Wanting, Choosing, and Alienation
Experiencing the world through tools leaves you with a feeling of emptiness
Some days ago, I thought about the difference between wanting and choosing. Even if at first sight, they really seem like completely different terms, they can easily be confused. I’d even argue that this confusion is even (at least partially) leading to the alienation in modern technological society.
Wanting
Wanting is not something that we can want. It is not an action in and of itself. It is a way our actions are structured. We do not want simply to want but want something which gives a why to our action.
On the other hand, to ought is not the same as wanting, as it gives a direction of how we ought to act. Even if different, wanting presupposes what we ought to do as we should want what we have to do according to it.
Wanting is an answer. We are responding to ourselves and act accordingly. To realise oneself happens in the state of wanting. To act is then performed as an act of will. Your willpower does not actually reflect the power to act but the power to let yourself take over your wants, responding to your own demands.
Choosing
Do we choose what we want? Or do we want to choose? It is easy to confuse choosing in its relation to wanting as something that is also about something to achieve, a ‘why’ we act. Quite on the contrary, the wanting of a goal enables us to choose. To be able to choose, I have to want it first.
We often assume choosing is some kind of balancing between reasons. The problem is, if I’m hungry and have two equal salads in front of me to choose from, I wouldn’t be able to choose. Both salads are equal and therefore, there is no reason to choose the one over the other.
Choosing is only possible if I already want something. It becomes possible through the possibility of achieving my wants. So, it has options and alternatives to form a path to the goal — choosing the necessary means to achieve it.
In summary, we obtain wants as something primal and pre-conscious while choosing is an object of our utilitarian reason — a simple tool, but not the goal. I’d argue that in everyday life, we keep confusing these two and that leads to our feelings of alienation or emptiness.
Seeing the World through Tools
Since Galilei, we know that the world around us is not what it seems. Science tells us that we need certain tools to be able to observe the truth. Our natural perceptions are faulty and misleading.
And so, it became normal for us not to trust our own experience of nature, the experience of our surroundings. We have to trust ever more complex methods of observation and rationality. Reasoning processes as abstract tools are the way of reaching truth.
But these tools, methods, and processes are all human-made. Nature seen through the lens of tools is just nature seen through the lens of humans. We stopped experiencing nature and are instead stuck in a circular process of observing ourselves. As Heidegger wrote:
In the meantime, it is precisely the […] human being who spreads himself out into the form of the Lord of the Earth. Thus the appearance spreads that everything that is encountered exists only insofar as it is a power of man. This appearance produces a final deceptive semblance. According to it, it looks as if man everywhere encounters only himself. Heisenberg rightly pointed out that this is how reality must present itself to people today. […] In truth, man today no longer encounters himself, i.e. his essence, anywhere.
The Confusion
This situation became regular common knowledge on how to process the world around us. But here lies the problem: using reason as our tool, thinking our way through the best decision, becomes our goal. We saw above that this doesn’t work. What we want isn’t what we choose.
Choice is the means to achieve what we want, and reason can be the tool to do so. But reason is not helping us to experience the world, it just makes us experience the human. What we want lays beneath the reasonable and even necessitates it.
I’d argue that this evolution towards making the reasonable choice in modern utilitarian society is making us blind towards what our heart really desires. It leaves us with a feeling of emptiness to instead think our way through what should be wanted. And, it leaves us with a feeling of alienation as experiencing the world through humans changes radically the way we can experience nature. It becomes circular and, in particular, alienating from what it meant to be human before.
To finish, here is an excerpt from the novel “Homo faber” by Max Frisch when the protagonist, a logical technician, protocolled his lack of understanding towards his lover when she points out his inability to experience the world:
Discussion with Hannah! — about technology (according to Hannah) as a trick to arrange the world so that we do not have to experience it. Mania of the technician to make creation usable because he cannot stand it as a partner, cannot do anything with it; technology as a trick to eliminate the world as resistance from the world, for example, to dilute it through speed so that we do not have to experience it. (What Hannah means by this, I don’t know.)
