Why I Write
2nd installment to my philosophical system.
To ask a writer why they write is like asking a person why they breathe. It is a question that defies all attempts to answer it, for the moment the question is posed, one is immediately filled with many weighty and proper rationales for writing, but none are the true reason for it.
The question itself is impossible for one who merely thinks of writing as an alternative to speaking; one who sees it from a utilitarian perspective—as a mode of communication, a way of passing the time, a way of pleasing themselves, a way of avoiding the world, etc.
What one does in the act of writing is far beyond what a particular response offers up; nay, I go further, to treat it merely as a type of entertainment or communication is to divorce it from the numinous, transcendental aspect it has implicit within it.
What exactly occurs when one is forced to make tangible their thoughts? I’ve always found it the most fascinating and perplexing paradox: that man can give meaning to anything at all. Look up at the world… what do you see? I see houses built in neighborhoods not far from avenues; I see buildings built alongside sidewalks next to parking lots and restaurants; I see cars driving upon asphalt surrounded by other cars; I see winding roads stretched out as far as the eye could see, connected to streets, freeways, and intersections; I see flat plains and mountaintops, large malls and super shops, tall bridges above the ocean, and skyscrapers below the clouds; I see kids playing in little parks while dogs walk upon the grass while every parent has a phone in hand; alas, I see the trees within the forest, rocks within the dirt, and life within the green: in short, I see modern life in all its glory; humanity and nature overlapping into one structure of experience, which I here relate.
Now, in that exercise, was one not blown away by its accuracy? Its relatability? Its honesty? Or how about the fact that one could say any of that in the first place.
Thought to man is like a foreign creature; the everyday individual thinks only insofar as his belly is concerned. The appetites of man are endless, and so too are his vices, but every now and then he discovers within himself this capacity to subjugate the world by the use of concepts. It was said that after God made Adam, He gave him the task of naming all the animals (Genesis 2:19–20). On its face, this fable represents the highest use of man’s capacity to order and subjugate, to place under the dominion of concept—in short, to use reason. Man is thus born for reason, to use reason, to apply himself in the world as he finds himself relating to it. The transcendental aspect is precisely that: that man has this capacity in the first place; to use his mind for the sake of organizing all of reality and furthering his own ends for his own good. It is unsurprising then to know that Moses (who wrote the Pentateuch) was a poet, for what other man could have been so acutely aware of the inner beauty within nature, of the profundity within Adam, and of the utter silence that falls upon one who gazes up at the world and takes in all its grandeur.
From all this, naturally, one would attempt to subjugate all of reality to reason itself—and thus we have the Enlightenment, a natural consequence of man tossing aside his past superstitions and taking the chance to think for himself; to communicate to himself what he saw around him, and to take nothing on authority but his own ideas and essence. This here marks the beginning of the modern age, whose rallying cry was: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). The I spoken of is the individual, the inner man, the person who thinks and subjugates the world to his will and idea. But Descartes, as audacious and intelligent as he was, still clung, I feel, too tightly to his rosary, and said himself that God could not be a deceiver, was not a deceiver, and never will be a deceiver. What faith, what irrationality, what boldness—to deny the precise thing you sought to prove from first principles (God’s existence), without reliance on anything but reason itself. It would’ve done him some good if he read Aquinas a bit more closely, instead of rejecting the scholastic tradition outright; for there are many things, Aquinas says, which grace alone can give, and which reason alone will never be sufficient to provide. Indeed, it would’ve been very good and respectable if every intellectual after Galileo gave up the game of God and became a staunch naturalist, rather than descending to the depths of metaphysics where no metaphysic (that prior to physic) existed.
You see, reason has only ever taken man so far. What I admire in someone like Descartes was his ability to say, “… I freely and seriously apply myself to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.” This is the essence of reason, for to reason is to doubt, and to doubt is to find fault in your perception of the world; but, at the same time, I find reason and justification for all my faulty perceptions nonetheless, and do not take it in the negative if my view of reality is wrong in some absolute sense. The singular drawback which has hitherto hampered philosophy as a way of life was the following declaration of Descartes:
… I resolved to begin by rejecting as absolutely false everything as to which I could imagine the least ground of doubt.
—Meditations on First Philosophy (Synopsis)
Dīcis omnibus dubitandum. Dīcis: Habeō rationem pro deō. Sed videbis mox quomodo absurdo lecturum esse omnia infernere. (You say that everything must be doubted. You say: I hold reason as a god. But you will soon see how, by means of the absurd, everything must be sent to hell.)
It was here that philosophy as everyday practice came to die; and it was here that the next two centuries of philosophy would be enthralled with the feeble ideas of rectifying error, avoiding contradiction, developing coherent, consistent theories with explanatory power, etc., etc., etc. As if any of these things got man closer to the essence of his reason, made him surer of himself, made him a deeper lover of nature and reality: in short, made him more powerful, more robust, more ample, elegant, confident, astute.
All this to say, it was only a matter of time before the anti-rationalist would arrive—those counter to the Enlightenment and everything it stood for; before a man like Giambattista Vico would arrive and proclaim just as loudly: Verum esse ipsum factum. (Truth is itself something made.) And would then go on to describe the history of the world after the manner of a poet: where man was born beast, made tame by the poet’s lyre, and later civilized through the use of reason and his domineering efforts with his whip against the backs of slaves. Moreover, Vico was the first of the moderns to ask, Unde est phronēsis? (Whence is practical wisdom?) The whole divide between what man feels and what man confirms through thought had its origin in the division between Descartes and Vico.
Isn’t the whole history of the world one of violence? It is to be expected, then, that the same viciousness which caused the rage of Achilles was to also stamp its mark on the pages of intellectual history; the key difference being that scholars spill ink, while men like Spartacus and Leonidas spill the blood of their enemies.
And how many men have given definitions and logical proofs and justifications for their own self-satisfaction? How is it that man came to be so self-conceited? To delight in using his reason to justify himself, and then proclaim himself the greatest beast that ever lived, oblivious to how ignorant he really is regarding his own self; and how stupid he must be to rely on his mind alone when confronted with a question like, “Why do you write?” As if an entire library of Babel were sufficient to answer a why question? Why this, why that, why anything at all? It completely eludes a man who still operates under the assumption that consistency and correspondence with reality somehow transcend himself. He defines what writing is, and then is boundlessly happy when he repeats his definition when asked. He calls that reason, because he used his mind in constructing his very answer. This man is still a child in thought. He still thinks of in abstracto conceptus (a concept in the abstract) when the thing in question is in concreto rerum (in the concrete reality of things).
The practicality of a mind will reveal itself instantly when asked a question that pertains to the world or the affairs of men. It is all too obvious that a man who says in response to the question, “Why do you write?” “Because I wish to communicate,” is still thinking only in abstracto conceptus, for the true answer lies beyond mere reason and ascends to the highest form of complexity that existence offers. It is a question that, as offered to the mind, is not immediately satisfied with a rigid syllogism. What rests in this complexity is the finite and the infinite simultaneously. Most would scoff at this and even say such a statement is impractical, simply because it flies above their heads—heads still in chains, enchained to the idea that something only has sense if it conforms to some abstraction, some concept, which relates to the thing under investigation. What absurdity! What mockery! How often must I repeat this again and again: it is the height of folly to present an answer to any question which is itself justified in a circular manner. You would claim that it is merely practical, maybe even logical, to answer after the manner of your own experience, but I would say that your experience is blind, for where does it derive its power; when does experience rise from its bed of straw and enter in the Hinterwelt (behind-world) of abstraction, and capture, at last, the light—upon which its blindness is suddenly cured—and confronts the inexpressible.
Writing is finite in the sense that man comprehends it as a mere extension of his mind, his imagination (for the sake of giving order to his experience); but he never contemplates deeply into the nature of this mind or imagination—not its origin or the cause behind it, but rather the very human fact that he can cogitate an imaginary world in the first place; a world in which he is like a God, and in which he can take ideas from for the sake of beautifying the very bodily, sensual, grounded-in-experience world he is actually forced to exist in while conscious: the waking-world of experience as such. In my view, therefore, it is an adulteration of pragmatism to use its concept of practicality as a justification for your ignorance. We must never forget what the father of pragmatism, C. S. Peirce, said regarding the essence of practicality:
To find the meaning of an idea, we must examine the consequences to which it leads in action; otherwise dispute about it may be without end, and will surely be without fruit.
—How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Popular Science Monthly, 1878.
And William James, more or less echoing this sentiment, said,
Pragmatism asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?”
—The Meaning of Truth.
Pragmatism defines truth as verification. Instead of asking where an idea comes from, it examines the consequences and results of the idea. Again, for pragmatists, truth is a verifiable process based on an idea’s results, not its origins. Now, people take the results of reason and logic at face value—as if they were objectively true for all times afterwards—and automatically assume that because this here statement coincides with our predefined definition for it, with all its cant presuppositions and false lemmas, it must be the tell-tale sign that we have reasoned correctly about the matter in question, and have reached the truth: ABSURD! There are so many airheads walking around in the world today, as has always been the case, stomping ten toes down on everything they say because they have, “the power of facts and logic,” behind them: these are not serious thinkers, in fact, they’re worse than false thinkers—pseudointellectuals (for at least they have to pretend to be smart)—, they are rather like the Greek sophists, who charged money to teach how to lie to able-minded men. Absurdity has never reached higher than when Gorgias argued that nothing exists in the world; not even solipsism, but rather the rejection of reality completely—Nihil in totō rērum. (Nothing in the whole of all things.) These philosophaster look at the legacy of reason with all its success and pomp—all its glistening medallions that hang from its noble tomes like the Novum Organum or Logique de Port-Royal—and praise on and on all that right reason and simple analysis has given to the world; but not once have they considered the cash-value of these ideas; not once have they taken seriously the synthetic aspect of thought; not once have they admitted their analysis has limits; and not once have they stopped treating categorization as the crème de la crème of human reason—punctum altum, a quō cētera cadunt. (the high point from which everything else falls.) They try with all their might to bend the world to their limited views, for the sake of reducing everything to point, line, deduction, and conclusion; but the reality of experience cares very little for our logic and bright-eyed assumptions.
Nothing will turn a man faster against reason than asking him how he feels. The man of reason can only ever defer to past experience, but trembles at the thought of actually having to investigate the inner nature of his heart; of actually looking at his existence from outside his castle of reason. Do not speak to me of comprehensiveness, consistency, noncircularity, explanatory power, or metaphysical baggage; I once worshipped these silly idols of reason—for I was once a decadent; a man who preferred the ideas of others to his own, but no longer. Now, as a matter of course, and on principle, I took into my own hands the things which were important to me, and sowed whatever intellectual tapestry I could for my own sake. There is a kind of freedom that is associated with thinking for yourself that is scarcely comparable with any other liberty; for the freedom to think after your own experience, and to live on whatever principle you’ve discovered as true as a result of its execution (its embodiment in the world), stands well beyond any other quality which man is capable of embodying.
That finiteness I spoke of earlier, however, now returns with a vengeance, for it seeks to conform to how we conceive it, rather than how it actually appears in the world as such: this world which, as the German idealists were fond to say, exists, but we shall never know it (Kant), or exists in the individual self—Das Ich—(Fichte), or that it springs from nature (Schelling), or that it is found in the process of comprehending it as such (Hegel), or simply that it lies within our will (Schopenhauer). All these men saw the limits of reason, but still tried to conceptualize it within reason as such. Man, it seems, is incapable of ever getting out of reason, so long as he is doomed to comprehend things in rational frameworks. What I find best in dialectics is that it allows one to advance an idea to its furthest point without worrying that it may be wrong; and what I find so excellent in pragmatism is that it ultimately defines truth to be the expected result of some action we undertake; in that sense, my dialectical pragmatics never finds a final solution, but rather consistently seeks the solution it thinks the question has; like methodological naturalism, free markets, or capitalism itself, the structure’s stability rests on its continuous searching for a solution; the continuous maintenance of life necessitates energy consumption, and the finiteness of existence necessitates mortality: it thus follows from all this that dialectics as such is what lies at the heart of every paradox and unanswerable question within existence. Reason for the longest time has been in the ascendant, and has more or less dictated to everyone else with relentless vigor how to approach reality: to effectively treat every problem as a kind of complex Rube Goldberg machine, which must have a cause (reason) for its being, and which can be understood so long as we reduce and rigidify, brush over and simplify, every nuance and complexity which the phenomena actually presents us with. That’s what I despise so much about reason,—like modern medicine—it creates the problem and then sells the solution; it takes the most complex and indiscernible beauty in existence, and reduces it to a mere bundle of perceptions, a table of categories, a flowchart of associations… a schematic of redundancy—as if the atoms that comprise matter were playing hopscotch until the observer actually “sees” them, to which they become an either-or—a quantum superposition. I’m convinced that the seemingly necessary reduction of all reality into a wretched dualism, a false dichotomy, is solely the result of mankind being too wedded to the notion of reason, logic, and deduction.
Reason is ultimately to blame for our inability to cognize the world in helpful ways. It gives man power, but little insight. It justifies itself by mendaciously adulating its past successes, and loves to endlessly commit—I think quite purposefully—the genetic fallacy; defenders of it say: “Without reason, there would be no solid foundation for science, no modern medicine, no internet, no advanced technology, and lastly—as if bowing before the king himself—no commodities by which to consume and enjoy.” All such arguments put the cart before the horse. On the one hand, there’s a parity in the argument itself: it could just as plausibly be assumed that everything we’ve discovered so far could have been achieved without the approaches and assumptions we’ve taken wholesale from the Enlightenment. On the other, it assumes that prior to the Enlightenment, man was incapable of thinking in such a way so as to make any real advancement on the questions of science; ignoring the historical dubitability of such a claim:—when you consider people like Hippocrates, Aristarchus, Aristotle, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Ptolemy, Galen, Hypatia, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Biruni, Avicenna, Averroës, Shen Kuo, Su Song, Roger Bacon, Vitello, and even Copernicus himself; are the accomplishments of all these polymaths and scientists to be ignored simply because they were wrong in light of what we know today, or because their methods differed from the one (which was to win out and become dominant during the Enlightenment and afterwards) laid out by Francis Bacon in his De augmentis scientiarum? Finally, and most egregiously, is the assumption that reality as it appears to us can be known objectively, that is, without the possibility of being refuted, objected, or overturned by another mind; and that our reductions of the world have infinite utility in regards to all questions pertaining to all reality—which they love to summarize as simply the totality of all physical phenomena, as if these moronic poindexters could actually comprehend such a thing.
Ultimately, what I rail against is not that their approach to truth is wrong, but rather that they misinterpret what the result is. If we should be strict pragmatists in this regard, we should only show deference to the end result, that is, whether the action taken by us has shown itself to be useful in the furthering of our objectives. The beauty of pragmatism, once again, is that this objective could be anything, not merely some result which traditional rationality assumes—i.e. drawing a correct conclusion, verifying something experimentally, disproving a hypothesis, etc. What I offer in this regard is a modern rationality, an anti-rationality, or perhaps better put, a rationality with a heart; a rationality that doesn’t seek objectivity, but utility with respect to the goals of the individual, not the advancement of some blowhard’s educated guess about reality. My only assumption is that the individual should be paramount in every aspect of existence, and any consideration about reality should be seen through the eyes of that individual—what’s good for them, empowers them, furthers them, improves them, etc. My formula for existence is one that seeks the essence of every experience, and which views life from life’s own perspective: the individual—the great master, rex regum (king of kings), der König (the king), el mejor hombre—el genio del hombre para la humanidad (the best man—the genius of man for mankind), Il Duce (The Leader), the one who says L’État, c’est moi (I am the state).
You may see now with what candor and seriousness I take every human being. If I couldn’t answer the question of why I write, then what makes you think I can fathom another individual—a singular and solitary individual—, let alone my own person—the one thing I should have complete knowledge of.
I said earlier that writing is finite in so far as man conceptualizes reality through concepts, which stem from experience, and which his mind organizes, but which have no relation to his own person as a self. The other aspect, the infinite, is precisely where this relation is born. The infinite takes hold of one whether they want it to or not. It is the void, the abyss, the endless ledge which drops into a black hole of nonduality. Duality, which originates in eastern traditions of religiosity like Daoism and Buddhism, says that the self is really an illusion, and every cogitation of the mind is simply a passing over of experience—an unconscious representation stemming from the self (a projection of the self, rather)—like the ripples in water made by a raindrop. What’s magnificent about the concept of Duality is its nondual aspect: that is, that the concept of the self is itself a projection of the self, which we as individual selves can comprehend conceptually, but which we can never understand objectively, for the self as such can only ever be a passing over, a going under, a looking forwards while moving backwards! The western mind has stumbled for millennia over a rock of its own creation; while we categorize and reduce all of reality, the east—with incomparable humility and contentedness—takes reality as such to be simply what it appears to be. While we wrestle with various logical paradoxes that result from our very own approaches and methods of reasoning, the east gains the world, and rightly takes boastful strides along the Earth; for it knows it will forever have the west beat so long as we attempt to bend nature to our designs, rather than us conforming to her. To live in harmony with reality, to take nature simply as given, to appreciate the little things as they come, to make do with what fate has given us, to cherish friendship, to honor our ancestors, to develop for our descendants, to be charitable, kind, honest, upright, helpful, generous—all these things and then some the east has in spades; while we in the west argue about whether the basis for our morality is founded in God or egoism, or about whether there is objective truth or not. We shall forever be behind the east, developmentally poor and ill formed, so long as we treat our existence as if it were a problem in classical mechanics—as if we lived after the manner of a Newton’s cradle, bouncing back and forth, conserving momentum, but ultimately stopping due to entropy. Oh yes, entropy! It’s actually a very apt concept to describe the west: a closed system that becomes increasingly chaotic the more time passes. Even physics can be used to analogize the failings of the west. Incredible!
But back to duality: the self is not really there, but as a subject of experience you cannot help but feel that you are in fact there; to overcome this, practitioners—such as monks, yogis, Rishis, etc.—do, what we call in the West, mindfulness practices—the primary ones being meditation and controlled breathing: to shut off for a time the inner voice, to calm the nerves, to forget your earthly miseries, and to return back to the incomprehensible self that is yourself, which you strive to forget but cannot, and which at every turn you are reminded of, which you wish you weren’t, but unfortunately must always be. “Must always be?” you say with some incredulity. “Yes. Always and forever. For as long as you are trapped in this body, you shall forever be subject to the passions and desires of your heart, and which your will ultimately commands, while you are in the backseat, merely along for the ride.” What these various activities do is allow the individual to detach, so to say, their sense of self, in the abstract, from their physical body, in the concrete. This dissociation allows one to freely exist without the attachment to the body, which, so long as one lives, must carry around everything that is harmful and dangerous to the well-being of the individual. This is the negative aspect of man taken in the East; renunciation and asceticism are seen as ideals, and to be worked towards, and highly praised should one perform them diligently. It is not surprising then why Schopenhauer was fascinated by Eastern philosophy; for he took everything with regards to culture, custom, and practice as superior to the modern simply because it was older, more refined, and closer to the time when mankind were willing subjects to the will itself; it also helps he took suffering as the ground which the will walked upon, with its only extinguishing being that of the very individual self.
If my attempts at explaining duality seem confused or utterly absurd, that is for one of two reasons: either I’m a poor explicator—failing as a writer to provide you with the pure idea, free from any superfluity; or the concept itself is too novel and counter to your normal conceptions on what existence could be. I suspect the latter is more likely, considering I’m addressing a primarily Western audience. The concepts of the East, while gaining steady influence and sway since Schopenhauer’s time in the West, are still largely ignored by the vast majority of people, and if they are studied, they are only shallowly, and very few actually reach any sort of distinguished knowledge in it. Even I would consider myself a dilettante in these regards, especially when confronted by, say, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda—nine volumes in total. But, where one does not have a path for a journey which they wish to embark on, they must carve one out themselves. Autodidactism has its drawbacks, but where one lacks in broad knowledge, one makes up for in singular discipline. To not have a teacher also fosters your own creative faculties, and is the fastest way to develop your own individual thought, which, in regards to education, is the most important thing one can obtain.
If I may now return to my original point, however: the infinite aspect of writing shares an almost complete identity with the concept of nonduality. One finds that existence as we perceive it is equally incomprehensible to the self as comprehending the infinite aspect of writing. What nonduality shows us is that the self is not only an illusion, but that its complexity is so vast that any attempt to conceptualize it instantly falls flat; for the concepts which we would normally label such amorphous bodies of information as stem from our presuppositions about what reality is as such; but as I said earlier, writing—which is severely limited by language and the mental capacity of the individual doing the writing—can only put to words that which is finite; therefore, to attempt any investigation into the nature of reality must, by necessity, be false in an absolute sense, and will, for sure, simplify or gloss over some complexity which the individual could not penetrate even if they had a million lifetimes. What ultimately restricts our capacity to express the incomprehensible—to go beyond the normal limits of expression, so to say—is the framework with which we approach any idea in the first place: the presuppositions and prejudices we carry around like a birthmark, and must forever be subject to, even when we do everything in our power to avoid such pitfalls in thinking. One should immediately see, if it isn’t obvious already, that to answer such a question as why I write has implicit within it the idea that I could possibly comprehend myself well enough to feel confident in affirming the identity, the social construct, of the I in the question. Now let me be very clear: this is not some Deleuzian or Derridean post-modern, structuralist hogwash; this is completely new in the history of philosophy. It is precisely my anti-philosophy: my existentialistic dialectical pragmatism at work. Not only do I concern myself solely with the I, but I reveal through the process of dialectic itself just how incomprehensible existence is, and in doing so, reveal the true heart of the matter: that I know that I do not know who the I is which I refer to—the Socratic maxim in existential garb. Now all this infiniteness, which I scratch and claw at as best I can with my finite mind and capacity in writing, subsumes me completely, and I lose the whole essence of myself precisely when that moment is reached: the moment when I comprehend the true incomprehensibility of existence, and accept in full all the fear and trembling that comes as a result of that great knowing.
That is why I write. To deepen the understanding and connection I have with myself—through the dialectical process—while at the same time seeing where the truth reveals itself in the act of processing my own existence. As I said earlier, pragmatism is never a justification for your ignorance, only a tool to affirm your truths, your power, your meaning, your existence. The cash-value of every thought, with respect to the individual, should always be true, in the sense that whatever conclusion is arrived at from the dialectical process is one which ultimately affirms life, empowers existence, and creates a version of yourself that spreads the same joy and love to others around you. That, to me, is writing. That is why I write.