Thanks for the advice. My theory is somewhat predicated on the concept that logic defines Nothingness..and I had never really read him..thought my theory was organic.
A word of advice, I just assume nothing I think and conceive of is organic until proven otherwise (which almost never happens).
And yeah, I just get past all of Heidegger's past dealings and cut to the theories. It's easier on your life.
If the spectrum of choices available to us is limited by our place in history, then wouldn't age/time constrain the choices we make? We wouldn't say that a journeyman in 13th-century England had a "choice" about getting a higher education. Yet there were writings floating about in educated circles that could have profoundly impacted his everyday decision-making processes.
Another, bigger problem with the doctrine of "free will" is the notion of responsibility. Partly because of the way that the history of thought has flowed from Plato onward, we take for granted that the subject is an "individual soul" to whom bad or good things happen, and who is responsible for ensuring that the best things happen to him- things that, by some miraculous ordering of the universe, also happen to benefit beings writ large. This seems to be the great ballast of the notion of free will. But what if the universe should turn out to have no guiding telos? Where does that leave responsibility? Where does that leave the "good soul" which is responsible for choosing only good, or at least benign, influences upon itself?
It negates it, to some extent, because that whole moral notion of a good and evil soul is a theological one made to seem somewhat natural (from Plato yes, but developing through means like Zoroastrian/Manichaean theology and, the most explicit and immanent influence on us Americans, Calvinist thought).
Now I'm not attempting to say that there is no such thing as responsibility in that case, just that there is no overriding moral principle that determines an absolute "good" from an absolute "evil" in the way that any decision in and of itself can be good or evil. Decisions are only good and evil (in so much as they can be, as they are not inherently so, and beyond even that "good" and "evil" are only moral-ideological values derived from an attempt to make "fortune" and "misfortune" concrete and apply them in a simplified, universal way) in how they relate to the context that they are made in and their results. All of those types of ideas complicates that notion of responsibility in ways that are not culturally and ideologically acceptable, so we default to the Platonic/Theological definition.
Basically, I don't deal with responsibility until I can identify the cultural bounds (and they are multi-valent and cross-cutting, which has been an underlying theme of this discussion not really made explicit) within which a decision is made. Then you can figure out how "free" a person is to make certain decisions and how "responsible" they are for it.
