For now a placeholder meta post. One of the dogs peed on the router, and consequently, my internet life has been seriously disrupted, which has both good and bad consequences.
One consequence is that several pieces of writing are on hold, but I hope to get to them shortly.
For now, another thought and reality post.
Sure I've got tons of posts like these, but it is worth pumping out yet another iteration, another articulation, so as to continue to strengthen my own understanding through writing. It is generally repetition that builds strength - more on that last bit later.
For now, there is an interesting argument here, which is also built off of a sound scientific observation: that our realities are very much localized and subjective. The argument progresses to a chilling suggestion that all we have are private worlds, and the evidence bears this out.
But then the accumulation of those subjective and localized realities does form an objective totality, which, it is true, we have no conscious or symbolic access to. I've been working for almost a decade trying to develop a streamlined philosophy that integrates multidisciplinary knowledge, a project whose object was crystallized after reading about half of Capital, Volume 1. How to build an onion, piece by piece, so that someone can peel its layers back once again and reach its core?
But the truth of the matter is that we are still talking about a patchwork of various interrelated knowledge and experience systems. I've still failed to see in my own conscious and symbolic thought a seamless whole. I can only jump from image to image, system of thought to system of thought, and put them together ad-hoc, one after the other.
Like looking through a pair of binoculars, there is only the juxtaposition of two images from two different, and limited angles. One can never see the middle, what is between the two images, and of course this metaphor holds for unaided human vision. But apprehension of the middle can be satisfied through the intuition, and that is the point.
It takes a sort of faith in the totality. That is partially what religion is about. When one looks out and feels an existential terror, and one sees only fragmented realities and disconnection, one is seeing a certain truth, but it is a truth predicated on the feeling that one is alone and isolated. It is an outlook that is valid, but which still exists as a limited experience in time and space.
The religious ecstatic vision is usually all that is needed to put this patchwork together. One feels connected and satisfied. Or else one gets along with one's peers, and is accepted, and feels connected, and all of this happens in the background. One fails to see the seams in the connected experience. But here the danger exists where one mistakenly believes that the patchwork of images which has been put together is in fact the ultimate reality. One is left to admit that loneliness and existential terror is a gift, and that with it, one can build a sound continuity.
