Freedom vs Destiny

It seems to me that some of us are more guided by a mode of living that is more geared to destiny or fate than freedom. What is the connection between the narrative sense, having a coherent history, and fate vs living moment-to-moment, making "free" decisions, but only in an ahistorical almost dream like state of freedom? This type of freedom seems analagous with me to spirit. And a quote comes to mind, probably Kierkegaard, out of nowhere, "anxiety (or freedom?) is a qualification of a dreaming spirit..." I'll have to search through my quotes on the blog to find the exact words on that, but it will be well worth it in this context and considering how fortuitously this quote popped into my head.

If the goal of life is to refine us, to test us, then you may see how unsubstantial are these free moments of decision, so light and airy, so devoid of matter and of bodies, of the corporeal, yes, indeed the ethereal moments of decision, vision blurred as if in a dream, not even the visual field having a concrete anchor. It feels foregin to have decisions made in such a "lightweight" manner - yet this is what freedom (of decision making) in an existential sense conjurs up inside me. The choices that matter. The choices that define us, where we pick one side or the other - indeed, the either/or of Kierkegaard perhaps?

Some of us may have had cookie-cutter, Normal Rockwell histories and rational lives that make sense. Others of us will be dreaming travelers, but they will be free. Those with histories will be good story tellers and the dreamers will be poets and philosophers.

I had a dream the other night that effected me, as amazing as dreams can be. In between the chaos and the bizarre setting of a grocery store near where I grew up and frequented often, as I jostled elbows at a table for some bizarre reason with lawyers, I stood up and told them "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." I haven't read my Bible in a year or more. I also sensed the sadness of aging and the passing of time. I am getting older, my parents are getting older. Those childhood experiences every day acquire more dust, become less relevant, less relatable. People move out of neighborhoods. But the memories remain and float around in warm cheery little voids in our imaginations, where the candle still burns eternally. Freedom is a qualification of dreaming spirit.

I am absolutely of the mind that the experiences we live, and I mean the good ones, the love that we experience, live on in a real and meaningful way. It is and always will be connected with us, even after we leave this world and those neighborhoods behind.

[update] 12/9/11, found the quote:

"Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. The concept of anxiety...is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility. Fore this reason, anxiety is not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit." -Soren Kierkegaard under pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis The Concept of Anxiety

and another

"Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity but in itself. If sin has come into the world by necessity (which is a contradiction) there can be no anxiety. Nor can there be any anxiety if sin came into the world by an act of an abstract liberum arbitrium." -Soren Kierkegaard under pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis The Concept of Anxiety

Mourning the loss of the personal narrative sense

I discovered to my dismay several voluminous and expensive Kierkegaard volumes coming to press from Princeton University Press. I saw them while browsing on sites like Amazon - a truly bad habit. (See link Here for amazon search).

So much of Kierkegaard's perspective centers on his breaking off his engagement. He is no doubt subjective and inward in the extreme.

Sometimes this vast, endless array of knowledge to be gained seems like an undo burden, a stress, the placing of a claim or a burden on existence. Almost a hamster wheel, but not quite circular - instead like following an infinite string all over the earth. So when you read someone like Kierkegaard, or for that matter, Henry Miller, the ultimate aesthete, you travel everywhere, and the writing never seems to end. You never have enough, always one more page to read, just one more book.

One can tolerate only so much possibility, potential - take your education from it as you can, but actuality beckons. But the mind has a hunger of its own and tires much more slowly than the feet, and occasionally refuses to be turned off. Even in dreams the mind walks countless miles.

Following the string, at least it is a pathway, restricted to the linear, even if infinite. It is more reassuring than the forever expanding, the dissipated. But it can lack the mystery, the condensation of narrative, of profluence. Stop to smell the roses, for Pete's sake. The simpler structure of fiction and possibly of life with a smaller axis to revolve around. When life was simpler.

Hang a sign on the door that says "Gone fishing," and listen to some Howlin' Wolf.

Either-Or

In my Kierkegaard studies I have recently gone back through books of his I have read to re-read the introductions in the light of having some grasp of the material. One book I think I will have to revisit, the first book of kierkegaards I ever picked up (but was woefully unprepared for at the time) is Either/Or. Kierkegaard, or his pseudonymous writer, rather, presents two ways of being, the aesthetic and the ethical. Indeed, what a challenge we are confronted with, what choices. And no one distills it down like Kierkegaard, with his intense inwardness and appreciation for subjective experience.

Anxiety, fulfillment

Away from anxiety and towards fulfillment--

Is anxiety freedom, and fulfillment destiny?
Or do we work out our fulfillment in "fear and trembling?"

All fulfillment is teleological and presupposes meaning.

_______________________________________

"This then is the formula which describes the states of the self when despair is completely eradicated: In relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it."

~Kierkegaard "The Sickness Unto Death"

"Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity but in itself..."

~Kierkegaard "The Concept of Anxiety" aka The Concept of Dread