Ancestry 31 - Existential Queries: Fate

Once upon a time, in some obscure and poor neighborhoods of old Salonica, the seeds of Father's life and, by extension, those of mine were sown. Lives in their uniqueness, as much as their insignificance and infinitesimality, with the infinite and the inconceivable majesty of the universe in the background, beyond the grasp of our comprehension; ephemeral lives in confined geographies and of a time conceived and its days measured only whilst existing. Our minds, which barely and on occasions (during the scarce introspective reflections and “calls to conscience”) manage to perceive and touch upon our delimited existence, are often overwhelmed and thoughts and ideas are swept away by forces and events and phenomena, whether invisible and trivial or distinct and broader of social and historical proportions, occurring, and coalescing into the moments of our lives. In striving to make sense of our existence and lives and being in the world that we have thrown in some fundamental questions of existential nature always linger. Are the lives, like the ones I endeavored to write about, guided at every step and turn by an invisible hand of fate, as some say, by omnipotent forces stemming from nature and history or even a supernatural god? Do even the common and, in a grand scheme of things, insignificant people have a say in their aims and can they influence noticeably their directions and paths in life? Can and do they embrace or deflect situations, utilize or reject the so-called chances that are presented with along their routes in life, and depending on each incremental decisions, shape their lives and those of the next generations in different individual ways?  Can apparently trivial choices amongst alternatives at any stage and turn, when people are called or compelled to decide and exercise their will and act accordingly, produce distinctly divergent life states and forms?

In the fate, as something predetermined, as a course defined from something above or outside ourselves, transcendent and supernaturally regulated, I have never believed; naturally as a scientist whose methods of thinking adhere to the principle of causality, or even as an unaccomplished revolutionary. There are still a few usually religious or superstitious people who with backward thinking remark: "it was meant to be" or “it was pre-ordained by fate,” unable in their ignorance or insulation to explain the how’s and the why’s of their being, as it is crystallised into a “being-in-itself” during a lifetime by personal and social relationships, education, employment, marriage, child bearing, health, sickness and death; in short, the how’s and why’s they lived the life they eventually did. Most people, even when they fleetingly or inadvertently refer to fate because either of a momentary mental weakness or an incomplete or lack of understanding of the factors that led to an event or the inability to breakdown a phenomenon to its causes, do not adhere, in truth and deep down, to the notion that there is an invisible all-powerful guiding hand above all. But in moments of introspective reflection, of analysing and the recounting of the past, in every "call to consciousness", they seek and agonize about these how’s and why’s. They sometimes ponder about what is to come -originating from the present moment and situation, referring to past experiences and the acquired knowledge, and speculating or conjecturing about the future. These are scarce moments of individual freedom in a generally repressive world; not seeking answers, but succumbing to a pre-ordained fate, even acknowledging it as a notion, amounts to the absolute defeat of the human spirit and the imprisonment of thought.  

Admittedly, humans possess variable deposits of individual or collective will, small or large depending on their position and relative power in the class societies we are destined to grow up and live, a will that may somehow influence the course of own lives, with slighter or wider deviations from principal pathways, which are seemingly presented exogenously as choices, at life beginnings or its later stages; that is, pathways within the borders imposed by the historical era and the environment: materialistic and social, national and geographical. Of course, it goes without saying that the more wealth and power one possesses in a class society, the wider the scope and reach of the individual will; it is nonetheless innate to human intelligence. The argument that the history of societies and their economies follows a deterministic course, which is described, and perhaps even prescribed and preordained by distinct, long-term underlying historical tendencies and laws, falls beyond the reasonable scope of any dilettante philosopher’s essay. The phases and stages of an historical process, as they succeed one another, often with regressions and setbacks and discontinuities from revolutions and wars, cover a period of several generations, and transcend in time orders of magnitude the span of a lifetime. Only with a wide view through the lens of an historian from the distant future, they can possibly be perceived, analysed and verified from accumulated historical evidence. However, even with external, apparently insurmountable, forces exerted upon oneself by an all-powerful socioeconomic status quo, there is still an array of paths the so called ‘free’-will (rather erroneously) can opt to walk; even escape routes to different destinations or back to the origin can be explored and exploited along the way. If the laws of nature that determine the functions of our bodies are impossible to defy without the help and implementation of counteracting engineering based on the same natural laws, the established social forms and norms can be individually or collectively negated and, to an extent, the pressure from exogenous socioeconomic forces can be moderated, even deflected controlling an individual’s life. As far as myself and my existence are concerned, I would rather paraphrase Sartre's rebuke for the effect of historical process and determinism in shaping an individual’s life: "We must live without a veil or make-up this heartbreaking, unbearable condition called 'human fate'... A man's secret is the frontier of his freedom."