On “Fate”

As I mentioned earlier, I feel as though I am being teased kindly by “fate,” and I may have used similar rhetoric in earlier essays as well. Well, this is similar to my saying things like “the ghost of Kant is poking me from behind” — it is simply a metaphorical way of expressing a “feeling,” and does not mean that I believe in “fate”; nor, of course, does it mean that I do not believe in fate. For an ill-defined concept, making an yes/no judgment about it is always pretty meaningless.

First of all, I would like to declare that, with regard to the transcendental world of deities, I probably count as an agnostic. I neither affirm the existence of any supernatural power, nor flatly deny it. When I speak of things like the starry sky as God’s, or mysterious fate, and so on, I am merely borrowing certain words to express a real sense of mystery that does exist in my mind. In any case, a certain sense of mystery or wonder that one personally experiences is an emotion that cannot be doubted. But the existence of such an emotion does not prove anything.

Personally, I feel that I am resisting, in an appropriate way, the natural disenchantment at work upon me — namely, by this agnosticism, or rather by the conscious suspension of rational inquiry. On the one hand, my philosophy, my reason, is meant to cherish and cultivate my emotions; on the other hand, one of reason’s great strengths is that it can have “self-knowledge,” know where its limits lie. In matters concerning that transcendental mysterious world, plainly limited reason is incapable of making judgments; a flat denial is uninteresting, while an obstinate insistence is apt to lead one into fanaticism. The best course is to let the sense of mystery exist as a feeling, without needlessly disturbing it, and only when it has triggered a judgment should reason step in.

Of course, a sense of mystery, like any other emotional impulse, is quite capable of becoming an inducement to a choice. Yet if this is truly a choice made after reflection, then it will be placed under the control of reason. It is like lighting the fuse of a firecracker: before the fuse has burned out, sober reason always has enough room to pinch it out at any moment or to divert the flame elsewhere. This is the role reason plays in the act of choosing.

So the “mysterious” element in my character or my philosophy may be said to be an important catalytic force, an important emotion that triggers judgment or thought, but it never becomes a governing or decisive basis. For example, when writing a paper and looking for a topic, I often have small mysterious experiences while reading, such as certain words suddenly appearing and lingering in my mind. When I am usually reading aimlessly, I need not care very much; but when I need to settle on a topic, these “inspirations” become the fuse that stirs me to further reflection. Yet in fact most of the “inspirations” that arise end without result; in the end, what gets settled upon and written into a paper is only one of them. Or, for instance, when looking for a romantic partner, I can enjoy mystery, even a sense of destiny, and use it to ignite my emotions; but if reason does not give the green light, there can be no real action. Only when my sentry of reason has also been toppled one by one can those mysterious elements gradually release actual effects. Even so, that does not mean that I thereby acknowledge anything beyond the limits of reason.

My second declaration is that in my philosophy I do not use the word “fate” very often; the words I like to use are “mission,” “luck,” and so on. As for the concept of “fate,” the usual understanding is probably that it refers to a “predestined” course of life. For example, the Buddhist doctrine of karmic retribution says that the circumstances of this life are shaped by the deeds of a previous life; Christian predestinarianism says that everything is God’s prearranged design (of course, this is only one view within Christianity); modern physics tells people that everything in the future was fixed at the instant of the Big Bang. These are all ways of speaking about fate. There are, of course, contrary views as well: for example, Fan Zhen compared people’s differing fortunes to flower petals falling in the wind — whether they drift into the hall or into the manure pit is merely coincidence, with no other reason behind it; nonlinear mechanics and quantum mechanics say that the future is unpredictable. And so on.

To my mind, these views are all of no real importance, and they may not even contradict one another. For example, if fate is compared to flower petals drifting down in the wind, then the question “Why have I encountered such circumstances?” becomes at the same time “Why has this leaf fallen here?” But is the latter question incapable of explanation? Precisely because it is a natural phenomenon, it can in fact provide some possible explanations. For instance, is the way a leaf falls really unrelated to its original position on the tree and the timing of the gust that blew it down? Are there really no differences among leaves except for where they land as they fall? Or is the wind that moves the leaves itself not subject to some force? In short, the metaphor itself does not dissolve the theistic or fatalistic answers one might give to fate; on the contrary, it introduces something real like “wind,” an external driving force. In this sense alone, compared with Buddhism’s insistence on atheism, Fan Zhen’s explanation actually seems more like theism.

In fact, there was no need to displace the question in the first place. If the falling of a leaf is a natural process, then natural processes are precisely the sort of thing whose causes can be traced. The one thing that truly cannot have its cause investigated is this question of “my being me.” “Why am I myself and not someone else?” — this can be said to be the most mysterious yet also the most obvious question in the world. To transfer this question into something like “Why is this leaf this leaf?” is instead to introduce unnecessary entanglement.

I once said that the key word in “I think, therefore I am” is not “think” but “I” (for example, at the end of the essay “Rethinking the Meaning of ‘Suixuan’”). “I am I” brings out something called “identity”; in any case, “I” is the entire mystery of philosophy. The reason the proposition “I am I and not him” is absolutely certain is that it is guaranteed by the concept of “I” itself. “I” is not an objective, ready-made object, but a miraculous thing in reflective activity that is both subject and object, fluid yet identical. Whatever contents the thing called “I” may encompass, those experiences as fate plainly also participate, and continually participate, in the construction of the “I.” Therefore, asking “Why is my fate thus and not otherwise?” is often meaningless, because my fate has always been one of the constituent elements of my becoming myself.

Of course, we can provide some external explanations, such as “Why was I born at a certain time?” because “at such-and-such a time, an ovum was fertilized …,” but this is merely shifting the question, treating the “I” as an objective object — like Fan Zhen’s flower petals — to be explained, and it is not truly satisfying.

In my view, any account that treats the “I” as an objective object and explains its “fate,” whether it is theistic, fatalistic, atheistic, randomistic, or whatever-ist, is a question in another domain altogether. But if one wants to ask about “my fate” by taking me as me, then the focus is not “how fate came into being,” but rather, “what my fate is, and what it means.”

For the “I,” whether one says that my fate was arranged by God, that it was the result of deeds from a previous life, that it arose randomly without cause, or, say, that behind the scenes there is a scriptwriter of an RPG laying everything out for me (for example, we live in a virtual world like The Matrix), or even that in the real world there is some malicious entertainment company staging a huge reality show for me, with everyone in my life except me being actors, their appearances all arranged by that appalling director… well, so what? In any case, I always live in “my world”; I can only enjoy and explore within this world. If I find a door that might let me step out of this world, perhaps I will go out and take a look, but even so, I still can only live in “my world” — only now, this world may perhaps be expanded through exploration. In the end, I can never escape the finitude of “I”; this is one of the most fundamental “fates” of being human.

In any case, this thing called “I,” my feelings and my consciousness, is beyond doubt real. This reality is unanswerable and unprovable. So when I explain “I think, therefore I am,” I do not mean that “thinking” is the precondition of “being,” but rather that “I” is the precondition of both “thinking” and “being.”

Therefore, the question of fate that I care about is no longer whether my experiences have anything to do with God, with natural law, with my past lives, and so on. The question I care about is: what relation do these experiences have to “I”?

Among the various experiences in life, some are entirely beyond one’s choice, such as the time and place of one’s birth, the education one receives in childhood, the environment in which one grows up, and so on. These certainties, which participate in the shaping of “I” but are not chosen by me, can be called “predestination” or “fatality.” Whether they are arranged by God, by physical law, by randomness, or by a director, they are all the same “for me” — they are all things I cannot choose. They participate in shaping the personality of “I,” while I cannot participate in them. The time and place of my birth determine the environment in which I grow up and thereby affect the formation of my personality, while I cannot possibly exert any influence on the time and place of my birth; thus this is called fatality.

What I care about with regard to these “fates” is not “their source,” but “my source within them.” That is to say, I do not care about “what caused me to be born at a certain time and place?” but care more about “what did the event of being born at a certain time and place cause in me?” Of course I can also ask how my growing environment came to be formed, but this question belongs to a completely different category. When I ask about my fate, my question is: how was “I” formed within my growing environment? Regardless of what governs my fate, what I care more about is: exactly which features of my personality were governed by those fates of mine?

For example, when I had not yet formed the ability to make independent judgments, I learned to play chess in my family environment. Then I do not care what motive or consideration the person who taught me to play chess may have had; even if teaching me chess was a conspiracy, so what? In any case, I learned chess and found pleasure in playing it — that is an undeniable fact. And the question I might reflect on is: what does the experience of playing chess mean for my growth? Is the act of playing chess very dangerous or evil? (In which case I, having already formed an independent personality, ought to reject it), and so on.

Besides these one-way fates, there are also some circumstances of life that will affect my growth, but which I can also “respond” to. When I have already formed an independent personality, that is to say, when I possess a definite and undeniable “self,” or when I have the ability to make “choices,” the situations I encounter are no longer merely acting upon me in one direction. I can influence my future through conscious acts of choice; I can actively approach certain possible situations or actively avoid certain possible encounters; and when situations arise, I can also make judgments and choices, involving myself in the corresponding circumstances, thereby not only allowing these circumstances to affect me, but also affecting the development of those circumstances.

In this case, I may well inquire into the “source” of those circumstances, but the purpose of this inquiry is to understand them better so as to respond to them appropriately. The most basic and most important question is still not the relation between these circumstances and something else, but always their relation to “me.” For example, when I encounter a certain person, whether that encounter arises from past-life affinities, divine arrangement, random collision, or a director’s plot, the question before me is: how shall I establish a relationship with this person? So what I care about is not an “explanation” of “fate,” but its confirmation and reflection.

As for those “technologies” said to be able to predict fate — divination, astrology, and so on — my attitude is noncommittal. I do not need them, and it is even less possible for me to rely on them to make judgments. Of course I do not reject them as occasional entertainment; perhaps some of them are indeed accurate, so what? If it suits my taste, I am happy to make use of it; alarmist warnings I will simply dismiss with a laugh. Since I possess the ability to judge independently, I ought as far as possible no longer depend on things that are not my own to make judgments for me — unless I have already judged something to be unimportant, in which case I may use a coin toss or some other mysterious ritual to decide for me.

March 25, 2009

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.