Tag: freedom
A thought I had — one grown to support my own current whatever — regarding incompleteness:
Persons are by their nature incomplete, and seeking completeness. In themselves, in their institutions. But at the moment one stops seeking, the moment one believes these goals of completeness are met, they are lost. Liberty, freedom, justice, love and happiness are never fully attained and cannot be possessed, like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Schrodinger’s cat, to know a thing is to change it.
So, the closest we can come to any of our desires is through pursuit. The bond between hunter and hunted. If you catch happiness, you kill it. It becomes a dead thing. If you think you’ve attained the apex of liberty and freedom, you’ve let them both go. But if you know that liberty, freedom, justice, love and happiness can be yours in the context of pursuit — and know that the value we ascribe to these ideas is not inherent to them but exists only in the dynamic of seeking — they can all be yours.
This seems very much in tune with the point Camus makes in The Myth of Sisyphus.
UPDATE 7 July 2013
There’s a danger in the pursuit too, a good hunter knows when to call off the chase. Sometimes you can pursue one thing that turns out to be something else entirely. Sometimes the pursuit itself changes a thing. Knowing when to call off the chase is just as important as knowing that the pursuit is what matters.