Man as World Objectification (re-edited)

I.

The philosopher who strives for profundity should attempt to strike a balance between obscurity of language and refinement of style, erring more (if err he must) on the side of the latter over the former.

This admonition is not for the benefit of his audience’s ear per se, but the good health of the writer’s own gut. For he alone will have to stomach himself after he realizes that every “cerebral” victory won today will be an embarrassing stupidity tomorrow; embarrassment which, though proof of the writer’s evolving aesthetic and sensibility, at all times threatens to paralyze his willingness to do anything at all in the present; that is, unless it can be raised to some other standard besides the philosophical: philosophy which is, indeed, Embarrassment’s purest and grimiest expression.  

II.

Cold baths are, alas, not for everyone: the tremors and sensitivity of skin and spaciness of mind and disjointedness of thought and incapacity to sit or read for more than an hour after the reintroduction of warmth and comfort –  

But, oh, how quickened life amid unease! How sublime man’s senses when he overcomes displeasure; how clear the day and pure the air, how satisfied the spirit to have accomplished something in these wakeful hours!

Sight, Jan Brueghel the Elder

III.

“Delusion Sells”

(for the deluded are always everywhere buying)

IV.

If Nihilism – insofar as it is seen as “the evolution of the subjective Life in the human body” – could ever be said to have an intrinsic “goal”, it must surely be the will to force the subject “Man” to acknowledge himself as Subject.

In order to accomplish this, Nihilism must once and for all compel man to transcend what others have said about him, how they’ve applauded or lambasted him, affirmed or denied his existence. In other words, one must overcome his own “reputation”, which is simply another way of saying “the world’s objectification” – his fellows’ literal attempts to render him as an object: a box, for example, a balloon, a bag.

The Archduke Leopold William’s Paintings Gallery in Brussels, David Teniers the Younger

As long as man continues to mirror his fellows’ opinions of him – “mirroring” which transforms objectifications into “truth” – he’ll never be able to affirm himself as his own unique Subject and by it, persistently confront Nihilism’s essential claim upon his life: that which says he’ll never aspire to anything besides the aforementioned balloon, box, bag, what have you.

Unfortunately, Life within refuses all emasculating reductions. And though trapped in subterranean vaults of illusory objectification, it will forever direct and control a man’s existential development or lack thereof until released, ventilated and otherwise brought to uncomfortable light; light which frees a man from the shackles of worldly objectivity to the bondage of personal subjectivity, of being his own slave as it were, for good and ill.

Awareness of one’s slavery, just as awareness of anything concealed, enables a man to gain a certain semblance of freedom over it. For unless one can grasp, however ephemerally, both sides of an argument, he is both precluded from moral agency as well as the ability to make any real choice besides the one predetermined. And it is only the free moral agent who can attain that psycho-emotional condition known as authenticity, that which allows a man to embrace life despite its horrors and yet bless it good with a clear and yet tempered conscience.

The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, Willem van Haecht

V.

Only the Authentic Nihilist, he who’s under no pretense concerning the impossibilities of life but nevertheless embraces it (and them), has the power to bless, christen, bestow.

He, which is to say, his “state”, is the justification of life: its antidote, enhancement, enabler.

VI.

Love should be done, not thought. 

For all that Thought touches it words, abstracts, reduces, de-sensitizes, trivializes and by so doing sends to flight any hope of expressing what is “essentially” contained therein; essentiality that is in all ways hindered, torn down and put to chain and whip by the mind with its insatiable need for mechanical stability and utilitarian uniformity.

VII.

The Subject :

We are the rock on which all things break.

Autoportrait, Johannes Gumpp