about fate

What occupies my mind after finishing the reading assignment are mainly two words, one is Fate and the other is Story, and let me start with fate, on which a good story is possible.

The question of “is there destiny in the world which dominates one’s whole life” has haunted me since I was very little. The answer I have gained via education in the following year, which might not be a good one, or might seem fairly convincing to me just because of its being congenial to me, turned out to be that destiny is determined by one’s character. The force of the question, however, has never waned for me. This character-oriented answer, though in most cases can serve as a good answer in explaining many phenomenon of our lives, seems not philosophical enough, at least before it is put under the philosophical scrunity.

As what the textbook mentioned, Hesiod refers to Muses to explain things for which he is unable to give an explicit account. Homer did so as well in his heroic stories when it comes to where each and every power of human beings come from, no matter courage, swiftness or integrity. If human destinies are in the control of their own hands, their characters and powers, then their hands are in the control of those heavenly gods. But any book regarding the history of philosophy then emphasizes that it is distinction between the reference to mythical power and the pursuit of rationality that marks the lifeblood of philosophy. Therefore what is fate consists at least not in mythical powers. Then where? Logos? Rationality? Characters? Or, contingencies? And why?

Philosophy helps people think, criticize, reform our lives, though sometimes in a trwisting and circuitous way by perplexing us, to faciliate an ideal mode of life in which we contemplate the nature of both the external and internal world, and further to empower us with insightful perspectives enabling us to engage in the world practically wiser. But what is destiny? What does it mean by “destined to be”? But in what extent the ability to think is related to one’s fate? Many platitudes spring to my mind such as “Change your daily attitude toward life and you can change your life”, or in a better formulation that “Cultivate the ability to think philosophically and you can reform both yourself and the world”. Maybe that has been so much to tell about the destiny?

Then comes my answer less inspiring that the power of philosophy is limited and life is destined to be filled with contingencies and fragments. It is all about the matter of how to treat these contingencies. While philosophy is one way in which the uniformity of the universe and ourselves is its basic presupposition, telling story is one of other ways of equal importance in which contingency remains its feature and presupposed uniformity of our lives might be explained in some other way. Fate is not only a combination of a series of consequence of our behaviors variously elicited by our different characters, personalities and ways of thinking, but also a series of outcomes of contingent accidents out of control. Therefore, although I completely concur with Roochnik’s view that mythical stories leave the nature of the beginning of the world unexplained, I am willing to amplify my claim that mythical stories explore and reveal the truth of human lives in their own ways in which the force of emotion usually towers above the systematic formulations offered by rationality. What I am trying to say differetiate here is the gap between internal world of ourselves and the external physical world, the ignorance of both of which leads to fear in our hearts. While capable of shepherding human beings to the truth of how the universe came into being, philosophy is less potent than literature, or some other kinds of art in comforting the fear in the face of the unknown.

Maybe we are able to reconstruct the factors and elements of the physical world in a scientific way by a systematic schema, just as what both modern scientists are and presocratic philosophers were doing, in which we are provided by the power to predict future events such as the eclipse, but are we capable of predicting each and every future in our lives? It is true that the picture of random order given by Hesiod in terms of the beginning of the world in which the chaos comes first and then Earth gives birth to Sky and Hill is diametrically dwarfed by the scientific schemas given by the philosophers emerging afterwards. While historians provide us with rational inferences based on empirical evidences and fragmential materials, why do we keep believing, though maybe in a different sense of believing, that it is a war about an apple, instead of a historical event based on economic and political causes? If I am allowd to make an even unpardonable generalization, I am intended to hold that the effort to figure out the nature of universe has very limited power to help us completely make sense of fate of human lives. And that is exactly why ancient mythical stories still worth reading and why readers today are still touched by those heroic stories.