Choosing Existence over Possibility

(This post relates in some manner to my other recent post Siding in Favor of Existence as a Problem.  I hope to return to this topic by means of these reflections, as well as the discussion of understanding the question concerning why there is something rather than nothing.)

   Recently, while reading Part I of Either/Or, I was considering what it is ultimately pulls us out of our life of possibilities into the world we often call the actual, or existing world.  There are clear advantages to a life in the possible: I can construct any story I wish, follow the paths of different lives, skip what's not interesting, change elements of my life on a whim, and many other obvious things.  However, we choose to emphasize the world which appears to us apart from our imagining and projecting, and tend towards using this as a standard for organizing our life.  

   From just noting that the actual world does appear to us is not enough to show that we must, even always do, organize our life exclusively around it: sometimes we think through the possibilities available to us to decide what to do, and even when we do not see how these possibilities relate to our current situation, we can understand from them how it is we want to advance in any circumstances.

   It is clear that we require empirical concepts for our projections of possibility, and so possibility must at least take their standard from the world so far as it will project particular possibilities, however, at some point could we simply begin to rank and prioritize the possible over the existent, even when it leads to our doom in the world of existence?  Perhaps we can, but I do not mean to try to develop a view to convince anyone to pursue this goal, but I am interested at least in why it is that the existent continually pulls us back in, not because these things are not obvious in their own way, but because it is important to get clearer on them, and their central role in determining our orientation to life.

   (We could just as well consider how even though we tend towards emphasizing existence, we sometimes are called out into the possibilities and emphasize those; how do we understand this shift in interest in an a priori manner (according to forms of experience)?)

   There are events which involve interest in the existence, such as, pleasure and pain, the beautiful and duty.  All of these play some role in orienting us to the existing. The latter two of these, beauty and duty, place us in a free relation to existence: in the case of the beautiful, we are interested in the object and it is susceptible to our understanding; with duty, we are responsible for something, and so cognize ourselves as able to bring it about ourselves apart from circumstances.  In contrast, pleasure and pain place relate us to existence through interest in continuing or ending a feeling, and not to us in a free determining relation to nature (as minds, with beauty, or agents with duty).  

   Not only is our enjoyment (and pain) tied to existence, but also the source of our sense of higher calling, and self worth.  From this, it seems little wonder why we prefer to concern ourselves with the existing, and would laugh at anyone who pursues a life of pure possibilities - to the degree they could attain this life, they also could not have actual enjoyment or actual self-worth.  (However, we learn from Kierkegaard to not have a hard heart towards those who feel they can avoid difficulties by trying to live a poetic existence, as the  aesthete does in Either/Or, even if he is not necessarily to be emulated.)

   These interests of pleasure, pain, beauty and duty all show experience, and us, to be organized in a certain way a priori, and first seem to allow us to start organizing and integrating more and more into a developing perspective.  There is a lot of work to be done in understanding how these different original interests in experience relate and develop in relation to each other.

A note on Leibniz:

   Leibniz maintains that all possibilities have a degree of being, but are not actual.  What determines them as actual cannot merely be their non-contradiction, since there are many non-contradictory possibilities, and so something else needs to play this role of determining the actual from the possibles: goodness.  It is possible to see this as related phenomenologically to the discussion above: we think and project all kinds of possibilities and certain of them are more vivid (have a greater degree of being) for us because of the characteristics which Leibniz emphasizes - goodness.  Perhaps the fact that it is by degree that the possible is separated from the actual is a signal that to Leibniz the interests in the actual illustrated above play a role in settling this ranking, and so Leibniz' rather strange sounding account of the determining of actuals is merely a phenomenological account of how we do cognize the actual from the possible, given that both are available to us with the same level of access.