Thoughts on our most fundamental of metaphysics, -epistemology, and -ethics
Beyond the world of symbols, interpretation, and the cognized, there is another potential existence. This other existence is not a possible world; it is not an understood possibility that might be. Rather, it isn’t understood at all. It’s unintelligible, and that’s the whole point of it.
For it is a point of access into Unhuman Reality.
It is The Alien.
When the universe is viewed with barriers in mind, with separations in time or in space, or in any other quality or quantity, then we implicitly make of that universe a place of separate things.
Time and space though, however insistent these things are that they are real, they lack the realness of a manifest separation. Time and space does not so much prove that there are separate things, or objects, as they suggest it. What do I mean by “suggest”?
“This is valuable to me” you say. “That I love”, or “What an admirable thing”, or “What a beauty to behold.”
To express value, is to bring the possibility of the value of a something into social consciousness. That is, if I express that something has value, I at the same time challenge myself, and I challenge you, to discover a point of view within which the associated kind of value could be grasped.
To express value, then, is to force it into existence.
Why is the world a place of discordance and conflict? Why are we so seemingly incapable of tending to each other’s needs, or of communicating in a manner that facilitates trust in each other, optimism about the future, and other such goods of social existence?
I know many thoughts have been made on this issue, and to my knowledge, most of these blame either political or cultural conditions. Or if you ask the overenthusiastic techno-optimist or historical materialist, they might just say that our problem is scarcity and the steady advance of technological innovation will inevitably produce a superabundance of goods. However, I think the problem goes much, much deeper than any particular problem of political corruption, faulty cultural developments, or simple lack of productive capacity. Since my teenage years, motivated by the seemingly complete lack of a good answer to my own miserable situation, I began to theorize that the catalogue of sciences available to humankind was incomplete. I began to increasingly realize that, at the center of human scientific study there was this big gaping hole – and it is this hole, this missing science of human civilization, which I wish to draw attention to in this essay.
I was just about to become an adult when I first started to build my own system of philosophy.
Once, when I was even younger than that, I’d heard of a philosopher who put at the center of philosophy the question. As such, when I first started building my own system, I did so by creating something for which I now call a questionity, or: a structure of questions that shapes and spurs into being a philosophical inquiry.
The human being is not a coherent decision-maker. Nor is it fully coherent in any way. It is a being of constant growth, and decay, of spreading out its influence, and losing its connections. A mess entangled in a great, alien, and remote world.
How is ethics to be conducted, in such a reality? That is the question motivating this dive into human being, and the fundamental issues facing creatures of ethics.
Action vs. Passivity
Domination vs. Submission
To create knowledge is in some ways to reproduce oneself in the world. Along such lines we often come to behave, if not consciously, then at least in a manner as-if this was the way. As-if, that is, self-reproduction of human culture upon the world was inevitable.