🪟 33 - The Birth and Development of Inwardness
Frame & Axiom #33 (Part 4): An awakening, Camus, and lessons from the Book of Jonah.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
The Birth and Development of Inwardness
🪟 33 - The Birth and Development of Inwardness
Don’t you feel sometimes that we are living … if you can call it living … in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just to look at it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But put the watch to your ear, and you don’t hear any ticking. You know what I’m talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures … it seems to me it must have had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had ‘stopped beating’.
— Marcel
Dear Inquirer,
Here we find ourselves facing the ultimate predicament. Man is a being who charts his territory on cosmic space and navigates it with full aptitude and intensity. Yet he finds his ‘ship’ marred irrevocably by the dirt and dust, whereby any semblance of cosmic achievement is intercepted by earth the moment it is even conceived. For the dirt is immortal, and sweeping away the dust begets dust. I will put the relation together in this way: man is the mediator of the Cosmic and Nature. Or in other words, between the infinite and finite, between heaven and earth.
Yet his predicament is not only founded on the negating in Nature—that is, dirt, grime, age—but also on the negating in the Cosmic—Mystery, the perplexing, for man’s ship is the Ship of Theseus; while being continually in motion, also continually basing and debasing itself, and with full cognisance to its own instability. In this way, man is an unwitting receptor for the Cosmic. His consciousness is ravaged with visions of everything that is, everything that ought to be, an extra-dimensional foreground against which he faces a restless immobility. For his rigid nature binds him against the space in which he wishes to move, or the space in which he senses he ought to be moving. Thus, there arises a curious sense of imprisonment, an imprisonment to his own body, his own nature, his own existential predicament. And it is in this realm that we find in ourselves a deep fissure, for it is here that we find Being in fragments—and it is a predicament without recourse! For though one possesses the freedom to choose and may choose to ignore or reject it, try as he might, it cannot be avoided. Now, this sounds about harsh enough! To smooth it into more of an acceptable proposition, let me try to illuminate this matter with a story.
In the year 700 B.C., there was a book written in the Old Testament of the prophet Jonah. Jonah was a man who was awakened to his predicament. God had called upon him to travel from Jerusalem to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, to influence its large population to turn from its corrupt ways. But he was determined to run away from it. I shall attempt to interpret the events psychologically.
But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
— Jonah 1:3 (ESV)
At some point, each one of us, like Jonah, awakens to our existential predicament. Indeed, one must awaken to it, for one is not born with an inwardness. Through time and development, when it does awaken, it reckons with the full force of the perplexing, the dawn of Mystery; and it is indeed an awakening not unlike a birth1, for as a newborn is born with a cry, so the inner self too is formed with a cry—a cry at the mystical, at the cold air of the universe. Similarly, in the arc of Jonah, he is awakened to his predicament at a particular point in time (though not exactly existentially, but he responds all the same). As he is awakened to it, horror and angst encapsulates his soul. Yet as a grown man, Jonah was free. He was free to narrate and act. Thus he exercised his freedom, and rejected the predicament set out before him. He sought to run out to sea instead, where he could embrace the blissful illusion that he was bereft of his predicament—the illusion that all was well, that he only had to find recourse in hiding from and stowing away the stirrings of his soul. He is rather successful! Nothing, no one, calls out to him out in the ocean of bliss, for he has escaped… out to sea, out to the countryside, out into the noise of the world. Has he found recourse at last?
But a little while after, the ocean becomes turbulent. At this stage, his eyes were opened to the world and his predicament, and he could see everything in full lucidity. For he saw that against the Cosmic, he was powerless. Indeed, he saw in himself a powerless subject played by a sadistic comedian (Life in dialectic with the Cosmic, or ‘God’), subjected to a prison of all its wit and undoings. In spite of everything turning over on itself around him, he opts to slip below the deck to sleep, in full obliviousness to the disintegration of his reality2. It is as if by doing so he spat at the cosmic sensibilities within him, remaining staunch in his refusal to be moved. But this time, he is not met with silence. A sliver of his consciousness, by way of the shipmaster, begins to shout and bang on his door, as a sort of cosmic reply: “How can you sleep so soundly? Arise! Call to your God!” Other voices begin to reverberate: ‘Tell us… what is your trade? From where do you come? What is your land? And of what people are you?” Surely—a man cannot hide from himself, for even the ocean and everything around him would cry out against his own self-denial!
Now at the eleventh hour, Jonah realises the inevitability of the predicament before him. Despite his zeal to distract himself, to escape, to deny, he realises with full consciousness that the omnipresent rays of the Cosmic (posited as ’God’) had never once left him, for it is everywhere and rests upon everything—as David pens rather prophetically in a psalm, “even those who sail on distant seas”. In seeing that he cannot run, and that even spite is futile, angst takes over him, for he realises his damnation to his predicament. Weariness envelops the soul, and it retorts, pummelling itself overboard into the engulfing waves. “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he cries to the voices within. ‘Bury my soul.’ For he sees he has been cursed with being alive, by his own being born, as he has been ‘thrown’ (as Heidegger put it) into such and such a predicament without wanting or choosing it. And here a temptation arises to curse upon himself that terrible curse that was reserved only for the Cosmic traitor Judas Iscariot: “It would have been better for [him] if he had not been born”, which according to Sophocles, would be the ‘greatest fortune’.
Jonah is given over to the abyss, the abyss of infinite despair, swallowed in the belly of a whale3, even as he remains alive in it. And here we can see how the word ‘predicament’ is entirely apt, for within the prevailing order in which he finds himself situated, there is an infinitely regressing shroud of powerlessness to Mystery: he perceives his inability to escape from the perplexing, and then the perplexing nature of his own inability, and so on… a regression by which he is consistently outwitted by reality, and by which despair eases infinitely into itself. And it is precisely this predicament—the predicament of being against the omnipotence and omnipresence of Mystery’s perplexing—that the absurdist Camus saw so clearly, as he wrote: "At the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity”. But he ultimately failed to see beyond it4. For had Camus been a sailor present in the ship with Jonah, he would have recommended him, with slow eyes and a lit cigarette in hand, to revolt against the supreme ironies of the universe and the divine consciousness within him: he would tell him that “the world in itself is not reasonable”, allude to the Sisyphus in concluding that a man is made happy, completed, atoned, in taking on his suffering, and that it would be better if he instead made of his life an “act of rebellion to the Absurd” (The Myth of Sisyphus). Yet with such a response, as a response from antagonism, the storm would never have stopped. No, the ocean of his soul would have remained turbulent till the day he was engulfed by it, till he was fully consumed in the belly of the whale!
The antidote to the perplexing is not the prescription of Camus, an enaction of absurdist heroism, a revolt against reality. That is not an effective resignation, but a spiteful acknowledgement of a certain inevitability, a response rather out of cosmic frustration. Though he believes so, I doubt Camus had effectively come to terms with it. He had, perhaps only in the way a husband comes to terms with his wife by acknowledging irreconcilable differences, and then separating himself from her, with spite to his counsellors. But one does not have that sort of liberty of divorcing, so to speak, with reality itself—not in light of synchronicity. And inquirer, as I have cautioned you before: the existential matters will not stop ‘knocking on the door of your heart’. No—here is where we can obtain the all-important takeaway from the arc of Jonah! For in the belly of the whale, at the eleventh hour, it dawned upon Jonah: it was he who was in the wrong. By his ignorance, by his spite, he had wronged the cosmic call in his inwardness; he had stepped out of synchronicity with Mystery.
“From the belly of hell I cried out,”
— Jonah 2:2
And here we arrive at the cornerstone of the dialectic between man and Mystery: Mystery is omnipotent and omnipresent—absolute—thus it follows that, to put a spin on Kierkegaard’s wonderful aphorism, ‘against Mystery [as voice of the Cosmic, or ‘God’] one is always in the wrong’.
The remorse of Jonah, in this context, is the voice of the cosmic that calls one back from a state of unsynchronicity, from being out of tandem. And here we can easily draw several comparisons, for a just relation in this context is hardly different to the other relations, be it with a wife or a husband, a brother, a friend, or a co-worker: the ideal antidote to an obtrusive separation is not a passionate revolt or rebellion, but a humble will to synchronicity. The former represents a youthful drunkenness in spite, but the latter represents the maturity of soul, for it follows an existential sobering up where one learns to reckon with reality with full seriousness.
Even so, as we know, remorse cannot be willed into being. It cannot be expected or called. It must arrive naturally, of its own accord. And remorse—a true remorse—is always late5. It calls out “at the eleventh hour”, from deep within the belly of the whale. We see this element of the delay correspond in language—as with the burden of guilt, or shame with the way one has predicated himself in the world, there is the commonly associated phrase of it ‘dawning upon’, or one ‘coming to realisation of’. And what, quite naturally, accompanies this remorse? It is none other than repentance. Now, I must acknowledge that my use of this word may or may not produce visceral reactions, but I believe I am positing it here in a rather harmless and acceptable manner. At core, repentance is to act on a renewed, empowered will to synchronicity (from being in a state of unsynchronicity) which assumes a humble posture of seeking to be in tandem. And it is precisely from this point of view that we can see the eternal light of justness in the response of Jonah, for remorse is a cosmic messenger and repentance is cosmically reconciliatory.
Inquirer, what a blessing it is to find correction in remorse! As Kierkegaard wrote, “So wonderful a power is remorse, so sincere is its friendship, that to escape it entirely is the most terrible thing of all”. And what a great gift of grace is repentance! It is by virtue of these treasures that one can effectively come to terms with the predicament of predicaments: the predicament of being human, and every aspect of humanness by which it is found grievously impaired and at odds with itself. For remorse is the border along the narrow road, and repentance is what makes for new dawns.
Till next time,
Euwyn
“A change takes place within [the individual] like the change from non-being to being.” — Kierkegaard
“Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.” — Jonah 1:5 (ESV)
“And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” — Jonah 1:17
For if only Camus had studied the Book of Ecclesiastes, he would have not only read, “everything is meaningless”, wailed, and sought to revolt as he did, since that was not the end of the matter. He would have also seen how the Book of Ecclesiastes was situated between the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, and the sensuous yearning of the Book of Song of Songs, and be able to put the perplexing in its place, as opposed to completing his worldview in it.
“…for when remorse calls to a man it is always late.” — Kierkegaard