purgatorydreams

I'd like to preface this by saying that this is not going to be organized in the slightest. To be honest, I don't even know what to call it—it's not an article, it's not an essay, and it's not fiction either. It just is, and that's the way I'd like to keep it. Often, I think too hard about the things I write. And, often, that leads me to never finishing most stories. These fragments, then, are my way of writing something and putting it out there. Anything.

The unknown is always a concept that I have been fascinated with.

It's been around 6 years since I finished high school. During my last two years of high school, I took philosophy classes and became deeply fascinated with the subject. Deep down, I always vaguely knew about the topics that philosophy touches upon. I'm not trying to pretend like I'm a genius or enlightened in any way, shape or form. I feel like most people, through different artistic mediums, are exposed to the ideas presented in philosophy; art and philosophy are deeply intertwined. The search for morality, the search for meaning in life, the search for justice, and so forth. A lot of post-modern media explores these absolutes, often reaching the conclusion that they are not absolutes in the slightest and are, instead, relative.

It wasn't until I took philosophy classes that I started thinking about this more deeply. Reading the works of philosophers like Plato, and those who followed him and took inspiration from his works, forced me to think about these topics more rationally. Philosophy is, at its very core, a study of the fundamentals of reality and the self. I always believed these topics to be very abstract—in a way, they are—but reading the works of philosophers across history made me observe a certain objectivity in them.

I remember reading René Descartes' Meditations and being fascinated at how analytical everything was. Despite talking about topics I thought of as abstract, he broke them down using completely logical arguments. “I think, therefore I am.” I believe almost everyone has heard those words at least once, even without the proper context of the meditations. What seems like an abstract statement is actually the conclusion to a series of arguments that René Descartes presents.

He begins the Meditations by presenting his method: doubting everything until he finds something that is necessarily true. This is what we now call “proof by contradiction”, and Descartes uses this method extensively. This method consists of the following: we start from an assumption, and we explore it until we find a contradiction; and if there is a contradiction, it means the original assumption is necessarily false. For example, he doubts the things we sense because our senses could be mistaken (a lie by a Malevolent God, as he puts it). He does this with basically all of reality, everything that surrounds us, everything outside our self. In the end, however, he finds one assumption that brings about the first contradiction of his Meditations.

Even if I assume that my own thoughts are a lie, there is still a thinking agent (“I”) who is being lied to. The fact that “I” think cannot be a lie, because the fact that “I” can doubt my thoughts implies there is a thinking subject. “I think, therefore I am.” Because I can think, because I can doubt, it means that a thinking self must necessarily exist. This is the first necessary principle that René Descartes arrives to, slightly summarized for the sake of this piece of writing.

The problem comes in finding other necessary principles, and I believe this to be biggest issue in philosophy. Sure, there exists a thinking subject. But can any other necessary principle be found outside the existence of this thinking subject? Descartes tries to find God from the properties of this thinking subject; if there is an “I” and there is “space” and there is “time”, then there must be a God that represents the absolutes (such as infinity, good, and so forth). David Hume, later on, questions the existence of an external world (something outside the subject) as there is nothing that can prove the relation between this external world and the impressions we receive from it. Wittgenstein would later appear and present the idea that our language, what one speaks and thinks in, is the limit of our world, and that to prove anything beyond our world is a meaningless endeavor. Other postmodern philosophers would point at the fact that there is no such thing as the absolutes, and instead their works began to explore how one should live in a world where nothing is guaranteed.

In other words, in terms of philosophy, we have never proven anything beyond the existence of a thinking subject. There is nothing that proves the past actually happened beyond an illusion the self has. Despite our understanding of physics, there is also nothing proving that these rules we have found are but an illusion, and that the world will simply change or disappear the next second. On the topic of seconds, there is not proof that time or space are anything but illusions the thinking self has.

Obviously, I don't believe these implications are going to have any effect on my life. I don't fear the validity of my past, nor do I fear that the world will simply end without a trace if the laws of causality end up being a lie. But there is something I fear. And, because of philosophy, I realize how this fear cannot ever be answered or solved through rationalization alone.

I fear the unknown.

I don't understand how people cope with it. I am genuinely scared of people, perhaps in part because I have been hurt in the past by so many. There is this darkness in the world that envelops absolutely everything outside the fact that we exist, and that darkness terrifies me. Not knowing what lies beyond the next step, not knowing what others are thinking about, not knowing if my own feelings are genuine. I know that I exist, but everything outside that fact is dark.

When you think, are you conscious about the things you think about? Where do the thoughts we have come from? I want you to think of a color. The color 'red' immediately popped into my mind, but maybe a different one appeared in your thoughts instead. Did you think of this color consciously? Let's assume that, yes, I thought of the color 'red' consciously. But then, why did I think of thinking about the color 'red'? Was that thought also conscious? If we keep going with that trail of thought, we'll find an infinite regression: for me to consciously think about something, I have to consciously think about thinking of it an infinite amount of times. This is, of course, absurd and contradicts the notion that our thoughts are conscious.

But then, what does this mean?

It means that the thinking subject, “I”, doesn't consciously think. It does so accidentally, through something other than causality or its own free will—which means that our actions and thoughts are not completely governed by ourselves, but by something else.

Something unknown.

If I cannot trust my own actions and thoughts to be a product of my own free will, then does that same thought process not apply to others? People are unpredictable, our self itself is. Can we ever truly know someone? And what does “knowing” someone even mean? Even I believe that this fear is somewhat ridiculous, but it is a conclusion that I have reached through what I believe to be a completely logical series of steps. So then, how do I cope with it? I fear that the answer may just lie in blindly hoping, in closing my eyes to make the darkness even darker and blind myself to my own logic.

Perhaps there is no answer other than to do exactly that.