The Fun of Writing

What peculiar inspirations am I waiting for, to push forward my pen and give life to my daydreams in my writing. What thought must I think to spark this epiphany, to begin rolling the stone of my method so that I may finally put onto paper what I cannot put into my life, put into your minds what I cannot quite complete in my own. I think that that must be one of the strong appeals of writing for me: the audience, the eagerly waiting readers who chose to pick up my particular work. I can almost envision them, stumbling across my yet-to-be masterpiece with looks of half-interested curiosity on their faces as they thoughtfully thumb through a few pages; then, in my little author’s fantasy, a miracle happens and they begin to read.
This is phenomenal, this is exciting, this is awesome— first of all because it is a hell of a stroke to my ego, and second of all because of consubstantiality. Big fucking word, I know, but here’s the gist of what I mean by that, in the most drawn-out and boring explanation possible: Abstract thought being (to our knowledge) an entirely human trait, one could say that merely having the capacity to realize, “I think, therefore I am,” is one of the primary symptoms of humanity. It is sort of an existential epiphany that allows us to verify for ourselves that we do, in fact, exist. “I think, therefore I am,” such a beautifully succinct statement that it is no wonder it is heard so often; unfortunately, like all clichés, this one has lost its potency with overuse and people pay it less consideration than it deserves. To assert that thinking is conditional to being is really a rather bold claim. The chair I’m sitting in right at this moment does not think (that I know of) and yet the fact that it is currently supporting my weight makes a strong case for its existence. I think, therefore I am; my chair thinks not, and still is. So is this classic excerpt of prose truly a non sequitur, a spurious assertion made solely for the sake of aesthetic poetry?
Or is there merely a semantic disparity between our definitions of existence? Consider the world objectively, as though you could perceive it without needing the lens of biological existence or sensory perception: without the ear given to us by God/evolution, all music and sounds are nothing but vibrations in the air. Without the eye, colors are just differing wavelengths of light bouncing off of objects. We, the cleverer monkeys, have invented the concept of color because of how our brain processes light. We invented the concept of harmony according to the peculiarities of the ear, the concept of flavor to the tongue and of beauty to the eye. We even invented the concept of concepts, started forming ideas, making plans, and just plain thinking things through. Having discovered a potentially infinite world in personal abstraction, we humans rush to fill the spaces of our minds with whatever seems fashionable at the time to know, whether it’s fashionable contemporary philosophy, the state of the stock market, or a pile of sports statistics. So occupied are we with knowing things and finding new things to know that it rarely occurs to us to ask what, exactly, knowledge is.
But before going into what knowledge is, I’m going to take a step back and look at whether knowledge is. As I was saying before, we have subjectively created and assigned meaning to certain aspects of reality in order to make it seem more organized and manageable for the mind, usually by assuming traditional, established paradigms that people have agreed upon for generations. These are of course learned behaviors, the unwitting enculturation every infant goes through while observing other people, who learned it from watching other people, and so on backwards into human history. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this; it’s a very functional paradigm and it has a very impressive pedigree, but we must remember that these are learned things and not necessarily a result of human nature. We learn to like art and music and certain foods because we are surrounded by people who like art and music and certain foods. We identify with paintings and literature that possess artistic quality, and stand like aspiring critics in museums fervently pondering this quality. There’s an unspoken agreement among intellectuals that holds them all to continue pretending that the whole damn idea of artistic quality isn’t just imaginary to begin with. This, among many other concepts such as democracy or freedom or love, is paid an inestimable amount of reverence for something that isn’t even really a thing at all. Quality. The shit drove Pirsig crazy, you know.
So does quality exist, or love, or democracy? If so, then where is it? Can I find it, see it and touch it? “Sticks and stones…” you know. Quality is just a word, just a thought some guy had years and years ago that he liked so much he decided he needed a way to share it. But it’s not tangible, it’s not visible, it’s not concrete, and people can’t even agree on what it is most of the time. The rock in my front yard, however, is tangible, visible, and concrete. I could ask my neighbor’s opinion and most likely get his assent that it is, in fact, a rock. The rock definitely exists; can we say the same thing about a concept such as quality or love?
Consider the rock a little more. Imagine if you will a straightforward conversation in which I hold a rock out to my neighbor and ask whether it is a rock. Naturally, my neighbor will say that it is a rock and he will be correct and the two of us will stand there and exist with the rock. Replay that same situation in your mind changing only one thing: assume for the sake of argument that I have never heard the word “rock,” and have used the word “shmiz” in its place for my entire life. In the scenario, I am holding a shmiz and I know that it is a shmiz I am holding. However, my neighbor will disagree and assert that I have a rock, a claim that I find completely ridiculous considering all the shmiz-related experience I’ve had in my life. And so I insist it is a shmiz, and he insists it is a rock and our disagreement is unresolved. When we agreed that it was a rock, the both of us were correct. Who was correct when we disagreed?
Naturally you ought to think the neighbor was, but that’s only because you sympathize with his perspective. Without the human lens, a rock isn’t necessarily a rock. It’s like that disgusting old debate about the tree falling in the forest and making a sound, only with an existential twist: the tree does not make a sound if no one is there to hear it because only the presence of a human awareness could assign the title of “sound” to what would otherwise just be air molecules rubbing together. “A rose by any other name can smell as sweet,” but only as long as someone is there to smell and name it. Otherwise it’s just another meaningless lump of matter like everything else.
Would it exist? Of course, the lump of matter would exist, but would the rose exist? I don’t believe it could truly be a “rose” unless someone was there to call it such. In so doing, a person bestows upon the flower its “rosehood” by symbolically associating the concrete object with the word arbitrarily pulled from abstraction. The rose itself may have always existed, but until that moment it did not exist as a rose.
This is getting confusing, I know, so I’m going to revisit a few thoughts. We’re examining the concept of existence now, particularly examining whether the imaginary can be considered real and vice versa. My awareness is proof of my existence, and my awareness of objects in the manifest world is proof of their existence. Although these actual objects could be considered to exist without the presence of a consciousness, they would exist without meaning. There would be no such thing as love or beauty in the whole universe if a person hadn’t thought of them. Even the concept of “existence” wouldn’t exist.
This is the human ingredient in reality: the relevance of things. Our great power over nature is our ability to discover or dictate what it means. And just what is so great about this power? How much does “meaning” really matter? What does “meaning” even really mean? What is significant about significance, and what is our reason for being reasonable?
I don’t know whether this metacritical approach will seem insightful or inane; in any case the questions were rhetorical. I don’t intend to be a nihilist, although I think it can be healthy for an intelligent person to understand philosophies with which he or she might not entirely agree. I believe these are important questions to consider, regardless of the fact that we are evidently not going to radically restructure what we classify as meaningful, significant, and reasonable. I’m not trying to alter these things, I only want to take a look at how things ended up the way they did, epistemologically.
So, based on the assertion that the concept of “existence” would not exist without human awareness, one might argue that said human awareness is conditional to the “existence” of anything. Hubris, I know, but this is a semantic discussion and I’m finally getting to the point. If we assume that subjective recognition has more bearing on existence than physical presence, we are a short step from recognizing concepts like love and quality as being fully existent.
But they’re just made up. They’re just ideas that people had off the tops of their heads, like anyone could have done. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but please remember that this is an act that expands existence. Thought is the creation of something from nothing, the human’s greatest contribution to reality. We are truly gods in the abstract world, creating and destroying and reforming entire realities within our minds. The potentialities of this abstract world have only begun to be discovered, and I believe that the most fertile of its parts are those still hidden in the spaces between our various human minds.
And that brings me back to consubstantiality and the appeal of being a writer. In writing, and more importantly in being read, we create conceptual bridges between our awarenesses. The work read becomes a common experience between the reader and author, an intellectual relation that recognizes the content of the work as being real, as actually existing. So we see that writing is man’s favorite way to exercise his divinity, using what are concretely mere ink and paper to create dazzling landscapes in the abstract world. This is the fun of writing.