this is an excerpt i stole from a paper i wrote on the 29th last month (november). there's a lot of semantic description that i left out, and i further stressed the necessity of freedom too often without corresponding it most appropriately to our culture; i don't believe that this is the nature of an existential freedom in all cases, but that varying degrees can at least be recognized elsewhere by members of our culture (by our natural bias).
and so, here goes my first blog post...
Freedom and Meaning
The ontology of freedom is within the mores of an experiential nominalism which is embedded (and I say this without derogation) in the heart of our preconditions as well as our care to act. It is a necessary freedom. In our lives, we wrestle with the bleak uncontrollability of events, over the determining factors that are the preconditions to our thoughts and behavior. In the history of philosophy, this has been an age-old argument, with thinkers contemplating the borderline between human freedom and universal determinism, even going so far as to take sides absolutely on only one or the other. My argument, however, focuses on the significance of freedom as it concerns meaning in action and what would consequently become of its absence. The freedom of our experience, regardless of the degree of controllability we each recognize in our unique experiences, has colossal social impact as well as great semantic value in one’s personal efficacy. I recall clearly having dreams where I would realize how light I felt and, with a running start usually, how I could take off from the ground and soar across the landscape of my fantasy. These were often in the form of lucid dreaming, entailing my almost complete awareness throughout the dream that it wasn’t ‘real’ and that I was in perhaps the only place (of mind) where this sort of thing was possible. After a few months of being exhilarated by it, I began to wake up irritably, acknowledging from the moment that I awoke that it was all over for at least another day and that any thoughts of being able to fly like that had no place among the boundaries of the ‘real world’ here. I became frustrated, until finally my mother took me aside one day to ask me what was the matter. After enduring some of her prying, I burst out in tears and told her of my experiences of freedom only within the realms of sleep and how limited and oppressive the world seemed not being able to fly like I could when I was least cognizant. I don’t know if my mother understood my anxiety to the point of my desiring a physical freedom from the ground, but she’d certainly experienced her own woes against the oppression my father and even her own mother (to name only a couple) had burdened onto her, and I think it is from that association that she was stirred with compassion to comfort me and let me know that I would fly someday, even if it didn’t seem in the way I was used to experiencing it in my dreams.
The human spirit is a lofty thing, and very many of us have had this same sort of dreaming, where neither gravity nor outlying authority had any say on what we choose to do at the next moment. From that, I think that we have spent a great number of centuries debating for the sake of projecting the object of that desire onto our metaphysical existence through concepts of fundamental freedoms of action, going as far as pure transcendentalism and individualism in the
This is the experiential nominalism of freedom, the truth of freedom insofar as it effects one’s next stage of action and experience of it. For, never, in philosophy, would we attribute an existent effect to a nonexistent cause.
If by ‘freedom’ we mean a complete liberation and separation from the consequences of the past, than we must recognize it as a metaphysical and, in fact, experiential impossibility: we no more experience a situation of absolute spontaneous generation, as if from nothing, than we expect something or someone to be born by spontaneous generation, to suddenly just appear without any prior cause, completely from nothing. Instead, we speak of the freedom of experience, and this interpretation has a far more reasonable, and meaningful, significance. Perhaps due to my steadfastly philosophical viewpoint, or my indulgences in the metaphysical implications of the Buddhism I have studied (in a dilettante fashion), I have had no problem at all reconciling the seemingly unending determinism of things with the reality of the freedom I experience. (I feel no more obligated to experience determinism than to directly witness, under microscope, the development and propagation of my genes within the family, as though its process, being as fundamental to life as it is, had to be experienced in my daily lifestyle to be true.) The issue of the possibility of this experience being an illusion, under which lies a reality of such determinism that we must more formally address, does not figure emphatically into my philosophy, however, as it might in some other cultures (where a traditional sort of Buddhism is prominent). I have, at this point of my life, granted a pluralism of experience as a far better explanation for how things work than a strictly universalized metaphysical system on which we are all expected to rest. Maybe this is why I find the sensations of freedom to be, at least for now, incomprehensible without, and this (along with the nature of a more tentative epistemology) constitutes its necessity and realism within the context (the preconditions) of our culture.
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