According to the famous words of Jean-Paul Sartre, a person is doomed to be free. However, you should not deceive yourself into thinking that this means that we are truly free and “objectively”. Freedom is not an external definition of a person, but a subjective internal reality, the possibility and inevitability of choice that we constantly experience. Naturally, a person wants to dispose of freedom correctly, but he never has enough information to be sure what exactly turns out to be correct. As the poet wrote, “we cannot predict how our word will respond” - and equally how our deed will respond, whether our path leads where we want, and whether we want it at all. The choice, however, has to be made. Every second we are sentenced to him, even when we refuse to choose, and every decision we make is irrevocable,irrevocable as the very past absorbing him. Awareness of this situation, of this enormous responsibility gives rise to existential anxiety in the most perspicacious of us, and sometimes an existential crisis, potentially continuing throughout our lives, as, for example, in Emil Cioran. Both states are a reaction to a painful wound, a gap between the vital desire to know how we should be in this world and what to do, what to desire and how to get what we want, and the lack of such knowledge. To resolve these issues, an idea is required about the location of a person in the most general context of reality (what is called the problem of the meaning of life), about the conditions and laws of our happiness and unhappiness, about those fundamental questions of being that science is methodologically unable to answer. Philosophy is an attempt to heal this wound,and man himself in his highest manifestations is a child of this wound.
The side of the personality that is responsible for asking about the principles and laws of our existence, the active desire to know oneself in its connection with the whole, I will allow myself to call metaphysical consciousness. Metaphysics is understood here in the spirit of its classical interpretation, coming from the Aristotelian tradition, as a doctrine of the first principles of being, to which the fundamental level of self-knowledge belongs, for the latter is impossible without explaining our place in the general picture of the universe and the nature of our connection with it. Metaphysics is above "physics", above science, not in a hierarchical, but in a structural sense, for it extends to objects, although they go beyond the limits of science, but are fundamentally important for our existence and cannot remain without some kind of solution. This in no way means that philosophy should come into conflict with science; on the contrary,nowadays it becomes clear as never before that philosophy can achieve a productive exit beyond its limits only in firm reliance on the current state of scientific knowledge, using it, and not rejecting it, as it often happened in the past.
Metaphysical consciousness does not necessarily rise in a person to philosophical creativity. There is no need for that. However, it is a fundamental characteristic of a developed, full-fledged personality that elevates us above prose and the "physics" of the surrounding world and gives a person true greatness. A person in whom this light does not glow is deprived of the most important dimension of his own being and dwells in a flat, two-dimensional reality. In one of the most famous passages in the history of philosophical thought, Blaise Pascal writes ("Thoughts on Religion and Other Subjects"):
The tasks set by metaphysical consciousness are so heavy and so heavy their burden that most of us have only a temporary and very superficial interest in them, usually at the very beginning of life. Sincere curiosity soon fades away, feeble independent attempts to get through to answers are discarded altogether. People close their eyes to the fact that it is too scary to see, but immediately they cannot figure it out, and they uncritically perceive ready-made concepts that have surfaced to the surface of mass culture, somehow cobbled together, making them their guide in life.
It would seem that this is a good way out, but this “leadership” is not at all disinterested and is not at all concerned with our well-being. Each mass ideology, including religious, contains a certain markup of the structure of power relations, in which you are assigned a place that is unlikely to please you and which has very little to do with your happiness. For example, behind the institutions of slavery, serfdom and caste in ancient times there was the idea that people, by the will of God or other cosmic forces, are born with a different set of rights and opportunities and should follow the lifestyle of the social stratum where they were born, without murmuring submission to those who higher. For the most part, slaves, serfs and members of the lower castes shared this view. The refusal of women to vote until the end of the 19th century was motivated by the fact that women are more stupid and lower than men,and the fact that by leaving men to decide important matters, they only make their life easier. Most of the women, again, agreed with this. There are many such examples, and they all say one thing - by accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as it happens everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.that by letting men decide important matters, they only make their life easier. Most of the women, again, agreed with this. There are many such examples, and they all say one thing - by accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as it happens everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.that by letting men decide important matters, they only make their life easier. Most of the women, again, agreed with this. There are many such examples, and they all say one thing - by accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.they only make their life easier. Most of the women, again, agreed with this. There are many such examples, and they all say one thing - by accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.they only make their life easier. Most of the women, again, agreed with this. There are many such examples, and they all say one thing - by accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.and they all speak about one thing - accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to independently choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.and they all speak about one thing - accepting the ideas transmitted by mass culture and political propaganda, we not only refuse the freedom to try to independently choose our own path in life, but also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.but we also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.but we also inevitably fall into the net of a certain system of domination and suppression. Having perceived the ready-made and displayed answers to the masses, you, with a probability approaching one hundred percent, become in one way or another someone's slave or serf, at least, as is the case everywhere today, a slave to the craving for consumption for show, your own illusions about the goodness of this act and the political and economic forces, this is the consumption of those providing.it is the consumption of the providers.it is the consumption of the providers.
In the current era, there are enough such ideologies ready to take us into their own hands. And if we talk about the secular, secular part of them, then its essence was well formulated by Slava ižek (interview in 2013):
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The problem with hedonistic cynicism is not at all that it proclaims happiness as the main goal (however, often he speaks not of happiness, but of much flatter pleasure). The fact is that the means he offers to achieve this goal are based on a superficial and erroneous understanding of human psychology and his internal structure, they simply do not work and trusting them, we make a false bet. Finding happiness within the framework of the modern ideology of hedonistic cynicism is extremely problematic, it is not by chance that the world professing it is experiencing an epidemic of suffering, stress and depression, while at the same time generating visual images of euphoria that lure new adherents into it.
Thus, people are divided into two categories, the boundaries between which are permeable and flexible. In some, the light of metaphysical consciousness burns - an active need to comprehend one's existence and place in the general picture of the world, the need to know oneself and the laws of one's own inner world, arising from the laws of the outer world, and to make this knowledge the basis of life decisions.
In others, it either went out or never really caught on fire, and they, often unconsciously, follow mass philosophies, cobbled together so stupidly and awkwardly that they inevitably lead them not at all where they promise.
It is in our interests to preserve in ourselves and others the spark of independent metaphysical questioning - both because it, a rare phenomenon in nature, is beautiful in itself, and because only it can lead to true freedom. Of course, we must admit that a happy life is more than possible without metaphysical consciousness, in a two-dimensional reality, no matter how poor it is in forms and colors. But although two-dimensional creatures are freer from the yoke of existential anxiety and horror, they face existential crises much less often and pass them much easier, their world has its own predators: nothing can protect them from the tenacious fingers of mass ideologies that do not contribute to happiness at all. Finally, they are not able to escape from the captivity of their own mistakes, once falling into them:not being able to analyze themselves and their life situation in their connection with the broad context of reality and draw practical conclusions from this, they by inertia repeat their mistakes to a bad infinity.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky