The same is so for ourselves, the way we relate inwardly. I have strayed from myself in order to understand myself better, and what do I have to show for it?
The existential nightmare.
What is my existential nightmare? To be loved by another!
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Spending money on real things.
Close to writing the word 'real', I had the sudden urge to stop as it caught my attention, the slow winding skein of self-consciousness seemed, even for a moment, to have been completely directed towards a term, a concept, an idea that I had become completely alienated towards. It was a paroxysmal dissociation from the concept.
The object in question is a book, was a book, will be a book, whichever qualifier of existential validation suits your fancy at the moment of conceiving the idea thereof and the function it is executed in, the context it is slave to, the identity which I and the potential (but no doubt nonexistent...) reader will submit it to as well.
Perhaps there is no real point to having written about this other than capturing the essence of the frivolous struggle to grasp the real in everyday circumstance- to become aware of it abruptly is to sacrifice entirely the notion that was being carried out along with the thought and at the same time elevate the thought to a level of the 'real' beyond that which was being posited as an almost cynical ideal, how do we understand what we call real?
Experience would have me separate the concept as a threefold manifestation more succinctly explained with an analogous example. Let us consider democracy in all of its splendor: the concept of democracy, the illusion of democracy, and the reality of democracy. The idea of our moral beings, existing in perfect harmony with the world (understood as the social structures we are submitted to) around us and the reality of our imperfect morality that is not necessarily recognized or maybe it is obfuscated by the state of whatever power turns its gaze is turned towards, and then the reality in the illusion, which is a twofold thing in itself, the social superstition of morality in our actions and the concept that is manifest in contrast to it.
The concept of democracy suffers the malady of idealization, there is a form of democracy that we are aware of, it permeates our lives and all of our actions and we might even be comfortable enough letting it slip by unnoticed as a natural given when partaking of it as a form of ideology, but ultimately it is an illusion, a self-referential tautology that propagates through the power of custom, that is to say, we believe in democracy simply because it is democracy, not because we adjudicate it values of good or evil. The illusion is of course that democracy serves to represent or give an equitable space to every whim it is subject to, ie the will of 'the people' (whatever that means), etc.
Within this illusion there exists a somatic and simultaneously practical idea of democracy, an idea manifest in our daily lives as stated before, but an idea no less, this is the real in the illusion, the concept we cynically believe in as a panacea for disbelief (as simple as that may seem this remits in a very powerful way to the negation we subject ourselves to every day unconsciously, repressing the distressing lack of true democratic value giving way to a sort of fetishistic relationship to the concept). Of course we can't leave out the real itself, which is simply the fact that it does not exist, but our aversion to the fact is almost clinical and does nothing more than highlight man's fundamental discomfort with living ex nihilo, nothingness is a zero-sum value, as such it is not acceptable and thus we mask the nothingness going on.
Comfort is the poisonous concept that tends to interfere with understanding, insight is sacrificed in favor of a light and purposeless infatuation with substantialism of the worst degree, there is an exigent notion for meaning and the abolition of a relative although there is not always a complete consciousness or awareness of it.
The object in question is a book, was a book, will be a book, whichever qualifier of existential validation suits your fancy at the moment of conceiving the idea thereof and the function it is executed in, the context it is slave to, the identity which I and the potential (but no doubt nonexistent...) reader will submit it to as well.
Perhaps there is no real point to having written about this other than capturing the essence of the frivolous struggle to grasp the real in everyday circumstance- to become aware of it abruptly is to sacrifice entirely the notion that was being carried out along with the thought and at the same time elevate the thought to a level of the 'real' beyond that which was being posited as an almost cynical ideal, how do we understand what we call real?
Experience would have me separate the concept as a threefold manifestation more succinctly explained with an analogous example. Let us consider democracy in all of its splendor: the concept of democracy, the illusion of democracy, and the reality of democracy. The idea of our moral beings, existing in perfect harmony with the world (understood as the social structures we are submitted to) around us and the reality of our imperfect morality that is not necessarily recognized or maybe it is obfuscated by the state of whatever power turns its gaze is turned towards, and then the reality in the illusion, which is a twofold thing in itself, the social superstition of morality in our actions and the concept that is manifest in contrast to it.
The concept of democracy suffers the malady of idealization, there is a form of democracy that we are aware of, it permeates our lives and all of our actions and we might even be comfortable enough letting it slip by unnoticed as a natural given when partaking of it as a form of ideology, but ultimately it is an illusion, a self-referential tautology that propagates through the power of custom, that is to say, we believe in democracy simply because it is democracy, not because we adjudicate it values of good or evil. The illusion is of course that democracy serves to represent or give an equitable space to every whim it is subject to, ie the will of 'the people' (whatever that means), etc.
Within this illusion there exists a somatic and simultaneously practical idea of democracy, an idea manifest in our daily lives as stated before, but an idea no less, this is the real in the illusion, the concept we cynically believe in as a panacea for disbelief (as simple as that may seem this remits in a very powerful way to the negation we subject ourselves to every day unconsciously, repressing the distressing lack of true democratic value giving way to a sort of fetishistic relationship to the concept). Of course we can't leave out the real itself, which is simply the fact that it does not exist, but our aversion to the fact is almost clinical and does nothing more than highlight man's fundamental discomfort with living ex nihilo, nothingness is a zero-sum value, as such it is not acceptable and thus we mask the nothingness going on.
Comfort is the poisonous concept that tends to interfere with understanding, insight is sacrificed in favor of a light and purposeless infatuation with substantialism of the worst degree, there is an exigent notion for meaning and the abolition of a relative although there is not always a complete consciousness or awareness of it.
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