Platonic Dilemma
Jul. 29th, 2009 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jrisingDoes it surprise you that life just keeps happening, balanced on the blunt edge of choice? The challenges of life always deepen to match you at every point, and never stop calling you forward onto an ever-lengthening road. No matter what decisions we make, we know that any resulting bliss or agony will be largely temporary, any new human connection will be mixed with alienation, and any new truth will only provide more ground for uncertainty.
Our deepest internal flaws will forever confront us, and are reflected in every moment. In life, we perceive exactly the challenges we're ready for, and we will never find a situation that provides lasting contentment, by virtue of how we're built, not how the world is built. The world we perceive is a projection of ourselves.
Brain scientists, Plato, Heidegger and others agree: we create our world. There is a huge gulf between the messy data that we're exposed to, and the orderly world we experience. Ours is a world of actions and properties and causation, even though these things are not really out there. The things that we perceive do not exist at all. Man is the measure of everything we know, but nothing at all. If you saw the world from a fly's perspective, or a tree's, it would be largely unrecognizable. The world no doubt exists in some form, but it is just beyond our perceptions of it.
What if every aspect of our world is explainable in this way? What if everything we experience is just a reflection of our own yearnings, like a dream? The people we sit near on the train, the flies that never leave our food alone, the latest news never actually happened. I meet the women I do because they represent the beauty I'm ready to perceive and patches on the flaws I hide in myself. We are like genius amoebas, experiencing primitive sensations and creating an elaborate story to occupy ourselves.
I do believe there's something outside of us. There is a potential to do good and pursue love. Our actions in this created world have some effect on the real world. I suspect that the real world is much more inside us than we realize (we don't think any part of the world is inside us now), and that actions are only proxies for the real work being done internally-and-in-reality. Life is a fabulous and very-serious game, specifically designed by our own minds out of their encounter with a primordial something. We are offered the opportunity to pursue this woman because she represents beauty, or to help this child as an exercise in providing.
Something in this scares me to the core of my being. I believe that the world runs by scientific laws because I've been told it does. But my own experiments in school have more often defied those laws than confirmed them. It is as though the world was knocking on my consciousness's door, asking to let it defy everything I know. If there's no science, then no biology, no technology, no civilization. My whole life may be like the delusions of a man in a coma, yet littered with clues of its falsehood and the muffled voice of someone trying to talk me out of it.
Our deepest internal flaws will forever confront us, and are reflected in every moment. In life, we perceive exactly the challenges we're ready for, and we will never find a situation that provides lasting contentment, by virtue of how we're built, not how the world is built. The world we perceive is a projection of ourselves.
Brain scientists, Plato, Heidegger and others agree: we create our world. There is a huge gulf between the messy data that we're exposed to, and the orderly world we experience. Ours is a world of actions and properties and causation, even though these things are not really out there. The things that we perceive do not exist at all. Man is the measure of everything we know, but nothing at all. If you saw the world from a fly's perspective, or a tree's, it would be largely unrecognizable. The world no doubt exists in some form, but it is just beyond our perceptions of it.
What if every aspect of our world is explainable in this way? What if everything we experience is just a reflection of our own yearnings, like a dream? The people we sit near on the train, the flies that never leave our food alone, the latest news never actually happened. I meet the women I do because they represent the beauty I'm ready to perceive and patches on the flaws I hide in myself. We are like genius amoebas, experiencing primitive sensations and creating an elaborate story to occupy ourselves.
I do believe there's something outside of us. There is a potential to do good and pursue love. Our actions in this created world have some effect on the real world. I suspect that the real world is much more inside us than we realize (we don't think any part of the world is inside us now), and that actions are only proxies for the real work being done internally-and-in-reality. Life is a fabulous and very-serious game, specifically designed by our own minds out of their encounter with a primordial something. We are offered the opportunity to pursue this woman because she represents beauty, or to help this child as an exercise in providing.
Something in this scares me to the core of my being. I believe that the world runs by scientific laws because I've been told it does. But my own experiments in school have more often defied those laws than confirmed them. It is as though the world was knocking on my consciousness's door, asking to let it defy everything I know. If there's no science, then no biology, no technology, no civilization. My whole life may be like the delusions of a man in a coma, yet littered with clues of its falsehood and the muffled voice of someone trying to talk me out of it.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-01 06:12 pm (UTC)So I agree: we can only see things that we have handles for, that we already identify with. The only reason we all see similar things in a forest is because our society already has handles for it. But although I stand behind your formulation, I don't feel as though you have really explained why it implies that we are "blind, bound, and drunk".
I was wrong when I said "the objective world is at our whim", but *our* world is in some sense at “our” whim. Of course, our world was largely shaped by society, our relationships, etc., but now that we’re in it, we can play around with it. You are only blind and bound if you continue to try to get at an objective world that isn’t there. You are only blind and bound if you see "freedom" as some mastery over the external world.
When you ask yourself why you like a certain landscape, you have to be careful with exactly what you mean by “why?” If you are grasping for the “actual” reason, the objective reason, then of course you’ll feel bound and blind because it’s permanently out of your reach. But you can also be looking for a reason within your own world, your own handles. Often there are parts of your world that aren’t fully crystallized (e.g. feelings that you can vaguely sense but don’t have a word for, and haven’t integrated into larger structure), and sometimes you can even create new handles out of existing ones.
That being said, I’m certainly not saying that since you there is no objective world we can just believe whatever. You can still be delusional within your own world. Delusion is not about a false objective reason, but about not accepting things for which you already have handles because, say, they make you uncomfortable. For example, maybe I am delusional about the fact that I started dating a girl primarily out of lust. By “out of lust” I am not referring to anything objective: I am saying that in my own world I felt myself being lustful – I already have a handle for it – but chose not to look in that direction.
I certainly don’t think I have a fully coherent way of looking at things. I am so used to thinking of everything in terms of an objective I in an objective world that it’s hard to disentangle this from my everyday concepts. But I think it is crucial that we do so because it is this entanglement, not the lack of an objective world, that makes one feel blind and bound. As long as one thinks with respect to an objective world while not believing in an objective world, one will always be seeing a lack.
(I like this whole reversal or roles. For once, I am the life-affirming one!)