Are Free Will and Romanticism incompatible?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I believe in free will.  I believe that our choices and the sum of our choices direct our path through life.  I believe we always have the ability to chose a different path if we discover our path is wrong for us or is damaging the people we love.

I’ve also always had a romantic streak.  The idea that destiny plays a hand and that one day greatness or love or something will land upon an individual and providing them with the opportunity for greatness.  I have always found that idea terribly appealing.

It has occured to me that these two ideas are fundamental incompatible and that their dual places in my heart and soul are a source of misery because of the inherent conflict they represent.  If I believe in free will then I shouldn’t find romanticism appealing.  I should reject grant romantic notions of destiny and mysterious coincidence.  It should be choices and purpose that drive our lives.  Not “destiny”.

This disjunction is awful.  
 

Discuss.

[Ormond]

Even most people who believe strongly in free will do realize that individuals do not have complete control over everything that happens to them in their lives. Chance factors are always at work in human life as well as in the rest of the universe. There certainly are times when "greatness" or "love" lands upon someone from chance factors. It of course would be just as likely for poverty, irrational hatred, or even death to show up because of chance. 

We may have some free will in deciding how to react and respond to chance occurrences, whether good or bad. But believing one has 100% control over one's life path is just as irrational as believing one has no control over one's life path. 

[Rippounet]

8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It has occured to me that these two ideas are fundamental incompatible

I would submit the idea that they actually aren't.
I would say what you describe as "free will," could be called willpower, attention span, cognitive load... etc. You can trace it under many different names in different cultures, all the way to the beginning of civilisation.
But it's a finite resource. We all have some, that we can exercise as we see fit, but we are absolutely incapable of exercising it for every single aspect of our lives, all the time. In fact, learning to use it wisely is the main goal of education - broadly speaking.
So I don't see why one's limited control over their lives would exclude the possibility of them having a "destiny."

Here's a quote by Sapolsky about this shit:

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Willpower is more than just a metaphor ; self-control is a finite ressource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent with that, the frontal cortex is atypically vulnerable to various neurological insults.

Pertinent to this is the concept of « cognitive load. » Make the frontal coertex work hard – a tough working-memory task, regulating social behavior, or making numerous decisions while shopping. Immediately afterward performance on a different frontally dependent task declines. Likewise during multitasking, where PFC neurons simultaneously participae in multiple activated circuits.

 

(Ormond ninja'd me... )

[Zorral]

Just the opposite, otherwise not all those great Romantic works glorifying such dark and tragic figures as Werther.  Free will and the Romantics rolled together.  Authoritarianism is about inevitability, not free will.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Not sure if you're referring to being a romantic or a Romantic, but Blake probably qualifies as both:

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‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

Sounds like a strong belief in free will, so can't see why these things are incompatible. 

In fact I'd say the Romantics in general would argue that our own inner world informs and affects the world outside ourselves, and that this subjectiveness of experience is at least very suggestive of a belief in free will. 

 

I'd also say that based on your OP the idea of destiny as you describe it has absolutely no contradiction with your own free will.  If you make your own path through the world you will be more likely to find someone who brings out the best in you or find an opportunity to be your fullest self, than you would be if you just drifted through life without making any decisions.  You create your own opportunity.  

I think this disjunction you speak of is mostly in your mind and more a function of language than a true contradiction.  I can't see any reason why free will and destiny as you describe them would be at odds or antithetical, other than that in casual conversation they are used as shorthand for concepts that that may sound opposed.  It doesn't sound like your idea of destiny requires any actual predestination.  

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Even if I'm wrong and they are contradictory ideas, humans are all paradoxes.  The duality of man and shit.  

[mcbigski]

Sounds like you want free will for yourself, and that you'll be bestowed with some sort of individual greatness.  Which would impair everyone else's free will.  I don't think free will and romanticism are necessarily in conflict, but your formulation seems self centered.

Or if you're not talking about your own self specifically, maybe we're closer on this.  Free will seems to me to have an inherently progressive bias (though not speaking in the current political sense).  People decide to improve their own circumstance.  I know there's a school of thought that says that no one has free will, but really, are Rick Astley and fission both just bound to happen from pre set conditions?

 

[Zorral]

Free Will - Milton's Satan, while Milton was a true ass Protestant! fighting the unitarian authoritarianism justifying the corruption of the Roman Church.

Napoleon, all about free will until he became A, and then, The Power, all authoritiarianism, no free will, kiddos.

Calvin, no free will, only predestination -- i.e. inevitability, i.e. authoritarianism.

 

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Free will is incompatible with reality. So much of who we are is determined by things out of our control--genetics, family, environment--luck of the draw. It occurred to me when I used to teach 8th grade. I remember a specific discussion that had something to do with child soldiers in Africa. Students in my class insisted those kids were evil/bad--that if the students in my class were in their shoes, they'd choose to not fight and kill for warlords. They'd often cite free will as their reason why. They believe that free will comes from who we are which then determines our actions, not that actions occurring around us determine who we are. 

Then I think about people like James Holmes or Charles Whitman. I can't see how we look at someone like Holmes and think his mind is all right. As if it were so simple as he simply decided to choose a path of evil. Charles Whitman's case is even murkier as they found, during his autopsy, a brain tumor the size of a pecan growing against his amygdala, which is believed to regulate things like emotion. Whitman knew something was wrong too, and in his suicide letter, he asked for his brain to be examined because he couldn't stop or control himself. Traumatic brain injury is linked to shifts in personality and many serial killers had brain damage at some point in their lives. Mixed with environmental factors out of their control, I can't say they had any choice in who they were or what they became.

My brother got hooked on meth back when we were in high school, and he's dying from alcoholism now (still in his 30s). Alcoholism runs in the family, but he had a significant head injury as a child and was always different from my other brother and me. Crueler, meaner, and seemed to ignore any possibility of consequences with his behavior. If I lived his experience, would I be any better off?

Free will, as we refer to it, is extremely limited insofar as it does/could exist. We can choose, freely, within the conditions in which we exist, but we don't have a full range of choices or opportunities to choose wisely. 

[JGP]

[tries to summon Gvico]

[RhaenysBee]

Is this a Ukraine spin off thread too?  

There’s no such thing as free will in the pure sense of the words. Will is never free, it’s always influenced by circumstance, opportunity, character, consequence, etc. Yes we all have control over the choices we make from our options to a certain degree which varies for each individual. But ultimately, life is a vast network of systems and like everything else we exist within those systems. The idea that we have, even at times, more control over the systems that they do over us is a romantic narrative in itself. So yes the two can perfectly coexist. We explain things our brains can’t grasp with stories, even the things it can grasp. Sometimes the story is that our free will led us somewhere, other times it’s a grand romantic design. And the best is that we can explain the same result both ways. 

[DaveSumm]

Surely it’d be the exact opposite: romanticism as you describe it would be incompatible with determinism. If everything were set on course till the end of eternity, there wouldn’t seem to be a window for any ‘destiny’ to course correct to. Nor any free will to alter this path.

But if things can change, then fate can change, and so can a persons will. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

What I haven’t made clear is that I see an element of determinism in romanticism.  You meet and instantly know the love of your life.  It’s not a choice.  It’s an experience.  You are at the right place at the right time and great power is thrust upon you that you use to great and world changing effect.

That looks like determinism to me wrapped in romantic notions of love and glory.  It looks as though it is stripped of free will, of choice.

[DaveSumm]

Ah, I see. Ultimately that’s just the age old debate about free will vs determinism; ‘compatibilism’ is the school of thought that there is no conflict there. 

For my money, I view my life as a deterministic set of world lines - a bunch of disparate atoms are floating around, then they become knotted together in my body. Some drift away and others join, but that knotted pattern persists for 80 odd years, then they all drift off again. Now, just because you might look at that set of world lines and say “your decision to go left instead of right wasn’t a choice; the world lines always went that way”, I don’t see why that decision isn’t still ‘mine’. ‘I’ took all the available data, and made a decision that appeared best. There were bears one way, kittens another. So I’m owning that process, part of what makes me an ‘I’ is that I can judge kittens to be safer than bears.

So I guess I’m a compatibilist. But it’s by way of being a bit selective in how I define ‘I’. Sam Harris has a lot to say on the subject, and it’s interesting and I don’t disagree with him really (he has a podcast that sums up his view that I’d recommend), but a phrase I heard to describe his view is that he “talks himself out of existence” which I liked. If ‘I’ don’t make decisions, then what even is an ‘I’? Is there a point to it? For Harris, I think he strips ‘I’ back to being nothing but conscious experience. I just put a bit more back on the plate for my definition.

[Zorral]

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

ou meet and instantly know the love of your life.

That's not Romanticism, that's pop voodoo on the order of guardian angels.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

That's not Romanticism, that's pop voodoo on the order of guardian angels.

 

Yeah… but it’s pop voodoo that always had strong appeal to me.  Far too many “Rom-coms” during my formative years.

[sologdin]

ontological freedom strikes me as an untenable doctrine, but am not seeing a conflict between it and romanticism.  maybe there's a conflict between freedom and the aesthetics of naturalism--recall ayn rand's arguments in the romantic manifesto, for instance.  

'destiny' is probably not romanticism, or at least isn't exclusive to it. we might think of fatalism as a form of theological determinism, whereas by contrast one romanticist doctrine is spontaneity, which is likely a form of indeterminism.

[felice]

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What I haven’t made clear is that I see an element of determinism in romanticism.  You meet and instantly know the love of your life.  It’s not a choice.  It’s an experience.

But how you respond to that experience is up to you. What do you say to this person when you meet them? And if you value freedom over happiness, you can choose to walk away from them.

Technically, I don't believe free will is possible, but it generally makes sense to act as though it did anyway.

[SpaceChampion]

I wrote a blog post about how this is reflected in genre categories of fictional stories here.

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With Attribution Theory we can see the Heroic view of life is that occurrences are Controllable and Internal/Dispositional. A weak person is a villain, only the strong are heroes. Weak people have bad intents and cause bad things to happen.

Romanticism i think is fundamentally about willpower, but not necessarily free will.  You have free will only over your disposition and reactions to the events of life and your place in society.  But then you expect to be rewarded / punished by the universe for your exercise of willpower, as if that is karmically deterministic.  Believing in karma is a romantic idea too.

Is that incompatible?  Depends on how you think the universe works.  Is everyone's emotions, thoughts, passions and desires information that the universe can process (like the climate system reacting to what the ecosystem does)?  Systems can develop hierarchical relationships.  They can have emergent properties, strange attractors, cascading effects, and catastrophic collapses.  The main effects would be in the realm of economics, politics, and culture, I imagine.  I think there might be something to that, but not karma on the directly individual level.

[Zorral]

I'm assuming you are speaking only of Europe and the US?  There are entire nations of people for whom those terms and the question are meaningless.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

14 hours ago, Zorral said:

I'm assuming you are speaking only of Europe and the US?  There are entire nations of people for whom those terms and the question are meaningless.

I’m speaking of my experience which is profoundly western culturally.  As such your point is well made.