Stripped - By John Paul Zalewski

An extended essay, released in parts, that will be released bi-weekly, compromised, roughly of around one-thousand words, so that reading it is not so much an arduous, overwhelming, undertaking. 

Foreword:

Before anyone tries to provide a rebuttal to the following, in terms of logical syllogisms, logic is a human construction; logic is dependent on a subjective, without which there would be nothing (How can you use language without the logical law: A=A?). To highlight contradictions is only inane point-scoring, and to do this is to ignore the underlying philosophical point; even though language is inadequate in this task in the first place, as it is a human construction used to convey to others one's own introspective abstract thought, which itself is unnatural in terms of natural human day-to-day life (as when one actually feels, rationality is never involved), rationality never portends to emotion, and although it can be used to demonstrate logical 'incoherences', it says nothing of the fact that there is an abundance of emotion, unequivocal, but ineffable in terms of translatability to oneself, as well as to others, seemingly ignoring the fact that everything exists only in the terms of our own beings; of our own phenomenologies, of which can never be translated into any others' experience. Hence, to speak of logic and logical contradictions is impotent in this respect. It may then be argued what the issue would be if I were to be found to be illogical in what I am saying, if I am only commenting on life itself, which cannot be understood in terms of logic, in that contradictions only are valid if you accept it; it can be disregarded in its seeming connection and explanatory nature, concerning life, as logic is unfeeling, whereas life and philosophy are concerned with the evocation of a feeling. For instance, the act to take one's life, the ultimate display of an individual's incapacity to handle what they are feeling can never be understood rationally; if anything, it is the negation of any kind of understandability. Life is fundamentally egoistic; abstraction, morality, etc., any kind of distortion of it only proves to be problematic, coming from our solipsistic position, as we would be trying to understand it in terms it cannot be understood in, and therefore should not come under the same scrutiny, but should instead be felt and should be tried to be understood in the terms of its experiences and of its qualitative 'feels', of what it is actually like, as much as we can comprehend it; it must be felt before it can be rejected, if one were to provide an adequate reason for its dismissal.

Stripped

There are moments when you stare into the abyss, that great beyond of piss and shit; in excrement abundant, you try your best to wade through, without knowing whether there is an end at all in sight. And you ask yourself, not what did you ever do to deserve this, but what did I want from life? This may differ from person to person, but all I ever wanted, personally, and want from life is to hold someone in my arms at night, and know that I truly love them and that they truly love me. Am I alone in this? Or is life more dense, are there more layers to it, and can life not be this simple? It is therefore my strong belief that all there is, in life, is love; nothing in this life is biological or purely mechanical, or lacking in introspective, intentional, self-reflexive acknowledgement/presence. To think as much is to belittle life, to undermine it. You only have to lose love to understand this. To reject this is to only show your uneasiness and cowardice in the face of something so palpably irrefutable; and of a fear from being able to actually bridge the void between oneself and the thing that one loves, being that of the exterior, now actualised world. We are no longer solipsistically imprisoned within our own subjectives, as least for a limited amount of time whilst we are loved.

This may seem overly morose in the grand scheme of objective meaning and absolute truths, of which will be demonstrated shortly, and which concerns the meaninglessness and purposelessness of life, but I think it is demonstrative of an invaluable philosophical point, one concerning the actual, non-objective, albeit livable, meaning (or objective un-meaning) of existence, perspectivism and phenomenology.

My first point is this: life is finite; we are all simply biological beings and some day we are going to cease to exist. This is irrefutable, and ultimately undermines any objective, absolute, sense of purpose or meaning; everything we will do, or will, or want, will be undone by our inevitable deaths; life is continuous, we are discontinuous. As such, we can never create absolute meaning, but only subjective meaning, as we are encapsulated by our own mortality, never being able to move beyond this; hence, affronted by the grand meaninglessness of it all, we are confronted by the overwhelming malaise and ineffectual nature of our own existences, and of the fact that everything we will undertake will ultimately be undermined. Thus, we feel a certain numbness to life; life has no reason behind its continuance, in terms of ourselves, and of the world in which we are forced to inhabit. So why does one not kill oneself? One does not kill oneself exactly because of this point; because there is no reason to do so. There is no reason to live or die; life, in terms of absolutes and objective validity is merely absence. We feel nothing, as if in wait for our encroaching deaths. As such, we stifle everything within ourselves that could remind us of our more organic nature, especially our sexualities, as the potentiality of creating something that is a part of us, but that would exist beyond ourselves, and after we no longer remain, is the greatest affirmation of this, and must be forgotten if we are able to continue, as uninhibited by this overwhelming fact as we can be; it is thus distorted as much as possible within the human phenomenological world, to disassociate it from its true purpose, being that of procreation, and is thus transfigured into something that can be then incorporated into this contortion of human naturality, as a pass-time, leisure activity. Hence, life as we know it is built upon superficial perspectives, from our anthropomorphised positions, so that we never have to introspect on this basic, non-arguable fact, to the point that everything is built on a singular premise, whereby everything must disaffirm this fact, of our own mortalities, as much as possible. Hitherto, modern societies, morality, modern thought, culture, etc., is designed in such a way to differentiate ourselves from more "basic" forms of life. Human relationships and the superficialities and civilities therein are wholly demonstrative of this; sexual relationships, or the absurdity of being in an environment where members of the opposite sex are congregated, such as in the most ordinary of places, leaves, if one were to think about it, us in a complete state of bemusement; we are all here, performing inane, arbitrary tasks, for no reason whatsoever, when there is the constant potential to fulfill that which we were, in a sense, designed and pre-ordained to do. But if we were to fall prey to our more naturalistic, biological urges, we would quickly become reaffirmed of our mortal, finite nature; sex is something animalistic and base; it is purely concerned with life and death. Sex can provide a feeling, it can remove, albeit temporarily, the numbness and un-meaning of existence, though once it is over with, one is given, fully, the understanding that that’s all there is in life, in terms of meaning. Thus, it is abstained from and made taboo. Sex, in itself, is inadequate; it is only a partial representation of the true meaning that can be found when engaging in this act. If anything, perceiving it in only its mechanical functionality is as unnatural as seeing it as only a leisure activity; love, though, a human construct, in terms of its concept, is of the upmost importance.

to be cont.

By John Paul Zalewski