I was listening to Imogen Heap’s “I can’t take it in” recently. What a magnificent song. It speaks to me of ultimate joy and peace. Two things which it seems to me people desire above all things.
Any real joy in this life is to be found in the responses and initiations of other persons to one’s self. Watch a guy driving down the road with the music pumping, his pleasure is intricately wound up in what it is he is imagining you are thinking about him - if he only knew. A girl getting ready to go out is evaluating herself in the mirror comparing what she sees with the expected responses of other people she is likely to meet.
Think about it for a moment, are there any real joys in your life that do not involve either a response or an initiation of another person or people?
If you can name them I suggest that the satisfactions of those joys diminish exponentially over time. Even the joy of being alone for a bit has limited returns, and it has as as much to do with people as being with them does.
Substance abuse, for example, gives what I understand to be an ever increasing internal, private pleasure. Even when used in the presence other people substance abuse divorces your individual experiences in an ever increasing way, the more drunk you are the less fun you are for sober people until eventually even other drunk people are not enjoying your company.
It is the same with sex, food, travel and even a walk alone. There is only so much you can do alone; to continue enjoying the thing alone one has to imagine another engrossed in the same pleasure with you, and so one invokes the law of diminishing returns.
The pursuit of continual unrelational joy is a perversion of what it is to be human, it is to make a Frankenstein out of one’s own body parts.
But to partake in a mutual joy is to invoke a law of increasing returns, I would argue that they are exponentially increasing returns (the diminishing returns are not exponential).
We are relational, utterly and completely. We always were, and we always will be. It has never been good for man to be alone, it certainly is completely joyless - in the largest definition of joy.
I ask then how could I possible conclude that reality ultimately is either impersonal, a devolution into chaos; or unified into a single inactive person, a nothingness?
Some philosophies would have us believe that this individuality that we experiences is an illusion. An illusion? The very means to joy, the plate on which our very sustenance is served, is an illusion? The only route to joy and peace, the two things which people desire above all things, an illusion? How could we conclude such nonsense?
There is only one way that we could possibly draw such conclusions. And that is if, by our intelligence we refuse to face the facts for the sake of our selfishness disguised as an existential, utilitarian, stoic mantra of hollow and lonely logic.
So I think that whatever ultimate reality there could possibly be, it has to be relational and whatever original state we could imagine it would have to be relational. I draw these two conclusions by what I observe. Like begets like.
So what then are the options of ultimate reality and original state that are presented to my reason?… Next
