Experience
11th installment to my philosophical system.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. —Søren Kierkegaard.
What is the whole of life but an experience? Within that word rest the entirety of our existence. In the interstices by which we human beings are forced to trudge along through, in this long and dreary forest of thorns and spikes, containing the most unthinkable miseries and deprivations which no conscious creature should force their way through—we, MANKIND, are born and die in and through experience.
In writing this, I am experiencing. In your reading this, dear reader, you’re experiencing. In thinking this, while breathing and itching and fighting the urge to give up, I am experiencing. One may as well equate conscious existence itself as mere experiencing.
Experience is that which we are doomed to suffer from in life every second we tolerate it. Existence as such is the progressive toleration of ever-increasing and immiserating circumstances which we are forced to adapt to for the sake of our survival. Oh! how cruel this all seems—how terrible, how much of a mistake existence seems when confronted by the whole of it; a whole so large that not even God could contain all of it.
The pressing pangs of life, and the hollowed-out dreams that are had within it, are such that we delude ourselves for its sake. Humanity, in some very real sense, only lives at all in order to see what could be in the future. It is with a very sad and sorrowful sense, then, that I relate the whole of it in its truth: it is all a shallow dream, lived on through hope, and through the lie of hope is made a good in itself for our very own gratification and appraisal of it.
What mockery our very lives are to the concept of life in the present. Modernity, like seemingly every other age before it, has made the end goal of man a lie. For hundreds of thousands of years, man’s sole concern was survival—and it could be argued that that age was the last time man was ever honest with himself; an age when the sole concern was life itself, and thus grounded in the truest of all true realities: his very continuation and subsistence.
After some development, only born out after countless millennia of consistent stagnation, man became comfortable enough to reflect in his pastime, to reflect, in fact, in order to pass his time. Time at once was free for man to think within. With this liberation from constant striving found in earlier times of bare-bones existence, man at once was forced to confront his life intellectually, abstractly, divided from the concrete reality of his former existence. Nature now appeared to man as something to understand, rather than to fear, and thus arose every single justification ever conceived by man.
What experience was prior to that revelation of abstraction was the nearest to instinct: the lived, the embodied, the completely encapsulated within the physical. No longer. Now, within the brain contains all of experience, organized and synthesized thanks to the prior categories of perception already contained within the apparatus as such. Experience is lived, and that is why the instinctual way of life will always be more true than that conceived in thought. We have our brains to thank for the whole of reality which appears before us as perception; but we in modernity live as if all is to become subject to it—to the principle of sufficient reason; nay, to the principle of insufficient reason, of wretched, anemic reason—of reason that is completely divorced from the instinctual, a reason not worth the name.
What is meant by reason today is the correspondence of all our experience to their rightful origin point. We wish to provide the cause to every effect. If every consequent could have its ground, we would strive for that eternally—and in fact, that is what has become of philosophy in the 20th century: one know-it-all after another pontificating on their grand unified, ultra-sophisticated, totally valid, utterly without error or fault system of absolute philosophy—an absolutism not seen since the days of monarchy. We of today would sacrifice our very life if it could be proved that we were right. That the correctness of our views holds more importance to us today than the use of them for our very being is a very grave sign that things have headed in the wrong direction, and have been for over a century; in fact, many centuries: since Hegel, no Kant, no Descartes, no Aquinas, no Avicenna, no Augustine, no Plotinus, no PLATO! DAMN PLATO. He was the one. He gave us the lie that truth and life were co-eternal and equal. What he did was make truth an objective quality of nature, abstracted from, and outside of, man. This here is the greatest lie in the history of humanity—even more than Christianity itself.
Experience bears the truth of every truth, and in that sense, truth itself is really subject to experience. That is why science is the ultimate guarantor of truth, because its method is fundamentally dialectical! Life is truth—like God in the Christian conception—and thus it is subjective: the exact conclusion of, possibly, the greatest dialectical mind in history—Kierkegaard. Life is truth and truth is subjectivity; thus, life is subjectivity; and in this subjectivity is found only the prescriptive (normative) rather than the descriptive; thus, every action we take is necessarily ethical, and requires sufficient rumination upon it in order to properly embody it in right action.
One instantly sees the true nature of life—a long, tiring, nearly incomprehensible uphill battle against our own ignorance, tethered with a passionate negativity of aspect in action so gut-wrenching that to even act is an infinite choice which necessitates despair. This explains why every dialectical mind—like my own and Kierkegaard’s—is necessarily syncretical, scattered, confused even, and everywhere melancholic. We are miserable not because we cannot act, but because we cannot understand the purpose behind our acts; we intellectual sentimentalists need to feel the infinite not only in the abstract, but also in the concrete; but because this eludes all conceivability, we have to relegate all our actions to a wretched finiteness, and thus annihilate the power that originally made us dear to the ideas in the first place. We want what we feel in mind but cannot bring to fruition in any sense, and so we hang our heads in shame even when we feel the experience itself was good. Endlessly do we dialecticians make a mess of every simple concept, for in their simplicity hides a potential divinity which, for life, is indispensable. Such is why modernity is vain, for it views everything through an already tainted lens—everything in reality is assumed either as matter, idea, or some stupid synthesis of the two, which in truth could never be the case—hence why it’s dialectical. To bring action to the finite is necessary; otherwise, one would contemplate the infinite in every action and never act in the first place; a very sad truth about the nature of man, but a truth which, when recognized, emboldens man to take a leap nonetheless. Every action is a leap, and every leap a commitment to that which is good for you as an individual.
Agere recte in vita impossibile est. (To act rightly in life is impossible.) This is a truth which holds good for all self-conscious creatures, but which is especially poignant within a reflective man—an melancholic, intellectual man, seemingly born to make difficult everything which everyone prior to him had tried to synthesize and comprehend in its entirety—as if the infinite could possibly be grasped in the hands of man. Man combs through his experience in order to find what was useful to him in them, but without ever acting truly rightly in anything, and thus making him, in an absolute sense, in the wrong in all things, he can only rely on his instinct to overcome in order to become anything within his wrong. A man serious about doing right, then, must look inwards, towards his own being, and strive after that which fulfills his essence in the immediate—noble actions, born out of his desire to act, in order that he may find within them a hint of the infinite which first compelled him to move past his state of inaction in the first place.
Every attempt to grasp the reality of life is really an attempt to bring it down to the finite, in order that the infinity of it does not swallow you whole, and leave you incapacitated and incapable of action. Action is experience, and experience must always be directed towards the higher, the infinite, God, without, however—in contemplating its highness—leaving you unable to do anything. Such is why the first important lesson of life, and essentially the end of all experience, is that which is edifying, uplifting, inspiring, and you; you in the sense that it is unique to your individuality, to you as a single individual, as a human not in humanity, but of humanity; you great soul, you—impossibly powerful, yet humanly limited.
Every power is really a mirage should it not be made total in its experience. It is hateful to the living to have such capacity, yet make nothing of it aside from a debasing consistency and uniform regularity—in short, to turn life into a system, a habit, a cycle—like digestion—which circles back and forth forever and ever without imparting to you some aspect of divinity, grace, potential, in short, POWER. POWER OF, BY, AND FOR, YOURSELF.
The category of the single individual exists within all of us, and so must be used as a kind of existence which is not merely the contingent or average, but a total—a, to use an algebraic analogy, closed solution under radicals. Life is to be lived in the finite while wrestled with in the infinite. It is extremely difficult, but no one has ever claimed life was easy. In fact, life, to me at least, seems almost too difficult at times; even to endure life seems superhuman—to just sit there and do nothing seems inconsequential, but in reality is an act of bravery matched only in mythology, in legend, in the tales of the truly remarkable. Every human being has every aspect of every other inside them; it is merely a matter of bringing it out. This bringing out is something which demands action, an experience of a kind that may seem impossible for one who has never acted in that way before; but be placed in the right position, or in the proper circumstance, and you can expect to do something which would shock upon later reflection.
The story of every life is one bound in experience, and thus experience becomes the only thing man can rely on in order to make sense of existence as such. To think of life absent of experience is really to think the impossible: a bare-faced nothingness, completely empty and void of any tangible content possible for its conception; you may as well compare it to the thoughts of rocks, which is to say, nothing at all. Everything done not for life is done in vain.
The end of every experience should not be pleasure, comfort, security, or happiness—for all of these things are doomed to oblivion by the rapaciousness of our human nature, always striving after novelty and excitement—but life itself. A meaningful life, if such a thing is even possible, is a life that is tarried with consistently, in a dialectical manner, such that it accounts for all necessary contingencies; contingencies which lie at the heart of every human life, and which remain to us impossibilities forever, in regard to our knowing what is to come of them in our life. In that sense, every life is uncertain, just as it is ethical, and bound in experience, and mediated by ourselves as subjects. Life which is NOT lived for the sake of itself is not worth being called life; nay, it is rather like an abstraction which sounds nice and pleases our ears, but which has no deep meaning behind it at all.
What becomes of existence when it is not lived for itself is a degrading process of suffering, which tires out the individual and makes them lose all sense of self-activity—that is, actions which pertain to the self, and are done for the self, and which are only done so that the self may prosper from them. Experience is that which holds all the beads on the string of life, for life, after all, is similar to a string: thin, short, and not much to get excited about in itself. Man today is like a shipwrecked survivor stranded on an island of despair, from which no material exists for a potential raft to be made—nothing but the sky, sand, and ocean.
What kind of dark abyss lay at the core of every man’s heart? It is such a frightful idea to indulge in that I consider it rather absurd to even consider. It is supremely scary because life so much resembles a darkness which is all-encompassing, and which none could ever truly comprehend.
I feel, in this discourse thus far, that I’ve reached a point in the explication of the subject at which the real analysis is over, and now the dialectic can really begin. In every writing, there is, at first, a sense of uncertainty, for every beginning is really a great leap of faith: a faith in yourself, that you actually have something to say, that you can, in fact, provide anything worthwhile to say. (Writers are such vain creatures—to value our own ideas so highly we think them worth imparting to the rest of mankind, as if our singular perspective were enough to enlighten all of humanity!) After the initial leap, however, it is not done there. There must be another leap, and then another, one more, forever and ever. There is no end to the leaping, for every leap implies another leap. Such is the nature of our minds, so inconstant and fleeting, that the only way to write anything of merit is to write it honestly, with feeling, in a natural manner—a stream-like manner, that reflects nature more than anything else. We have to cultivate our gardens deliberately, and maintain them consistently, if any hope of overcoming the miserable experiences of our life can be thought possible. What is possible is everything, so long as our subjectivity is remembered, our truth strengthened, our power powerful, and our hopes unwavering.
That is what it means to be dialectical, after all: the ability to repeat every repetition, every action, with the same firmness and conviction we had when first living them out. The eternal recurrence of the same, the life lived over and over—like some representation of the Ouroboros—without end or deviation from its inception. The origin point of every great life—and especially of every writer—is that which is born out of suffering and misery. It is for that reason that depressed individuals have the most acute sense of not only their own suffering, but of the sufferings of others; there’s a kind of sensitivity they possess that is not common among the herd, for most of the herd drown their depression out with antidepressants—a kind of antipode to feeling, a manifesto for more misery, a very real love for that which is anti-life.
People today are against life, instinct, feelings—in short, being with their emotions—because all their life they’re told that that which does not aid them immediately with respect to life is a hindrance to life; such a foolish attitude to adopt, for they do not see the necessity of suffering, to say nothing of its inevitability. They ignore life by making it a sterilized system, an association of associations, which strives to cobble together out of nothing something which can be used as a sort of guide in life. These people do not know the first thing about their subjectivity, about the power of their individuality, about their life as such, and so they fall back upon that which is familiar to them, but which gives them no lasting impression of assistance in life. In life as something within you, in your subjective experience of things—experience as such, for experience’s sake, which in turn involves you, and makes you not a stranger to yourself, but a master. You master yourself by being yourself: be yourself—such a platitude worthy of hell, no? Yes! Indeed—but also one worthy of the Gods if it be understood in an existential sense, as all of life should be understood. Remember, dear reader, this whole tome is only for your upliftment. My own experience means nothing. It is found in you. Born in you. Created from you. A book is only as useful as the one reading it. In books, one finds nothing which wasn’t already in the reader; it was only expressed and made tangible in words the author felt in the moment of writing—but as for the experience, and the takeaway overall, it is all on the reader.