The Loop of Freedom

Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 206:

In Kant’s terms, as we have seen, I am determined by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will determine me: we, subjects, are passively affected by pathological objects and motivations; but, in a reflexive way, we ourselves have the minimal power to accept (or reject) being affected in this way—that is to say, we retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine us, or, at least, the mode of this linear determination. “Freedom” is thus inherently retroactive: at its most elementary, it is not simply a free act which, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me. Here, we should add a Hegelian twist to Spinoza: freedom is not simply “recognized/known necessity,” but recognized/assumed necessity, the necessity constituted/actualized through this recognition. This excess of the effect over its causes thus also means that the effect is retroactively the cause of its cause—this temporal loop is the minimal structure of life. At the level of reality, there are only bodies interacting; “life proper” emerges at the minimally “ideal” level, as an immaterial event which provides the form of unity of the living body as the “same” in the incessant changing of its material components. The basic problem of evolutionary cognitivism—that of the emergence of the ideal life-pattern—is none other than the old metaphysical enigma of the relationship between chaos and order, between the Multiple and the One, between parts and their whole. How can we get “order for free,” that is, how can order emerge out of initial disorder? How can we account for a whole that is larger than the mere sum of its parts? How can a One with a distinct self-identity emerge out of the interaction of its multiple constituents? A series of contemporary researchers, from Lynn Margulis to Francisco Varela, assert that the real problem is not how an organism and its environs interact or connect but, rather, the opposite one: how does a distinct self identical organism emerge out of its environs? How does a cell form the membrane which separates its inside from its outside? Thus the real problem is not how an organism adapts to its environs, but how it is that there is something, a distinct entity, which must adapt itself in the first place.