The Choice to Choose

Authentic reality only becomes visible when one is finally left with no other choice but to choose, at last and for the very first time, truly to have a choice. That is the point of breakdown of all duplicity, most especially duplicity toward oneself, not just to others.

Only when one finally arrives at such a crossroads — such a turning point, such a jumping off place — where one is truly faced for the first time ever with genuinely and fully making the choice to choose, and not just to remain the plaything of all the forces that try to force one to go one way or another.

Søren Kierkegaard saw and said that very thing in the 19th century.  Then in the 20th century, heeding the call he heard Kierkegaard to follow him down the same path of thought, Martin Heidegger said the same. Early in the 20thcentury, Alain Badiou followed that same call down that same path.

In a lecture Badiou gave to, and at the request of, a psychoanalytic society in Mexico in March of 2006, he characterizes Kierkegaard’s own thought-path as follows — in my own quite freely chosen translation of some lines in French from that lecture, the fourth, last, and shortest of four Voyages mentaux philosophique, “mental philosophical journeys,”   published just last year (2023) in France by Éditions Stilus:        

For Kierkegaard[. . .]the essence of choice is the choice to choose, not the choice of this or of that. [. . .] That is absolute choice. The choice to choose. The choice thanks to which we have choices. [. . .] Simply put, one can be brought to the crossroads in such a way that there will be no other way out for one except choice. So one will make the right choice.

Alain Badiou

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At one point in The Irrelevance of Power (San Jose, CA: Juxtapositions Publishing, 2020, p. 183) — which is available to buy through the “Shop” at the top of this blog site — I wrote the following:

            Whatever the expectations others may lay upon us, we all have a natural tendency, to which we are ourselves mostly blind, to fulfill those expectations. Drawing upon this tendency, expectation itself tends to engender the very thing it expects.

            We have a tendency to try to live up to whatever high expectations of us we experience others as having, but we have no less of a tendency to try to live down to whatever low expectation we experience them as having of us as well. 

None of us can arrive at the “crossroads” to which Badiou refers in the quotation from him with which I end the preceding section of this post unless we cease to be blind to the very “tendency” to which I myself refer in the above lines, the tendency we all have to fulfill what we experience as the expectations “others” place upon us. We can only arrive at such a turning point, such a jumping off place, where we are at last faced with having to choose at last to choose, or else just continuing on as we remain lost not only to one another, but to ourselves.

In the same book a few pages later (on p. 217), I address what we need to do when we arrive at such an existential turning point:

Then we just have to make the choice that we have been at that moment given to make — and then to repeat that choice, which is really our choice to keep on having a choice. If we do not continue repeating that choice moment by moment thereafter, then we immediately lose it again, and return our will to its chains.

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What is the right choice to make in a given situation?  

Well, in any and every conceivable situation, to make the choice to choose is always, without any exception, to make the right choice. Only by making that choice do we set off along the path down which all free beings are called to walk.

Keeping Things Handy

Note to my readers: I am putting up this post today in honor and memory of my father, who was born three days from now in 1910, on the Fourteenth of March — or “the Mourteenth of Farch,” as he always liked jokingly to put it.

“A place for everything and everything in its place.”

That is an old saying. My father sometimes used it to encourage my brother and me to put his tools away where they belonged when we were done with them. Once we finished using any of those tools, we were to put them back in his toolbox, our garage, our closets, or other storage spaces he and my mother had built or designated for them. That way, they would be handy for the next person who might have occasion to lay hands on them, whomever that person might be, including especially my father himself.

Indeed, as I will discuss in one of the subsequent sections of this post, it is the proper usage of things that first lets them be in the space which is theirs, and then maintains them there.

My father, Charles James Seeburger, Sr.,  as a young man

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To use something is not to ab-use it. To say the same thing somewhat more expansively,  to handle something is not to mis-handle it.

Usage, handling, does not require that we adapt what we use to us. Rather, to use or handle something requires that we adapt ourselves to it.

            [. . .] If we handle a thing, for example, our hand must adapt to the thing. Proper accord lies in usage. Authentic using does not diminish what it uses; rather, using defines itself by being what first lets the used as such be. But such letting be is by no means unconcerned laxity, let alone neglect. On the contrary: authentic using lets the used loose into its own presence and protects it therein. [. . .] Using is letting loose into presence, is guarding in presence.

Those lines come from the published text of Martin Heidegger’s 1951-52 two-semester lecture course Was heißt Denken?[1] The book of that title was eventually published in an English translation as What is Called Thinking?[2] The passage I cite above is my own very freely interpretive translation of most of one paragraph of the lecture Heidegger delivered to his class during the seventh hour of the second semester of the course, the summer-semester of 1952.

What Heidegger says in the passage cited is of course true of all physical crafts — for example, the crafting by hand of pottery out of clay. However, Heidegger’s remarks are no less true of all mental crafts. 

Most especially, his remarks are true of that singular mental craft which constitutes the very basis of all genuine crafts, whether they involve any physical component in the ordinary sense at all or are entirely mental. That is, Heidegger’s remarks are true of thinking itself as such.    

Handcrafting potterz

*   *   *

We are trying here to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking is just the same as building a shrine. In any case, it is hand-work. The hand has its own meaning. According to the ordinary notion, the hand belongs to the organism of our body. However, the essence of the hand will never let itself be fixed or clarified as a bodily grasping-organ. Apes, for example, have grasping-organs, but they have no hands. The hand is infinitely, that is, by an essential abyss, distinct from all such grasping-organs as paws, claws, or fangs. Only a being that speaks, which means thinks, can have hands and in handling achieve the works of the hand.

That paragraph, once again in my own freely interpretive translation, also comes from Heidegger’s Was heißt Denken? Only this time it comes from early in that course, the second hour of the winter-semester of 1951-52, the first semester of the two-semester course. I will repeat the line that is most crucial for my purposes in this post: “In any case it [i.e., thinking as such] is hand-work.

Just a bit later, in the summarizing transition from the second hour of the entire course with which he opens its third hour, Heidegger writes a very brief paragraph consisting of no more than the following two lines, yet again in my own freely interpretive translation: “Thinking guides and bears every gesture of the hand. To bear means literally: to gesture.”

 That leaves nothing more to say or do. It puts everything back in its proper place, keeping it handy.

[1] The text of the course was first published in 1954 by Max Niemeyer Verlag in Tübingen and eventually became Band 8 of  Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main; Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), from p, 190 of which I have taken the lines cited above.  

[2] Translation by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).