The Freedom That Birth’s Civilization

The Embedded Logic Of Reciprocal Movement’s Synchronic Structure Concluded

Pictures always help simplify what is difficult to comprehend, so with
simplification in mind, I present the following pictured attempt at describing
the changes that occur in synchronic structure, the changes resulting in
increased freedom. To begin: Let the V shape represent the image of freedom’s
synchronic structure. Let the left side of the V represent the empirical world (the
negative pole of synchronic structure) and the right side represent the freedom
pole. Where the lines converge, indeterminacy reigns, and so begins the liberation process. Indeterminacy, at the quantum level, as far as I can tell, is an idea that is no longer challenged by physicists. However, we do not have to be a physicist in order to understand the concept of indeterminacy for, as Piaget tells us, “any content is form relative to some inferior content and any form the content for some higher form.” (Piaget, 1970, p. 140)

To be sure, where the synchronic poles meet is a constrained state, but it is
open enough to allow for the expansion freedom. Label the vertex, the V
bottom, as ~~b (not, not being). “Negations negating negations,” on this level,
define the entire V structure, (as they also imply that which lies outside the V
structure, or the logical space of affirmation); that is, “negations negating
negations” define the V structure until, on the back of negation, a new level of
freedom becomes liberated.

On the next freedom level, somewhere above the V vertex, on the empirical side,
let ~b represent the physical event. This is a temporary condition,
interrupted, eventually, by death and decay. Across from ~b, let b, the
reciprocal and necessary counterpart to ~b, on the freedom side of the V, represent life’s journey toward more evolved life forms, i.e., life forms of greater complexity. Life, through adaptation and diversity, reproduces and evolves.
Freedom, on two levels now, persists until further up the V, but still within
the V structure, another level of freedom is liberated.

In this higher liberated state of freedom, let b~b (continuity occurring in
discontinuity), on the empirical side of the V, represent the physical event.
Directly across from b~b, on the freedom side of the V, let ~bb (discontinuity occurring in continuity) represent Jean Paul Sartre’s “for-itself consciousness,” i.e., consciousness participating in the self-conscious experience. On this evolved structural level, a new freedom is produced, the freedom to consciously participate in freedom. In other words, out of this embedded experience arises the subjective aim of a conscious self (~bb creates identities and becomes the source of symbolic representation). Freedom, on this level, births civilization—and the V shape grows larger and wider. Social interaction and social organization, over time, produce modernity (and the negative effects of modernity). Unfortunately, all this progress is now, in part, working against the continued expansion of freedom; that is, the Earth’s resources are being eliminated, polluted, and/or unjustly horded.

In the words of Sartre, we must perpetually “confront the world and self as a
lack,” and because of this we cannot escape the responsibility for our choices.
For Sartre, responsibility lies in the chosen act and therefore cannot be separated from the person who chooses. While Sartre has delineated the not-self and the consequences that follow from not-self (Being And Nothingness), he stops far short of identifying the synchronic dimension encompassing both nature and human consciousness. Since Sartre’s description of not-self—being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is, is also a description of the pure form of this double movement, we can now confidently place this reciprocal movement in the empty box that Lane described as the “innate structuring capacity of all structures.” In so far as this structure characterizes the synchronic axis of all experience, it may be thought of as unconstructed, but in so far as its form circumscribes all experience, all experience may be thought of as a product of construction, i.e., the diachronic axis of experience.

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