Space
7th Installment to my philosophical system
To be born is the first and greatest tragedy. The second is that we inhabit this tragedy in space. Space is that which is from without. What we conceptualize as space is merely the mind’s attempt to develop fleeting pictures of what external reality is. It can only ever be fleeting, for that which appears embodied in space is like a mirage—really no different from the man with jaundice seeing everything as yellow: a fanciful illusion of the mind’s perceptual apparatus.
All reality would be a void were there no consciousness by which to perceive and make sense of it. The universe is primarily an infinite void of empty space, and it is only from a man’s-eye view that any of it has meaning at all. Hence why I say the first tragedy is birth. To come into being is literally to inhabit space. Space is that which surrounds us at all times and yet which we can never hold in our hands; the best man has done has only ever been the ability to measure everything from his conception of length and extension in it. But I highly doubt space, should it have a consciousness, would really care whether we make sense of her in inches or meters.
What Euclid did was to provide man a system by which to make sense of that which he sees but which he cannot comprehend outside of vague assumptions and empirical deductions. The Euclidean method, from which all classical geometry stems, is merely the reduction of the objective (external experiences in reality) to the conceptual (abstract paradigms with use cases, not total validity). That is what man has always done: mistakenly develop systems that work in one particular case, but which brush over or ignore other, more complicated complexities.
The true nature of things—the metaphysics behind every phenomenon—has always caused man to tremble at the thought of its incomprehensibility. Such is why the ancients thought all was, in some way, subject to monism; in fact, most humans in history have assumed some primordial force which was seemingly responsible for spawning all contiguous reality—it was our first basic assumption, and from that gave rise to the entire history of thought. The Chinese assumed it was implicit within the way of nature as such—the Dao; the Greeks assumed it could be conceptualized—and thus gave us theory after theory of what the singular constituent aspect of reality was; the Indians (Hindus) assumed the plurality of all things to be contained within a single unity that was itself trinitary; the Zoroastrians assumed a similar thing, but thought it unitary instead; from them, Judaism gave the world “the Lord thy God”—and called it YHWH; and from here sprang the pious frauds of Christianity and Islam. However, we moderns need not relegate ourselves to the past and repeat the same nonsense of the Axial Age metaphysicians: all is water, archē, air, atoms, void, stasis, change, fire, forms, earth, or a mix of all these, or none at all—to say nothing of the priestly classes’ attempts to justify their power through logic and persuasion rather than force and strength.
In this new technological age of ours, we find our only refuge in ignorance. It is easier to say you fear God and ignore His every command than to actually struggle with the implications of His love. It is easier still to disbelieve in God and become absurd instead; far easier, in fact, for an absurdist, a provocateur, a contrarian, or a nihilist all have the advantage of falling back onto themselves rather than on some higher force—at least the believers have a quasi-understanding of what it is like to conceive of reality with a higher aspect within it. Space is one of those higher aspects, or rather, an intuition from which all our thoughts around higher aspects stem. What we are is but one solitary speck of froth amid an endless torrent of violent foam, spewed forth from a giant source of chaos which we see but wish we hadn’t. Thus is the trouble with being born: that we are doomed to conceive it in space, when the best of all possible worlds would have been one in which space was not conceived at all—and to think cosmologists today suggest the shape of the universe is flat, with its size still too indeterminate to even dare a suggestion (although most lean toward finiteness)! If I were God, the shape of the universe would be a sphere, for it would only make sense if the totality of the world were really only a collective shadow of all its electron orbitals within their lowest energy level; then again, quarks have no discernible shape and are rather excitations or vibrations within theoretical strings—so perhaps the movement of a guitar string would better simulate that. This is all mindless speculation.
If Einstein hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to create him—for he is the one who gave us our current conception of space. Newton only knew the world classically; Einstein, armed with Riemannian geometry, provided us with a more powerful conception of what space is: a manifold which bends in direct relation to mass. The more massive something is, the more space moves around it. With this now becoming standard, and philosophy largely falling out of favor at the end of the nineteenth century when it came to explaining the universe, Kant’s intuitionist approach to space has been lampooned and shot out of the water. But I feel both are satisfactory answers; it just depends on the context they’re put in. Psychologically, Kant is still right—space is merely a synthetic a priori, a transcendental aspect of reality, which is born from without and yet eternally experienced from within. The ability to perceive space is inborn, arrived at well before we even realize we’re conscious; it is prior to us, just like gravity, and so it follows from this that we are merely the kind of beings that are able to conceive of space prior to our ability to conceptualize it. Synthetic here refers to predicates or statements we make about reality which in themselves do not contain any new information about the thing in question. Synthetic statements are those which are not definitional, but rather experiential in the context of reason—known after the fact through reason alone. A priori refers to something that is known prior to experience. All this served to make Kant’s reputation among the ignorant and the learned alike, and it is no wonder why his name is still echoed across philosophy halls all around the world today: for he was the first to point toward the inward nature of our faculties of experiencing nature as such, yet did so in a manner so convoluted and drowned in a prolixity of style never before seen that most who attempt to understand Kant come out more confused than when they started. I suspect it cannot be helped, however, for to compare experiential categories with definitional categories would, on the surface, seem to conflate them. In fact, it was a conflation going off the traditional logical categories at the time—standardized by the English empiricists and French materialists. That’s why the transcendental category had to be created—to give way to this new approach to conceptualization. It’s funny, too, because Kant essentially synthesized all of Western philosophy prior to him—and it only took thirty years after his death for Hegel to put the capstone on all of philosophy with his Science of Logic.
After what I would consider the greatest achievement in the history of the human intellect (Hegel’s Science of Logic), it would only seem natural for things to stagnate and wane with time—even the greatest minds become victims of scorn long after their death by future intellectuals who disagree with their premises. It cannot be helped, for man will always find something to argue over; even if the whole world were given to him alone to enjoy, he would desire another person in it just to fight against. After Hegel, Kierkegaard’s existentialism, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, William James’s pragmatism, and Freud’s psychoanalysis—all of which paved the way for modern, postmodern, and metamodern (contemporary) thought—were inevitable: all of them being philosophical approaches or methods which depart from reason as such and refer back to man’s subjective nature, turning the whole point of philosophy upside down, making it not about the discovery of truth as such, but about subjecting it to man’s present circumstances for the sake of his purposes.
One can only fight against that which is logically coherent if the coherence of it does not satisfy his life. And so here is born the eternal divide between those minds who are tender-minded (rationalistic, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, dogmatic) and tough-minded (empiricist, sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, skeptical)—those who are left-hemisphere-oriented and those who are right-hemisphere-oriented. As I said before, my philosophy is one of subjectivity made absolute: where truth is not merely the correspondence of some cause with its effect, but rather where the cause itself is always the effect; for from the existentialist perspective, all stems from the individual—the individual is the end of all ends, and the supreme essence in the world from which his whole conception of reality is bound in his being: a representation, to be sure, but a fact so powerful it cannot be ignored without ignoring life itself. My essence is being as such—a synthesis of all categories which doesn’t go quite right, but which gives an appearance believable enough. In that sense, it is fundamentally pragmatic while also being tediously dialectical. That is why my writings always seem disjointed and rambling: from the standpoint of one’s being, it can only be taken in its entirety or not at all—all else with respect to man is folly. It is unsurprising, then, why everyone today says they’re doing their best, but are in truth only hanging by a thread which may snap at any moment, and hence all their anxiety and misery.
We see in every uncurious mind the hopeless prattle and confusion which eternally follows them so long as they believe themselves immune to their subconscious cogitations. Nihilism stems precisely from this, in fact. No one in history has ever come to a belief in God after being shown a syllogism. Likewise, nihilists don’t reason themselves into a position of meaninglessness; it is a position that can only come from reason—an overuse of reason, an exhaustion of the intellectual faculty. What we have is a symptom of reason, not a direct result of it. The cause of nihilism is the feeling that reason itself cannot answer itself; that is, what reason purports to be can never be justified with reason. It is this realization—the sudden awakening that all is really without ground beyond caprice—that shocks a young mind so thoroughly that the only thing it resorts to is the complete negation of meaning itself. Ah, but this too is reason, all too reasonable. What is rationality but a pillow for a tired mind—the last safe space for a man in utter terror at his own lack of understanding; a mind so in fear of everything that it only feels comforted when it has placed a box around everything and categorized all according to specifications. That is the kind of world we have, and that is the kind of world we will consign to the flames, for there is nothing there for us. We existentialists are the future. We are the true inheritors of space. What we are bound to is a limit in our spatial conception, but modern man must think beyond categories, grow beyond mere conception, mere abstraction. What must empower man is his will to affirm reality in abstraction. The future of what man will be is a mindset, not a thing to bring about, but a thing to await. It is foolish to believe that a single coherent system for the world will bring it to its knees and make it submit to its designs. What man—no, the intellectual—must wait for is not that others will follow him, or even listen to him, but rather that he listens to the Zeitgeist itself: only those who measure the tremors of humanity on the Richter scale are free from the burden of present obscurity, for they can rest assured they have measured the times well enough to be appreciated afterward.
All existentialists must write as if they were the only person on Earth, for the whole of their experience is so subjective and powerful it takes on a life of its own in the process of writing it. A certain psychology is at play and lurks beneath the surface of every idea that not even the individual is privy to. That there is the greatest source of endearment to life; a source which is felt but not understood. Like space, the being of life evades our every attempt to capture it in our essence. This frightens us, and instead of turning this feeling inwardly and understanding it passionately, we turn it outwardly and look to a “professional” who can help us with our problem. But these “professionals” have no direct experience with our own subjective content; the best we can offer them is a simulacrum, from which they can only vaguely hint at what is wrong dialectically, in a Socratic manner, but the results are hit or miss. When one is faced with an internal struggle, they feel all of space around them closing in, and danger seems imminent. What space becomes to such a person is a dreaded reality of solitary confinement. Oh, how we tremble at the thought of being all alone, in our vast solitariness, unmatched by even the hermit. Why does such a situation seem like a fate worse than death? Because man is socialized to be around others; most natures seemingly demand it—where no one seems, all else seems dead. And so man believes himself to be dead in such a state, and that life is just a dream played out for his cruel amusement.
Space seems to be the definite end or limit to our external world. We perceive all reality in three dimensions. The human body is divided into three planes: sagittal, coronal (or frontal), and transverse (or axial). Rigid bodies in physics have six degrees of freedom, but three of them are merely the reverse of the first three. Newton has three laws of motion. I could go on. But what are all of these to the individual? Merely his intuitions at work, his representations shining forth in all their splendor. The space of Einstein is no closer to the truth of reality than Newton was; it merely refined our notion of what it means to be bound in reality using tensor calculus. But this boundedness seems less stable than one would like to put forth. What we have today regarding the notion of space is either a capitulation to current scientific thinking or a philosophical (probably neo-Kantian) idealism which hopes to relegate space to a mere faculty of the mind. This dichotomy shocks contemporary philosophers: to see a concept that was once theirs to rule now made subject to the “specialist” of the universe—the physicist! Physicists, like all good scientists, love to shatter the idyllic, sometimes absurd, ideas of bright-eyed philosophers. To them, every speculation is a nail to be hammered, and if the hypothesis does not hold up, it is to be driven out by another nail. This advent of specialization is so disheartening to one who theorizes about the world from their own point of view—from an existentialist’s perspective, for whom the facts of the universe are just pretty ideas made to make those more analytically minded happy… happy to have “advanced human knowledge” one step closer—whatever that means. These people do not think philosophically, and so the whole of their boastfulness rests on a certain acquaintance with “facts of the universe” that somehow make them “more correct” than another if that other does not think as they do. Science today has become the go-to subject for answers, and such is why nearly every field of human endeavor has been molded and subjected to it for the sake of some imaginary progress that we never really saw. Science has progressed; general human knowledge has not, for man will always be more ignorant than intelligent so long as he conflates coherentism with foundationalism—an oxymoron yet to be topped in the realm of philosophy. It should be noted, too, that neither of these systems works absolutely unless you view them under a pragmatic microscope. Everything beautiful in existence—all these splendors explained through the inductive method, made clear with science, happily running about—are forever to remain as dead facts from that point forward unless life can be breathed into them.
Science has turned the whole of man into a mere scientific diagram—as if life were comparable to the wretched food pyramid. What science would want every man to become is nothing more than a mere confabulator of concepts which explain himself. That’s as absurd as not eating merely because you cannot explain the process of digestion. What science lacks, and what most have yet to catch onto, is that science is not a total philosophy; in fact, it’s not a philosophy at all. What science is is a method—methodological naturalism put into practice—but this does not put the individual at ease. No one is comforted by having their anxiety explained to them psychologically. What man demands is answers, and so long as he feels himself “unqualified” to make responses in his own name, after his own thinking, in the manner most commodious with his being, he will forever feel behind and weighed down by a force of his own making. OVERCOME! That is what must be shouted at man. This here is the method by which to achieve that: POWER! Space may bound and limit my life, but being is far beyond it.