Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The problem of two conscioussnesses.

A very basic and perhaps somewhat hard to generalize observation, due only to the necessity of specific knowledge and information, concerning the nature of all things in existence is their overall and quite relative unknowability. Where does this ghoulish sense of unfamiliarity stem from? Once acquainted with the natural world and it's vicissitudes it is easy to start to trace the enigmatic pathways of understanding, or perhaps better said the lack thereof, and our perceptive ability when shifted towards making rational, existential sense of our surroundings, that is to say, everything that is by way of conscientious awareness and topography, not us. Camus called this unfamiliarity the absurd, "the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth." According to him, the feeling of the absurd is a phantom that can strike a man at any given moment, a half-dumb epiphenomenon born of the realization of awareness of self, of what is and what isn't, the mutilation and abstraction of the ego, in essence, an inflation so inward it thrusts you out of the ostensible universe and then back in and straight through the doors of perception, revealing in one fluid, albeit nauseating, motion the absolute emptiness and silent despair innate to one's own unpurposed existence. There exist a myriad conclusions to be drawn from this particular statement, but one in particular should concern us in relation to the subject at hand, this is the limits of experience. What of these limits then?
To summarize, as all this has already been said before, they are limits of perception and our ability to experience and interpret the world, the limits themselves of course being our own physiology and how it absorbs and manipulates the information presented it when interacting with the world. Unequivocally, one of Camus' more recognizable ideas is the all-consuming alienation that comes from this dissociative exercise. This posits an even greater conflict concerning out relationships and interactions with other human beings.
Consciousness is not a thing that can be discussed as an object insofar that is not a thing at all, it is a figment, devoid of objectification and one can barely say it exists if not for the fact that it is the only verifiable inward experience man has. That is not to say that it is also outwardly verifiable, but we will get to that soon enough. To intuit consciousness is to make it an object of the mind, this is the only way to reconcile it logically, but consciousness itself is transcendent, the originator of all our actions and proper sense of being and ultimately the most intimate experience man could ever suffer. Consciousness in turn makes the ego its object, which is to say the the ego is a reflection, albeit an imperfect one, of consciousness. In any case, the issue to be argued here is that these factors create a disparity in the human experience that some might call the basis of subjectivity, the root cause of which is none other than consciousness itself. The perceptive possibility of two or more consciousnesses is deemed impossible by reasonable standards, though it may be simple to affirm the existence of such other consciousnesses by way of speculation we know of only one as true, the absolute consciousness, and that is our own. This is what I like to call the problem of two consciousnesses, we only assume the existence of one consciousness due to the fact that it is impossible to ever intimately experience another, the reason for this being that it is an intimately inward phenomenon, the only inward phenomenon in fact that is absolutely inexpressible. This is something that is experienced at the most primeval level, the one experience one can truly say belongs to one's self. This has some very serious repercussions on our interpersonal relationship-building mechanisms, when we meet another person we are at a loss to explain their existence, and furthermore their consciousness as a thing apart from our own. As a result we become what can only be phrased as "lectores incomodos", a term used when studying narratives. This is a term I chanced upon when studying St. Augustine's "Confessions" where he aims to literally make uncomfortable spectators out of his readers by conversing with god, subliminally forcing man to reflect on his own sins and thus feel shame.
The consciousness of the other is a foreign discourse to ourselves, what is the very essence of it to us if not a dialogue with our own person? It is the discourse that precedes and is simultaneously terrified of will, because will itself is control and consciousness is freedom. However, considering the nature of freedom, we know that it comes in degrees, a slow burning star in its billion year quasi-sleep releasing more and more of itself to the receptive universe. "My I", wrote Sartre, "is no more certain for consciousness than the I of other men. It is only more intimate." Not to be confused with an advocacy for solipsism, there is a very real affirmation in this, in the failure humanity suffers when we come to express ourselves, when we want to communicate, and ultimately, when we try to express each other. Language is sometimes woefully inappropriate, leaving us with only the ability to intuit, to create objects of the mind which we can fill with consciousness and the states thereof, this is the only way to give meaning to each others existences.

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