the unproblematic soul

Emile Cioran from On the Heights of Despair:

My tremendous admiration for enthusiasts stems from my inability to comprehend how there can be such men in a world where death, nothingness, sadness, and despair keep sinister company. It makes one wonder, to see people who are never desparate.

And:

The enthusiast is preeminantly an unproblematic person. He understands many things without ever knowing the agonizing doubts and chaotic sensitivity of the problematic man. The latter cannot solve anything, because nothing satisfies him. You will find in him neither the enthusiast’s gift of abandon, his naive irrationality, nor the charming paradox of love in its purest state. The biblical myth of knowledge as sin is the most profound myth ever invented. The enthusiast’s euphoria is due to the fact that he is unaware of the tragedy of knowledge. Why not say it? True knowledge is the most tenebrous darkness. I would gladly exchange all of the harrowing problems of this world for sweet, un-selfconscious naivete. The spirit does not elevate you; it tears you apart.

Of course, the one thing the unproblematic soul generally shows very little enthusiasm for is being in problematic discussions like this one. Instead, he/she has adopted either a practical or an idealistic methodology for dealing with things like death and destruction and sadness and despair…or contingency and chance and change…or uncertainty and confusion and ambiguity. So, it is not likely we will ever encounter many we can vigorously challenge…philosophically? They are, after all, virtually immune to the existential probe by now.

Know thyself. The unexamined life is not worth living. The truth will set you free. And yet more than just a handful of folks have located an actual heart of darkness in the very attempt to probe these things with both eyes open. In other words, the more they probed the more fractured and fragmented their knowledge of “reality” became.

And it is not a question here of whether Cioran’s speculations are rational. Who knows, right? They certainly appear to be rational to him. And to me. Instead, it is more a question of whether or not the unproblematic souls can demonstrate this point of view is irrational; that, say, it is not a perspective a reasonable man or woman would accept.

My own admiration for the unproblematic soul stems more from the awe I feel towards someone who – in this world – is actually able to sustain the illusion that there is, indeed, a way to keep the pieces from becoming even more fractured and fragmented than they already are.

How do they do that?

Defense mechanisms of the mind outrank “truth”.
Staying happy is necissary for living and being active.
Therefor it is something that is valued higher than truth.

People live in a cencored religious dream.
It can get to be complicated but the basics are these:
Lies can appear to be more true or more useful than the actual truth.

That’s a load of shit. Cioran undoubtedly makes that judgment on the assumption that he is one who has attained “true knowledge.” But maybe true knowledge tends not toward either darkness or lightness, and maybe Cioran never knew true knowledge.

Now I can get on board with the notion that the more one seeks, the more one probes, the more fragmented reality becomes for him. BUT Cioran’s “tragedy of knowledge” is just a miserable pessimism. He can have it if he wants, but it will not be a notion that I choose develop. Like nihilism. I deny that there is inherent (objective) meaning and that is the extent of my nihilism. Others may choose to paint the world as meaningless and themselves as mere objects occupying its space, but I do not choose to develop that view of the world. Thinking like that tends to “make it so.” I think it is important to look at worldview as prophesy. It becomes destiny. If on all occasions I am preoccupied with the aspects in which things are pointless or not as meaningful as they appear then I undercut my own motivations and desires to participate…to live. For that reason, I choose not to develop that view of the world.

Why couldn’t one be an enthusiast who is also not one-dimensional, who also knows doubt and the anxiety of sensitivity but who strives to recognize the good in it, or the strength that can become of it?

If you subscribe to Cioran’s view, “the unproblematic soul” basically means “the less developed soul”. Because he says that spirit (soul) does not elevate, it tears apart. So obviously it’s going to work out for him that the “problematic soul” has a more developed spirit and therefore more internal conflict and tragedy in life. I just don’t subscribe to Cioran’s sketch of true knowledge…

I agree, that is certainly one way to look at it. Cioran’s reaction to the world around him is subjunctive. In the end it can only reflect his own point of view based on his own experiences. And this will either make sense to you or it will not. Cioran is merely speculating that the deeper you go into “reality” the more fractured and fragmented you become.

And since that was the case with me as well, I agree with him. If you do not agree however you are certainly not “wrong”. At least not necessarily. You are obligated only to show how one can probe deep into the cracks and the crevices of human interaction and not think and feel this way.

And it certainly can be done. For example, you can equate a fractured and fragmented point of view with…freedom. Your options increase significantly if you are not bound to, say, a religious or ideological framework. Right? It’s all rooted in dasein, not physics.
My point is merely to suggest philosophers cannot read Cioran and insist his point of view is unreasonable. Let alone irrational.

One can be. If nothing else, one can be an enthusiastic nihilist. Or one can find existential meaning in any number of experiential interactions. After all, “out in the world” the permutations are endless. And Cioran’s own foul disposition was rooted for years in chronic insomnia. It pummeled him with a truly debilitating misery.

I don’t agree. That is the sort of prescriptive language that tries to transcend dasein and root language of this sort in some measure of hierarchy. As though to say, “the way I think about these things is more enlightened.”

From my vantage point, it’s really only a matter of falling into a circumstantial hole that matches Cioran’s subjunctive point of view. The “spirit”/“soul” is no less embodied in dasein.

But, again, I see your point and I respect it. Cioran does project himself [as do I at times] as someone who seems to insist, “this is how I think and feel and if you don’t, you are not in possession of true knowledge.”

That is bullshit. But, then, for many, the deeper they do go “underground” the less it can seem that way.

iambiguous,

Okay. Still, Cioran is pretty clearly implying that: “the way I think about these things is more enlightened” and “this is how I think and feel and if you don’t, you are not in possession of true knowledge.” If further knowledge always serves to fragment and complicate (though this is not clearly the case) what is necessarily tragic about comlexity?

Cioran’s tone is objective: The enthusiast’s euphoria is due to the fact that he is unaware of the tragedy of knowledge. Why not say it? True knowledge is the most tenebrous darkness. He’s saying that if you don’t understand the tragedy of knowledge then you are ignorant.

All he can do is put the pieces together in a manner that makes the most sense. And the manner in which he does so seems to revolve around a whole that can never be more than the subjunctive sum of those particular parts. And he has acknowledged that his writing is at times a bundle of contradictions.

Here is how Cioran put it himself:

How a philosopher becomes a poet is like a drama. You fall from a world of abstractions into a whirlwind of feelings, into all of the fantastic shapes and figures entangled in the soul. How could the actor of a complicated drama of the soul in which, all at once, erotic anticipation clashes with metaphysical anxiety, fear of death with desire for innocence, total renunciation with paradoxical heroism, despair with pride, forebodings of madness with longings for anonymity, screams with silence, apiration with nothingness----how could he still go on philosophizing in a systematic way? There are men who started in the world of abstract forms and ended in absolute confusion. Therefore they can only philosophize poetically.

And thus, obviously, knowledge of some things will always be more inherently ambiguous than knowledge of other things.

Complexity per se isn’t necessarily tragic. But when complexity and contradiction innundate your search for answers pertaining to things that pummel you, this can readily become the center of the universe. But, again, it is always rooted in dasein.

Here is a snapshot of his particular dasein:

Emile Cioran in The Heights of Despair:

Truly instense and irrevocable despair cannot be objectified except in grotesque expressions, because the grotesque is the absolute negation of serenity, that state of purity, transcendence, and lucidity so different from the chaos and nothingness of despair. Have you ever had the brutal and amazing satisfaction of looking at yourself in the mirror after countless sleepless nights? Have you suffered the torment of insomnia, when you count the minutes for nights on end, when you feel alone in this world, when your drama seems to be the most important in history and history ceases to have meaning, ceases to exist? When the most terrifying flames grow in you and your existence appears unique and and isolated in a world made only for the consumation of your agony?

Cioran’s tone is subjunctive. Well, it is to me. And the unproblematic soul is often one that stays on the surface when the quest for knowledge revolves around a sense of self or around value judgments that come into conflict. At least that has been my own experience in discussing this with the most rabid of enthusiasts. These are [to me] the folks who insist there really is a way to understand themselves and the world around them by embracing one or another God or one or another philosophy or one or another moral and political dogma or one or another meaning of life.

duplicate post

The basic questions concerning ourselves or reality, if that’s what you call it, and, we may add, questions about the meaning of life, are the self. And these questions try to maintain themselves as the self. And, moreover, they do not allow for any complete answer, for the answer would put an end to the questioner which equates to placing the continuity of the self in jeopardy. In fact, the same thought process which created the original separation between the thinker and the world would endlessly keep asking further questions about whatever answer is given.

Anyway, there cannot be any `experience’ of unity or union with reality and constant attempts to do so is the crux of the frustration of fragmentation and separation. A claim to any experience presupposes not only an awareness of the experience as an object, but also a recognition of it as an experience. And these conditions are enough to destroy any possibility of there being a unity, let alone an experience of unity, because any recognition implies a duality or division between the subject and the object. How can there be an experience of unity where there is a subject left out of the object of experience?

When the self is not occupied with its continuity through the constant utilization of thought, there is no separation from a ‘reality.’ Without thought there, there is no concern whether reality is there or not. Life goes on in accordance with whatever reality is being encountered at the moment. It’s just when past experiences are extracted from memory, brought forth into consciousness and compared with the present, a separation occurs between the thinking self and the world. This creates an illusion in that what is presently the case is not the case in the mind. The thought of a different reality resulting from a past pleasurable experience being brought into the mind has destroyed the possibility of coming to terms with the reality of the world exactly the way it is. Anything that avoids the world as it is now is denying the only reality there is.

And this, in my view, is why Gods are invented—whether consciously or subconsciously. Many manage to convince themselves [or are indoctrinated as children to believe] there is a point of view that is always occupied continually with reality. The real reality. The reality of Commandments and Sins. And, in believing in God, they are tuned in to this reality. Then, when face with the complexity of human interactions that beget conflict, they need but ask themselves, “what would ______ do?”

Secularists then substitute Reason for God. But, psychologically, it’s basically the same defense mechanism. Minus eternal Salvation of course. Which is why religion will almost certainly never go away. You can’t beat immortality as an incentive to join, right?

Emile Cioran from On the Heights of Despair:

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely cystalized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

Perhaps. Or perhaps he will cry out in terror and despair. Or whimper. Or scoff. Or go about the business of living his life indifferent to all that is not somethingness, instead.

It is never a question, however, of whether any particular reaction from any particular man in any particular circumstantial context is more or less authentic or appropriate. After all, underlying all such reactions is the essential [and, perhaps, ontologically incomprehensible] chaos of human existence.

You will read Cioran’s words and “own” a reaction to them from within an incalcuable, ineluctable constellation of idiosyncratic variables that may or may not resonate for others.

In other words, realistically we react to the world around us not from a rational philosophical vantage point so much as from within an ever swirling kaleidoscopic jumble of subjunctive moods.

And what is a mood but a mental state that combines the biological parameters of human evolution with the reasoning mind within the ebb and flow of emotional and psychological states; all embedded, in turn, in the ebb and flow of a particular existential trajectory enscounced in the ebb and flow of enormously complex circumstantial contexts. All of which evolve and change over time until the ebb and flow ends abruptly [and for all time] in oblivion.

So: how are we to penetrate the inherent [and largely immanent] ambiguity and caprice of human imagination, intuition, and subjectivity with logic and epistemology? I would suspect we will never be able to. And why would we even want to? If we explain everything then everything becomes predictable. And if everything becomes predictable then is not human freedom exposed as an illusion?

Along a more conventional philosophical route, Simon Critchley considers this antinomy in his Oxford VSI series book Continental Philosophy. In particular, Chapter 7, “Scientism versus Obscurantism”.

After previously discussing the manner in which both Rudolf Carnap [and the analytic philosophers] and Martin Heidegger [and the phenomenologists] saw each other’s point of view as reflections of metaphysical gibberish, he then explores the relationship between science and philosophy and alienation:

From a Continental perspective, the adoption of scientism in philosophy fails to grasp the critical and emancipatory function of philosophy: that is, it fails to see the possible complicity between a scientific conception of the world and what Nietzsche saw as nihilism. It fails fundamentally to see the role that science and technology play in the alienation of human beings from the world. This alienation can happen in a number of ways, whether through turning the world into a causally determined realm of objects that stand against the isolated human subject, or through turning those objects into empty commodities that can be surveyed or traded with indifference.

The good news, however, is that until scientists can unravel the extrordinary mystery that emanates up from out of human minds [and moods], I doubt we have much to fear from them. As long as philosophers acknowledge that human phenomenal interaction is not on par with, say, the interaction of celestial bodies, our freedom will remain more or less intact—embodied [and embedded] in an alienation of a completely different sort.

On the other hand, others argue this alienation is not really any less disquieting, discomfitting, disconcerting and/or despairing than the doom and gloom generally associated with nihilism.

The lesser of two predicaments, perhaps?

Probably. But the alienation that seems inherent in nihilism at least embraces human consciousness as subject [groping about for meaning from the cradle to the grave] rather than object [classified, tagged and then put on the shelf].

In other words, which rendition is the least alienating?

Too close to call, no doubt. And always reflecting the profoundly problematic proclivities of dasein.

He sounds kinda dramatic and unstable here. But I guess that’s not out of place in a text On the Heights of Despair.

Hard to tell what, if anything, he’s trying to get at.

Good stuff, iam. I follow you. However, it appears to me that some “reactions” are more than mere reactions. We do have the capacity to reflect, plan, and then (re)act.

Likewise, it’s possible to make a distinction between feelings and emotions, setting aside the word feelings on the one hand to mean those purely spontaneous and involuntary impulses/attitudes we have and the word emotions on the other to mean the way we respond to and carry our feelings. Or something like that. All this to say- I do believe there is a sensical way to observe and measure authenticity and personal responsibility.

Cioran was a subjunctivist. He understood the extent to which some aspects of human interaction can never really be gotten to. They can only be endured in a jumble of mental, emotional and psychological reactions rooted in a clearly [at times] precarious world of ambiguity and uncertainty.

Thus:

You will read Cioran’s words and “own” a reaction to them from within a…constellation of idiosyncratic variables that may or may not resonate for others.

This is true. And what we do here [in a philosophy venue] is to deliberate – as rationally as we are able – on the extent to which being reasonable rather than rash is applicable in any particular set of circumstances.

I’m all for embracing an intelligent approach to human interaction. But what are the limits of intellect when points of view clash?

James Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things:

[b]When the call of conscience comes, provoked by whatever event of conflict or breakdown in one’s ordinary identity, one must in some way or other own up to oneself; that is own up to those constitutive social practives into which one has been ‘thrown’ by one’s history…There are two major ways in which ‘owning’ of oneself can occur. The first is what Heidegger calls ‘inauthenticity’. The inauthentic response is one that claims some sort of metaphysical warrant for identifying oneself with some particular set of one’s constituitive social practices…

The alternative response…is what Heidegger calls ‘authenticity’. Here too Dasein recognizes its ‘lostness in they’ into which it has been thrown, but in this case it does not respond to its ‘falling’ by concealing…the contingency of its thrownness. Nor is authenticity any…attempt to escape from that contingency. Authentic Dasein is still and always the ‘they-self’.[/b]

The existential hero, in other words. Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain along with all the rest of us…but pausing from time to time to [after it rolls back down] to acknowledge [in a self- congratulatory manner] that, unlike the others, he is aware of the essential futility of it all…but it is that awareness itself that makes him heroic as he starts in on rolling the damn thing up again.

It’s just one more academic pea under one more academic shell to me. It’s Sartre’s “being a useless passion and knowing it or being a useless passion and not knowing it”. And then slapping a badge that says AUTHENTIC to your shirt if you are one of the few “courageous” enough to go on despite the brute, naked facticity of all human interactions in a godless universe that ends for each of us one by one in eternal nothingness.

Where, in fact, Martin is deeply enscounced right now on his way back to being “star stuff”. Where, in all due time, we will be ourselves.

In my view, it is basically a con game. Both intellectual and psychological. It’s a way to reconfigure the absurdity of human existence into something other than what it is: ultimately meaningless and ultimately absurd. And the supreme irony regarding Heideigger is where he “chose” to embed his own “authenticity”: In the Third Reich! Ah, but at least he contemplated “I” and “they” profoundly and prodigously. If you are going to embrace authenticity why not go all the way and write A Philosophy about it!!

What is human conscience? It is rooted [like so much else] in our biological and psychological predispositons [as a species]. Then depending on your own particular ethnological parameters [and the staggering importance of childhood acculturation] nurture molds it into any number of infinite permutations. It revolves by and large around some manifestation of the Golden Rule. And, most important of all: around political economy [power]. The historical evolution of political economy is, in fact, a 100 times more important than philosophy in reconfiguring it from decade to decade to decade.

In my view, the world is wallowing in human suffering precisely because we still insist on talking about human relationships as though Authentic and Inauthentic behavior wasn’t just philosophical/religous bullshit. Only when philosophers finally come to acknowledge the role of philosophy is less figuring out how to bring us all together and more in figuring out how, instead, to keep us from becoming ever more fragmented, will it be more than just the scholastic endeavor that [in my own opinion] it is: Ontic…or ontological? Being…or becoming? for-itself…or in-itself? empirical…or rational? phenomona…or noumena?

Problematic…or unproblematic.

Always, it seems, either either or or.

Emil Cioran:

In the fact of being born there is such an absense of necessity that, when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left – ignorant of how to react – with a foolish grin.

You’ve seen them on National Geographic or on Nature: the colonies!

The camera takes you inside the termite nest. Literally millions of tiny bugs going about the business of, well, going about the business of….

Period. Existence qua existence. Everything reduced down to merely sustaining life from day to day.

Imagine then an entity able to peer down onto and into any given human colony. The first thing they might note, of course, is how we strive to point out, in turn, the profound difference between a termite colony and, say, the folks going about the business “of” in, say, New York City. True enough.

I suspect however that once the novelty of the complexity wore off, the observer might, instead, begin to note the parallels so much more clearly than we do.

It never ceases to amaze me how, given human history to date and the manner in which the daily newsmedia horrifically reveal the apoplectic world we live in still, the more unproblematic souls continue to speculate [philosophically] as to whether members of our species come into the world “innately good or bad”.

Especially given the fact that so much human suffering is caused precisely by folks hell bent on molding all the bad people into reasonable facsimiles of themselves----the good people.

Or, to put it another way, what is almost always overlooked by those of the rationalist persuasion is the deeply profound and mysterious relationship between, say, the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia in the human brain.

Indeed, the MIT “news office” web site speculates about it as follows:

[b]Our brains have evolved a fast, reliable way to learn rules such as “stop at red” and “go at green.” Dogma has it that the “big boss” lobes of the cerebral cortex, responsible for daily and long-term decision-making, learn the rules first and then transfer the knowledge to the more primitive, large forebrain region known as the basal ganglia, buried under the cortex.

Although both regions are known to be involved in learning rules that become automatic enough for us to follow without much thought, no one had ever determined each one’s specific role.[/b]

And:

…researchers speculate that perhaps the faster learning in the basal ganglia allows us (and our primitive ancestors who lacked a prefrontal cortex) to quickly pick up important information needed for survival. The prefrontal cortex then monitors what the basal ganglia have learned. Its slower, more deliberate learning mechanisms allow it to gather a more judicious ‘big picture’ of what is going on by taking into account more history and thereby exert executive control over behavior…

Ah, but the catch here of course is that historically, culturally and experientially there have always been any number of conflicting and contradictory environmental contexts out of which this astondingly complex interaction might occur.

And that in my view is where rationalization comes in. Virtually any human behavior can be rationalized.

If, for example, the Koran says it is wrong for Islamic jihadists to kill innocent men, women and children, the ones who, say, lob missles into Israel justify what they do by pointing out that every Israeli citizen is required to perform military duty.

So no one is really innocent, right?

Same with the infidels in the World Trade Center. They worked in a building construed by Al Queda types to be the belly of the Crusader beast. And, given the nature of the global economy, that’s not altogether irrational, is it?

But the key point ultimately revolves around survival. The world has to be chopped up so that those who have the power to prosper have a better chance at making sure their progeny are able to follow in their footsteps. And that power takes many forms. But they can’t actually come out and admit that, of course. Especially not to themselves. Instead, they invaribly employ folks like ideologues, imams, priests and neo-conservative political philosophers who sagaciously spin out these lofty narratives in order to make it all seem so axiomatically lofty.

That is where the more problematic souls come in: to expose this.

From Lipstick Taces by Greil Marcus:

The shock of punk is no longer in its thuggery, misogny, racism, homophobia, its yearning for the final solutions to questions it barely asked, in negation’s empowerment of every fraud and swindle. ‘The punk stance,’ Lester Bangs wrote in 1979, ‘is riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.’

On the other hand:

Today so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. ‘A Boring Life,’ ‘One Chord Wonders,’ X-ray Spec’s ‘Oh Bondage, Up yours!,’ the Sex Pistol singles, the Clash’s ‘Complete Control,’----the power in these bits of plastic, the tension between the desire that fuels them and the fatalism waiting to block each beat, the laughter and surprise in the voices, the confidence of the music, all these things are shocking now because, in its two or three minutes, each is absolute. You can’t place one record above the other, not while you’re listening; each one is the end of the world, the creation of the world, complete in itself.

And:

The punks who made records in 1977 didn’t know what chords came next—and they hurled themselves at social facts. The sense that a social fact could be addressed by a broken chord produced music that changed one’s sense of what music could be, and thus changed one’s sense of the social fact: it could be destroyed.

In fact, doesn’t much of our day to day interaction revolve around trying to come up with the existential equivalent of which chords come next? Aren’t we always confronted with that next descision: what ought I to think and feel and do…here and now?

Punk perhaps might be thought of as but one more reaction to what happens when it begins to dawn on someone there really is no way [deontologically] to resolve that. It’s not necessarily the right way or the wrong way to react. It’s simply a particular reaction that makes sense from a particular point of view ensconced in a particular circumstantial swirl.

In other words, as a reaction to life it is really as legitimate as any other; as, for example, yours and mine.

Still, it is always fascinating how music can dissolve the fragmented chaos of human existence and distill it down [“in its two or three minutes”] to an absolute sense of reality. That this is no less true of punk is particularly ironic. Here you have the Johnny Rottens snarling that “life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit” and all the while embracing this no less passionaitely – as an anthem – than others might embrace pop culture or celebrity or consumption or God or socialism or the American dream. Or, admittedly, fascism.

On the other hand, Zbigniew Brezinski, that quintessential purveyor of the American Dream, once snarled himself at those who revel in chaos and negation. He called them, “the death rattle of the historical irrelevants.”

But then Brezinski will soon be historically [ontologically?] irrelevant himself, right? He’ll be dead. In fact, in a few hundred years it will almost be as though he had never been born at all.

And no less so than, say, Johnny Rotten.

Perhaps the two of them might then consider sitting down together to discuss the meaning of that. They can, among other things, connect the dots between Malcolm McLaren and the war in Vietnam. Who knows, they may actually succeed in discovering that which Heidgegger, Kant, Descartes, Plato and so many other philosophers utterly failed to grasp: the nature of Being itself.

The actual unproblematic thing-in-itself Being.

In other words, I’m guessing, something analogous to nihilism.

From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward to nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to prefer the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.

Sort of reminds one of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. But then that was, “the story of Wall Street”.

How does one react to this point of view? Can it be construed as a reasonable philosophy of life? Or is it more reflective of a psychologism?..a subjunctive mood? Perhaps a neurosis?

A pathology?

Could you imagine yourself thinking thoughts like this? Does it make sense to think like this? Is it the wrong way to view one’s existence?

Think of it, perhaps, like this: it is less a matter of whether this describes you and more a matter of how, given the right set of circumstances, this is how you may well describe yourself some day. And, if and when you do, reflecting on it will almost certainly be among the last things you would do. What’s the point?

And yet Pessoa has, in fact, chosen not to abstain from reflection…from writing this down.

He still clings to that, right?

Emile Cioran from On the Heights of Despair:

I witness pain, old age and death, and I know that they cannot be overcome; but why should I spoil another’s enjoyment with my knowledge? Suffering and the consciousness of its inescapabilty lead to renunciation; yet nothing would induce me, not even if I were to become a leper, to condemn another’s joy. There is much envy in every act of condemnation.

This is not necessarily a philosophy of life, of course. It is, perhaps, more a mere conjecture, a psychological snapshot, a story that might one day become a philosophy of life given the right [wrong] set of circumstances.

It all depends on just how wide the gap is between what you endure and what you imagine another doesn’t. And, as with most things, you may eventually reach a point where you change your mind.

I ought to know. I have changed my own lots of times.

And doesn’t it invariably come down to what you imagine another is feeling joyful about? If, say, it revolves precisely around what is making you feel miserable the envy can easily transfigure into rage. Then all bets are off.

Yet Cioran seems intent here to focus the beam on what we know. As though he is willing to spare others his nihilisitic bent…a philosophy of life that might desecreate or obviate their joy. Or their illusions. Perhaps however he was not aware that, regarding the overwhelming preponderance of men and women you will ever meet, nothing we can know philosophically could be more irrelevant to either sadness or joy.

Or, instead, was that his point?

In any event, it makes you wonder: are they the lucky ones?

Would or could? Would implies causation. A reasonable person coming in contact with this perspective would accept it. This means to have another perspective is to be unreasonable, or? Could is not a problem for me. Of course confusion, doubt and ambivalance are natural responses to our situation. I no longer think that prioritizing such states is good, nor to I see at root those who do managing to evade absolute committment via acts and interactions to a specific lifestyle.

Would it be indelicate to point out that saying it is an illusion like this is making an ontological claim without qualitification? I’ll leave it to others to decide if I have been unfair.

Of course, I notice you did not say - they are deluded. But then you found a way to say this, or I am missing something?

Does the eye tend to stray towards examples of that reinforce the idea that not having problems is a dead end?

Do you want to end fragmentation or do you see fragmentation as part of the least pernicious solution?

They would not accept it because in their own minds no rational man or woman can accept it.

Where things become problematic however is in devising an argument “out in the world” that would in fact demonstrate how a rational mind must reject it.

This is where we all draw the line – in different places as dasein – between what is true for all and what is not. The “unproblematic souls” simply include many, many more relationships in the either/or category than do the “problematic souls”.

These relationships are then integrated into a whole truth by way of God or by way of Reason.

Yes, you are right. But I have noted this connundrum many times before. And it revolves around the gap between certain words and the world we live in. If I say that “human existence is essentially meaningless” how do I express this in such a way I am not construed as conveying that this is essentially meaningful?

Instead, it is just my opinion [as dasein] that the unproblematic soul’s point of view is an illusion. If you accept my premises regarding what can or cannot be construed in an unproblematic manner then you will agree with me. But I do not mean to convey that my premises are necessarily more rational. In fact, my point is just the opposite: to suggest these things may never be wholly known objectively.

In existential terms, one might say they are living their lives in an “inauthentic” manner. In other words, they are objectifying relationships that can only be understood and expressed as points of view. But in suggesting this I can then be charged with objectification myself, right?

Again, the ambiguity here revolves around Wittgenstein’s intimation that there are things we can and cannot encompass wholly in language. Then we argue about what is and what is not problematic. I just insist these arguments be taken out into the world. And that, when they are, I find human relationships are considerably more problematic with respect to value judgments and identity.

What in the world does this mean though? “Fragmentation” and “least pernicious solutions” regarding what?

Let’s bring it down to earth and discuss it.