Heinrich Rombach: Decision
A decision cannot be based on a process of selection but takes place in direct relation to the whole being. A decision effects the being, what it is itself. When the choice of a career is considered a decision, for example, then it is not about whether it is the most "convenient", "promising" or "lucrative" profession among all the "possibilities", but about the profile of being itself. Whoever in this manner is a fisherman (doctor, pilot, blacksmith), is it in reality. He or she thus freely accepts certain limitations with clearly restrictive and at times oppressive effects, but thereby also gives birth to a decisiveness which has a certain force of assertion and conviction as a result.
Whenever a decision arises from a choice, then the stage of action is transformed and another structural model comes into force. If this transformation does not take place, then the choice is reduced to indecision; the decision completely loses the principle of selection without gaining a new, meaningful criterion. To be and act as a whole means to directly experience the whole of one’s profile in a single possibility. The possibility thus loses its limitations and its demarcation to other possibilities.
"Different possibilities" no longer exist. Decision involves one single possibility, and that is the whole possibility of existence itself.
Every decisive action also determines its past history, it establishes new meaning and purpose and organizes them in such a manner that it flows out of necessity. Every decisive action shapes its past history, it acts with the same energy toward the past as toward the future; life thus springs from a single point. In this sense, nothing is ever past.
Expressed in the most general terms it can be said that the right decision is that which is a decision. And in fact, upon closer inspection, the situation of decision no longer appears as the presentation of comparable "possibilities", but as the offer to accept a single possibility, everything else is escape or deceit.
(Rombach’s notion of decision influenced the film "Bruckner’s Decision")
