#notes on freedom

[chahatkesafar]

My biggest mistakes in life have all stemmed from giving my power to someone else, believing that the love others had to offer was more important than the love I had to give to myself.

[penchant-for-paradox]

Infinite, limitless, unbounded = free

If metaphysical freedom means anything, it does not pertain to some indeterminate will unconnected to any sort of determinate cause, arising out of an indeterminate nothing – but rather it stems from the infinitely variegated nexus of causality from which a finite agent or will emerges. Strictly speaking, that the will’s determining nature flows into infinity is what it means to say that the will is free in a metaphysical sense; that it emanates from God. (Its ontological source is of an infinite nature.)

Each component of that nexus (the entirety of the universe, the infinite series of causality) exerts its causal power over every other piece of the nexus, all according to an infinite harmony and order comprised of subordinate concentric spheres or orders of laws. Freedom is precisely that ‘infinite complexity’; – actual infinite complexity contained in the mind of God – and it is only through an infinitely extending connexion of causality that anything can be called ‘free’, because only that which is infinite is ‘unbounded’ in any absolute metaphysical sense.

  Metaphysical freedom: that the real causes of our agency extend forever into the infinity of the causal nexus, which in turn emanates from the infinite (unbounded) nature of God, outside of which there is literally nothing, neither possibility nor necessity. Only within God is there possibility. (We can reasonably consider other possible worlds, but, strictly speaking, not another possible God insofar as God’s infinite nature encompasses ALL possibilities.)

Phenomenal freedom: a finite mind’s real incomprehension of the origin (or completely extensive and intensive, extrinsic and intrinsic, constitutive features) of its own agency (or will) in the face of that inexhaustible infinite nexus of causality, when the agent is faced with choosing. i.e. it is the freedom felt at making a choice, that is to say, a kind of anxiety that arises from the infinite (perspectival) nothing out of which the choice emerges – not that the action of choosing emerges from an actual nothing, but  it emerges out of an infinite nexus of causality that in toto  infinitely outstrips the agents comprehension, and thus truly, under the aspect of particular comprehension (rather than abstract metaphysical comprehension), the choice emerges from nothing (perspectival liberum arbitrium). the experience of 'being free' is the spirit's quivering at the impending unknown that will emerge through the subject's agency out of and through a kind of infinity.

There is nothing illusory about what’s going on here; there is nothing illusory about this freedom, unless one conflates that ‘epistemological nothing’ with a metaphysical one. The non-metaphysician doesn’t employ those categories, so the non-metaphysician doesn’t make that mistake. The real metaphysician is careful to avoid that snare of conflating the two categories. One has to learn to distinguish between the everyday mode of discourse that says ‘the sun is rising’ and the mode of discourse that says ‘the earth is rotating’; no one defends the literal content of the former mode of discourse in terms of the principles of the latter. The same goes for common understanding of freedom and metaphysical understanding of freedom – only those living in between get entangled in the illusion. This is because there is a lag in fully cohering with metaphysical principles (and probably none of us could ever even fully do this!). This is, of course, why I sometimes think the sloppiest thinkers are generally NOT ordinary people, but often half-philosophers (most philosophers), living in some vague place between two frameworks of discourse, unwilling to wholly depart from common notions in metaphysical speculation.

  “In contingent propositions one continues the analysis to infinity through reasons for reasons, so that one never has a complete demonstration, though there is always, underneath, a reason for the truth, but the reason is understood completely only by God, who alone traverses the infinite series in one stroke of mind.”

–      G.W. Leibniz

Tracing the causes of ‘the will’ is loosely analogous to this.