Plunging into the swirling water of 'free will' and autonomy

  If Hillman’s theory/perception/notion about emotions holds ‘water,’ and our emotions are more like gifts or flags rather than exhibiting or defining our ego, or our self, or our identity, what about the concept of ‘free will’ in relation to our emotions and our decisions?

What about????….the question that for some has neither substance nor direction, and is thereby irrelevant for any legitimate probe into any ‘nugget’ or issue, seems to be a kind of invitation into another potential unpacking of another mystery. Previous readers in this space will know that one of, if not the first reference, s/he will encounter will be to the work of James Hillman. Believing that Hillman’s gift of Archetypal Psychology holds promise for many people, many academic and professional disciplines and for a significant potential transformation of the western culture, this scribe leans on Hillman here once again.

In Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, in a chapter entitled, “Fate,” he writes:

‘But if the soul chooses its daimon and chooses its life, how have we still any power of decision?’ asks Plotinus. Where is our freedom? All that we live an believe to be ours, all our arduously-arrived-at decisions, must in truth be predetermined. We are snared in a delusional veil, believing that we are the agents of our own lives while all along each life has been laid down in the acorn and we are but fulfilling a secret plan in the heart. Our freedom, it seems, consists only in opting for what the acorn demands…To cast off this erroneous conclusion, let’s make clear what the genius does and does not do. Let’s become more precise about the range of the acorn’s powers. In what ways is it effective and how is is limited. If it causes behaviors in childhood, what do we mean by ‘cause’? If it intends a specific way o life, such as theatrical performance, mathematical invention, or public politics, what do we mean by ‘intention’? Has it a final end in view, even an image of fulfillment and a date of death. If it is so powerful as to fatefully determine school expulsion and childhood illnesses, what do we mean by ‘determinism’? And finally, if it the acorn that gives the feeling that things could not be otherwise, that even the wrongs have been necessary, what do we mean by ‘necessity’?....

Fatalism is the seductive other side to the heroic ego, which shoulders so much in a do-it-yourself, winner-take-all civilization. The bigger the load, the more you want to put it down or pass it off to a large, stronger carrier, like Fate. The hero is America personified. The heroic ego landed on Plymouth Rock, went with Danial Boone into the wilds with gun, Bible, and dog, stands tall in Tombstone with John Wayne, and stonewalls his corporation against the whole bloody planet. This ego cuts its way through the forest and made its own path despite competitors and predators.

Even she, Little Red Riding Hood, has to cope with harassment by the predator wolf on her lonely path. This burden of being al one with your own self-dame destiny in a world lurking with figures that want to do you in makes life one helluva struggle. If I do not beat back the obstacles and push my way forward, I could be ‘left back’ in school, or become an ‘underachiever’ and sent for counselling to get me through psychological ‘blocks’ and ‘fixations.’ I have to advance from preschool onward, I have to develop, to climb, defend, secure simply to exist, for that is the heroic definition of existence. Not much fun here—and when Little Red Riding Hood does pause to pick flowers to put in her generous basket of goodies for Grandmother, up pops the toothy wolf.

In this paranoid definition of life- life as struggle, competition for survival, the other as either ally or enemy- fatalism offers surcease. It’s all in the stars; there is a divine plan; whatever happens, happens for the best in the best of possible worlds (Voltaire’s Candide). The world is off my shoulders, for it is really carried by Fate and I am really in the lap of the gods, just as Plato’s myth says. I am living the particular fate that has come straight from the lap of Necessity. So it doesn’t matter what I choose. I’m not really choosing, anyway; choice is a delusion. Life is all predetermined.

That way of thinking is fatalism, and it is not what is meant by fate. This way of thinking reflects a belief system, a fatalistic ideology, not the goddess Moirai, whom we call in English the Fates and who appear in Plato’s myth arranging the lots and leading the daimon toward our birth. They do not determine each and every event as if life were set up by them.

Rather the Greek idea of fate would be more like this: Events happen to people. ‘They cannot understand why it happened, but since it has happened, evidently ‘it had to be.’ (Ref: E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1951, p. 6) Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After the event, (post hoc), we give an account of what made it happen (ergo propter hoc). It is not written in the stars that the stock market must crash in October 1987. But after it crashed, we find ‘reasons’ that clearly made it necessary for it to have crashed right then. For the Greeks, the cause of these untoward events would be fate. But fate causes only events that are unusual, that oddly don’t fit in. Not each and every thing is laid out in a superior divine plan. That sort of comprehensive explanation if fatalism, which makes for paranoia, occultist Ouija board prognostics, and passive-aggressive behavior combing meek submission to fate with bitter anger against it.

So, it is better to imagine fate as a momentary ‘intervening variable.’ (p. 192-193)

Fatalism bestows a feeling that what happens in my life is intended to ward a distant misty goal. Something is meant for me…..I am meant to have success, or be cursed and wronged and luckless, or to die in a certain way on a certain day….’Teleology’ is the term for this belief that events are pulled by a purpose toward a definite end. Telos means aim, end, or fulfillment.  A telos is opposite to cause as we generally thing of causes today. Causality asks, ‘Who started it?’ It imagines events pushed from behind by the past. Teleology asks, ‘What’s the point? What’s the purpose? It conceives events aimed toward a goal…..Teleology gives a logic to life. It provides a rational account of life’s long-range purpose. (p. 196)…

The idea of telos gives value to what happens by regarding each occurrence as having purpose. What happens is for the sake of something. It has intention….But adding an ‘ology’ to ‘telos’ declares what that value is. It says what is intended in the tantrum and the obsession. It dares to pronounce the purpose. The acorn acts less as a personal guide with a sure long-term direction that as a moving style, an inner dynamic that gives the feeling of purpose to occasions…This supposedly trivial moment is significant, while this supposedly major event doesn’t matter that much. Let’s say the acorn is more concerned with the soul aspect of events, more alive to what’s good for it that to what you believe is good for you. This helps explain why Socrates’ daimon told him not to escape imprisonment and execution. His death belonged to the integrity of his image, to his innate form. A death…..may make more sense to the image and its trajectory than to you and your plan. (p. 202-203)

This “Hillman lecturette” is offered as an introduction to one perception of the often-conflated concept of fate. The conflation in our culture is coloured with many over-lapping and interspersed and blended notions from a variety of sources. One of those sources is the doctrine of predestination, which is often cited as a biblical  doctrine that God in His sovereignty chooses certain individuals to be saved. Clearly, the question/issue/existence/definition of free will inevitably abuts this doctrine, and has been explicated in religious thought and writing as ‘voluntary choosing’ to follow God’s will. The free will, in that instance, is expressed through the voluntary, and not compulsory, choice of the individual.

One of the most mountainous obstacles to be overcome for anyone to begin to wade into the waters of Hillman’s (Plato’s, et al) daimon, as a guiding light, and not as a determinative force that confounds one’s free will is the plethora of research into the neuroscience community around the notion of free will. In a piece in The Guardian, April 27, 2021, entitled: ‘The Clockwork universe: is free will al illusion?’ Oliver Burkeman writes:

The difficulty in explaining the enigma of free will to those unfamiliar with the subject isn’t that it’s complex or obscure. It’s that the experience of possessing free will- the feeling that we are the authors of our choices-is so utterly basic to everyone’s existence that it can be hard to get enough mental distance to see what’s going on…..According to the Public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth- useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

Hillman’s depiction of and advocacy for the daimon, as an angel, a guiding light acting in the highest interests of each individual, while still have the potential to ‘turn dark or south,’ seems perhaps to have anticipated presciently the more recent research on brain activity, the timing of the electrons/waves in the direction of a decision, from a poetic perspective. The daimon’s imaginal existence as an ‘idea’ does not impose a molecular/neural/empirical/literal/nominal force that can either be anatomized under an electron microscope nor disputed as a defiance of a religious belief. Indeed, it is so subtle and so sophisticated, so ephemeral and ethereal, and only potentially discernible from a perspective of looking “backward” into one’s life that is has the significant advantage of magnetically/imaginatively refocusing those accidents, those emergencies, those traumas and those unforgettable moments into a psychic landscape that seems to have been moving toward an enveloping artistic archetype that includes and represents the voices of many gods goddesses, myths and legends.

Whether we chose to eat the banana or the orange for breakfast this morning might seem like a totally personal choice. And whether or not neuroscience can detect that the electricity in the brain had already started to “move” in the direction of the choice we eventually made, the culmination of our choices, decisions, happenstances, accidents, and even our traumas are like psychic landmarks in our personal biography. Each of them, if sat in and reflected upon, with a longer lens than one that searches  for immediate ‘causes’ or ‘motivators’ or cultural enemies, or religious beliefs, and begins to imagine an existence that is ‘connected’ not merely in a genetic, or a sociological, or a demographic or even an ethnic framework, or even in a framework that incorporates all of these ‘data-banks,’ and tends to take the perspective that in each act is a poem and that the totality of the poetry of each life is a unique existence, that embraces all of life and death, all of love and apathy, all of time and space, all of history and meta-history, all of human voices from our several locations and myths, perhaps not literally but imaginatively.

And in the course of re-visiting our lives through such a lens, we are more able and more likely to shed some of the pretentious “meant-to-be’s” that have ensnared us, and some of the ‘exceptionalities’ that our heroic culture has foisted upon us as part of its over-weening propaganda to conform, to climb and to win. Looking down, rather than ‘up’ all the time, pursuing quiet reflection and legitimate links to those various voices that have accompanied the human story forever, and seeing in and through the lens that each poem is linked both in content and purpose to our demise, rather than to our secular and empirical ‘treasure and wealth and power’…we might find that our meaning and purpose, that ‘holy grail’ of the existentialists, is contained in and beneficiary of voices new to our perception and vision and values.