another learns. As we are all radically unique, even if our uniqueness is not always readily or simply apparent (and requires us to understand and investigate it first).
In and through this process of self-exploration, which is, I imagine, life-long, we can find that which pleasurably and edifyingly absorbs us.
I was skeptical of Fargo Season 5, and while I stand by my feelings, it is also a worthwhile addition to the anthology, with great, strong female characters, suspenseful action, unique performances and a scenic Canadian backdrop. Great ending, replete with Midwestern warmth.
I think, in general, it is important to understand that which we take issue with. Especially if we seek to criticize it. Any critique must be based on a reasonably-complete understanding of the thing critiqued.
To that point, I’m starting a book called Determined, by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford Neurobiologist, and from the moment I heard of the concept, it rubbed me the wrong way. Still, I will slog through this book for as long as I can stand it.
I agree with his initial point that the world is determined, and us as beings are determined by the social and biological history of the world, but I don’t think a determined world eliminates all possibility of a conditioned free will, as I posted early about. But his claim is that free will is an illusion entirely, which frankly, I think is an exaggerated claim he makes to sell more books.
Still, the question of free will is an important one, but I’m already disliking the definition he’s using of free will, which is overly reliant on a chemical/biological picture of things, a neurological explanation, rather than one grounded in our felt experience, which he hasn’t taken account of yet (perhaps he will later).
But this is why, I think, a neurobiologist should be careful about wading into philosophical waters. Just because we can explain what is happening with neurological explanations is not to say that there does not exist some way in which we are driving the event, even if we are not able to chemically or biologically map or identify that exact thing. Also, just because he cites certain philosophers doesn’t mean he’s covered enough philosophical territory to justify his claim, which is a high bar indeed, that no free will exists *at all.*
To this point, I am also reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (I am reading this book at the pace of about 3 pages per hour, given its extreme linguistic density). But he is much more focused on our felt experience, and he takes what is called a phenomenological approach (focusing on the phenomena of our felt experience and how it relates to how we think of ourselves in the world). He has a concept called ‘thrownness’ which I think is perfectly equipped for this kind of conversation.
Thrownness entails the state of being we find ourselves in when we are born. We are ‘thrown’ or born into a family with a particular culture with a specific biology at a precise moment in the history of the universe, all circumstances which certainly influence what we might be or could be, but this is not to say they determine us entirely.
Part of being a human being is working out, throughout our whole lives, what we are or who we could be. What our existence means to us in the context of a world we are thrown into. Things that have no definite or clear path. No determined way, even if they are circumscribed by our environment. Instead, in my opinion, the present is full of what Hannah Arendt (a student of Heidegger) calls the uncertainty of the present (the space between the past and the future which is still and always being built by us and plays a role in the construction of the future) which no complete accounting of the history of the universe could or would fully explain because the present is always the present and uncertain because it is not yet fully known (and may never be known fully).
If Sapolsky’s argument that free will did not exist were true, then all we would need to know is everything about the past and then the present and future would be determined and understandable (theoretically). And while we learn more everyday, this could never be. A complete understanding of everything has never been achieved, even when we thought we had it. As an example, Einstein’s ideas completely changed physics in a way that was totally unpredictable, even as physicists were of the opinion that they were reaching a point of a complete understanding of their discipline.
But also a final and full understanding of the world is also not possible because any human thought is limited by the fact that it is thought within the interpretive framework of a human world. There is no way to see the world from outside a human lens, or at least not completely. Even with Sapolsky, his discussion of free will is done within the world and language of human sciences, which are backed by evidence and experimentation but are also still from a human vantage point of interpretation. So to say he is discovering or unearthing some hidden scientific truth about the will or freedom in the context of the universe is to forget that he too is human, not some outside observer with a final or complete answer that nobody else has access to and ends the debate on free will for good (a debate that philosophers have been engaging in for centuries, I might add).
Moreover, no matter how many answers exist to address this question, the debate between Free Will and Determinism has raged for centuries, and will likely continue for as long as there are human beings to debate it, as long as there are new people who have new and novel ways of thinking about it, as there have been for so long.
When I was younger, my aunt told me a story about our genealogy (one of many). My paternal grandfather’s mother’s last name was Kingsley. Apparently, an ancestor earned the name Kingsley after having helped William the Conqueror once find his way after having been lost in the woods. The ancestor, having helped William find his way, then was given the name “Kingsley” as he helped the king find his way through to a ‘leigh ’, which was another name for a meadow in England.
It’s hard to verify these things, but an interesting story to be sure…
This passage gives you a flavor of Heidegger and his writing. His language is difficult to interpret, maybe in part because it is translated German, but also because he has a philosophical way of speaking that reflects a lot on language construction, and he even creates a number of neologisms himself. But also, as a professor of mine said once, the process of reading it challenges you, is an exercise in itself.
In this passage, he talks a little about what he thinks makes Dasein, human beings, unique. Dasein is distinctive because Being is an issue for it; that is, that we are, unlike other entities, concerned with our Being in our everydayness, whether expressly or indirectly through our actions, somehow concerned with what it means for us to be, what Being means to us as individuals or as a collective.
In reading these passages, I remember how much I’ve missed reading and studying philosophy…more to come…
Bearer of Pity 