Jiani Gi
Philosophy I
I had ideas about definitions, but then I noticed that death vindicates the persecuted martyr and breath inducts her into villainy. She dares to exist with purpose concentric not about me, which is to say she dares to take a breath that does not harbor my name, daughter, the name of her son.
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Now we place too much credence in time. It’s a setting, an environment. No catalyst is the cycling of night with the day, except for the fear of the depth of darkness, not to be interchanged with fear of lack of warmth[1]. We fear a lack of warmth, biologically. Aversions to blackness, those developed in translation.
Yet, time is not due for dismissal solely on the basis that it seems immaterial. I can think of the myriad things that run along its tangential, fill in the negative space between those things we name, those sons we bare, those skins we bare. All the movement that we can’t see is derivative of all that we can. And just as the sun purports birth, so too, the night harnesses time. Show me the land of the martyred heroine vessel and I’ll know existence without the qualification of economy.
— — — —
Language is an economy too. Speech is always self-conscious and self-interested. Don’t trust these words. Each sound fulfills a purpose. The hierarchy of verbiage and predilections towards predicates— which move like time but are always implicit— are the qualification of the sentence (stop!), it doesn’t have to be a conscious thing. Stratification is an organizing mechanism. No malice in ordering entropy. Just a job. Sustains an economy in which each word favors itself, or must sacrifice its place. Survival doesn’t have to be a conscious thing.
Philosophy II: The Body is Lying (Unsourced/Conjecture)
I will begin with this theory:
Existence is a thing that is experienced, not something that itself experiences.
An experience is an instance of something larger or more general than itself. Thus, the momentary manifestation of awareness of that experience that human beings call intelligent life is derivative. Its integrated form? Probably some larger cosmological or otherwise physical phenomenon, easily conflated with selfhood, personhood, and or personality. That is of no consequence in a system that has no object morality or God.
The potential existence of God through this stratum is paradoxically complicated. If it is reasonable to assert that existence, because it is derivative, as a part and not a whole must in those individual manifestations contribute in some way to its integral form, then existence serves a purpose that is wholly outside of itself. This would mean that it is not autonomous, or in different terms, only something that serves no purpose is autonomous because it is not derivative.
How can a moral absolute or God exist is He is to be sovereign?
The first explanation of this paradox, is not really an explanation. God, if an autonomous agent, resides in the stead of existence. He is a manifestation of biological/cosmic need for survival as it is met with absence. However, that would make Him more resembling to a second derivative which is theoretically further from “the truth” or whole integral. In this case, if He were somehow the last derivative He would basically be the lowest common denominator for the integral. For example say:
—Human existence is represented by the rather simple function 7x^3+ 3.
Then our lowest derivative would be: 42. And that 42 would represent God.
—Yet, there is another issue with this comparison in that numerals are themselves representations of a system which would make 42-God, not autonomous after all.
The second possible solution to the question of a moral absolute is to say that it occurs where there is no existence, and siphon the vagaries off to the inherent semantic inadequacy and expression.
The tangential solution to the initial imposition of existence as purposeful and derivative is that moral absolutes are simply not absolute, and that God(s) can exist, they just cannot be sovereign.
Human beings, though we sometimes tend to cling to quasi moral-absolutist ideals, do not actually operate under them. Instead, we create distinctions so that the impossibility of living completely ethically becomes slightly less impossible. Instead of protecting all life forms, we only protect those that align best with our survival. For some that presents itself as protecting their identified species, for others race, religion, appearance, function. The institution of hierarchies is an attempt to rationalize and/or reconcile the experience of selfhood relationally. No conscious entity knows what it is independently, and cannot exist independently. Existence operates off of precedent, and language— the ultimate human organizational tool— is transactional to a fault; it can’t expose truth because it was created to aid survival. The moment a person makes a decision, the way that language forces the brain to choose a specific meaning from a set of stimuli, they have deviated from the truth. This phenomenon could be partially responsible for human shortcomings in trying to undo the things we call unjust without replacing them with some perpetuation of a form of categorization we have already inherited. A body is like a decision; it is an instance or experience of the larger thing of which it is apart. However, the conscious entity must prioritize itself, and think of itself as individual in order to do so if it is to continue to be. Something about the truth of the universe and environment of life requires a bit of misdirection, illusion, and deceit.
Part of the epic saga of the true integral form is that it lies.
[1] Nikki Giovanni, Knoxville, Tennessee