We’ve worshipped…
… many many things, from weird to normal, from possible to impossible – alas, even the actual, whatever that may be and what interpretation holds it steadfast. We’ve worshipped systems, ideas, thoughts. We’ve worshipped things that were, things that are not, things that may be, and then things that should be. The past, the future. Deities, men, women. Animals, plants. Planets, Stars, rocks. Our own constructions, other people’s. So many things we’ve worshipped, so many things we’ve placed above ourselves. Our fervid worshipping bone has not been without our hands placed together palm to palm infront of our face, eyes closed, tears flowing and sighs igniting our whole body such that each hair on our arms, neck, back and legs stand erect and at the ready.
We’ve worshipped.
We’ve done so with fervent humility, unbeknown to us that hidden concealed behind each prayer, each hope, each worship, each passion, lays a most conspicuous pride. Behind the humility of the masses lays the most numbing pride. With every worship, we’ve worshipped ourselves. The furthest worshipped thing from us is by far the closest to us. We’ve never worshipped anything but ourselves, we know nothing else. Yet, this is the monstrous paradox of the humility of worship – it conceals the most monstrous of prides. Each prayer is a prayer to oneself for oneself, and we pretend to worship another. How pretentious the worshipping human bone is, how anthropomorphic. Yet, the few, the very few, who have the courage to break free and say with utter conviction and honesty,
“I worship nothing but myself, I trust entirely in myself and that which I am a part of, that which bore me and is me. I am it. It is not other than me. My pride is true, it is not conveniently concealed to console you squeamish, to seduce you, to seduce myself and prolong my ‘ultimately’ undesired state. I am proud; pride is me. This is my humility; the humility of honesty, the courage of honesty. The one and only social courage.”
Those strong few who have the ‘heart’, the energy, to break free from seeing through another’s eyes, to segregate from and divorce the returning gaze. They, in their misfortune, harbour gazes that return with malice, whose true form in its naked disclosure is fear. Those lucky and apparently malicious few, whom with such profound anger we acquaint, they are the authentic, the ‘real’, the ‘ideal’ – or at the very least, the closest thing. A vision that turns fully inwards is what each prayer is directed at, and each one that misses it is left gazing once more at another in search for itself. It turns to its malignant spouse, to that satire of satires, to the returning gaze. Those few, they are the true worshippers, they know the one and only deity, the deity we all worship but conceal it from ourselves.
Have I convinced you? Need I do so? Can’t experience do the job for itself? Look you at the many deities, and the differences between each. Then look you at their similarities. They are all other than oneself, but so important to oneself. Each deity is constitutive and constructed from one’s immediate state, their immediate condition, their immediate mode of life – alter that immediacy and you alter the deity. The differences between deities is manifest in the differences between modes of life – and that is all. Nothing more special than that. They are all directed at oneself and one-self’s interests – their life. That self that worships itself by pretending to worship another, that delusional self, as a friend of mine would say. The delusional self that needs to go to somewhere other than oneself in order to be itself, to be at one with itself. That delusional self that in so doing does nothing but the obvious: worship itself.
Why does it do this? Why else. To establish an authority for being itself, to have a ’reason’ for being oneself. To ‘give’ oneself meaning. It reasons and contends, foolishly, that it can’t have meaning in and of itself, it needs to mediate the process. Only in mediation, in the injection of otherness, can meaning for this delusional self be established. Meaning in immediacy has been something that we, as delusional selves, have forgotten. We fight ourselves in this forgetting, we reject our immediacy in the belief that only mediation is real, only mediation is the true, the self is only in and through mediation. That is where, for our delusions, lies the deity – the worshipped. This is where, for me, Wittgenstein went horribly wrong and horribly right, both in different ways and degrees.
There lays a most profound irony in all this: our immediacy seeks to foolishly find itself through mediation. Like a mirror that places itself in front of another mirror, but sees nothing but eternity in repetition. There is enough comedy in this to amuse us forever. There also lays enough tragedy in it to make us weep without end. A toast to mediation, a toast to delusion and a toast to you, my humble reader.
Lauren said,
July 10, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Interesting, what about people who believe in disambiguation? If you believe in chaos is that the antithesis of worship? Or atheists? If you worship nothing or believe that nothing gives meaning to your existence does that make you selfless?
incognitio said,
July 10, 2009 at 10:29 pm
I take by your notion of chaos the metaphysical doctrine that there is no teleology to existence, no purpose, no end. As such and likewise, by negation, there is no beginning either – correct me if I am wrong of course. There is major difficulties in dealing with this question, so with your premission, let us go to its logical conclusion – the last question.
I believe, your most interesting question and a summary of the others is the last one concerning what seems like Nihilism. (For an interesting conversation on Nihilism, check out the discussion I had with Solarflea on my post “Sceptics”.)
Nihilism I shall take here as the grounding/foundational belief on which all other beliefs stand. This belief itself concerns existence: there is no meaning to existence or life.
Now immediately, and only for clarity, the Philosopher will ask: what do you mean by meaning? What sounds of course like an absurd question, but at the same time, a necessary one. A question I only subtly dealt with in the text itself, and at such a distance that I am not surprised it was missed. It was dealt with in the 5th paragraph, where the “why” questioning begins and where I slotted in Wittgestein – a great contributor to modern thoughts regarding ‘meaning’.
I juxtaposed two ways of establishing (giving) meaning: mediation and the immediate. I argued, albeit poetically, that this distinction is severely overlooked. Further, that we’ve been worshipping mediation for much too long, so long that we’ve forgotten what immediacy is. Worshipping something means giving it a status of sublimity, making something other than oneself higher than oneself. Why does one worship though? For oneself of course, in hope that one day one can attain that same height. Everyone worships for oneself, and as I argue in the text, they worship themselves, but only in a backward manner. In a manner that takes a detour and conceals the real and quickest root. I call this otherness, this detour: mediation.
My beef with Wittgenstein is simply that he only allows for one way of linguistically categorizing meaning, due to his combat with solipsism, being the idea that nothing else exists but me, or that I can’t be sure of anything but myself. Wittgenstein was afraid of immediacy because he thought that its only conclusion was simply solipsism. I would argue that he was too closely wed to logical conclusion, and as such favoured mediation. Something that one expects from a disciple of Russell and the analytic tradition. However, to be fair to him, he did distinguish mediation from immediacy, but his distinction was in a distinction kind and at the same time implied in only one little aphorism. He said about the immediate self,
“It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.”
In other words, the self for Wittgenstein is the limit point of language. It is the purely qualitative and something which no quantitative thing can quantify. We can’t bring the self to language. The self is immediate, and language demands mediation. BUT, this does not mean that ‘the self is nothing’. Why? – Because language is not everything, or for him, language is not used in one way only and to one purpose. This is the issue at hand here. Language and its primary tool, mediation, is not everything. Can we possibly fathom an immediate language? What would happen to meaning under such conditions? What role would it take?
I do not in any way contend that there is no meaning to existence. I likewise do not believe that meaning is given to existence by some ‘thing’ – if by that you mean to refer to something other and external to that which the meaning is given to and by. I reject pure transcendence. I content that existential meaning needs to be distinguished from linguistic meaning. The former is immediate and internal, purely qualitative. The latter is mediated, necessarily, and purely quantitative. Further, I believe that they are in constant tension, and unlike Wittgenstein, do not distinguish them completely. I do not reduce one to the other either. I believe the immediate existential meaning of the self always affects and collaborates with the mediated linguistic meaning of the terrain where we meet others; other selfs, the social, society, language, things etc. My inside is in a constant tension with the outside where I meet other people. However, meaning on the outside is different from meaning on the inside.
It’s like a fish in land, out of its element, but still struggling for breath. Still trying hard to live and be in its element. Eventually the fish is lucky, it gets picked up by a human, that has pity on it. The human places it in a fish tank, which we call language, making the fish able to survive, but only with clear-cut boundaries and limits – the tank walls. The self in language is like a fish in the fish tank, pretending to be free and one with its element, unawares that its element is a fabrication, a lie, it is not really a fish, but a pet. Something that’s just there for decoration.
When the human being became aware of itself, aware that it had a self, everything went completely wrong. This is what one might call: nature’s only error, her mistake. When man became aware of himself he jumped out of his element, like a fish unto land. Only that fish has not grown legs and lungs yet, it only managed to artifically bring its element to land via the fish tank, via language and sociability. It did not evolve, it compansated.
Now the real question is. If we can’t reproduce this inner existential meaning, if we can’t share it with other people and offer it to them, how then can we even verify it, let alone be sure that it is there or has any significance? How do we know if we’re delusional or not? This is where a most interesting Philosopher comes into play: Soren Kierkegaard. A big influence of Wittgenstein. I won’t get into it here, I’ve babbled for long enough.
Here’s my quick answer: yes, there is meaning. It is never what you think, speak, or reason it is. It is always what you feel with a burning sensation from the chest.