KAVI VADAMOOTOO
To will our freedom is not a given, a nebulous concept which has always troubled humankind. It was the beginning of such struggle that distinguished us from other animal species. Historically, this struggle has yielded a plurality of belief systems. Yet philosophers have always been inclined to be logocentric, that is, to have an obstinate tendency to see the world from an adult-speaking point of view. Hence, there has always been an assumption that we are born ready with a free will as agents to exercise our willing ego and thinking ego.
In the beginning we are thrown, I postulated, as flesh into an irrational and chaotic world, yet our unorganised instinctual will is to be impressed on and morphed by the maternal touch (Vadamootoo, 2013). So we do not make our entry in this world with a free will and thinking ego engraved in our brain by the Cartesian disembodied divine hand. Nor are we to believe in the Sartrian idea that we are already and always born as agents to assume our responsibility and freedom. Like in all traditional philosophy, the wordless world of the infant has been passed in silence. I will be inclined to think and extend Beauvoir’s basic premise, that is, we are not born embodied as a woman, but we become one. To that I will add not only are we not born as agents, whether male or female, but also our will is not free at birth, because we are born helpless, biologically and anatomically incomplete.
As newborns, male or female, whether we are dressed in blue or pink, we suffer equally from a lack, lying in wait to become complete, and are not yet embodied agents with a stable perceptual centre to view the world from a gendered prism. Then the tragic journey unfolds through the gendering process of our flesh through the maternal, paternal and familial touch. Through the latter our fleshy unorganised will, which is part of our irrational and chaotic energy, referred to by Freud as id, the wild horse, is morphed intelligibly or unintelligibly. From such perspective, becoming a free agent is conditioned by the way our ego is constituted out of our irrational state in order to master the instinctual wild horse in us. Our well-being or undoing, seemingly, leans on the extent to which our ego has managed to tame the wild appetitive horse in us. Too much taming might kill the creative force within us. Or on the other hand, ego is trapped in a state of madness, if the wild horse is not broken and tamed enough. Plato’s equine metaphor, a few thousand years ago, preceded Freud’s.
From the view of human psychology, Plato was aware of man’s inner conflict; his idea of the individual was as a charioteer riding two horses: one white, the rational part of us, and the other black, the irrational part of us. Freedom is to rein in the power of both horses so that they can align to the wishes of the individual and social demands. I will suggest that in Plato we can already glean a grounding from which to imagine the inner conflict of a person, in terms of what I will call divided will, or what R.D. Laing would call the ‘divided self’. A word of caution: the black horse here is not to be associated with the aboriginal man.
We can imagine ourselves as babies, male and female, infused with chaotic and irrational forces, yet impotent and disoriented as charioteers in a world we did not choose. Incarnated in a fleshy and unfree state, we are slaves to id, the wild horse, and subjugated to m(other)’s hand, waiting to be morphed and tamed aesthetically. We become, intelligibly or unintelligibly, gendered cultural products. Our birth is not viewed from the prism of preserving our species.
What happens to those whose will as agents never learn to break or tame that wild horse within us all, or those who have fallen victims to those in power? If hell is other people (Sartre), then heaven is found through others too. We are our relationships. We need each other, starting with the relational touch of the maternal orbit. That touch inevitably cannot be perfect, but ‘good enough’ (Winnicott). Thus there is always hope if we are helped to find a middle point in our relationships between heaven and hell. Not all is lost, as long as we do not kill or enslave the wild horse in us and others. Perseus released Pegasus, the repressed and imprisoned spirited winged white horse, from Medusa’s victimised body, who was punished by the unfair and punitive Greek god. We must not be ignorant of the wild and irrational horse in us and others. We too can learn to struggle to develop the will to free each other from hell.
Do not cast your gaze above in the sky for divine intervention, as the blind beggar warns us (Baudelaire). It has been long deserted since Nietzsche announced that God was dead, hence encumbering us to choose and steer the power of the wild horse on our earthly journey. Nietzsche was not the perpetrator of the demise of God. It was, rather, Spinoza who deposed the personal God in the Western world when he declared that Nature is God and God is Nature. For him there is no hell or heaven but rather it is our doing, and through the latter we contaminate and constrain each other’s freedom. We are each other’s hell and heaven, Spinoza would argue.
As to Nietzsche, he set us free from believing in the power of a God, harnessed out of fear and guilt induced in mankind. But his downfall emanated from his wilful struggle to be an overman, steeped in ignorance of his basic self-empathic will to take care of the wild horse from within. He rode it too wildly. Poor Nietzsche; his insight came too late when faced externally with a reflection of the bruised and battered horse within him. He seemingly cried when he actually witnessed a horse being beaten and abused by the coachman. It was too late! He felt bereft. He lost his basic humanity in his struggle to develop an omnipotent will, spurred on by a weak one. This echoes Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’ when he could not steer the appetitive wild horse, thus in his over-leap he landed stripped of his basic humanity.
Was the dawn of the dispirited postmodern thinking inaugurated with the death of God and the ethical world of Nietzsche? Since then we have become free, but inhabiting a wasteland where only ‘hollow’ men and women tread (T.S. Eliot), or where obstinate beings are pushing the stone up and down like the Greek character Sisyphus, or others are like thoughtless Meursault (Camus). From a lack of compassion for our inner wild spirited horse, our will to be free has become dispirited. The ultimate fate was Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape: the inner horse has bolted, leaving some bereft of their basic vitality, albeit irrational, and have become voiceless and mute. All these protagonists are death-like persona, products of death instinct; that is, whose organs of thinking were attacked and nullified, hence with no will to live but rather endowed with a counter-will that killed off the wild living horse within them.
Yet, you and I, we exist embracing the basic life instinct, contrary to the above soulless protagonists. We persevere to get up at dawn, every day, enticed by being responsible for ourselves and others. We are charioteers riding on resilience: between the bookends of birth and death we pick up our will, every day, off the shelf, dust it down, and onwards we go as if we are not mortals. We are driven to persevere, albeit with a new motto: ‘chacun pour soi’… where ‘Dieu n’est pas pour tous’. Yet we are not dispirited and homeless figures on the world stage, but tragic charioteers, forever endowed with a common sense to catch a glimpse of happiness, albeit momentary. Meanwhile on our journey we learn to love our neighbours as ourselves just as much as we hate them as ourselves. We are not ‘Don Quixote’, fighting imaginary intellectual shadows; we, full-blooded beings, instead ride, with vigour, our own visceral shadows.
