Prolegomena to My Future Philosophy: What’s Left to Be Done?

What is the future of my philosophy?

I am in a state I cannot describe, it is a sort of translucent phase. I image the world like this:

Every belief I have falls through the lines, escapes my grasp. The Nausea Sartre described has long left me, yet I still feel a sort lack in the world, lack in the explanatory principles which constitute our experience.

I have for awhile experienced this, yet, never as much as I have as of late. It has been peaking ever since Evan wrote on the Logocentric Predicament, and I feel an urge to figure out what surrounds me. Although Evan may not agree with me, I do think he has sufficiently solved the predicament, and his proofs have at least been convincing enough for me.

What do I do with myself? I have been reading Erotism by Georges Bataille and he has completely solved my philosophical project. If you view my work in ‘Love as Being and the Law of Preservation’, you will see very clear corollaries in the entire work to what Bataille did in Erotism (the only difference being our terminology, of course). Bataille did everything I attempted to do in that essay, subsuming and and grasping the idea to the point of the most beautiful explication of the topic I have seen. Bataille has completed my philosophical project that I began with, and I have the utmost gratitude toward him. If I had read him sooner, I think I would’ve already become Bataille.

To return back to my first point, as to how I will attempt to escape this void of existence, I will first read some books I have left over that I have been meaning to read: The Accursed Share, On Ideology, Empire, K-Punk, and Postcapitalist Desire.

From there, I will go back to Plato. Planning my way through systematically reading some of the more important thinkers of our time, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, etc… Finally, where I will spend the most time on, the German Idealist tradition. I will be reading a metric fuck ton of: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, etc… with the hopes of coming to some sort of truth.

I must confess: when I first started philosophy, I aspired to the great French 20th century thinkers… nowadays I find them to lack substance, I abhor their form of writing, placing philosophy — instead of as a position of truth — as a fiction. One large fiction, with their writing being like that shitty sticker you placed in your room when you were little; when you grew older you realized its a shitty sticker so you tried to peel it off, but then you get that dreaded residue and the underlying paper was stripped off the sticker, so now you have that dreaded mess on your wall — that is the experience of reading those pitiful writers.

We should go back to the German Idealist thinkers, but what do I know! I will let you know what I think once I have sacrificed my subjectivity to a task most find useless. I will try to write one large work systematically going through them — but I might not — depends if I feel like it.

I had watched this video about a week ago, it’s an anti-self improvement video; it has changed me in ways I cannot describe. Now, do I agree with the original message? I have found myself struggling with it, and I am still not sure. (Also, I had watched this video while writing this and I like it quite a bit, definitely not as philosophical as the former though.)

For the past 6 months I have experienced a constant state of feeling I have been wasting time. Doing homework? I could be doing philosophy. Doing something that will be vital to my life? I could be doing philosophy. It’s the most completely nerd shit you have ever heard.

I always thought I was happy with myself. But this constant need for self-improvement (as that’s ultimately what it is, I value myself 80% on my intelligence) is really — I have come to realize — a constant state of dissatisfaction with myself. Why would I want to improve in the first place, if I was happy with who I am? And beyond that, why do I need to prove it to others? It’s nothing other than a pure insecurity on my part.

I thought I stopped my depression, I outsmarted it (there’s a long story behind that, but I will save you the time), but it seems my hatred for myself has manifested itself differently, obsessing over becoming other than what I am, reading incessantly. This constant feeling of anguish — this need for productivity — is ultimately rooted in a constant lack found within myself.

That’s the problem though, it’s almost as if I enjoy this internal anguish. As far back as I can remember, it’s a sort of masochistic enjoyment of this very lack I feel within myself. Any time I have been happy, I have purposefully disrupted it.

This made only more absurd by that fact that… well… I don’t feel like I hate myself. Or at least, I can’t think about something I do… well, sort of… I guess I could say I hate that I’m not the smartest to ever live. I could never handle anyone being smarter than me at anything (I understand this is narcissistic). Maybe I need to accept my very anguish? But that puts me back into the power struggles of which I so hate, my intelligence relies on that which aren’t intelligent (in the sense, my intelligence only exists in virtue of those who are not intelligent. But what makes one intelligent?).

I had this “5-year plan”, wherein I was going to kill myself if I didn’t reach a certain point of philosophical development; it’s not that I didn’t like living, it’s just that I didn’t see a point to keep living. Looking back, I find it ridiculous that I didn’t realize I hated myself this whole time.

I evoke this ‘trying to become other than what I am’, but what am I other than this becoming? What am I other than this anguish, “Hell is — other people!” states Sartre, but what if Hell is located in yourself. You are yourself Hell, trying to become other than what you are. But you cannot escape yourself (other than in death, wherein you enter the cosmic becoming), what constitutes you is precisely what you try not to be. The point isn’t to accept what you are, but precisely what you are not.

Reading Nausea by Sartre, I felt like if I had read it a year ago I would’ve related more. But as I experience life I realize I am more related to the main character than I think I am.