1. A disclaimer: this is part-theory, part-speculation of materialist ontology pertaining to the Human. No aims to justify, nor develop from foundations, any concepts here. Purely a dense consolidation of ideas. As to expel them, such that the creation of the methods that can analyze, interpret and justify is possible.
2. Nature of the Human – Common discourse, both public and academics, characterize the Human as an essentially determined creature. Previous to the enlightenment, that entailed theological essence. While it still remains, the corollary of the event, the Death of God, are creations of its shadows: that is, an assumed biological essence. For some apologists, an integration of both. To note, only Darwin will be analyzed now; theologians, the clowns, have no place here.
Darwinian evolution is misinterpreted, perhaps he himself, with the addition of psychological essentialism, the central instruments of religious atheism. A synopsis of evolution:
Population of (biological) creatures, an unfavorable environmental condition, random favorable mutations that adapt emerge, those members with said mutations survive.
The fitness function measures its namesake by this contingent biological event.
Humanity has not subjected itself to the fitness function, for some time. Incestours relationships, politically motivated marriages and the like; examples of a deliberate opting-out from the “pure” biological process. Also the case that humanity, maximally more than other related creatures – those that use tools, the great apes, monkeys, otters – have adapted to unfavorable circumstances not through biological evolution, rather culturo-conceptual evolution. Covid pandemic, an excellent example. A case of an unfavorable environmental condition, however, in lieu of the survival of favorable mutations and the death of the rest, a vaccine was created. Thus, overcoming the crisis.
Can this culturo-conceptual evolution not be interpreted as a sign, an explicit materialization of evolution i.e. the Human? Certainly a contingent base set of characteristics exist, evolutionary preferences: pleasure in social acceptance, fear of predators, anxiety-proneness to circumstances. Nonetheless, these are contingencies, and our essence? Capacity to adopt any essence, in its highest form to create new ones. It is mere idea now, the methods of such interpretation itself remain to be developed, a new scientific method to emerge.
2. On Freedom – A serious problem exists within the context of philosophical discourse on Free Will and Determinism. The problem framed in the context of universals, that a “universal” freedom can be conceptualized, claims of its (non-)existence debated after, a battle playing out in the dead grounds of Platonism. Freedom as founded in materialism, a notion unexplored until now.
Freedom is spoken in context of the Human, and if characterized of other animals, it necessarily implies the freedom of the Human. Thus, an understanding of freedom requires that of human ontology. Extending the previous conception of the Human qua Material evolution, a formulation of Freedom as the capacity for evolution, the material explication of it, for contingent necessity.
Now, what is contingent necessity? A moment of affinity with Zizek, the idealist characterization of Freedom as necessity, and not the popular superficial contingency, the pseudo-freedom of choices inside capitalist ideology. Innumerable flavors of ketchup, an example.
Note a similar conception of Nietzschean Freedom.
Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?
On the Way of the Creator, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Nietzsche. Freedom as capacity for creating necessities, a capacity that is entirely contingent. An idea of creating oneself, as opposed to discovering it.
3. Creativity and Freedom – Creativity, not the common meaning, one fails to find mere artistic practice, market-optimized social media content, and the rest here. Creation as ascertained by the emergence of the non : that which has not existed hitherto. Like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, in his words “ the first new form that was ever created, the first artistic creation in the strong meaning of the word”1
Black Square (1915)
Ubermensch as metaphor for the event of creation.That one overcomes the self-present and creates a self-beyond2, however, this self is non-existent given the present context; a pure act of creation.
Mere awareness of the nature of freedom as contingent necessity is not sufficient. Such uncreative acts of awareness, submits to an existen necessity, as provided by the socio-cultural context.
Creative freedom, on the other hand, procures a new necessity, a new value, from the non, the great event of creation. And escaping the supposed inevitability of submission. Perhaps the only possibility of freedom. While I have a partial idea of the concept in abstraction, I am yet not capable of its articulation.
And for that I must overcome myself.
Citations
1. TSS. p. 6
2. TNT
References
TSZ. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
TSS. Zupančič, Alenka. (2003). The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two.
TNT. Krishna. Niranjan. (2023). The Non-Regrettable Tattoo