Freefall, Squared

Boundaries of the Existential Self, Part 4

Postcard representing the element of air, Gisbert Combaz, 1898

Twenty-five years after that first existential crisis, the same themes that precipitated it were still shaping me. I went looking through some old Reddit threads while I was thinking about how to write this part of the story, and this entire passage is completely apropos:

Principles can hold you to something more reliable than the whims of the moment, or they can stifle your ability to see the nuances of the particular. They can force you to resist your worst impulses, or they can confirm for you that your worst impulses are just fine the way they are.

I think perhaps both the unreliable poles, here, suffer from incuriousness. The insufficiently principled person doesn’t bother building out the values of the moment to see what they might have to say about other situations. The rigidly principled person doesn’t feel able to look and see what a cherished principle might not take into account.

I approach the whole thing from a position of terrifying existentialist freedom. I care deeply about something that isn’t guaranteed to work out. I can ditch anything I like, whenever I like. It might, however, be very bad for me to do so. That the very notion of “bad” might not be built on firm ground is no comfort to me, and I am a little suspicious of anyone who seems to find comfort in it.

In short, friend, I couldn’t build my philosophy on a single large framework of the kind Christianity supplies, even if I wanted to, because I am not in possession of such a thing. And I might want to, if I could. But it might not be good for me, if I did.

Does that description look a little contradictory, to you? It must have looked a bit contradictory to ProfGerm, because after mulling on it for a couple of days he called me on it:

One odd phrasing, "if I could." You could! What other than your choice limits you from possessing a single large framework? Christianity would be one option, but there's a number of others.

What, other than my choice, indeed? If I had been talking to anyone less than a trusted friend I might have diverted myself, defensively, into a philosophical discussion on the nature of existential choice. To be so completely free, in that way, is actually a profound loss of control. It all depends on how you look at it. You don’t get to use a framework to control yourself, so in that sense you don’t have control. On the other hand, no framework controls you, so you’re free. Yet precisely because the choice is free, it has a lot of staying power. So perhaps in yet another sense it is not free after all; it feels necessary.

Is a thrown object free from your grasp, or is its motion constrained to a parabola?

However, all of this talk would have been avoiding the point. Yes, hypothetically, if I made a free choice I would in a sense be constrained by it, but it had actually been a while since I had made a free choice on the full worldview level. There were some possibilities that had come my way that I hadn’t fully explored yet. There were some small alterations in perspective that had accumulated over time. If I was to be thorough, then I shouldn’t just discuss how choices work! I ought to actually think those through and then make a choice.

For a friend who had just made a cogent query? For the kind of friend who would never hesitate to note a weakness in reasoning, and never take advantage of a weakness in emotion? Yes, I’d take a risk of that magnitude.

Besides, he’d just handed me a new possibility, writing, “I'm not quite sure it would be any less existentially terrifying to have that framework.” This was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me. I had been assuming that anyone with a single over-arching framework would divert responsibility to it. “Don’t blame me, I’m just following [the will of God/my religion/a cost-benefit analysis/the moral law].” If I pre-committed to not doing that, the hope of such relief wouldn’t influence me and I’d have one less moral hazard.

While I was at it, there was another moral hazard that needed tidying. There was a path I wasn’t taking, here—namely, that of following something external to my current understanding of myself¹. Instead, I was about to consider taking an internal source and… deifying it? I didn’t like that idea; large parts of my development are of course devoted to not turning into a self-righteous fanatic. But—and here my younger self choruses with me—sometimes you have to consider a thing properly before you can know what would even follow from it. So I pre-committed likewise to only setting that fear aside temporarily. I’d reconsider that issue once I knew what I was dealing with.

Having thus dispensed with both hope and fear, I directed my attention to the question at hand.

Since the conversation thus far had been about religious frameworks, I decided to try to construct my nearest theism. I was aiming to find the way of looking at things that seemed most likely to be something I’d accept, or, at least, understand. Call it a steelman, but in the sense of “construct the version you would find most acceptable” rather than in the sense of “construct the version that the person you’re talking to would recognise.” Important distinction, that.

Plausibly, my nearest theism would be some form of Christian existentialism. Something catches me, when I let go; that much was basically true. I had always attributed this to some sort of obscure but stubborn aspect of myself that simply couldn’t be erased. My conscience? Except that I kind of thought of my conscience as being something else, something constructed of the rules people tell you. This felt, if anything, more reliable, or at least I was treating it as such. Right before you fall in, when you’ve let go of everything else. Call it a guidance.

There is a guidance just before I fall into the abyss and I could in some sense be said to trust it more than my conscience. That shook me. If I removed the assumption that everything detectable by my mind was me, then, yes, one might suppose the existence of an external authority. Probably the only authority I’d accept, in fact.

Well, but should I see it that way? Should I even have an opinion one way or the other?

I had a pre-existing way of deciding these kinds of questions, of course. As I recall, I didn’t even consider that I was about to make the most open existential fall I’d ever done—an existential fall about the existential fall. If I had known what I was doing, I’d have flinched.

I didn’t know. I didn’t flinch.

I fell.

Postcard representing the element of air, Gisbert Combaz, 1898

The next post in this series is here.

1. I’d attempted that before. It did not go well.