To me, the most fascinating aspect of the mind’s functioning is its ability to give shape to a person’s life. A mind has many choices in how to entertain itself when not being educated. To a certain extent, living a life shapes one’s mind. Yet the mind catches the pieces that fall in between these impressions, creating ideals and compelling a human life toward realizing them.
How does it achieve this? I am amazed at its ability to perceive events, and run the body through cycles of ingestion, digestion and disposal, all while gradually drawing an existence into line with the strength of its will. The mind knows where it wants to go, and pulls that which isn’t headed there into its orbit.
Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher who asserted that every detail of one’s life derives from human choice, would be irked were he alive and present to read my above statements; I have implied that humanity is a puppet living in the shadow of an autocratic life-deciding entity.
I wouldn’t blame him for rolling his eyes, nor even someone who hadn’t devised a philosophy on the dominance of human choice in all situations; life would not be very rewarding if it were true that an alien awareness controls it from beginning to end.
But total choice comes with what another prominent existential thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, called angst. Experience grows more complex as it gathers, and one’s chances of making a fatally wrong decision only grow with that complexity. In a model of total responsibility, there are two forces: yourself, and your attempt to perpetuate that self by making super-intelligent decisions every moment.
Perhaps in the middle of the 20th century, an existentialist could overcome cognitive overload by retreating to an extended, intensely moody walk. Upon returning home, he/she could then continue on a satisfying decision-making path. Yet with the
surplus of information that now defines daily experience, a long walk won’t suffice. Choice is in danger of drowning in an excess of options.
Humankind is born condemned to be free, Sartre said, but maybe the truest damnation has only come about recently: to become free of freedom in a process of cultural, sensory and perceptual globalization.
Up until now, the United States’ values of wealth and freedom – embodied in entrepreneurial drive and liberty of expression – have been rocks upon which millions of citizens have founded their lives. Now, the Patriot Act has undermined Americans’ security in expressing their often-passionate and diverse opinions. Additionally, confidence in the US economy has reached its lowest point in two decades, and predictions are bleak.
We may now be experiencing a reprisal of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” except this time rather than Biff failing to carry on his father’s business, Americans have failed to sell their way of life to the world. Existential dread has shifted its gaze from material abandonment to cognitive incapacitation. In striving to save the entire outside world, the American will has turned from choice and toward compulsion.
I would like to believe that I alone determine the shape of my life – or as Sartre might put it, that it is my responsibility to create my existence. Yet I wouldn’t know where to begin were that level of choice available to me. I find myself stuck between a stifling and unsatisfying relationship to freedom.
Simone DeBeauvoir wrote inThe Ethics of Ambiguity that “the means [of living] determines both the definition and fulfillment.” Life seems to me more complex than are my own means. I am willing to make a place in my mind for a foreign consciousness to help me chart a way through my American existence.
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