Sartre's Anguish

I remember the first time someone told me what would happen if you were outside on a cold winter day and you stuck your tongue to a metal post; how you were likely to find yourself securely fixed until the paramedics arrived.  This idea held a grip on my imagination for days, weeks, even months after that.  I was afraid that I would find myself in a situation where I would just go ahead and...stick my tongue to a metal post.  It wasn't that I wanted to do it.  I wasn't particularly curious about what would happen, and I had little cause to doubt what I'd been told.  And I could hardly imagine a situation where I would need to stick my tongue to a metal post.  In fact, I really had no conceivable reason what-so-ever for sticking my tongue to a post, but despite all that, I was still afraid that somehow I was just going to go ahead and do it anyway.  I suspect that many of you at one time or another have had a similar experience.  Sartre calls this feeling "anguish."

Anguish, as Sartre uses the term, is a special breed of fear: fear before one's self.  A soldier going off to war may understandably be afraid of the enemy, of battle, of leaving home, and many other things, but there's another sense in which he may fear the potential of his own actions.  He may be afraid that he won't measure up in his duties as a soldier.  He may fear that he'll run when he should have taken cover, or that he'll take cover when he should have ran.  He may spend long, sleepless, hours possessed by the thought of inexplicably sticking his head up out of a hole at the wrong moment to see what's going on and catching enemy sniper fire right between the eyes.  More even than the fear of being killed, it's the fear of doing something stupid and getting himself killed that seizes the soldier's heart with such a powerful rush of anguish that it takes his breath away.  So he tries to be a soldier, as a thing in a uniform equipped with a weapon, a machine designed exclusively for war.  If he must die, he wants to die as a soldier, not through his failure to fulfill the responsibility of that role.

Of course, we don't need to invoke the special circumstances of war to find anguish.  There is, perhaps, no more common or appropriate illustration of our experience of anguish, than our morbid fascination with suicide.  I'm sure that most of us probably have no pressing wish to kill ourselves or serious plans of doing so, but yet the thought does flutter in now and then, doesn't it?  We think of the opportunities that might present themselves, the rigged noose and the chair, the gun laid in our lap.  We sense all too well that we are capable of pushing through all those layers of resistance, all those reasons not to do it, and with a quick flip of the foot or twitch of the finger we could end our lives....Snap! Just like that.  It's enough to turn your blood cold.  It's the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing that you could just say the hell with it and hurl yourself over the edge and nothing would stop you.

It's not a all a question of mortality.  It crops up in a number of little ways.  I remember a while back when I debating some of the finer points of free will and determinism with Mr. John Myste, I used the example of how I had to continually force myself to get up for work night after night, how I had to perpetually sustain my role as a responsible family man.  I told him that I could throw it all away at a moment's notice.  I could just get in my car and drive off into the dark, never to be seen from again.  Even writing those words gave me a flash of anguish, a dizzy spin of vertigo from the cliff's edge.  It's not even that it's a particularly terrible prospect.  It's just that facing the fact that you could change your life so radically at the snap of your fingers is exhilarating and yet horrifying at the same time.

Naturally, a determinist would insist that these are baseless fears, a odd glitch in our psychological programming.  They would say that this agonizing over suicide, for instance, is a pointless waste of time.  They would say that no one has ever been seized by such a reckless impulse of self-destruction; no one has ever pulled a trigger because they were overcome by their own willpower.  But yet, people do kill themselves, do they not?  Who's to say that all of those people had better reasons for doing it than you or I do?  Where do you draw the line?  Where does the determinist stand over the body lying on the floor with the smoking gun and say, "causality led to this"?  I submit that not only would I disagree that no one has ever pulled the trigger out of sheer willpower, I'll go as far as to say that it always goes down just the way we fear.  It's rarely a clear cut case of a person just wanting to kill themselves.  There's struggle, conflict.  There's nearly always some reasons to live.  But the person pushes past all that, says the hell with it, and does it anyway.

This all makes anguish sound like a negative thing, but it's actually a necessary part of our existence.  It serves much the same purpose psychologically, that physical pain serves biologically.  It is the constant pin prick, keeping us on our toes, reminding us of our responsibility for our actions.  It drives the soldier to train, to learn, to sustain his role as a soldier.  The sobering awareness that he is not merely a soldier, as a thing, that he has within him the capacity to fail to live up to the demands of being a soldier, prods him and drives him on.  To try to defuse that feeling, as determinism does, is dangerous and deadly.  A soldier without anguish, a soldier who has fallen into bad faith, has sealed his fate.

And suppose I'm wrong, and Sartre's wrong, and free will is all just a big delusion.  Well, then what difference does it make?  Whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and I have no more control over the fact that I believe in free will than I do over my own eye color.  Ironically, there's always, behind a determinist's argument, an implicit subtext that they came by their position by choice.  They keep telling you why they're a determinist and why you should be a determinist, even though from their position "why" shouldn't matter a bit.  They are a determinist as the western wind blows and nothing more.  So, if I'm wrong, it makes no difference, and I can't even help being wrong anyway.  But if I'm right, and we really are free, then believing in free will makes all the difference in the world.  It means that you assume ownership of this life, and all the possibilities open to it.

For now, we end our adventures in Sartre's theory of free will out along its most paradoxical outskirts: will beyond reason, choice beyond control.  We face the disconnection between the person we dream ourselves to be and the consciousness which is free and unbound by the limitations of that dream.  We face anguish with that nauseating drop in the pit of our stomach as well fall into nothingness, free almost even from ourselves, overwhelmed by that freedom.  Sartre said that we are doomed to be free.  Well, so be it.  Let's make the most of it.             

Reflections on the Meaning of Christmas

When I was a kid, there was a rather strange couple that taught a few of the Sunday school classes at the church that I went to.  Their family adhered to a very strict orthodoxy, which included a few extra and unusual stipulations that they had thrown in themselves for good measure.  For one thing, they didn't believe in owning a TV, as they considered the idiot box to be inherently sinful regardless of what channel it was tuned to.  Furthermore, they didn't really celebrate Christmas.  I mean, being Christians, they naturally believed and observed Christmas, but they didn't celebrate it in the traditional manner.  In other words, they didn't give gifts.

I can still recall that woman's syrupy, pious voice, and all the countless times she explained it to us.  "Christmas is Jesus' birthday.", she told us.  "How would you like it if everyone else except you was getting presents on your birthday?"  Seriously.  She said that.  I can almost imagine a certain sanctimonious wink accompanying this pronouncement.  They thought they were awfully clever.  They were going to celebrate Christmas the right way.  They didn't buy each other gifts.  They didn't buy gifts for their kids.  No fruit basket for the neighbors.  No token of appreciation for the mailman; not even a card.  They didn't even buy a special treat for the dog, but then again, I don't think they had a dog.  They probably considered having pets to be some form of pagan animal worship.  They could probably show you the chapter and verse to back it up too.

But hold up a minute.  Let's think about this.  It's not like you could ever get Jesus a tangible, physical gift.  What are you going to do?  Buy him a pair of socks?  Get him a sweater that says "World's Greatest Savior", or a coffee mug that says "#1 Begotten Son"?  I mean, what exactly do you get the omnipotent Lord of time and space that literally has everything?  Well, what if people presented a gift that could only be offered through their own free will?  Something like, say....oh...I don't know, maybe peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.  Yeah, that has a nice little ring to it.  Oh, and hey!  Maybe they could demonstrate this gesture of peace and goodwill by giving each other gifts and generally trying to be decent human beings to each other.  Crazy idea.  I know.

Of course, when I was a kid I was just appalled at what this woman was suggesting and the whole notion of not getting toys on Christmas.  I was horrified when my mother even seemed to give it a few seconds of serious thought.  But now that I'm older I see that the matter goes beyond Christmas.  These people were an extreme case, but I grew up around quite a number of these "Super Christians" who never missed a church service, prayed before every meal, made sure that the boys' hair wasn't too long and the girls' dresses weren't too short, who could quote you an endless stream of Bible verses for any occasion, and yet they didn't have the slightest clue what their own religion was all about.

Christianity isn't about not owning a TV, or trying to turn your life into an ascetic monument to your own self-righteousness.  Christianity is about accepting that you're never going to be able to mold yourself into this perfect person "worthy of God's love", and yet realizing that God, in His grace, loves you anyway.  It's about opening your heart to that love, and showing that love in return to your fellow human beings.  It sounds like a trite notion, older than the dirt itself, and it's certainly been devalued over the ages by people paying lip service to the words without really embracing the spirit.  It's definitely a case of easier said than done.

Take the present example, this family that I've been talking about.  Part of me clearly harbors a certain anger towards them.  I'm annoyed by their smug "holiness" in the service of such misguided ignorance.  I'm angry that their kids never got to enjoy a proper Christmas, and I'm angry that for a split-second they almost ruined my own Christmas.  And yet, there's another part of me, like a quiet calm whisper out beyond all that, a part of me that realizes that these people were just trying to do what they thought was right.  Christianity is about embracing that feeling, and letting everything else go, the anger and the hostility, because it doesn't do me or them any good.  But it isn't easy.  And this isn't even a difficult case!  There are definitely things that are much harder to forgive.  But beyond all the noise and anger that quiet whisper is always out there, reminding me that we are all lost and confused children in this world, trying to get by the best we can. 

Jesus brought an idea to the world, so enchantingly simple and yet so difficult to practice.  He told people that the vicious cycle of vengeance and retribution could end with them.  They just had to lay down their arms, turn the other cheek, let go of their suspicions and their resentments, sincerely open their hearts, and have faith that their friends and enemies alike would do the same.  It's a risky proposition and few people have been fool enough to commit to it fully, but the stakes are plain to see.  Peace on Earth is at our fingertips, anytime we want it, and whenever we're ready for it.  It's completely up to us.  It's up to us as the whole human race, and it's up to each of us individually.  That's where it has to start.

I may be fuzzy on the details; I may have my own spiritual and metaphysical doubts from time to time, but I believe in the idea.  And the idea here goes beyond a matter of religion, beyond the question of whether there's a bearded man in the sky or whether there's a cloud and a harp with your name on it somewhere.  It's about what we make of life here on Earth.  Jesus has had two thousand and eleven birthdays, and we've had two thousand and eleven chances to get it right, and we keep handing in the same badly wrapped gift with most of the pieces missing and all scuffed up here and there with our wars and the pain we constantly cause each other.  Hopefully one of these days we'll get it right.

(Note: This post is an entry is yet another one of Rachel Hoyt's Sociology Studies.  I could have mentioned that at the top, but I didn't want to break my rhetorical momentum ;D )      

The Philosophy Tree

When we think of philosophy, we tend to think of an esoteric subject far removed from the actual practice of living.  We think of the obscure terminology, the perpetually ponderous "isms" and the various schools of thought which bear their names.  We tend to think of the great names of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and so on, those giants of wisdom who's names we invoke in intellectual arguments as though they were the patron saints of their own peculiar ideas.  If we're in a particularly imaginative or hypnagogic state, we may even picture philosophy as the domain of the wise hermit living on the mountain top who pilgrims have to brave treacherous paths and passes to reach in order to hear his sage advice.

In short, we tend to focus on the vast body of work done on the subject of philosophy, accumulated in books and texts, rather than on the object of study itself.  While the stars serve to remind us what the astronomer is looking at, and the flowers are there to remind us what the botanist is up to, philosophy studies something that isn't quite so easily brought to mind.  It seems like something more intangible and remote.  So it's easy to fall into the misconception that philosophers are off hunting ghosts in another dimension with no relevance to the real world.  "That's all well and good.", we say, "But we've got work to do and bills to pay.", and we move on with our lives.  This is a dreadful mistake.  Philosophy isn't hard to fathom because it's so remote from our lives.  Quite the contrary.  We have a hard time seeing it because it looms so large in our lives, because it is so fundamental and all encompassing.  Philosophy is nothing less than the study of existence itself.  Deeper still, it's the study of our understanding of existence and our place in that existence, and our understanding of ourselves.  It makes all the difference in the world.

Imagine that you and I and everyone else has a tree growing somewhere deep in the core of our minds.  As trees tend to do, this tree branches out from a central trunk, and those branches branch out into more branches and those into even smaller branches, and so on.  This tree and these branches form a kind of network which connects all the ideas and opinions and beliefs that you have about everything, from the seemingly inconsequential things like the etiquette for parallel parking out along one of the small twigs, to more meatier issues like where you stand on the death penalty on one of the sturdier limbs.  Your position on fundamental matters along the main branches are going to affect all the smaller branches that lead off from it.  It's all connected.  The tree as a whole represents our concept of the world and our attitude and approach to life.

Philosophy is the study of that tree.  More than that, it's a way of caring and tending, trimming and maintaining that tree.  Many people don't bother.  They let the tree grow wild, the gnarled branches twisting haphazardly around each other at random, choking the life out of some branches and leaving others neglected in the shadows unexposed to the nourishment of the sun.  They suffer the consequences of this in their actions, their choices, and in their very feelings towards life itself.  There are others who do tend to the tree, but some of them end up doing even worse damage because they don't know what they're doing, because they're not careful, and because they don't take the task seriously to begin with.  They cut into some vital organ and leave the tree half-barren, lifeless, and rotted from the inside.

If I say that I am a philosopher, I don't mean that as a matter of vocation or title.  I am a philosopher in the sense that I am an eater, a dreamer, a bather, and a sleeper.  I am a philosopher because I tend to my tree.  I've devoted a large part of my life to tending to my tree.  I've nursed it to health through the long, grey winters; I've cultivated its blossoms in the spring.  I've tried more than one ill-advised method and risked permanent damage, but hopefully I've learned something from my mistakes.  It's nearly a full-time job, taking on the task myself.  It takes time and thought and study and research.  But so far I've resisted the temptation to farm the job out to any religious group or political affiliation.  I have consulted a few experts on occasion, though.  I let Nietzsche have a go at it one summer.  The tree grew tall and strong, and even a little terrifying to behold.  Kant proposed putting a box of mirrors around the tree, blocking out the sunlight completely.  I sent him packing.  And of course Sartre still drops by now and then in the evenings.  He smiles and nods and reminds me that the tree is mine to make what I will of it; the choices and the possibilities are up to me.

And it's up to you as well.  You can tend your own tree, or you can ignore it altogether, or you can hire someone else to do it and find all of your ideas in their debt.  But make no mistake about it.  You have that tree too.  We all have that tree.  Philosophy studies something which is relevant to all our lives.  We all have some way of looking at the world.  The question is: Are you going to let that view fall into place by a random accident of jumbled ideas, or are you going to cultivate that view deliberately and help it to grow into something wonderful?  The choice is yours.                    

Sartre's Bad Faith

"Bad Faith" is Sartre's rather odd term for a rather odd concept.  The nearest equivalent that I could think of is "self-deception", although taking the term at face value as a description of misplaced faith might be appropriate as well.  Neither interpretation quite does the term justice.  The former is a bit misleading in its tone and the latter is a bit too broad in its scope.  Sartre employs the term with an implicit sense of familiarity, so I suspect the issue may be one of translation.  It seems to designate a certain type of self-deception, or an even better description might be: our perpetual quest to find substance and definition for the void at the core of our being.

Sartre provides the example of a cafe waiter.  He describes the waiter's quick steps, the eager way he leans forward when you speak, the deftness with which he balances his plates and trays.  All of it adds up to a kind of performance.  In a sense, the waiter is playing the part of a waiter.  He is carrying on as though the style and the purpose of all his actions were dictated by his being a waiter.  He is carrying on as though being a waiter were to be a thing, as a table is a table or a chair is a chair.  This sort of phenomenon isn't restricted to waiters, of course, as Sartre goes on to say, "there is the dance of the tailor, the grocer, the auctioneer."  Sartre suggests that these tradespeople lend this shallowly mechanical touch to their duties partly as a way of making their clientele more comfortable, "A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer."  But this sort of thing isn't restricted to the world of trade and commerce.  We do this in all walks of life.

In this context, Sartre describes determinism as "a perpetual game of excuses."  It is the veritable dogma of Bad Faith.  Certainly the waiter is a waiter in the sense of the contingency of his circumstances and situation and choices.  He has taken a job as waiter; he has to arise at a certain hour in the morning to fulfill his duties as a waiter; he gets the tips and pay and benefits of being a waiter.  But yet, he is not a waiter in the sense of being simply a thing in the world.  He can not rely on being a waiter as something that will dictate his behavior.  On the contrary, being a waiter is something he has to sustain with his behavior, a part he is compelled to play if he wishes to maintain his station in life.  

Likewise, an orphan is an orphan in the sense of the contingencies of their situation and circumstances, but yet they're not merely an orphan as a chair is a chair.  True, they haven't chosen to be an orphan, as the waiter has chosen to be a waiter, but regardless of whether they arrived at their situation by choice or not, one thing doesn't irresistibly dictate behavior any more than the other.  One cannot be an orphan as a thing in the world, any more than one can be a waiter as a thing.  One's being cannot be entirely exhausted in the concept of "orphan", any more than it can be exhausted in the concept of "waiter."  The orphan is always something more than an orphan, and the waiter is always something more than a waiter.  We continually transcend the concepts, the contingencies, and the "excuses" by which we might try to define ourselves.  We are always more than the sum of our parts.  There's is always something in the orphan and the waiter which can step back, consider themselves as an orphan or a waiter, and consider the possibilities which transcend those things.

Bad Faith is our attempt to deny this transcendence.  It is our attempt to find security and substance in a kind of a role which we can play in a given situation or in life in general.  It is a woman on a first date stepping into the coy flirtation of a "woman on a date."  It is a "Capricorn" or an "alcoholic" or a "middle child" or a "single mother" turning to these things as ready-made characters to play, essential parts on the stage of life with lines to read and marks to hit, rather than contingencies to grow beyond and rise above to see possibilities that are open to them.

There's a certain comfort in thinking that you can wake up in the morning and put on the uniform of a policeman or clock in as a waiter and find yourself consumed in the role.  You know your place.  You know what you need to do.  You try to assume a certain confidence that you'll do what needs to be done because you're a policeman, or because you're a waiter.  This is the comfort of Bad Faith.  It is the comfort of trying to escape the burden of maintaining the being of this policeman or this waiter, even the being of the orphan or the alcoholic, hoping instead that these things will sustain your being.  Once you strip away the waiter, the middle child, the Frenchman, the dyslexic hemophiliac, you find yourself staring into a most uncomfortable void.  You open the door and find no one there.  The problem is that that no one is you.  So we turn to Bad Faith rather than face this.

It's not easy being nobody, but there's freedom in being nobody, there's possibility.  Years and years before I ever heard of Sartre, I had long expressed my misgivings towards the growing trend of diagnosing teens and kids with all kinds of disorders like ADD and depression and so forth.  My feeling was that at such a young age, when these kids are still groping for an identity, they would take these diagnoses the wrong way.  They would treat them as something that they could hold onto, something that would define them, rather than something to be overcome.  Unfortunately, that trend has kept growing.  We may all fall back on that "perpetual game of excuses" from time to time, but we shouldn't be in such a hurry to indoctrinate our children in the church of Bad Faith.                             

The World (Reposted)

I originally wrote this piece for a project which Vincent and I were working on during this past summer.  I'm not sure how much sense it will make when taken out of the context of that project and all the strange metaphysical disputes Vincent and I were having, but I figured it might serve as something appropriate for Rachel Hoyt's latest sociology study which is on the theme of "doors & windows."  Anyway, it is what it is.  It's about the World.  I'm not sure how else to put it, so I'll just let it speak for itself.

It's Early Morning.  The light is just beginning to show in the sky outside my window.  A bird perched somewhere in the tree below greets the day with its delicate call.  Man has several names for this bird and this tree in various languages, and science has names for them in Latin which identify their genus and species.  I don't know these names, but then neither do the bird or the tree.  These names were not affixed to them by nature, but rather by man.  However, these names do identify genuine natural realities about them.  The words "bird" and "tree" signify them as something distinct from one another, and their particular names signify their distinctions from others of their type.  If it is a sparrow in the tree, we call it so in English because it possesses those attributes in common with birds of the type "sparrow", and in contrast to the attributes of another bird which we would call a "blue jay."  It has possessed these defining attributes for millennia before mankind affixed these attributes with the name "sparrow", for millennia before there even was such a thing as man, and it was certainly long, long before man began to be confused by himself and to doubt himself and to doubt the world and to ask, "Where is this 'sparrowness'?  Is it real?  Is it in the bird somewhere?  Could I find it if I cut the bird open?"  But the sparrow has gone on, simply being what it is, contently singing its unique song sung only by sparrows, oblivious to the sweet, simple, and breathtakingly obvious answer its providing to our question.

At this hour there is very little traffic passing by on the road below.  The road and the vehicles that travel on it are creations of man.  They were ideas conceived in the mind of man, and turned into physical realities by shaping and manipulating matter, giving it the form and function designed by the human mind.  These things stand as a testimony, as evidence of the co-operation between reality and the mind.  The matter involved behaves according to physical laws, and the people who designed these things were able to do so because they discovered these laws, they believed these laws, and they shaped the material involved in such a way that they would be able to use these laws to their advantage.  The car travels on the road because of the laws of motion, of thermodynamics, of combustion, and many more besides.  If these laws were simply the invention of man, or if they existed solely as a fantasy in the mind of man, or if they had no relation to physical reality outside the mind of man, then the matter involved in the car and road would behave completely indifferently to these laws.  They would slump like stubborn horses refusing to stir as man struggles at the reins of his desires.  They would sit rotting in a field as useless heaps of junk.  For they themselves are objects which lie outside the mind of man and beyond its direct control.  The fact that the car works stands as proof of the accuracy of man's concepts of these laws.  Like the bird and the tree, man has named these laws, man has studied these laws and formulated theories about them, man has designated them by the general word "laws" because of his confidence in his own ideas about them, but the functions and relationships between physical matter that they designate are genuine realities.  And again like the bird, these functions and relationships existed long before man discovered them, long before man existed.  "Nature", Francis Bacon said, "to be commanded, must be obeyed."  The car drives by as elegant proof of this.

As the car passes, its sound increases in pitch as it approaches me, and then abruptly switches to a low pitch as it goes by and speeds off in the other direction.  This is called "The Doppler Effect", and it is a peculiarity of my perception.  The sound of the vehicle never actually changes, but yet this effect is not entirely an illusion either.  It is a relationship between my ear, the speed of the vehicle relative to me, my position relative to the vehicle, and the compression and decompression of the sound waves as they travel the distance between the car and me.  There are a number of such peculiarities.  These are not delusions or unrealities, but rather consequences of my perspective on the world.  The way the information of the world reaches my senses and my mind is itself part of the world, and it too behaves natural law.  Like the Doppler Effect, these things can be discovered, scrutinized, and studied as part of the reality with which we all have to deal.

Sometimes these peculiarities have led man astray, and such an example is appearing now just over the trees.  In casual speech we still say the sun is rising, but by now it is common knowledge that the Earth is turning to meet the sun.  It is true that I have no first hand verification of this fact, and that I'm forced to take other people's word for it.  It is possible that mankind is in error about this "common knowledge", or that a vast number of people have lied to me about it all my life.  But when I consider the evidence that the human race as a whole claims to possess on the matter, my mind is set at ease on the issue of error.  When I consider the number of people that would have to be involved in a "lie", various world governments, various space programs, phone companies, GPS manufactures, astronomers...well, the list goes on....I'm persuaded to accept this "word" as honest in the face of the alternative.  I'm confronted frequently by such situations, most of them not as clear cut and easy to decide on.  I weigh the available information, consider the agendas of the source, consider its fidelity to other information, and consider how much internal sense it makes unto itself.  It may not be the most solid foundation to decide what one believes in, but given the limits of my own first-hand experience, it's the best that I can do if I hope to learn anything beyond the limits of my own life and the things that I personally witness.  I am not omniscient, nor do I claim to be, nor do I believe anyone else can claim to be.  It is always possible that I am mistaken, or that I have been misled.  But I believe that the truth is constant, irregardless of my wanderings.  I have seen Saturn through the lens of my own telescope, and I have seen that Venus has phases like our moon.  This is valuable corroboration of what I've been told, as well as an awe-inspiring experience.  There's nothing quite like seeing it for yourself.

Although I must occasionally rely on my fellow man for factual information, it is not through man that this information is fact.  Whatever the actual relationship between the sun and Earth, or the actual nature of anything else for that matter, the facts of these things exist without regard to whether they are known or believed by ten or ten million people.  I may rely on my fellow man in my belief that the world is round, but if the world is round, it is not out of respect to the opinions of men.  For thousands of years, man believed that the Earth was flat, and the world stayed round in absolute indifference to that belief.  When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by comparing a shadow made by the sun at Alexandria with a shadow made by the sun in Egypt, the truth of the round Earth was waiting there to be discovered, outside of the ignorance of man.  When Copernicus discovered that the Earth went round the sun, the rest of mankind was still in the dark, scratching their heads over retrograde motion.  If facts existed entirely through men, then the entire history of science would just be men making things up and then selling the rest of mankind on the idea in order to make it fact.  It was the evidence presented by Copernicus and Eratosthenes that changed the minds of man, not the minds of man which changed the evidence.  The power of consensus is in its persuasiveness, not in its control over reality.  How can I know this for sure?  Another car drives by, reminding me of the physical laws by which it operates, reminding me of man's cooperation with those laws as facts beyond themselves, reminding that the inventions of man have often worked in defiance of consensus and the general faith of the population.

If I decide to trust in my fellow man, not as the determiners of my reality, but rather as fellow travelers seeking to discover its true objective nature, then I am able to gaze with them beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy, and out to a distance of 14 billion light years in any direction.  This is not believed to be the limits of our universe, but it is the limit of what we can see.  We believe that this is so, because we believe that the universe came into being 14 billion years ago, and light from anywhere beyond that hasn't had time to reach us.  This last idea is bit controversial back here on Earth, it challenges what many other people believe, and leads to a lot of arguments along the frontiers of what we know, and what we are capable of knowing.  But like my sparrow, the universe goes on, placidly indifferent to the conflicts and confusion of man.  It is what is.  Whole stars are born and die out without man ever setting eyes on them, possibly without anyone ever setting eyes on them.  They burn just fine without the fuel of being seen.

So, this is the world as I find it.  My confidence in it begins with me, with my first-hand experience and with the rational conclusions that I have drawn from that experience.  I extend that confidence to the experiences, the explorations, the discoveries, and the ideas of my fellow man, depending on what degree I'm willing to trust them and how much I concur with their conclusions.  But I believe that the world out there beyond me and the facts of that world exist without regard for my confidence, or my confidence in my fellow man, or their own confidence in what they think they know.  I believe that the world out there is what it is regardless of what I think I know about it, or what anyone else thinks they know about it.  First-hand experience has convinced me of that much at least.  The world has demonstrated its constancy to me time and again.  I go to sleep, and reawaken and the world shows every evidence of having gone on steadily without my knowledge.  The world has cut me and bruised me many times to prove its solid existence.  It has often frustrated my efforts and at other times it has rewarded them in turn to demonstrate its indifference to my whims and wishes, and its obedience to my cooperation with its facts.

My understanding of the world begins here with me, in this room.  I can doubt the things I've been told about it.  I can doubt my own conclusions that I've drawn about it.  But I can not doubt the world itself.  I can not doubt the foundation of it, which begins for me with my immediate experience.  It could be said that I have no grounds for believing in this world, but yet I have no grounds for doubting it either.  The world itself transcends belief and doubt, because the grounds for those things have to be found in the world.

Suppose I do try to doubt the world.  I reject the world wholesale as it begins for me here in this room.  I try to flee from it through a door marked "doubt."  I find that this door opens onto this same room, and it returns me right back to the world, searching for the grounds with which to justify this doubt.  I dismiss this world as a dream, and again I try the door hoping it will return me to waking reality.  I find myself right back in this room facing the world which provides me with no evidence that I am asleep or that there is any "waking" world beyond this one.  I defiantly declare that the world is an illusion unto itself, and I flee again through the door, only to find myself dumped again on the solid floor of this room, the world showing me no distinction between physical matter and the illusion of physical matter.

As a thinking being, it is my privilege to keep insisting on trying that door for the rest of my life if I like, to perpetuate my attempt at doubt indefinitely, but I can not escape the fact that that door will always return me right back to this room.  It is not that I have grounds for believing in the world.  It is not that I have a reason to believe in the world.  It is simply that the world is inescapable.  My only choice is between the futility of trying that door over and over, or embracing the world as I find it, as it begins here with my immediate experience in this room.  Only by embracing the world can I leave this room, to explore it, to learn about it, to understand it, and to experience it.  

Collateral: The Things That Matter to Us

"Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?"

That line comes from Vincent, the coldly efficient hit man in the movie Collateral.  It's arrives at a pivotal point in the story, and it expresses Vincent's extremely nihilistic outlook in a simple and straightforward manner.  It's a clear-cut moral rationalization, and yet it has a sort of enticing logic to it.  It would seem that from a far enough perspective, and on a broad enough scale, that the problems of three little people really don't amount to a hill of beans.  Vincent's night of systematic elimination might seem brutal and tragic in close, human terms, but to him it's all "a speck on a blink."

This statement, however, leads to an unintended epiphany for Max, the cab driver which Vincent has coerced at gun-point into driving him around all night as he runs his "errands."  Max's epiphany and his subsequent actions reveal the fatal flaw in Vincent's philosophy.  Here he is declaring that nothing really matters on the grand cosmic scale, and yet all night long he has been using the things that matter to Max as leverage against him: his life, his mother, his job, his hopes and his dreams.  This blatant contradiction throws Max into a rage, and yet it also gives him the clarity to see through the things that have been holding him back in his life.  What Vincent takes as a nihilistic blank check that justifies murder, Max takes as a liberating affirmation that allows him to see the concerns that have been restraining him for the petty trivialities that they really are.  He takes Vincent's philosophy to its logical conclusion, jams on the gas, and flips the cab at full speed, nearly killing them both.  Perhaps Vincent would have been better off keeping his rationalizations to himself.

But Collateral, after all, really is Max's story.  Through-out the night we're given enough information to piece his life together.  He has been driving a cab for years, but he harbors a secret dream of someday owning his own limousine service.  "Island Limos", he calls it, and he grows somewhat wistful when he speaks of it, "You never want to the ride to end."  He says that he's just waiting to get enough money together, the right client list, ect., but there's a sense that underneath it all that the dream will stay a dream, and deep down Max fears that he'll spend the rest of his life driving the cab.  Vincent cuts immediately to the core of this fear and he needles Max relentlessly with it.  He taunts Max with it, rubs it in his face, because...well, maybe just because that's where Vincent's predatory mentality drives him.

Vincent arrives in Max's life like a walking personification of the kind of near-death experience that kicks someone out of the comfortable complacent place they've settled into.  He starts off as just another fare, but even then he's waving a wad of money in Max's face, asking him to bend the rules and chauffeur him around for the rest of the night.  Max reluctantly agrees, already a little out of his comfort zone.  When the first of Vincent's victims falls out of the night and lands on the windshield of Max's cab, he suddenly discovers exactly what kind of insanity he's gotten himself into here, and now there's far more than his cab license at stake.  His life itself is at risk, minute by minute, as Vincent turns his gun on him and tells him to get in the cab and drive.  It's the kind of thing that puts your life in perspective.

But Collateral is more than a movie about a man taking stock of his life in a dangerous situation.  It pivots on Vincent's philosophy.  For Vincent it is a bleak declaration of despair and meaninglessness.  For Max it is an awakening to the fact that his life is his to take control of, and make the most of.  In a pointless "speck on a blink" what does he have to lose?  Isn't "Island Limos" a small risk to take in the great scheme of things?  That's what Vincent is missing.  The things on this little speck matter, because they matter to the creatures living on this little speck.  Max sees liberation, because he cares about something, because he has a dream, and because he sees that the dream only matters because it matters to him, and it's up to him to do something about it.

By confronting us with a man who lives beyond the concerns of morality, who murders his victims with the cold efficiency of checking off a laundry list, Collateral propels us out there to that place beyond the galaxies and stars where it all becomes meaningless.  And then through Max, it draws us back to Earth with a renewed appreciation for the things we truly care about, and the fact that we alone give them meaning.  "Island Limos" might mean next to nothing on a speck of dust in limitless space, but it's Max's piece of that speck and it means something to him.  A powerful argument against Vincent's nihilism, and an elegant display of philosophy in action.  It's a deceptively simple movie that raises some complex issues.            

Sartre's Question (Act Three)

When Sartre speaks of the question, he is referring to more than just an interrogatory statement with a piece of punctuation fixed to its tail.  He is speaking of an attitude of uncertainty towards being.  Although this attitude may only occasionally be expressed through a literal, explicitly outright question, it is nearly always with us, close at hand.  It is a fundamental part of our relationship with being.  It is the glance elsewhere.  It is the grounds for proposing otherwise.  It is the nexus, the crossroads of our creativity, our imagination, and yes...our freedom.

If it were not for the question, our consciousness would coincide perfectly with our experience of being.  It would become absorbed completely by being.  I would only ever find the thirteen dollars in my wallet.  I would only ever encounter being at my door.  Without the question, nothingness would never enter the picture.  In fact, there would be no sense in which we could discuss what was and what was not in "the picture."  There would only be the picture, and us smiling serenely at it, our satisfaction completely exhausted in it.  Without being able to question the picture, we would have no means of proposing other possibilities.

In such a case, determinist causality would simply work its way through our actions like a run of dominoes.  There would be a knock at the door, and we would inevitably answer it without even so much as speculating about who might be on the other side.  Action and reaction, we would fall as just another link in the chain.  We would respond to being without any means of considering that response.  So, we begin to see that the question is more than just another domino in the run.  It disrupts the dominoes.  It says, "Hey, wait a minute.  What if...?"  It holds up the show.  When the knock comes and we say, "I wonder who that is.", we immediately put possibility and choice into play.  "I hope it's not Tom.  I don't really want to see Tom.  Maybe I shouldn't open the door.  Maybe it's Jill.  Maybe I should open it!"  Now we begin to see that the act isn't merely contingent on the knock, as simple action/reaction.  It becomes contingent instead on the question, the possibilities raised by it.  We search ourselves for the grounds on which to choose our answer, and we act on the basis of that choice.  We decide it's Jill.  We open the door.  We decide it's Tom.  We hide in the basement.

Suppose being doesn't leave us in suspense.  Suppose we peek out the window and see that it is Tom standing on our doorstep.  The questions still present themselves, "Do I really like Tom?  Do I want to deal with him right now?"  Suspense may arise on other levels.  "I wonder what he wants?"  Again, our actions become contingent on what questions we pose and how we answer them for ourselves.  And yet, there seems to be no contingency for the question itself.  Under determinism, the knock should simply provoke a response.  You'll answer it, or hide.  Raising doubts and dilemma places the subject in an ambivalent position, requiring choice.  Causality is a very strict, definite thing.  Cause leads inevitably to effect.  There's no room for ambivalence and uncertainty.  It cannot, as Sartre says, "contain the tiniest germ of nothingness."  The question, on the other hand, requires a break with being, a nihilating withdraw, a distance from being in order to gain perspective on it and consider it's possibilities.  This break cannot be provoked by being, because, by its very nature, it is a transcendence of being, and therefore also a transcendence of causality.

In the determinist view of the world, we see everyone going through the motions like so many figurines in a vast, complex toy that is wound with a single key.  Bills come in the mail, and people pay them or fail to pay them.  The ice cream truck rolls through the neighborhood and the kids catch it some days, and some days they don't.  You can stand back from it all and see that this gear turned this cog, and it's all an incredible display of interlocking order.  The question is completely superfluous to this process.  What purpose does the question serve when the outcome is certain and inevitable?  How would this endless trip of dominoes ever give rise to uncertainty?  It seems that the question can find no gainful employment in the lock-step world of causality.  In fact, it seems that consciousness itself is superfluous to the determinist model.  What does these figurines need with consciousness when all their actions are set in motion by the winding of the key?

But it's not that consciousness arises from the question, but rather the question arises from the nature of consciousness.  The withdraw from being puts us in this position of uncertainty.  It provides the breathing room necessary for the question to be asked.  Consciousness is not the apple, but rather an awareness of the apple.  Therefore it can take an attitude of uncertainty towards the apple.  It can transcend the apple and consider its possibilities.  Consciousness steps back and considers these possibilities from the far hill, and once again it's able to transcend them to further possibilities.  There is nothing between consciousness and the apple, and yet it is precisely this nothingness which provides consciousness with a certain amount of leg room in its relationship with being, what Sartre calls the "decompression" of being. Consciousness slips back, gains firm ground, and poses the question to being, and from the question determines its own destiny.

To be clear, I am not, nor do I believe is Sartre, suggesting that causality has no bearing what-so-ever on human actions.  Free will is a transcendence of causality, not an exemption from it.  We are driven by causality, rather than determined by it, just as hunger might drive a person to seek food, or even in extreme cases, has driven people to resort to cannibalism.  Circumstances pushed people to these desperate extremes where these possibilities presented themselves, but these possibilities arose out of their capacity to question.  "Can we live with this?  Is there some other way that we might get food?  Can we hold out until a rescue party arrives?"  The circumstances provided the occasion for these questions, but ultimately the choices were made on the basis of the questions themselves.  The knock at the door drives us with the necessity to make the choice, but the choice is ours to make.

In this disparity between being driven and being determined, lies a world of difference.  In the next, final, two posts in this series we will consider the concepts by which Sartre explores this difference and the rather curious chasm between consciousness and being.

A Brief Interlude Where I Literally Leave You Hanging

Imagine that there's a very large rock poised precariously on the edge of a precipice.  Tremors from an earthquake shake the ground beneath it just enough to dislodge it and send it falling to the ground far below where it shatters into several pieces.  This is causality in nearly its most elementary form; basic physical interaction, the shaking ground disturbs the rock and causes it to fall.  But let's suppose for a moment that this rock was equipped with retractable claws or hooks which could be deployed to anchor it and keep it from falling.  We see a possibility of saving the rock, but of course the rock doesn't see this.  It's just a piece of inert matter, incapable at any rate of deploying the claws itself.  So, unless a second chain of causality reaches the rock by another path, and some other physical force interacts with the rock, say a smaller rock falling against a button on the rock that deploys the claws, then the earthquake will dislodge the rock just as it did before, and it will again fall and shatter.

Clearly this is a rock in need of a fighting chance.  The claws alone aren't going to do it much good without the means to deploy them.  So let's equip our trusty rock with a certain basic level of consciousness, say an animal consciousness, one that relies on instinct rather than intelligence.  We'll assume for the moment, hypothetically, that it's incapable of transcending these instincts.  Now the rock possesses its own internal means of deploying the claws, but it can only do so on the basis of its instincts, and unfortunately it's instincts only drive it to use the claws as a defense mechanism in the presence of dangerous predators.  So, unless there's a predator in the area when the earthquake strikes, the tragedy will unfold just as did before.  We've graduated to a more complex level of causality, but it is still causality nevertheless.

I'd say we've increased the rock's odds of survival to some degree.  Rather than relying on a small object to hit a certain exact spot on the rock, now all we need is a wild animal in the vicinity.  Still, it seems that the rock's survival is out of its hands, and beyond its control.  It needs a little something more to give it an edge.  So, instead of just consciousness, we're going to give it human intelligence as well.  Now the rock has the means to appreciate the predicament it's in.  When the earthquake hits, it should be able to take matters into its own hands...or claws...or hooks...or whatever.

When the quake hits this time, the rock is now capable of understanding the alternatives it faces: to hold on or to fall, to live or to die.  The question provides it with the means of understanding this, by enabling it to split the outcome into different possibilities which it can choose between.  So it deploys its claws and chooses life.  Seems like a fairly easy choice; one might even be tempted to call it an inevitable one, having every appearance of causality behind it.  The rock desires to live, therefore it chooses to hold on.  Simple as that.  But as the quake goes on, and the rock grows tired and weary, another desire comes into play: the desire to let go.  It grows in intensity with every passing second.  The choice the rock faces is a perpetual one, and the alternative begins to look more and more appealing.  It goes from alluring to downright seductive; a moment of sweet relief, then pain, and then the ordeal will be over.  Meanwhile, the desire to live is still there as well, burning like a desperate, ragged thirst.  But then there's the rock itself, not the physical thing perched on the edge of the precipice, but the consciousness which we endowed the rock with.  It views these conflicting desires as though from an eye of calmness in a chaotic storm.  It is not the the desire to live.  It is not the desire to let go.  It is...something else, something which is aware of these desires, something which can consider them as objects, something which can question them and consider their possibilities.  In short, it is something with a will of its own to choose between them.  So the rock chooses to live, and it throws the full weight of its will behind this desire, fanning it like a flame, and that will extends from the core of its consciousness all the way out to the tip of its claws which it digs in tighter with an even deeper resolve.  

But wait.  Surely, you say, there must be some causality behind this will, something which determines it to throw itself towards the desire to live with such abandon.  Ah, but you're forgetting that the choice is a perpetual one, and the struggle goes on.  Now, only a fraction of a moment later, the rock isn't the thing which threw itself behind the desire to live.  It is an awareness of this thing, and as such it can consider it, question its motives.  The rock is in control now, and it may even flirt with the desire to let go, loosening its grip ever so slightly, enticed by that thought of sweet relief.  Fortunately, the rock isn't the thing flirting with the desire to let go.  It's an awareness of that flirtation, and it can second guess it, and question the reasons behind its moment of weakness.  It renews its resolve and its fast grip.  But the rock isn't the thing that renewed it's resolve either.  The struggle goes on, and consciousness continually slips away, perpetually faced with the choice.  Second by second it has to choose to live all over again, and it constantly has to re-evaluate the reasons for making the choice.  The thing controlling the claws can not be locked down securely with causality.  It keeps falling back behind cause, splitting it into possibilities with the incredible fission of the question.  This may not lead to an atomic detonation, but it results in something every bit as cataclysmic.  It opens a tiny point of nihilation, releasing the "worm coiled in the heart of being", and providing the opportunity for Free Will.                      

Sartre's Question (Act Two)

At this point you may be wondering, "If it all comes down to our ability to question, then why this circuitous route through consciousness and nothingness?  Why even bother with Sartre to begin with?"  A fair question.  Well, as I said in the previous post, determinism builds its case entirely on the basis of causality.  So, any argument that wishes to challenge determinism must begin by establishing some human capacity to transcend causality.  Since free will is such a powerful intuition to us, we're almost tempted to argue this transcendence of the basis of free will itself.  It's tempting to push through out of frustration and declare, "But our actions obviously proceed from choices!"  However, since determinism refuses to grant credibility to this intuition and regards it as a delusion, then we're faced with a bootstrap problem where we're arguing free will on the basis of free will.  So, it becomes necessary to find some other foundation for this transcendence.  Sartre turned to the nature of consciousness itself, and began building from there.

Trying to argue a transcendence of causality is no easy task.  Causality is one of the most fundamental principles of science.  The idea of something being beyond or exempt from causality strikes some as a sort of voodoo or mysticism.  It strikes some as an appeal to the superstitious.  This is why the determinist tends to feel that they have science and logic on their side.  They reason that since causality has provided us with a better, more rational, explanation of the workings of nature, then it seems to follow that it would also provide us with a clearer understanding of how human beings work as well.  Their mistake, I believe, is in their assumption that causality is an unlimited commodity, a remedy for whatever ails you, applicable to any situation.

Consider a volcano.  Ages ago, when a volcano erupted, people took it as the explosive wrath of the gods.  Then science revealed to us the truth about tectonic plates, the molten rock in the Earth's core, and so on, and the superstitious explanation gave way to the causal explanation.  It was not the manifestation of a living being's wrath, but rather the blind forces of matter interacting with one another like the cogs and gears of a machine.  Or consider disease.  People once took it as punishment from a vengeful deity, displeased with their sinful existence.  Then science eventually discovered that it was caused by the spread of bacteria, and again the causal explanation dethroned the superstitious one.  Or finally consider the sun itself.  Long, long, ago people believed it was being driven across the sky by a divine charioteer.  Our ideas about the sun have undergone many transformations since then, but these days causality has expunged nearly every trace of the divine from our magnanimous fire in the sky.  It burns at the expense of its own nuclear power, rather than at the whim of any god.

My more quick witted readers may begin to see a common theme emerging here.  In all of these cases, prior to the causal explanation being given, these things were all ascribed to the will of a conscious being.  In other words, as explanations go, causality is an alternative to consciousness.  It stems the anthropomorphic tide.  It keeps us from projecting our own nature onto inanimate matter.  It grants us a means of understanding the mechanisms of non-conscious things.  This is how causality has gained its reputation as the exorcist of superstition.  The determinist has grossly confused the matter.  Rather than understanding that the superstition lies in ascribing a free will to things which don't possess it, the determinist has concluded that free will itself is a superstition.  The determinist says, in effect, "Well, we've outgrown the notion that earthquakes are controlled by something with a mind of it own, now we should outgrow the notion that a human body is controlled by something with a mind of its own."  You know...for science.

A compelling argument, I know.  Thank you.  But yet it's still not quite enough to completely establish free will, although I feel it does get determinism on the ropes at least.  Arguing for free will takes more than just undermining determinism.  It has to be established in own right.  And it's going to take more than just declaring that our ability to question transcends causality.  In fact, I suspect that some people may be largely unimpressed by that proposition.  If I had led with that, or I simply left this proposition from the last post to stand without further explanation, I would hardly consider it a compelling argument against determinism in its own right.  It requires further qualification.  It requires further explanation.  It needs to be tied in with Sartre's concepts of consciousness and nothingness, so that a complete picture might emerge.  This will be the goal of my next post.

(...to be continued.)                   

Sartre's Question (Act One)

When we first began this little existential adventure, I briefly mentioned the basic rudiments of the theory of determinism.  I said at the time that the theory seemed to be missing something, but that it was hard to put my finger on exactly what that was.  Well, I think that perhaps the time has come to go back and take a closer look at determinism, and see if we can't pinpoint the problem, and having perhaps pinpointed the problem, see how this all relates to Sartre's concepts which we have established thus far.

Determinism proceeds on the basis of causality.  Any human act, the theory argues, can be traced back to a cause, to which the action is the effect.  The theory draws on any number of sources for these causes, genetics, environment, condition & response, biology, and so on.  The particular recipe of these combinations of causes may vary, but it is the principle of causality which ties it all together.  Place any action under consideration, and a cause can be found for it, having every appearance of inevitability, and seeming to leave little room for the concept of choice.  If we shop at a certain store, it's because the store is the closest, or has the cheapest prices.  If we refuse to ride on an airplane, this can be traced back to factors of conditioning, childhood trauma, possibly even genetic makeup.  If we like a certain food, prefer a certain movie, listen to a certain type of music, the determinist is right there, ready to dissect the entire thing back to its causal antecedents.  Behind the "illusion" of choice there lies at every turn a cause which led us step by step along the path with no possibility of deviation.

We can certainly admire the thoroughness of determinism.  It leaves no stone unturned, and it's always there to trump free will with a causal explanation.  In fact, it's so comprehensive, that it seems almost like stubbornness and wishful thinking to try to resist it.  It provides a complete map of human behavior with everything accounted for.  Or so it seems.  There's still that nagging sense that something is missing.  Pressed for an answer we might say that this automaton proposed by determinism just seems so...mindless.  But what do we mean by that?  Certainly determinism provides for the fact that we have thoughts and passions and dreams.  It admits to the appearance of making choices; it just insists that there are strings underlying these choices, determining the outcome in advance.  It admits to our thoughts and passions; it just insists that these were preprogrammed in advance by factors behind our control.

So, where is this mindlessness?  Determinism leaves us with a thinking, feeling human being.  It's just that it leaves us with no control over what we think, feel, and do.  This is the part that seems wrong.  This is the part where something seems to be missing.  The determinist tries to assure us that we're merely holding on to our preconceived delusions of free will, but no...there's something really off here.  We look at this determinist automaton and we sense some fundamental lack of something we find in ourselves.  What is it?  The determinist insists that we stop questioning it, and learn to accept it.  And that's when it hits us.  That's what the automaton is missing: the ability to question; the ability, as it's being swept through these various illustrations on a river of a causality, to stop and turn and look up at us from the page and quietly ask, "why?"  It's missing that little vital spark.  That's what we mean when we say that it's mindless.

Let's take another look at our determined human being, and just consider one of the examples of determined behavior: which store we shop at.  If we look very closely, we begin to see that determinism has worked a certain sleight of hand here.  It has robbed its automaton of the ability to ask the questions, "Which store should I shop at?  Why?  Do I want to save money or stay close to home?  What matters most to me in my life?"  It has posed these questions implicitly, provided the answers in advance, given the appeal of these answers the weight of causality, and sent its automaton off to the store without further objection.  It does this time and again.  Everything it credits to cause implies a question asked, an answer provided, and an action taken on the basis of it, all without giving the automaton a say in the matter.  The alcoholic isn't allowed to ask, "Why must I have this drink?"  The business man is rendered incapable of standing back in wonder and asking, "What is the true value of money?"  Determinism prods us continually with the stick of causality and denies us the ability to turn around, to consider it, to question it, and in this questioning, to decide how to react and deal with it.

Determinism doesn't, of course, deny that we ask questions.  It just tries to sweep them under the rug of causality, along with everything else.  But if you press the matter, you find that it's not quite so simple.  You can pull the puppet's strings and walk him down to the store and back, but it's hard to imagine what string you would pull that would lead the puppet to question the sense and meaning of it all.  What string do you pull to make the puppet ask, "Why must I be driven by these strings?"  Once you give the automaton the ability to question, you've opened a real can of worms.  An automaton that asks why at every opportunity is really no kind of automaton at all.

You can try, as determinism does, to claim that these "why's" originate from a sub-routine in the automaton's programming, but these "why's" eventually transcend the program.  They have the ability to stand back from the program as a whole, and consider it as a subject does an object.  They slip away from any attempt by the program to contain them.  The automaton breaks loose and runs free.  The causalities of being try to hold it, but the question allows the automaton to distance itself from being, to place it under consideration, to break the link by link chain of causality.  Suddenly, this is all starting to sound quite familiar, isn't it?

(...to be continued.)