The Truth
It is possible that all we want, actually, is an ordinary life, a life without unnecessary tragedy and even with a surplus of peaceful moments, good times, feelings of contentment and happiness.
This is precisely what the modern world begrudges us.
The modern world upholds virtues of truth, honesty, progress, freedom, security, and above all, love. These vestiges of the Western Christian tradition insinuate themselves into the lives of subjects regardless of their history, entering into consciousness at most inapproriate moments, forbidding even the most imperceptible moment of freedom. And so we are faced with particular moments of moral truth, where we stand wondering curiously enough where in fact our personal moral sentiments may have arisen from, when one cannot recall a reason, any foundational reason at all for ever believing in the virtue of Truth, for example, and yet it looms before us and impedes our ability to slip outside of the ordinary life. The external world provides no significant reason for valuing its values, and in fact the world lies bald face to itself, living in permanent contradiction.
So as bombs drop overhead, we make love. Then we wonder why our relationships fail and we don't feel entirely secure with ourselves, or why our friends fade away and our feelings remain permanently uncertain, or why our passion for thinking is as useless as our passion for people, and why as soon as we create something we turn around immediately and destroy it.
Ordinary life promises the hope of permanence, of possessing finally the fleeting suggestion of contentment that emerges out of living on occasion, the momentary feeling of delight prior to making love, the exhale of smoke from a cigarette, or the discovery of a new passion. Ordinary life sublates these moments by promising the unchanging, the transformation of desire into ritual and habit. Ordinary life freezes the private delights of living into consummable bits that we can pop into our mouths when we get a craving. We desire the ordinary because it seems uncompromised, it is a private delight, yet one that we can share communally amongst ourselves. Yet the moment we desire the ordinary we already begin to compromise it, we elevate individual satisfaction and mistakenly discover universal satisfaction.
The only satisfaction the modern world promises is the satisfaction of restlessness and discontent. If we can only accept that moral virtue has no place in this world, we can then continue believing in our own values with the recognition that the world will not recognize their significance. Truth is not meaningless, but it has ceased to exist in a meaningful world.
This is precisely what the modern world begrudges us.
The modern world upholds virtues of truth, honesty, progress, freedom, security, and above all, love. These vestiges of the Western Christian tradition insinuate themselves into the lives of subjects regardless of their history, entering into consciousness at most inapproriate moments, forbidding even the most imperceptible moment of freedom. And so we are faced with particular moments of moral truth, where we stand wondering curiously enough where in fact our personal moral sentiments may have arisen from, when one cannot recall a reason, any foundational reason at all for ever believing in the virtue of Truth, for example, and yet it looms before us and impedes our ability to slip outside of the ordinary life. The external world provides no significant reason for valuing its values, and in fact the world lies bald face to itself, living in permanent contradiction.
So as bombs drop overhead, we make love. Then we wonder why our relationships fail and we don't feel entirely secure with ourselves, or why our friends fade away and our feelings remain permanently uncertain, or why our passion for thinking is as useless as our passion for people, and why as soon as we create something we turn around immediately and destroy it.
Ordinary life promises the hope of permanence, of possessing finally the fleeting suggestion of contentment that emerges out of living on occasion, the momentary feeling of delight prior to making love, the exhale of smoke from a cigarette, or the discovery of a new passion. Ordinary life sublates these moments by promising the unchanging, the transformation of desire into ritual and habit. Ordinary life freezes the private delights of living into consummable bits that we can pop into our mouths when we get a craving. We desire the ordinary because it seems uncompromised, it is a private delight, yet one that we can share communally amongst ourselves. Yet the moment we desire the ordinary we already begin to compromise it, we elevate individual satisfaction and mistakenly discover universal satisfaction.
The only satisfaction the modern world promises is the satisfaction of restlessness and discontent. If we can only accept that moral virtue has no place in this world, we can then continue believing in our own values with the recognition that the world will not recognize their significance. Truth is not meaningless, but it has ceased to exist in a meaningful world.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home