FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM – A FALSE DICHOTOMY

Philosophy has many clichés, of which the dichotomy between Freedom and Determinism is not least. There is, however, no such dichotomy but, rather, one between freedom and binding, the latter determined by freedom.

Therefore since binding is determined by freedom, it exists in relation to freedom as its shadow counterpart, its corollary and in some sense complement. And just as freedom can be somatic or psychic, female or male, so binding can be psychic or somatic, the psychic counterpart of somatic freedom and the somatic counterpart of psychic freedom.

There is no more one freedom than one binding. But that which is bound will be determined by freedom as the self determines the nature (in this case bound) of the not-self. And the self, like the not-self, can be somatic or psychic, depending on gender.

Females, I have long maintained, when left to their own devices, are free soma and bound psyche. Males, by contrast, free psyche and bound soma. Therein lies the basis of the so-called 'war of the sexes' or ‘friction of the genders’, the gender struggle and in some sense 'tug-of-war' between opposite selves and, correlatively, opposite not-selves.

Complementarity is seeming, insofar as it follows from the hegemonic control of the one gender over the other, whether in sensuality or in sensibility, from a freely somatic or, by contrast, a freely psychic standpoint.

The compromised gender I have tended, in my writings, to classify as either antimales (under female hegemonic control in sensuality) or antifemales (under male hegemonic control in sensibility), and either 'upended' gender, compromised by criteria appertaining to the controlling gender, can and will be subject, sooner or later, to disillusionment with their lot and anxious to return, one way or another, to gender sync.