What I Will Be
6th Installment to my philosophical system
Man must necessarily adopt the role of a prophet or soothsayer when he endeavors to speak of himself in the future tense. What a man was in his past was merely his fleeting image. What a man is in the present is merely his current instantiation. What a man will be, however, is only what his imagination will allow him to be.
Notice, by the way, the manner in which we represent ourselves when talking of our existence in relation to time: I was, I am, I will be—our past, present, and future cogitations all refer, and make reference, to the core principle of our beings as such; however, we can only interpret this great being in the present.
What our past relates is only that which happened to us, and rightfully so it is the prima materia (first matter) from which our essence is conceived, and through it matures. The present, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of our current character—not necessarily subject to what will be, but primarily sees the world through past experience and present circumstance. There is a kind of presentness which cannot be easily grasped when thinking in the now. Every substantiation of being is supported and affirmed in the present, but it has been a consistent failing of all past philosophers to conceive of being only in light of the past and present, rather than in light of the future. That presentness which is hard to grasp in the present is the result of an ambivalence toward ourselves. We see what we are through the then and now—the past and the present—which we feel we are eternally bound to and ultimately subject to and determined by; but I seek to move beyond this conception of being which seemingly all of mankind has accepted wholesale since our beginning.
What was is dead, and does not concern us phenomenologically. Our past seems as present to us as a dream which we wake from every day, but which we cannot recall the contents of. To man, the past is a distant memory, yet he views his whole life through its cloudy lens. Man is very fond of making himself miserable at the thought of what could have been:—he is perpetually thinking about how much better things could have gone for him had he made one decision over the other, all of which he justifies in light of his present reality.
All would be pleasant if, like the brute animal, the only passing consideration was self-preservation; but we human beings are so designed as to actively recall every slight and misfortune Mother Nature presents us with. In many ways, we are still all-too-bestial: to say nothing of our drives, ambitions, or physiological makeup—man loves to torture himself with his present concerns; man sees his whole existence only through the light of fear. The system as such is far removed from our natural environment, and yet we still operate subconsciously on every bit of that barbaric architecture.
The herd is the collective unconscious of the common man, while the true individual—free from modernity as such—does not allow himself to be wholly subject to everything which is today corrupted, malformed, weak, degenerate, and life-denying. Being for the common man is one of drudgery and toil, in which his every aspiration is made in his mind in the abstract, but which he lacks the means to act on in the concrete; and so the whole of culture, and our existential conceptualization of it, is necessarily framed within, and seen through the perspective of, our collective privation and material struggle. If everyone could actualize their higher ideals, what we would have is an abundance of mundanity and sloth—not because modern man is incapable of greatness, but because his conception of greatness is so typical, safe, boring, lazy, and utterly without imagination that it ascends no farther than merely conceiving of a life without work—that which sustains his life and which is his ultimate concern at the end of the day.
In this respect, I fundamentally disagree, and even abhor, the idea of Nietzsche’s: that mankind should be organized on aristocratic grounds—where the vast majority of the population is only fit for bondage to their lords (a superior man), who, free from needing to labor for his subsistence, can pursue with total freedom whatever “great” ideal he can think of. From Plato to Curtis Yarvin, it has seemingly always been true that every intellectual’s political ideology bends toward the aristocratic, the authoritarian; their rationales are different, but the results are the same: man is divided by nature into the competent—worthy of greatness and complete freedom to pursue their greatness—and the incompetent—worthy of enslavement and misery only. It is a relatively new phenomenon that man has argued for the upliftment of the majority at all; a by-product of the Enlightenment, no doubt, for it would take modern, mature reasoning, along with cunningly slick rhetoric, to make the obvious, intuitive, naturalistic fallacy (persisting since the time of Aristotle) seem questionable at all. They all make the same mistake: they conflate the normative with the descriptive; nay worse, to them, their normative assessment is descriptive—what they feel is true, and it is true because they feel it; and moreover, they rationalize their barbarity by anecdotes and value judgments which cannot have any validity even if the whole Earth agreed with them. This is why the being of man must be cultured on its own, free from any encouragement by a society which purports agere recte (to act rightly) but in truth is sōla mala facta (only bad actions). Nature is the purest form of encouragement because it relies solely on the individual alone, rather than on a reliance on what others may think—which we see all around us through advertisement and technology.
Man, being flung into his society and generation without consent, and made bound to every contract which he did not sign, is necessarily at odds with his own authority. Not only is his life dictated to him subliminally, but he is socialized to accept all those narratives uncritically; on top of which, if he is to live (in the modern world) in any way unprecariously, he must adopt ways of being, crude habits, and unfortunate routines which are contrary to his natural essence. His existence as such is grounded in an intuitive inequality which he feels and sees all around him, but which he cannot break free from without constant worry and fear. Feeling all this, but lacking the means or methods to approach these systemic issues intelligently (rationally), he resorts to his more base instincts—what he feels is more intuitive and subject to power alone; thus, we have ourselves a perfect cacophony of outrage and boneheaded thinking, which gloss over every complexity for the sake of making the problem appear more solvable than it really is. Their “solutions,” by the way, have already been tried throughout history: what results is a continuous antagonism between the working and upper classes—upon which the fate of the nation rests entirely on whom the middle class sides with—but all this is an aside.
What is important for man to realize is that he should not see his life through the lens of his material conditions alone. To focus on the practicalities is seen as wise today—and who would be so bold as to doubt the common wisdom of the herd? Me! It is an abject failure of creativity and imagination to make life merely the succession of material circumstances. What is good for man is that which inspires him to action, what makes him move, what makes him irrational. What is safe is that which is commonly pursued, what everyone expects from you, what society at large seemingly demands from you. But who would ever willingly follow suit with a thing that is contrary to their heart? In the rational lies dormant a faculty which, if not exercised, spills over into society at large and grips minds with a particular narrative that is destructive. What modern man does not realize is his irrational faculty as such. One can never argue for creativity, art, passion, love, expression, etc., without appearing as a crude idealist, or as a romantic or sentimentalist; that irrational force is what is used when reason is not enough, and thus the mind calls on the humanities and the arts for the sake of making the rational more tolerable. As Nietzsche famously said,
We have art in order not to die of the truth. —The Will to Power, §822.
Every narrative we give our life is at its core irrational, for it has no ground beyond what we feel is most desirable in it. If all of mankind were to acknowledge this, and this alone, there would be no argument over whether one existence had more value than another; for it should always be remembered that the sufferings we see today are largely systemic—that is, in all the ways in which we organize ourselves and all the incentives and values we adopt wholesale from the broader culture. If it isn’t already clear, man’s essence is that which changes and adapts to his material conditions, while his being, free from all bodily concerns or practical considerations, remains eternal—and that eternity is what rests within his heart.
Man lives one life and yet desires to live another. Why? Because his essence is not in line with his being. All existentialists before me have had, necessarily, to become either utopian, absurd, or religious, all for the sake of aligning their being. The religious are the oldest and most basic. They see man as subject to too many powerful forces which he knows individually he is unable to prevent or overcome; with this acknowledged, he passively accepts things which he knows in his heart are unjust, but, feeling powerless, performs one of the most disturbing psychological reversals in history: he makes himself subject to a feeling which is grounded not in this world, but in another. What he effectively does is dissociate, or detach, himself from any desire within this world, and is thus unable to conceive of any possible action to align his essence with his being, aside from believing in a life after this one where he can utilize his power in a way consistent with his heart.
The absurd are essentially the religious but without the belief—or rather, with a different kind of belief. The absurd do not look for hope anywhere but in themselves; they see the world for what it is, and instead of adopting an absurdity in abstracto (in the abstract), they do so in concreto (in the concrete). What matters to them the most is how to sustain their being in the midst of a wretched essence, which is on all sides attacked endlessly—by society in general and family in particular. They feel themselves not their own, and they feel themselves unable to find their own, but they do not give up, because to them, giving up is equally meaningless; this meaninglessness, however, becomes for them novum genus significendi (a new kind of meaning), in which—like their religious counterparts—they feel themselves no longer attached to the world, and can thus affirm themselves more easily in the world as a result. In the same way Spinoza felt himself freer than ever after affirming determinism, the absurd individual feels that as soon as their essence becomes meaningless they are finally able to affirm their being with as much meaning as it can possibly contain. There really is an extraordinary amount of reserve energy within the human heart once it is freed from the shackles of fake narratives and societal pressures which it is taught to obey but not criticize, reconsider, or even overthrow if need be. The reason they are absurd is precisely because they affirm a narrative which is itself meaningless; in that sense, they do not live in search of meaning, but rather live in the absence of meaning as such, in order that they may feel themselves free enough in a world without meaning to act at all. They must affirm their being without meaning, and in that commit themselves to a life of continual striving after that which is ultimately illusory, and in doing so live nonetheless in spite of it.
Lastly, we have the utopians, whom I respect immensely but who I feel miss the mark the most. These are people who feel that human flourishing can best be achieved through the collective will of society—specifically in institutions (governmental or private) that are subject to the will of the people alone, and which provide them with enough abundance so that they may be able to affirm their being without the constant threat of material constraints which relentlessly attack their essence—which resembles the predicament modernity finds itself in today. The first and most glaring problem with this idyllic vision is that society at large is not organized enough to place the requisite pressures on all the necessary institutions to bring about this abundance agenda; the entire labor force, in nearly every sector, has no real organizational capacity. Unions are few and far between, and everyone is demoralized at the prospect of being fired, especially if they need the work to survive. This is to say nothing of the already entrenched powers—the powers that be—who would rather see the world collapse than give an inch to those barely making it, living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck (utterly disgraceful!). The utopians are right in wanting to bring about a better world, but they pull the wrong levers on the machine that may bring that about; for you cannot expect change to occur without first changing the incentives of individuals at large. Almost everyone would agree with the utilitarians that the greatest good for the greatest number is preferable to the world of austerity and precarity we have today; but what they—and every other utopian-minded ideologue—get wrong is the means by which that world can be achieved. A better world is not possible until people take seriously the impossibility of a utopia. The utopians believe that there is some aspect of flourishing, abundance, or the good life in general which everyone can agree on; this kind of thinking completely destroys the individual as such, for it assumes erroneously that the collective will of the people can somehow override the being of the individual alone.
What must occur for the sake of a better world is two things in tandem: the first is not to make man’s being—the actions he pursues for the sake of his individual upliftment—subject to the collective; for not only does this lead to a tyranny of will deleterious to all parties, but, and this is more important, it causes the individual to live a lie, for he feels himself unable to affirm his being if it is in opposition to the collective, who may not hold the same view of the good life as he. The second is to find a way to organize society’s resources such that material injustices (which primarily manifest themselves in austerity and economic hardship for the majority) are nigh impossible. This avoids the common objections made against incentives as organizational tools alone—due to their implicitly subjective nature—by making society’s main concern the tangible, the material, the externally real: food to eat, liquid to drink, and a place to rest your head under are not incentives—fanciful ideals or phantoms from an impracticable mind—but necessities without which culture, and civilization in general, will languish and decay until death swallows them whole.
With all this said, I feel it is finally time for me to give my own interpretation of existentialism. What I offer is not a solution, not a guide, not even a system—COURAGE. That is what I offer. Courage to think. Courage to feel. Courage to dare. In short, courage to exist—to affirm in every way all conceivable aspects of reality. There lies at the core of every soul an endless abyss which has no qualms reducing you to absolute despair. In every hope is a desire to move past your essence, or rather, a fervent wish to see your essence made actualized in your being. The greatest health for a man is not necessarily in his body, but rather in his mind—his mental health—the intellectual vigor by which he sees the world, interprets it, and grows dear to it.
A person without despair is a person without a mind, for there is no aspect of life which is a pure good on its own. And as Schopenhauer similarly argues in his essay The Vanity of Existence,
If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
What we have in our essence is our representations, which stem from our mind as the intellect within it attempts to make them comprehensible; in this attempt, however, is an endless series of crises which follow one after the other in rapid succession without us cognizing them. These are all the doubts and subconscious fears which we feel but do not understand. In our essence is soul, for soul has within it the spirit, and the spirit has within it the embodiment of action, which is our being. Spirit, then, is being; or rather, spirit is the term given to the process by which essence approaches being.
Like Kierkegaard before me, I believe one cannot conceptualize reality until they have burrowed deep into the heart of their is-ness—their being as such, which they can never come to unless they humble themselves before the world and welcome every prick and pang which life presents before them as a miserable essence. Again, the mind seeks out the spirit, for it is the only thing in man capable of realizing itself, from which he creates for himself a picture of the world wholly his own.
It is only through living that one can appreciate the thought of death, for life presents man with more misery than joy; and so the one who feels time plays a cruel joke against him who no longer wants to be finds great relief in thinking about an endless sleep—or better still, a quick death from a bullet, or maybe some horrible accident. Our life is suddenly put at ease when we accept the fact that we are born into a losing struggle from which no amount of thrashing on our end will help one bit. It is not enough to say life is suffering. Suffering is but one aspect of life—the majority of it, for sure, but still only one—which, in the face of time, seems like a sweet nothing which falls straight into oblivion. If the game of life were played seriously, most would have paused it long ago out of fear of continuing.
Life is certainly no joke, but it is the character of irony which allows one to laugh in the face of it. If it weren’t for such audacity on the part of man to make everything revolve around him, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself; for man in the present age is told to make everything and pursue everything for the sake of himself—but this kind of attitude is more egoistic than it is individualistic: the difference being that the egoist takes the negative aspect of existentialism, while the individualist takes the positive. Of course, this is merely my own false dichotomy, but I find it an effective way to separate out the innumerable drives and psychologies at work within and underlying all decisions. The egoist finds his being in forgetting himself, and so he is an active man of the world, always wanting to look busy and in the midst of a very important engagement, when in truth he’s merely trying to avoid the shallowness of his own life. What I have just described here may as well be considered a diagnosis of the whole of Western civilization—for who would disagree with any word of that last sentence, especially considering it rings very true when you realize how few people today actually engage with their life in a passionately reflective way. On this point, Kierkegaard is supreme:
The most ludicrous of all ludicrous things, it seems to me, is to be busy in the world, to be a man who is brisk at his meals and brisk at his work. Therefore, when I see a fly settle on the nose of one of those men of business in a decisive moment, or if he is splashed by a carriage that passes him in even greater haste… I laugh from the bottom of my heart. And who could keep from laughing? What, after all, do these busy bustlers achieve? Are they not just like the woman who, in a flurry because the house was on fire, rescued the fire tongs? —Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.
As I said in the introduction, every philosopher before me (with the exception of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) has only ever treated life with deep contempt—that is to say, they were not critical towards it; they ran from it, in fact, as far and as fast as they could, and would not dare stay to hear a dialectical breakdown of it. Thus, one sees the kind of psychology at play the instant an evaluative judgment is needed. The herd seeks comfort ultimately, while the singular individual—the self-reliant man of action—takes account of his being (well before his practical considerations are weighed) and acts solely through its impetus. The individualist is one whose being is concerned only with itself, in and for itself. From all this, one would have to agree with Schopenhauer when he says,
For everything which a man fails to pursue for its own sake is but half-pursued; and true excellence, no matter in what sphere, can be attained only where the work has been produced for its own sake alone, and not as a means to further ends. —On Men of Learning.
The distinction between the egoist and the individualist has to be reiterated once again, for it is the exact opposite of how everyone today understands those terms: to make your being your main concern is the only way to reflect passionately on life; without this, you lack the means by which to see past the egoist’s practical, worldly, material concerns.
How you make your living can never be considered the end of existence, and yet nine-tenths of the whole world seemingly figure that an individual must “discover themselves” or “find their true passion” by the time they’re finished with high school—as if any eighteen-year-old ever actually had the rest of their life planned out by then.
Life does not come to you; it happens to you. Life is a storm which quickly descends upon a ship, in which everything on deck must be thrown overboard for the sake of saving the crew and vessel altogether. And now remember that this exact thing must be played out and lived by you every day. In all this, where is one to turn to when the path to being yourself is laborious, tempestuous, and without certainty? I say to yourself—turn to yourself! Dare cogitare et vivere tibi. [Dare to think and to live for yourself.]
That is what I will be, and all I can be, in fact: a man who lives after the manner of his own principles alone; a man who strives to make his being (actions) perfectly overlap with his essence (existence as process). Unless one approaches their existence pragmatically, and analyzes it dialectically, there will never be harmony between a person’s being and essence. Life is infinite, but so too is the spirit which strives to grasp it, which, in the process of doing so, reveals its meaning.
Ultimately, that is what we all will (and must) be: pragmatic dialecticians for life. One must be contemplative, self-critical, ironic, dialectical, pragmatic—in short, a genuine feeler and seeker for the totality of themselves. Kierkegaard put it best when he said,
All knowledge requires courage, and only the person who has the courage to sacrifice his life saves his life. —On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, I. The View Made Possible.
One must go under in order to go over, and afterwards sacrifice life itself for the sake of saving it. The future will of mankind must will itself something great, in order that it may save itself.