On the Beginning of Change and Human Freedom Within the Flow

The human mind lives in a frantic rush to domesticate chaos. We compartmentalize our lives into chronological divisions and carve an imaginary "turning point" into every major transformation. As Paul Valéry cautioned, our eagerness to invent beginnings after the fact is actually an attempt to seize ownership of the flow (Valéry, 1997). We want to believe that change initiates in a single "moment," with a single decision; because if the beginning belongs to us, we hold the reins. This is a tragic illusion built by man against the relentless movement of the spiral. Yet, any potential beginning lies far beyond this desire for a founding will; it is a state that human consciousness can never fully solidify.

This unknowability manifests in Heidegger’s concept of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit), which strips away our imaginary starting point. According to this notion, we are passengers cast into an coordinate we did not choose, inside a colossal spiral that is already spinning (Gündoğdu, 2012). Consequently, we cannot be the sovereign finger that initiates change. Within an existing flow, we simply fall into an existing change. This inevitably drags us into the labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges. Unaware of their origin, human beings find themselves in the midst of a narrative composed of endlessly expanding, branching, and perpetual corridors. In Borges's labyrinths, a beginning is always an awakening into another dream; while imagining we are experiencing the genesis of our own story, we fall into the lap of a cosmic fiction established long before us. Here, we experience the beginning not as a frozen "moment," but as a continuity reshaping itself at every layer (Borges, 2013).

If, then, the process of change does not originate from us, and we are merely passing through a flow, where does freedom hide?

When viewed through Foucault’s window, we see billions of puppet-like human beings. Woven through the fine craftsmanship of discourse networks and systemic structures, these subjects can experience freedom only as a side effect (Foucault, 2011). In a general sense, the thought of an besieged humanity can feel disheartening. However, this encirclement cannot condemn us entirely. We cannot choose the existence of change nor its predetermined mechanics; this is our existential destiny. Yet, we determine how we position ourselves on this moving ground. Freedom is not stopping the rotation of the earth beneath us, but deciding how to walk upon its flow. Against the velocity of the spiral they ride, a human being can choose to sprint, slow down, or come to a halt. As Sartre noted: "Freedom is what we do with what is done to us." Choice is not building the process from scratch, but forging an ethics of response and constructing one’s own law within the spiral into which we have been thrown.

"I was thrown onto my own shores; now, I write my own laws in this foreign land."

-Nilgün Marmara

Why, then, will a human being seek freedom within a change whose beginning they do not own?

Because the only way to escape being a merely drifted object, and to remain a "subject" within the flow, is to collide one's own will with the change one is subjected to. The desire for freedom revolves around being meaningful and remaining with meaning. And man is condemned to meaning. In this process, accepting what is predetermined is not submission; it is a clear-eyed, sober realization that the beginning does not belong to us and that the flow was established outside of our control.

Ultimately, our desire to be the beginning is an illusion, our thrownness is an acceptance, and how we position ourselves in the flow is our sole truth. True freedom lies in our stubbornness against the spiral’s attempt to turn us into a mute object—our insistence on making every ring of this endless motion a part of our own matrix of meaning, and forcing this foreign flow to speak in the language of our own will.

...Anyway

you exist; and I, surely I will find a way if there is a way

or if I possess a capacity to find a way, if I am enough for this...

-Oruç Aruoba

References

• Borges, J. L. (2013). Döngüsel yıkıntılar [The circular ruins]. In Ficciones (pp. 45-52). İletişim Yayınları.

• Foucault, M. (2011). Özne ve iktidar [The subject and power]. In F. Keskin (Ed.), Seçme yazılar 2: Öznenin teknolojisi [Selected writings 2: Technologies of the self]. Ayrıntı Yayınları.

• Gündoğdu, H. (2012). Heidegger’in fırlatılmışlık (Geworfenheit) kavramı ve dünyada-varlık analizi [Heidegger’s concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit) and the analysis of being-in-the-world]. Kaygı. Uludağ Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Felsefe Dergisi, (18), 45-62.

• Valéry, P. (1997). Variété: Estetik kuramlar ve denemeler [Variété: Aesthetic theories and essays] (B. Onaran, Trans.). Payel Yayınları.