LIFE AND REALITY

From chemicals, fractals, sound waves, romantic tragedies, and heartbeats, we can’t deny that our sensorial experience has some level of truth attached to it, or at least it has to, cause in our search for understanding life is only the empirical value that we have as proof, deny this is to reject the truth value behind any phenomena that our perception is able to experience.

Coming from Religion to Science, in the Renaissance period it was all about arriving at inferences through the scientific method using logic and reasoning, we passed from believing in our abstraction to our reasoning, thinking that every aspect of reality can be summarized by certain mathematical principles.

From Empiricism to Rationalism; it is not a secret that in philosophy the search for the truth lets us question every aspect of our sensorial experience. Since the illustration period, Kant said that our perception was mere impressions of truth phenomena and analyzed every aspect of our epistemological process.

Nowadays we now know more about how our brains work and how they interpret reality, knowing that every cognitive process will be always posteriori to its material conditions, we can arrive at the conclusion that we cannot detach our inferences from our sensorial experience, that our perception is, in fact, the only way to stay close to the truth.

THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE SELF

Psychologists agree that questioning reality can lead to mental instability, we can see through statistics that there are more people with depression and mental illness problems than ever before in history, we can make a list of every possible variable causing this but that is not the point of this article.

From existentialism questioning every aspect of our existence and the place that we have in it to ontology questioning the conditions correlated to the notion of the being, and psychology trying to understand the psyche of the individual and every collective phenomenon. We can say that the central topic of these fields has been the “Daisen” (as Heidegger put it in words).

We can see that the search for understanding the being is correlated to the search for understanding our reality, to make sense of who we are (if there is such thing as the “self”) inside this swirling entropic universe.

As I said before, every aspect of reality is determined by its material conditions, and this also includes us; Erich Fromm said that “transcendence occurs when a certain individual experiences a sense of completeness from the world that previously felt detached from, that occurs when stays in peace with every aspect of his environment.”

It’s true that this is an idealistic point of view since in psychoanalysis the search for transcendence is the only way for the individual to keep living, to stay in duality with itself. On the contrary to the concept of shadow integration of Jung.

This is what I think every individual is subconsciously looking forward to, this can be replaced by fitting his inner “lack” (as Lacan put it in words) with any object of desire never finding this transcendental experience.

Is it possible to find true peace in a world full of noise where the individual seems to be detached from every aspect of it?

CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONS OF THE SOUL

Living in a post-modern period passing the Industrial and French Revolutions, we now live in a society where every aspect of it has been designed to follow certain rules of behavior for the benefit of a functional society that is supposed to maximize our quality of life.

Every aspect from how we constitute ourselves, to our social interaction, our educational notion, and freedom. Seems to be pre-fabricated in order to obtain a desired output with the only purpose of keeping us in the same model of thinking and acting, of normalizing our behavior rejecting our freedom of questioning and searching for better ways of relating ourselves with any aspect of the world. (Byun Chul Han refers to this as “the expulsion of the other”)

Being our economic and political model the main factors that constituted the things we can and cannot do. Nowadays the individual is fabricated to follow certain social rules that are constituted by the interests of the state and market, to maximize productivity and follow social standards, and to reduce every other aspect that does not seem to benefit the state or market. (Byun Chul Han refers to this as “the fatigue society”)

Foucault talked about the discourses, spaces, games of truth, and power hierarchies that constitute certain societies in a given historical context, that then constitute the self.

I think that it’s important to be aware of the things conditioning our behavior, the biases that we carry on, and how we can transcend them by a dialectical process.

ART AND EXPRESSION

No type of analysis of the “Daisen” and reality can do justice to the feeling of our sensorial experience, we can describe something by using language and symbols, but it doesn’t seem to do justice to what we are capable of perceiving. (Heidegger said that language is the house of the self)

We can see art as a language, the end goal of every piece of art is to communicate something through the composition and every aspect of it. Art is done for the sake of expression, as a species capable of thinking and experiencing complex levels of emotions, I find that art is where rationality and spirituality meet through our sensorial experience, where our inner conflict seems to disappear.

Art is a way of expression, a process of giving life a thought or an emotion, to the essence that escapes the rational thinking that expands the limits of ourselves, is a remedy for the tragedy of our lives is the abstraction of the mind finding peace inside.

-Another_data_source