Freedom and determinism are well-known philosophical problems. The determinist notion holds that the environment pre-determines us and that all our choices are determined by circumstances. Today we understand that it conditions us, but it does not determine us. We are free to choose how to influence the environment, but we must not let ourselves be influenced by it.
We previously spoke about how Sartre maintained, unlike Freud, that our unconscious desires do not determine our behavior and that we are not forced to act as we do, just as we cannot invoke our motives or our emotions as justifications.
We are free to ski according to our free will without being influenced by external (our environment) or internal (our personality) deterministic factors. Social restrictions are institutionalized, and our personal freedom on the slopes is, in a certain way, restricted. The opportunities to reinvent ourselves as skiers are less frequent because determinism exerts a profound influence on each of our actions. The external factors that influence our skiing are not the only legacy we possess from our past; our recollections and memories (internal determinism) endure with us despite external changes.
We debate here how our skiing should not be influenced by our past and that, even though we cannot alter it, we have the freedom to react to it. Likewise, we should not let ourselves be influenced by our current circumstances, since we have the ability to choose to evolve. Refusing to choose to be better skiers is acting in bad faith. It is also a choice to blame internal or external determinism to avoid assuming responsibility for our own free will. In other words, instead of accepting responsibility for our actions, we attribute them to fate.
According to Sartre, reinterpreting our own past experiences helps us overcome determinism. A descent only has true significance when it ends, and until that very moment, we can change what is based on what we do. Therefore, bad faith is the belief that what we are determines what we do. If we believe that we are mediocre skiers, we will proceed to ski accordingly. And this is where free will steps in, because what and how we ski determines the skiers we are, since we are free to create a new interpretation of our skiing past, a new way of acting, given that we can always reinvent ourselves and ski differently.
If we have ever experienced an exceptional descent, why not think that, at that moment, we were great skiers and that we can continue to be so. However, we often doubt whether we are capable of transforming ourselves because we are caught between the freedom to reinvent ourselves and the fear of changing.
We can truly believe that we have the freedom to change our skiing, but we can also interpret it as an illusion that masks the tremendous power of our own determinism. We are free to choose our future and continue skiing mediocrely, but we are also free to choose the opposite.
