Following up on yesterday's post about José Ortega y Gasset on personal destiny, here are some related thoughts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty on personal freedom (excerpted from his essay "Cézanne's Doubt"):
We can only see what we are by looking ahead of ourselves, through the lens of our aims, and so our life always has the form of a project or of a choice and therefore seems spontaneous. But to say that we are from the start our way of aiming at a particular future would be to say that our project has already stopped with our first ways of being, that the choice has already been made for us with our first breath.... If there is a true liberty, it can only come about in the course of our life by going beyond our original situation and yet not ceasing to be the same: this is the problem. Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, since, looking back on what we were, we can always find hints of what we have become.
It seems to me that this tension between looking back and looking ahead is inherent in the human condition; it's also part of what I was getting at in my post a few weeks ago about thinking in six directions. No one perspective - in this context, neither that of the complete spontaneity of one's future nor that of the complete determination of one's past - can do justice to the complex experience of moving along the path of life. And that's a good thing: if life were simple, it'd also be awfully boring, wouldn't it?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION