Form

29th installment to my philosophical system.

Whatever this thing is... by Hieronymus Bosch.

If matter is what the world is, then form is how it presents itself to us. Philosophically, this distinction was initially made by Aristotle and since then was modified slightly and dressed up in new jargon over the centuries; but I suspect very little is actually revealed with this most meretricious of all distinctions. I struggle to even call it a distinction. It is difficult to even affirm the is-ness of reality when everything we know about it thus far points to its ultimate unknowability.

With such vagueness being the common stamp throughout all of thought—which philosophy has never been able to answer with a straight face, that is, objectively—it only seems reasonable to assume that the whole of humanity is really in the dark about the phenomenal and the noumenal. Some have even gone as far as to say that the noumenal is an abstraction without content, a distinction without meaning: a mere concept born in the minds of philosophasters who desire to know the ultimate without first considering the possibility that the ultimate is itself a meaningless abstraction which men can either never know (because it does not exist) or never comprehend (because it lies far beyond the capabilities of human understanding).

I, for one, believe that the noumenon of Kant is just the thing (Das Ding) he wanted to know in itself (an sich), but because of the antinomies which inevitably result from relying on pure reason (Reine Vernunft) alone, he had to satisfy himself with a servile agnosticism—a critique to end all critiques, which at the same time gave birth to an infinite variety of them. Nowadays, there are innumerable schools of Kantian and post-Kantian thought which claim to have finally reconciled reason with reality—NONSENSE!

I’m with Hegel on this one and claim that the search for a reconciliation between what we as human beings bring to consciousness and our capacity to comprehend this consciousness—in all its particulars, in both its matter and form—is Das Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself). In a word, the noumenon—the objective, the absolute, the “truth”—is… Spirit (or to use modern terminology, a process of becoming or self-realization). In that case, all distinctions melt into air and become misty abstractions which we see evaporate before us, but which we cannot see shortly afterwards.

It is on this point, actually, that Hegel is almost a materialist, but I suspect the reason he didn’t wish to affirm a materialist metaphysic is because he, like me, felt it would be to affirm a groundless abstraction which is itself totally unknowable to us in an objective sense: therefore, the only true compromise between objectivity and subjectivity is reason (on the objective—exterior reality) made subjective (from within the subject—interior reality).

I cannot affirm because I do not ultimately know, but I’m also aware that the concept of “ultimate knowing” may itself be an abstraction that is meaningless, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. You see, the process of my thought is dialectical and therefore open to contradiction and evolution—indeed, it lives off the uncertainty implicit within consciousness. It is a form of skepticism that is itself anti-skeptical; what it is at its heart is a systematically unsystematic system: a system that organizes and conceptualizes all claims about reality (the systematic part), but which does not affirm any of them (the unsystematic part). It is a type of speculative philosophy, a paraconsistent framework that is ultimately pragmatic.

One cannot speak of the deep without first entering the shallow. The depths of man’s consciousness, which give rise to this whole accidental reality, are really like a shadow within the dark, indistinguishable from the surrounding darkness of everything. One can only produce a shadow in the presence of light, and so, what we do when we attempt to speak of concepts, or draw abstractions from experience as such, is really only light a flame from which all phenomena are given their corresponding shadow of incomprehensibility.

What would it even mean to “know” reality, to “know” the noumenon? I venture to say it would only mean to provide an answer to something that is itself unanswerable. The greatest theories which man has come up with to interpret the world, to give it some semblance of comprehensibility, have only ever been the classification of his ignorance. Even mathematics and physics, the most “grounded” in reason, evidence, and deduction, are really just models of understanding which have predictive validity, but which do not approach the “why” of reality, only the “what then.”

I respect the consistency, I even admire it—to view the world with awe but never with reverence, happy to not know, only to uncover, figure out, or reveal—ah, if only I were capable of truly affirming such a framework, it pains me sometimes… I make everything more complicated because I’m unable to separate myself (in my subjectiveness) from the world which appears before me as an object to be analyzed (in its objectiveness).

That pragmatic adherence to empiricism and reductionism—my oh my, what a commitment, what audacity, what strength; furthermore, what lack of self-respect!—where do you fit into that jigsaw puzzle of reduction and commodification? I’m all ears to hear how you fit, but I doubt it would make much sense to someone like myself, someone who doesn’t share that intuition about the world: that the world is only the world, its own brute fact, and that man’s “facts” about it are merely our extrapolations from our hypotheses about it.

Oy vey, this world is impossible for me to truly wrestle with subjectively, because everywhere I turn, I’m met with the physicalist, the reductionist, the empiricist, the rationalist, the positivist, the physicist, the religious, the artistic, the calculating, the mathematical, the nihilist, the objectivist, and every other aspect of humanity which I love and respect but which I cannot ultimately follow. The true path to life is to be found on the road which leads to no sects or doctrines, no premises or presuppositions, no dogmas or unquestionable beliefs; only in your own way, and with your own understanding, can you live a life of sufficient complexity and grandeur to be called a well-lived or well-spent life.

People think of life as a problem to be solved, when in truth it is a reality to be experienced. Life is an endless journey, a place which can be mapped but which has no finite topology—no surveyor’s chain is capable of measuring the complexity of this terrain. Every second of existence is one second of overcoming death: the tendency to decay and languish, to die a nothing in this world, to despair and become one with nothing, to love nothing, to make the emptiness of existence the only love possible, the only vanity worth falling into, for it is the only true “truth” the world seems to abide by unconditionally—all this and then some is really the condition of life, and yet, we persist… to what end though?

To live is, in a very real sense, to reject the demands of entropy to disband and disorganize and fall into a sea of chaos. Disunity between man and the world seems the way of all things, and to think men are so vain that they are capable of turning this resolute nothingness into a serious somethingness. What greatness lies within all these narratives of form—matter concerns us not; everything emerges out of small somethings, but we wish to know that something more than the object (the noun) which we have before our eyes. What ridiculousness is all this? Really, truly, what incredible grandeur this whole motion picture of reality really is.

Life is like a movie that is played out on a molecular scale, but which is only given apparent color and content in the broader scale of perception: the five senses—vain, fickle pricks of consciousness—only serve to prolong themselves in the consciousness of the subject they inhabit, and that is why life is so absurd yet simultaneously the most grand thing there is. Wallahi, nothing is more transparent than the inevitable nothingness which we are destined to become; nothing steals the hearts of men so quickly as the inevitable sadness which all things are bound to become.

We like to feel ourselves in command of all our fortunes and capable of changing them through our efforts and consistent labors, but it is all too much—all remains either perpetually out of reach or simply impossible to achieve given the current state of things; man is limited even in his imagination by what the current state of societal and economic development is for him, or rather for his epoch.

The ideas of the ruling classes are, sad to say, the true ideas which dominate our times; and though we like to think of ourselves as self-reliant, independent, intelligent, and conscious single individuals, immune to all that nonsense, we must never forget that we inhabit a world in which the majority are not so independent, not so intelligent, not so desirous of becoming great or interesting or clever or erudite. What we are, rather, in this world, is but a speck of matter given form from within ourselves (in the mind—the subjective) as conscious beings, but expressed by the same material (in the world—the objective) which we are forced to interpret and overcome!

This very line of reasoning (this nonsense “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality) is used by the ruling class to distract people from what actually matters in life. Just like the scientists who reduce all of reality to merely the physical, or the religious fanatics who reduce everything to God’s will, the grand narrative of existence itself is (today at least) sold, packaged, and commodified into a game of money-making or wealth-building—living a “good life,” which is really a life of little reflection and total hedonism; a life that isn’t really a life at all, but a fantasy, a narrative, a literal story that is lived through in struggle and ends totally in death.

The modern world could not be more monstrous than it already is: totally senseless, wicked, and insipid. Even if the world played out like a story written by a genius on par with Shakespeare, and who had the powers of God himself… it would still fail to reach the level of utter depravity which we find ourselves in today—a wasteland, a psychological black death, a mundane, tepid, crippled, ignorant, backwards orientation of existence. Until we cease profaning life and place back on its pedestal the glory that is subjectivity (subjective immediacy), we shall never overcome this “practical,” “pragmatic,” “common sense” approach to life—a life that is nothing more than a span of a few decades in which we work merely to live and die.

Our perceptions of existence account for more than our actual existence. Misery could be a glory. Pain could be a joy. Death could be an escape. People today are driven by narratives they don’t actually believe in, and if they do, they are made miserable by them because those same narratives are themselves narratives, stories, fairy tales—not realities to be accomplished without sacrificing your humanity to them.

The crisis of the modern world is that form is profaned for matter. We reduce things to simplify them, and we then go on to use this same kind of reasoning with life itself, which of course would lead to very dark and meaningless places—the abyss of all abysses in this context would be capitalism (no shock really), because it is the matter which also strives to become the form. In contradicting itself, it tries to become what it is not through a continuous dialectic of “progress,” which is not progress at all but really a regression to the lowest elements of life—the bare essentials made optimized in order to allow profits to flow the most seamlessly.

Nothing could be further from life than a spreadsheet of business transactions, because these abstractions represent only the subsistence of the business, but not the actual commotions of the firm. You see, this kind of empirical, reductionist reasoning is equivalent to saying that it is the mouth alone that is responsible for sustaining the body, or that the purpose of life is to eat because eating is the only way to sustain life. It is taking a part and making it into a whole. It is the composition fallacy made perfected by lived experience. You cannot call a lie the truth when experience shows the obvious falsity of the thing in question.

The very way in which life is organized reinforces false notions about life, and that is why the dominant mode of interpreting life today is so empty of any real content or meaning—it is soulless, and made solely for the sake of profit, or commodified for the sake of virality. There is no character or individuality in it because it isn’t produced for the sake of connecting with other individuals, but rather made to enrich a single individual who doesn’t have anything else on his mind aside from capital accumulation.

This is why we can never live happily in the world even if we actualized ourselves in it, or removed ourselves entirely from it—because the overriding narrative is one of continuous, perpetual, yes, eternal, dissatisfaction, want, and ennui. Therefore, our tangible material struggles must not be overcome with our own liberation in mind, but with everyone’s liberation in mind; the system as a whole must be destroyed, while leaving in its wake only the tools which exploited us, but this time with us using them for our improvement overall.

Everything in life seems geared towards a contradiction, and this is true—possibly the only truth in the world—but it is nearly impossible to handle when actually dealt with on its own. I mean, with everything said above thus far, doesn’t it seem at least a little true that we fear contradiction in the modern world the same way kids fear the dark? Well, intellectuals do at least.

The average person lives through contradiction by replacing the complexity of life with a rigid system of “practical” concerns that touch on material interest alone; that’s it. I’ve just explained all of modernity in a single sentence: you live through your own life—that great vessel of experience, which is but a moment in the sun—focused only on what sustains it, rather than thinking about ways of transcending it. It wouldn’t be so bad to live a hard life if the average person’s mind wasn’t addled with delusions of wealth and fame that are not coming to them even if they prayed to God for it, or EVEN if they found a magic genie in a bottle—that wish alone would take all three wishes.

Modern man doesn’t want freedom, I’m sorry to say, because misery and toil and endless drudgery is easier than actually analyzing life existentially. Figuring out for yourself what you want your life to be is harder than accepting what is commonly accepted without reflection by the herd. This truth is what led Nietzsche to admire rank order and actually desire a world in which people would return to slavery and live in even greater misery and bondage than they suffered as wage workers—what humanity!

This is what I meant when I said that life is a contradiction, that life is spirit recognizing itself for itself, that life is a gradual process that is punctuated by periodic tragedies and bouts of depression. I don’t agree with Žižek when he said: “Today, in a society in which the striving for pleasure and happiness fully displays their self-destructive potential, only figures like Mainländer can save us.” I prefer, rather, to say that the only savior for us today is ourselves; and if I was feeling really pessimistic, I would say Emil Cioran or Arthur Schopenhauer are the true saviors: our true prophets and intellectual saints; men to be canonized not as people who followed the way of the Lord, but rather as people who followed the way of the world, and saw it for what it was, and said afterwards that it was very bad.

But this is all too much. I’ve said enough. I’ve written enough, so much, in fact, that I really can’t tell whether I’ve said all my mind or none of it. Such is the tragedy of complexity and reality lived existentially. Whenever speaking on subjects of profound complexity (it should never be forgotten), it becomes almost impossible for one to turn their thoughts (the matter) into a coherent form. The art of a writer, in truth their genius, is nothing more than turning every thought into a concise, elegant expositional form. Every explanation for any phenomenon is form distilled into its most brief representation.

The matter ultimately determines the individual’s interest. It is for this reason those who write on anything out of interest alone usually write in a manner that is light, enjoyable, and very obviously personal and engaging. The thing which all writers hope for—and which few achieve but which all cling to the moment they obtain it—is spontaneity. Spontaneity is not something that can be cultured or developed, but rather is something that can only be arrived at randomly; it cannot be called upon willingly, but rather is something which happens to you precisely when you least expect it.

Half of greatness in writing is patience, for one must wait either a very long or very short time for an idea to come into their head which is good enough to carry them the rest of the way. The other half of greatness in writing is brevity; something which I strive for in my sentences, but which I scarcely think I manage to perform in my writings overall, not because I can’t, but because I feel like it would be a disservice to myself to allow my mind only part of my thoughts, rather than the whole of them.

Not everything has to be engaging, for not all matters strike our interests or are worthy of our engagement, but the end result should be something from the heart which carries meaning and truth overall. I know the form of this essay on form may have come out a bit sporadic or haphazard, but it could not have been otherwise, for the very nature of the subject necessitates long diversions and confusing digressions if the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of all experience is to be uncovered and made clear to others.