Saturday morning in Cleveland. It is unclear how much I will be able to write.  A few minutes is available before our Tour Coach boarding time.  Our night at the Hampton Inn was pleasant. One feature of our stay, from our second floor room we had a fine view of the front entrance of the grand Catholic church right across the street from our hotel. Jesus, as is customary, is depicted hanging, frozen with agony. Rome, like every empire before and since, murdered without apology any who objected to it’s method of organizing society. Victims endured the suffering required of them, and were eliminated.

Was this necessary? Of course a Roman aristocrat would answer in the affirmative. A colonial subject or a slave would have agreed reluctantly. In either case the respondent would not have imagined any alternative world than the one into which they were born.

Returning to the puzzle which persists for me, what is the range of freedom available to me as agent? Who am I and what choices may I possibly make? At every juncture when I desired to take the better course of action, that sensation of acting freely, was that delusional? Did the appearance of agency mask decisions and actions which were in the cards all along?

This conundrum vexes me. Do I learn from my circumstances? Is choice and change possible? Do I collude in a collective delusion, a fantastic belief that I’m free – nonetheless  joining in the time-hallowed-habit of murder, my bit part to maintain the empire unbroken…

This from Zizek:

…the way I relate to an other is always also a way I related to myself: I search for food because I need to survive, I search for a mate because I need to procreate… What this means is that, as a living organism, I am not just myself in my flat presence, I simultaneously APPEAR TO MYSELF IN A CERTAIN MODE (of hunger, of a drive to mate…) One has to add to the objective order is the appearance itself: one has to grasp how the subjective appearances and illusions of a thing that blur and misrepresents its “objective reality” are a moment of this thing itself, its necessary moment.

– Freedom A Disease Without Cure, page 70

Two hints -which could be my thread promising a way out of this daunting labyrinth. I’d like to think that decisions are true actions, based upon reason, and not entirely a reenactment of the behavior of everyone who has come before me…

My situation is not as simple as first thought. I have missed important aspects of the situation. It’s not that I am a mammal altogether at the mercy of cause and effect, a determination more complex than I could know. Is my predicament summed up by prior events and mistaken (false) sensations of freedom? That would be too simple.

As Zizek points out, taking his clue from Hegel’s philosophy, attempts to address the basic needs is also accompanied by a set of self-conceptions that I have of myself in the course of my pursuit of satisfying those needs. Certainly much of how I appear to myself is inaccurate, a misrepresentation – still each of those appearances is critically important, and I could not do without them. If these illusions were subtracted somehow, I would lose my identity as the person that I am.

Consider the versions of self conceptions which I entertain in reference to my relationships with females. With respect to this theme, that of gender difference, “I” find female points of view interesting and different.  Females mystify, enchant me.  A woman “knows” in ways that I do not.  It is worth the risk of being perplexed, to become acquainted with a female.  Those are some of the shades-of-myself that come to mind when I reflect upon my history of relationships with women.

(We homo sapiens are more nuanced that we give ourselves credit.)

Perhaps there is enough space-for-movement within those representations, freedom genuine if limited, something that we can count on! Within that set of appearances, those self-representations is there a repertory of potential futures available for selection?

One more thought about our room with a view at the Cleveland Hampton Inn. Perhaps there is a way after all! I mean a way to break the venerable binary pattern, that of being the fated victim or the victimizer.

What tune coincides with this rumination upon freedom? This one, a signature of Janis Joplin works! Me and Bobby McGee… What if Janis and Bobby respectively had entertained representations of themselves inclusive of the other? Was an alternate future genuinely available, other than to go their separate ways, – a better future, one where they would have made common cause?