Having just read my two first philosophical texts since my college years, I am surely akin to the teenager who has read one Nietzsche and is now having existential debates about everything, with everyone, and who becomes quite irritating for it.
I feel that the inherent question behind the entire philosophy of existentialism concerns chiefly the notion of free will. While this may be a known fact to scholars or some erroneous and stumbly conclusion of my limited exposure to it, it appears quite central either way.
In questioning whether something exists, one should first attempt to define the object of their inquiry. For free will has wildly varying parameters, whether you ask a Christian or an Atheist, a child or his parent, a biologist or a psychiatrist. And before we can determine who is “right or wrong”, before we can defend the merits of either position, shouldn’t we ensure that the conversation revolves around the same, carefully and elaborately defined notion?
This, I believe, is a simple concept that may be at the very root of so much socio cultural disagreement. Questions that are multifaceted are presented as dichotomies by our political parties (and the format of our current democracy that elects groups of people rather than discuss and enact its best ideas and merits, but I digress), vehiculated and amplified by our media (social or otherwise) and defended with ferocity as tho they were facets of our very identities. To fail then, in reaching absolute consensus or convincing our adversaries causes a deep crisis of the self, of our individual validity and worth. Science and rationale quickly become meaningless and whether vaccines are safe, or whether abortions should be legal become irrelevant points of contention, relegated to interchangeable battlefields where we battle for our right to BE, for our self-proclaimed identity.
The irony then that so much of that identity depends on our upbringing (and probably to some degree by our genetic imperatives and baggage) is often lost on us, and I believe, on pure existentialists. There may not be an essence to humankind that is static and universal, or that precedes our very existence, but there is certainly a much narrower band of possibilities within which we operate than existentialism and individualism proclaim. Regardless of the yet-unreached consensus on the meaning of free will, it should be noted that it operates within an infinitely complex set of base parameters, which not only differ (even) between siblings, but itself constantly morphs, influenced by countless, chaotic and unpredictable yet ultimately very deterministic circumstances. Free will then, is akin to pacing about a prison cell as wide as the Earth. You may never reach its walls, or feel its restraint, but those walls are no less present.