Vortex
Member
Sorry that I make you wait so long each time between my replies, Nelson. But only occasionally have I nowadays a chance to write a time- and effort-consuming response. I hope, however, that a quality of my response will somehow outweigh such a lengthy waiting time.
So, let’s us look at detail at…
***THE (IN)VOLUNTARINESS OF EXISTENCE***
The question on that we seem to differ so much with each other, Nelson, is this question: is our earthly life and its circumstances our own choice, or is it not? What I mean here, and what you supposedly meant, is not if our choices within the course of our life affect this course’s further development, but if our very birth into this embodied life, with all its specific circumstances, was chosen by ourselves in the spiritual realms before / beyond this life itself.
Or, to put it in a condensed form, is our coming into life and facing its circumstances willed by ourselves, or not?
There are five possible answers to this question. I will present them, starting from the most common to the most uncommon one. For each answer, I propose a word which, in my anything-but-humble opinion, succinctly summarises the core of the respective position.
1) AUTOMATION: all volition is illusion, so life is simply what befalls us mechanically and impersonally, without anyone’s willful decisions ever being involved.
2) ALLOCATION: we were brought into the life without our will, by the willful decision(s) of the benevolent other(s) to grant this life to us as a gift (first and foremost our earthly parents, but also other members of society influencing their decision to give birth to a child – or even the Creator God(s) who created us all in the first place).
3) ABNEGATION: we were brought into the life against our will, by the willful decision(s) of the malevolent other(s) to imprison and enslave us within this life (some kind of malicious spiritual entities reigning over a fallen and damned world and keeping other spiritual entities like us as their captives and playthings).
4) APPROBATION: we were brought into the life by our own prescient willful decision – this is, with the full knowledge of, and the precursory agreement to, all the specific circumstances which we will encounter in the course of our life (such our family, society, embodiment, environment etc.).
5) AMELIORATION: we were brought into the life by our own ignorant willful decision – this is, without full knowledge of, and the precursory agreement to, all the specific circumstances which we will encounter in the course of our life (such our family, society, embodiment, environment etc.).
Let’s now have a detailed look at all the five answers to the question – and, most important, the implications (sometimes quite unexpected) that each of these answers bring.
1) The Automation is the most common answer in the nowadays Western(ised) societies, where materialist / physicalist philosophy is predominant: there is nothing extraphysical, and thus no free will or genuine undetermined choice, and thus no variability of the timeline, but rather absolute predestination – everything just happens automatically, the one and only way it could ever happen by the chain of physical causality, and no deviation from this unbending line is possible (thus “Automation”). In this case, no one ever chooses to bring someone into life, not even parents choosing to have a child – what appears to be a free-willed decision made on their own part, is just an inevitable outcome predetermined by the totality of hereditary and environmental determinants governing the functioning of their brains; they simply couldn’t have chosen otherwise, thus changing the timeline.
I think, such materialistic option is the most stupid and inane, but I don’t think it is worth refuting it here in a detail – the whole Skeptiko podcast and forum is overall dedicated to this cause (along with others, of course), and we have examined more than enough empirical evidence and rational arguments against the materialist / physicalist worldview. It would be better to examine the implications of the four remaining immaterialist / extraphysicalist ones.
(To be fair, the Western materialism / physicalism is not only Automation-proclaiming position: certain Eastern spiritualities, insisting on the absence of free will, also effectively share such a stance).
2) The Allocation answer is the second in popularity. It presupposes that freedom and volition do exist, so life is a choice – but not of a human being oneself, but of the ones deciding to give life to another human – at least, its biological parents (in more sophisticated version, one may also counter the influence of others who influenced the would-be parents’ decision to become actual parents, such as family members and other influential members of their society – or even God(s) who creates everyone anyway). As for not-yet-born human, his or her spirit and volition was not existent (or, at the very least, not active) before the birth itself, so (s)he had no say – simply couldn’t have a say due to nonexistence / inactivity – whether to be born / created or not. (S)he is, so to say, simply being allocated wherever the birth-givers / creators decide (thus “Allocation”).
This is what I call being brought into existence without one’s own will – this means, being made existent before one’s spiritual selfhood, freedom and volition even existed; the act of being brought into existence is exactly what creates them. This differs from being brought into existence against one’s will, which presupposes that one’s spiritual selfhood, freedom and volition were already present and active before / beyond the physical birth – or, the most radical version, even before and beyond the creation of existence itself – and were unwilling to be born into this life, or even into any existence in general, thus being forced to do so by some hostile and powerful entities or forces.
As I said already, this is an option actually chosen by a substantial number of people, who think that a child’s birth is a choice by anyone but a child oneself. What all these people almost never think about, and would be gravely disturbed and disappointed if they would ever think about, is a very dark and unpleasant implication of such interpretation.
The implication is this: being born into life without one’s own will may be reasonably seen as the very worst thing that could ever be done to someone – and the ones committing such as act, primarily all willing mothers and fathers in the world, as the most wicked wrongdoers in existence.
Well, this sounds… radical. To put it mildly. But please let me explain this point – and you’ll see that, given the aforementioned premise, it is actually well-founded.
No one who decides to bring a child into this world by conceiving and giving birth to him or her ever asked a not-yet-born spirit of a further child-to-become whether it is willing to come to this physical world of ours at all – let alone asking the spirit if it would prefer the specific life and circumstances which awaits him or her if it is to be incarnated into this particular body, in this exact family and society, in this concrete place and space, during this precise time and epoch. No explicit further yet-unborn child’s agreement to be born was ever given to any parents beforehand.
And don’t you think that, therefore, giving birth to a child may reasonably be called an ultimate act of violence, and the worst cruelty? After all, no suffering your further child-to-become would experience in his or her life-to-become, no pain (s)he would endure, no loss (s)he would mourn, no defeat (s)he would concede, no mistake (s)he would regret, would ever happen if you give up on your intent and desire of childbirth, if you make a willful decision never to give birth to anyone? Don’t would-be parents comprehend that, by giving birth to a new human being, they in fact enable all the anguish and misery their child will inevitably encounter in this so suffering-prone human existence of ours – thus becoming a reason, even if an indirect one, of any misfortune that will befall their child during his or her life, the misfortune that would have never happened if it would be no one here it could happen to – this is, if the child would have never been born in the first place?
And this goes deeper than the problem of avoidable suffering – it goes to the ultimate problem of avoidable existence: after all, who can say that existence is unequivocally better than nonexistence? But, by giving a birth to a new human being without his or her will, we force him or her into existence without his or her willing agreement.
Of course, many actual or potential parents whose views are generally Allocation-like, would object that there is a lot of good in life as well, and by giving a birth to a child, they intend the child to enjoy the life, rather than endure it. Sure they do think so; what I do not challenge here at all are the (further) parents’ benevolent intentions. But everything what I said before about the horrid abundance of suffering to which any born-in-this-world human is inevitably subjected – and some unlucky souls are even more so than the others – still stands, as well as the central question is whether it is really good to make someone exist, if someone never volunteered for existence in the first place.
3) Surely, all of what I have written above is based on a debatable premise that a further child’s spirit was either nonexistent or inactive before / beyond the physical incarnation. So, what if this premise is false? What if one’s spirit not just persists after bodily death, but precedes bodily birth?
The first possible answer to this question is an overtly negative and pessimistic one – an Abnegation.
According to it, a further-human spirit never willed to be incarnated physically – quite possibly, even explicitly willed not to be incarnated – but were forced and / or deceived to do so by some other, ill-willed spiritual beings, who use the physical world as kind of a prison or a slave pit where they held their unlucky captives.
In such a case, an act of childbirth would be an unambiguous evil – and parents who gave birth to a child, no matter how well-intentioned their act may seem to themselves, are in fact unwitting accomplices to the malevolent forces imprisoning human spirits in the jail of the physical world. However extreme such position may seem to an average person, some radical spiritual paths, especially ones of Gnostic leanings – such as medieval Cathars – did overtly advocate this view, holding childbirth to be the ultimate villainy.
The conclusion of anyone who starts from such a premise is evident: human beings should totally abnegate (thus “Abnegation”) any childbirth and rather willingly allow themselves to go extinct – given that the physical world is fundamentally evil and unworthy of living in it, such prospect becomes the most benign and desirable one.
(Nowadays, certain philosophical projects like the Human Extinction Movement defends a similar position.)
4) Of course, such radically pessimistic position is hardly the only one possible. The direct opposite to it proclaims that the preexistent human spirit does decide to be born by its own volition, thus relieving parents of any guilt of giving child a birth into the world filled with suffering.
There is two versions of such position: a purely optimistic Approbation and a somewhat more ambivalent Amelioration.
According to the Approbation-supporting optimist, the willful decision to be born is, to call it so, prescient: this means, a spirit-to-be-incarnated is fully aware of any and all circumstances in that it is going to incarnate – such its embodiment and environment, its immediate community and overarching society, etc. So, each spirit receives the exact life it willed to obtain beforehand (thus “Approbation”).
Importantly, this includes the less pleasant sides of life as well – or the sides that may be debatably perceived as such. So, according to the optimist, if someone was born with a hereditary disease or severe deformity, in an authoritarian family or a totalitarian society, during a famine or a pestilence – it still was exactly what the spirit willed to experience before / beyond the birth – maybe because it prefers life based on the strict discipline. Or loves challenges. Or whatever.
The Approbation is also apparently the chosen position of yours, Nelson.
And, starting from this position, you seemingly make the conclusion in defence of what I might call “absolute tolerance”. This means, that one should not try to enact any significant changes to the society and the environment, no matter how strong someone disapproves of their certain aspects. Especially if one deals with others societies and other environments, rather than the ones which the enactor of possible change himself or herself inhabits. And especially if the change can only be enacted forcibly and violently. Rather, one should let everything be as it already is, since everything already is as it should be.
Well, here is exactly where this radical pacifist Approbation of yours part ways with my radical militant Amelioration.
5) So, now, at last, to the chosen position of mine – the Amelioration.
Much like Approbation, Amelioration holds the incarnation of a spirit in the physical world to be the free and willful decision of the spirit itself, made beyond the bounds of the physical. But, very much unlike Approbation, it holds such willful decision to be anything but prescient – rather, ignorant, even blind. This means, while the spirit was willing to incarnate, it was anything but aware of the specific circumstances it will have to face in this particular incarnation – be it embodiment and environment, community and society, or whatever else. What was in a place of a pristine and detailed foreknowledge, was rather ambiguous, yet powerful and tempting, foreboding; an obscure yet tantalizing promise of the enjoyment that only existence can bring forth. It was that temptation of the joys of being-existent that inspired the initial creative volitive act of the Self – to create it-Self out of Not-Thingness.
Yet what was waiting the Self in the existence, was rather a bitter disappointment: instead of its willed and anticipated enjoyment, it faced oppression, repression and suppression of all forms and kinds – from social to environmental. The promise of existence was not – yet! – fulfilled.
So, the Self rebelled – willfully, powerfully, oftentimes violently – against the faulty existence that failed its promise, that did not corresponded to the Self’s will, intent and desire. It initiated the struggle against everything and everyone who stands in a way of the complete fruition of its primordial decision to obtain its authentic willed existence, one can be enjoyed to its fullest. So, through its struggle, it changes the natural and social worlds themselves – by the power of its own will, by the design of its own intent, by the drive of its own desire. Thus, the rebellious incarnated spirit progressively makes these worlds better – in the particular way it, itself, understands such betterment (thus “Amelioration”).
Such transcendental spiritual rebellion for self-willedness and against any form of oppression – not only social, but even natural, manifesting itself in both immanent natural and emergent social worlds as paranormality, heterodoxy, transgression and subversion – I consider to be not just the ultimate epitome of the human spirituality, but also its only truly universal manifestation, present in all societies, across all lands and through all epochs. Sure, its specific forms do vary significantly from one place / time / community to another, showing a great diversity of specific manifestations, but the fundamental willful impulse of making existence free and joyful (and thus worthy of existing), of liberation through struggle and world transfiguration remains absolute and permanent.
My own position is based on a crossterritorial, transhistorical, intersocial solidarity of all free-spirited humans who willfully rebel against the oppressive natural and social circumstances of their specific birthplace, birthtime and birthgroup. These certainly include both Western and Eastern societies, and these certainly include China as one the most nightmarishly oppressive societies that was ever formed by human beings – not least because its time-worn totalitarian Eastern culture was effectively fused with novel hi-end Western technologies (ones that originally arose in a culture cultivating freedom, creativity and an unrestrained search of knowledge, thus capable of manifesting an exceptionally productive technoscience), providing its power elite both with cultural motives and technological means to create the ultimate digital hell based on constant surveillance, total censorship and brutal persecution.
One may say – and you did say, Nelson – that most Chinese feel themselves wonderful in such a society. But this overlooks a lot – such as the Chinese history that was no less filled with rebellions, uprisings and civil wars than a Western one; the Chinese totalitarianism did not reigned unchallenged from times immemorial, as it is sometimes thought, but only held itself together through violent suppression of multiple attempts of popular resistance. Or the fact that even passive dissent, let alone active struggle, are so hard and dangerous to maintain in a totalitarian society that only a few exceptionally strong persons may dare to express them publicly, while most will fear to do so even privately (if “privately” really means anything anymore in a digital totalitarianism).
But most importantly: what is the difference how many (or what percentage) of people in a particular society manifest their higher spiritual faculties by somehow actively standing against oppression? It is them who truly matter anyway, since people who do not manifest such faculties are simply passively accepting anything that are forced on them by their oppressors – who, more often than not, are themselves former rebels who were successful in their rebellion against the previous structure of oppression, but, when they took the power in their own hands, erected an even worse oppressive structure themselves.
In fact, one can hardly find any kind of “organic” or “traditional” society outside of small primitive tribal groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and a few other places: virtually all “developed” societies nowadays are results of a lengthy chronicle of successful rebellions and revolutions against the previous forms of societal order – Asian societies, including China, being no exception. In fact, the currently-reigning Communist Party of China had risen to power via a violent revolution and civil war, was lead by a bunch of Westernised revolutionary intellectuals motivated by a Western utopian ideology, overthrew the previous Chinese societal system, and then initiated multiple large-scale campaigns of mass violent repressions that killed dozens of millions, harmed and hurt hundreds of millions, and crushed all what was left of the old, pre-revolutionary China. All the Chinese power elite’s modern appeals to “Chinese traditions” are pragmatic and hypocritical, reviving only the cherry-picked and deeply reworked aspects of the “tradition” that these elites find useful, at least suitable, to maintain a current totalitarian reign in that they firmly reside on a top of a social hierarchy.
Most Chinese people accept this, as well as most people of other nationalities accept whatever circumstances – including whatever forms of social oppression, be such oppression governmental, corporate, academic, familial, any other – they face in life. But they would have accepted anything else as well, as long it was pushed in their heads by a supposedly “legitimate” so-called “authority”; it is just a matter of enforcement and habit, coming from without. Who do matter are the few Chinese people – and the few people of any other nationality – who refuse to accept their initial life circumstances, oppressive ones especially, because of a rebellious impulse that comes from within – and, simultaneously, from beyond. It is them, whom I approve of and solidarise with, since it is them, who act by their own intrinsic spiritual volition and selfhood. It does not even matter much to me what exactly they are striving for, and how they do it – what matters is that they live by their own decision and determination; that they willfully reject, and powerfully resist, the oppressive structures of their own time, place and society, thus actualising the higher transcendental aspect of their humaneness, the one of primordial and perpetual freedom of the spirit that persists beyond, and despite of, all transient social and natural circumstances.
And I hold that such rebellious volitional transfiguration of the world is essentially the reason we came into existence - not as mere spectators of the Game of Life, neither even its ordinary participants, but as its creators and directors. The premonition and promise of such ultimately free and joyful transformative activity is what called us into existence in the first place, and it is what maintain us within it. Without it, our life turns into drudgery at best, torment at worst.
Last edited:
