Meandering Thoughts... Anyone there Anymore?
Digging away at the layered sedimentation of history, can we know about the past? Or is it lost forever beneath impenetrable encrustations and strata, like geological rock formations burying and preserving ancient artifacts. Historians are like archaeologists on some level, but there is a certain futility to pretending like we can "Know" about the past, that there is a very real possibility that as historians dig deeper and deeper beneath the layerings of history, it becomes increasingly difficult to discover a kernel of truth buried beneath the layers. The Origin is perhaps unknowable, but hey, I can venture a guess... digging into history leads us ultimately back to the origins of the universe. Like asking "When did Capitalism begin?" Well you can go back to the Industrial Revolution, and then to feudalism, and then dig deeper to pre-Roman times, to bartering societies, etc. Where does it all begin?
The Universe just is, as the existentialists say, indifferent to my existence. I am on my own, and there is quite possibly no singular origin to the Universe. It is always already infinitely and eternally there, without an origin and without an end. It is human existence that is the contingency and finite. Life, money, the body, pleasures, all of these things fade and diminish with time, plus you cannot take them with you when you die. If the Universe Just "IS" then how do we conceive of a moral ground to stand on? OF course, this is an illusion, morals are made by three forces 1. history 2. social pressures 3. a personal exertion of Will.
The Secret to life is, in the face of this indifferent universe that does not care about me, I must find the courage to will myself to become what I desire to be. To know that I cannot escape History of Social pressures, but to find my inner Will Power and create myself in my own image (not God's). Not merely "thinking" about my desire, but actually willing it thus by tapping into my sense of agency, my capadity to become what I want to become. This means thinking the future as an infinite possibility of a radically different becoming, wherein the present will not be extrapolated into the future in a conservative sense, that is, in the sense that NOW will be conserved in the future, but a wastefulness or an entropy to the present (not an inertia). An energy flow that might actually recycle the temporal body (as it exists now) into the karmic becomings of the future in a chaotic sense of becoming, creating an infinite number of future possible worlds.
I still think that energy is recycled, never lost, but I think that entropy has a moral component and this has a lot to do with decadence and decline on a Historical level, and that this decline trickles down to the individual level as well (epistemes being co-opted by doxas, etc.)
Hope this makes sense. Lots of Eastern Gobbly Goop mixed in with Derridean thought, but dumbed down considerably.
The Universe just is, as the existentialists say, indifferent to my existence. I am on my own, and there is quite possibly no singular origin to the Universe. It is always already infinitely and eternally there, without an origin and without an end. It is human existence that is the contingency and finite. Life, money, the body, pleasures, all of these things fade and diminish with time, plus you cannot take them with you when you die. If the Universe Just "IS" then how do we conceive of a moral ground to stand on? OF course, this is an illusion, morals are made by three forces 1. history 2. social pressures 3. a personal exertion of Will.
The Secret to life is, in the face of this indifferent universe that does not care about me, I must find the courage to will myself to become what I desire to be. To know that I cannot escape History of Social pressures, but to find my inner Will Power and create myself in my own image (not God's). Not merely "thinking" about my desire, but actually willing it thus by tapping into my sense of agency, my capadity to become what I want to become. This means thinking the future as an infinite possibility of a radically different becoming, wherein the present will not be extrapolated into the future in a conservative sense, that is, in the sense that NOW will be conserved in the future, but a wastefulness or an entropy to the present (not an inertia). An energy flow that might actually recycle the temporal body (as it exists now) into the karmic becomings of the future in a chaotic sense of becoming, creating an infinite number of future possible worlds.
I still think that energy is recycled, never lost, but I think that entropy has a moral component and this has a lot to do with decadence and decline on a Historical level, and that this decline trickles down to the individual level as well (epistemes being co-opted by doxas, etc.)
Hope this makes sense. Lots of Eastern Gobbly Goop mixed in with Derridean thought, but dumbed down considerably.