On my condition as of late.

Finding myself somewhat disheartened by the relative lack of epiphanic realizations and discoveries, I decided to dedicate some time to discover the reason why this was so. Why was it that years of conceptual insight and ontological development suddenly came to a halt with no discernible warning or predictive measure to precede it? The answer, it would seem, is congruent to the sojourn transmigration of self I had been pursuing. Experience is the form by which all humans must live, a form expressed in all its complexities by consciousness, the vehicle which drives not only the human experience but human self-identification and thus reflective identification by way of the ego-conscientious relationship with 'objects' that we familiarize ourselves with (this particular kind of familiarization consists mostly of filling the world up with consciousness, as it were), this is due to the fact that the world is a collection of experiences before we are aware of its state as a collection of objects. On the other hand, this consciousness doesn't just extend to the exogenous facet of existential interpretation, but lends itself more personally to indigenous experiences. Consciousness, as it were, is an internal reflection that supersedes but does not precede the ego, as such both are indispensable aspects of being, one needs to be comfortable delving into both the nature of one's ego and the nature of one's consciousness, and then working them together in order to achieve a sort of arbitrary understanding of the world, and from there on a more stylized understanding of that arbitrary knowledge. This, I theorize, leads us to one of the more important parts of a conscientious self-exploration, that is awareness. Awareness of self, awareness of reality; awareness is a sort of existential separation from the typified sense of 'belonging' to the world, a manner of retroactive self-realization that heavily involves the conscience of time (past, present, no future) because it severs our ties to the all. This altruistic dehumanization, by that I mean a separative act for the good of the self, ultimately also severs us from banal social relations, and this is really where the problem stems from. Existentialism is not only the study of man and his internal condition, but also his external, Sartre himself admitted that a man could never truly know himself without knowing another, but he has also said that it is true that no one man could ever truly know another, that the best we could ever really hope for, through transcending our humanity, is always limited by the affirmation of a single consciousness- the one identifiable and recognizable that spills over to everything we perceive and interact with: our own. This is a sort of deadlock that never truly found its peace in existentialist debate, the clash of ideas between Husserl and Sartre seem to have sealed this conflict, leaving consciousness as a revealing intuition that, the being of which is everywhere. How profoundly should this affect our interpretation of social relations? Immeasurably so, existentialism preaches a doctrine of responsibility, first personal before social, holding man accountable for his condition even above his causal condition, it condemns a man to both absolute and graduated freedom, the absolute existing in the self whereas the graduated in every other relation... the deadlock manifests itself here in the fact that existentialism, in a certain way, leaves us locked within ourselves and purports a sort of action that derives from the condition of simply existing, there is no conscientious necessity for choosing, being aware of the choice and of our condition is what (to put it bluntly) constitutes being. Why is this not sufficient for social relations? The answer may seem simplistic, but it is no less true, social relations are far more important than we give them credit for, and the collapse of the self cannot solely be attributed to the responsibility of self, there are many external conditions which influence, mutate, and ultimately completely distort our perception of what choice is, this is grave and dangerous for our awareness. It is a social malady that we live in a neo-liberal and adaptive-capitalistic society where the tenets of capitalism have changed to the point that it is able to adhere to any ideology, commodify it, and repackage it as a viable alternative to the abandonment of capitalistic thought, which extends far beyond the physical love for commodities and has invaded the psychological space of commodities. Freedom, Schopenhauer affirms, is in no way absolute, but conditional, we experience freedom as it is theorized when volition finds no obstacle, when the will remains unhindered, but we know the will is animalistic by nature and carries no inherent values other than incessant desire to be without conscience, it is the way our organism is determined. In neo-liberal societies, choice is the key ingredient of the market economy, the act of purchasing is an obfuscated and confused attempt at validating that freedom given that we are flooded with almost interminable products to choose from, when the act is done we feel as if we have exercised volition, that our will has been satisfied and that we truly have made an almost ideological effort, a conscientious attempt at separating ourselves from mindless consumerism, however it is clear to see there is no authentic existential choice involved in this. The myriad choices the market offers really serves to mislead the absence of real, radical choice, this boils down to the fact that we buy into the same ideology while being sold the idea of freedom under the same paradigm- an act that is not only futile, but utterly and contemptibly worthless. The reasoning and understanding required to achieve an awareness of our inability to choose is muddled and as such we have many movements, both external and internal, born of the same bark that capitalism has helped to sow, the emptiness of such gestures is gravely concerning. John Gray wrote that we are forced to live as if we are free, Zizek tells us that there is an incessant pressure to choose which involves not only ignorance about the object of choice, but the subjective impossibility of answering the age old question of desire. No longer is desire simply originally lost and we are eternally condemned to live under the guise of freedom to pursue it (pursue happiness for example as an empty object of desire), but that the object has become the subject, and as such we subject ourselves to the idea of desire, causing us to see ourselves as potential objects of desires for another. The anxiety one experiences as an existentialist is thus not as much as the anxiety of being free and having a voluminous gift that we do not know how to use, but rather we lack substantial determination, a fixation on any sort of formal or clear ideology that has not been tainted and ultimately devoured by neo-liberal influence. Authentic ideology has been compromised and has caused a great but silent confusion. The lesson learned here is that we should not treat consciousness as homogeneous to our psychological condition and that it is necessary to radicalize existential philosophy beyond the point of mere spectatorship with almost reactive action, that at one point one can look at himself and begin an epiphanous journey into the self, but we should not forget that it is not true that it is a singularity event, but rather a long and interrupted (or intermittent) journey that begins with us and must ultimately extend to all that which is not ourselves, both object and subject must be transformed, like the twin pressures involved in the formation of stellar bodies of inward gravitation pressure and external, explosive pressure, we too must find a breaking point rather than let ourselves collapse under the false pretenses this epoch has laid on us.