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A Question of Being Human (8)

(Between) Inside and Outside

Any image of the inside as complete, as including its limits, boundaries, horizons, is one from the outside (possibility of enunciation). The view from the inside is either aware of the approaching boundary (a hiatus, contradiction or absence of sense in the object language) suggesting a change of strategy, or silence in the face of a singularity: or not aware - in which case we (from the outside, the purview of a meta-language) observe the classic movement outwards… then note a return inwards (as the other, unaware of reaching the limit, continues in a motion, in effect a loop, that returns one to where one was before) in a move often described as repetition (one believes one is doing, thinking something new, when in fact it is something we have thought before). The view from the outside is the one that accompanies totality. Paradox and contradiction immediately arise; not least if we are talking about our own experience, which we are, then that outside point of view is then also inside… already inside (so imaginary, a ‘thought experiment’). Yet is it better to stay within and note the fictional nature of our constructs of the outside, of our (imaginary) vantage point ‘outside’, so avoiding contradiction, as also the opposite fallacy, the leap into naïve realism… all to often accompanied by an objectivism which views humans as machines or animals, so loosing humanity and the human point of view? (This former posits the self as central -god-like- subject position and all others as objects only). Yet… is not part of us always outside of ourselves (we say, ‘beside ourselves…’) part of our social evolution as other-dependant, as recognition-dependant, a sense amounting to a social organ, allowing us to see ourselves as others see us (and so others as if us…) – so not simply dismissible as pretended, secondary, or ‘inauthentic’…

From outside… the view from outside: the objective, scientific and so quantitative viewpoint, whereas our fundamental experience is qualitative, is of the presence of qualities (and their interrelation as subjects and predicates ((afterwards to be reconstituted as sets and elements, so translatable into quantitative analysis)) together subject to axioms). As seen from the outside, we are as if a cloth with all printed upon it, recorded and (to the perceiving moment) already evaporating, a being frail and inconsistent, so easily effected by its context (in space) and the pulse of its surrounding architecture (in time). This ‘time’ itself another delusion (of the inside) as seen from the outside, insofar as perceived as linear (unidirectional, cumulative, if chaotic) but from inside constitutive, divided, with dubious fading margins, and centered on the present…

Therefore: The inside (our sense of our being the recipient or place of perception) is always already made up out of the arrival of perception, including perception of the self (self-presence, which we may loose in sleep, reverie or action) and the ability of thoughts to both shape perception ‘passively’ and to act upon the world ‘actively’ are combined already in this ‘space’. A matter always before us… (which we extend to ourselves as corporeal). So not between us and the real, but as constituting ourselves (as experience) and the (experience of the) real simultaneously…

The spaces within: (self) and others; and an ‘outside’ (Absolute Other) imaginary spaces all - but necessary. Thus far total skepticism and empiricism (by definition ((a ‘definition relying upon reference, the motion of a digit and its witness)) ‘true’), leave us too exposed to ‘other’, ignored, foundations and, not least, the arrogance of a rationalism that imagines all beneath it… The humility that comes from an appreciation of our fragile lot in the universe quickly evaporates into the blind hubris of the would-be superman… Conferring value – as we must, makes of us gods enough… To learn to do this appropriately – and still avoid the pratfall of self-deification; this apparently is still beyond us. Anyway we are, despite our worst delusions, continually reminded of our mortality… and to go further is to ascend to …? Parody.

Parody: (especially when filled out by matters hyperbolic) fallibility, even mortality denied; as when the fabric of the self is depicted as seamless, complete. Unitary; without rent or tear. As if made to last forever. Whereas we are more like…

The rent in the curtain… rift in the fabric… a rent in the fabric of matter.

A tear in the fabric of matter. A tearing which is our on-going sense of self, of place(ment) within matter, in space and with time (as time…). Whence the present participle. A tearing that does not cease…

A tear on the fabric of matter. Film of water on which our short film is caught. Short, but to us, self as perceived on the skin of the bubble, felt as occupying the space of the bubble, within, eternal.

And if the light within the tear dazzles… Our ‘room’ as a prism, a droplet of water whose skin is a patina of images and whose possibility is light. So (from the point of view of a language dominated by vision at least)… mysticism without mysticism… religion without religion. New as the realization that these latter may indicate a fundamental desire: as old as the remembering that philosophy’s difference with religion was born of reason refusing blind or superstitious belief - which difference however bred the, politically inspired, ‘noble lie’ of belief as suitable only for ‘others’… To go beyond the ‘noble lie’ can we employ the insight of the need for sacred feeling as hardwired, as a potential -even if culturally restricted- part of everyone’s experience, and offer a new foundation that is either the admission of two levels, public and private, communal and individual (conceptualised as homo-duplex, or the ‘Public Secret’, after Durkheim and Taussig) two levels, two ‘languages’ or ‘imaginary’ registers that divide the individual and so all culture (so giving rise to new culture, to new narratives, lyrics and new art). Or, alternatively, the recognition of such needs as unavoidable, positive and not requiring any metaphysical, or theological subsidy (or political sleights of hand)… to be experienced as an aspect of the enchantedness of things as they appear (occasionally) to us as important entities - important in the sense of giving value to matter. As a wonder at things within the rent; and as a potential aspect of all that we can not perceive or know and which admits only of useful, but reductive, second order experience (rationalization, classification and science).

Intense experience; inner experience. Not requiring further justification? But also not taking us much further…? Unless taken as posing a question to the other orders of experience. Of what value is the human in ‘human experience’?

Ourselves as in a dream, as if viewed from another place, vision of others (of self as other) and vision of science (of self as object), the latter a product of reason plus… plus, the other point of view, the organ we develop from our earliest years, a truly social organ, consciousness of self as product of interaction, consciousness of consciousness as interaction; once more, consciousness as interaction – including with its own past…

The ghost that haunts the room; (we) the ghost that haunts our rooms… together with the structures, the pathways of the garden of present enchantment and the passages of the house of eternal sojourn… and the specters that populate them…for we are never alone.

On one side of the room, perhaps built into -immured- within one of its walls (like Poe’s black cat), is the ‘self’: on the other everything else, all the others, including the view onto the… this… self. And, shocked, we find that that wall has become this wall (or is it ‘this’ become ‘that’…?). As what we thought was a mirror, now becomes a hall of mirrors. And as we attempt to trace the contours of the wall, all ways lead to the same place in the wall, always we return to the same starting place…a place that is space, is everywhere… or do we…? (As our memory constitutes the experience as a spiral and not a circle – so it is time that rescues us - if we are conscious, that is). No awareness before self-awareness, certainly no return to such; all awareness as mediated by prior self-awareness, meaning; all reframed as in the frame of the self in the present; as past to semi-present (where the later term is its passing through presence to us), once a stage has been created, it must be traversed again by all that follow (must be reframed by such, in such)… to fail only with the failing of memory (where the disappearance of the past signals the parallel disappearance of the future…).

Self: that fragile intangible - but what insistence!

Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2012