Reverse Mandate

Good will to man. The last night of 2013 was full of old songs, sub-zero temperatures and an old dog that refused to go out and freeze his paws.

This made me think about free will. 

So around midnight, found Perlman’s violin concerto CD, a tortured compendium of Spinoza’s writings, and sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace.  When I opened the book, my dog curled next to the fireplace and I thought “This is how one welcomes the New Year.”

Determinism, causality, cosmic harmony. Good-willed people, at some stage of life, touch upon these concepts. They may not call it determinism, but they may wonder why they act in a certain way. They may not know it as causality but may be told that the blueprint in their cells has been written a while ago to predispose them to events and behaviors. And, they may not see harmony in their daily struggles, but somehow wonder why the heavens above do not collapse.

Good will to man, the wishful song repeated. Free will to man was how it resonated in my mind, past midnight, reading Spinoza. Determinism was central to the pages I was slowly reading. Slowly, because I stopped to think, re-read, and listened to my snoring dog with Paganini's Caprice No. 24 as background . Did he exercise free will by refusing to go out in the cold and keep his bladder distended?  At the bottom of one page there was a reference to Schopenhauer saying “A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.” I put the book down. It was 2014 already even though time had no meaning in determining what free will good-willed men will discover next.

But is that true? What about the space-time serving as the canvas for our understanding harmony? A bending time, an expanding space, somehow causally related. Where was free will in there?

… I realized that my feet were now cold. “Maybe all my blood has gone to my head while reading Spinoza at midnight” I made light of the moment.

Then closed the book, turned the rocking chair around to fit my feet under my dog’s warm belly, tickled him with my toes a couple of times, and shut my eyes to recall a few moments from the past year.

January 1, 2014

©Vahé Kazandjian, 2014