As some of you might have guessed, I am a student of many different paradigms of thought and due to this I’d like to incorporate some of them into the discussion about theory. During the class discussion about the Heidegger piece I brought up another philosopher by the name of P.D. Ouspensky and his work is a focus currently of my private studies. I think that he may have something to offer in the way of theory, the process of thinking and moreover a bit to contribute to the idea of digital media.
Heidegger makes a point to express his opinion that we are not thinking and that this very idea is what is most thought provoking for him. The idea that we as people are currently not thinking is a bit hard to swallow at first. Ouspensky takes this a step further, even supporting Heidegger, to suggest that not only are we not thinking but that we aren’t even truly conscious. This philosopher believes that there are various different states of awareness and that, as a people, we tend to live in only the first two of these states which he calls sleep and waking state.
The sleep state I am sure you are very familiar with but the waking state is of primary concern here. In this waking state we are awake but we are not truly aware. We function in this state in very much like automata and we are driven in this state by the external forces surrounding us. In this daily routine where we spend the vast majority of our time consumed in this waking state there is very little thinking to be done and even less of it an “intentional” sort.
Taking a quote from Heidegger that Mark had already pointed out in his post, “We are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only towards something that in turn inclines towards us, towards our essential being,” we see that Heidegger is referencing this “essential being” which very well could be seen as the essence of our being if you will. This is where Heidegger and Ouspensky disagree.
Ouspensky believes that there are two, not one, driving forces inside man. These two forces are personality and essence. Personality, Ouspensky explains, is the part of us that is acquired while essence is what is born in man. From birth we all have drives, predispositions towards certain things. We all have innate likes and dislikes, inclinations towards different ways of reacting towards stimulus. These predispositions are part of our very being, our “essential being”. However, as we grow older we develop other likes and dislikes, ones that change and fluctuate with us over time. These are largely dependent on other people around us, external influences that steer us in one direction or another. These are parts of our personality as it develops and is not directly tied to our “essential being”.
(This is directly what I was referencing in class when I had made the statement that not all people are predisposed to ‘thinking’. It is possible that even thinking may not appeal towards a person’s essential being and trying to foster that in them will do very little good – I’m sure Heidegger and Ouspensky would both agree.)
This is important to note because with this sort of distinction we can see that we incline towards not only the things that incline towards our essential being but also the things that incline towards our personality. The latter serves only as a distraction however; it appeals to and gratifies this part of our personality and denies us the pursuit of that which appeals to our true self. It is this idea of self that brings me to the topic of digital media and ties this all together.
In this world of ‘digital media’ it seems that there is no end to the desire for “self expression”. This is interesting since Ouspensky would have us believe that we are unconscious all the time and have very little knowledge, if any, about our true self. There must be some relevance to this argument considering that there have been religions all over the East for centuries that have long since been in the pursuit of self-realization and understanding leading further to objective awareness. So if we have no realization of who we are and moreover we certainly aren’t thinking then how can we possibly set out on the journey of self expression through digital media?
This is a theory.
Currently in digital media we begin to see a trend with how people interact with it. Online, for example, people develop these ‘profiles’ on places like MySpace and Facebook where not only are they pursuing a detailed inventory of who they are but they are also, at the very same time, making an attempt to appeal to the interests of other people in these communities. This is not so very unlike these digitally created ‘avatars’ and other fictitious personalities that crop up in the tens of thousands each day. Behind this veil of anonymity we can be exactly who we want to be and no one will be the wiser – or so we hope. We collect artifacts from popular media, from volumes of history, from the world around us as if we could somehow use these trinkets to build ourselves, as if our essential being were some patchwork quilt, to identify ourselves and we use them as badges that we put on display for others to see and admire.
However, it is clear to see that none of these examples are a representation of our true selves. Is it possible that somewhere, deep inside ourselves, we are even slightly aware of what Ouspensky was talking about? Is there any credence to the idea that we know that we have no clear idea of who we are, of our own “essential being”, and we satiate this void by living through these avatars online? Perhaps we have some deep rooted feeling that we are asleep and rather than struggle to wake up, to take the long and arduous path to knowing ourselves and thinking, we instead deflect our energies into modeling these personalities that we can quantify and calculate from an objective perspective?
As an aside I wonder if this has an appeal to Maggie or Preston. This ‘disconnection’ that they both described from the digital world was refreshing they said. Maggie even went so far as to distance herself from the rest of the world around her. I wonder, while she was there, if she had any time for personal reflection while she was admiring the beauty of a sunrise or the dancing golden light of a campfire.
I know that I went a long way out to come back to where I started but I’m fond of trips down the rabbit hole. Thank you for coming with me.
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