Eureka!

The human mind is an enigma. You can think about an issue for years, decades, and make little progress forward. But then, one day, seemingly for no reason, something clicks. At that point the mental thorn in your side, the niggle that wouldn't go away, the itch you couldn't scratch, becomes resolved. 

Such, for me, has been the issue of the apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. Throughout the course of my life I've tried out various solutions to this question but none satisfied. There was still, appropriately enough, a hole at the center of my thinking about this. This hole is a meaningful symbol for what, more generally, might be described as The Void. The Void is where our existence is located and where we have our being. Its best expression is space itself, vast and inscrutable, a vast nothingness which reduces everything within it to just some more inconsequential detritus. It is impossible to place yourself in the context of the mass of space and imagine you are anything important or necessary at all. You just are. Remember that next time you imagine your views matter so much or that things around you must take notice of you. You are literally nothing special.

People, for as long as they could think, have wanted to ascribe some meaning to this vastness. Often they have wanted to ascribe some overarching purpose to it or give some reasoning which explains why everything is and how its all of a piece, a oneness, and to give it some reasonable basis for being. But people have always failed in this and this is why other thinkers have explored its emptiness and what that means for us as thinking people. But this is a clue to where we should be looking for answers. The Void is often conceived as everything out there and, in a spatial sense, it is. But this void of meaning, this void of understanding, is not out there. This particular void is inside each one of us. My "Eureka!" moment is realizing that, actually, we are the void. We have an absence of presence, a presence and substance we try to give things with our descriptive schemes in our role as engineers of a meaningless universe.

For what is it that creates this void of meaning and sets up the questions to which we can find no satisfying long-term answers? What is it that means that all we can ever do is relate things one to another, both giving them context and allowing them to fit into a map of our understandings and beliefs? It is us, us as the universe has given us life. This form of life of ours which must make meaning, must understand, must hold beliefs, it is this which creates the void that we cannot fill. It condemns us to relate things one to another in some great mental act of dexterity so that we can even survive. We must believe things. We must hold what we regard as understandings. Things must mean. Without these operations we would die. They animate us and give us purpose. And so its not some void out there that needs to speak to us and explain itself (and that's good because it never will). The void is in us. The Void is us. We are the ones who create the problem we then cannot solve. Just by being the beings we are. With this form of life we condemn ourselves to explanations but never to an explanation much less the explanation.

And so I ask myself "What is our form of Being?" and I reply "Chaos giving expression to itself." And then I ask "What is my existence?" and the reply comes back "A partaking in my form of Being." All our questions find an answer not out there, not from some God figure, whether personal or metaphorical, but in us, in our form of life, who we are. This form of life offers us up meanings but never the meaning. It gives us beliefs but never the truth. It proffers knowledge but never that thing beyond knowledge in which all talking and thinking would cease because, finally, we have found something that could speak for itself. If there was something (and it would be divine in the truest sense) that could speak for itself then we would have found what human beings have always searched for: something beyond their creative self-understandings with which they could get in touch and about which there would finally be no words, the thing that was not just another thing to relate to something else. But we don't have that. We never will. There are no divinities and, much as we would like it, no God substitutes either. All we have is a void we cannot fill but must, nevertheless, keep trying to.

Given this background, my mind wanders. I think about the Transhumanist agenda I've been interacting with for a year now. Transhumanists want to "improve" the human form of life and they think of this primarily in physicalist terms. So this means they want to stop bad physical outcomes like disease and illness and, eventually, even death itself. Obviously, overcoming death, that decay until life becomes impossible for an organism, is no small task. After all, the laws of the physical universe seem to be that all things decay and die on a long enough timeline. So Transhumanists are happy to go with extending life significantly as a starting point. But I have a huge problem with this and its there in a play by a French existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre. The play is called No Exit. In this play there are but three characters and they have died. They are in a room and they, so the play seems to suggest, must spend their eternity together. The play focuses on their relationships (which in life were complicated) in this scenario and ends with the comment "Hell is other people".

This comment needs unpacking. Sartre is not saying there, at the climax of his play examining the idea that you would be in the public gaze for all eternity, that everyone else is a shit. That may or may not be the case from your point of view. Sartre's point is more that a life in the gaze of others that does not end is not a life in which people can be themselves. Its like this: imagine you yourself in your public life. You are constantly aware of other people in these types of situations and your behavior is molded to this scenario. You wouldn't do some things in public that you would do when you are home alone in your own place and you imagine no one is watching you. The point there is that the gaze of others changes your behavior and your consciousness of yourself. You often hear a related complaint made about social media where some people act like asses and are then told that they wouldn't act like that if we knew who they were. Exactly! The gaze of other people affects your behavior. Public CCTV cameras (of which the UK has amongst the most in the world) work on the same basis. You are being watched and its affects you. And so you become a socialized version of you and not the you you are by yourself. So why is Hell "other people"? Because it would be to act out that socialized, bad faith version of yourself that is a performance for public consumption forever.

And so how does this relate to Transhumanist dreams of radically extending life and to my "Eureka!" moment? I think its because the Transhumanist understanding of the human being, by which I mean the human form of being, is not adequate to the task. Primarily thinking of us as biological organisms in need of a pep up is not, I think, good enough. Its like thinking of us as a car and saying that if we had a more powerful engine we'd be a better car. Well, we might be. Or you might just ruin the car you had in the first place. Crucially, to my mind, such understandings do not take into account who we are and how we live in terms of our life and existence. And it needs to. Instead, it focuses quite narrowly on the perceived downsides of being physical, that we can be hurt, that we die, and says that if we could solve these things then, somehow (and this point is largely assumed and not explained) things would be better. One thousand years of you is better than eighty years of you, right? Really? Is that what being you is about? Are you just meat that needs to avoid hurt? I think that Transhumanists, either wittingly or unwittingly (and some seem more tuned into this consequence of their thinking than others, to be fair) want to actually supercede a human form of being for a post-human form of being. They want, I think, to head off into the "we are become gods" direction. They want the end of human being.

And this is the problem when, as I see it, we are The Void. Wanting to live forever and cure all diseases is just another way of trying to escape what fate has given us. (And being fated beings is yet another aspect of our being.) This is not to say that we shouldn't try to escape. Its not to say that we shouldn't do any of the things that Futurists or Transhumanists want to do. Its merely to contextualize it. It is, as Richard Rorty said, just one more way to try and escape "time and chance". Its another effort in the on-going plan to escape being human with all its flaws and failures, its pains and struggles. It doesn't, I think, understand or even examine what human being and human existence is at all. I don't think it is to glory in the physical flaws like some masochist to say this. But I see this as the real essence of humanity (in a descriptive and not an actual sense). The human being is the suffering animal, the animal that is aware but never sure of what it is aware. It is the animal that always lacks something. And knows it. It is the finite animal who can see death from almost the beginning of its days. It is the animal that wants and needs and desires. And knows it. Behold, it is become The Void.

I don't think that we will ever become gods. Far too much in this chaotic universe is out of our control. It seems that Dr Stephen Hawking is convinced we will kill ourselves and that some man-made disaster is inevitable at some point. There are many foreseeable future scenarios for this but its just as likely that an unseeable one gets us too. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads. But even if this didn't happen there is too much going on out there for us to control it all. Even the most arrogant of people wouldn't think we could account for everything (another human failing, incidentally). So I do not think that a divine life will ever be something we can approach. Indeed, I think that the urge for divinity is internally generated and part of this form of life that we have now. It is a way to fill The Void with meaning, as we must, as we are impelled by our existence as an expression of our form of being. We are more than biological organisms. Even if you do not think we are in any sense "consciousness" you can at least admit that we have a consciousness. This, too, is part of our being, part of who we are. And its who we are that concerns me when I read philosophers telling me that to become who you are is to find the most meaning that we can in life. 

But when you look into the mirror what do you see? 

The Gospel of Existence

In the beginning was the absurdity and the futility filled the void and the nihilism was forever. Everything that was in the beginning was emptiness. That which came to be was meaningless and the meaninglessness was everywhere. Nothing came to be that was not without meaning. In this meaninglessness was life and this life was the futile absurdity of Men.The meaninglessness fills the void and the void is nihilistic without end.

There came billions of beings out of the void. They came as witnesses to the futility of life, to testify to the nihilism so that all might comprehend there was no meaning to be found. They came and were not always well received as Men tried to avoid their experience and pretend otherwise. But those who did receive this testimony got no benefit whatsoever from the knowledge. They learnt only of the absurd, futile nihilism of their existence and of their fate: to come from the void and return to it.

Our futility became flesh and dwelt in the void and we saw its emptiness, emptiness that could only be an empty eternity in the void. Many testified to its purposelessness and empty promise. Nietzsche testified about it saying "God is dead and we have killed him!" Of its emptiness and futility we have all received, time after time. For hope was given through the naive beliefs of Men but the futile absurdity of life was given through the nihilism of the existence we all share. No one has ever seen eternal meaning and the void reveals the futility of it all.

Thoughts of an Invisible Man

Another fuse blown. In my head. Another cull of Twitter "followers". I read somewhere yesterday that social media has warped our language. We have accounts with thousands of "friends". But are these "friends"? What then is a friend if you can have thousands of them you've never met? Its more hot air, empty and meaningless.

But I'm not here to discuss that. Borne in on me of late is that this moment, this one, right now, is special. It happens once, never to be repeated. Shouldn't you cherish something like that? It would be a shame to waste it like a Donald Trump of time who, with his braggadocio, wastes moments like dollars because he feels he has so many. Look at me! LOOK AT ME!

No. Time is precious. Short, even. I don't have much. I don't know when the clock stops. Forever. 

My music plays. New music. Music only I have heard. Three more albums. Unpublished. Maybe unpublishable. My music isn't for you. It really isn't. Its my therapy. My crutch. An empty "purpose". The only one I can find. Besides finding words to write. And yet I still feel like a cog in a machine. The things I always didn't want to feel. The reason I hate "employment" and cannot work for companies. The ultimate debasement of the human soul. To feel as if you are a cog. 

The music drones on. Vague. Featureless. Distorted. Alien. Is it a musical autobiography? A cry for help? Sadness that must leak out? The soundtrack to my internal monologue.

I told you it wasn't for you.

I'm reading Camus. He is trying to explain to me, TO ME, why the absurd mandates that I revolt. He is making a good fist of it but I'm not really buying. Sentences, phrases, get jotted down. I understand and agree with the premise ("life is absurd, living is absurdity") but the conclusion seems like just another evasion. He says that no one can follow logic to its conclusion because they only ever follow it until its takes them where they don't want to go. Well, Camus, hoist by your own petard old son! Look in the mirror. Behold the man invoking slippery logic! You're like Kierkegaard but without the Christianity!

On I go. Reading. Listening to the music. 

My life.

Who Are You?

It is a fact of life that we don't see problems or issues with something until some event or insight allows us to see things from a different point of view, not the one we hold, not the one we regard as "normal". So it was that yesterday I found myself reading Albert Camus' short novel, The Stranger. The Stranger is an existentialist story about a character called Mersault. Mersault is in almost every respect an unspectacular and ordinary man living in French Algeria (much as Camus himself did). He has a mother (who has just died when the story begins), a job and lives in a room in a building that also allows him to mix with others and notice their habits. He is neither an idealist nor particularly active in any other sense. He is just a guy living his life, an everyman.

But Mersault is also the "stranger" of the book's title. He is this stranger because, from the existential point of view of the book, Mersault is a man who simply refuses to pretend. He is honest, so most others would say, to a fault. If someone is addressing him or talking to him and he has no thought or response he simply says nothing back, leaving an ugly silence. When thinking how to act in public he doesn't generally bother thinking how to act in public. He just unreflectively does what he wants - unlike pretty much everyone else who has been socialized into public expectations. At his mother's funeral he never cries and sits by the coffin drinking coffee and smoking. He leaves as soon as possible after giving the impression of little remorse and having imparted the fact that he doesn't even know her age. When he gets a girlfriend she asks him to marry her and he agrees but concedes to her that he'd marry any girl he liked in the same way. 

So Mersault is a man who absolutely refuses to pretend. It is not that he is doing it for effect but that he himself refuses the pretense that is living as a social being. He ignores expectations whether they be to do with funerals, business or personal relationships. He doesn't really care for social consequences in any sphere of life. He speaks and acts a bald, unfettered truth as if this should have no further, social implications. Mersault is a man literally out of phase with the world around him. He is in it but not of it. Its every day concerns and its ways make no impact on him except to irritate or bore him. He comes across as a lackadaisical individual whose own world is a completely different set of signs, symbols and significances. For this Camus calls him "the stranger" since, to everyone else who is "normal", he seems passing strange. Its also worth pointing out that in the course of the story all this comes to be used against Mersault so being strange is not without dire consequences.

It is, of course, Mersault's own strangeness that shines the light back on to the rest of society for in Mersault's character we see its opposite, the socialized character that society expects, in sharper relief. As Hannah Arendt saw it, writing about the book in 1946, "the stranger is an average man who simply refuses to submit to the serious-mindedness of society, he refuses to live as any of his allotted functions." And its this last point which starts to tweak my ever sensitive nipples in regards to the subject of personal identity, my subject for today. 

We all are assigned a number of functions by society. I'm male so that could be son, father, brother, co-worker, citizen, British, English speaker, etc., etc. There are a number that apply to each of us and maybe you can think of roles which would apply to you. But these are socialized roles and each one of them has expectations attached because in each of them we can think of stereotypical ways in which each of them should be acted out in various situations. Yet if we read The Stranger we find that Mersault is oblivious to people's views about him or expectations for him. Indeed, it seems as if he never even cares to consider the question. It is because of this that Arendt can go on to write in her review that "Because he does not pretend, he is a stranger whom no one understands... he refuses to play the game, he is isolated from his fellow men to the point of incomprehensibility." One insight that the story gives us is that in public or with others you really shouldn't say what you really think - for this will have social consequences. And so the existentialist novel is starting to weave its particular concerns into the fabric of story. Its asking "Must you be dishonest and inauthentic to be a person in society?" There can be no doubt that you must. But is this a good thing?

And so I find myself asking "Who am I?" And, to be honest, I wish that more people would ask it of themselves too. There is a great strand of philosophy extending right back to Socrates with his "The unexamined life is not worth living" that encourages if not demands that people know themselves better. ("Know thyself" is, itself, a ubiquitous Greek maxim that has been attributed to many.) The great Friedrich Nietzsche has a strand of his philosophy that is about "becom(ing) what you are" but you cannot do this unless you know what it is you are. Well, that's not quite correct. Its truer to say that you cannot become what you are unless you drop all the pretense and expectations that others exert upon you and begin to live authentically as yourself. To do this is not without its price though because you can be sure that others will not do the same. You will then appear, once more, as Mersault did to his fellow Algerians, strange, different, aloof, a bit of an oddball. But it is the testimony of Mersault that all you can do is be yourself. So why do so many play at being like others and fitting in? What is thereby gained?

And its with this that we come to the meat. The conclusion of The Stranger seems to pose a dilemma. Already in the book it has been hinted that choices in life, the path we take through its shadowy corridors, maybe doesn't make that much difference. I write notes as I read, things I need to remember or important points that I'm gleaning from the text. I had already written midway through the novel "Recurring theme: this option or that one, it makes no difference." With the ending of the novel I think this is made more explicit. The Stranger poses all readers a challenge. It asks them to consider life as going from Point A, your birth, to Point B, your death. These are the only fixed points. It then challenges you to answer the question: What does it really matter how you get from Point A to Point B? And, I think, it asks you to consider that question primarily from the position of Point B.

And we can make this quite extreme. Think of yourself as anything and taking ANY possible path from Point A to Point B. Living life as a criminal, a thief, a cheat, a murderer, a philanderer, a pimp, a confidence trickster. How about a terrorist or a pedophile? I am not saying these are good things to be or urging any choices here. I'm trying to be extreme in order to make Camus' question in The Stranger more pointed. People are many things in life and have many experiences. They make many choices. A number of them most would call immoral or even evil. Many religious people would hope and believe that their god punishes such things. Failing that, the State may punish people for certain life choices. Mersault himself is sentenced to death in The Stranger for shooting an Arab and its from his cell that the question is framed. The point is not the details of the life you lead. The point is what difference does it really make how you get from Point A to Point B?

It seems to me that, in this way, Camus offers the question "Everything you are, everything you do, leads up to nothing, Point B. So what matters the route?" Indeed, in the story Mersault starts to understand why his dead mother now seemingly took a close male friend near to her death. Mersault imagines that seeing the door to life closing and the door to oblivion opening, she felt a new freedom. Mersault, in his cell, says that "for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe". This, it seems to me, is death as the release, death as the escape from life. This is death as freedom and life as always a somewhat constricting prison.

And so my question to you, my readers, is this: Who are you? Who are you really? Are you a person who fits in, or someone who is going to be you regardless of those around you? And what difference do you think it makes how you get from Point A to Point B?





PS On this occasion I have need for a postscript. For when I read the story of Mersault I felt like I was reading an alternative biography of my own life. I am, myself, a stranger and much of Mersault's characterization could equally apply to me. I don't fit in socially and very often don't try. I'd be the worst employee in the world and am, no doubt, a terrible son and brother. I have been in the past a boyfriend and felt very much the way Mersault does towards his girlfriend in the story, Marie. Indeed, I recall telling my last girlfriend, when she stupidly asked, that the girlfriend before her was the most beautiful girlfriend I had ever had. This, of course, was not the answer she expected nor the answer that people would expect me to give. But I straightforwardly told her what I regarded as the truth. Shouldn't that be enough? No, for in a social world there are expectations and, reading this story, I feel the weight of them, and my own strangeness, all the more.

Commentary (Part 4)

This week I have been blogging comments and observations on life from my own perspective. This is the 4th and last entry bringing me up to 100 comments. Feel free to read the previous three "commentary" blogs as well if you wish. They are all thoughts meant to lead the reader on a voyage of their own thinking. They all occurred to me when thinking about my own life and its circumstances but they are also more generally applicable.

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71.

Revenge is really a matter of ego and ego, quite often, is not a very helpful thing in a social context. “Winning” can happen in such as way that the win is both entirely sour and entirely hollow. And what good is a win that doesn’t feel like a win?

72.

There is no feeling so powerless as not being able to communicate. Spare a moment’s thought for the voiceless.

73.

“The criminal prospers, and the just are brought low.” True enough, life is not organised on strict moral principles. People do not pay for their crimes and often misdeeds result in earthly success. I wish I could ascribe to one of these figmentary flights of fanciful imagination that religionists have where they extend earthly justice into some ethereal realm where justice always happens and criminals always pay. Alas, I think the law of the universe is “Take your chances, you might get away with it.”

74.

I know there are things I am good at. My problem is that I can think of no reason why anyone else should care about that.

75.

It was suggested to me the other day that even the amoral have morals. That may well be true but I don’t think that understands the term “amoral” correctly. To be amoral is to eschew public values and, instead, to take your own without regard to others. Now does anyone truly act without regard to others? Not if they have any mind for consequences, no.

76.

Death as comfort. The big escape. Perhaps this is the hell and that the paradise….. of nothingness?

77.

I have some sympathy with those spiritual people who speak of emptying yourself and of nothingness. It can be seen as a foretaste of the hereafter.

78.

So many words. And yet, there are always more.

79.

With maturity comes the expectation to act and think for oneself. So why then do so many still try to influence and cajole you?

80.

I will try not to use my upbringing as an excuse. But, you know, you are the sum of where you’ve come from….. or something.

81.

There is a certain kind of naive political campaigner who bemoans the fact that there are the powerful and the powerless. Their hearts are in the right place but it’s as if they don’t realise that the world is a dirty place and their opponents will be more than happy to get down and dirty. Good is not achieved with your head in the clouds but with your hands in the muck.

82.

When I think how many times in life I’ve been hugged or embraced I’m staggered by how startlingly few times it is. This causes me to reflect on my form of life again and its relation to my views. As it should.

83.

I stood in Tempelhofer Feld again, all too briefly. I cycled there especially in a 50 kilometer round trip. There was an hour’s worth of torrential rain. I didn’t really care even as the rain worked its way through my clothes and I stood there literally dripping wet. The Feld was almost completely deserted, as you might expect, and I stood under a tree which was not up to the task of shielding me from the downpour. Then, when the rain ceased, I did one more lap of that special place on my bike in soaking wet clothes. I have a kind of romantic glow about it even as I write now. If there was a heaven that would be it.

84.

Is life a constant struggle to be yourself, unashamed and unbending to social pressures and mores? It can seem that way. I cut my own hair the other day, as I have done for decades now. I wasn’t very careful because I could care less what it really looks like. But I went out and wore a hat. I didn’t want people to laugh and point. I hate myself a little bit for that show of insecurity. I was just saving myself the little bit of stress that comes from having to deal with it. I’ve been laughed at in the street just for wearing cargo shorts when the weather was thought not suitable for such things!

85.

What would real isolation be like? I obviously have no idea. I’ve lived a “one foot in, one foot out” kind of life.

86.

What is worst in life? To be merely tolerated.

87.

I don’t want a tombstone. I want to be forgotten. I want time and space to rush and claim me and wash over me, blotting out that I ever existed.

88.

Living life with your eyes shut sets up some strange conditions of life.

89.

Honesty to yourself is perhaps the most important thing you can ever cultivate.

90.

In life you often need to accept loss or lack of control. If maturity is about accommodation to the circumstances of existence, then this is surely a decent part of it.

91.

When you’ve had enough of rejection, you stop trying to be accepted. But I’d be a liar if I said you ever completely give it up. But it’s head and heart. My heart would risk it all again. My head is determined I will never ever let that happen again.

92.

Better to dislike oneself and question yourself than to think you are the greatest thing since sliced bread. 

93.

The key to happiness: peace and enjoyment in yourself in the moment, creating a self that is not at odds with your existence. Happiness can never be about the external situations of life, although they can obviously affect you. Cultivate your being.

94.

The 9 year old has sat down, the tears have run out. What is left is a child sitting by the roadside, resigned to never reaching his destination. (Confession of a boy who got lost aged 9 and was found in the street crying.)

95.

People don’t choose the path of their lives. They will kid themselves that they do, but they don’t. So don’t listen to the (often American) preachers of “positivity” who say you can do anything you want and it’s all up to you. Even an idiot can figure out some of the myriad things in life you do not control. Take me. I do not control even the thoughts in my head, affected as they are by mental illness in the form of anxiety and depression.

96.

One of the things that makes you feel most powerless is realising that you cannot grasp time. You cannot stop the clock. It ticks, and only in one direction. Human finitude is a deeply profound thing.

97.

I think these people should mostly forget me. Oh, they have.

98.

I find this comment exceedingly strange. It’s a rare example of me looking forwards. Something I hardly ever do.

99.

It’s easy to be negative about the human race, very easy. And so we are. Rightly so.

100.

It is a fact that I am much more popular as several fictional Internet characters I play than as the physical being I legally am. What does this mean?

Commentary (Part 2)

This week I'm running a series of blogs entitled "commentary". They take the form of a series of personal reflections on life - a bit like if someone were looking in the mirror and reflecting. Each acts as a self-contained thought but some may be linked together. It is for the reader, of course, to decide if any of the comments offer insight of any sort.

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21.

I don’t understand the sense of ungratefulness some people feel (or accuse you of) when you say that you wish you had never been born. Life, for these people, is regarded as some kind of sacred gift and you are meant to feel, first of all, profoundly thankful for it. Is this the overflow of some religious sentimentality? I honestly don’t understand it at all. Life is random, an accident. It might never have happened, as I mused in one of my musical pieces called “Point Zero”. Point Zero, I considered, was that moment at which you were conceived. But what if it had never happened? What if mum had been washing her hair that night? What if dad had been tired and turned over and went to sleep? It’s not as if any of us are fated to exist, much less willed by a higher power. Nothing chose you. We just are, a cosmic accident, the work of a moment that might never have been and yet, right in one moment, was.

22.

Life is a large pool of clear, refreshing water. But it only takes a little piss (or one conspicuous turd) to contaminate the whole pool.

23.

We all have drives and sometimes the desire to satiate them can be overwhelming. Experience is one means by which to counter them. Providing we can learn from it!

24.

I suppose I do not really regret the things that have happened to me. It’s natural to wish things had turned out differently but, then again, each situation is an opportunity for many things and not just one. There is always the opportunity to learn, whatever happens. Things are never uniformly good or bad.

25.

“Travel broadens the mind” is a truism. And true. It should be compulsory. Isolation breeds only mistrust and easy lack of empathy.

26.

I have an inkling that the most important of philosophical subjects is our human relationship with time. Temporality is a subject that towers over us, much as space puts us in our true place in the physical realm. Even thinking that all our sense perceptions, intuitions and thought processes are time-bound and time affected is a huge subject. We are defined as beings and as Being by our relationship to time. It makes sense why Heidegger would write a book called “Being and Time” and why it would be a pre-eminent philosophical topic of discussion. And yet…… it’s all relative. What is the meaning of time in the context of infinity? (Irony: my song “Stream of Consciousness” plays as I write this.)

27.

I still have great moments of ego. I should keep working on it. The Ego is nature’s gift to us for survival but the way it operates is most strange and completely selfish. It’s literally there to ensure your survival…. and that’s it. I would like to think, in my more cerebral moments, that I am learning to countermand and control it. But maybe this is yet more self-deception. I would like to think I can rise above it but then I ask myself why I would even want to do this. Is conscious thought somehow more pure or noble than the unconscious prods of Ego? What version of me is it trying to save? In every sense "I" is a fiction.

28.

The human being is a random beast. In public they prefer order, considered thought and coherence of thought with action. In reality, they are vain creatures of habit, drive and inconsistency.  It’s a consistent phenomena we see through the history of human thought to find an ideal of their own making which human beings do not live up to.

29.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

30.

Humans have a will to meaning that mere beasts, perhaps, do not have. This throws them into a game they have no choice about - to make things mean something. Where meaning gaps or deficits appear this can only manifest itself as a crisis.

31.

Beware the lures of knowing

Imagine, if you will, 100 country mansions. In these country mansions are 100 libraries.

Every room in these country mansions is a library and each one of the mansions has 100 of them. In this great space you spend your life storing up all the things you learn, all your knowledge collected together. But what you don't have, in this fable, is any inkling as to what any of it means. What, then, I ask you, is the point of all this collected knowledge? Have you not simply spent your life collecting useless facts? Is it not just so much jumble? Is knowing an end in itself?

We switch focus. Consider the biblical tale of Eden, a place of innocence and freedom from the burden of knowing. But its carefree inhabitants lose their innocence and become burdened with knowledge. And now, as knowers, they are burdened with what to do about what they know. Their crime, if crime there was, was in wanting to know too much and our intrepid gatherers of knowledge and eaters of fruit did not realize the consequences of knowing. Human beings have a need to act when they know. And this knowing will lead to acting and, if they do not have other necessary qualities, their knowing will lead to bad and negatively consequential actions. Perhaps now we understand why the biblical innocence was to be preferred?

There is a traditional dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. Some people (and, indeed, communities) prefer one over the other - and there are various intellectual and/or religious shrines to both in various places. Some people venerate knowing, and the need to know, above all else. (Examples could be those who wear scientism heavy on their brow or certain essentialist and foundationalist philosophers.) And I take issue with this. For knowing is not, and cannot, be an end in itself.

There is, of course, no end to knowing. We cannot imagine that there would ever be an end to all the facts. But the situation is more dire than simply letting a drive to know have its head. (I ask myself here what the outcome of letting a drive to eat have its head would result in - by way of analogy.) There is what we may call a crisis of knowledge - and a crisis of knowing - in that knowing is simply not enough. Knowing, of course, does not realize this itself because in its knowing it does not have the wisdom to know that knowing is not enough. (In the same way, Reason often doesn't realize that reason is not very reasonable, rationality doesn’t realize that it is not very rational, etc., ad infinitum.) And it’s not a case of the amount of knowing but of what simply knowing is able to achieve. A collection of facts, as I hope my parables illustrate, is actually a pretty useless (but also burdensome) thing. Knowing, by itself, is in the end both impotent and potentially dangerous. Other things, perhaps we may describe them collectively as wisdom, are needed to enable us to appropriately deal with the things we know. I can immediately think of 3 strands here:

1. You need to know what knowledge means (the question of meaning).

2. You need to know how to appropriately use the knowledge (experience).

3. You need to know how things fit together, or can fit together (understanding).

An issue with knowledge will always be that the knowing and the collecting of knowledge will never be enough. Knowledge leads inevitably to action and people almost always feel the need to do something about the things they know. And it’s precisely here where knowing, by itself, is impotent because knowledge does not tell you what to do with it. Its not part of the package but, instead, a separate skill and not one anyone is forced to have - regardless of how many of their 100 houses with 100 libraries is full of knowledge. The second issue is that that need to do something about the knowing is experienced as a burden for, in reality, people do not simply store what they know in libraries. This leads to the spectre of doing the wrong thing or using the knowledge badly. Knowledge is dynamite, it’s a dangerous thing with consequences.

In the light of these twin issues (and the at least three other separate requirements I mentioned above) it seems to me that wisdom dictates we can know too much. The drive to knowledge, if given its head, is a bad thing with a negative impact. It produces more data than a person (or community) can handle. The appropriate response is to curb the drive to know and, instead, have a sober and reflective innocence. Without the extra tools that wisdom provides knowledge becomes but a blunt instrument of possible self-harm. What those who wrote the story of Eden saw was the dangers of an inappropriate lust for knowledge, a lust which raised up knowledge and knowing above its station and made it the god at whose temple we all now had to worship. In those circumstances, knowledge and knowing were always going to be capricious gods who abused their power and destroyed us by virtue of attenuating our all too corruptible egos. In the end, the moral of the story of Eden is both that you can know too much and that knowing is not without burdensome consequences. It's a message we need to hear again and again.

32.

PS Who amongst us knows things they wish they didn't know?

33.

“What is the point of my life?” update! There is not, nor can there be, any antecedent point, of course. I’m currently drawing breath on the basis it is at least an opportunity to try and understand something, anything. Maybe myself or the world of my experience? Once all the metanarratives and metaphysics have been burned away by an innocent honesty what’s left is an empty space to fill. So rock on as much as the world of experience allows. You may end up trapped within a bubble of your own making (and without really knowing it) but what’s the alternative? Or the harm?

34.

Two people share the same belief but have completely different behaviour as a result. Would this not show that beliefs do not determine behaviour? Would it further show that beliefs and behaviour, theory and practice, are simply different and not necessarily related things? If you cannot determine someone’s practice from their beliefs then, with that, the idea of a one-to-one correlation is put in doubt. Where that leaves the idea of a coherence of beliefs with behaviour is then also a matter for discussion.

35.

I have mellowed (in my own way). I have grown more appreciative and reflective with age. Maybe this is natural and what happens to all human beings as they get older. I wouldn’t know about that though as I’ve never done it before.

36.

I am reminded on just how few crumbs a dream can actually feed. There is something to be said for the human spirit. Or is it a (sometimes necessary) blind stupidity?

 
37.

“Philosophy as music” is my motto for my musical output. It’s thought in sounds. Alternatively, think of my music as my opening a conduit to my insides and what is there flows out in chunks. “Its not necessarily good but it’s honest” is another way I have described it. Such naivety is my authentic signature. I’m like some dumb, fluffy creature unaware there are so many bad things that can happen to me in the world.

38.

Contradiction corner. - Is my musical practice a result of my anti-foundational, anti-essentialist beliefs? Is my focus on its directness and honesty, at the cost of professionalism or “doing it right” according to antecedent standards, because of what I value and what I don’t? Have I created an existential form of music or, as my friend on Twitter says, a “toe-tapping nihilism”?

39.

Suffer is what human beings do. Its the downside of feeling and thinking. Anyone who thinks for long enough will meet a crisis. Evolutionary fate has dealt us the cards and we must play our hand and suffer the consequences.

40.

Enough said.

Commentary (Part 1)

From time to time I write a commentary on things. More often than not this is on myself or my past or things that occur to me in life. This week I will publish a number of these commentaries for public consumption by unwary readers. Often these comments aspire to be nuggets of wisdom. It is of course for the reader to decide what they mean, if anything, and if they are of any use.

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1.

Still the same room. Still the same things. Still the same external conditions. And yet now I feel more hopeful. A sense of finitude can do that to a Man. Of course, my question concerning “what the point of me is” has not been answered. I currently think it’s one of those questions that can never be answered. To seek after generalised meaning or reason is a fool’s errand. Perhaps now I see life as a process of understanding, an awakening from an Edenic innocence, in which you try to make sense of who you are, where you are and why. This, you may agree, is basically a study of Being and what it means in a world without purpose or meaning beyond the local and contingent. I meditate, sometimes daily, on the fact that my life is but an Augenblick and my non-existence will be an eternity. In that perspective, how can any earthly, human, “cares of the living” really be that troublesome?

2.

Anything that can be thought of must certainly be a fiction, so wrote Nietzsche. How can my self-understanding, my telling of the paths and conduits of my life, be any less so? It is no privileged account to be sure. It’s merely my own as it occurs to me at a point in time. But I am lying to you and I do have my reasons. How could I not? And how could you not read me with your own needs to be satisfied? We are none of us here blank slates.

3.

The clock is ticking. That’s how important you are.

4.

Innerspace and Outer Space. Within your own imagination you can dream a billion dreams. Without, there are a billion truths you will never guess at. Each of us is stuck between the world within and the world without, an insignificant point of contact between the two. To one, you are of utmost importance. To the other, you are almost an insignificance. It is a source of wonder and mystery how consciousness could come of something so unconscious as the Universe.

5.

I got my wish. Am I happier? No. It remains a truism that people have little idea what is best for them. As a species, we are half blind in the fog, scrabbling around. For me, relationships are an excellent example of my blindness. The scars of bad ones get deeper and have more long-lasting effects over time. Of course, isolation is no solution.It merely solves one problem by creating another one. I console myself that at least no one else is involved in that case. But it’s a sticking plaster to deal with a broken bone.

6.

Are people basically honest with each other, or basically dishonest with each other? I come down on the side of the latter. Oh, I know that from time to time some people (perhaps Christian types) try to show that human beings are good and basically altruistic. However, I think they are pissing into the wind on this one. Of course, people CAN be altruistic but it seems to me that the fact you need to point this out speaks against it. The fact is that altruism is occasionally useful. But it’s the “what’s useful to me?” mentality that prevails overall.

7.

Not so much crying these days. Over the past year or two I’ve become very attuned to the solar cycle. Currently, as I write, we are heading towards the summer solstice. The days are long and the light hangs on into the night. I awake to sun beams through a gap in the curtain. I experience the beneficial effects of extra electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum (that’s light to you and me). I’ve noticed over the years that I seem very sensitive to the amount of light that is around. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that my worst episodes of panic occur in early Autumn when light disappears. I know that there is a disorder for this (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I think that I might fall within that category. Like everything else, I’ve never been diagnosed though.

8.

Power. In the end, I think that quite a lot comes down to this. Having it. Wanting it. To feel it, just for a moment. A lot of things can be explained by the idea of power. And that’s without being Foucauldian about it. Power, and powerlessness, are things that you could get very philosophical about if you wanted to.

9.

I’m still impotent, of course. But I wonder if I might not have settled for less. I was embroiled in an internet conversation in which I had taken on a false identity and I revealed myself to my unfortunate and unwilling victim. He took it quite magnanimously, considering, but then left a landmine of his own behind by suggesting that if only I used my clear powers of intelligence positively I might actually achieve something in life. It came to me as a slap in the face, I must admit. It’s good to hear contrary points of view. Humans are self-deceptive. They need it.

10.

Death can be a shadow, there is no doubt of that. And we can live in that shadow. I had always wanted to be able to die happy, joyously, having, as it were, howling into the void that I had existed. It would have been futile of course. But it would also have been my victory cry. “I existed! Fuck you all!”

11.

I am 46 years old. Still NO actual friends. A lot of the time it isn’t that bad. I have time, such as now, to think and write. Life without other people is certainly less complicated. In an ideal world of my imaginings I wouldn’t have lots of friends coming round anyway. I like (or, I have learned) to keep myself largely to myself. And I don’t dislike that fact.

12.

“The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.” And isn’t that all that one can ask for in life? It’s easy to be negative. My autobiography gives some examples of where I am certainly that. But how about biting back? There can be no more perfect life but than that you took hold of your circumstances and lived the life you wanted to live considering the circumstances you had. I don’t mean this in some secular, economic sense. I don’t mean it in the shallow terms of capitalist society either. I mean that you followed your own beliefs and motivations through. Authenticity to yourself, that’s surely what counts when you have to look yourself in the mirror? On your death bed what comfort would it be that you had achieved material possessions or a life enviable to others in the world? I’d much rather lie there thinking I had been true to myself. You may occasionally need to justify yourself to others. But you will need to justify yourself to yourself every day.

13.

My life and my music are truly intertwined. For those with ears to hear, my music is the best guide to what goes on with me internally. Its the escape valve.

14.

I don’t honestly think that I have any duty to justify myself to anyone. Oh, of course, it may be that this is sometimes expedient. Sometimes, it may even be due to power and authority taking me in hand. But it’s all a joke, isn’t it? A game? I return to a perpetual thought of mine right now: my life is an Augenblick and my death will be forever. What do I care what you think about me? If you honestly wanted a genuine assessment from the horse’s mouth, I could give you one. It wouldn’t be pretty because I know the things I have done. But I’m not a very convinced bad person. When I do wrong its because I’m bored, because I can or because I thought it “clever” to do so. I often regret bad things I’ve done. My heart isn’t in it. I just want to be left alone really and “live and let live” seems to be the best policy for that.

15.

“Physician, heal thyself”. Pulling threads from the twisted haystack of life is certainly a perilous thing. I should heed my own, unasked for, advice. The women were largely a mistake and responsible for massive scars on my psyche. Do good times ever outweigh the bad? I find it hard to think so. If only there was a way to have good times WITHOUT the bad. A solution to this problem has not yet been discovered.

16.

Knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is a conclusion that gains more force the longer I live. What’s more, knowledge without wisdom is next to useless and dangerous. There is little good in the bare knowing of something. At a bare minimum you also need to know where it fits and what to do with it. This is why choosing not to know things is often the better course. It is hard to “unknow” and such is our make up that we often feel the need to do things about what we know. This way many bad things have happened and not just for me but in general.

17.

My origins are an absurdity to me. It must be true, I muse, that absurdity is the principle of the Universe.

18.

I don’t think that it occurs to people very much just how temporary and fragile they really are. Of course, the old and the sick have this reality impressed upon them more frequently and with more force. But, in general, we seem to have a consciousness which, on the good days, operates as if we are in some way eternal. And I suppose that makes sense. How could you live on an even keel if your every other thought was of how vulnerable and contingent you are? Well, let me tell you from experience that the answer is “Not very well”.

19.

“The crisis of Being”. Only now, as I keep reading, in fits and starts, do I learn that people have been discussing this for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps I’m not so weird and individual after all? This year I’ve written a suite of music in 10 parts called “Human/Being” which really functions as a musical meditation on what it means to be human and the whole subject of Being. If my life is become anything to me it is a process of self- Enlightenment, a process that will one day just be snuffed out. Gone. Unimportant. Another example of “the concerns of the living”.

20.

“The Wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #638.

I could accept this quite well as a description of me. If I am anything at all it is a wanderer.