I am sitting above the Inn, watching it flowing down towards the Danube. Thoughts around Existentialism, Kierkegaard and Sartre wander my mind. The chaotic flow of thoughts and their discontinuities set them loosely into context of my experience of the last two and a half years. And mainly circle around a discrepancy between my current understanding of Existentialism and vague notions of my own philosophy.
Corey Mohler, author of ExistentialComics.com has published a nice first-step comic on Kiergegaards reasoning on despair, portraying him in a therapy session illustrating a paradox which only resolves in despair either way.
``Every moment I live I am thrust into despair at having to choose what to do with my brief life, but ultimately knowing that only the void awaits and all my choices are meaningless in the end. This can only be overcome through faith in the eternal, but a new stronger despair haunts us then: we are always aware that faith is irrational, and we can never eradicate the gnawing doubt that we might waste our one life worshipping, a god who doesn’t exist. Don’t you see? The very structure of existence itself is despair, and we cannot escape it.''
But existentialism goes further. And together with the psychology of Viktor Frankl, logotherapy, it resolves around a quite simple maxim in life: to construct your own meaning in life and to exist through becoming, filling the void of freedom.
Up until some years ago I was inituitively or subconsciously following quite such a maxim of constructing ones owns goals, vision and meaning of life and pondering about the boundaries between rational access and irrationally experiencing life in an agnostic manner. That changed, however, with the experience of an baffling event which could be simply rationally explained from outside and closed as such. But from inside I was so much confronted with disturbing and fascinating experiences. One is the impression of containing so much more information than what we usually could access during a day or in a dream because I could at best describe the event as being a dream, partially observed by myself, but taking place in a sleepwalking manner and fading much slower such that the boundary between reality and dream is almost non-existant. Another experience is to automatically navigate through the world and even to communicate with others while it does not involve the usual feeling of actively choosing any of it – again like in a dream. And a third experience is, that most of the intertwined thoughts resemble around either very emotional themes or relationships or around spiritual images, probably inspired from memories or deeper subconscious thoughts or probably archetypes.
This experience and the thoughts about trying to understand and carve out my own philosophy lead myself to currently call transferism something I would like to detach from philosophies such as existentialism. A lot ideas in Existentialism and several other late philosophical movements are directly hitting what moves me at the core. And they often also encompass nowadays understanding that we are continuously undergoing psychological developmental processes throughout our life. But there are two points which currently bother me most with what I read so far:
First, a lot of despair is not just coming out of these paradoxes and stages of self-awareness we should overcome. But despair is constantly coming forward from the circumstance that we have an inner, transcendental life, which is not expressed conclusively as to be existant. Transforming this inner transcendental life into existance involves decisions, actions and any kind of thought processes. This transformation takes energy and therefore time. I see this transcendental inner life as an enourmous treasure of information – may it come through an evolutionary process from our ancestors, their and our environment or even through any moment of singularity, meaning it was given to us e.g. in purely random and unpredictable manner or through a spiritual greater thing. But in our limitation to energy in forms of time and whatever surrounds, hinders or supports us, we learn to transform some of it into our existance and mostly fail to bring most of it onto this existential surface. I argue, that we are not just what we create and what we are up to at this moment but we are this treasure including our growing experience of despair in what we could transform and what only we could sense to see.
Second, this treasure of information must already exist all along, obviously, or the transformative process of bringing ourselves into existance would involve new information. This does actually hold, as we are interacting with eachother and the world, but ultimately this combined information of it all is already in existance and the transformative process can only merge or enrich it. From a christian perspective, one could maybe think about this treasure as being our soul. But having this transformative process also means that there must be true sources of information, e.g. through an spiritual epiphany or a divine connection, an initial compressed big bang singularity or other such sources.
My experience so far tells me that each human already carries quite an enormous treasure of information. At the same time and seemingly contradictorily, my observation gives me the impression that truly novel ideas are not only very rarely or infrequent but even hard to recognize. Especially in our technical research field of machine learning, I mostly just observe clever and deep recombinations and synergetic effects, although we seem to make productive steps forward. Most people consider that probably as highly pessimistic, but for those who really care about a deeper understanding of e.g. learning or philosophical connections to what we do, most progress lives in progressing theoretic understanding which is often way slower than the progress I perceive from reading the sheer amount of published work. And I am not aware of too much progress in the theory of learning.
Maybe it’s all just a transformative process of energy, connecting seemingly opposite dimensions: rational and irrational world, cognitive and emotional world, physical and transcendental world. The discrepancy between what I imagined to write down or what my mind ponders about and what I’ve actually scribbled down - as always.