604
(Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology – L’Être et le
néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, 1943) Unamuno, like Jean-Paul
Sartre and Nikos Kazantzakis after him, would commit themselves to a philosophy
of action, by which humanity’s role, if any, was to struggle, to believe, to invent.
And by these counter-resistant ploys, try to survive. Nature insists that we do so,
or that is one philosophy. Any alternative would merely result in our perishing
before we even realized we were a Being, alive, newly risen within a geography of
great difficulty
64.2.1 The Continuation of a Philosophy
Oxford scholar Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621) held
up psychology over the natural sciences as the key to unlocking the most rampant
ailment of his time: depression. He himself spoke of it as “gravidum cor, foetum
caput” (a heavy heart, embryonically lodged in his head). Over 300 years later, the
Catholic existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, declared his preference for the phrase “neosocrateism.” Whether “existentialism” actually dates to the thinking of Socrates, to
Søren Kierkegaard in 1841, to Fyodor Dostoevsky or to Friedrich Nietzsche, the
interpretive outcomes do not begin to encompass the ecological despair of the
twenty-first century, summed up by Albert Camus who wrote in his Myth of Sisyphus
that the only truly philosophical problem for humans hinged upon the ever looming
issue of “suicide.” For Sartre, it was the notion that “l’existence précède l’essence,”
and that, by implication, our free will had fashioned whatever essence we might
define for ourselves, over and above the fundamental impermanence, absurdities,
instability, and vulnerability of our lives, a realm as fitting for contemplation by
metaphysicians as by biochemists. All bolstered by the amalgam of our past experience into a kind of hardened, serial fiction trapped within a world “in-itself,” Sartre’s
definition. A biosphere, more precisely, that has absolutely no need of our one species, based on all the evidence, to date (Fig. 64.2).
Hence, to embrace life is to inculcate precursors: of thought, memory, and that
constellation of fever pitches and optimism that can effectively hold at bay the nullifying quotients, our annihilation. Such precursors involve an ancestry formed of
2–5 trillion molecules per human cell. Such invisible weight connotes the ultimate prefix.
In the ethnographic and shamanic literature, this primordial miasma, part physiology, part dreamtime, seduces the conscious or subconscious claims to affiliation.
When we invoke God, and Back-to-Nature, we are touching the live-wires of an
infinite antecedent comprising particles, gasses, waves, frequencies, forces, espied
laws of physics and other interactions, spins and the even greater proportion of
non- baryonic (unaccountable) dark matter and black holes out of which cosmology and exobiological research derive so much of their own speculative matrices.
A world, or worldly dimensions thought to exist simultaneously to, and/or before,
humanity—dimensions that will persist long after we are gone. The question as to
64 Fundaments of Observation and Melancholy
(Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology – L’Être et le
néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, 1943) Unamuno, like Jean-Paul
Sartre and Nikos Kazantzakis after him, would commit themselves to a philosophy
of action, by which humanity’s role, if any, was to struggle, to believe, to invent.
And by these counter-resistant ploys, try to survive. Nature insists that we do so,
or that is one philosophy. Any alternative would merely result in our perishing
before we even realized we were a Being, alive, newly risen within a geography of
great difficulty
64.2.1 The Continuation of a Philosophy
Oxford scholar Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621) held
up psychology over the natural sciences as the key to unlocking the most rampant
ailment of his time: depression. He himself spoke of it as “gravidum cor, foetum
caput” (a heavy heart, embryonically lodged in his head). Over 300 years later, the
Catholic existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, declared his preference for the phrase “neosocrateism.” Whether “existentialism” actually dates to the thinking of Socrates, to
Søren Kierkegaard in 1841, to Fyodor Dostoevsky or to Friedrich Nietzsche, the
interpretive outcomes do not begin to encompass the ecological despair of the
twenty-first century, summed up by Albert Camus who wrote in his Myth of Sisyphus
that the only truly philosophical problem for humans hinged upon the ever looming
issue of “suicide.” For Sartre, it was the notion that “l’existence précède l’essence,”
and that, by implication, our free will had fashioned whatever essence we might
define for ourselves, over and above the fundamental impermanence, absurdities,
instability, and vulnerability of our lives, a realm as fitting for contemplation by
metaphysicians as by biochemists. All bolstered by the amalgam of our past experience into a kind of hardened, serial fiction trapped within a world “in-itself,” Sartre’s
definition. A biosphere, more precisely, that has absolutely no need of our one species, based on all the evidence, to date (Fig. 64.2).
Hence, to embrace life is to inculcate precursors: of thought, memory, and that
constellation of fever pitches and optimism that can effectively hold at bay the nullifying quotients, our annihilation. Such precursors involve an ancestry formed of
2–5 trillion molecules per human cell. Such invisible weight connotes the ultimate prefix.
In the ethnographic and shamanic literature, this primordial miasma, part physiology, part dreamtime, seduces the conscious or subconscious claims to affiliation.
When we invoke God, and Back-to-Nature, we are touching the live-wires of an
infinite antecedent comprising particles, gasses, waves, frequencies, forces, espied
laws of physics and other interactions, spins and the even greater proportion of
non- baryonic (unaccountable) dark matter and black holes out of which cosmology and exobiological research derive so much of their own speculative matrices.
A world, or worldly dimensions thought to exist simultaneously to, and/or before,
humanity—dimensions that will persist long after we are gone. The question as to
64 Fundaments of Observation and Melancholy