{"id":3140,"date":"2020-05-15T16:49:17","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T16:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/15\/credo-2\/"},"modified":"2020-05-15T16:49:17","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T16:49:17","slug":"credo-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/15\/credo-2\/","title":{"rendered":"CREDO: Agency and Spectatorship"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether or not God and the soul are real, and whether or not this life has any final meaning, we are free to live as if they are and as if it does.  And this is how we ought to live. We can go around and around on the Big Questions, and to do so is a way of honoring the seriousness of life and of living at the highest pitch possible; but we will achieve no satisfactory result on the theoretical plane. Reason is weak and its conclusions are inconclusive.  God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. The same goes for the objectivity of morality and every other question on the far side of the quotidian, including the question of the freedom of the will.<\/span><\/p>\n

The freedom of the will is proven, in the only way it can be proven, by an act of will, by descending from the theoretical to the practical plane. And then the theoretical question becomes moot: to act is to demonstrate practically the freedom to act. To act is to act freely.  The freedom of the will in the pregnant sense as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae<\/em> is a presupposition of action. So act, and verify<\/em>, in the sense of make true, the presupposition.<\/span><\/p>\n

By acts of will we de-cide what to believe and what to do. By de-ciding, we cut off<\/em> reflection which, left to itself, is interminable. After due consideration, I WILL accept this and I WILL reject that; I WILL live according to my best lights, dim and flickering as they may be, for as long as I can and as best  I can, all the while continuing the search for truth on the theoretical plane.  I WILL NOT allow doubts to undermine decisions arrived at in moments of of high existential clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n

"But can't one still ask whether the will is really<\/em> free?" You can, but then you are abandoning the point of view of the agent for the point of view of the  spectator. Mirabile dictu<\/em>: we are both actors and spectators. We both march in, and observe, life's parade.  <\/span>How is that possible? How integrate our subjective freedom and our objective determination? A nut that cannot be cracked at the level of theory can only solved at the level of praxis.<\/span><\/p>\n

RELATED:<\/span><\/p>\n

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whether or not God and the soul are real, and whether or not this life has any final meaning, we are free to live as if they are and as if it does.  And this is how we ought to live. We can go around and around on the Big Questions, and to do so … Continue reading “CREDO: Agency and Spectatorship”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572,503],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency-and-spectatorship","category-credo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}