On Love and Angst
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—come afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.” – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
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Every philosophical inquiry is born of some angst
which stems from one’s confusion in facing a certain inconsistency of the world
(whether it be the world of numbers, particles, matters, people, or spirits).
If one is so bothered by the inconsistency to the point that he takes it to be
his vocational duty to resolve the tension, philosophy is his calling. So, what
is my angst? What form of inconsistency am I bothered with?
Here is the origin of my Wertherian angst: 남자는 그가 사랑하는 이가 그를 무심하게 바라볼 때,
시인이 되고 철학자가 된다.[1]
My psychotherapist once noted to me that I seem to
tend to idealize romance in hope of escaping from my depressing situations and
traumas. Also, a friend of mine has pointed out that what I love is my idea of her
rather than the person herself. To these remarks, I respond by contending that
the fact that the origin of my angst is my own idea, or idealization, does by
no means make less urgent its inquiry. Just as Davidson wrote, one cannot get
out of his own skins as to compare his thoughts and the world. All that are
available to us are these phenomenological impulses, and we must somehow make a
transcendental sense out of their idealism.
The inconsistency that struck me in my youth was that
between two givens of the world: my desire and the reality. The intentionality
of orectic states has the world-to-mind direction of fit in which its condition
of satisfaction is that facts conform to the (propositional) contents of
desire. Usually, the fit is achieved by altering the reality via actions.
However, when the given desire is not accompanied with corresponding power to
make alterations, i.e., if the world is indifferent to the demands of one’s
heart—when there is nothing one can do about the cold stare—the inconsistency
arises, and this inconsistency insisted itself on me as a conundrum to solve. To
put it in Heideggerian terms, the dasein that I am comes in the context
of the world in which her rejection is given as an affordance to cope
with. There is no who I am apart from this peculiar way of being-in-the-world;
John Pester was perhaps onto something when he called me “peculiar” in front of
all students during a school meeting.
The inconsistency between two givens (mind and the
world), insofar as the tension is conceived as an inconsistency, generates
uneasiness (or, Lockean-Humean pain) which results in sufferings. Thus, the
fundamental question for me to answer was that of sufferings. Why do I suffer?
What is the meaning of my tears? Why are things the way that they are rather
than some other ways?
Inconsistency is unendurable. When the power to alter
facts is unavailable, the only way to save oneself from sufferings is by
rendering things consistent through reflective equilibrium. This process of
thought experiment operates on the faith that all things work together for
good, that the inconsistency is only apparent, but everything is actually
fit together within the bigger picture (Romans 8:28). The mission is
then to see whether there is a good reason to accept this faith.
The question “What is the meaning of my sufferings”
requires asking “Does God (the guarantor of consistency) exist?” (Perhaps, this
is why the nature of God qua guarantor is logos.) In turn, the
theological question of the existence of God requires asking the
epistemological question of justification: How can one justify his beliefs (i.e.,
how can one establish the correspondence relation between his thoughts and facts—whereas
the direction of fit in correspondence is either mind-to-world or world-to-mind)?
Through philosophical investigations in my
undergraduate years (2011-2017), I came to the general consensus that the epistemic
foundation (unmoved mover, self-justifying propositions, first principle, etc.)
is a myth—that there is no good reason to accept the faith.
Without the faith that the inconsistency is only
apparent, one must either accept the inconsistency as it is or find another way
to nullify its force. The first option, which is often recommended in the form
of gnostic meditation, I think is abstruse. Thus, I had to nullify its force in
some other way. Either the inconsistency is the reality, God is evil, and she
was meant to hurt me or God does not exist, the reality is barren of
logical structures, and my encounter with her is a coincidence. How can
one live under the impression that God is malevolent, i.e., does everything within
His power to cause harms? Thus, I became an atheist and decided to embrace the
meaninglessness of my sufferings (i.e., that I am not suffering after all) by
rejecting the world in which her rejection is given as a contextual
affordance to cope with, by rejecting the idea of “inconsistency” and furthermore
“logic” as an outdated concept.
How should we understand her missing presence? What
should we make of this destitute time? How can we endure uncertainty? What
should we do with the Nietzschean corpse of God? Why should I not kill myself at
the absurdity of life? Is morality possible with atheism? What should I do now
that I have turned away from aseret hadevarim?
These questions were the next stages of my inquiry
during which I was working on my MA thesis (2019-2020). But the more I tried atheism, the
more I sensed that solitude, solipsism, and disenchantment are psychologically
unbearable. There was no way I could move on without supposing that the
end must be good, and I do go on anyway. So, one either believes (or
continues playing the game of doxa) or is dead (logged out). Perhaps,
the right question to ask was not whether God exists and whether I could
justify my faith in His existence, but whether I could do away with the idea of
God, of truth, of meaning, of hope, of the possibility of reciprocal love, of
logical consistency. I came to succumb to the conclusion that the language-game
of God (morality and rational agency) is an ineliminable part of human culture and
praxis. At this point, I did turn away from atheism and began to reconsider the
angle from which I approach my angst.
Since 2022, I have therefore been asking these new questions
instead:
How should I (have) interpret(ed) her gestures? In
what sense should I take the sufferings as a process unto good? In what way can
I include her stare in my language-world? What referential-intentional relation
should my mind have with the reality? How can I resolve the tension between my
orectic and doxastic attitudes towards the world of affordances?
But here is a dark thought that accompanies this
series of new questions. Am I missing the mark altogether? Should I have built
practical careers if my objective was to convince her to be with me?
Should I have regarded her as a prize to win over and conceal this cunning mindset in order to play the game successfully? There is a joke amongst philosophers
that the end of our inquiries would be something like the following title of a
dissertation: “On Happiness; Why One Should Major in Finance.” Should I have studied
finance or engineering instead of taking the inconsistency of the world
seriously? Should I have not taken Socrates as my role-model?
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What does it mean to have a feeling for someone else?
What does it mean to love a person?
I did not choose to have this feeling for her. But I also resist the claim
that my feeling is a mere impulse, given certain conditions and dispositions.
It was given, but not accidentally. Nor am I a puppet of fate. Here is the
implication of these ways of understanding love: I would have still chosen to endorse
my feeling for her, all things considered, i.e., even if I was given other options.
To put the matter in modal semantics, in every possible world, I would have developed
this feeling for her, should we come across each other.
Here is the assertion:
To love someone is to summon something out of nothing,
to insist lawfulness and orderliness (normativity) that things ought to have been this way,
to wave fists with anguish in the air, to uphold necessary connections against
contingency and arbitrariness, to breathe destiny (spirit) into coincidences (mud),
to draw Kantian lines between Humean dots.
When we reject each other’s heart, our words carry a
philosophical claim—that one’s particular theoretical model of the world
(deductive-nomological or inductive-statistical) is incoherent, that the model fails
to maintain any surjective relation with the reality it purports to describe.
For this reason, I came to the following realization.
To those to whom I said no, I owe a sincere apology. In rejecting their
hearts, I should have been more careful and sympathetic. I should have in
humility appreciated their bravery in opening themselves up to me. Each of them
had to carry a cross in pain and agony for the sake of my sins. They had to
suffer because of my blindness and arrogance. However, the same blindness and arrogance
do not belong to her rejection of my heart because, here, the fault is
with my peculiar disposition (being-in-the-world), which takes her cold
stare seriously, to be sensitive to what many of us simply pass-over in
good faith.
===
“And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the
man, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh in its
place. And Jehovah God built the rib, which He had taken from the man, into a
woman and brought her to the man.” (Genesis 2:20-21) The word for rib in
Sumerian language is nin-ti which also means life.
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