Table of contents
Boundaries of infinity
Dear Reader,
I recently watched Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series. A main character, Bucky, a trained assassin whose mind could be controlled with the right triggers, is tormented by his bloodstained past. Facing his therapist, he is reminded: “You are now free to do whatever you want”. In a dismal manner, he replies, “free… to do what?”
🪟 17 - Boundaries of infinity
One of the best and worst features of human nature is our hyper-adaptability. We do not require very much circumstance in order to act, as we move within whatever constraints we have been put in. That is even the case with those handed the most oppressive of vicissitudes. If I may once again quote a prisoner of the most oppressive imaginable conditions (Frankl): “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” That which we call freedom is only a figure of circumstances, the setting of place and boundaries. It does not exist on its own.
We paint our strokes on the canvas of reality, whether we like it or not, no matter what sort of paintbrush we have been thrown, and we are oriented in this manner for as long as we persist. In other words, we act within our constraints. That which we call freedom only seeks to enlarge those constraints in certain ways. But that is all there is to it. Without movement, the map that enlarges in breadth does not serve the ship. To live effectively is to navigate the great chaos, the mad multiplicity of choice laid out before us, and to tread its waters.
What good is there in the maximisation of options? The spouse who cannot decide on one place to eat encounters a (decision) paralysis. A non-musician sat in front of a piano encounters the same acute problem: too many to choose from, with nothing to guide him. But the ascetic monk who deprives himself of all his options and shuns his own desires? The freest of all. Too much freedom with nothing to guide it is not really freedom at all. Modern lamentations such as “drowning in information while starving for wisdom” point to precisely that. Is all this not cause for aimlessness and crises of meaning? The marketplace of stories (as meaning-vehicles) lies rampant with free optionality. In our modernity, we have both everything and nothing.
Indeed, a consequence of our great democratic leaps is that we raise free children and not responsible adults. It is only a boy who asks: “how can I push my boundaries here? How can I push my boundaries there? And how about there?” The matured soul on the other hand has learnt not to rebel against his given lot, but to master it. He sees the multiplicity laid out in front of him and learns to manoeuvre through it. The matured soul turns from his boundaries to his criteria, which orders the infinity he recognises. If Nature has already provided everything we need, does freedom not only lay boundaries on an infinity of space? Where Nature has us thrown is into a piece of machinery with ten thousand levers to pull, on a canvas with a thousand colours to paint.
But I do not mean to say, freedom is pointless. The freedom the masses speak of is good, but it is not an ultimate good. To recall the saying of Epicurus: “it is wrong to live under constraint, but no man is constrained to live under constraint.” Does the ultimate test of time not attest to this? Those solemnly on their deathbeds do not wish to have been more or less free. They only wish in relation to their engagement of it. Freedom, therefore, is a good worth preserving, but ultimately unworthy of ultimate concern. Freedom exists to be traded for a choice, and it is in that choice (or lack thereof) that meaning or disillusionment lies.
The question follows: what should be worthy of choice? How shall the Actor be engaged justly? Where multiplicities of options are laid out, by what criteria should the locus of value be directed? This is a difficult question, but in this series of essays I want to concern myself with these. And my answer is as follows. I have found that a higher form of freedom is attained in enslaving oneself to the right thing. Freedom must lay in direct servitude of something higher, perhaps being justified only in such servitude. One must gradually erode the question “what am I free to do” and ask, “what master am I to serve”?
Freedom is to be in direct servitude to its own just exercise. What is this justness, that ought to order the mad multiplicity of options? Allow me to walk through it in my mind. When one speaks of bending rules, one tends to speak of cultural or sociopolitical rules. Surely such rules may be bent into oblivion, for no matter how rigid or well-intentioned they may be, they are also fragile and levelled on arbitrary grounds. But the rules of nature are not nearly as malleable. Nature herself appears to value certain things more than others, universal rules, that sow the generation of sentience in human beings or harmony in frequencies. Until we possess the power to break such laws, and unless we ourselves make the fraction of humanity fortunate enough to design such immense power, it is better to learn to excel at her games.
What are these universal rules of nature? They are the most obvious grounds by which we operate, so obvious that they are not even worth mentioning. Some of which I have discussed previously: that we are creatures where it has been determined it be better for us to act than be kept on a leash. Or that a worse evil corresponds to a greater good. Or that the mind hungers to cohere. Or that we are creatures of self-interest in desperate need of one another, disallowed from peace in complete isolation. There are realities the hammer of logic can only stumble on a brick wall and find no way around. These are first assumptions that most of us would find little good in attempting to examine, that is more productively treated as given rules of a game, attributed to something elusive, as some may call the Tao. And in regards to justness, there is one first assumption I have in mind: in the immediacies before the end of any lifespan, on judgement day, flashes of what ultimately matters always allude to similar conventions, now as have been maintained through history and culture.
Nature’s games must be learnt. Otherwise, the naive treatment of freedom defaults to the idealising of childish ideals that will not stand in the ultimate test of time. How often does a teenager live only to find his parents had been right in one too many ways, that the advice of the old and wise was sound? An archetypal rebel of every generation, dissatisfied with the wisdom of old, ringing like annoying echoes, explores and seeks knowledge in worlds and experiences of all sorts, only to arrive at the same simple precepts as prodigal children. They then wonder why they ever doubted in the first place. (But they had to arrive by their own accord.) The utility of tradition lies in that it is a pre-packaged container of freedom-exercise, of time-tested grounds that point toward things that are just. The postmodern man likes to speak of inventing his own values, but that is pure nonsense. As in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”. Beneath the entangled currents of human affairs, the human nature that lurks will persist, and for as long as it does, one would earn to pursue the just exercise of freedom with reverence to the gifts of history. That which is time-tested is wise, guiding our freedom to an exercise that the court of reality will decorate.
One may now object: the Actor requires its own engagement detached from a pre-packaged justness. Its lust may be directed to that which seems quite strange and arbitrary, as in one who obsesses over the collection of stamps, or the carbon dating of rocks, or the sculpting of it, yet it is that very arbitrariness that justifies existence itself! But the crux of the matter, of justness, is that as exploration ought to lead to obsession, freedom ought to give way to choice, as an incessant dabbing from one to another will not endow meaning, only fits of aimlessness. It remains that happiness pursues those in depths and not shallow waters. To the end of effective living, the maturity of one’s soul, as shown in the deepening of its tastes, is in order.
This is what life has taught me, that a higher freedom lies not in the maximisation of optionality but in the limitation of it. One must sacrifice freedom to be more free. Nowadays there is generally too much worship of “freedom”, and we loathe to speak of choosing. But nature has set out that life is to be played like piano keys. Whether it resonates with beauty and harmony, or discordance, is up to the mastery of choice. And where does freedom sit? It promises everything and delivers nothing.
As the Narrator is allowed an infinity of space to dance within, as permitted by the court of reality, so too does the Actor in enacting. Where one rightfully belongs is to be both uncovered and striven for. This is what it means to effectively engage our inner Narrator and Actor — to pursue masterful action (outward) and narration (inward). We are not solid constructs of non-authenticity to be measured by some objective truth-to-self ratio, but currents and waves to be measured by our own movements. As our Actor and Narrator move, so do we. “The world is your oyster” begins from your stream of consciousness. How will we move upon infinity?
Till next time,
Euwyn