Reactions: Existential Viewpoint: Taking Responsibility
I came across a blog named Atheist Spirituality and thought that I’d write a reply to one of their posts.
First, I'd like to say that I like the quote that they took from the movie "Waking Life". Great movie, check it out - though, be prepared to take a break halfway through. It's very philosophy heavy.
Personally, I'm not entirely convinced with the idea of existentialism. I'm not for the idea that god controls our actions, but I don't believe that we have entirely free will, either. Through this post, they discuss what reality we're left with if we discard the idea that god is a guiding force in our lives. They propose that we should seize the day; Carpe Diem!
I do enjoy its message that we should evoke the use of more meta-cognition (thinking about thinking; thinking about our own actions, and the self, in-depth) because this is a task that people need to take into consideration. Their instructions are vague, however. It's one thing to suggest to do something; it's another thing entirely to actually figure out how to go through with it.
I believe more in the concept of equifinality: the principle that in open systems a given state can be reached by many potential means. In other words, everything is a product of many other events converging on a given point in time. This is reaching back to my post on determinism, but I feel that everything can be explained by other events and we don't truly have free will because we can never shake free from the bonds of our personal history. We are products of our past.
Their solution is for us to loosen those bonds by realizing what they are, and I back this idea up. This is a very difficult process, much like picking at the strands of a rope and breaking them each individually before the rope starts to give. Though, where I differ from them is that I believe, once the rope is gone, there's still a steel chain with more slack than the rope, and only modestly less binding.
Part of the loosening of our bonds would be taking responsibility and realize what we did to create this outcome. Only then can we be more free from our past.
meh, if you live in the moment you may not have time to deconstruct the past. I dunno if the message to be taking from that other blog was that our will is necessarily completely free. what they talked about seemed an awful lot like some of the things sartre grappled with, that is that while we ultimately decide what to do in a given situation we may not be aware that we have made a choice, (i believe that is where this metacognition/thought deconstruction comes in.) I think perhaps you misunderstood what it was they were trying to say, (then again maybe its me who misunderstood.)