I must admit before the reader that in writing this piece ,I have not attempted to advocate a point of view.Rather I have tried to put forward an honest admission of a sort of conflict that I have been unable to resolve.
I would start by quoting Sartre:
"Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance."
There is another statement by him which goes as:
"All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure. "
Now if without falling into the trap of a pessimistic or an optimistic perspective,if one analyses the logic behind these statements ,one will see that they seem to directly challenge the rationality of choice. Rationality to me here implies whether to a choice made in a given context, the reason backing it was good enough or not.
There is no denying fact that under a given situation the individual interest becomes the prime motivation to guide the necessary action. Here 'individual' implicitly implies also a group element or what one calls collective decision.Herefrom arise two points of serious debate.
Firstly arises the question of how much freedom do we actually have or can exert in exercising a choice.Here one is confronted with a bigger decisive factor , what I call causality.Causality in general implies a sequence of cause and effect. It has been since we have acknowledged time to be and will linger till time is. Now all our decisions, choices, actions have a beginning in time,meaning they arise out at some instant in this sequential flow of causal interconnections. This is the very fact that renders those decisions
devoid of any sort of so called freedom.It is because in a causal setting future is not independent of present and likewise present not independent of past.What is today has its seed in the womb of past.It includes everything ,you me,our reason ,our being ,this whole order before us ,of which we are an insignificant part .
What I ask is that if reasons for the present to be were already there in the past and what I call today is merely a result of a causal flow,then how can my thought or reason or choice be free of this supremacy of a causal decisiveness.This really gives a feeling of ' What is there is meant to be and it could not have been otherwise'.
The second point of debate is on the conflict of choices.When I try to act according to the reasons which to me are correct I may be coming in the way of what is right or beneficial for the 'other'.
In such a case one can say that this conflict has its roots in the bounded nature of rationality of the two conflicting groups. Argument given is that both are having a myopic vision of the nature of what is to be called 'right' decision and can be corrected by an informed and broadened vision which might result into coalescing of conflicting interests instead of a confrontation.
Now here there is a question which would put us before a broader question on the nature of existence.This so called 'right' decision backs the idea of good for the largest possible number of people.But this is statistics,a sort of quantification. All we are saying it is better to make hundreds smile if it can be done on the tears of few. All that is happening is a mathematics of quantifying justice and surprisingly humans have always adhered to this principle sacredly since times immemorial. One has never questioned the importance of the ones left behind in this scheme of justice.This is what is called the rule of majority.We never put a question that why is it that will of a lesser number of people should not have a say if it is opposed by a greater number.There is no more basic premise other than to go with what the greater number of people have agreed to.
Now here you will see the defeat of the very order of justice. Just is what is right for the maximum number of people possible. Or in other words maximum number of 'I's' satisfied is what we understand as justice.This kind of a definition lacks a notion of good or bad or right or wrong that means anything other than a greater extent of individual satisfaction materialised.
This is what opens the door to the crisis of existence. If in the entire scheme of things we tend to justify existence as a protection of individual interest, or in a collective sense, of siding with justice , we are confronted with a lurking notion of the futility of this entire exercise. The question that troubles is that the very 'individual ' that seeks his protection or validation of his strive to be, loses his import if there is no absolute way to decide why or why not one is needed is this order. Reason being the fact that the sides created to nurture the illusion of right and wrong are created and decided by individuals only and there is no universal law to uphold or justify the reason for you or me to be here. Thus it seems right to say that it is not that we are here because we were needed , but since we are here now we have to fight to justify why we are here.
It is because of this reason that all our debates of national or international, physical or metaphysical concerns have put the individual at the centre, and rest everything as a peripheral extension signifying his needs or his responsibilities.And since this way of understanding the world around us is so old and deep rooted in our psychology, mankind has almost fallen prey to the thought that its existence taken into centre must define the course of all that is and would be.This is probably the reason we are the most selfish, authoritarian and cruel race on one side and on the other side constantly fight with a sense of deep insecurity to save our ground, to uphold our claim towards our fulfillment.
I guess we will never know for sure, but as it is said 'to be or not to be' still remains the unsolved question before us.
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