Category: Thinking

I’m fair­ly well read in exis­ten­tial­ist lit­er­a­ture, I still buy into por­tions of it, for they allow great strength to be present with­in an indi­vid­ual, there­by strength­en­ing myself.

But as with all things in me, there is an inevitable back­lash. Although I am not quite sure this one is a true back­lash or mere­ly anoth­er spin.

Instead of free­dom of choice in the world, we are total­ly lim­it­ed by that very free­dom.

My under­stand­ing of exis­ten­tial­ism, is that, though the world is inher­ent­ly mean­ing­less, we as humans, have the abil­i­ty to cre­ate our own mean­ing for our­selves with­in the world, thus giv­ing our­selves con­trol over our lives.

But this series of choic­es has anoth­er side. If I make a choice, by its def­i­n­i­tion, I have also exclud­ed oth­er choic­es, there­by lim­it­ing my own exis­tence. How­ev­er, if I make no choice [in and of itself still a choice], I remain stag­nant and lim­it myself in that way.

An exam­ple:

You are in a room with two doors. You can go through one of them, or you can go through the oth­er [sound a bit like the Matrix: Reloaded, or the Lady and the Tiger?], or you can go through nei­ther and remain in the room. These are your choic­es.

If you choose to go through one door, you exclude going through the oth­er, and exclude choos­ing nei­ther, you have lim­it­ed your choic­es, and moved for­ward.

It works the same with the oth­er door.

If no choice is made, you just remain, and are lim­it­ed to the cur­rent set of choic­es.

So it should be unde­ni­able, if a per­son is con­cerned with progress mak­ing a deci­sion and mov­ing for­ward is prefer­able to remain­ing still.

Yet each deci­sion cuts off the pos­si­bil­i­ties that oth­er choic­es could have made. Thus, the abil­i­ty to choose the path you fol­low, the exis­ten­tial­ist free­dom of mean­ing, con­tains with­in it a para­dox. You choose what path not not to fol­low as well. This free­dom, con­sid­ered the ulti­mate free­dom [by me at least], is lim­it­ing.

In any case, we are bound by forces out­side of our con­trol. Since we all die, this lim­it­ing free­dom is only some­thing that is as extant as our mind.

Meta­physics is a whole dif­fer­ent ball­game.

c’est la vie.