The Uncontrollable Will - An Essay

Self Determined, from the Self Overcoming Collection

INTRO 

Free will?

Is it possible to possess genuine free will when innumerable forces manipulate, constrain, influence, and superimpose themselves upon our will?

We enter existence under conditions we may or may not have chosen. Physical laws, biology, circumstance, history, other beings, and forces beyond our awareness establish the field in which our choices become possible.

Even the fatalistic forces of astrology were once understood as powers whose influence upon human destiny was nearly insurmountable. 

And yet we experience ourselves as willing beings. We struggle against these forces. We choose, resist, redirect, create.

This is what the process of pour painting reminds me of.

THE ARTIST - AS THE AEON

The artist assumes something analogous to the position of the Aeon: the provider of the conditions from which the painting can come into existence.

The artist provides the raw materials from which creation becomes possible:

The canvas.

The tools.

The cups.

The paint.

The pigments.

The medium.

The environment.

Nothing can occur without this field first being established.

And yet providing the conditions for existence is not the same thing as determining everything that existence will become.

THE ARTIST - AS A MANIPULATING FORCE

The artist does considerably more than provide the materials.

The artist intervenes. Water or medium is introduced to manipulate viscosity and therefore change how the paint is capable of moving.

Colors are selected in advance, substantially controlling the deck of cards from which the painting can play.

The artist determines when paint enters the canvas, where it enters, how much enters, and how violently or delicately it is introduced.

The canvas is tilted, rotated, and manipulated in an attempt to direct the movement of the paint and influence its eventual form.

New material can be introduced. Existing movement can be interrupted. A developing form can be encouraged or deliberately destroyed.

The artist continually attempts to impose will upon the system.

THE PAINT - AS THE UNCONTROLLABLE WILL

And then something happens that the artist cannot completely command.

The paint moves. Gravity pulls it. Viscosity slows it. Momentum carries it. Colors collide. Layers pass over and underneath one another. Boundaries form unexpectedly. Pigments intermingle. Some territories expand while others disappear.

The artist can influence these events but cannot completely determine them. No matter how much the manipulating force attempts to exert control, the interaction of multiple layers of moving paint eventually exceeds precise command.

The paint goes where it will go. It settles where it will settle. It reveals forms that were never consciously designed. The painting begins to participate in determining what it will become.

THE PARADOX

But even here, there is no absolute freedom. The paint did not choose its colors. It did not choose its viscosity. It did not choose the dimensions of its world. It did not choose where it entered that world.

It did not choose gravity.

It did not choose the hands that repeatedly tilt its environment and interfere with its trajectory. Even its apparent acts of independence occur inside conditions imposed upon it. And yet neither can the artist completely determine what the paint will do.

The controller cannot completely control. The controlled cannot completely escape its conditions. The finished painting exists somewhere between the two.

CLOSING THOUGHTS - THE UNCONTROLLABLE WILL

Perhaps this is where the human being also exists.

We are thrown into a world we did not construct, into circumstances we did not select, subjected to forces we cannot entirely escape. And still - we will.

We choose within constraint. We resist influence. We redirect ourselves. We attempt to become the authors of lives whose initial conditions were authored by something else.

Perhaps free will is therefore neither absolute freedom nor absolute determinism. Perhaps free will is the struggle to determine ourselves within a universe we can never completely control. 

The pour ends when the paint finally settles.

But even then it leaves behind a record of the struggle:

The forces that acted upon it,

the forces it resisted,

and the form that emerged between them.

THE UNCONTROLLABLE WILL.