9 Choices
The Ninth Chapter,
In which you ask yourself again:
What’s Keeping Me Here?
Preparation
Required Reading: Quarmby, “Impostors” (Aeon)
Optional Reading: Schechter, “What We Can Learn About Respect and Identity from ‘Plurals’” (Aeon)
Writing:
- Quarmby talks about “passing.” What is it? Answer with paraphrase, not quotation.
- An argument is a thesis supported by one or more reasons. What is Quarmby’s thesis? What reason(s) does he provide in support of his thesis? Paraphrase or quote briefly.
- What is your immediate reaction to Quarmby’s argument? Agreement, disagreement, or something else?
- Respond to the following question by writing at least one paragraph: If people should be able to change gender, should they also be able to change race? Should they be able to voluntarily amputate limbs in order to change from “abled” to “disabled”? Why or why not?
Introduction
The Matrix ends by leaving the choice of “where we go from here” up to you. Neo doesn’t know where we go from here, but he knows it’s a world where people choose where they go, instead of a world where people live under the illusion that this is all there is, that there’s nowhere else to go. The world outside the cave is a free world, and freedom means freedom from limits on what we can choose.
What does philosophy do for you? Does it dissolve all the artificial limits placed on your choices, and increase your negative freedom, like Neo promises? Or does it discover the natural limits, the limits that secure your positive freedom? Or does it do both of those things — distinguish the artificial from the natural limits, and work to replace the one kind with the other, so that we are less and less constrained by “society,” while society is more and more guided by “nature”? What does it look like outside the cave? Is it a place of total freedom from social pressure, or is it a place where the social pressure makes us free?
And what is the role of choice itself? How important is it that you make the choice?
Think about that question as you listen to Masha Gessen’s talk, “Stories of a Life.” After you listen, read the rest of the chapter.
Discussion
Imagine you are Masha Gessen: imagine that these are not the stories of a life, but the stories of your life. And imagine that they are stories that tell you something about the philosophical life.
Your story starts with an “application for an exit visa.” You are trying to get out. Normal World (Russia) can’t be your home anymore. You don’t fit in. You have to go somewhere else. But you don’t know where you’re going. You have a name for the undiscovered country, the unfamiliar city: “America.” America is outside your cave. But it’s only “an outline on a map.” You’re excited to explore it and fill in that map, but you’re nervous about what you might discover. You don’t know whether it will actually be better than Normal World, or whether it will ever feel like home. Still, you have no choice. So you strike out for the unknown.
What do you leave behind? Not just the place. You leave behind your sense of who you are, which is your sense of where you belong. You can remember what it felt like to fit in in Normal World, what it felt like to rest on all the common assumptions, to take for granted what everyone else took for granted. “Everything about it seemed self-evident: once you knew what you were, you would just be it.” And you would belong with all the other people who were the same as you. In The Matrix, what’s written above the Oracle’s door? “Know thyself.” Know who you are, and feel at home. But now that you’ve left where you were, you no longer know who you are. There’s been a break in the story of your life. Before the break, it was about knowing who you are. After the break, because of the break, you become aware that “who you are” can change. So now, it’s not about who you are. It’s about who you’re becoming. And you don’t know who you’re becoming. The meaning shifts. “Know thyself” now means “know that you don’t know” yourself.
And isn’t that the beginning of philosophy? Socrates was always going around saying he knew nothing, that he had no answers, only questions. He said wisdom wasn’t in knowing, but in knowing that you don’t know. Socrates had an oracle, too: the Oracle of Delphi. Once, she told him he was the wisest person in his city. He didn’t believe her, because he knew that he knew nothing. And then he realized: that’s exactly what she meant. That’s why he was the wisest: because he knew he was ignorant. Everyone else lived in a daydream in which they knew everything already. He alone lived in the truth, which was that he knew nothing. To really know yourself is to know that you know nothing about yourself. You don’t know where your story will take you. You don’t even know where you want your story to take you. You have to become something that is only “an outline on a map.” You can’t fill in the map before you get there.
This is the difference between “discovering who you are and discovering who you could be.” You learn the difference in a “moment of choice,” a fork in the road, where you could go one way or another, and you don’t know which way is better, but you know you can choose. And that is the key thing about this moment. It’s not just a moment in which you can choose. It’s a moment in which you become aware that you can choose. Because — if you think about it — there are many many moments in your life where you could choose. Moments where there are actually different paths, different ways to react to the situations you encounter, different answers to the questions you face. But in most of these moments you aren’t aware that there’s ore than one way to go. You’re not aware that you’re choosing. It’s easier to forget that you’ve made a choice, that you’ve answered a big question, that between the stimulus and the response you’ve made a judgment. Because then you don’t have to deal with the uncertainty. And you don’t have to take responsibility for making a choice in a context where there’s no right answer, only better and worse ones. It’s easier to pretend that you had no choice. It’s easier to pretend that you were born this way, that this is just your personality, that these are the rules or this is the way things are. “We are, mostly, comfortable with less choice. . .”
Philosophy can be one of those breaks in the story of your life, because philosophy, with its big and bigger questions, can make you aware that you are choosing. That you are choosing all the time, whether you want to or not, whether you notice it or not. That you have already answered those questions, whether you remember it or not. And so philosophy can help you make the choices more freely, by making you aware that they are yours to make.
Suppose that after you leave Normal World for the Unfamiliar City, someone back in Normal World tells everyone a version of your life’s story in which you never left at all. Suppose someone tells everyone else who you are, based on their understanding of who you used to be. They lock you into the story that you might have lived if you had never discovered it was up to you to write your own story. They write your story for you: the story in which you react to every situation in the predictable way, the way everyone back in Normal World reacts. The story in which you give the Correct Answers to all the big questions. Meanwhile you are not who you used to be, because you’ve learned that “you” are not who you are: you are who you’re becoming, and your choices take you there. You’re filling in the map with your choices.
When that person back in Normal World holds up this “mirror,” the mirror in which you see what they want to see in you, it hurts you. They are not seeing you, the you that is capable of choosing, of leaving the cave in which all your choices are made for you. The only see their daydream of you. But while it hurts, it also helps, because in that mirror you see more clearly than ever that crucial difference between “discovering who you are” and “discovering who you could be.” If you focus on “who you are,” you’ll be mostly focusing on who others think you are. You’ll think you’re defining yourself, but really you’ll be getting your definitions from them. You’ll import their illusions about who you are into your head, and you’ll believe them. But if you focus on “who you’re becoming,” you’ll be focusing on the choice that you’re making all the time, the choice to accept or reject those images, those illusions. And, by realizing that when other people make you feel inferior (or superior: flattery is another one of those mirrors) it’s because you are choosing to let them, you’ll be taking those next steps out of the cave, into the sun, where you won’t “know” yourself at all — and where you’ll feel the freedom that only comes when you’re willing to choose, without having to know.
Jean-Paul Sartre (who was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover) said: “even the red-hot pincers of the torturer do not exempt us from being free.” He thought were were always free to choose, no matter what our circumstances. Even with a gun to your head, you’re free to choose, and you’re responsible for your choices.
But you have to remember: to be outside the cave isn’t to be outside of reality. It’s the opposite: to be outside the cave means to live fully in reality, without illusions. And in reality, aren’t our choices more or less limited by circumstances? Isn’t the idea that “you are always free to choose” the worst kind of illusion? What about “dilemmas” — what about the Trolley Problem? Sure, you have a choice, and you have to make one, but it’s the kind of choice we call “impossible.” There’s no good choice. And you didn’t choose to be put into that situation in the first place! What about person who’s being tortured so he’ll give up the location of his friends — in the end, does he really have a “choice”? Aren’t we often forced to do things? And aren’t there some things you really can’t change — things about how you were born, the personality you have, the rules of society, the “way things are”? Isn’t there something called “nature”?
Well, maybe there is a “nature” — maybe there are things that can’t be changed. Maybe there are things we don’t get to choose. But it’s not nature we tend to resist: it’s nurture disguised as nature. Things that could be different, disguised as “the way it has to be.” This is the social situation in Normal World. And that’s where this work of “choosing,” of being aware that you are choosing and being capable of choosing well, comes into play.
What does Masha Gessen say, after talking about all those impossible choices faced by grandparents in terrible, even totalitarian, social situations? “I think resistance can take the shape of insisting on making a choice, even when the choice is framed as one between unacceptable options.”
Kill the one to save the five, or let the five die; these are unacceptable options. The thought experiment forces you to choose, and you don’t get to change the rules: there’s no third track, no time to untie them all. There’s no magic ring. But that doesn’t mean your choice is meaningless. By choosing, you’re taking responsibility: you’re refusing to live in the illusion that you aren’t responsible, that you are just “being who you are.” It isn’t so much about the outcome of the choice; it’s about the act of choosing itself. It’s not so much about what happens, as it is about what happens to you when you make the choice. You let go of excuses, including the excuse that you “know the right answer,” and you take responsibility for choosing without knowing the right answer.
But you don’t want to do this. None of us do. None of us wants to leave the cave, not really. “Because choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable.” And so the powerful, the puppetmasters, “aim to stamp out the possibility of choice” or else to “relieve you of the need to choose.” The puppetmasters aim to tell you who you are. They do this by spinning nightmares, in which all your choices are impossible ones; or they do this by weaving daydreams, in which all your choices are being made for you, but the whole time you think you’re doing what you want. They do it by telling you that whatever you happen to desire, or whatever happens to you, is fate — that no one, including them, chose to make things this way, or chose to make you this way.
This is how power works: by not taking responsibility for what its choices. Neither the powerful, nor the powerless: both live inside the cave. Resistance to the power of others and to powerlessness they want to make you feel starts when you take responsibility for your choices. It starts when you stop believing in fate: like Neo. It starts when you start doing philosophy. You can only escape the matrix of power if you’re more interested in being in control of your life than you are in living a safe life, or a pleasant one. You can only get out of the cave if you’d rather find out who you’re becoming than find out who you are.
But this is not all Gessen says about these stories of a life. There’s making choices, but then there’s also “more importantly, making better choices . . .” There are no right answers; but there are better and worse ones.
The next chapter is about what happens when you forget that.
Reflection
- Can you give an example of a time when you made a choice to go one way rather than another, without knowing which was the right way, about something that mattered?
- One the one hand, “having a choice” seems closely connected to feeling free. On the other hand, “having to choose” seems closely connected to feeling unfree. Reflect on this tension. When does having a choice make you feel free, and when does having a choice make you feel unfree?
- Sartre’s idea is that even the person who is being tortured is “free.” Which of the two kinds of freedom does he seem to have in mind? How do you react to Sartre’s idea?
