Existentialism...

Hi! I do not see the direct realtion between free will and existentialism....too big of a word, period, or thought movement?...
I believe in free will, and also accept the fact that this might be apparently limited to a limited context.
I say apparently because a couple of times in my life, i have heard things that at the moment i could not understand, yet i have kept them within, many years later, they have become a soort of compas in my life, which means to me...that we grow out of that limited context,
that our boundaries do not remain always the same, if we dare to think, to try out of the box.

i share with you those phrases...maybe they do not make sense to you. but both drew a new horizon to me when i heard them.
1.- make always life-giving options
ten years later: dare to dream what you don't yet dare to think....

to me free will, is not only making choices within our current possibilites,\it also has to do with these two phrases. With realizing and accepting that we know so little about human nature, and that our possibilities are gigantic if we dare to open ourselves to the unknown.

daring, meant in my young years, just walking through everything and everybody and going for IT! after crashing myself in one and many ways, I personally came to terms with my Creator and felt compelled to listen what his plan was for me....
the last 25 years of my life are the result of a 180 degree change in the direction of my life.
i can say today, that i think God has a wider, bigger, deeper capacity to be creative, and that the things that i have gone throught i could not have dreamed of them, 25 years ago....

opening myself to something/someone greater than me, understanding me as a piece of a greater work, has allowed me to grow out of myself....
of course there have been difficulties, and still are....

one time someone said...i am so happy with my life ! are you happy? and i looked within myself, and i thought, i do not if this is happiness, i only know that i have the life that i have chosen.
Now i add, that it gives me a soort of peace within myself, finding my place within, as small as it may be, there is a reason why we are here.

@Sh3ld0n: This one is for you, fresh from the oven!

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2992#comic

this is not like maths, where the 'best' choice is the 'correct' answer! what is perceived to be 'best' will vary depending on the person making the choice, and thus will invariably depend on their 'experience'. if we define free will within the context of knowing everything about everything, then we basically exclude all of humanity and we might as well conclude that only god could express that quality, which seem to me to reduce the question to absurdity,

and i must add here that i always very much enjoy anagram's opinion on such matters because he so often brings a fresh and informative perspective to these kind of discussions.

anagram wrote:@Sh3ld0n: This one is for you, fresh from the oven!

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2992#comic

LMAO, are you sure Sh3l0n didn't actually write that himself??

shock_the_monkey wrote:this is not like maths, where the 'best' choice is the 'correct' answer! what is perceived to be 'best' will vary depending on the person making the choice, and thus will invariably depend on their 'experience'. if we define free will within the context of knowing everything about everything, then we basically exclude all of humanity and we might as well conclude that only god could express that quality, which seem to me to reduce the question to absurdity,

Yes, exactly!

and i must add here that i always very much enjoy anagram's opinion on such matters because he so often brings a fresh and informative perspective to these kind of discussions.

slugger wrote:LMAO, are you sure Sh3l0n didn't actually write that himself??

Lol, probably not, but on the other hand it's not the first time that the SMBC of the day is particularly relevant to an ongoing thread — could Zach Weiner be using us for inspiration?...

this on was just too good to pass up on ...

no god - no peace. know god - know peace.

... over to you, Sh3ld0n!!!

Sh3ld0n wrote:Does it ignore aspects of the human condition?

It does. It is the whole point of it. People are defined by their acts and the reason is irrelevant.

Sh3ld0n wrote:How much free will do we truly possess given we are often at the mercy of our genetic predispositions...

The question is whether it matters or not. It is a legitimate question.

Sh3ld0n wrote:To me it seems laughable that we supposedly have the ability to change our inherent nature...
And it also seems infantile, or at best naive, to think we can legitimately take responsibility for all our actions...

Are you thinking about essential nature, or accidental nature?
I don't think existentialism talks about changing nature (I could be wrong). It talks about accepting what is and taking responsibility. It is no different than saying you take responsibility of gravity. If you have a condition that forces you to act in a certain way, you take responsibility for it.

Personally, I think it makes a lot more sense than blaming others for that. The hunter that shoots an arrow and misses can take responsibility and adapt what he can, or he can blame the wind. But in the end, the best hunters take the wind into account. Those that only hunt when there is no wind limit themselves for no reason. What existentialism says is that a miss is a miss, and it does not become a hit because things were not as they should have been.

Its main difference comes in the moral arena. Some people think that a killing is not really a killing if there was a good reason. They may say a theft is not a theft if it is for a piece of bread. And in the case of that philosophy that was made in occupied France: if you collaborate with the invader, you are a collaborator. There was plenty of people that said it was ok because they had no choice. It still does not change the fact that you collaborated.

OneRinger wrote:Are you thinking about essential nature, or accidental nature?
I don't think existentialism talks about changing nature (I could be wrong). It talks about accepting what is and taking responsibility. It is no different than saying you take responsibility of gravity. If you have a condition that forces you to act in a certain way, you take responsibility for it.

Personally, I think it makes a lot more sense than blaming others for that. The hunter that shoots an arrow and misses can take responsibility and adapt what he can, or he can blame the wind. But in the end, the best hunters take the wind into account. Those that only hunt when there is no wind limit themselves for no reason. What existentialism says is that a miss is a miss, and it does not become a hit because things were not as they should have been.

Its main difference comes in the moral arena. Some people think that a killing is not really a killing if there was a good reason. They may say a theft is not a theft if it is for a piece of bread. And in the case of that philosophy that was made in occupied France: if you collaborate with the invader, you are a collaborator. There was plenty of people that said it was ok because they had no choice. It still does not change the fact that you collaborated.

Nice post, oneringer, good valid points

OneRinger wrote:Its main difference comes in the moral arena. Some people think that a killing is not really a killing if there was a good reason. They may say a theft is not a theft if it is for a piece of bread. And in the case of that philosophy that was made in occupied France: if you collaborate with the invader, you are a collaborator. There was plenty of people that said it was ok because they had no choice. It still does not change the fact that you collaborated.

i'm not too sure about this for the reason i previously stated ...

shock_the_monkey wrote:

TDT wrote:The western philosophy tends to lean toward the idea of the individual self having a lot of choice in the matter.

i'd tend to go along with this except that many people do tend to use it as an excuse for a complete lack of any human compassion.

... let's break this down a little ...

OneRinger wrote:Its main difference comes in the moral arena. Some people think that a killing is not really a killing if there was a good reason.

it think there's a confusion of wording here. to kill is to kill. how could it not be. but there's a difference between murder and manslaughter. murder is to deliberately and wilfully take another person's life for no justifiable reason. manslaughter is to take another person's life but with some mitigating circumstance, such as insanity or an accident or in self-defense. clearly, society can and does rightly draw distinctions between these.

OneRinger wrote:They may say a theft is not a theft if it is for a piece of bread.

and again, context is important here. if one is starving and the only way to live is to steal, then that isn't the same as someone that has their basic needs fulfilled and steals for greed or pleasure. morally the former is understandable, whilst the latter is arguably less so.

OneRinger wrote:And in the case of that philosophy that was made in occupied France: if you collaborate with the invader, you are a collaborator. There was plenty of people that said it was ok because they had no choice. It still does not change the fact that you collaborated.

and this is a case in point for such context. because in occupied france one may well have faced the choice of being a live collaborator or a dead non-collaborator. this is a significantly different context than for those that collaborated in order to better themselves socially or economically. hense the apparent contradiction in terms. but again, morally the former is understandable, whilst the latter is arguably less so.

it is perhaps a because of a paucity of language that similar distinctions, like murder and manslaughter, don't exist here for the second and third cases discussed.