🪟 36 - The cosmic origin of despair
Chapter #36 (Part 5): Aimlessness, powerlessness, and the human condition.
Writer’s note: I am hitting ‘Publish’ on each chapter as soon as I am remotely happy with it, as a sort of minimum viable product. Once I have let everything on my mind out, they will all go under the knife, so to speak, and be tightened, refined, and made rigorous—both conceptually and aesthetically.
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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
PART 5: IDEALS
The cosmic origin of despair
🪟 36 - The cosmic origin of despair
Dear Inquirer,
Does it not happen all too frequently when a traveller is unsure of her destination, that she inquires as to where she is going, or when instructed to perform an act, that she inquires as to the point of doing that thing? And uniquely for a human, that it doesn’t require a gigantic leap of thought to go from inquiring as to the point of a particular act, to the point of a repetitive series of acts, to the point of the whole phenomenon of acts at once? When the ‘stage collapses’, it collapses not gradually but cataclysmically, as a structure that implodes from its core. And that is precisely how it is for the inquiry as to one’s conception of oneself (and reality within it), for it is an inquiry from the core.
Yet this unique, implosive angst is the very mark of humanity. A deer does not question in the way man does, and a deer does not hope the hopes, want the wants, despair the despairs of man. No, it simply pervades the present moment completely. (Though I must acknowledge that the experience of an animal is totally other, unintelligible to us, I think it is reasonable to draw certain conclusions based on basic observations.) To the deer, a doubt over its own conception of self and an angst over its own aimlessness, everything I have been discussing here, would not be remotely conceivable. Yes, it may like a domesticated animal, have a want for food, for accompaniment, for the return of a familiar face (over the longest spans of time), and maybe even commit suicide in a fit of mania and fury, but it cannot have a want for or wonder about anything in the grand scheme of its own life. It does not possess the apparatus to perceive at such a level.
Yes—if man did not possess his predisposition to teleological grandiosity; if he was not predisposed to perceiving grandiose causes and effects, means and ends in no less than his whole scheme of life—then man would not be man, but among the beasts of the field concerned with their own immediate survival and gratification. A beast of the land is finite and ‘always in the present’. But man is not such a beast. Man is eternal, or there is an essential aspect of man that is eternal and beyond the present moment1. And here is where man unwittingly finds himself in a predicament: for he is a half-god and half-beast presiding amongst beasts, existing both in the temporal and in light of eternity, both in view of earth and in juxtaposition to heaven, in contemplation of the most particular particularity and the most abstract abstraction all at once. This is to say, man’s vision comprises all that is immediately before him, but also all that is intangible and beyond, and all that is presupposed and within.
In this way, it is senseless to relegate man’s consciousness to the immediacy of animals. The only serious argument in favour of levelling man and animals exists in the landscape of ethical duty, in the sense of there being an ethical or an unethical treatment of a lower life form ‘for it is yet still a life’, which is its only and greatest defence. Even so, there is an irony in our imposition of ethics on beasts, for why do we argue over the extent of animal rights when they tear themselves apart in the most bestial and inconsiderate fashion, if not because we saw what they cannot? If the wish remains to equate man to beast, beast to man, then let the beasts fight for themselves; let them unravel their own ethics, and then let us seek to co-exist within our own ethical systems. Let us not arbitrarily impose our ethical system upon another species, let us not presumptively fight an ethical war on behalf of them and divide ourselves over edge cases; let us fight a natural war instead (after all it is nature that we are juxtaposed against here), where whoever dies out dies out, and let the standing species reap the spoils as rewards for their ingenuity. Yes, in this way—there can be no illusion that man’s “cosmic” essence is infinitely set apart from the beasts. Whether it is higher or lower, whether there are ethical and unethical consequences to such a classification, that is not for me to argue; man is simply and absurdly set apart, and I see him as set apart by his predisposition to the unnatural, to everything beyond pure bestiality—his otherworldliness. It may be said: aliens do exist, except they have already set foot on this planet eons ago, for they are us.
Thus, at this stage, my series of deliberations has developed (starting) from the epistemological, on the limits of knowledge and the all-importance of framing and the various completions of the unknown, to the ontological, on various patterns of reality and the measurement of justness we are bent to aim towards, to the universal, on how justness is often cast in light of the community, to the existential, on the birth and development of my inner life against which everything I have discussed prior is foreground: going from my bout with my angst and despair of narration, and now to my angst and despair of action. And it is in these last two parts that the unique core of man’s otherworldly essence is found: in doubt (as narration’s angst) and aimlessness (as action’s angst). I have already endeavoured at length on the former, so I will now deliberate extensively on the latter.
The angst of action is aimlessness. Aimlessness is the angst of action. To ought to go somewhere but not know where that place is, is angst—and it is a uniquely and fundamentally human predisposition. It is that sometimes-irritating, sometimes-arousing experience of discontent that causes me to itch, to itch for more, to itch to become more. It is an angst pregnant with remorse, that makes me overcorrect in a direction, and then in another direction, eventually in as many directions as there number branches in a forest. And it is this very angst that leads us all too commonly to seek refuge in the country, by the sea, in the hills. Ah! As to a budding globetrotter, why does no one ever bother to interrogate her reasoning? Why does everyone just seem to intuitively understand her? It is not only because it is a status symbol, no, that is never usually the main driver. It is because we all intuit our impulse for this beyond, and for a young person, we intuit how this beyond falls without much effort into the form of travel and exploration. The allure of the world (thus of life itself) is found beyond her tiresome environments, beyond her (tyrannical) social and bureaucratic identity within her family, her community, her State.
But how often does the globetrotter end up coming to the simple realisation that such a beyondness is never quite beyond enough? Of course, it is because this beyond is all too finite and exhaustible, and does not match up to her infinite longing. Seneca, in a letter to his friend Lucilius, pens this: “Do you ask why … flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself.” Yet here lies another layer of reality that is untold, for in the first place, it is that very neediness of flight that tells of Lucilius’ angst of action, as apprehended by him alone. For he is bent towards the beyond, and he has to act, and since he can never be completely still—being fated to always be in movement towards a mysteriously presupposed beyond (whether consciously or unconsciously)—the question is begged of simply where that beyond lies. Yet in Seneca’s reproaching words, though not said explicitly, we can find a hint as to the realm of that beyond, for to say ‘you flee along with yourself’ (Letter 28) is to refer to that only place in the world where ‘everywhere’ exists—that is, inwardly2.
This is the angst of action: to possess an ought to the beyond, but to be uncertain of where that is, and yet to remain adrift—aimlessness. But this is not final, for as soon as our young globetrotter begins to exhaust the novelties of travel, as soon as she realises that it is insufficient to the beyondness she seeks, as soon as the (illusory) spark of the eternal is snuffed out, reality outwits her, and her angst of action resigns into a state of unsynchronicity. Angst leads itself into despair. And how is this despair expressed? The despair of action is in powerlessness. To become so ridden with angst to this point of despair is to embody the idleness of a great vessel bound to the dock; it is to slouch spiritually—embodying a monumental potentiality unused, with that sense of potentiality becoming something cursed rather than embraced, and it all occurs in a manner unknown to others, being apprehensible only to oneself. It is by this very sense of despair that one involuntarily bursts out: ‘I was made for more than this!’ And that would be none other than the outburst of remorse—that which arises at the eleventh hour, the critical point when ‘the stage collapses’, the point at which she is brutally awoken by an awakening.
Yet here lies the ultimate paradox, for this outburst of despair points to the very essence of the cosmic in our avid globetrotter. It is the impalpable voice of teleological grandiosity; it is the call of infinite potentiality, the will to cosmic wholeness; it is the call that originates from over the seas and the land across the seas, that echoes from across the universe, that reaches out from beyond the present moment. It is her predicament. For though she senses beyond the present moment, she cannot grasp it. Though it comprises all of her imagination, she cannot apprehend it. As for me, though it drove my will, my will to understand and explain, it was ever only as substantial as a cloud, and I struggled against it until sanity afforded me no more zeal (for a cloud bows not even to the collective strength of the strongest men)—after which, I could only curse it.
Ah! And this is the sense in which our incessant use of therapy in modernity is a little ironic—for it often fosters a false expectation, harbouring a secret illusion, that normalcy is the normal state. No!—man is an otherworldly creature confined to this world, there is no normalcy in his predicament. Despair is his normal state3. It is an unassailable condition against which he is only ever able to cope. Insofar as he despairs, he copes with life, that is, his longing. Insofar as everyone copes with living and longing, everyone despairs, knowingly or unknowingly, inwardly or outwardly. Of this matter, there is no one exempt. As Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness Unto Death:
“Just as a physician might say there isn’t a single human being who enjoys perfect health, so someone with a proper knowledge of man might say there is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something, or a something he doesn’t even dare stroke up acquaintance with …”
I see it to be the case that most people simply do not awaken to the universality of angst and despair. They do not see how it reaches far down into the roots of the mind and how it compels the will, like a cosmic parasite. They prefer to denote ‘despair’ as when sadness catches a viral infection, and then they love to prescribe therapy as a cure. Ah! But why is this surprising, given that despair is only apprehended or unapprehended to oneself, that there is not an opportunity to talk about it, nor even offer so much as a hint of it in action? But in denoting despair in this way, they slip into the illusion of seeing their predicament as exceptional: as a unique affliction that should not be and that has somehow been visited upon them, and not upon others. What is the result? The afflicted one (even our wearisome globetrotter) moans more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about her predicament; moaning as if life was generally acceptable, normal, reasonable, and as as if it should be as such4. One could not be any more misguided. Despair is reality as such, despair is the universal element, despair is the bruise that marks a human life, or the shadow that follows being. Despair is the predicament of man. Yet, as it is affirmative for a man walking with a limp to receive a proper diagnosis, so it is for me: I am not negated but affirmed in the knowledge of my despair. I am completed in my consciousness of it. Despair first brought me onto the cosmic road, Now, she walks with me hand in hand.
Till next time,
Euwyn
And indeed, as it is rather biblical to say: man is made in the image of the eternal and infinite—the cosmic; God—whereas beasts of the land are not.
Seneca also later concludes, ‘to live well, – is found everywhere’; of course, ‘everywhere’ is ‘inwardly’.
Now, I am aware of a brimming objection. There are degrees to despair, yes—as there are terminal sicknesses in the body, so there are terminal sicknesses in the mind. I would not hesitate to acknowledge there to be an extraordinary case of depression, equivalent to a terminal sickness, for which psychiatric and psychological help is essential. But what I am saying is that in an ordinary sense, despair demarcates our mysterious capacity to perceive the actuality and beyond it, and to be pulled towards that beyond. Only humans despair, animals do not, thus it is the unique mark of the cosmic in humanity to be able to despair at all.
I know of this incessant moaning, because I have done my fair share of it.