🪟 Transcript 44 - Know thyself (never)!
Transcript #44 (Part 5): On the circularity of desire as the in-between of hiddenness and unhiddenness.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
PART 5: IDEALS
Know thyself (never)!
🪟 44 - Know thyself (never)!
There is a certain traumatic condition to being human. You are hidden to yourself. When you were born, you began hidden to yourself. You were hidden even to your own hiddenness. Through the stages of life, you were introduced to fragments of yourself. Over some time of collecting fragments, you realised that you were hidden to yourself, that you did not know yourself, and that what you thought to be yourself was not definitive. As the shroud of hiddenness came under the light, so you began to seek yourself with earnestness. “Seek and you shall find!”—was the unspoken mantra. Nevertheless, despite ‘earning’ a series of illuminations, you continue to persist in hiddenness! You continue to be foreign to yourself, you continue to find parts of yourself dishevelled and unsatisfactory.
The problem here is not in this hiddenness in itself. I say, ‘I don’t know myself.’ So what? What precisely is the problem in this—where is the traumatic condition in this? The problem is not that the self is hidden, but that hiddenness of the self is not ideal. Thus there emerges an in-between, between the current state and ideality that entails, which gives rise to its preoccupations. Being, in its substantial hiddenness, preoccupies itself with the possibility of its unhiddenness; it seeks after it with all its might, it squirms and toils after it, it blankly and pointedly refuses any kind of satisfaction in being hidden and obfuscated. Certainly, there is no happy safety and security in being hidden to oneself. Perhaps this is a gift only known to animals! Now, the problematic condition of being becomes more apparent: I am hidden to myself. I am at odds with myself. Some island of gold—of the undiscovered truth that will put me at ease once and for all—sits somewhere within me at all times, and I fail or succeed mildly at flailing at it. “X marks the spot”, or as the psychoanalyst Lacan terms it, object a marks the spot.
Even when I do find or attain some semblances of myself, even when I make some progress with climbing the Maslowian hierarchy of self-“realisation” or Jungian “individuation”, I paradoxically end up finding myself becoming simultaneously more put together and more split apart. What I find in my being is something like a tree sprouting with a multiplicity of branches. I am in the multitude (of branches), ever sprouting and ever growing. It sprouts cacophonously and imperfectly, with clusters of branches undergrown and overgrown, some trending towards growth and some towards death. But I am not only a passive tree in itself, for I am simultaneously the active gardener (or, I am a tree that gardens itself), thus my attention always shifts towards cutting the crucial over-growth and resourcing that crucial under-growth in me—fuelled by the imagination that I would then become fully balanced and rooted in the ground. Despite my efforts, in the course of my diligence, even supplied with the most impressive technology, the under-growth I tend to becomes an over-growth, and the over-growth I withhold from becomes an under-growth. I am plagued with objective imprecision and disharmony. Ah, here is the usual course of human action! I am imprisoned in the course of constant remedial action that turns out to be overcorrections. But I am not overcorrecting for no reason; as a self-gardening tree, my overcorrection is the collision of my willpower with my imagined goal of persistent sustenance (the object a), an imagination on which each overcorrection was staked, an imagination against which each overcorrection however fails!
Here we find the fundamental position of being: in a teleological circularity. This is life, this is reality, tried and true as it is! As humans, we are always at odds with ourselves. We climb the ladder of being and find small strides up to grandiose progress, in constant pursuit and attainment of the sublime object a. But everything that is taken for this final object turns out to be not quite it. It is always not this, not this, not that. Kierkegaard says: ‘marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret both … hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret both…’. My being circles around a puncture at the heart of reality—a void of pursuit and regret. This circling recurs mechanistically, up until a certain event: an inflection point. Like a child who first becomes “conscious” by not just thinking it but becoming aware that it is he who is thinking, so I come into a self-awareness of this incessant circularity—the teleological treadmill short-circuits into awareness of its movements. I am made aware of myself as a constantly-regretting, unfinished being. I have been running for twenty five years, persisting steadfastly in motion; I lift a leg for another step, but suddenly, something makes me halt—the curtains fall—I notice what is happening, and I refuse one more step. The tracks I am running on turns out to not be a sprint or marathon, it is a treadmill. The light shines on my place, and it is glaring.
The problem is stark. An arrow of a question is raised to penetrate its heart. Who (or what) am I?—as I simultaneously pose the rest: what have I been truly doing, what am I truly here for, what am I truly to do? This development is when we usually take the ‘introspective’ turn. We begin journalling, we begin daily gratitude exercises, we begin meditating, we begin praying. I have observed this development in the new-age Western Buddhist wave. The West is now full of meditation retreats and New-Age monkishness. In the span of two decades, we have gone from brutish Christopher Hitchens-type atheism to mindfulness and spirituality. And for what—if not in hopes of balance, once and for all; in hopes of short-circuiting the treadmill of desire, to come into mediation and balance; to transcend our imprisonment, to escape from the Matrix? Ah! But even in recourse to introspection, the circularity of being in its Telos is nevertheless repeated. We leave the Matrix of imbalance, progress, only to find that we are still in the heart of it. The circularity has only been repeated in another direction. Now there is just one more failed remedial action: another undergrowth that has been tended into an overgrowth1.
This is the eternal recurrence, the Sisyphean recurrence of self-relational distance! Is this not the wellspring of all sustaining human anxiety? Whoever has been safe and secure, at peace, with being split apart in oneself—with being distant within oneself, between the I and the true-I? One might think of exemplary figures like real Buddhist monks, stoics, certain impossibly authentic people; one might even think of positive psychology and therapy-types—and think about how they have attained resolution: how they have become safe and secure with being split apart, and how they have managed to mediate the anxiety of being. Ah, but even with the greatest courage of will and wisdom of foresight, the comedic turn here remains: every one of them wills their apparent greatness within this Sisyphean treadmill of obfuscational imprisonment and self-distance. The joker delivers the punchline yet again, much to the subject’s chagrin! “Being loves to hide itself”, I read somewhere. Like children playing hide and seek, being is a cluster of self-relations hiding away and separating themselves from each other, enjoying themselves in this hiding, and seeking no higher good other than finding every single one and bringing it back into the same room for good cheer. In this way, being is self-destructive. It is always incomplete, and it seeks completeness. Yet, for every child that returns to the nest, another two goes hiding. Incompleteness and completeness tussles against each other in this absurd and rather comedic way. This is the essence of being human, of humanness. We are split subjects, through and through. Being is, as Heidegger writes, “a question of the deepest truth and at the same time it is on the edge of, and in the zone of, the deepest untruth”.
But, what of completeness, or wholeness? Can we achieve balance and finality—can we put ourselves back together into complete wholeness? Impossible… not only that… inconceivable! I cannot perceive how it is like to be this fully complete human. I can only perceive as an imaginative outsider, and perceive what it would be like to be before this remarkable human. What would she be like? To begin with: she would not be speaking or moving at all. There should be no reason to do so. Perfectly still, balanced on all scales, she would simply be. Every element of her, down to the smallest particle, would be in a state of perfection, in true finality. Being would be the easiest thing to do. It would not be a matter of will, courage or ethics—indeed, as a concept “ethics” would be empty of meaning to her, as to the lilies of the field the concept of “acting” is meaningless. Heightened into the ‘once and for all’, there would be nothing further that could possibly surprise her. Everything that can be seen is seen. She would be fully unified, harmonised, in a state of theosis, one with the eternal Telos—in a godlikeness. On the other hand, if she retained the capacity to think and act like a human, that would be a forced action, it would be tremendous and effortful, since it would return her into into the muddliness of being. Ah! But then, it occurs to me: even by her retaining the capacity to think and act—by retaining the possibility of returning to humanity—would already be a mark of imperfection, it is the revealing human taint. And now, it occurs to me that this being—perfectly still, thoughtless and actionless, not effortfully but the easiest thing to do, out of impulse, atemporal… this being would seem unexpressibly inhuman.
Praise God from here below! We humans are different, and thoroughly ambiguous. We think and we speak, and out of what impulse? There was a comic strip I recall where a doctor tells a patient: “I can cure your back problem, but there’s a risk you’ll be left with nothing to talk about“. The fundamental experience of being is therefore the antithesis of complete clarity: to be human is to be in obscurity. The position of obscurity is unconditionally the ground from which one desires the inner possibility of complete clarity—it is a very human desire; it is an entirely human desire; it is the most human desire; it is the human desire; it is the essence of being human—to know oneself! In this sense, the ancient ‘Know thyself!’ is not simply a Socratic ethical injunction to think more, to study more, to read more books. No, let us not confuse knowledge with the academic, educational sort of knowledge2—the accumulation of facts, systems, and language games! Being does not strive for the facts. All significant instances of true “knowing” is a goal-directed knowing, a striving knowing. The emancipating truth is not the truth of cells and atoms, but what is gained by knowing the facts—towards the unhiddenness of being. Therefore, the injunction of ‘Know thyself!’ is really, in relation to the fundamental drive of human beings, which is behind all human activity and desire: the drive to de-conceal my hiddenness, to illuminate my being in full transparency, to find myself in my being, be one with my being, and thus to be secure in my being.
In this way, ‘know thyself!’ is not one ethical statement among many ethical statements, to be measured alongside ‘be decent!’, or ‘stand upright!’, or ‘pet a cat when you see one on the street!’—it is the ethical injunction. It is the substance of the in-between, between the I and the true-I, the Not-I. It is the puncture in the heart of human nature which gives rise to ethics, and to which all ethics return. This is what it real—the most real—to us, insofar as it gives rise to all our intentions and actions. As Christ said, “the truth will set you free”, so too it can be said that the truth is that which emancipates us from and within our obscurity. Truth is not in pure knowledge. Truth is not what is immediately before us, nor even what can be examined, broken down, dissected and deconstructed into a million parts. Insofar as truth is that, the word “truth” has been hijacked by the scientific method. Truth—true truth; Truth—itself is something for more primordial. (The origin always comes to meet us from the future.) Truth is not in pure knowledge, but in knowledge attaining its goal: the goal to know oneself and be secure in oneself. Truth is in the eternal goal (Telos): ‘Know thyself!’, the goal and possibility of the emancipation on which all thought and action is staked at every given moment, yet which our being strives in constant circularity nearer to and away from. And can it not be said that what is most real to us is what most keeps us most alive? The candle of being is kept flickering with the oil of this eternal possibility: the possibility of emancipation in finality—once and for all.
Introspectiveness has the benefit of being rooted in the motions, however, and it allows us to discover that our will to introspection is itself in the pursuit of this same, fated, elusive object a.
The fundamental need for clarity does not pertain to the sort of knowledge normally discussed in education and in the workforce. It is not about knowing how to find one’s away through the world, whether it is knowing how to count how much cash one has in the books, or knowing how to hammer a nail into a pile of wood, or knowing how to live morally. This need for revelation is born of something far less capitalist and far more primordial, that is, the need to see oneself clearly, and to ground existence in existence.