Not Oneness, but Harmony

What about union to the tribe? What about the picture of the self who dies to become part of something greater than itself? The one who is so much a part of the tribe that it ceases to be an individual?

Not only is this not possible, the self will always remain a removable atom, but it is not necessary to aspire to. To ensure the coordination of a larger body does not require the removal of selves, but rather harmony among its parts. That desires and aspirations within the tribe should work together rather than being competitive is what is needed to be a part of something greater.

This too is a matter of ego. An ego may need to die to ensure harmony, but the self cannot. What is the result of such ego sacrifice? Only the creation of a new ego - one that exists in harmony.

Death to the Ego

What then of the veneration of those who overcome the ego? What then of the myths of the hero who prevails over the self?

Indeed, where does that leave the notion of self-sacrifice?

Self-sacrifice in the pursuit of Oneness is misguided, for it is still your experience of self-sacrifice and your experience of Oneness. Rather, prevailing over the ego is still to be venerated and the myths should continue to be told. For ego is not the same as a self: ego is the story about the body that houses the self.

Those stories can always be changed. At times such a narrative may need to be annihilated. This is the proper death of the ego.

The Melancholy of the Disinterested

There are those few who cannot seem to attain flow, however. They have not yet found that experience that can draw them out of self-awareness and into a state of pure fixation on some part of the world. For them the world becomes grey and life is melancholic, for they cannot escape the anemic experience of being self fixated on self.

They may take up this or that activity, but it never arouses the passions enough to shrink the fixation on self. The world remains grey.

This is one form of what we now call depression. The solution is elusive: one either continues searching for the thing that arouses the passions, or one resigns themselves to the melancholic life of self-fixation.

I, for one, would never denounce a person for being in such a state.

The Impulse Towards Oneness

When the introspective self finds itself melancholic it may turn toward the world to find fresh air. A passing interaction may be soothing, but far too much self-awareness will keep the experience shallow. So the passing interaction becomes deeper and deeper as self-awareness shrinks. In this is a greater intensity of experience, and one may begin wanting less and less self-awareness.

At some degree this becomes the impulse towards Oneness. The desire to be so fully connected to something else that one ceases to be separate entirely. This impulse can then be enshrined as an ideal or as a "proper state of being." Those who enshrine such an impulse may come to see the self as a hindrance to the proper state of Oneness.

This, however, is nothing more than nonsense. For it is still your experience. It is still the World as I found it even if the fixation shifts from the I to the World.

Remove the enshrinement and you have the aspiration to what we now call "flow." There is no killing the self to attain flow, flow is an experience unto the self as well.

The Essential Melancholy of Self Fixated on Self

You are a self. This fact is not melancholic inherently. What is melancholic is when a self fixates on the self.

How is it that the self is known? Through experience of the world.

However a self may also seek after the self. Famously Hume tried this and found that it could not be done - leading him to deny that there is a self at all. This is not a necessary motion, for the self is found in the perception of things outside the self. However, when the self tries to fixate on the self it leads only to melancholy, for there is nothing there to perceive.

When there is nothing there to perceive, there is only thin air, boredom, and starvation. This leads to melancholy.

You Are Essentially a Self

The nature of the self is unknown. What a self is is unknown. What cannot be denied, however, is that you are essentially a self. This is known not through introspection (an attempt at a self finding the self) but through interaction with the world. For that interaction is your interaction. That experience is your experience. It all comes to a central point, and this character of phenomena is the essence of the self that we can discover.

Why is a Wise Guy Not a Wise Guy?

Requested by RGF

To properly answer this question it must be stated aloud. “Why is a wise guy not a wise guy?”

Or perhaps the proper way of writing the question would be “Why's a whys guy not a wise guy?” In which case the answer is that a wise guy does not bother with so man “whys,” because he sees that “why” is only useful up to a certain point. Why allows one to make sense of how forces and agents operate within a system, but also comes to a terminus where continuing to ask “why” will only yield impotent “because” answers. Eventually one is bound to come to a point where the answer is “it just is” or “I just do,” and the “whys” guy who insists on asking why beyond the point of usefulness cannot be a “wise” guy who applies knowledge and understanding to his actions.

On the other hand, maybe this is all wrong and it is not a question at all, but a statement: “Wise: a whys guy not a Ys guy.” In this instance we have two types of men, the “whys” guy and the “Ys” guy. Y being typical shorthand for a “yes” response, especially in questionnaires, we can picture the “Ys” guy being the chap who does as he's told and doesn't bother with asking too many questions. He acts based on the vision of another and is not concerned with understanding too much of his own area of activity. The other man is the questioner – the “whys” guy – who will not act unless he has been given an explanation of the meaning and context of his actions. The statement declares the “whys” guy to be also “wise,” to the exclusion of the “Ys” guy.

Or perhaps it is the reverse! Perhaps this statement says that the “Ys” guy is “wise” while the “whys” guy is not! For what, after all, is wisdom except an aid in determining what actions one should take? And what is the critical foundation of society except a willingness to trust others and accept a certain level of blindness in order to function at greater levels than any single individual imagination would be capable of picturing? In this case, the “whys” guy slows society's progress, the “Ys” guy understands the value of endorsing a social structure – and is therefore “wise.”

And what else might these words be saying? “Why is a wise guy not a wise guy?” That is, asking why the wise are not wise? A bit a shoddy logic that illuminates the deeper truth that a wise guy is only wise in a certain context – that is, certain behavioral inclinations and certain maxims may make a man wise in one situation, and a fool in others. Put a wise debater in a managerial position and see the fool come out; ask the analyst to be an artist and you'll soon beg the fool to go back to his dungeon of spreadsheets!

And thus we see that the same bit of wordplay can be used to say this but it can also say that and that in this context we're discussing wisdom in the abstract and in that context we're discussing social structure, and no doubt there are more this and thats that might be appealed to as context. No doubt all this confusion could be avoided by multiplying words to create clear logical pictures of what we are trying to communicate, and therein lies the real wisdom of the statement: A bit of wordplay will stay with us far longer than logical clarity, for the wordplay resembles the obscurity that characterizes our lives as they are rather than our lives as our logical pictures say they can be.

But even that explanation pales in comparison to the goofy joy of playing with words!

Hope is not Out There

How does it end? Whatever situation you are in - or even the entirety of life itself - how does it end? Does it end in victory for you? Rest? Satisfaction? Does the whole thing end utterly fucked up? Miserable? In defeat?

You can watch life's trends and try to predict the ending. You can tell when the situation is turning against you and you can tell when the situation is turning in your favor. But Fortune is fickle, and just because one day is full of warm fuzzies holds no bearing on whether the wheel might turn the next day and leave you with nausea and exhaustion.

However, for practical reasons, in life hope largely comes from within. In so far as we can study life's trends and study the way an action leads to a consequence, hope is a matter of phenomena and method (something like a science). However, insofar as we cannot see very far in front of our face, and insofar as life is full of mystery and twisting turns, hope is more a matter of creating a certain picture of the world and clinging to it through strength of will. Anxiety is little different, except that it points in another direction and it is far easier to cling to. Regardless we do not, on the whole, come to hope or anxiety because of data that the world provides to us, rather it is through the pictures that we use to make sense of that data.

This is to say, that if we see our lives growing greater and greater, that comes from our own vitality; if we see our lives ending in brokenness, that comes from our own acceptance. The world, however, will not allow us to see more than a few feet in front of our face. Our near circumstances are not something we can study. Our anticipations are context that we use to make sense of our present moment.

The Absence of Love

In the absence of Love, one will do whatever strikes the highest balance of ease and stimulation. Without Will to compel us to chase or seek after something, we will turn to what we already have that is able to keep the boredom at bay.

In short: find something to pursue or settle in for a life of binge eating and masturbation.

The World as We Found It

I conceive of the world as one fact. We must carve it into tiny pieces to make it usable, but this does not mean that it is truly composed of tiny pieces.

I conceive of language as an inherent falsehood, and I say that the xRy nature of our language indicates human creativity and a segregating of facts apart from other facts that the world does not actually resemble.

All this is to say that the entire history of philosophy, science, literature, poetry, and essentially language and mathematics entirely is one big book called The World as We Found It. What we meant to write was The World as It Is, but that is not what the final product turned out to be. The text turned out to be a creative work that emerged through the interactions of Selves with the World, determined to varying degrees by either those Selves or by the World, but never without the interaction with the two. No Self ever produced a work without appealing to the World beyond himself, and the World has never been described without passing through the filter of a Self who encountered it.

In the Face of a Mystery

In the face of a mystery, I can not give an answer. Before a dilemma, I can not choose one horn or the other. It seems that doing so misses the truly remarkable point: that a mystery exists here.

If I understand Wittgenstein, his position was that mysteries occurred from the misuse of language, of applying concepts incorrectly and looking from the wrong point of view. The correct answer was to look at the situation differently until one found a perspective where the mystery dissolved into thin air and one could move on.

I am not there yet with Wittgenstein, either because I shall eventually regard Wittgenstein as wrong or because I have not yet fully seen the merit of his method. For me, at least at this moment, mysteries are places to stop and stare and wonder why we can not advance knowledge there. The method that I would use there is to stop and jot down the different possible positions one could take in the face of a mystery, and then consider why it is that one of them is not clearly true.

At the Crossroads of Dissatisfaction and Sloth

There exists a particular kind of despair in the world: not a very intense one nor (usually) a very long lasting one, but one that crops up from time to time in life. That despair is the feeling of lacking the energy to do anything challenging or requiring ones attention, but also being unable to get any significant stimulation or satisfaction from the old and familiar. Moments of this kind of despair are moments of the most pathetic feeling boredom: you're bored because the old stuff ain't interesting and you can't be bothered digesting any new stuff.

I'd like to offer a reasonable solution to this problem: perhaps the answer is to muscle through the lack of energy and force yourself to learn something new (this has never worked for me); perhaps the answer is to take a deep breath and put on an old movie and force yourself to appreciate what you already know (again, this has never worked for me). Frankly I've never found a solution except to wait until either the jadedness passed or you get some vigor back.

Art and Life

If we say that art is a reflection of life, how can we avoid saying that life lived is superior, more substantial, than art appreciated?

Here I do not advance anything factual or ask for an intellectual judgment. Instead I ask, don't you feel that the living of a life to be a more momentous thing than the appreciation of works of art?

In practice perhaps we see the greatest works of art and our participation in them to be a reason for continuing to live; there may be times when we see in art a kind of a salvation and a kind of purpose around which we can organize our lives. I too sometimes feel this way. But when I cut down to the central notion, I always find that I can not place art above the genuine article. 

Something to Consider on an Individual Meaning of Life

My worldview involves the belief that there is no absolute objective meaning to human existence that human beings will encounter and recognize as such. My worldview also states that we should be hesitant about creating meanings of life for ourselves because creating our own summum bonum creates a model of life that does not reflect the variety in both ourselves and the world.

However, I wonder if we might not conceive of an individual meaning of life differently. Rather than a highest good to aspire to, or a best activity to be engaged in, or the best character to model ourselves after, what if we simply conceived of the meaning of life as being whatever infuses our every act and every contemplation with a sense of worthiness. That is, the meaning of life is whatever makes you say 'this is worth doing' whenever you reflect on the various games and activities you happen to be a part of.

This is something to perhaps contemplate further.

Why Ad Nauseum

Ask 'why' and I can give you a 'because.' Upon submitting that 'because,' you can demand an additional 'why.' There is nothing that ensures that this chain must eventually break. There is no clear terminus, you can always keep asking 'why?' So what will make you eventually stop? What will satisfy your need to keep asking. Only that you will eventually be satisfied. Not that the answer will ever reach a point where is has conclusively settled the matter, only that the questioner will eventually come to value the air they use asking more than they value the asking of the question.

There is a purpose for asking why, but you must understand to what end you ask the question and what the answer means to you, that is, how it will change your course of action. If you ask it simply to dig to the bottom, eventually you will hear, 'it just is!'

And then you'll probably ask, 'why,' won't you, shithead?

So Much Repetition

Sometimes you'll find a thought, a fantasy, or a project large enough to capture every free thought that you have. Your mind will seem to be constantly playing thoughts with the same flavor; you can savor the productivity and the love that's involved in that kind of single-minded pursuit, but at the same time it is easy to begin wanting change for change's own sake.

Especially because at some point the thought will creep into your head whether or not the thing you are focused on actually deserves that much attention. It is here that you have to be cautious - there's going to be an impulse that says it's best to cut your losses and find new mental territory to dwell in for awhile. As with most impulses, there's no clear correct response. Shifting up focus keeps you well-rounded, but staying the course allows for the possibility of reaching an emotional height.

Self vs. Other

I imagine my body and I imagine the surrounding landscape. I observe the sensations of the body, but the landscape I observe only through the impressions it leaves on my senses. The body I call Self - the landscape I call Other.

Go back further. I imagine my mind and I imagine my body. I apprehend the thoughts of the mind directly, but the sensations of the body must be made conscious for me to apprehend them. The mind I call Self - the body I call Other.

Deeper still, the thoughts come when they want. The mind works, what is conscious becomes conscious without any input of mine, and the thoughts pop up. The mind I call Other - what then is the Self? Only the perception.

They Come and Go

Just try keeping track of all the little observations and questions that pop into your head in the course of a given day, particularly if you keep any kind of blog. Little ideas pop up, and if you don't feed them, they fade right back into the obscurity of your mind. 999 times out of 1000 they are completely mundane ideas that interest no one except yourself and yourself only because of a self-interested bias, but the question is should you go out of your way to feed them or only let the useful ones - the ones that regular recollection and employment ensure are not forgotten - occupy head space?

I keep this blog specifically because I like feeding those ideas, but I would not necessarily recommend it to everyone else.

A Conception of Despair

If we conceive of human beings as lacking unity, of having a divided nature that may or may not be united in its ends, if we conceive of value as consisting of whatever individual humans happen to love and desire, and if we conceive of happiness as a kind of satisfaction or indulgence of our loves and desires, then I propose a conception of despair.

Despair is the state one gets into where one or more deep fragments of one's nature desires what conflicts with one or more deep fragments of one's nature. The result is that harmony and satisfaction becomes impossible: every indulgence is simultaneously a wound and every satisfaction simultaneously a poisoning. Happiness eludes a person in such a state because their loves and desires cannot be altogether taken care of.

What hope would there be in such a situation? So far as I can see, only a self-recreation could save such a person. They would require a new nature so that they would love differently.

Atheism and Nihilism

Atheism does not imply nihilism. Nihilism does not imply atheism. The two are distinct, but there is a popular perception that the two are tethered together. Why does this perception arise?

The first reason would be the historical one, which is that in Christendom morality was rooted in theism, so a rejection of God implies a rejection of morality. This is less interesting, since I wonder why the perception arises still today. You can say that it is a holdover from the past, or you can say that the perception only arises among those who still root their morality in their theism, but I think there is an epistemological reason.

We do not need a God for true, objective morality to exist. Perhaps it is just there. Perhaps moral imperatives are just natural facts. Yet, if we reject God on the basis that it does not satisfy the intellect to believe on such scant evidence, would we not also have to reject any kind of external morality for the same reason? It is the standpoint of doubt that causes trepidation: if your doubt causes you to reject this picture of reality, what else is missing from your picture?