What am I?

Last night I wrote this post twice. The first time I lost my internet connection not long after I started. Thus, there was no autosave function and once I hit publish it went to a new screen, losing the old one without it ever going anywhere. But rather than go into a fit of anger and frustration at technology I was instead filled with a cold-hearted determination to recover the entire damn thing from memory. This is what I churned out in the half an hour that followed. Sadly, the argument does not feel as tight as in the first draft. But that may be because I was only more aware after making it a second time and becoming more attuned to its problems. Ten points to anybody who can figure out what's nagging me that I can't put my finger on.


I was reading some pretty funky stuff on Academic Search Premier (God bless my still- active Earlham library account) when a rather strange thought in my head. This post is the explication of that thought. It concerns the possibility of free choice. But I do not want to pick sides in the free will-determinism debate. That would be rather…well…lame. Instead I will explore the experience of being a freely willing I and the conditions that make that possible. Perhaps it will help me understand what I am.

“I have made choices in the past and will continue to do so in the future.” This is the manifesto of the freely choosing I. At first glance it appears obvious. But open closer examination its basic assumptions turn upon themselves with such strength that it’s a bit of a wonder the experience of freedom remains intact all the while.

On the one hand to be an I is to be a unity that gathers together and fuses a multiplicity of singular moments. Once together they form a temporal sequence, a unified field that cuts across variations in time and place. Insofar as their I-ness is concerned, each moment is equal. They all partake on a level plane of the I that unites them. In this way, a person distinguishes oneself from things. I alone am conscious. I am different. My existence transcends my immediate presence and extends outward into past and future. Across time, I am the same I.

But on the other hand, that sameness and continuity can be the very failure of a person to distinguish oneself from mere, inanimate things. In this model to be human is to be able a choose between a multiplicity, to determines one’s own destiny in one direction rather than another, and by extension to make changes to oneself. After all, we are the choices we make. To fail to determine one’s own destiny is to be stripped of his or her humanity and to become a mere function of who or whatever does. Everyone has experienced this in one limited circumstance or another, as a slab of meat in a hospital bed, a sex-object exploited for another’s pleasure, or an assembly line worker whose occupation is to be little more than a carbon-based robot. In such situations a cold indifferent unity is projected upon one’s existence. The fork in the road is erased, and replaced with the bare necessity of a straight path. To change oneself and one’s surroundings in such contexts is not an option. But to do so is the very means by which one distinguishes oneself from mere things. To establish one’s freedom of choice is to cut against the unity of necessity and choose one path over others. It is to establish oneself as an empty and surging contingency in the space between a multiplicity of options. If there was only one option then there could be no space to insert oneself, only the overbearing presence of destiny.

So, on the one hand, to be a freely choosing I requires a unity for its very constitution. This is what makes consciousness rise above the singular nothings of which it is formed or are immediately present as things set before us in experience. But on the other hand if I am to be in control of my destiny there must be a possibility of change in myself, and thus of violation to that unity. One must be situated between a multiplicity of options so as to surpass the dead unity of thingness. To choose is to tie off the unity of the already-is so as to open up the new reality of the just-now. To be an I requires that one bridge the gap between these two moments, while the reality of that choice depends upon the substantiality of their difference. To be a freely choosing I requires both a unity and a fracturing of that unity, opening the space for choice between the multiple.

“I have made choices in the past and will continue to do so in the future.” Caught between the one and the multiple, the necessary and the contingent the freely choosing I is a far odder terrain than at first imagined.