The disaster of being alive

On philosophical pessimism, pt. 1

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed—with no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power—with no one to comfort them. 

And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

Ecc. 4:1-3 (probably 400s BC).

Is it worth it at all? Being born? Being alive?

For a child, this is a strange question. Of course it is. The infinite value of the good of being is juxtaposed against its absence. The good is obviously better than the bad of non-being.

When a human being matures, however, the realization often emerges that created existence can never ultimately satisfy.

That self-contained, contingent being, as something limited that we can possess and fully subject to our own potentially infinite scrutiny and understanding, is ultimately the worst kind of prison for the soul.

We can know it totally, such confined existence, and since we by nature, desire and perspective are greater than any inert good we can find therein, our entrapment within contingent existence is ultimately a kind of hell.

This idea is closely related to the saṃsāra of the Indian religions, the meaningless “running around in circles” of the endless cycle of death and rebirth, from which certain traditions literally offer non-existence as a final liberation. Incidentally, this idea is paradoxically close to Catholic mystical theology. Paradoxically so, because it’s almost what we Christians have always maintained, yet also almost its exact opposite.

But these higher-order conclusions seem to be increasingly absent.

In the current situation, characterized by an uprooted jumble of often contradictory worldviews whose fragments cannot not really bind together into a meaningful whole, the emerging generations not only seem to be unable to make any sort of sense of it all.

The position that there’s nothing, literally nothing, that could even possibly make existence worthwhile is now increasingly expressed in the mainstream, a sentiment that seems to bridge politics, culture and spirituality alike.

It’s not simply the existential doubt of the modern skeptics, or the proclamation of the insufficiency of all human thought and endeavour that seems to characterize much of postmodern thought and its hopeful relativism. It’s not the nausea of Sartre, which in its radical dissolution of meaning and relation asserts the consequent omnipossibility of an absolutely unfettered existence.

We’re now rather dealing with the immediate conviction that all of this is just shit. That there’s no sense whatsoever to be made of existence, and that the fact of us being alive couldn’t even in principle have any redeeming qualities.

What’s in view for an increasing number of people today, it seems to me, is just a suffocating jumble of disjointed facts, without the possibility of any foothold for critical reflection.

In other words, we have no tools to properly address this confusing dasein. This heap of nonsense all around us is approached without the least inkling of an awareness of any abstract universals or immutable principles, so there are no general conclusions to be made, nor any real questions to be posed to the mess we find ourselves in.

The positive, “right-hand path” of a metaphysical and ultimately theological analysis of being is obviously blocked for these reasons - but that surprisingly also holds for what we perhaps could call the “left-hand path” of ultimate negation, which as per Sartre’s example will finally lead us through a backdoor into the illuminating darkness of transcendence.

This is a really disastrous situation. It’s probably historically unique due to a confluence of cultural, spiritual and technological factors that I think could be likened to a barrage of spectacular and cognitively dissonant noise, akin to a meta-narrative radio jammer that prevents the rational mind to adquately assess its own subjective existence.

The solutions to the questions are the same as they always were - but there’s no space to even pose the questions properly. There’s no system for general observations, and little possibility to anchor or maintain any general conclusions about the nature of reality. They get “attrited away” immediately in the incessant barrage of the technological spectacle.

Perhaps, therefore, the response must be an intuitive rather than rational one. If there’s no space for higher-order criticism, maybe a new foundation must first be built on top of the immediate, intuitive awareness of certain principles of being.

And chief among these principles, as I’ve previously maintained, is the fundamental relationality of subjective being. The interpenetration and co-existence (in the deepest sense of the word) of subject and object, and of the knowing subject and the conscious Other.

For that first principle, the irreducible and absolute relationality of consciousness, the “knowing together” of its root conscire, is the cornerstone that unlocks not only all of truth and the foundations of its logical forms.

It also, in manifesting the mutual gaze into each other of two minds, each a potentially infinite universe of his or her own, immediately opens the door unto transcendence, and evinces the ineffable possibility of a meaning beyond all conceivable meaning.

Beyond the good of created being.

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one.

A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Ecc. 4:9-12