Kevin's Watch

I like it.

--A

Although by now my theory of free will is a sort of Kant-Jung hybrid (with some singular judgments therewith admixed), my original argument, which still stands in my eyes, for free will as libertarian choice in the sense of "the principle of alternative possibilities," goes as follows:

• 1. No imperative ("Do this," "go here," etc.) can cause itself to be complied with for the sake of being complied with (because imperatives are second-personally addressed, even if from ourselves to ourselves by ourselves, they inherently depict compliance with themselves as something done from their targets, and not by virtue of being commanded).
  2. If it is necessary for me to do what is in compliance with some directive, that directive itself is as such irrelevant to me (so if I am independently caused to do what counts as said compliance, or already doing it, I am not complying with the directive for the sake of compliance but for whatever other motive I already have).
  3. If it is not possible for me to comply with a directive, then that directive is to that degree meaningless for me.
  C. Therefore, if I ever have a directive given unto me, that is reasonable, or that "holds" as a meaningful article of language, or whatever along these lines, in the act of compliance therewith I must be both able to comply, and to fail to comply; that is, even apart from the question of whether some directives are ethically charged, it is true that the concept of prescription or imperative sententiality in itself requires us to be able to make unfixed choices relative to the possibility of a meaningful use of this aspect of our language.

So for the longest time, the catch was: what if the imperative form of sentences, or the prescriptive aspect of meaning, or some other like thing, was just... an illusion? But then I learned from Wittgenstein, in part, that all words have an imperative element to their meaning, and so the very form of the truth itself codes this element, so that it is impossible to have the concept of truth or facts without knowing how to correctly--because there is a genuinely correct way--apply prescriptive conceptuality.