We Anticipate Forever

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We Anticipate Forever


There is only waiting. All time is passing
We were here/together.
We laid.
We slept.
We dreamt.
We woke.



We should know some might think that all existence is to be dealt with, without meaning and direction. Despite the opinions of some, there are many who believe in an existence with an ending. In search of such meaning and direction is set within human capacity but the answers go without universal acceptance, and some go without answers entirely. Perhaps we could consider each to their own as we look for definition and direction, as experience of humanity, experience of peers and experience of living is dramatically different. The search and questions are often the same but the line of direction changes as some cast away their problems through an existence of ‘god’ whilst others question it and even more just accept an inevitable unknowingness. Discussion and technical communication from the likes of Sartre, Kant and Schopenhauer define existentialism, ontology and epistemology as we search for truth and (forever) justification of this truth. To here we begin in defining two parts of a human search, the unanswered question of why, the ‘Ens Causa Sui’ and the ambivalent attempted answers and discovery of the search.

The approach of philosophy towards art in photographs happens within the nature of character. Charles Baudelaire believed photography lacked in soul, as art was the reproduction of nature (Baudelaire 2), such reproduction. “As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. “ (Baudelaire 2). If the soul is not within the photographer then it could stand within the character. The model becomes less of a model, and more of a person within a narrative, defining a persona that exists within each and every one of us. Through the slow study of an expression there is a life drawn between the world in which we live and the world where we exist, that is formed through narratives. Narrative from images relating and portraying to the viewer as the experience of human relations, the subtle disperse of emotion and feeling of the inside are blindly open to you, the audience. These characters from the images simulate the ideas that we all think and feel at times, to live and die on this earth. They are here with reference to the philosophers of existence to question god, question humanity and journey into the search of direction, meaning and hope- hope of something much more in a life in which we live.

To here from wherever we stand there must be realization. Realization of both a higher power and continual awareness amongst peers. Awareness between You and I. We walk together, if I speed, you slow. The balance between one and another is the simple shift of weight between your left foot and right foot as you walk. It’s the continuous momentum and freedom that keeps you moving. The freedom is only disbanded when we lose placement between each other. Upon awakening is a new perception but a perception you can never look back from.

There is something extraordinary about us Humans that clearly distinguish ourselves from other life forms in the world. It is not a hierarchy or ill-informed pro-human development movement, but rather what Descartes renounces as a single principle. “I Think, Therefore I am” (Descartes. Part 1, article 7). Thought exists. This is not to say that it does not exist in other mammals but as our domination on this planet has shown us, we are the most advanced in certain aspects. It is a phenomenological thought that classifies us in our ability to think beyond our own existence. Our mental composition is only what could be described as the formation of higher power. Phenomenology, our structure of experience and consciousness, is restricted to humans, which resides beyond our sensory field and into a transcendental experience.

Sometimes I feel like I’m here only because you’re here. You seem to know what you’re doing. Everybody else does. Dispersed, backs to the wall, backs to each other, it’s claustrophobic, it’s loud, and the only conversations happening, happen between two people dipping in and out of my aural nerve.

Out and about at night, a controlled set of morals and fluent in what is deemed cool, acting the part seems to be far from what we could call real. Situations become more like plays, we huddle and form to our corners, we watch each other as morals droop through the liquid death and soon the ones that are acting out could be considered the real as we, the ones on the sidelines, are still standing trying to wonder if we’re doing it right

As the state of the individual is defined and swayed by our surroundings, through the phenomena around us- both physical and transcendental, we can sometimes find ourselves too overtly aware of each other, thus we come to Schopenhauer’s ‘Moral Consciousness’ (Schopenhauer 57-67). Perception is awoken and it is this Moral that we align ourselves with Humanity. To be both the tormentor and tormented, we allow ourselves to feel for the opposite party, we open to the sublime, “tranquillity tinged with terror” as described by Edmunde Burke. (Schopenhauer 61). To sympathize and identify with the ‘Other’ is a quality ascertained by the post-modern society we are currently in. What connects ourselves to this real is the undeniable human action of emotion. Sartre portrays true emotion as an uncontrollable act, a reaction of causality, and true to that of what is real.

Baudrillards view of the real, and further the hyper real, is best portrayed in this paragraph from Astral America:

“Sex, beach and mountains. Sex and beach, beach and mountains. Mountains and sex. A few concepts. Sex and concepts. ‘Just a life’.
Everything is destined to reappear as a simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world. When the only physical beauty is created by plastic surgery, the only urban beauty by landscape surgery, the only opinion by opinion poll surgery...and now, with genetic engineering, along comes plastic surgery for the whole human species.”
(Baudrillard 32)

Looking towards the post-minded human world, Baudrillard’s view of the hyper real in ‘Astral America’ is very similar to the ideas from Zizek’s ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’. A fantasy reality deemed real. In ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ he suggests that real emotion- that which is an unconscious act of the body, is something only revealed at its most traumatic peak. He examples the 9/11 Attacks of the World Trade Centre, whilst the initial present act is the unimaginable, the abject, the post-act of the terrorism becomes “much more symbolic than real.” (Zizek 5). That is to say, hyperized by the media, what we see becomes a processed thought- that of reality and no longer a true emotion. Through emotion, Sartre describes this uncontrollable ‘thing’ to be Duality, the split between real and reality, the physical and non-physical. The gap between body and mind is formed as we lose control between one and another.

Our body and mind is split between being both perceived and perceiving. In a world of objects, objects that can only be perceived, we are just apart of this, no different from one another. Schopenhauer says we are both subject (perceiver) and object (perceived), both will and representation. Regarding that, without object there is no subject. In the unity of duality we see ourselves as will/the perceiver/our internal movements, but our body moved by will is also being perceived as an external object. He states, “the body is nothing but the act of Will objectified, that is, translated into perception” (Schopenhauer 33). Within the self there is this transition, but also in the perception of Other- life forms and beings around us with the capability of perceiving and being perceived.

In the perception of others, Sartre articulates ontology into irreducible categories: being in-itself, being for-itself, the Other-self and presence-to-self. (Sartre 15-27) Where we currently sit in the internal is the presence-to-self, where Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’ could be considered and also where we see our transcendental self. The being in-itself and for-itself is noted as our non-conscious and consciousness, our past experience and our projected-future experience which in parallel is the difference between the in-itself and for-itself. We would normally assume to sit in our consciousness, but because (as stated earlier) emotions can be an uncontrollable affect, this is beyond our consciousness as we have little control over our body at times. The last is the external, the Other-self, what we see as our projected self onto others. It is the external to our self, an affect of another onto our self and vice versa, what Husserl calls an eidectic reduction.




Out of touch, out of just, out of love.
We form, we relate and we live with one another.
It isn’t something we normally think twice about. But today we’re here together. What we see in each other is what we see in ourselves. I can’t help but think with thoughts outside my own body.
So much to say, so little form into words and even less come out of my mouth.
It is the loss of relation between two people.
Embraced in arms, a one sided love before the news becomes mutual.

All of the self’s rest within a place outside of time and space. They exist through a connection in the body, but without body there is no way in which they can be perceived (by humans), and some respect, exist. From the long-winded words of quasi relations, it is easier to understand to apply it to a situation.

What we can analyze from one perspective is the presence-to-self and the being and for-itself. The actions defined in touch as one comforts and one pulls always. Conscious of where your hands rest as you embrace, how your head rests on shoulders or maybe it does not, the thoughts internal do not reflect through the external. The other-self is telling the tale of the moral consciousness, to feel and to be felt, the tormentor and the tormented. What it is to love and to lose, it is the reaction of both that pulls us at the unease of the situation.

If we take for example, an apple sitting on a table, from the diagram (below) we can come to several conclusions. At the External/Other, we know from a sensory perspective that the ‘object’ (apple) is patchy red, pale yellow in places, smooth, near round, has a small point sticking out of it. These points taken to our being in-itself, our past experience, suggest that the small point is in fact a stalk, the object- round, smooth and red is an apple. As it is, the physicality of the apple is not all that exists. In suggestion from our other-self in correspondence with our being in-itself, we know that a crunchy apple (by opinion) is better than a mushy apple. We know this from either experience or being told from a believable or reliable source. Before this happens the apple simply exists, it is an object outside of time and space to us. It has not been perceived therefore we cannot tell where this apple currently is, by extension whether it actually exists assuming life is just a perception. Relation to Schopenhauer’s conclusion of objects to not exist without subjects, we cannot to ever prove this, but a theory nonetheless.



As the diagram suggests, the internal workings of the self are outside of time and space, where our body and actions are within. It is thought that the connection point between these two parts exist at the point between the two hemispheres of the brain: our Pineal Gland. ‘Seat of the soul’ as it is referred to, it only suggests a connection with something greater. As Schopenhauer states, we all have the same energy flowing between us, looking inward to our self implies looking towards the universe. (Schopenhauer 28)

In ‘The World as Will’ Schopenhauer talks of “perennial philosophical reflection” (Schopenhauer 28) a basic energy, an energy that flows through objects and people. Theoretically we are all made of this energy, we are all compatible with one another. To conclude that coming into contact with this energy that flows inside us- that is, to find ones self, would mean finding the universe. This greater connection between bodies and minds is looking towards a theory of God and unity of humanity. Amongst this unity we have our ‘moral consciousness’ (Kant 10-22). Parallel to the freedom of being that exists within man is a coextensive responsibility (Sartre 16). It is, simply put as our responsibility to the ‘world’ – everything that exists around us that we influence/affect. Described as a “horizon of meaning” (Sartre 16), an indefinable law or rule that we abide to, not for reasons of the psychology of what is right and wrong, but rather an instinct in its most basic form. The raw instinct that Schopenhauer calls Will and what relates to Kant’s ‘Good Will’. This responsibility crosses over between psychological and ontological, an interaction between body (in a social sense) and mind.

As humans we constantly search for some sort of meaning, of both direction and answers. Kant’s ‘Good Will’ and ‘Moral Law’ is based from looking at humans a priori, that is to look at humans without actions and rather inner principles, as looking a posteriori will be unsuccessful as general expectations of humans are never met and human behaviour can look like a declination from the expected as we move to an aesthetic world rather than one based on logic. It “is not the actions one sees, but their inner principles, which one does not see” (Kant 9). Good will and moral law are the basis for direction metaphysically, actions by humans that do not result in the praise of others, nor do they do it for themselves, they are pure in action. This will is unaffected and perhaps even in explainable by words, although it should be known the existence of such is a duty we fulfil and react to, not always, but at times that show an interconnectivity between peers and surroundings.

In a world of will as defined by Schopenhauer, he suggests, the world is a frightening place. What we do, we do on impulse. We strive for existence with no real promise of an ending worth living or dying for. Will is the very basic principle of existence, there is no knowledge or laws binding our ‘will’ to what we have, only good will which is a transcendental thought and could be ignored on a more primitive level of humanity. We are free within this world, and free within this will. In this anthropomorphic world, everything is meaningless. No direction. No Hope. Certainly no God, without evidence other than a higher thought. It is an eternal frustration, as we move to nothing within our reach and essentially we move nowhere. (Schopenhauer 37)


In a portrayal of this concept, it is a mere mood that lights the narrative of an artwork. Despite the negative out view of Schopenhauer’s ‘World of Will’, there is also a hope reflected from the work of other philosophers. It’s an aesthetic experience that separates itself from other experiences. Pure in separation of subject from object, which what we see through our eyes is not logical in any way but instead is aesthetic. Seeing objects not for their uses, but for their build. If we were to look at a chair, we would think of it not as an object for sitting but rather admire its form and shape. Art, is highly regarded in an aesthetic experience, it is the attempt to create divine intervention- to truly touch on emotion, as Zizek will explain this can happen through the unexplainable terror of the unimaginable. In what is a personal event, so simple from the outside- we are humans, perceiving one another aesthetically with little effort, but there remains much more deeper into the surface than we first see.

Henson’s life work revolves around the “social and psychological aspects of the human condition”, he “find[s] their distinctive expression through his manipulation of the unique properties of the photographic medium.” (Crombie 1)



Bill Henson, Untitled

Body, form, shape are all aesthetic qualities lit with a dark truth. Models in their prepubescent years portray a simple look. No part of it is intended to be suggestive in any way but behind the gaze of quiet eyes is a lot more to be considered than just a bare body, both revealing an impassive truth but nothing at all. A body is no longer photographed as a body but more of a soul. In his catalogue ‘Bill Henson’ they begin to explain his work as a creative puzzle. “It dwells on the value of what is difficult and mysterious in the drama of each individuals existence”. (Crombie 3) He provides a new look on what is considered the familiar, new worlds, new outlooks on suburbia. What is not just a formation of homes is a new age of ocular pleasure. Hidden within the black is how we, as emotional humans, live each day. It is a society with a great complex to how we’re perceived, and to how we shield ourselves from the true vulnerability we hide.

As pessimistic as Schopenhauer may be, there is no reason to denounce any of his words, as it a split opinion on the matter. His world of will is far from Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, where God- although impossible to prove, does exist. Possibly not in the image that has been hyper realized by everyday and tales through Christianity, but rather the formation of god and it’s association with morality and happiness. He explains that one cannot be separated from the other, Voltaire goes as far to say that it would be necessary to invent god if he did not exist in an epistle to ‘The Three Imposters’ author.


“If the heavens, stripped of his noble imprint,
Could ever cease to attest to his being,
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
Let the wise man announce him and kings fear him.
Kings, if you oppress me, if your eminencies disdain
The tears of the innocent that you cause to flow,
My avenger is in the heavens: learn to tremble.
Such, at least, is the fruit of a useful creed.”

(If God Did Not Exist It, Would Be Necessary To Invent Him 3)


It is a world not necessarily true but it is this world where an idea is bound to emotion, it is an informal unwritten law to how we live. In optimism, a perceived ending and continuous movement in the same direction. Jean Paul Sartre has the same recreation of this idea but through a similar aspect in that he calls it the ‘Ens Causa Sui’, what in religion we could translate to God but from French it could also translate to the ‘completion of man’. (Sartre 21) In completion, although different for all, there must be unity between the duality of body and mind. The comprehension of surroundings must be beyond aware, to a belief that objects and subjects align. This is a world with both distinction and definition, both logic and beauty, as they can coexist within the same. Essentially we are describing heaven, the forever happiness and morality of ourselves.

Relations between humans is difficult to perceive when each is to their own, each is to hide their own, and each is to portray something different from the truth… blind truth. Emotions, feelings and our ability to comprehend each other and separate ourselves from vulnerability in public, separate vulnerability from ourselves, all define an outside hyper real life. Just as we hide, we also reveal in what seems to be the worst of times, as described in ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’. In a struggle with life we see our other-self in others, our for-itself as a mirage, and our presence-to-self as a detachment. We become a world of objects benefiting the subject. Perception is never true to happiness. What lies behind eyes is a world Schopenhauer describes as meaningless, an eternal struggle with our selves and with each other. As we do with our aesthetic life, we look to objects to fulfil and sustain the struggle, but as the energy flows through our body it seems we will only find it within ourselves. We look to you, to god, to a life with direction and meaning. A journey from the single perspective is what we can hope to realize before it’s too late in the search for the Ens Causa Sui.


There is no waiting. No time is passing
I am here/alone
I lie.
I sleep.
I dream.



Bibliography

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