Thursday, August 25, 2011

6. Anxiety

The second attempt to meeting a thing in infinite disposition is to let it present itself to us. Here we would encounter a thing freely, without disposition. One would look up and see a cloud, and instead of thinking 'a cloud' one would simply see 'it'.

Many philosophers have written about anxiety, and truly there are few more humbling and terrifying experiences out there than observing all the meaning attached to things being hastily dilapidated around us. In this mood, where things are stripped and ethereal, there is effectively no world. The being therefore, who used his image as a tool for navigating this world, finds this once valued ego-image tool nothing more than a now unwieldy piece of rudimentary machinery.

Whereas the crisis has people filling the unending void with their new endeavors, anxiety places the being in the center of this void. Here gravity is much different from anywhere else. The meaninglessness of things, and their downright silliness, cuts them from the ground where they may float freely. Finding oneself surrounded by things, suspended and revolting at the meaning once ascribed to them is certainly an uncomfortable thought. Our previous endeavor to crush a thing under infinite definition is now reversed upon us. Now, surrounded by meaninglessness, things inflate and close in on us. The cloud we once saw would simply be 'it', but without word. A thing growing in size, imposing on us, descending, nearing, and finally crushing us with the weight of it's most naked identity: "a thing, and nothing more."
Anxiety towards the being itself results from the fading of ego-image boundaries in the deeply exposed disposition. This is the same anxiety that we experience in the fading of significance to things around us, only here, the object is the being its-self.

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