Lost Inwardness

Inwardness is losing. We live in a society of cell phones, cameras, the incessant superficial poser anxiety. With the loss of inwardness comes an inverse growth of externality. With externality comes massification. With massification the self no longer is itself; the "I" is lost to the intoxicating "we". Ontology becomes mixed in with the path of least resistance; this means transparency, superficiality. The doors of desire are opened, and the pathway of addiction is walked. It would be better to say that addiction does the walking.

Desire amputates existence. It keeps a man alive -- with no freedom to question why he is alive, an existence for the sake of fulfilling. This is false meaning, or, more appropiately, pre-meaning. Desire is bestial; consequently is means the fragmentation and dissipation of consciousness. Only when the desire is transiently fulfilled or frustratingly abandoned does a man have the possibility to question himself and his world -- both of which are inextricably linked. But this is becoming harder and harder with the progress of civilization and its continually new clever ways at providing the means to the fulfillment of these desires. Desire is a stomach. It stretches imperceptibly with each moment of oversatiation. And stimulation is so expedient, so simple, so overflowing, a possibility at every thoughtless angle, that it is capable of murdering the soul, shutting it up, leaving the world of the sensate in domination. The self is a relation between two terms, two polarities. With the amplification of one comes the negation of the other. A moment of pure sensation, pure stimulation, is the death of the soul; the relation is lost, lopsided, and this results in the death of the self. In a moment of pure contemplation, the body (outside of neurological processes) has died; the relation is lost, lopsided, and this results in the death of the self. Consciousness is the relation, and insofar as one is conscious, he is at least minimally "alive". Walker Percy likened our selves to a percentage: the average self, he said, is about two percent. Thus the common man is perpetually on the edge of oblivion, existential nothingness, death, death, death.

Desire makes the other opaque. He is no longer a You realized through relation, translucent in being. Even sub-relationally, the recognition of his body, her smile, her laughter, her fingers fail to signify immediately a subject, a relation potentiality. This is because desire instrumentalizes for the sake of its own fulfillment. A You instrumentalized fails to be a You, and becomes instead an It. With the loss of the You, Buber notes, comes the loss of spirit. "Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his You." This response is made freely; it literally defines man through the freedom he presents as a response. Whether God or mankind (a tautological statement), existence as becoming-towards, as striving, as freedom (all of which are synonyms for spirit), is possible only through relation. With the loss of relation through the reduction to and particularization of the Other, the I, which otherwise has authentic being only in relation to a You, becomes a ghost, a misconception, an existential misnomer. A critique of Descartes.

The past age was one of constipated meditation. No action. Today hardly anyone thinks with a depth enough to deserve the title of meditation, yet activity inwardly qualified is a ghost, a nonentity, a fiction, just as much as it was in the past age where thought was almost an excuse for movement. Thought and authentic action are both erased from culture. What is left? Sensationalism, sentimentality, intoxication. In short, the senses. In short, a return to Greece. But at least the Greeks knew how to think. A child is born into this world, discovers his surroundings tactilely, visually, yes, gustatorily (and maybe the carpet does taste better than we think). He learns to crawl, then learns to walk. This inclination and dedication to movement is a parable for mankind. Spiritually understood -- inwardly understood -- most men have only crawled through life, with the smallest possible amount of self-assertion. Few have actually stood on their own legs and taken a few steps. Only the saints have walked. Which isn't to say that the crawling man doesn't have spark-moments wherein he proves himself to be a saint -- but again goes back to crawling. The same is true for those who don't know how to crawl.

Inwardness is losing, and true movement is possible only by surpassing the threshold of externality and joining with inwardness. Nietzsche hypothesized a necessary return to man's prelinguistic state, where consciousness becomes a thin veneer, stretched over the controlling impulses that now constitute man's "lower" nature. Brutal, if you will. But Nietzsche, the incarnation of Dionysus he claimed himself to be, was opposed to drinking. He had profound moments of transcendence. He knew beauty, and knew the aesthetic "fight" for life entailed with this incendiary love for the sublime. But a thin veneer of consciousness has no place with a deep love for life. Feelings transcend, yes; but it's after the experience, when the self is left with the effulgent remainder of the experience that culminated in transcendence, when it returns again to itself in a deeper sense that it can truly appreciate what has happened. It is the feeling that follows transcendence that results in the positive feeling of this transcendence, and without a relative depth of, by no means a hyper-selfconsciousness (this often is painful), there is a smaller appreciation entirely. The hidden law of existence comes to mind: contrast is everything.